1 Dead in Attic (20 page)

Inside the storefront window, on a tabletop: work gloves, industrial wipes, small electrical fixtures, and a book,
Your Best Life Now: 7 Steps to Living at Your Full Potential.

Indeed. Talk about self-help. Best of luck to you, my friend.

There's an unmarked green tin building down the block, the parking lot still full of drowned cars, but life and commerce stir around them.

This is Dooley's Auto & Wrecker Service, but you'd know that only because that's what's printed on the brand-new shirt that the man named Dooley wears in the office.

There's no actual wrecker visible on the premises, but gospel music blares from the back auto bay, where Dooley's grandson-in-law—the only current employee—busies himself with auto repair.

Dooley sits at his desk eating lunch out of a Rally's bag with
Guiding Light
blaring on a TV against the wall. After losing every tool and every machine seven months ago—to say nothing of the eight cars he was working on at the time and all the old mechanics' uniforms with names stitched on the pockets—he's been back in business for three weeks.

New uniforms. Some new tools. Still need new machines, but can't wait forever.

“Need to get back to work,” Dooley says. He's cobbling this thing back to life with no help from FEMA or the Small Business Administration or anything else that's government-related or spelled by acronym.

“I don't fool with that,” Dooley says. “Just doin' it myself.”

Doin' it with no sign and no phone; there is still no land-line service in this part of town. Seven months later.

A customer walks into Dooley's shop. Broken headlight. Dooley loses interest in his conversation with a stranger and attends to the customer and the gospel music in the back bay blares and the sound of tools—new tools—clatters in the shade.

Moving down the block, more piles of debris. Big and small. A pile of riding lawn mowers stacked up on the sidewalk speaks of the loss of a small business. One small story. Many small stories make the big story.

Other places, little things, cosmetics, bedding, toys, small appliances. It's just stuff. Possessions. But it was
somebody's
stuff, and it took a long time and some scrap to get this stuff, and in a lifetime, this stuff amounted to somebody's comfort zone. Their home.

We are Humpty Dumpty, laughing on a wall one minute, then cracked and flat on our back the next.

A work crew is gutting a home, its debris spilled out onto the traffic lane and marked off with police tape. A man in a mask delicately lifts and tucks strands of Christmas lights that hang from the aluminum awning on the front porch to keep them from getting tangled in the floorboards the workers are ferrying out. It's as futile and loving a task as you could witness.

Let there be light. Let there be life.

Most houses here on this stretch of Toledano are one-story and empty, but some folks here are living in the rare upstairs and there are some trailers dotting the landscape, though not much sign of activity in them.

Clara Hunter watches this world from her front porch. In a housecoat and plastic hairnet, she is the only resident in view this afternoon, one of the first back.

“I was in Metairie, but I didn't like it,” she says. “Didn't like paying rent. So I came back home. There is nothing like home.”

Her front lawn, all twelve square feet of it, holds two new azalea bushes and one gardenia, the only living plant life other than the menacing, spiky weeds you see up and down this street.

She regards the boulevard before her, silent but for speeding, anonymous drivers seemingly oblivious to the stirrings out their windows. They've got their own problems.

A retiree, Hunter has lived here for thirty-five years. She says most of her neighbors own their homes. From what she has heard, the neighborhood will rise again, but she doesn't hear much these days because there is no phone service and she can't afford a cell and there's no one on the stoop next door or next door to that or next door to that.

“I can't talk to my friends,” she says. “But the lady up the street says some folks say they're coming back here soon. And some folks say they're not coming back at all.

“You got to be patient, I guess. You're not patient, you get a stroke or a heart attack.”

Words to live by. Seven months in.

There used to be a sign at the end of the road in Delacroix, at the termination of Highway 300, that said
END OF THE WORLD
.

The official state Department of Transportation and Development map identifies the endless expanse beyond this point as simply “hunting and trapping.”

Of course, that sign and that map predate August 29, 2005.

On that date, the sign disappeared, washed away like just about every man-made structure in lower St. Bernard Parish. The End of the World went from being a commentary on geography to a statement on what happened here on August 29. The sign itself washed out to sea. Obliterated.

Some other time, some other place.

And the landmass that reaches forever southeast to Black Bay and Breton Sound—next stop, Cuba—is currently of indeterminate quality as the famous pristine Louisiana sporting grounds it once was.

Standing at what was once the End of the World, a commercial fisherman named Cap'n Rocky Morales, a brick house of a man, gestures toward the horizon—the hunting and trapping—and says, “It was marshland before. Now it's just water.”

Indeed, as far as the eye can see, mostly water, with lumps of land trying to rise up, trying to break through, trying to dry out. Trying to exist. Kind of like St. Bernard itself.

The tidal surge that Katrina's brutal storm bands pushed into this land took everything, including the sure footing, geographically speaking (and perhaps psychologically as well).

There are boats where they shouldn't be and no houses where there should. And in the trees, everything, crazy stuff, it makes no sense: furniture, appliances, tires, clothes, ice chests, a toilet—all of it hanging like some nightmare vision of Christmas in the Oaks.

Katrina in the Oaks.

And there are blue trawler nets everywhere—everywhere—fanned out in branches like spiderwebs across the expanse for miles, and it's impossible not to think of Bob Dylan's song about Delacroix: “Tangled Up in Blue.”

The whole damn place is tangled up in blue nets and just trash. An unholy mess. Coyote ugly, and there's not enough beer in the world to make it look pretty.

“It's not so good,” Cap'n Rocky says. “I was leery about coming back here at first. But I was born here.”

That explains a lot, particularly why he would try to carve a life here out of the matchsticks that remain. The inexorable lure of a sense of place. Home sweet home. A man's trailer is his castle.

Cap'n Rocky was born half a mile up Bayou Terre Aux Boeufs, and in his forty-two years he has moved only this far—third house from the End of the World.

Funny, sort of, but he doesn't even know how to spell the name of the bayou he has lived on all his life. Apparently no one has ever asked him to spell it before.

It has been a life uncomplicated and on his own terms, and this is where he will stay, despite the fact that his house vanished and everything in it is a memory now.

“When most people came back here, the only way they found their houses was by the steps,” says Cap'n Rocky. “That's the only way we knew.”

And it's true. All that seems unmolested by the fury are the steps to the doors of the houses that aren't there, stairways to nowhere.

Lined up and down the highway, they call to mind that macabre joke about the little black boxes on airplanes that always seem to survive a crash: Why didn't they make the houses out of the same material they used for the steps?

Delacroix, it's just wreckage and steps and ghosts. No ice, no fuel. Hardly a way for a man who makes his living on water to carry on, but carry on he will. His life is the water. Give Cap'n Rocky a boat and some bait, and he will make it.

And not necessarily alone. “Let's see,” he muses over the question of who else has come back to live at the End of the World. “My uncle is up the road; he's back. There's my other uncle. And there's that old man up there; I guess there's four or five families.”

But more will come back, in that prideful and insolent Louisiana fashion that The Thing has carved into our hearts.

You can see already at the End of the World at least two dozen stacks of new crab traps set out on empty lots where people used to live. Local fishers have delivered them down here and will get busy with them when they can clear the channel and if they can get new boats and if they can find a place to live and if it doesn't all happen again this summer then, well . . . then everything will be just peachy in Delacroix.

“It doesn't pay to worry about it,” Cap'n Rocky says. “Whatever's going to happen will happen.”

I don't suppose Bob Dylan will get down here to Delacroix when he comes to town to play the JazzFest in a few weeks. It's just not a song anyone wants to hear right now.

•  •  •

Moving up the road, up toward civilization on Highway 300, there is smoke on the horizon to the east, off toward Chandeleur Sound. No one knows what it is. Grass fire is everyone's guess. Natural causes. Probably methane. What doesn't drown burns.

This area is supposed to be the region's natural defense against hurricanes, and if it were a dog, someone would shoot it. It's flat, clear-cut by winds and water, and you look at it now and you'd almost think God took the sixth day of Creation off and turned over the job of Louisiana's natural barriers to the Corps of Engineers.

It's scary is what it is, all tangled up in blue.

Over in Yscloskey, at the foot of Lake Borgne, there are lots of trailers and tents and fishers who look as though they're still wiping the unbelievability of it all out of their eyes.

Dazed and confused. It's all rust and incongruity. And more steps to nowhere.

In Violet, there's a sacred place called Merrick Cemetery. The caretakers of the place don't know how old it is; just that it's nineteenth century and that there are slaves buried there.

The flood came through like stampeding water buffalo, plowing, piling, and stacking the simple white above ground tombs like toy blocks. When the water receded, it left a jumble of concrete that looked like bad modern sculpture all tilted this way and that.

Scores of vaults broke open and the caskets inside them broke open and the bodies—those that were found—are unidentified. Add to the indignity that the cemetery records, in a nearby house, were destroyed.

So much for eternal rest.

There is a long line of new gray tombs that look as if they were hurriedly made of pavement and they're lined up along the length of the west side of the cemetery.

A man tidying up the grounds with a weed whacker explains, “A lot of 'em came out and they don't have any names so they put them there.” On them are markings: ME 12-00001, ME 12-00054, ME 12-00107, and so on.

That's who they are now.

Some families have come back and tried to locate where the tombs were before August 29. In one case, someone has stuck the end of a yellow kitchen broom—bristles up—to mark where a headstone should be.

Just past here, past the house that's painted
MAW MAW, CALL CHAD
and the trailer that says
WE SHOOTERS LOOTERS
, the road to Plaquemines Parish is washed out.

This area has the distinct air of a place you'd call the middle of nowhere—unless, of course, you lived there. In that case, it's home.

•  •  •

In the Story Park subdivision, in the lost suburbia halfway between the middle of nowhere and Chalmette, three teenage boys skateboard through empty streets piled shoulder high with debris.

The voyeur accustomed to the brown watermark of New Orleans and Metairie—the line that measures our misery index—would be confused here.

The houses were clearly flooded, but there are no watermarks. The riddle is easily solved by the appearance of a tree and other debris that settled on a rooftop when the water went back to where it came from.

It's just as bad as it gets; it's the Lower 9th but with low brick houses that refused to budge. Painted on one:
DESTROY THIS MEMORY.

On another, a homeowner has painted a one-finger salute to Allstate.

There are several
FOR SALE BY OWNER
signs up and, way up close to the 40 Arpent Canal, the rear door of St. Bernard Parish, there's a guy laying new sod.

On a sad long cul-de-sac that cleaning crews have yet to clear a man is carrying hope—or is it delusion?—onto his yard, one strip at a time.

It's hard to know what to say to this guy. So I offer, “Good luck, man.”

“Thank you,” he says and toils on while the skateboarders down the block rule their street without fear of oncoming traffic or a cranky neighbor telling them to cut out all that infernal racket.

•  •  •

No question about it, nature and the Corps opened a can of whup-ass on St. Bernard. It's impossible not to wonder about its future, not to worry about its precarious location between the river on one side and the ruinous man-made Gulf Outlet on the other, and then the lakes and the sounds whose shores move closer day by day, week by week, the disappearing coastline now more famous than the hunting and fishing grounds.

There's little doubt: it can't possibly take another hit like this.

But the hustle of the streets is constant, traffic off and running on the main streets, Chalmette literally pulsing with commerce and cars as people forge ahead—that Louisiana insolence: This land is our land. No one is going to take it away.

No one trusts the Corps, and no one trusts the government. Nature, they'll take their chances with. Live free or die trying.