City of Refuge (12 page)

“We can’t keep going,” Alice said. “We have to find something.” Both the kids were asleep under the blanket in the backseat. It took five minutes to follow a long, slow line of cars into the parking lot. Neither Craig nor Alice said anything; obviously the chances were overwhelming that the place was full. Stopping the car would wake the kids up, but there was no real choice.

Craig pulled the car over behind a dozen other parked cars; the
lot itself appeared to be filled, and there were cars parked on the grass by a gated area that he took to be the pool. He got out and told Alice he would go inside to check out the situation, and she could stay there with the kids.

A crowd filled the lobby, but to his surprise there was almost nobody lined up at the desk.

Craig approached a tall, pleasant-looking clerk who gave him a commiserative look and, before Craig even reached the desk, said, “You know what I’m going to say, right?”

“We’ll take anything,” Craig said.

The clerk, pointed over behind Craig, toward the large, lodge-like lobby which Craig, zoned out, hadn’t even glanced at, and Craig followed the direction of the finger and saw, to his disbelief, the entire lobby spread with blankets, people on couches, on the floor, televisions going. From behind him, Craig heard the clerk say, “Every place in town is the same story.”

Craig stared at the scene, sick in his stomach. A moment later he turned back to the clerk, who was holding up a finger, telling another newcomer to wait for a moment. “I have two small children. What do I do?”

The tall clerk’s face softened a little, helplessness wrinkling the corners of his eyes. “We can put you down by the pool,” he said. “That’s the best I can offer you at this point.”

“The pool?”

“We have an indoor pool on the lower level. There are beach loungers down there; we can give you blankets and pillows. I wish we could do more. Or you can try and find a space on the floor in the lobby.” To another new person he said, “We’re full up; sorry.” Then to Craig, “Let me know what you want to do.”

“Every place is like this?”

“Yes sir,” the clerk said, his tone already contracting slightly at Craig’s vacillating and the pressure of more arrivals.

“Okay,” Craig said. “What do I need to do?”

“Just go on down and pick a spot and then come back up and we’ll give you some bedclothes.”

“Should I pay you now…?”

The clerk waved his hand dismissively. “We’re not going to charge you to sleep in a beach chair at the pool.”

A man who had approached the desk asked, “Does anyplace around here have any room?”

Craig headed back out to the car and told Alice what the story was. “I guess we can just leave the car here; people are parked all over the place.”

“We can’t sleep in the pool, for God’s sake,” Alice said. “Where are we going to change clothes? How can we sleep…”

“Alice, look…” He took the standard deep breath. “There are people all over the lobby sleeping. All the rooms are sold out, and there are no rooms anywhere nearby. What do you want to do? Should we keep driving? I can’t do it. I say we just get it, claim our little place, make it an adventure”—Annie rustled in the backseat, waking up—“and make the best of it and then God willing we head back tomorrow. Or we head to Oxford tomorrow. We’ve got the room up there.” Alice finally agreed, and they moved inside.

On the televisions in the wood-paneled living room of the lobby, images of the storm filled the screens in lurid color, with voices of urgent report, miles per hour, looking like a direct hit, radius equal to, water temperature, landfall estimated at, evacuations have been ordered for, storm surge as high as; this would go on all night as the country watched one of the largest storms in recorded history head straight for New Orleans. Unremarked in any of the reports were the dozens of places along the levee system that had been designed improperly, built improperly, and around which water had been seeping for years like blood from diseased gums. But it was all beyond anyone’s control now.

SJ fell asleep on the couch just as the sky began to lighten. The wind had started to rise as the sun went down the night before, and it had kept rising. The sound went from a whistling to something deeper, a groaning sound as if you were pulling a rope through a hole in a piece of sheet metal. This groaning started and stopped unpredictably, leaving only the whistling behind it. Odd moments of near-calm were ruptured by abrupt shrieks of wind. Lucy sat on the green upholstered chair in the living room; she could have slept in Camille’s room, but she didn’t want to be alone.

SJ left the lights on so that he would know exactly when the power went off, which happened around one a.m. He was stocked with flashlights and batteries and candles if they were necessary. Somewhere around two in the morning, with the wind very high, he heard a loud, vibrating sound coming from the back of the house, off the kitchen; he made his way quickly to the back with his flashlight beam, slipped the dead bolt and opened the door and saw through the lashing rain that the rear gutter had come detached at one end and was waving around. Something large came flying through the beam and smashed into the old shed on the left side of the yard. He closed the door again and threw the bolt and something smacked into the side of the house with the sound of a door slamming, then there was a kind of clack
eting sound like he remembered from putting baseball cards in his bicycle spokes when he was a kid, then that stopped.

He knew there would be roof damage; the question was how much. He followed his flashlight beam up the stairs and looked in the rooms, sealed like tombs to the raging outdoors, the howling and groaning outside contrasted with a creepy stillness within. Two rooms; nothing apparently amiss. He walked back downstairs and spent the rest of the night prowling the house this way.

He was on the couch with his flashlight in his hand at his side, he had fallen asleep, when something shook him. He sat up, still asleep in the gray morning light, but buffeted by something profound, like thunder he thought at first. As he listened, sleep draining from his head like water from a sieve, trying to determine its shape, a second pounding, shaking roar exploded and the house shook again.

Now he was awake, and he knew what had happened, knew before he saw it. He ran to the front door and opened it to see a car rushing by, upside down on top of a foaming river of sticks and debris. A moment of free-fall in his mind before he slammed the door and reflexively started for the back of the house. Three steps and water was swirling around his feet, dragging at the cuffs of his trousers; he stepped higher, idiotically trying to keep his feet dry, when he realized he didn’t know where Lucy was. He hollered her name out, as loudly as he could, heard something break behind him and turned to see one of Rosetta’s vases fall off a pedestal and smash on a table, and as he watched the broken crater of the vase scoot across the room on the water the window on the right side of the house exploded—the image he had was of someone throwing up—it spewed inward, glass, sash and blinds, the foaming water following it into his house, and he turned and ran for the stairs, with the water up to his knees, yelling for Lucy, who had appeared in the door of the rear bathroom and
seemed to be frozen in place. She was staring down at the water, and SJ went to her, the water now to his thighs, and took her by the wrist and when she didn’t move, said, calmly as he could, “We’ll be allright upstairs,” and she started following him and they made the stairs, the water now at their waists, and climbed, and by the fifth step they were out of the water, and he told her with his hand on her back to keep going, and he didn’t look back either. As long as the house doesn’t go, he kept thinking; as long as the house doesn’t go. He couldn’t feel the house shifting at all, but it was hard to tell with the wind shaking it. The upstairs bedroom was pitch dark and stifling hot. He felt for and found the flashlight he had laid on the dresser, and with it he located the matches and a candle, which he lit, concentrating on keeping his hand steady. He got Lucy settled and sat with her; they said a prayer together and she said it with her lips shaking. After she had stopped shaking, he got up and retrieved one of the gallon water jugs he had laid in upstairs along with some food for a couple of days, and pulled the plastic cap off of it and poured some into one of the glasses he had put up there and handed it to Lucy. She drank it.

“I didn’t think we’d never use those supplies,” SJ said, trying to keep his voice as even as possible. “But that’s what Daddy always said, have a second floor and put food and water up there.”

“I know that; Daddy said that,” Lucy said. “Daddy said that. Have you some water for three days.” SJ drank some, too. The radio was downstairs, useless now, even though he had batteries. He hadn’t thought to have a radio up in the room. When he was sure that Lucy was at least stable, he went to the stairs to try and see where the water was.

The surface of the water was up to within two feet of the downstairs ceiling, and an unbroken river seemed to swirl from his living room out to the street. The façade of his house had been pulled off by the water. The seven feet he’d moved the house back from the sidewalk might have been the reason the house was still standing at
all; the rush of water had been deflected by just enough. Then he thought about his van, and the truck. He sat still for a minute on the top stair, trying to breathe slowly, trying to gauge whether the water was still rising, and how quickly. It seemed to have slowed. He went back to check on Lucy.

Lucy seemed to be hyperventilating and SJ sat with her in the wobbly candlelight and told her to look at him, which she did, and he said, “We are going to be allright. The worst is over. We are going to be allright.”

She looked into his eyes, and nodded her head and said, “Where Wesley at?”

“Wesley is allright. He’s in Gentilly by his friend. Wesley allright. Do you hear me?”

She nodded, exaggeratedly, and then she began sobbing in his arms, shaking, and SJ held his older sister in his arms, and after no more than a few seconds, she said, “I be allright, SJ. I will be allright. But stay with me, don’t leave me here.”

“Nobody going nowhere,” he said. “Nobody going nowhere.”

Craig woke up slowly, feeling as if he had had no rest at all, as if he were on a hospital gurney in a tank…some kind of tank…he drifted…then, suddenly, all awake, his heart pounding, he sat up, almost losing his balance out of the narrow, plastic-banded chaise lounge where he had spent the night, in the humid chlorine funk of the swimming pool room. Alice’s chaise was empty, as was Malcolm’s; Annie was dead asleep in hers.

A sharp pain shot down through Craig’s shoulder blade; inhaling made the pain wow up. Your regulation sleep-in-the-wrong-position muscle freak-out. He stood up carefully. Around the cement floor that surrounded the rectangular pool were maybe fifteen other families in various attitudes of sleep. His watch said 8:30. The journalist in him felt as he did on the morning after a big and heated election, the itch to get the results. He wanted some coffee badly, and even worse he wanted to see the news, find out what had happened with the storm. But he couldn’t leave Annie there. He debated whether to awaken her.

“I’m awake, Daddy.”

Startled, he looked down at Annie, who was in exactly the same position as before, eyes closed, and wondered if it could have been someone else’s child talking. He kept looking at her, then he looked around the immediate area. He was tired.

“Here, Daddy.”

He looked back at Annie, quickly, and she seemed, again, unmoved, except for a smile that she was trying to hide, before she broke up in giggles.

“You little fibber,” Craig said, bending down and tickling her. That was another thing he loved about his daughter: She joked, he thought, like a New Orleanian. Now she squealed at the tickling and Craig noticed someone nearby shift in their sleep and open their eyes, and Craig quickly stopped and said, “Shhhh…” to his daughter.

He sat down on the chaise next to her. “Did you get any sleep?” he whispered to her.

“Yes. I was scared for a while but then I went to sleep. Malcolm went to sleep right away.”

“Malcolm can sleep through anything except a normal night.”

“Where’s Mommy?”

“I don’t know. You want to go find her?”

Annie nodded and sat up and they started off to the exit, but Craig stopped, looking back at their stuff. “I don’t think anyone’s going to bother our stuff, do you?”

Looking back at their little camp, Annie shrugged. Craig went back and retrieved his cell phone; Alice had apparently taken her Big Bag…They could go. Everybody there was in the same situation.

Upstairs they found Alice standing in a group of people watching one of several TVs positioned throughout the lobby, where the news was being reported live from New Orleans and the Gulf Coast.

“Where’s Malcolm?” Craig said.

Alice pointed to the couch right behind her, where Malcolm was totally immersed in a small truck that he was driving into an abyss between two cushions. “It missed New Orleans,” Alice said. “At the last minute it jogged east.”

“What?” Craig said. “It missed the city completely?”

“Not completely,” Alice said. “But it was weaker than they thought it would be, and it went off to the east.”

All around the lobby people—black and white, young and old—ambled around, drinking coffee and eating doughnuts, or lolled, asleep, in sleeping bags on the floor and on couches. Around the televisions, denser groups of people sat, surfacing from sleep, hopeful that the storm had in fact, like so many others, missed the city.

On the television a reporter in a yellow poncho with the hood up was reporting from a side street in the blowing wind; the screen showed serial images of downed trees, glass windows blown out of a hotel, a traffic light that had come off its wire and was sitting, broken, in the middle of a street, looked like around Howard Avenue, Craig guessed. The reporter was saying, “This is still a very dangerous storm; anyone listening needs to stay inside to avoid getting hit by flying debris. It is not safe outside yet. As I was saying, here is the view down Canal Street, we have a number of trees over and broken windows, and it’s just a mess out here. So stay inside, but, again, it does seem as if New Orleans has dodged the bullet once more, as Hurricane Katrina heads off to the northeast…”

Craig and Alice put their arms around each other and stood there for a long moment, watching.

“Can we go home?” Annie said.

“Not just yet,” Craig told her. “We need to make sure it’s all clear and then see what’s happening with the traffic.”

“They have a buffet over there,” Alice said.

“I could use some coffee. Did Malcolm eat?”

“Yes, but he’ll have to eat again before we start back. I’ll start packing up.”

“Let’s give it a little while before we start back,” Craig said. “We should see what’s happening with the electricity.”

“I can’t spend another night on that chaise lounge,” she said.

“Well, it doesn’t look as if you’ll have to.”

They stood there together for a moment, looking blankly at the television images. “I can’t keep doing this every month,” Alice said. “This is crazy.”

Craig was about to say “It’s not ‘every month’,” about to step on the rapidly moving walkway that led to one of their entrenched arguments, but he stopped himself. He was too tired, and too close to the edge, and he knew Alice was, too. So, instead, he said, “Let’s get through this and we can talk about it when we get back, right?”

Alice pressed her lips together, nodded, looked up at him, right in his eyes, for a long moment. “I love you,” she said.

Craig frowned, smiled at her, said, “Really?”

“Yes.” She put her arms around him and hugged him with her head on his chest, and they stayed that way for what were, for Craig, several long, blessed moments during which all the pain of the world disappeared.

Craig got himself a cup of coffee and got some cereal for Annie, and then he and Annie went out for a walk to look around. The sky was gray and mottled—the outer edge of the hurricane as it made its way north—but they walked out, holding hands, through the parking lot and down the hill on the sidewalk to the intersection. Craig treasured these moments when he could get away with Annie. Alice tended to make her nervous and quiet, but when they were alone she asked Craig questions about everything, and shared her own developing inner life with him. Now, walking, she asked if New Orleans was still going to be there when they got back, and Craig assured her that New Orleans would still be there and would always be there.

“I want to always live in New Orleans,” Annie said, and Craig heard the words with a happiness that, even as he held on to them, he knew wasn’t quite right. It was his love of New Orleans he was hearing reflected, and that he needed to hear reflected, not hers, not exactly. He knew that putting the weight of his own needs on her would do her no good in the long run. But for right then, after the
upset of the past couple of days, he would let this be their I-Love-New-Orleans club. He needed it.

Then she asked him what made hurricanes happen, and Craig struggled briefly to retrieve enough information in his mind to fashion a coherent answer that could satisfy her as they walked part of the way up another block. But by that time the first few drops of rain had started falling. It began as barely perceptible needle-pricks of drizzle, and then those began to be interspersed with drops that felt fat and round like grapes, and Craig knew that the sky was about to open up. They ran back to the motel, getting pretty well soaked in the last fifty feet. They stopped under the canopy and watched it coming down in sheets, with a sound like frying bacon.

“Wow,” Craig said, “we just made it.”

“Yeah.”

“Let’s go see what Mommy’s doing.”

They found Alice back in the pool area, gathering their stuff. Annie went off to grab Malcolm and walk him around the pool. “Maybe we ought to sit tight and see what the storm is doing before we give up the space.”

Alice looked up at him. “I’m not staying in this pool another night,” she said. “I don’t care if we have to sit in traffic for another ten hours.”

“Listen to what I’m saying,” he said. “It’s not just the traffic. If we head back now we’ll be driving through the storm. Look what it’s doing outside. We need to wait until it passes.”

“Fine. I’ll pack up the car and we’ll leave after the storm passes.”

“The roads might not be passable. There might be flooding.”

“Craig,”
she said, exasperated.

“Fine,” he said. “Pack up the car.” He walked away.

Craig got himself a bagel with peanut butter from the buffet. He walked over to a group of people who had gathered to watch the
news coverage from New Orleans on one of the four or five TVs. It was somewhere around ten a.m., and people were crowded onto the three couches near the TV, and another ten stood around. A newscaster, his face eerily lit against a darkling, chaotic background that turned out to be the Superdome, was saying that parts of the roof were blowing off the building and it was raining in on the people who had taken shelter there. One short white woman with a definite New Orleans accent standing next to Craig said, to no one in particular, “The power went out on ’em.”

Craig said, “It looks like they have lights, though.”

The short woman looked at him, half-smiling. “Dat’s the backup generators, dawlin’. We’ll see how long dat last.”

A heavyset African-American man in a blue and red polo shirt, standing on the other side of Craig, said, “The power is out in the whole city it looks like.”

That, Craig knew, was more or less to be expected after a storm of that size. Outside the sky was dark, but they were inside, they were warm, they had the television going, there was food. They were okay for a while. Craig knew that he wouldn’t relax until he knew just how bad the damage was. It did sound as if the city had escaped the worst once again. If the power was in fact out and the storm was still going, they were certainly not going back to the city that night. Alice was reading
Sense and Sensibility
on a couch, with Annie next to her drawing in a sketchbook and Malcolm on his knees looking over the back of the couch at someone, making faces.

Restless, Craig walked out front under the motel canopy. People smoked and looked out at the rain and the abnormally dark sky, punching numbers in on cell phones; once in a while someone would come running up to the shelter with a jacket over his head, looking around, smiling. Craig pulled out his cell phone to call Bobby. His first try yielded nothing; on his second he got an “All circuits are busy; please try your call again later” message. He
waited for five seconds, tried it again, same thing. He flipped the phone shut, looked around. He noticed the heavyset African-American man from inside, closing his own phone and shaking his head, looking over at him.

“Yours, too?” Craig said.

“I think they are all down,” the man said.

Craig asked the man if he was from New Orleans, and the man said he was.

“So are we,” Craig said. “What part of town?”

“Gentilly,” the man said. “Up off Mirabeau.” Craig knew the area as a middle-class black neighborhood of tidy, almost suburban homes.

“Oh yeah,” Craig said. “Are you going back tonight?”

The man looked at him as if to see whether he was joking. “I don’t think any of us is going back in tonight. They have to send in tree crews, electric. It’s going to be a few days.” The man chuckled.

Craig checked his watch; it was just after eleven. Maybe it was subliminally noticing a line of cars backed up by the light at the corner, their headlight beams cutting through the driving rain, maybe it was something else, but on an impulse, an intuition, Craig felt for his car keys in his pocket, moved to the edge of the canopy, gauged the distance to his car and, taking a deep breath, made a run for it, got in soaked, and drove it to the gas station on the corner, waited for five minutes in a line of three cars and then filled up the Toyota with gasoline. Later, when the power went down in Jackson and the gas pumps couldn’t pump, he would look back on that, at least, as one good decision he had made.

Back in the motel, Craig noticed something slightly different in the tempo of things, a different deployment of people somehow, some difference in the distribution of people, and then he saw Alice gesturing to him across the long lobby from one of the couches where she was gathered with a large group, watching the television.

Something was wrong; he could tell that by the looks on people’s faces.

As he arrived, one of the reporters, on the street in what appeared to be the central business district, a deserted side street, was speaking into the camera, saying, “As we said a few moments ago, we don’t know where this water is coming from. One city official told us they thought it might be a broken water main, but we now have word, just in, a report of a possible breach in a levee along Lake Pontchartrain that might be connected in some way to this water. These reports are very preliminary, though, Regina, and of course we’ll keep you up to date as we find out more.”