The Yellow House

  Imagine this being all that you can do. It is as paltry as it sounds.

  CARL

  We knew they was coming but you go to getting mad anyway.

  From the roof where he sat, Carl could see the staging area on the interstate where the rescued were dropped off. The airboats came straight through the area where before you could see a fence, where before you could see a car dealership and the train depot where freights docked for loading.

  This new Old World seemed boundless.

  They finally come get us, some white guys from Texas. They pulled up in an airboat to the pitch of the roof.

  Seven days had gone by.

  Carl was deposited on the interstate right before the point where the bridge rose. This was not the quiet of the roof. Carl saw many people he knew, people from all over, out of the East, out of the Lower Ninth Ward, out of the Desire Projects.

  Army trucks were taking people from the bridge to the Convention Center, which had become an impromptu shelter, but there were the old and infirm who needed to go first and Carl was in good health with legs he could use. Mindy and them wasn’t on no leash. I had some Adidas tennis on, but they was so tight. I took the shoestrings off and made leashes. He took the dogs on a long walk to the Convention Center, joined by several men, bending his six-foot-three-inch frame down to better grasp the strings. From New Orleans East, they walked the five miles to Martin Luther King Boulevard, then back around to the Convention Center, a long route to avoid Orleans, St. Bernard, and Claiborne Avenues, all of which were underwater.

  The walk took all day. But Carl never went inside the Convention Center itself. He stayed on the perimeter watching the clamor. For him, nighttime was not for sleep: a certain time of the night dogs would run loose from sleeping owners, sprinting through the dreaming masses.

  Beyond the dogs’ motion, things seemed dire and unmoving. But then Harry Connick Jr. appeared with TV cameras and buses showed up.

  I wasn’t worried about getting on no bus, Carl said, opening another beer. Look like a movie, like the world coming to an end, people was just running. People just trying to get the fuck out of Dodge.

  “What about the drug addicts?” I want to know.

  All them was out there. Shaking like a fucking leaf.

  After days as part of a growing crowd that seemed to go nowhere, Carl set out from the Convention Center with two men he knew from the Grove. They headed toward the interstate where they found a boat with paddles sitting at the base of the ramp at Claiborne and Orleans Avenues, close to where Carl normally spends Mardi Gras day.

  Whoever left it must have kicked ass. I said, Let’s take that mutherfucker and get the fuck.

  Me and the two dudes pattlin.

  People stranded on balconies in the projects, his brother Michael among them, but he could not know that then. I thought Michael was gone.

  The men paddled down Orleans away from the Convention Center, away from Canal to Broad Street.

  The water was so high you couldn’t even much see Ruth Chris Steak House. This shit was amazing.

  “Hold on, bey,” Carl says, answering his cell phone. He has come a long way since 2005. He says to a man’s voice, “I was doing a lil interview with Monique about that Katrina shit.” He does not know how to operate the phone fully, only ever answers it on speakerphone so that whoever calls talks to Carl and whoever else is around.

  Back in the boat, Carl and the two men moved through the watery city, one boat among many, down Broad Street and back down Canal before night.

  You thinking that’s mannequins floating by you, but when you get by it that body smell so bad, it then swoll up big. Man that ain’t no mannequin, that’s a dead body.

  Now water leaking in the fucking boat. One dude got a bucket throwing it out, two of us pattlin.

  They headed down Canal Street toward the Regional Transit Authority building where Monica worked, but by then it had already been evacuated. That night the men stayed in the boat, tethered to the massive metal rollup gates in front of the building’s parking lot, stranded cars and buses just inside.

  Just like we were fishing somewhere. We just sit up in the boat all night smoking cigarettes and talking. Nodding off, fighting sleep.

  That next morning they woke to the same watery city as the day before, but now there were boats with motors. That was the sound that woke them.

  From the boat, Carl tried to see the next stage of things. The Dome—wasn’t nobody moving out. Convention Center, same. So now we all the way up Broad Street and Tulane. Now, what you think is there? What’s there, Mo?

  I hesitate. It’s a geography test. I don’t know.

  Orleans Parish Prison where inmates—some of whom were evacuated four days after the water rose to their chests—waited on top of the Broad Street Overpass in orange jumpsuits. Carl pulled his boat up to the bridge where other boats idled.

  After the helicopter took all of the inmates, Carl headed to the top of the bridge instead of milling about at the foot with the others.

  Helicopter was a big ole sucker, bigger than this damn house here. They always land at work, but I never rode on none of them hard-riding bastards. I say hey to the dude who was flying, Man where you taking us.

  It was a rough ride. Mindy and Tiger bucked and pulled. Tiger was Mindy’s son and they acted it.

  I’m home free now. I’m there now, said Carl, placing himself in the landscape. He knew exactly where he was: Int’national Airport.

  Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport.

  MICHAEL

  It was the balcony that saved them. At night you could go out there and sleep. Or in the dark night you could sit watching explosions coming from the direction of Lee Circle, an oil refinery, maybe, but you didn’t know, or watch houses burning down furiously across Broad Street. “Like fire from hell,” Michael said. Everyone seemed to have guns. The balcony could feel like a box seat: Across the street, men with weapons shot grocery store doors open. Down below, two men argued over who would pull the boat while the other sat, one of them brandishing a gun to pull rank.

  Michael and Rodney, Angela’s brother, the two eldest men of the group, went out every morning in search of food, waking before daybreak, while the others slept. They were fifteen people in a two-bedroom apartment in the Lafitte Projects, which were demolished in 2008, rebuilt, and renamed Faubourg Lafitte, but that is now and I am still speaking of then, that September of 2005 when Michael was one of two self-designated lieutenants of the group that included his girlfriend’s children and her mother.

  The men walked or swam the streets, depending on the water levels.

  More than four thousand people were stranded on the interstate where Carl spent a short time. Michael and Rodney avoided the masses, staying down on the streets figuring they were much better off in the housing project, protected from the elements at least and with toilets that they flushed by dipping a bucket down into the water and pulling it back up, an emergency well that served pure filth, but still.

  The men foraged for food and other items from broken-in stores, eventually finding an air mattress and two boats. Whatever you needed and the last thing on earth you needed could be found, it seemed, in the dirty, fetid water. When they arrived back at the apartment before sunset, havoc-wreaking time, the men doused themselves with Listerine scavenged from shelves of abandoned stores. Closed their eyes and poured the entire bottle all over everywhere.

  But the food in the house and on store shelves was “constantly getting less and less,” said Michael. The men had less stamina for the daily journeys to forage. As time wore on, they had to travel farther and farther away from home base. The farther east, the deeper the water, the wilder the stories: “This crazy dude was whacked up off of some angel dust, lady police trying to help him,” said Michael. “He grabbed her gun and shot her in the head and all kinda shit like that.” For instance.

  In the apartment, one woman among the fifteen people had taken to stealing food fo
r herself and her daughter, hiding it from the rest who were rationing small bits. The clamor that broke out when this was discovered had no place to go but within the apartment walls. And this was the sound everywhere, a collective groan born from waiting shut inside.

  Days later, after the Superdome had been evacuated, helicopters began circling the Lafitte. When they hovered low down to where the men on the balcony could see, the rescuers were pointing guns. Michael refused to separate his group; several times they turned down would-be rescuers who did not have sufficient room for the entire crew.

  When they were finally rescued, it all seemed to begin and end in the same instant. The group, still intact, moved from the boat that pulled up to the apartment steps to an army truck and then to an idling bus.

  “Where we going?” Angela asked the armed man standing at the head of the bus. Only silence.

  IVORY MAE

  Hattiesburg, where Mom and her crew had arrived, was no escape. It rained so hard that water started coming into cousin Lisa’s house. At first, it rose to ankle height. They raced to lift furniture onto tables, but the water kept coming, forcing them to flee to the neighbor’s house on higher ground. They waited and waited—one then two days—until it was safe to drive to the airport where they would fly to another cousin in Texas.

  Troy had never flown. Nor had thirteen-year-old Brittany. But grown Troy was the one to act a fool, proclaiming how he would die not from the Water but from this. “Dammit, dammit, dammit,” he chanted the entire flight, his leg furious and shaking. He was getting on everyone’s nerves.

  The Dallas/Fort Worth airport was full of arriving New Orleanians who were asking, “Where we landed at?”

  GRANDMOTHER

  A yellow school bus full of ailing nursing home patients made its way down the highway, which highway? Van Gogh said yellow is the color of divine clarity. Was Grandmother sitting on a seat, was it plush, was it fake leather like on school buses where when you sit the air releases, or was she lying on pillows on the floor? What of her arthritic knees? Were they hurting at all, did she say a single word, did she sing like normal, did she look around, did she have a flash of clarity? That is the thing I want to know: Did she have a moment of lucidity in her Alzheimer’s-ridden mind? Can the body feel the crossing of a state line, even if the mind does not grasp? Was Grandmother’s forgetfulness like drinking from the River Lethe? Did it cast her into oblivion, I wonder, erase the landscape of her former life, and is this the only condition, this unknowing, under which one should cross over state lines, leaving your familiarity behind? Is this the only way to properly leave home?

  III

  Settle

  September 6–September 29, 2005

  Vacaville, California–St. Rose, Louisiana–Tyler, Texas

  Byron’s two-story house on Dawnview Way in Vacaville, California, fifty-five miles north of San Francisco, was spacious under normal circumstances in that suburban way that grants illusions, with three bedrooms and an office. But there were nine people living in it now: six adults and three children. Like addresses everyplace in the days following the Water, it appeared as house on the outside but was shelter for the dispossessed within.

  The minute Byron, Ivory Mae’s youngest boy, learned that our mother and her crew had made their way through Mississippi’s flooding to dry Dallas, he sent them five one-way tickets. He also sent a ticket to Herman, Alvin’s big brother, our neighbor on Wilson who sling-shot Lynette’s front tooth out. Herman, who was stranded in Baton Rouge, was like a brother to us.

  Shortly after everyone arrived in Vacaville, so did I. I came not only because I couldn’t figure out what else to do with my body but also because I had been assigned the difficult task of writing a “Katrina story” for the magazine. My assignment was to write about what my family had come through, which required that I put myself in the impossible position of reporter. I knew it was ridiculous, my writing down what everyone said; after every conversation I hid myself away in the bathroom, writing scenes into a notebook instead of feeling.

  Mom shared the room downstairs with Karen. Brittany, Karen’s daughter, shared a bed with Byron’s only daughter, Alexus. The men shared a bunk bed upstairs in the former office, where if you closed the door in the evenings it grew so musty you could barely breathe.

  On the first night in Vacaville, Herman had a nightmare that woke the house. He was a dehydrated, overweight thirty-four-year-old who could barely walk on swollen feet. In California, Herman claimed to have sat one whole day on the roof of the Yellow House until it split into two underneath him, forcing him to swim to safety. But he is always making shit up. Herman spent his days in Vacaville on the phone exaggerating his exploits to gullible local radio stations. How he kept getting found by these journalists, no one knew. Sometimes we joked about whether another person was on the other end of the line at all.

  Carl and Michael were still somewhere out there; ten days had passed. The only time we cared about was the minute when we would hear from them.

  Herman swore he saw Carl in a boat helping people near the Superdome. This sounded like exactly the kind of thing Carl would be doing, so almost everyone believed him, except for me. I kept saying, “I need to hear from him.” Whenever Herman repeated his Carl-the-rescuer story, I looked at him, angrily.

  Herman was loud in the day and loud in the night, his hauntings persisting. “He had some real standout moments,” niece Brittany says now. Herman told tales, but everybody knew those were the best entertainers. He seemed able to transport us back to a feeling of home, which was Wilson Avenue. In Vacaville, he performed silly, momentous feats like racing small Justin, Byron’s ten-year-old neighbor who was a track star. Herman, who was overweight by at least seventy-five pounds (and with swollen feet), who was asthmatic and stroke prone, challenged small Justin to a race down Dawnview Way. Somehow Herman’s bluster grew into an event. At the designated time, around six in the evening, people on the block came out from their stucco homes, some of them with chairs, to watch. The whistle was blown and off they ran in the direction of Cedar Crest Drive. Herman was OK for the first thirty seconds, but then small Justin left him a wee bit behind, which led Herman, who did not like to lose or be shamed in front of a crowd, to pick up his pace. It seemed his legs might collapse. For a moment it could appear Herman was gaining, but small Justin left him far behind, so far that for a long time Herman was running against himself. Justin seemed to fly and disappear while Herman, bent over in the street, huffed and puffed for his life.

  All the spectators were bent over, too, laughing uproariously. No one paid attention to Herman’s recovery. We were all tickled by how serious he had been, to believe he might actually win! His performance brought levity to a grave, sinking reality. For the time it took Justin to beat Herman, no one thought about the Water. This was how Herman became a hero.

  This story, “Herman’s Race,” was revived during every depressing moment in the long days ahead.

  When neighbors brought over piles of used clothes, my family, who I had never seen ask for anything, slowly looked for things they liked, though it was mostly about need:

  Herm started out real, real strong, someone would begin.

  When Melvin, a teenager, sulked around all the day in a perpetual fog, dismayed and dispirited by the new arrangement, this foreign world:

  Justin flew, that was too much, seeing a grown-ass man up against a lil boy. Herman wouldn’t give up though.

  When the news channels (which were always on) blared updates on the city and the storm that did not address the whereabouts of our two lost men:

  Next thing you know Justin wasn’t nowhere to be found. Herm made his point though.

  One week after they arrived in Vacaville, Melvin and Brittany enrolled at the local high school, the only two Katrina transports as my mother called them, their names and travails announced one morning over the loudspeaker. “I just want to fit in. This is high school,” said Brittany. “It was a top story. Everyone was
trying to figure us out,” said Melvin who was called Louisiana by his football teammates.

  Herman said he was moving to Austin, Texas, where “I’ll never have to evacuate again,” but then he took a job at the local auto parts store on Nut Tree Road.

  Troy started unloading boxes from Walmart trucks for eight dollars an hour, far more than he earned in seventeen years of furniture making at Walter Thorn and Company, a job he had inherited when Byron left for the Marines. That job had been Troy’s habit for a long time, since he was twenty years old: catching the Broad bus on Chef Menteur at 5 a.m., getting off by Louisa Street, then catching the Desire bus to Poland Avenue.

  The men found jobs before Karen, who could not recall the last time she was without work. She had already decided the moment they arrived in California: we are never going back. After several months of searching, she—who had spent her professional life as a social worker—applied at UPS for holiday work scanning and retrieving packages. The job was surprisingly fun, a relief actually.

  My mother cooked big pots of red beans and rice, meat sauce and spaghetti, cabbage and rice, things the household could eat off the whole day. Life tried to settle.

  MICHAEL

  Eleven days after Carl and Michael went missing, I dialed Michael’s number again. Instead of voice mail, Michael answered, said, “Wo nah, baby girl. Where y’all at?” as if we had been the ones missing.

  At the New Orleans airport where they’d been carried on buses, “They had it written on a white piece of paper where you were going,” said Michael sometime later. “They’d say this plane is going here, this one is going here, and that one is going there. They say you could go to Atlanta, Houston, Dallas, San Antonio. Which one y’all want to go. We got on the first flight out of that mutherfucker.”