City of Refuge (13 page)

Wesley awoke from a fitful sleep on his friend Roland’s couch; his T-shirt was wet with sweat, and the lights, which had been on when he fell asleep, were off, along with the air-conditioning and the rest of the power. His cell phone said it was 10:09 in the morning. Outside, rain was spitting and splattering against the windows. Trees blowing.

He got up, walked to the door of Roland’s bedroom, where his friend was asleep, mouth open, holding desperately onto a pillow, a comforter tangled around his bare legs. Wesley walked into the darkened kitchen, opened the refrigerator, which was still cool inside, felt for the carton of milk, opened it, smelled it, and drank greedily from it. They were still there. One more hurricane.

Back in the living room he retrieved his cell phone and walked out onto the screen porch. He wanted to call over to SJ’s house and check on them, but he knew his uncle would be angry with him for not showing up to help the previous morning, and also for not staying by his mama’s house overnight as he had said he would.

He had been staying at Roland’s most nights for the past two weeks. There was another young man in the Lower Nine who had gone out a couple of times with Chantrell, and Wesley had heard that the young man, whose name was Elias, had been talking about
fucking Wesley up because he had hit Chantrell. Wesley didn’t take the talk completely seriously, but anyway he also liked to be off on his own sometime instead of just at his mama’s house. He and Roland delivered pizzas for Café Roma four nights a week; they liked to ride the bikes, talk bikes, just chill together, watch a movie, play PlayStation. Roland also had a widescreen plasma they liked to watch movies on. Roland’s uncle, who owned the house, wasn’t around much.

Wesley tried Chantrell’s number and got an “all circuits busy” message. Then he called his friend Ray-Ray and got the same thing. He stood looking out absently at LaHarpe Street, waiting for his head to clear from sleep. The street in front of Roland’s house had flooded a bit at the edges, nothing special in a heavy rain. They had put the motorbikes in the shed in back, the way they always did, to keep them out of sight. He debated about going to get them and putting them on the porch, but the bikes would be too visible on the porch and the rain seemed to be slacking off. He figured they were safest where they were for right then at least.

He went back inside but it was dark and there was nothing to do with all the power off.

Restless. He tried the cell phone again; no luck. Then he thought to try Roland’s phone, which had no dial tone when he picked up. His own cell said it was just about ten-thirty. He found his jeans on the leather chair where he had left them folded, a habit he’d learned from his Uncle SJ, snapped them open and pulled them on leg by leg over his boxer shorts. He uncrumpled his white socks and got them on, then his sneakers. He grabbed his keys and money from the coffee table and headed out to look around. He would let Roland sleep a while.

Wesley made his way in the light rain and wind to the end of the block, turned left and then cut across a short street and came out on the corner of Broad a block from where Bayou Road made
its diagonal cut, headed for the Fairgrounds. He crossed Broad, which was empty of cars. Across the middle of the street, a gigantic piece of twisted metal that looked like part of a store awning, and a garbage can rolling back and forth in the middle of the street like a severed head. The traffic lights were out. The dogleg of Bayou Road merged into Gentilly Boulevard, the street and sidewalks full of downed branches, leaves and debris, wood, shingles, glass thick on the ground, gnarled lengths of gutter. One house seemed to have had its roof torn off, and a little bit past it Wesley saw the roof, fractured and sitting on edge, between the house and the one next to it. Two men stood looking at it. A few people were out on their porches.

As he made the curve onto Gentilly Boulevard, Wesley saw a disturbing vista in the distance, as if a mirror had been laid over the street reflecting the wide, dark canopy of oak trees so that the same image was reflected upside down. It was disorienting. For a few blocks in front of him there was only a little water on the sides of the boulevard, by the curbs, but six or seven blocks down, water covered the narrow grass median strip in the middle of the road and made the glassy illusion.

He headed for a grocery store two blocks down, thinking to see if there was anything to eat. A few people were carrying groceries out of the store’s dark interior and putting them into an SUV that sat at the curb in water up to the middle of its hub caps. Wesley recognized one of them as Roland’s cousin, a slightly older fellow named Lonnie. Lonnie acknowledged him briefly as he passed carrying a bag of groceries.

“Where Roland?” Lonnie said.

“He sleeping back at the house,” Wesley said.

Lonnie looked very disturbed. “He still asleep?”

“Yeah,” Wesley said.

“The canal broke,” Lonnie said. “They had a break up by Mira
beau. That’s where all this water come from. We got to get out of here.”

Wesley said, “Where you heard that?”

“Kwa-ME,” Lonnie shouted into the store, ignoring Wesley’s question. He stepped up into the store and left Wesley on the sidewalk. The water in the distance seemed to have crawled nearer, but it was hard to be sure. Lonnie came out of the store at a trot, dashing past Wesley. “You going to come with me or not?”

Wesley’s first thought was to get to his uncle’s house and make sure his Mama was okay. He climbed into the Explorer without knowing where Lonnie meant to go. “We got to get Roland,” Lonnie said. “When we get to the house, run inside and get him. Not walk, you hear?”

“You can bring me down Claiborne to my uncle house?”

Lonnie looked at Wesley as if there were something wrong with him, and didn’t answer. Halfway back to Roland’s house the water looked too deep for the Explorer to continue straight to their destination.

“I can’t get through here,” Lonnie said. “Meet me on Esplanade by the red statue. You know the statue?” Esplanade Avenue was laid along a slight rise, the highest ground in the area.

“Yeah.”

“Meet me there.”

Wesley got out of the car as Lonnie turned and the Explorer cut a wake through the shin-deep water, and he ran, high-stepping, through the water for a block and a half the rest of the way to Roland’s house. He let himself in, dripping water across the living room all the way to Roland’s bedroom, where he saw only Roland’s empty bed.

Wesley hollered out his friend’s name, dashed into all the rooms of the house, but his friend was gone, no question about it. When he was absolutely sure, he started for the front door at a run, then he remembered their bikes. He turned around, ran back through the
kitchen and opened the back door and saw that the yard was a lake, the water knee-deep against the shed. The bikes had to be flooded, he knew, if they were even still there. But he opened the door anyway and ran across the yard, opened the shed door enough, hard against the water, to see the bikes there, in water to the tops of the wheel rims. He got back into the house dripping water all over, looked around, made sure that he had his cell phone, and headed out to meet Lonnie.

Outside, now that the rain had all but stopped, neighborhood people were out on their porches, talking to one another across the street. The water had reached the second step on most houses, and the residents assumed, knowing nothing of the levee breaks yet, that it was from the heavy rain. Wesley made his way carefully through the water, which was just above his knees. As he waded, he again tried SJ’s number and Lucy’s number and now had no luck at all, not even a circuits-busy. Nothing. He replaced the cell phone in its faux-leather holster on his belt, thought about the water, then removed the phone from his belt and rigged it so that it would hang from the neck of his T-shirt. The streets were uneven and sometimes the water got deeper, sometimes shallower.

On North Dorgenois, a block and a half from Esplanade, he saw an old lady across the street, in water up to her chest, holding on to an iron railing leading up to a shotgun house. She was looking down with a frown on her face; her wispy gray hair was pinned up and her yellow housedress ballooned around her in the water. She appeared frozen in place. Wesley called to her, asking if she were allright. The old woman looked slowly up at him, smiled slightly around her eyes, then turned back down to regard the water again with a frown.

Torn, the thought of Lonnie waiting pressing on him, the urgency to check in with Lucy and SJ, but still this woman wasn’t moving, and Wesley waded across the street, careful not to lose his footing, until he was by the old lady on the other sidewalk. Again she
looked up at him slowly with that smile, and said, “I was just going out to make groceries; I had the money in my pocket…”

Wesley could tell that the woman was disoriented; he asked where she lived and she said “I stay by my daughter’s house.” Then he asked where she was going, and she looked him in the eye, puzzled slightly by the question, it seemed and, frowning slightly and laughing at the same time, her eyes clearing, she said, “I don’t know.”

“This ain’t your house?” he said.

“No…” she said, looking back down at the water.

“Listen,” Wesley said, “it’s a flood from the canal. I’m going to carry you to Esplanade. You allright with that?”

Her eyebrows went up slightly in mild wonderment and she shrugged, saying, “I guess that’s allright…”

Wesley took a deep breath, set himself as well as he could, and then he slid his right arm under her arm and around her back, crouched down, closed his eyes as his head neared the water, feeling for the back of her knees; he found them, slid his left arm under them and with a sweep lifted her and stood full up, then began carrying the woman toward Esplanade. It was only after he had done it that he realized that he had submerged his cell phone as well. “Where did all this water come from?” she asked, almost amusedly.

At Esplanade he was able to set her down on the ground. She was barefoot. He was unclear at that moment which way the statue was. Half a block down on Esplanade, the winking, twitching blue lights of a patrol car, and two officers, one white and one black, standing by it.

Wesley told the old woman to wait where she was and he took off at a trot through the leaves and around the branches, one of them huge, that covered and crossed the wide, shaded avenue, to where the two police were, along with two patrol cars, one with its lights on. They took no apparent notice of his approach. The largest of the
officers, the white one, leaned against one of the cars and a black officer with a shaved head leaned against another. They didn’t seem particularly concerned about anything.

“Excuse me,” Wesley said, remembering, as he always did, SJ’s injunction to be polite to police. “Where the big statue at?”

“You mean that statue?” the white officer said, turning only partially toward Wesley and tilting his head as if to point behind Wesley. Wesley turned around and saw the statue, right there at the place where Esplanade and Bayou Road forked in two. He could not see Lonnie’s Explorer. The officer was saying something to the black officer about overtime. Wesley saw no sign of Lonnie.

“Did you see anybody around here in a green Explorer, like he waiting for somebody?”

Now the white officer turned his head again toward Wesley. “Nobody supposed to drive through here.”

Looking around for Lonnie’s Explorer, Wesley said, “There’s a old lady down here got trapped in the water and I carried her but she need help.”

“Everybody got to go to the Superdome,” the officer said.

Absently, and feeling a slight panic rising in his stomach for no reason he could identify quickly, Wesley looked around and said, “I got to find Lonnie and Roland.”

“Sorry,” the big white officer said sarcastically. “I don’t know where Lonnie and Roland went.” That seemed to be the end of discussion as far as he was concerned.

Now the black officer spoke up and said, “There are buses down at Claiborne shuttling people to the Superdome. You can pick up one there.”

Wesley looked back up Esplanade toward where he had left the woman, whom he could no longer see.

“That old lady can’t make it to Claiborne walking.”

“This ain’t a limousine service,” the big officer said.

The black cop gave his partner a stony look, stepped toward Wesley and led him a few steps away.

“Where is the woman?” the officer said.

“She’s down on the corner, but now I don’t see her.”

“I’ll get down to her or send someone to look for her in a few minutes. Is the rest of your family safe?”

“I don’t know. I was supposed to meet Lonnie and Roland. Lonnie said a canal broke by Mirabeau.”

The officer frowned slightly. “We haven’t heard anything about a Mirabeau break. We heard the Industrial Canal broke into the Lower Ninth, maybe that’s what they were talking about.”

Wesley looked at the officer. “What?” he said. “Why you said that?”

“There was a levee break. The whole Lower Nine is under water.”

“Why you said that?” Wesley repeated, hearing himself almost yelling at a police officer, but he was sliding suddenly down a steep incline with nothing to grab on to. “Where my Mama?” he said, hearing the hysteria in his own voice as if at a distance.

Regarding the young man evenly and cautiously, the officer said in a steady voice, “Be cool, little brother. Your mama live in the Lower Nine?”

Wesley was breathing hard and rapidly, looking at the officer, looking around in a panic. The beefy large white officer was walking over now, with his right hand on the gun in his holster, and the black officer waved his partner back with a look of annoyance.

“Listen at what I’m saying,” the black officer said. “Your mama all right. They had buses to get the people out. They taking everybody to the Superdome. She allright. You need to get to the Superdome and you will find her there.”

Wesley’s heart pounded against the inside of his chest, and he thought he was going to throw up. A storm of firing neurons in his mind pushed and pulled at him: Lonnie was not where he was sup
posed to be; these police didn’t know where the water was coming from; he should have stayed with his Mama and Uncle J; he lied to his uncle; maybe his Mama was drowned. He had started shaking, looking up and down the street. “I got to go home.”