City of Refuge (10 page)

“Where’s Dave?” Craig asked as he pulled out a bar stool and sat. Dave was Serge’s best friend and constant foil at Rosie’s, a news cameraman for WYAT-TV and Vietnam vet.

“He’s throwink his money away on video poker. Now he has a system which will make him rich. I asked him to advance me enough for another scotch.”

“I’ll have an Abita,” Craig said to the much-pierced bartender. When she went to get the beer Craig said, “She new?”

“She’s been fillink in for Martine this week. She’s afraid of magnets.” Serge took a long pull on his drink as Craig paid for his beer. They clicked bottle to glass and as Craig took his first long swallow Dave walked over. Serge regarded him balefully.

“Where’s my next scotch?” Serge said.

“It’s in the poker machine.”

Dave approached the bar, leaning against it with the palms of his hands and doing pushups against it. “Hey Meena…”

“He thinks he is going to haf sex with the bartender,” Serge said to Craig. “He is under a misapprehension.”

“So, Serge, what do you think about the noise bill?” Craig asked, referring to one of the perennial efforts on the part of some French Quarter residents to ban music from the streets.

“It doesn’t matter because Hurricane Katrina is goink to come to town and reorganize city government for us.”

“You think it’s coming?” Craig said, trying to sound more amused than alarmed.

“No question.”

“Are you going to leave?”

“Can a cypress tree leave a swamp? I am a live oak in a swamp of scotch. I am like termites who die if you cut off their water source…”

“Man, why don’t you shut up,” Dave said, coming over with his drink.

“He is frustrated because the bartender has repulsed his middle-aged efforts.”

“You should have seen him the other night,” Dave said. “Some guy who works at a Radio Shack on the West Bank came in and
started talking about how forty years ago he had heard Clay Shaw plotting the Kennedy assassination. Serge calls him a retrograde fellow traveler and starts ranting about conspiracy theories and how if the guy had grown up in Transylvania or someplace he would really know about government conspiracy.”

“I wanted to see how steady he was on his feet. I am afraid I offended him slightly.”

“Just slightly,” Dave said. “Hey I liked the piece you wrote on Irma Thomas.”

“Thanks,” Craig said.

“Fuckink prick,” Serge said, vehemently. He was looking up at the television over the pass-through to the street, which was the one that always had the news or political shows on it. Craig and Dave followed Serge’s gaze up to it, where an interview was in progress with Bobby Wise, the radio talk-show host. He had been in the news lately for some remarks he had made on immigration and border patrols, advocating a shoot-on-sight rule along the entire Mexican border.

“That son of a bitch,” Serge went on. “He said the other day ‘Why should we let them come here and work for minimum wage when we can pay them sixty cents an hour if they stay home?’ Look at them—it’s a fuckink love fest. No wonder—it’s Fox…Bartender…”

The bartender came over and Serge said, “Put the channel back on CNN. What is Fox News doing on there?”

“That’s what was on when I turned it on, Serge,” she said, grabbing the remote and searching for CNN.

“It’s channel twenty-nine,” he said, disgustedly. After she had changed it and walked away to serve another customer, Serge said, “Fuckink replacement bartender.”

“Hey,” Dave said. “I have a date with her next Tuesday.”

“That is science fiction,” Serge said, looking at Craig. “So aren’t you evacuating for the comink cataclysm?”

“You mean the hurricane?” Craig said. “We’re leaving tomorrow.”

“Good luck with the traffic,” Dave said, looking up at the TV. “Serge called Nash Roberts at home. In Mississippi. Called him out of retirement.”

“Are you writing a column about it?”

“No,” Serge said. “I just wanted to see where God, in the person of Nash Roberts, thought I would be most likely to witness the apocalypse with my own eyes,” Serge said.

“Even Nash Roberts can’t predict a storm’s path this far in advance,” Dave said.

“Wait and see,” Serge said.

Another half hour went by amid the banter, the familiar mode, and toward the end of it Craig noticed a foaming feeling in his stomach, a carbonation of fear, or dislocation, like what he had felt earlier at the
Gumbo
office, as if he were looking at all this normalcy and familiarity from outside, from somewhere in the future, after it had all been wiped away. It came up unbidden, like a sudden and overwhelming wind. Craig told himself to relax, that they had been through this many times. Somehow, the familiarity of these surroundings was upsetting him. He waited for the feeling to pass, and when it didn’t he took his leave. As Craig said goodbye to his friends and walked toward the door, Serge called after him, “See you downriver.”

Even before daylight on Sunday morning the traffic had thickened and slowed to a crawl along the roads leading out of the city. The hurricane was headed directly for New Orleans, and at the last minute, now, even people who had never before evacuated finally packed bags, threw blankets and bottled water in their car, or their neighbors’ car, or their brother’s, along with one or two toys for the kids, their medicines, their pets, all grabbed in an escalating urgency, along with last-minute things that struck them—either heirlooms (
Oh, get the wedding album…take the wedding album…
) or odd choices that crossed their field of vision at some final moment and were suddenly irradiated with meaning—that old lamp that had sat for decades on their mother’s nightstand, or a favorite picture from the wall—and started out of town, faintly dazed with a sense that this might in fact represent the end of everything they had ever worked for, or taken for granted, heading toward some undefined future. Countless copies of that day’s
Times-Picayune
sat unsold all over town, with the headline KATRINA TAKES AIM.

Some headed northeast, across the water toward Slidell and on to eastern Mississippi and Alabama. Others headed north across the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway to Mandeville and Covington, or out Interstate 10 to Laplace and then north through Manchac toward
Hammond and McComb, up toward Jackson. And many more than that were bound straight west on I-10, toward Baton Rouge, or Lafayette, and then north to Shreveport or straight west through the long stretches of eastern Texas and finally to Houston, or up to Dallas. They had a hotel reservation, or they had a brother or a second cousin or an old college roommate somewhere where they could stay for a night, or a few nights if they needed to.

New Orleans is surrounded by water. The Mississippi River forms the crescent-shaped southern border, where the city’s highest ground rises to meet the levees along the cuticle-shaped riverbank. To the east of the city is Lake Borgne, and to the north is Lake Pontchartrain, a 630-square-mile brackish lake. Off to the west is swampland that had been partially tamed decades before; pilings had been sunk into the mud and the lake bottom, and causeways had been built heading north, northeast and west, and bridges had been built across the Mississippi River to the suburbs of Gretna and Marrero and Terrytown on the Westbank.

The city proper forms a kind of shallow bowl, half of which sits technically below sea level. Most of New Orleans would flood even in a heavy rain if it were not drained by a network of pumps, built nearly a hundred years ago, that suck the water out of the city’s subterranean drainage system and push it into canals at 17th Street and London Avenue, and into the Industrial Canal that divides the Upper and Lower Ninth Wards. The water level in these canals is higher than street level in many places alongside neighborhoods like Lakeview and Gentilly, and it is held back by levees, built decades ago by the United States Army Corps of Engineers. Residents near these levees had been alarmed, for years, by evidence of seeping water around the giant earthen banks, with no identifiable source. In other places, concrete walls, which had been driven down into the humped levees and extended up above them to hold back the water in the canals, had buckled slightly and shifted out of line, like teeth
in need of straightening. The residents’ alarm had caused some investigation, which had concluded that there were structural problems with the levees and the flood walls, which bore further investigation and, most likely, extensive and expensive repair. The reports were made, and nothing ever happened. By Sunday morning, most of the city’s population was trying to get out of the cracked bowl ahead of the hurricane.

Police and state troopers had blocked off most roads leading into the city, and they routed traffic on the interstates so that all lanes were pointed outbound. This helped to a degree, but all it takes is for one badly serviced car to break down and block a lane, and traffic slows sharply. If another breaks down a bit farther on, it will cause a monumental snarl. People who are rattled, distracted, scared and in a hurry often do not drive well, and even minor accidents slow traffic for hours.

By eight o’clock Sunday morning, an apparently endless river of traffic crawled along Interstate 10 westbound under a withering sun, toward Baton Rouge and Lafayette and Texas. Cars inched along at ten miles per hour, and five miles an hour, past the shopping malls and chain stores of suburban Metairie and Kenner, all of them locked and shuttered now in advance of the storm. In Kenner, an accident blocked a lane of traffic, and cars merged, inched in, slowly, haltingly, squeezed into already engorged lanes, past the airport, which would shut down operations at five p.m., and into the causeway above the swampy area set aside for a spillway should the Mississippi River threaten to rise dangerously high. Police cars parked at angles, their red and blue lights flashing; occasionally one would zoom along the fire lane, siren hooting and burping, toward some invisible emergency. Across the long swamp between there and Boutte and Laplace and farther on toward Gonzales and Baton Rouge, the two eastbound lanes on the raised concrete roadway had been converted into westbound lanes as well, and in all lanes people
sat at their steering wheels, or in passenger seats, staring straight ahead, grateful when they could move forward twenty feet without stopping.

Those who kept their radios on were bombarded by exhortation:

“If you have not yet left the city we have one word for you:
Leave.
You can come back and rebuild later.”

“That’s right, Jerry. This is a Category Five storm, it’s not just a puddle-jumper to ride out by candlelight. We’re looking at these images right now on the screen and you just can’t believe the size of this thing.”

“We’re going to go now to Andrea, who’s in our storm center…”
…and its audience sat at a standstill, staring into the distance past the heat vibrating above the hoods of their cars, waiting to move another ten feet away from home, away, out, gone.

It was nine-thirty before the Donaldsons had thrown the last pillow in the backseat and found the one toy that Malcolm wanted to take, which they could not locate anywhere, and obsessively double-checked on the refrigerator and the lights and the other appliances. Finally, packed with pillows and water and blankets and towels, and everyone’s special bag and clothes and toiletries, they set out through their neighborhood’s eerily silent streets, rounding the corner onto Willow, and up to Carrollton, where they made a right turn and headed for the interstate.

Craig knew that they would hit terrible traffic. He assumed it would take them close to half an hour to get out of the city. Oxford was usually a six-hour drive; figuring an extra two or three hours, maybe they would pull in around seven that evening…Once they were out of the New Orleans bowl he could relax. They had hotel reservations; they would be all right. He had taken one Benevol to steady himself, but he had tanked up on coffee as well, to stay alert and focused.

In the backseat Annie and Malcolm sat in an unusual silence as they drove past the familiar houses and street signs—Jeannette, Spruce, Hickory, Panola—along Carrollton, which was almost empty of other vehicles, deserted feeling under the beautiful sheltering oak trees. Alice, next to him, was silent as well, and Craig fought to keep a hovering panic at bay. They clipped along, away from the river and toward the interstate, past the familiar restaurants and stores, but as soon as they passed Claiborne Avenue traffic began to back up from the entrance to I-10, still a mile or so away. A double line of cars, vans, trucks, and SUVs fed slowly past the fast-food places and the Pep Boys store and Xavier University, and into the overloaded evacuation route.

Alice had tried putting in a cell phone call to her mother, but she had difficulty getting through. After two attempts she gave up and sat silently as well. Craig drove with his foot on the brake: roll for ten feet; stop. Roll for seven feet; stop. Stopped, stopped, roll for ten feet, stop…the traffic was slowing to a near standstill as they approached Five Happiness, the Chinese restaurant where they liked to eat on Friday nights, just past Pep Boys.

As he nursed the car along a few feet at a time, Craig felt claustrophobia entering him, stealthily, like a force of commandos in black, spreading out down the unlit backstreets of his body, his stomach, his chest, his legs. His clothes felt intolerably tight along his shoulders, his ankles. He realized that he would lose it if he had to sit in the long line just to get on the westbound interstate. The prospect was equivalent to contemplating a slow death by suffocation. His forehead and chest were wet with sweat. He considered taking another Benevol, but that would have made driving hazardous.

“We can’t do this,” Craig said. “We’ll never get out of the city this way.”

“Craig,” Alice said, “we just have to deal with it at this point.”

“Why are we stopped?” Annie said.

“There’s just a lot of traffic, honey,” Alice said.

Craig ran through the possibilities in his mind. He knew that if the traffic was this bad on Carrollton it would be impossible on the interstate. His plan had been to take the interstate west to where I-55 peeled off heading north toward Mississippi. That was beginning to seem like a bad idea. The rains at the leading edge of the storm were probably no more than a few hours away. Airline Highway, with its traffic lights, would likely be just as bad as, or worse than, the interstate. He could head out Carrollton, make a left at Canal and snake around the cemeteries and out Metairie Road, but they would still have to deal with the interstate. The Earhart Expressway would be the same story, eventually. The interstate was the bottleneck.

He decided to head for the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway. That led from the western suburb of Metairie straight north across the lake to Mandeville. If they could drive out Carrollton, and then Wisner, all the way to the lake, then cut across on some of the smaller streets and hit Causeway just north of I-10, they would at least bypass the westbound mess on the interstate. It would be better to be moving slowly on backstreets than to be stuck at a standstill on the highway. Once they were across the lake and out of the New Orleans bowl, they could make their way west to I-55 either on Route 190 or I-12 and continue north into Mississippi. The main thing was to get out of the bowl as quickly as possible; after that they could consider their options.

“We can’t do this,” he repeated. “It’s going to take us two hours just to get on the interstate.” Rolling his window down, Craig gestured to the car on his left that he wanted to maneuver out of the line, and started nosing out to the left. Alice noticed and said, “What are you doing? We can’t get out of line…”

The car let him in, and Craig yelled “Thank you!” to the driver, pulled in front of her almost perpendicularly and, with a deep breath, swerved into the left lane, around all the cars merging right for the
interstate entrance. From the backseat Malcolm’s voice said “Stop it!” and Craig could hear Annie trying to shush him.

More emphatically than she intended, Alice said, “What are you doing? How are we supposed to get out of town?”

Craig swung the car crazily to the curb, across Carrollton from Thrift City, and brought them to a lurching halt. His hands were shaking on the steering wheel. “I am going to get us out of here,” he said, struggling to keep his voice steady. “I want us to get out of here as badly as you do. But I can’t do anything if you won’t let me do it without yelling at me.” He felt tears coming and he ordered them back.

They all four sat there, suspended for a long moment, silent and alert, and then, looking carefully in the side-view mirror, Craig pulled the car out onto the road and headed up Carrollton through deserted Mid-City, flying along at 50 mph with no problem, passing Banks Street, Canal Street, Venezia, Brocato’s, the
Gumbo
offices—the streets all so quiet. They passed City Park and the New Orleans Museum of Art behind its long avenue of oaks and then drove out along Bayou St. John all the way to Robert E. Lee, where Craig allowed himself a small sense of satisfaction; they had clipped off a portion, at least, of the impossible traffic by doing this.

At Robert E. Lee they turned west, with the neighborhood called Lakeview to their left, and made their way past Bucktown through the traffic that was slowing and thickening once again, with cars heading for the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway. They crossed the bridge over the 17th Street Canal that separated Orleans Parish from Jefferson Parish, where the traffic now started to constrict and halt again, making its way through construction lanes, and snaking through residential streets en route to Causeway. By picking his way through the backstreets, Craig got them almost to the Bonnabel Canal, eventually turning left and coming to West Esplanade, and a glacial crawl, once again.

It took another thirty-five minutes to drive the half mile from the Bonnabel Canal along West Esplanade to Causeway, and the line of cars crawling north across the lake. That was an hour and a half for a trip that usually took fifteen minutes. At that rate they would get to Oxford, Craig calculated, at dinner time the next day. But of course the traffic wouldn’t stay this bad all the way to Oxford.

Once he knew there were no other, better options and they were committed to the plan, Craig relaxed a little and was able to try lightening things up a little. “Okay,” he said. “How are we doing?” Annie was in the backseat playing some kind of little game with Malcolm. Without looking up, she said “Fine.” He looked at Alice to see if they were friends again yet, and she stared straight ahead out the front window.

“Once we get across the lake,” he said, “we can hit 190 or I-12 and take that west to I-55.”

She nodded. After a few moments Craig turned on the radio, switched it to AM looking for a news station, and pulled in an amped-up announcer who was saying,
“…Hurricane Katrina, now a monster
Category Five
storm. The folks at the National Weather Service tell us that you’d rather live through a nuclear attack than a
Category Five
hurricane. So if you are out there, batten down the hatches, secure what you can, but get to someplace on high ground, away from the shore. We are hearing predictions of a tidal surge of up to twenty-five feet along the Gulf Coast, so you need to find a place now. As we say, this
is
the big one…”