by Tim Downs
J.T. approached them from behind. “Are we goin’ or not? It’s startin’ to get crowded around here.”
Both men turned and looked at him.
“Maybe we should let him decide,” Nick said, taking the boy by the shoulder. “J.T., I’ll give you a choice: You can come with me and Jerry and help us rescue people and look for bodies, or you can stay here and find your way over to the Superdome.”
“I’m coming with you,” he said.
“There you go,” Nick said. “Out of the mouths of babes.”
Jerry rolled his eyes. “Some choice.”
12
Nick steered the boat back along St. Claude Avenue toward the bridge; when he came to the bridge he turned right, following the levee north along the Industrial Canal. In less than half a mile they came to a second bridge, a lift-type structure carrying Claiborne Avenue across the canal. Damaged by the hurricane, the entire center span had been hoisted high above the water and secured in place, rendering the road impassable but leaving the canal open to navigation—whenever the Industrial Lock was repaired, which had also been damaged by the storm.
Beyond Claiborne Avenue they discovered two enormous breaches in the levee floodwall, the apparent source of the water now inundating the Lower Nine. The storm surge in the Industrial Canal had overtopped the floodwalls, thundering over the ledges like a waterfall and quickly eroding the earthen levees that held them in place. Without a supporting foundation, the massive concrete slabs had been shoved aside like so many dominoes; in some places the slabs had vanished completely, allowing an unimpeded view across the canal into the Upper Ninth Ward on the opposite side.
Past the breaches Nick steered away from the canal and into the flooded neighborhood again. Since two more SAR teams were right now putting in on St. Claude Avenue, and since more were sure to come, Nick decided to head deeper into the Lower Nine—no sense covering the same ground as everybody else. Jerry sat in the bow again, serving as both ballast and figurehead, and J.T. took up his usual position—standing on the center bench with both fists on his hips, like Peter Pan patrolling the Blue Lagoon. They talked as they motored along, raising their voices above the constant drone of the Evinrude.
“I still say it’s the hands,” Jerry said. “It happens every time.”
“The hands? What are you talking about?”
“You tell a woman you’re a mortician, and I guarantee within thirty seconds she’ll look at your hands. It’s like they wonder if you washed them or not—like they wonder what you’ve got under your nails.”
“That’s crazy,” Nick said. “I can think of lots of reasons women don’t like you.”
“You know what a woman told me once? She said, ‘I thought your hands would be cold.’ Cold! I said, ‘I run a funeral home, not the Hair Club for Men—I’m the president, not a client.’”
“There’s your problem,” Nick said. “You’re too sarcastic.”
“I’m telling you, it’s the hands. It’s getting so I don’t even mention what I do anymore. I just say, ‘I own a business,’ but I don’t say what kind.”
“Morticians are like lawyers,” Nick said. “Nobody likes them until they need one. There’s nothing wrong with what you do, Jerry—it’s an ancient and noble profession. I’d tell them if I were you; if they don’t like it, that’s their problem.”
“Do you tell women you’re a bug man?”
“Absolutely. I walk right up and say, ‘Hi, I’m Nick Polchak. An hour ago I was collecting maggots from a decomposing corpse. May I say, you look lovely tonight.’ It works every time.”
Nick looked at the boy. “What about you, J.T.? You got a girlfriend?”
“Plenty,” J.T. said.
“Well, help us out here. What’s your secret?”
“I just act like me, that’s all.”
“I already do that,” Jerry sighed. “That’s my problem.”
“You weren’t listening,” Nick said. “He said you should act like him.”
“There!” J.T. shouted, pointing across the water.
“Where?” Nick straightened up and blinked. As usual, he could make out nothing but the featureless geometric shapes of rooftops and chimneys. “Just tell me where to turn.”
A hundred yards ahead, at one end of a long row of carbon-copy shotgun houses, a woman’s body floated near a wooden lamppost.
“How could you possibly see that?” Nick asked.
The boy just shrugged.
Nick killed the motor and they coasted forward in silence. The body floated facedown; she was more than a little overweight, and the corrosive water had leached enough cheap dye from her hair to reveal her advanced years. Nick considered the body and its position in relation to the house behind it. He wondered if the woman had tried to escape from the flooding house; he wondered how deep the water was when she decided to take a chance; he wondered if this was as far as she’d gotten before the water swept her away. Nick shook his head. Six inches of moving water can knock a man off his feet; people always underestimate its power.
Apparently the boy’s mind was traveling the same path. “You think she lived here?” he asked, staring down at the body.
Nick looked at J.T. He knew he needed to be careful; the boy had thick skin, but he was still only a boy. It took forensic professionals years to sufficiently harden themselves against constant exposure to death. That’s why DMORT always included a psychiatrist among its team members. Nick thought about Beth; he wondered what she would say about the boy—and the things Nick was exposing him to.
“You okay?” Nick asked.
“Sure.”
“I don’t suppose you recognize her.”
“Want me to look at her face?”
“No,” Nick said, wanting to avoid the additional trauma of a full frontal view. But what he told the boy was, “Her lungs might still have some air in them. If we roll her over it could send her to the bottom. It doesn’t matter anyway; they’ll figure out who she is sooner or later. Right now, we just need to keep track of her.”
Nick took out his GPS receiver again and took a reading; that way, when DMORT finally returned to the business of recovering bodies, they would know exactly where to find her. To make certain that her body didn’t drift with the shifting currents, he cut a length of rope and secured one of her legs to a lamppost nearby.
Nick started the engine again and let it idle, allowing the boat to cruise slowly down the row of houses; he revved the engine from time to time to send a signal to anyone trapped inside. Near the opposite end of the row they found a man and a woman sitting quietly in lawn chairs on a second-story balcony with water covering their feet. The scene was strangely surreal—a peaceful suburban image cut and pasted into a background of total ruin.
J.T. once again extended the invitation, and once again the boat took on additional passengers. An hour later, the boat was loaded to capacity again; they returned to the earthen levee and dropped them off, advising them about the damaged Claiborne Bridge and encouraging them to seek shelter in the Superdome.
Back in the Lower Nine, they entered a commercial district where houses gave way to barbershops, clothing stores, and markets. Glass was shattered everywhere, and water flowed freely in and out of storefront windows; in one window a mannequin stood up to its knees in water, as if modeling the latest fashion for flood victims. Nick noticed that the water here came only halfway up the storefronts; this section of the neighborhood must have been situated on slightly higher ground.
They rounded a corner and came face-to-face with four men standing waist-deep in the water. One of the men was pushing a grocery cart loaded with plastic-wrapped cases of bottled water; the man behind him struggled with a wavering stack of twelve-packs of Bud Light. A third man had a bulky block of Huggies disposable diapers under each arm and three pairs of tennis shoes tied together by the shoelaces and strung around his neck.
The fourth man had a rifle.
The instant Nick spotted them he shut down
the engine and brought the boat to a stop—but when he saw the rifle, he regretted the decision.
The man pointed the rifle over their heads. “Get out of the boat,” he ordered.
Nick said nothing, quickly considering his limited options.
The man squeezed the trigger and fired three shots into the air—one for each of them, Nick supposed.
“Get out of the boat—I ain’t gonna tell you again.”
“I’m looking for my father,” J.T. said.
“Not now,” Nick said, taking J.T. by the arm and trying to pull him down into the boat—but the boy twisted away, refusing to surrender his position on the center bench.
“You see your old man around here?” the man with the rifle asked. “Get out of there, boy.”
“I’m looking for him,” J.T. said. “That’s why we need the boat.”
“Look,” Nick called out, “we’re a search-and-rescue team—we found this boy stranded on a rooftop not far from here, and there’s bound to be a lot more like him. C’mon, man—it’s your neighborhood, not mine. We need the boat more than you do.”
The man leveled the rifle at Nick’s head.
Nick felt his face go red.
He knew what he would have said to this moron if he was alone—he would have held up one finger and told him to aim at this. He knew precisely which words he would use, and he could feel them rising up in the back of his throat even now—he could taste the acid. But he wasn’t alone—he had J.T. and Jerry to think of, and he knew he had no right to make a stand—though the thought made him sick to his stomach.
“All right,” he growled. “We’ll give you the boat.” He glanced over at J.T. “We can find another one.”
Just then a fifth man emerged from the flooded store. To Nick’s astonishment, he was dressed in an NOPD uniform and wearing his service sidearm. “Who fired those shots?” the officer demanded.
“They got a boat,” his armed companion said.
“What’d I tell you ’bout that? Gimme that rifle—you fire a bullet into the sky, it comes down on the other side of town like a rocket. You fool, you can kill somebody that way—don’t you know that?”
“We’re with FEMA,” Nick called out. “We’re a search-and-rescue team.”
“You boys go on about your business,” the officer said.
How about doing yours? Nick wanted to say. He had a dozen questions he was dying to ask: What are you doing with a bunch of looters? Why aren’t you helping with the rescues yourself? Why don’t you establish some order around here? Why would you let that idiot carry a firearm? Why don’t you use your own? But he had no way to know how far the officer had strayed from his duty, so he thought it best to keep his questions to himself. Right now the best thing to do was fire up the engine and get out of there.
He did.
No one said anything for the next few minutes.
Nick looked over at Jerry: “I didn’t hear much from you back there.”
“I know,” Jerry said.
Nick wanted to rib him about it but quickly decided not to. He had felt the adrenaline racing through his body, too, and he understood the effect it had on the brain: The hormone had a way of shifting the mind into hyperdrive, making it spin like a runaway flywheel, generating a thousand possibilities but resting on none. Jerry was no coward. It wasn’t a matter of courage; sometimes adrenaline takes away your ability to choose.
Instead, he turned to J.T. “I’ll say one thing for you—you’ve got guts. I believe you would have taken a bullet back there.”
“I don’t care,” the boy grumbled. “It’s not his boat.”
“We could have found another boat,” Nick said.
“We already got one.”
Nick started to say, “It’s not as important as your life,” but it occurred to him that maybe it was. The boy didn’t refuse to give up the boat out of stubbornness, or because it was their property—he was using the boat to find his father, and the man was about to interfere. Nick thought again: Maybe he had taken his promise too lightly; maybe it was more important to the boy than he knew.
“Tell me more about your father,” Nick said.
J.T. looked back over his shoulder. “What you want to know?”
“His name, first of all.”
“Bastien Callais Augustine Walker.”
“That’s quite a mouthful.”
“Catholics got lots o’ names,” he said proudly.
“Describe him for me.”
“He’s a big man—tall, like you. Real smart too—knows all kinds of stuff.”
“Is he black, like you?”
“Sure.”
“Hair?”
“Sure.”
“I mean hair color. Is it like yours?”
“Sure.”
Nick tried a different tack. “Where did you last see your father?”
“I told you, we got separated in the storm.”
“Was he in the water? Was he trying to swim?”
Before the boy could answer, they heard the sound of an approaching boat and looked up.
“There!” J.T. said, pointing to three o’clock.
Nick slowed as they approached the next intersection and waited; three blocks away, a boat approached carrying four National Guardsmen. The boat was large and solid-looking, painted in a distinct camouflage pattern that made it stand out more than conceal it in the suburban setting. In the bow of the boat, a soldier rested the stock of an M16 against his thigh and kept the barrel pointed into the sky. It was a very simple and very clear symbol of authority—one that Nick’s boat lacked.
“I’ve got boat envy,” Nick said. “Everybody else’s is bigger than mine.”
“Afternoon,” one of the Guardsmen called out.
“Welcome to the Lower Nine,” Nick said.
“You fellas from around here?”
“We’re with DMORT, up in St. Gabriel.”
The Guardsman looked at J.T. “I thought you guys collected bodies.”
“I thought you guys rescued people. Where’ve you been?”
“Whaddya mean? We’ve got eight thousand men along the Gulf Coast.”
“You’re the first we’ve seen.”
“Well, transportation’s a little tough around here.”
“That’s what the people on the rooftops tell us. What are you hearing about the rest of the city?”
“They’re trying to plug the holes in the levees with big sandbags—no luck so far. The lake’s six feet above sea level, so the water keeps pouring in. The pumps don’t work—the motors have all been flooded.”
“Any casualty estimates?”
“It’s anybody’s guess. Coast Guard claims they pulled twelve hundred people off rooftops yesterday, but there’s a lot more out there.”
“We’ve been sending ours to the Superdome. Is that still the plan?”
“That’s what they told us—but we hear they’ve already got thirty thousand people there.”
“Thirty thousand,” Nick said. “The Superdome is a stadium, not a hotel. This isn’t a Saints game; they can’t expect people to just sit in the bleachers for a week or two—people have got to sleep, they’ve got to stretch out.”
“I hear the place looks like a landfill,” the soldier said. “Trash everywhere, the toilets don’t work, and they’re running out of food and water. They said they were bringing in buses, but nobody’s seen any so far. We can’t even get our own trucks in yet—the water comes all the way up to the ramps.”
Nick shook his head. “Maybe we should start putting people back on rooftops.”
“Maybe we should just follow orders,” the soldier said.
“That’s always my policy. By the way, have you guys spotted any bodies?”
“Sure, we’ve seen a few.”
“I’m talking about unusual ones.”
“‘Dead’ isn’t good enough?”
“I’m looking for bodies with bullet or trauma wounds—bodies in an advanced state of decay—tha
t sort of thing.”
“We saw one like that, ’bout a quarter mile from here.”
“Did you get a GPS reading? Let me have it, will you?”
The Guardsman relayed the coordinates and Nick jotted them down.
“Thanks,” Nick said. “Now here’s a tip for you: About a half mile down this road, you’ll come to a commercial district; you’ll find five guys there looting a store. One of them is an NOPD officer—see if you can knock some sense into him, will you?”
“Glad to oblige,” the soldier said. He signaled to his helmsman to move on, then turned to the remaining two Guardsmen. “Lock and load,” he said. They responded by checking their M16s to make sure there was a round ready in the chamber.
Jerry’s eyes were fixed on the rifles as the two boats pulled away from each other. “That’s what we need,” he said.
“I’ve never been much good with guns,” Nick said. “You have to be able to see the guy you want to shoot—they tell me that’s an important detail.” Jerry didn’t respond.
“C’mon, Jerry, lighten up—we’re in the business of recovering bodies, not producing them.” But he knew what Jerry was feeling.
Nick steered as Jerry directed with his GPS unit. Fifteen minutes later, they arrived at the coordinates the Guardsman had indicated and eased up alongside the floating body.
“He was right,” Jerry said. “This guy’s in bad shape.”
Nick leaned out over the side of the boat to take a better look. J.T. once again began to do the same, but Nick pushed him back. “Not this time,” he said.
“How come?”
“I need an assistant. I want you to open my equipment bag and get out the same stuff you saw me use yesterday. Can you remember it all?”
J.T. rummaged through the canvas bag while Nick examined the body.
Jerry once again had to serve as a counterweight to balance the boat. “What do you see?” he asked.
“It’s already in the third stage of deterioration—floating decay. The skin has been thoroughly macerated by the water; it’s sloughing off in some places, and it’s already turning black. The abdomen has collapsed, but there’s still enough gas to keep it afloat. There are some blowfly infestations on the exposed areas, but those are only a couple of days old—this man’s been dead much longer than that. If only there were—”