by Julia Reed
A week or so later, when devastating tornadoes hit Dyersburg, I was hopeful that the skittish Rose would be motivated to return home, but shortly thereafter, FEMA extended the deadline for stopping the free rent, and as long as she and Thomas had the use of the two-bedroom apartment, I could tell she wasn’t budging. Roseanna was back in her house, and Frankie was heading home with her children at the end of the school year. I had talked Joe Wallis, who owns rental property on Delachaise Street, into getting one of the bigger apartments fixed up for her. He had one for Rose too, but when she told us the closets weren’t big enough I knew we had lost her, maybe for good.
Easter also brought progress in the yard, in the form of my own personal savior, Russell Plessy, a second-generation mason and friend of Blair and Billy Dupré, who could not have been more opposite from Daniel Brown. An ardent fisherman who wore a tiny gold trout on a chain around his neck, Russell was so soft-spoken I had to lean into him to hear anything he said. We sat on the front porch and after he looked carefully at the long-neglected plans spread out in front of him, he said he could not only finish the job but he would fix everything both previous masons had done wrong, no problem.
With most of the hardscape finished, I could attend to the more rewarding and less expensive task of picking out trees and plants to fill in what had been, for well over a year now, not much more than a very messy muddy field bounded by the holly hedge we’d planted before the storm and punctuated by the fine new oak in the back corner. Benton and I drove across the lake to a vast nursery in the wild, owned by three generations of plant people. We trudged around for hours, picking out and tagging sweet bay magnolias, Japanese plums, gardenias and Japonica camellias, a hard-to-find loblolly bay, seven sweet olives to line the brick drive, and six sasanqua camellias for the front of the house. In the greenhouse, I then picked out a truckload of giant white swamp lilies and deep-blue agapanthus lilies, and by the time we were done it was almost dark. I knew I was getting way more attentive service than Benton usually provides his clients—or than most of them wanted—but we both needed a respite of sorts. I couldn’t wait for the chance to walk around in a rare unblemished natural setting, and Benton, as usual, was in need of the ad hoc (and ultimately unsuccessful) marriage counseling I had been providing. Guys like Benton and Joe (whose own wife had left him for several weeks during the winter) had been all but killing themselves, working nonstop since the storm, and their personal lives had suffered tremendously.
At the end of May we planted the trees, which was the good news. The bad news was that crime was back with a vengeance. In a city in where less than half the population had returned, the killings were already back up to their grim pre-Katrina rate. I received an email copy of one of the routine “urgent alerts” sent to our neighborhood security patrol, advising them to be on the lookout for a “gang of approximately five African-American teenagers, aged fifteen to sixteen years old,” who were further described as “armed and very dangerous.” I had visions of some out-of-hand kids on bicycles carrying cap guns and pocketknives until a few days later when the paper carried the story of the “massacre” of five African-American teenagers, one of whom was barely sixteen, shot less than a dozen blocks from our house by what was believed to be a rival drug-dealing gang.
While the gangs reestablished old turf (the only real but heartbreaking difference between the old gangs and the new was that a lot of the older members stayed behind in Houston and ceded their corners to increasingly younger men), some of the same professional looters on the scene right after the storm rolled through recovering neighborhoods with big trucks, stealing brand-new appliances and hauling off the heavy equipment of construction workers trying to make a living. Finally, the mayor established a juvenile curfew, and the governor, much less hesitant than in Katrina’s immediate aftermath, called out 300 National Guardsmen and 60 State Troopers, and once again the slow-moving Humvees were crawling through the city, augmenting the beleaguered and seemingly ineffective New Orleans Police Department.
The National Guardsmen weren’t the only folks to return. In June, I interviewed the remarkably sane doctor who heads one of the state-run mental health centers in town for a piece in Newsweek, and he told me that a staggering amount of homeless people had returned, despite the fact that only one shelter, the all-male Ozanam Inn that Antoine had favored, was up and running. “There are a number of people who have just wandered in here,” he said. “It’s kind of mysterious. One man who was just in here, it was hard to imagine where he was coming from, how he’d been surviving. These are people who have very few resources and not a lot here waiting for them, but this is home and they miss it, and the neighboring states and towns who’ve been supporting them are tired, so they’re not going to stand in the way of their return.”
When I left him, I thought, of course, of Antoine, and sure enough a week or so later, I got a call from Richard Sexton, a photographer for whom Antoine occasionally worked and whose patience with his habit and his many absences matched my own. Given his surly refusals to be “rescued” by me, Antoine told me later he’d been afraid to contact me directly, so he had shown up on Richard’s doorstep with little explanation other than the fact that he was back. He did tell Richard that Cassandra was still in Texas, which we both regarded as excellent news, but before we were able to enjoy a warm reunion, he was arrested and tossed into jail. The storm destroyed a great many things, but the NOPD’s computer system had not been among them, and Antoine had a long list of outstanding “attachments” to his rap sheet, showing that he had not, for example, paid the fines he had owed for years, or completed any of his probation requirements. After he disappeared, it took five days of calling the black hole that was now Central Lockup to ascertain that he was really there. If Richard or I ever wanted to see him again, it was time to get Antoine a lawyer.
Earl Perry Jr. is a dandyish sort of fellow who in his spare time takes photographs of car races in places like Monte Carlo, but he is also intimately acquainted with the doings of the New Orleans Criminal Courthouse, and just the man for Antoine. Since, by the time Earl had negotiated Antoine’s release, he had been in lockup for more than two weeks, and since it was now far more crowded and a whole lot hotter (the air conditioning had still not been repaired from the storm), it no longer provided the Betty Ford–like R&R Antoine had earlier not seemed to mind. There was also, said Earl, the fact that “Our local criminal aristocracy is not held in very high esteem by the foreign nationals currently visiting our jails,” or, as he translated, “the Mexicans are beating the shit out of the likes of Antoine” and the petty crackheads he ran around with. Earl was hoping that Antoine might have finally been scared straight.
We all hoped so because in addition to posting bail, Earl had to personally vouch for Antoine in front of the judge, and I had to meet with the court officer who collects the fines so we could work out a payment plan for him, as well as with his probation officer, a Haitian Antoine loathed named Mr. Ernest, who would administer weekly drug tests and make sure he remained employed. Both gentlemen were clearly amazed by the fact that a well-dressed white woman accompanied by a real-live criminal attorney in a good-looking suit and titanium glasses had taken such an interest in Antoine, a fact that was not lost on Antoine either. He vowed, for the millionth time, to stay on the straight and narrow.
I was, of course, glad to see him, and within a week, our house and yard looked like an entirely different clean and organized place. I wanted to keep it that way, and I also hoped that Antoine might at last want a clean and organized place of his own. When I interviewed the doctor for the Newsweek story on the dire mental health issues confronting the city, I had also talked to a homeless counselor who told me about a new facility for recovering addicts who could rent subsidized apartments with kitchenettes and private bathrooms in exchange for taking part in counseling programs and submitting to random drug testing. I had seen them and they were nice; when Antoine turned up, I had called her and she told she
would help me get on the waiting list. But when I mentioned them to Antoine, he tried his hardest to act interested and said he’d definitely like to go see them—“soon”—but I knew it was a trip we’d never make. As long as the Ozanam Inn was still accepting folks for the night, Antoine had no intention of getting a place of his own.
Still, I was heartened. Sorting out his legal troubles was a definite step in the right direction, but it was trickier than I had thought. Less than a month after he had been released, he was picked up again, on his way back to the house after buying lunch for himself and Lisa, Elizabeth’s efficient maid whose services I was sharing in Rose’s absence. It had been a case of profiling pure and simple—two cops stopped him and asked him what he was up to while he walked down a public sidewalk carrying a paper bag filled with two hot sausage po-boys and couple of cans of Cokes. But when he showed his I.D., the dread attachments popped up again. It was true that the information in the computer had not been amended to include the terms of his current arrangement. But, as I also found out when I called the officer in charge of the fines, Antoine had not made a single payment since we’d been in his office, even though every time I paid him he assured me he was doing so.
At any rate, the two cops handcuffed the “prisoner” and threw him in the backseat and the only reason I even knew anything about it was because Antoine had insisted that they drop off Lisa’s lunch before taking him downtown. Now that is precisely the kind of innate sweetness and utter guilelessness that gets me about Antoine every time, so that when it came time to write another hefty check to Earl so that he could get him out, I didn’t even mind, and thereafter started paying the weekly installments on the fines myself. It took me a while to make Antoine understand that I was paying him a little bit less so that I could send the money he owed to the courthouse and thus keep him from getting picked up again. But after a while, he got over being mad about that and we continued along in the same happy and highly dysfunctional existence together that we had enjoyed, with one longer-than-usual interruption that we never discussed, for the past decade.
16
ALL SUMMER, WE had been looking for a dog—the beagle that I had always wanted and never been allowed to have—in earnest. I couldn’t understand why it was so hard to find a beagle, which is bred for rabbit hunting after all, when the denizens of the parishes of southwest Louisiana are so crazy about the sport that an election was once postponed when it fell on the opening day of the season. Apparently, Hurricane Rita had put the breeders there out of business, so we turned to the newspaper. At one point we’d been on our way to pick up one we’d found in the classifieds, but when I called from the car the kid who answered said the ad had left out the fact that theirs were miniatures, so we turned around. I wanted the same sturdy animals I had seen growing up—one of the cotton farmers near our house leased a fenced corner of one of his fields to a serious rabbit hunter, and every day on the way to and from school I passed the enormous doghouse, with dozens of adorable beagles lounging in the sun atop its roof.
Finally, in August, I was in Chicago visiting Frances, and John emailed me an ad. The guy selling beagle pups for $100 had a house in a little subdivision in River Ridge, right by the airport. John picked me up from my plane and we went right over. I knew we were in the right place when the breeder came out wearing nothing but a pair of shorts and proudly told us in his Cajun accent, “Me, I ain’t had on shoes for three months, me.” He made his barefooted way to a fenced-in side yard, whistled, and two tiny pups came waddling over from their respective mothers. I knew “the one” immediately, and after I reached over the fence and picked up his trembling little boy body the deal was done. The guy assured us the puppy had papers—“I just can’t quite lay my hands on them”—and that he would eat anything, including the powdered eggs he’d been giving him. We had been poring through beagle books, all of which recommended expensive healthy stuff like Science Diet and Eukanuba, but this puppy seemed healthy as could be, so we paid the money and left with him, while the guy apologized profusely that the watermelon wine he’d been fermenting in his garage was not ready yet.
John drove and I held the dog in my lap where he stayed for the next two days, dozing and munching affectionately on my hand. While he chewed I told him the story of the beagle hunt I had embarked on at age seven after I had talked my father into buying me the Styrofoam pith helmet that had been on sale at the local A&P. I have no idea why I wanted it so badly or what in the world it was doing on the shelves of the grocery store, but as soon as we got home, I put it on and rode my bike all through the overgrown pecan grove near our house, looking up in hopes of finding beagles lolling in the branches like leopards. When our neighbor’s teenage son Ephraim, on whom I had an intense crush, asked me what in the world I was doing, I solemnly explained that I was on a beagle safari. I do not have much faith that the puppy understood a word I was saying, but it wouldn’t be the last time I talked to him at length. To me the story was confirmation that the dog was my destiny. At McGee’s suggestion, we named him Henry, because he looks like one, and it is beyond ridiculous how much I love that dog.
To us, Henry’s presence made the house on First Street complete. It wasn’t technically complete of course—my father kept asking me if we had grass yet and I kept telling him no, we didn’t have grass, and the concrete for the new sidewalks hadn’t been poured and the garage door had still not been replaced by the windows and there was no fence around the air-conditioning units and the iron fence had been repaired but not painted. I had a new electrician but he had installed only half the outside lights and I hadn’t seen him since January, and I had yet another plumber but he could not solve the problem of why rusty water was the only kind that poured into my fine and increasingly brown Waterworks bathtub. We’d thrown out the spotted rug in the sunroom, where the roof still leaked and there were not yet any curtains on the windows in the parlors or our bedroom or my office, but we’d gotten a chandelier for the dining room and gotten rid of the dangling bulbs in the parlors in favor of lamps, so that was something.
Joe had taken on so many jobs he was suddenly in short supply, and when I called him to find out where he had been hiding, the first thing he asked me was “You’re not gonna cry are you?” in a tone that let me know he had been listening to a lot of clients cry lately. As Katrina’s anniversary neared a lot of people were getting a tad jumpy. But Joe knew me well enough to know I was not going to cry, I just wanted him to come over, so he did, armed with his brushes and a couple of burritos from Chapparal Patio. Joe and I were family now, in this together, learning to take our silver linings wherever we can find them, including at a taco stand in the parking lot of an abandoned gas station.
On the last Saturday night in August, a year and a day since our first dinner party with Byron and Cameron and Egan and the lobster spaghetti, the five of us gathered again. And this time, since neither of them was stuck in evacuation traffic on the way to the Delta, McGee and Elizabeth joined us.
John grilled skirt steak on the Weber we’d finally retrieved from the storage unit, and I made salsa verde and squash casserole and Cameron brought her famous pound cake. For the occasion, I’d bought some more Billecart-Salmon. Before we sat down, we went outside and toasted to friendship and love and the city we couldn’t seem to leave and, finally to the house on First Street that was now my one true home. When I looked up, the stars were no longer visible, but that was okay. I knew that they were there.
Epilogue
ON JANUARY 17, 2007, almost a year and five months after Katrina hit, and five days before the manuscript of this book was due to my already long-suffering editor, there was a robbery at the house on First Street. John had an early business dinner and I had a late one, and there had been maybe an hour during which no one was home. John arrived first and found the kitchen window jimmied open; I was still at Stella!, the upscale sibling of Stanley, where we had enjoyed those first post-Katrina five-dollar hamburgers. When John called me on my ce
ll phone, he told me all my jewelry was gone, and two TVs, but I could tell there was something else, something he was having a hard time coming out with. “Is it Henry?” I shrieked. “Henry’s dead, isn’t he?” When I started to cry, John reassured me that Henry was not only alive and well, the thief had locked him in the laundry room. We both managed to laugh briefly at that, knowing our ever-enthusiastic puppy had probably greeted the bad guy so joyously he had to lock him up in order to get on with the business at hand. (To this day, Henry’s nickname in the neighborhood is “The Burglar’s Assistant.”)
But the chuckle was short-lived. Henry was still with us, thank God, but my laptop was gone. When John finally came out and said it, I’m pretty sure I let out one of those low guttural moans, a sound not unlike that of a wounded cat. The implications of what I was hearing were enormous: I had backed up exactly one chapter of the whole book the old-fashioned way, by printing it out. Everything else was in my hard drive: my daily post-Katrina diary, the timeline I had put together from the hundreds of newspapers I’d kept piled up in my office (and recently thrown away), the other ten chapters of the book.
All I could think was what a total idiot I was, but I’d been spoiled. I’ve had computers melt down, blow up, and simply cease to turn on, but some geek could always retrieve my hard drive and everything was fine. It never occurred to me that somebody might just take the whole thing. I was so blindsided by losing more than a year’s worth of work that I didn’t even think about the stunningly beautiful 1920s diamond cuff that had been my great-grandmother’s, or my grandmother’s yellow diamond ring my mother had given me on the night of the Rebirth New Orleans fundraiser, or the diamond chandelier earrings that were a gift from John when we got engaged. My heart sank to my knees as the valet brought my car around and I drove the seemingly interminable three miles home to the scene of the crime.