1 Dead in Attic (5 page)

Yes, indeed, all is returning to normal. I think there is no better indication of this than the running commentary that has been taking place on the plywood boards mounted over the windows of Sarouk Shop Oriental Rugs down on St. Charles Avenue near Lee Circle.

Early on, in the hairy days of Aftermath, the owner/proprietor/squatter who was living there spray-painted (I'm no handwriting analyst, but I'd say it was with some urgency), “Don't try: I am sleeping inside with a big dog, an ugly woman, two shotguns and a claw hammer.”

Claw hammer. Nice touch.

Then, in a spray-paint posting dated 9/4/05 (talk about meticulous graffiti!), it says, “Still here. Woman left. Cooking a pot of dog gumbo.”

As I said, dire times call for dire humor. Or maybe it wasn't a joke; some strange things have happened around here lately.

Anyway, in a spray-painted update dated 9/24, it says, “Welcome back, y'all. Grin & bear it.”

Ain't that the truth? I mean, what are the other choices?

I was walking around the French Quarter Saturday, surveying the hurricane cleanup efforts twelve days after the storm, when I came upon Finis Shellnut, who possesses one of the best names I've ever known.

“Come here,” he told me. “I'm going to show you something you will never believe.”

Shellnut is a real estate wheeler-dealer in the Quarter but is perhaps better known as the (now ex-)husband of Gennifer Flowers. They're originally from the Arkansas power network: he takes credit for introducing the Clintons into the Whitewater deal; she conducted more personalized business with the ex-president.

Together, they opened the Kelsto Club on St. Louis a few years ago and he held court behind the bar while she sang torch songs in the front of the windows that open across the street from the legendary Antoine's restaurant.

But they divorced just weeks before Katrina, which he weathered in the French Quarter. And after the storm passed, he immediately established himself as the go-to guy for goods and services on the street. Lumber, gas, cash, ice, backhoes, cleanup crews, cold champagne: Finis Shellnut can get it all. Within the hour, generally.

“I'm like Mr. Haney from Green Acres,” he said. “I can get anything anybody needs.” And then he proved it.

He led me around the corner, to an unmarked delivery entrance for Antoine's, where a guy named Wilbert has been reporting to work every day, trying to keep on top of the food situation before it all rots and stinks—and then trudging “back over to the projects,” as he says, to sleep in a tenement with no tenants and no power.

So Wilbert deals with rancid butter and tomatoes that have gone to black. But there's one thing he hasn't had to deal with, and that's what Shellnut wanted to show me.

He positioned me in front of a big storage cooler that is probably about forty years old, and then he pulled the door open and a cloud of frost blew out. Inside, it was cold. Real cold. Not only had the ice inside Antoine's meat and seafood locker not completely melted—it hadn't even started to melt.

Don't ask me how this is possible. I do not know. And I did not take down the name of the ice company nor the refrigerator manufacturer, but I should have, because they've got a good bit of PR to capitalize on.

Because together they had saved shelves and shelves of lobster tails and soft-shell crabs and tubs of lump crabmeat and fillets and New York strips and tenderloin tips. Thousands of them.

This wasn't just a big pile of food. This was the overabundant but abandoned inventory of the city's glorious tradition of overconsumption. It was like looking at a small piece of New Orleans history.

And twelve days after the storm, when the city's survivors had long since acclimated to diets of looted Doritos, Salvation Army cheeseburgers, and prepackaged MREs from the National Guard . . . it made me hungry.

And speaking of the National Guard: We're standing there looking at all this food, and Shellnut asks me, “What are we going to do with this?”

He told me he'd been trying to give it to NOPD officers, but they were all too individually stressed out to embrace the concept of fine dining and there was no discernible central command to alert to this situation. And this was one hell of a situation.

I asked Shellnut if he was sure—
if he was positive
—that this was what it looked like: fresh food. I mean, how could it be?

He shrugged. He said this was how they had found it, he and Wilbert. So we cut open a fillet and we popped a lid on the lump crabmeat and smelled them and they smelled . . . beautiful.

So I proposed this: Uptown, where we have been operating an ad hoc “news bureau” by generator from inside a reporter's house, we are under the protective operations of the California National Guard.

They patrol our area and have given us their MREs (the beef ravioli is to die for), and they have generally treated us with more respect, grace, and kindness than one has a right to expect under martial law.

Fact is, every one that we have come in contact with—and there are plenty of them—has been a Good Joe.

Back home in California, these men and women are cops and teachers and businessmen who were given about twelve hours' notice to tie up any loose ends in their lives, say good-bye to their families, and come to New Orleans to bring some serious heat and restore order on our streets.

And they're doing a helluva job and that big pile of meat looked like a real good way to put into action what we've been putting into words for them for two weeks: Thank you.

But first, I figured we better test it. Despite its alluring physical appearance, if it was, in fact, rotten—as every other steak in this city most certainly was at this point—I did not want to be personally responsible for wiping out an entire unit of the California National Guard.

With all the bad headlines coming out of this town, that's not one I wanted to add to the pile.

So I tested it on my colleagues. I brought home about a dozen massive beef fillets and I seasoned and cooked them and they were excellent. (No one would try the crabmeat; despite appearances, the implications seemed daunting.)

In the morning, I polled my group of housemates and found no reports of constitutional distress—at least no more distress than usual, considering our fairly unhealthy living conditions. But enough about that.

So Sunday morning I went back to visit Shellnut. “Are you sure it's okay to take these?” I asked, and he assured me he had cleared it with the restaurant and I hope that is the case, and if it is not, Mr. or Mrs. Guste—or whoever currently runs that classic culinary landmark—we'll clear this up later. Somehow. I give you my word.

So we packed up 240 fillets and tenderloins and I dropped them off at Sophie B. Wright Middle School, where the California Guard unit is stationed.

Then I hustled a few grills off some front porches in my neighborhood—which is basically in preserved physical condition, so if the worst thing that happened to you in Katrina was losing your old Weber, then I don't want to hear about it.

It went to a good cause.

Then I called in a delivery of twenty bags of charcoal from a colleague in Baton Rouge and we set up at the corner of Prytania and Napoleon, under the oaks (they're still there!), and we had us a Sunday-afternoon barbecue.

And when I was informed that 240 steaks were not going to be nearly enough for the six hundred Guardsmen and -women based at the site, I dispatched a team of them to go down to the Quarter and find Shellnut—which is not hard to do—and they came back with him and also a few hundred more steaks.

The Guard, they went nuts. Absolutely nuts. As platoons came back from patrols, they were greeted by four grills going full steam, a much better smell than our city streets in these hard times.

At one point, several company cooks returned and were thrilled to have some real cooking to do, so they relieved me of duty. That was their prerogative. It is, after all, martial law.

So then I just watched. Shellnut and I leaned against my car and took in the scene, and all these guys, they just fell over us with gratitude, as if
we
were the heroes—an absurd notion. But maybe for one afternoon, we did a little bit of good on behalf of our city, our people, and particularly Antoine's world-famous restaurant.

And with my story told, I'd just like to add—gently, so as not to sound as though I'm complaining—but if we ever have a storm like Katrina headed this way again, if Wilbert or someone else down at Antoine's could toss a few hundred pounds of potato salad into that cooler before it hits, that would be great.

Because it would have been really nice to have some fresh sides with all that meat. Now, that would have been something.

The first time I came back to New Orleans after Katrina, I'll admit that the whole specter shook me to my core. After spending eight days reporting in the city, my hands were shaking and I had lost about ten pounds. It was time to take a break.

As I drove to Baton Rouge to catch a flight, I pulled off at the first interstate exchange with any life to it—Laplace—and went to the McDonald's and got a Big Mac, a fish sandwich, large fries, and a large Coke.

I inhaled the stuff as I drove, and two exits later—Sorrento or somewhere like that—I pulled off and went to the McDonald's there and got a Big Mac and a large Coke to sustain me for the rest of the drive, my own personal take on
Super Size Me
.

Then, after a brief respite with my wife and kids in Mary-land, I returned to New Orleans for more. Reporting, that is. Not McDonald's.

The second time I left New Orleans, Armstrong Airport was open. Again my hands shook as I drove away from town, but when I settled into my seat as we went aloft, my troubles, too, stayed behind on the ground.

I looked down over the region as we rose, and—maybe you've seen pictures of this—the sea of blue color beneath me was nothing less than awe-inspiring.

At first I had this vision that I was flying over Beverly Hills until I realized all that blue beneath me was not swimming pools but roof tarps and coverings. It is the color that bonds us in these times, maybe even more than that weird purple hue that Rex, LSU, and K&B seemed to conspire to make us love so many years ago.

The Blue Roof Town. Man, there's a great country song in there somewhere.

There are a lot of heartache songs in this whole ordeal, no doubt assisted by the syncopated double whammy of Katrina/Rita.

Somewhere, right now, someone is writing a song that will make Tim McGraw a million dollars; I just hope that someone is from New Orleans.

On my most recent trip back to New Orleans, earlier this week, I was waiting for my connection in Memphis and listened while the gate agent called the names of standby travelers to come forward: “Passenger Cheramie. Passenger Bettincourt . . .”

The gate agent's Tennessee drawl mauled these names, but it was a wondrous thing to hear these beautiful French names being called and to know that our people were coming home.

Settling into their seats, almost everyone turned to the stranger next to him or her and asked, “Have you seen it yet?”

It. Our home. Our place.

A haunting quietude consumed the plane as we descended over Lake Pontchartrain. You could tell that most of the people on the plane were coming home for the first time, and instead of the usual world-weary travelers burying their noses in paperbacks or trying to catch a last wink of sleep, everyone craned for looks out the windows to see what “it” looks like now.

It felt like a plane full of kids on their first flight, as if they had never seen such a vista from the air before. And, of course, they hadn't.

I wanted to pipe up: Man, you should have seen it a month ago; it was so much worse. Or maybe tell them all: It's not as bad as you think it's going to be.

Or, I thought, I could harness more practical advice from recent experience and tell them: Whatever you do,
do not
open your refrigerator. Ever. Again.

But even though I have one of those profoundly annoying personal compulsions of talking to (at?) strangers all the time—particularly at inappropriate moments—I found myself lingering on some advice whose provenance I have long forgotten (and seldom followed) but that seemed so apt for this anguished moment: “If you cannot improve upon the silence, do not speak.”

Words of wisdom, to be sure. At a time like this, a flow of platitudes from a self-absorbed dilettante veteran of the War of 2005—a dilettante with shaky hands, no less—is not what anybody needs to hear.

So I kept my mouth shut and let the passengers' heads wrap around what was about to happen to them when they got out of the plane and drove to their homes for the first time.

For some, it will be a foul-smelling but mildly comic discovery that they forgot to empty their Diaper Genie before they left. For a friend of mine who accompanied his mother to their home off Paris Avenue in St. Bernard Parish over the weekend, it was the discovery of two tenants in the rental side of her shotgun double—two tenants who had been dead for thirty-three days.

Wrap your head around that.

For those who return to the area and those who do not and those who never left, these are our collective memories now, our marks of distinction and suffering, small stuff like Aunt Ida's meat loaf sitting in your fridge for five weeks or big stuff like dead people on the other side of your living room wall.

Like our blue tarp rooftops, these are the bonds we will share forever. They are the bonds that will hold us together.

New Orleans still unfolds itself to you in a sensual way. That was always her seductive forte, but it is different after the storm.