The Yellow House

  I felt bad for making her conjure up all she loved about my father. The detail could sometimes make you feel too much.

  Mom carried on with the he was this and he was that, but I no longer heard a word she said.

  VIII

  Dark Night, Wilson

  The street mostly changes in the small, cumulative ways of decay. These ways do not easily draw attention. If one pipe bursts beneath the concrete, creating a running puddle, it takes on the look and appearance of every pipe that has ever burst and every puddle that has ever run. There are always cars parked along the street, mostly broken-down vehicles that do not move except for when they do, another hunk of rusted metal deposited in the former one’s place. What is noticeable now is how the car shop that used to be the laundromat on the corner has suddenly gone missing. There is only the concrete foundation and a FOR SALE sign. The laundromat was the place where families took refuge after Hurricane Betsy in 1965. When my brothers say, “I learned to swim,” they mean they learned to swim to the laundromat that housed the offices of the trailer park that used to be Oak Haven. After the laundromat closed in the eighties, it became a used tire shop where men loitered, the shop sign spray painted on a piece of wood leaning against a great oak.

  Michael has just arrived back on the Greyhound bus from San Antonio for a job interview in a hotel restaurant. Out of the mass of shuffling sleepwalkers there he came, wearing shining white sneakers and a black outfit, creases pressed crisp, ironing being for him a meditative practice, executed with sincerity. The rigor that Michael has for pressing his clothes is the rigor my mother has and the rigor of my grandmother before her.

  Together we wait for Carl, who has insisted we meet him here, on Wilson. We stand where the front of the house used to be. I examine the table where Carl holds court. Beyond repair now, the wood disfigured from too much rain. Bottles are strewn on the front lawn while others lie neatly in the back of a pickup truck.

  A man across the street greets us like he knows the place.

  “What that dude name is?” Michael is asking. “Huggy or something like that?”

  “They say he burned down the laundromat,” I tell Michael, repeating what Carl told me. Calling places by what they originally were, especially when the landscape is marred, is one way to fight erasure.

  The man crosses over to us.

  “How you doing, my love? My hands kind of dirty, my respect,” he says grabbing and bending my hand to kiss it. He disappears back into the house across the street.

  “That’s Rabbit coming now,” Michael says after we have waited for at least an hour.

  Carl parks directly in front of the one cedar tree still standing, where he had always parked when there used to be two cedar trees framing the walkway.

  “What’s up, big boy?” Michael says to Carl.

  “What’s up, Mo?” Carl says to me.

  I say, “What you got in there for me, Carl?”

  “Look here,” he says lifting up a bottle. “A Long Island ice tea. You got a cup? Shake it up good. That’s one good ice tea.”

  This stuff is potent. Keep away from direct sunlight, the label warns. It is early evening by now, the sun, set.

  Carl calls the name of the man across the street so that we can never forget it: “Oh, that’s Poochie. Crazy, drunk Poochie.”

  Poochie lives inside the brick house with the arches that Mr. Will from Mississippi built, the house he finished just days before dying of a massive heart attack. Poochie is squatting on Mr. Will’s estate. Before the Water, Poochie lived in a junked-up bus on Old Gentilly Road, before he moved to “the house on the hill,” as Carl puts it. He has stored his belongings, a mass of rusted things, along the side of the house, which is pink painted wood, not brick like the front. Was the house pink on the side and brick on the front all along, back when I praised and felt cowed by the house’s facade, the dark mystery wrought by those peekaboo arches where I always imagined a satisfied Mr. Will from Mississippi sitting on the porch seeing but not being seen? That was and still is, to some degree, my definition of power.

  Poochie has planted an American flag in front of the house where the sidewalk used to be. Now there’s just broken-up concrete. The house is still triumphant, in a way, by the fact of its existence and the posturing of its arches in the front. Poochie is proud of the house, it is clear. Ever since Poochie took up residence, the house has gained several myths. Carl’s favorite is the anaconda story. “They say they got a snake in there bigger than your tire,” he tells me. “Ain’t never got him yet.” I know this is Carl’s story, that he is the originator, because I know how much he loves the film Anaconda (parts one, two, and three). He is fascinated with snakes, such as the anaconda in Poochie’s house that will, Carl says, one day take him out. That or the Bigfoot also living in there—the Bigfoot’s paw is to blame for the large hole in the roof that has never been patched, not since the storm when something flew through it. According to Carl, either the anaconda or the Bigfoot or Poochie’s own mouth will take him out. Poochie is another presence tonight. He is meddlesome in a way that disturbs Carl for it contradicts his religious-like belief in minding his own business.

  Over the course of the evening, a great many things happen. The mailman passes at 6 p.m., delivering mail to the one rightfully inhabited house on the block where Rachelle lives with her two daughters and delivering to the one business on the block, Crescent City Tow. But it is not so simple a mail drop. Carl and Michael and anyone else formerly belonging to 4121 Wilson can still receive mail even though there is no box and no house. Carl receives mail in Ms. Octavia’s mailbox. He and Michael brag about 4121 still being their official address on driver’s licenses and in voting records.

  In my childhood drawings of the house (a house seemed the only thing I could ever draw), I always made a mailbox with our address, 4121 Wilson, written across it. After the storm, when the house was already demolished but the mailbox was still standing, when the space we grew up in seemed to have been swallowed by the ground, even after the street turned against itself, becoming the junkyard it always tended toward, the postman still delivered circulars to mailboxes with no houses. I know this because I was standing there to witness it with my own two eyes.

  Seeing the mail truck head toward Chef, Michael laments the absence of a mailbox belonging to 4121. “Like there used to be,” he says.

  “We’ll dig a hole and put one up,” promises Carl.

  Michael raises the idea of buying the whole street, “making it a museum or something,” which rouses our imaginations. Carl imagines redoing the blue house closer to Chef that once belonged to Ms. Schmidt: “It would be nice to make those doors face that highway,” he says. “Some French doors.” This way the house would look upon Chef Menteur rather than run parallel to it. I think that’s a bad idea but don’t say so. “I’m thinking lots of big trees,” Michael says. “We could make Uncle Joe be the overseer and make sure everything is done with quality.”

  That’s key, I say.

  “We gotta watch the money,” Michael says. “We shrewd though, we shrewd. We could put all antiques in there.” About the Davises who were our next-door neighbors, to whom much of the empty parcels of land on the street still belonged, he said, “We not trying to push them out. We not trying to push out they heritage. We can tell them we lived on this place, too. We lived here.”

  Just then a strange cat passes by.

  “That’s Yellow,” Carl says about the gray cat with the bad eye, filmy and colorless. “That cat was here during Katrina. She was stranded in a tree. Do a story on her ass,” he tells me. We laugh. Yellow gained her name by living in the Yellow House after the storm, before it was erased. Now she is outside like the rest of us.

  Street: Completely dark except for a single lightbulb shining cold white on Rachelle’s front door. From time to time, the small orange eye of Carl’s cigarette. Lights flashing on Chef Menteur Highway, yellow, red, and greenish tints refracting back on us, changing from c
aution to stop to go to caution again. The three of us stand around Carl’s parked car on one side of the street.

  Carl stands near to me. “You cold, Mo?” He is wearing narrow black sunglasses made of hard plastic that slit his face. Sunglasses in the pitch-black night, a form of willful blindness. Who and what does Carl not want to see?

  A ten-year-old boy wearing pajamas appears from the direction of Chef. Someone calls the boy Notorious.

  Notorious lives in a white house closer to Chef Highway.

  “Where do you go to school, Notorious?” I say.

  “Nelson,” he says.

  “Where is that?

  “On Bernard.” Meaning St. Bernard Avenue, ten minutes west from here on the interstate.

  “He catch the school bus,” Carl says.

  Notorious was looking for a playmate at eight o’ clock at night, but Rachelle kept her two daughters in sports or else inside as a form of protection.

  How will the children living here now describe the street on which they grew up? What will they have to say, these children growing up on a block with two houses left, in an abandoned, disparaged section of New Orleans where a city councilman claims coyotes reign after dark? What will they say about the world they came from and the world before them? “The East,” W. G. Sebald wrote, “stands for lost causes,” but I do not accept this dire and grim view, precisely because of the children.

  Over the course of this night, Poochie will cross over to us and cross back to where he came from. He will fall in and out of Carl’s grace. Strangers will arrive on the dark street claiming to be distant cousins. Another man would appear by foot, introducing himself as “A Little Bit of This, a Little Bit of That.” He and Michael worked together at the Sheraton Hotel on Canal Street many years ago. Michael named him that after asking him how he arrived at a recipe; he answered, “A little bit of this, a little bit of that.” Now he calls himself the name.

  The four of us stand outside where the Yellow House used to be. I have never been out here with Carl this late. We are slapping the shit out of ourselves trying to kill gluttonous mosquitoes.

  As the night deepens, so do the sounds. A train passes. Then another. Or is it the same one setting off again? A woman’s voice floats through the air. Rachelle calling for one of her girls who has escaped the house? We never find out. Crickets and car engines, someone’s radio. But greater than all of these is the sound Poochie makes yelling out from across the street. It’s so dark we are only voices, but we know it is Poochie because his sentences begin and end with “Rabbit.” As in “Rabbit, that man say … Rabbit!”

  Carl will sometimes address the voice: “Don’t put all that trash back here,” he says to Poochie about bottles he has left on the ground that used to hold the Yellow House. “Them Road Home people still coming. We ain’t never settled with Road Home.” Other times, the voice yells YEE HAW or else the voice mumbles. Most times we do not acknowledge it. It will get quiet, then suddenly we will hear “Rabbit,” as if it is Poochie’s tic, screaming Carl’s nickname out. Michael and I look at each other and laugh about it.

  Little Bit says he’s just returned to New Orleans from Indianola, Mississippi, which he calls the country.

  I say, “It feels like we in the country now.”

  “Yep,” says Michael. “Mosquitoes biting you all on the fucking head.”

  “Not even much like we in New Orleans,” Carl says.

  “Indianola, Mississippi, top of the delta, we went up there in three cars, stayed up there for five years,” Little Bit says before launching into his entire displacement story, which includes a mean wife, demeaning jobs at the Dollar General, and jail time.

  “That’s what I went through since Katrina,” Little Bit says as an ending. “Where you was at, Rabbit?”

  “I was everywhere,” Carl says.

  Little Bit talks to Michael, but Carl is stuck on the past.

  “They had the Yellow House taped off,” Carl starts saying. “They had DANGEROUS. DO NOT ENTER. Fucking right. I had a lot of boiling pots still in there that was good. My big pot filt up with water. This was salt water, you gotta realize. It ain’t did nothing but really cleant them suckers.” Carl went inside the house anyway, laying boards to connect one edge of the temporary stairs our father built that didn’t hold to the ledge of the upstairs room where Carl grew up. “I went through Katrina. I wasn’t worrying about that son of a bitch collapsing.”

  He collected T-shirts and hats and things still left hanging in the closet upstairs. He gathered silver boxes with Mom’s papers. One day after the Water, he saw Poochie in the street wearing one of his T-shirts. “Bitch, you must have been in that house. You been in that closet?”

  “You gotta realize,” he says suddenly to me, as if embarrassed, “me and him about the same size.”

  We stand unmoving against the night. The chairs belonging to the table where Carl entertains are pushed forward like in a restaurant at closing time, their front legs lodged in the soft ground. We huddle around Carl’s battered Toyota. I photograph my family in the darkness, snapping photos blindly, seeing nothing through the viewfinder. What appears afterward is lit by the flash: Carl in dark black shades framed against the cedar tree. Cigarette by his side. Zipped up. Beard growing in an oval, edging his face. In another shot, Carl looks toward the highway, sunglasses off, mouth slightly open, elsewhere entirely. The cedar tree massive behind him, its leaves delineated into grains, the sole surviving tree, planted when he was only a baby, casting Carl into miniature.

  IX

  Cutting Grass

  When Carl finally invited me to cut the grass with him it was deep summertime, hurricane season. Cryptic emergency text messages from city hall pushed through regularly on our cell phones: “Turn around. Do not drown.” It was the time of year when, as Carl put it, “that grass be jumping.” Jumping so high that Carl arrived on Wilson prepared, still wearing his work outfit: navy pants, white T-shirt, a white towel wrapped around his neck like a cravat, and steel-toe boots with snake guards.

  “Are there snakes out here?” I asked.

  “Prolly,” he said, then began loading the riding mower off the back of his pickup truck.

  We were cutting grass for the look of it, making a small blot of pretty in a world of ugly. From high up above where the survey pictures are taken, this would not show. But standing on the ground, we knew. And, too, the land could be taken away from us for any and for no reason—American History 101—so we wanted to avoid appearing on the long indecipherable list of blighted properties in the newspaper, an entire page of small dots that were actually names and addresses, so tiny that if you were standing two feet away and throwing a dart the point would not, could not, land on a single name. Also in small print, at the very top of the list, the mumbo jumbo of obfuscation: “If the property is declared blighted, it is eligible for expropriation and if the property is declared a public nuisance, it is eligible for demolition.”

  Along with Michael, who was in town again for another round of job searching, we were all dressed up as if going to a special place. Lisa, Carl’s girlfriend, Mr. Carl’s mom, wore a neon-pink visor hat that matched the pink ribbon Lia, her nine-year-old daughter, wore. Lisa’s hair changed daily and today it was curly frizz hanging down over her eyes. The hair and the large shades covered most of her face. She looked like someone in hiding.

  We sat around Carl’s ruined table, drinking and passing Mr. Carl around when where he really wanted to be was on the ground running or held by Carl, both his father’s long arms wrapped around the base of Mr. Carl’s legs so that Carl’s hands touched his own waist, giving the impression that Carl held himself and the baby. Mr. Carl, who was almost two, was too grown-acting for a pacifier, but he still sucked one, or else he drank from beer cans when no one was looking. After he had taken sips and we had all hollered in uproar, Michael said, “Now he looking all crazy.” A drunken baby. Wobbly and sated. Light skinned with a fresh fade haircut, black Buster Browns, and p
laid knee pants bouncing on his mother’s knee.

  “You never came to our house before, hunh?” I asked Lisa.

  She shook her head no.

  Michael said, “They got a tree right there, a tree right here. That’s the front door. Our living room was right there.”

  Lisa was straining to try and see.

  The sun was out and beaming. Carl was tired today, from work, but that was all he said. His patience was running thin; you could tell that. Nothing on the street moved or seemed changed from the week before, except for the addition of a neon work cone midstreet where a water main had burst.

  After some time, Carl boarded the riding mower, which suddenly seemed tiny, especially compared with the ones I saw him riding at work, those “big old monsters,” Carl called them. Those times when I needed to retrieve something from him, usually money that he wanted me to give Mom, we made our exchange over a tall barbed wire fence with the sign US PROPERTY NO TRESPASSING, Carl in a neon safety vest, reaching his long arm over, saying nothing more than: “Hey Mo, here you go, drive careful now.”

  Carl cut a bit and then asked if I was interested in cutting the grass. It was not as simple as I thought. There were abandoned cars and Carl’s green boat on the lot. Carl sat at the table near to the curb and yelled directions. “Push that clutch in,” he said. The mower stuttered and quit.

  “Carl, I don’t think it’s cutting anything.”

  “You got that clutch all the way in?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You sure? Push that clutch in. Engage them blades.”

  The mower started.

  Lisa yelled, “Go head cut that grass, Monique.”

  But then when I was out of earshot, my red recorder, always on, captured her saying, “Oh my God.”