1 Dead in Attic (10 page)

I decided I could fit about fifteen or so Barbies into my carry-on bag and began to try to dress them from the mounds of discarded dresses, gowns, and fashionable minis that litter my floors.

I found this task about as easy and pleasant as hanging Sheetrock. Apparently you need fingers smaller than toothpicks to accomplish this. I gave up the task.

And that's how I ended up recently wandering around several major American airports with a small satchel stuffed full of naked Barbies. All mashed together in a fleshy heap.

No other luggage to speak of. Nothing checked in. No personal clothes or items; I am fully outfitted in Maryland.

Just a laptop computer, a couple of notebooks, and a suitcase full of naked Barbies.

If anybody was ever wearing a sign at airport security that screamed “Full body cavity search!” it was me.

Guns, knives, drugs, explosives, cigarette lighters—that's old hat. A travel bag stocked with Lesbian Orgy by Mattel is a whole 'nother circumstance.

Mercifully, I made it from Point A (New Orleans) to Point B (Maryland) without incident. That's because none of the security screeners would make eye contact with me. Or maybe I was only imagining that.

Maybe the X-ray machines render the plastic components of Barbies almost invisible. Or maybe the imagery was so creepy that no one wanted to deal with this haggard man with a carry-on bag full of naked Barbies.

Pass by, horseman.

And that's my story. Not much there, really. But there comes a point at which I choose to purge myself of the images and the smell and the dust and the sepia horizons of New Orleans. Of all the doubt.

Sometimes I just want to ponder something else.

Sometimes I just want to travel halfway across the country just to see my kids smile and to crawl under the covers with them at night and listen to their syncopated chorus of snores and nose whistles, wince at their involuntary spasms and howls, and stare at the ceiling and wonder at the wonder of it all.

If you've done any traveling in the post-Katrina era, you already know this: it follows you.

Not only is The Horror the only thing anyone around here ever talks about anymore, it's also the only thing everyone Out There wants to talk about when they meet you.

I went to my high school's homecoming in Maryland recently and discovered I was practically a celebrity alumnus by virtue of the fact that I live in New Orleans.

We aging, potbellied guys shoved our hands in our pockets and rocked on our heels, standing down by the end zone watching the game.

“How is it?” they all ask, and I know they're being kind and really are concerned, but just how the hell do you answer that question in time to get back to the crucial third-and-long situation on the football field?

I mean, really: What can you tell them? Where do you start? Levees? FEMA? Looting? Do you really want to get into it?

So you lie and make it easier for everyone. “We're getting there,” you tell them.

My high school is Georgetown Prep. It used to be affiliated with Georgetown University—way back a century or two ago—but is now a stand-alone institution in the suburbs of Washington, D.C.

It's a coat-and-tie place, all boys, an academic and athletic powerhouse on ninety rolling acres; one heck of a place to spend your formative years. Latin was required when I went there; I'm sure it still is.

It was like living inside that novel
A Separate Peace,
which was also required reading when I was there.

It's composed mostly of day students, but there are a couple of dormitories there for boarders, and when Katrina blew through New Orleans, the folks at Prep contacted Jesuit High School in New Orleans and offered to take in some kids for the semester. No charge.

That amounts to considerably more than a nice gesture: it costs $25,000 to go there (which is a few more bucks than it was when I was a lad, to be sure).

There actually weren't any vacancies at Prep, so the academic brain trust there came up with a plan: any undergraduate roommates who agreed to make room for a Jesuit student and make it three to a room would be offered the coveted privileges allowed only to seniors: televisions and refrigerators in their dorm rooms.

Fifteen Jesuit kids wound up at Prep this fall. Maryland is a whole different world for these kids, trying to break into an alien East Coast social scene in midstream. Who are these girls? What are these people talking about? Don't they have any Abita around here?

After the football game, I met Jude Fitzmorris, one of the Jesuit kids. He's Tom Fitzmorris's kid; you know, that “Mr. Food” guy on AM radio.

Jude said he really likes it there. He's fitting in. He plans to stay the full academic school year. Most of the other guys, he said, are homesick as all get-out and they want to come back here.

In fact, some already have.

There's just something about New Orleans, I guess, even when it's beaten down like a wet three-legged dog. With mange and fleas. That's blind in one eye. And won't hunt.

That's us. The three-legged dog. But a confoundingly lovable cur all the same.

At that homecoming game (we beat St. Alban's by three touchdowns, by the way), I ran into my friend Rory Coakley, who happened to be in New Orleans the weekend Katrina began her ramrod track up our wazoo.

He had been moving his son, an incoming freshman—and recent Prep grad—into the dorm at Loyola University. In fact, this September, I was scheduled to host a dinner for Rory, Jr., and seven other incoming Prep freshmen at Jacques-Imo's Cafe on Oak Street.

Another local Prep alum and I were going to give the boys a little shrimp and alligator sausage cheesecake just to let them know they're not in Maryland anymore, then do the old-fart routine of welcoming them to the city and rendering our deep fonts of local wisdom and advice.

Of course, that didn't happen.

That Friday, Saturday, and Sunday before the storm, Rory called me from his room at the downtown Hilton as things were getting scary around here. I kept telling him to get the heck out of Dodge, but he couldn't find a flight. Or a car. Or a train. Or a bus.

I offered him one of our cars—told him to take it all the way to the East Coast; I didn't care. “You really need to get the hell out of here,” I told him.

In my signature fashion, however, my car had zero gas in it and at this point there were no gas stations left open around here. So Rory, his wife, his son, and two other Prep grads were on their own.

“Godspeed to you, brother,” I told him as I split town with my own family. “See you on the other side.”

Rory's a creative and intelligent guy—and fairly well off, it turns out. As I said, we had a pretty good education, so, in thinking-outside-of-the-box fashion, he walked out of the Hilton lobby and up to a cabdriver and offered him a thousand dollars for a ride to Mobile.

In perhaps another characteristic of a typical Prep alum, Rory was delighted to discover that the cabdriver had a six-pack of Heineken in the car, which he threw into the deal as lagniappe.

Rory decided to drink one beer every hour. The six-pack was finished before they even made the Mississippi state line. The trip took so long that the cabdriver said he was too tired to continue, so Rory finished the driving duties, some sixteen or seventeen hours later.

A few days later, Rory and I were on the phone—he safely back in Maryland, me in Baton Rouge—watching the grim TV images of the Convention Center.

“You know, that would have been you,” I told him. “That's the best thousand dollars you ever spent.”

Anyway. At the homecoming game, Rory told me he would be back in New Orleans in January. Turns out, Rory Jr. and some of the other Prep guys are reenrolling at Loyola.

I wanted to ask him: Are you out of your mind? I mean, I think they're plumb crazy to do such a thing when they can comfortably remain in the safe, familiar environs of Georgetown University, where all the other Prep Loyola guys ended up.

But I swear to God, I wanted to kiss Rory when he told me this. It just slays me that there are people Out There who are committing themselves to this city when they have no other need or obligation to, no other reason than that they think it's the right thing to do.

They believe in us.

And this is so important. If our universities don't survive this thing, we're in deep trouble. And I will testify to you that a half-dozen boys from Georgetown Prep are a good place to start.

And yeah, sure, they'll probably wind up being among those really annoying shirtless yahoos you see sitting on living room furniture on the littered front lawns of the frat houses on Broadway, but they're also going to be young men who saw what went down here ten weeks ago and understand what went down here and they and their parents are still willing to stick it out with us.

Without them, we're toast.

And for that I say: Fried green tomatoes and eggplant pirogues at Jacques-Imo's on me, boys! Just give me a call when you get here in January.

Here to your new home, this crazy little three-legged dog named New Orleans.

Each time I go to Maryland to visit my children in exile, my daughter, Katherine, asks me the same thing: “Daddy, is everything in New Orleans broken?”

My first impulse is to tell her, “Only our hearts, darling. In a million little pieces. But our spirits will endure.”

But Katherine, being six, isn't much for purple melodrama or lofty sentiment. She just wants to know if her swing set is okay.

So I tell her that a lot of things are, in fact, broken but that most of her stuff—that's what counts to a child, right?—is fine. Except for the swing set, oddly enough. It's history. But that's a small price, I tell her.

I try to teach my kids that they are the lucky ones, the fortunate few, and they saw all that stuff on TV, so I think they get it.

I think.

They see the piles of donated clothes at their schools in Maryland and the table where students were raising money to buy backpacks for Katrina kids and so they know: there are folks out there a lot worse off than us.

On TV, they saw the images of people sitting in baskets dangling from ropes out of helicopters and they thought that looked pretty scary but pretty fun all the same and they wish they had done that.

“No, you don't,” I tell them and leave it at that.

Katherine and my son Jack recently asked me for status reports about their favorite places. The zoo: good. The aquarium: not so good.

Creole Creamery: good. This is important. After all, who would want to live in a town without ice cream?

I try to paint a somewhat accurate picture of what life looks like here, filtered through their lenses; I want them to understand, in some small way, what they will come home to one day soon.

They need to know what will be different in their upside-down world. The fewer surprises, my thinking goes, the smoother it will all go down.

They seem to grasp the situation best by an accounting of their friends. Where are their friends? they want to know. Who will be here when they come back to New Orleans?

I tell them that Walker and Olivia and Margot are like us: they're all here and safe and settled in their own homes.

I tell them that Casey, Helen, and the twins Sisson and Tappan all lost the first floors of their homes in the flood but that they are going to live upstairs in their houses and they will be in school with us in January.

They think this sounds cool, this living upstairs thing.

“Can we live upstairs?” Jack asks me.

Hmm. “We can pretend,” I tell him. “How about we make believe we live upstairs?”

He thinks this sounds like a good game.

Then I tell them that Lexi and Mila have moved away and they won't be coming back. Same for Miles and Cecilia. Ditto Charlie. They're gone.

They don't like this news, but they process it and they have been aware for a while that lots of families are spread around the country as they are, living in new places and going to new schools. Hurricane Kids, just like them.

They don't like the idea that they never said good-bye to Lexi and Mila and Miles and Cecilia and Charlie. I tell them we'll find these kids and we will tell them good-bye. I promise them that we will find these kids. So they can say . . . good-bye.

Continuing on the list of friends, I tell them that Sean is up in the air but that he will probably be coming back.

“Why is Sean up in the air?” Jack asks me. He's four. I try to picture what he is picturing. Sean. Up in the air.

That sounds even cooler than living upstairs. I guess it sounds as though he's dangling under a helicopter. I don't know. Sometimes I wonder how we're able to communicate with our children at all.

Katherine asks me about the specific fates of two other friends, Juliet and Nadia. I tell her that, truth is, I have no idea what happened to Juliet and Nadia. Not a clue. Vanished. They're just gone, and we don't know where to or for how long and maybe we'll see them again and maybe we won't.

I don't know.

Kids don't work so well with uncertainties.

“Will you find Nadia for me?” Katherine asks.

I tell her yes, I will find Nadia. But I don't know where Nadia is. I can't even find my barber; how am I going to find some kid who has been cast to the fates?

Where did everybody go?

Man, it's a hell of a thing that went down here.

Juliet, Nadia, are you out there? Somewhere? Anywhere?

If you are, Katherine says hello.

And good-bye.

We have been waking up with Groundhog Day Syndrome for a long time now, dragging ourselves out of bed with a sense of dread that the clock has stopped, the calendar pages don't turn, and nothing is changing.