City of Refuge (16 page)
Midday on Tuesday, and SJ probably should have taken a break. Using the strip of weatherboard for an oar, he paddled the dinghy down what had once been Reynes Street.
Silence. Or not silence but an alteration in the aural wallpaper—the usual distant cars, radios, air conditioners, replaced by a dense, barely translucent stillness, punctuated only by discrete signs of action—a voice, in the distance, or a boat motor, the occasional ratcheting helicopter overhead or, twice that day in two different locations, a bubbling churning that was more felt than heard, churning, boiling water caused by a ruptured gas pipe under the thick surface. One careless match or cigarette flicked away and the oil and gasoline that drifted and spread here and there in dark multicolor on the water would ignite and those gas bubbles would become geysers of flame.
This, now, was New Orleans.
He had put on his old army-issue green fatigue all-weather hat to keep the sun off, but the heat and exertion were extreme, and the water in his jug was gone. Through the morning he had paddled around the lake that had been his neighborhood all his life, finding people, helping them into his dinghy, carefully, carefully, and depositing them back at the Claiborne Bridge, where the word was that trucks were
coming on the other side of the canal, or buses. Across Claiborne Avenue in the Holy Cross neighborhood, the destruction was less complete; many of the houses had at least stayed in place, although most of the single-story dwellings were flooded to the roofline.
He had done the same the previous afternoon after dropping Lucy off, until finally, exhausted, he had gone back to his house to get some sleep. Today, Tuesday, there were more boats—motorboats, rowboats, neighborhood people like himself, outsiders, some police and marshals, and the first helicopters. All of them were busy nonstop. Some of them appeared to be kids, or hunters—red-faced Cajun boys in duck-hunting outfits, who had gotten there God knew how. As they passed SJ pointed them toward places where he knew people to be stuck. His hands were getting badly blistered and raw, but he didn’t stop.
The farther he got from the actual levee break, the more people there were to rescue. In some areas, the water was up only to porch level. Twice he encountered old couples, in their seventies, sitting with suitcases, dressed nicely and waiting for the buses they had been told would come to get them in case of emergency. Those he picked up SJ would ask if they had their ID and necessary medicines. Those he passed when his boat was full waved weakly and smiled, maybe nodded. They had learned patience and endurance over a lifetime, along with gratitude for any small sign of progress, any tiny ray of light through the dark.
Late in the morning another dinghy had approached him, rowed by two young men in white tank tops and blue jeans cut off at the calf, bright boxers bunched over their waistbands, and one of them called out, “Mista J…”
As the boat approached, SJ saw that it was Tyrell, the young man he had seen after so many years on Saturday at the block party, with Wesley. The young man had a vague smile on his face, a stunned expression overall. “We been steady picking up people Mista J.”
“Is your family allright,” SJ asked. “Your mama?”
“She didn’t make it, Mista J,” the young man said, smiling slightly, and frowning simultaneously, looking SJ in the face. “She didn’t make it.” Smiling slightly more now, and his eyes suddenly larger with tears. “We going to see about Danny cousin over by Holy Cross. Your house okay, Mista J?” The other young man was not paying attention, looking around, scanning.
SJ hardly knew how to answer. He was able to do no more than shake his head.
Tyrell smiled again, and shrugged—the dissociation, which would become one of the most common facts of human interaction in days to come—and the two young men headed off to their fates, and SJ continued looking for people.
Inside himself, SJ was locked down as well as he could be. He was needed, as long as his hands held up on the oar and he didn’t overheat. Piecing together what all this meant was for later. He had shifted into a mode of pure action, and he knew from experience that he would pay for it eventually. He still, for example, had dreams involving a baby he had seen in a village after an action during his time in Vietnam, facedown with its back open like a geode, seething with maggots. Seeing it, he had felt himself starting to go, to lose his grip, and he forced himself to push it down, put it away; there was no alternative at that time to his being able to function. But the image did not disappear merely for being submerged, any more than what was under these flood waters had stopped existing just because it was hidden.
After the first two people he saw floating facedown, he had wrapped up the part of himself that would react, the way you would tape up a sprained ankle so you could walk on it. He was needed. But spreading like a bruise under that tight bandage were all the questions he could not yet face directly, the facts that could not be carried, the meaning of the extinguished lives floating like garbage,
discarded, unneeded. And why had this flooding happened, what had caused the levee break that had trapped and drowned people in the homes they had acquired through a lifetime of work and struggle?
As the day wore on, former Specialist Four Williams wondered where the military was—the Marines, the Army, Airborne—there was nobody, except for some Coast Guard helicopters. No sign of transport at the overpass where he had been dropping people off. The levee had broken at dawn the previous morning. Here it was the middle of the next day, T plus 30 at least, and they had had no reinforcements, no help, he meant…He had lived through Hurricane Betsy, but this was something else. Hurricane Betsy was something to get through. This was the end of something. For many people he passed, it had already meant the end of everything.
He probably should have and would have taken a rest under ordinary circumstances. But the degree and the extent of the need around him was overwhelming, and he kept on as long as he could, through the long, nameless reaches of the afternoon. Around six p.m., after dropping two women off at the bridge, he found himself about to get out of the dinghy and lie down on the asphalt roadway as it rose on its incline out of the floodwaters. And he knew then that he needed to stop, and he paddled back to his house with what was left of his energy, secured the dinghy fore and aft as well as he could to the gutter, and hauled himself up by the sheet, barely able to, out of the dinghy and onto his roof.
For a moment he looked down and thought about trying to pull the dinghy up out of the water and onto the roof somehow; he was afraid that it might be stolen while he was asleep. But it was hard to pull even a lightweight boat up out of the water, and he was as tired as he had ever been in his life. He made sure the boat was secure one more time, then he dragged himself inside, through the window.
Night. Tired as he was, he had trouble getting to sleep. Voices
in the distance reflected oddly off of water, sounded closer than they were, sometimes almost as if they were in the room with him. Shouts, weeping, even low, monosyllabic conversations. The day’s images had been too strong to leave at the door and too relentless, and all that machinery was hard to shut down. Past and present mingled, and the future was all over with. He lay on his bed because he was physically exhausted, but it was better when he was moving. When he lay still it all seemed to swarm around his head like bees because there was nothing to shoo it away.
He could do no more that day. His hands were shot, but then his entire body was shot, arms, back, shoulders, legs. He lay throbbing in a darkness he had not known for thirty-five years, since patrols in the jungle. Somewhere well after dark a wailing started—impossible to tell where or how far away—a woman’s voice, weeping, sobbing, saying indistinct words. The sound spoke of pain that would not heal, a scar that would bleed without ceasing. He lay on his sheets wet with sweat, in a darkness beyond darkness, and the weeping didn’t stop, and it was unendurable to hear.
Finally SJ sat up, stood slowly, blindly and, crouching, felt his way to the rear window, which was open for what little breeze was available. He shouted, “Where are you?”
Weeping stopped.
Again he spoke into the dark: “Are you allright?” A moment later, he wondered if he had in fact spoken the words.
The voice in the dark began weeping again, then SJ heard it say, “No…
No
…oh no…” and the sound could not be escaped and it demanded an accounting of an absent God. What do you do, SJ? Jump out of a dark window into an invisible lake full of sharp edges some invisible distance below, swim who knew where in the dark…? Of course not. Of course not. He turned back in the direction of the bed, tripping but not falling over a chair. He found the bed with his searching hands, felt along it to the right place and sat down, tried to
breathe deliberately, and finally lay down again and fell into a fitful sleep that gave him no rest.
Glaring wobbling light awakened him, morning yes, reflected light on ceiling from the jittery water, voices in the distance, sleep draining out of him…The ratcheting sound was a helicopter, undeniably—but how? Then this was home again, and everything came back quickly. He sat up in the impossible heat. This was Wednesday; shouting. Helicopter blades fade. His whole self hurt.
He put one leg then another over the side of the bed, stood, steadied himself, stood. Pounding heart suddenly; ran to the front window to look and the boat was gone.
He pulled on his shorts and climbed out onto the sloped roof once he was sure he had his balance, scooted down crabwise to see if the boat had perhaps just come undone at one end and drifted to one side. Voices in the distance; a motorboat maybe five blocks away. No dinghy; the shredded end of one line hung down where someone had cut it loose with a knife. Would he have even been able to use it; hands so sore. And then something caught his eye in peripheral vision, noticed down and to the left, and he looked, focused, and there were two of them floating facedown. One was naked, its bottom presented to the sky for care that would not be forthcoming, and the other with a diaper unfastened at one hip, floating loose, filth spilling out of it, an umbilicus of shit, bumping up against the gutter, lazily, like any other garbage in the water, two brown babies out there just like any other garbage, and SJ started shaking, his whole body, as if in the worst of fever, muscles contracting, squeezing his bones as if to crack them; he shook, racked with spasms, even when he tried to look away, and he didn’t stop even after the motorboat with the two policemen came and helped him off the roof.
They took him to the Convention Center, eventually, a large, modern complex just uptown from the French Quarter and backed up against the river; it had been opened the day before, Tuesday, to warehouse the overflow of people who were no longer being allowed into the Superdome.
All day Sunday and Monday and Tuesday citizens streamed toward the Superdome from around the city. The Superdome was a product of the mid-1970s, designed for football games, concerts and other epic indoor events. It had concentric stacked, ringed halls, concession stands, box seats and sky boxes and media rooms, and it was a center point of civic pride, certainly among the business leaders, and certainly to the fans who loved the New Orleans Saints with a tragic love, since the Saints traditionally made a weak showing. It sat in the middle of what was called the Central Business District, much of which had been constructed on the bulldozed site of one of the roughest areas of the city in the early years of the twentieth century, an area where the legendary Buddy Bolden had played jazz in the Eagle Tavern and Louis Armstrong was born to a prostitute in Jane Alley. All that was gone now, replaced by parking lots and skyscrapers and hotels, and in the middle of it, the Superdome. The Superdome had been designated the shelter of last resort in case of a major hurricane,
as well, stocked with food and water adequate for a day or two of city-wide inconvenience until basic services could be reestablished.
Beginning Sunday, most of those who stayed in the city walked there and stood on line for hours to gain entry. Once inside, they camped in seats, they camped in hallways, and in the upper-level seats, and on the Astroturf where the New Orleans Saints had played the previous Friday night. The atmosphere on Sunday was tense, as it always is before a large storm, but it also contained an undercurrent of festivity; New Orleanians knew what to do with interruptions of business as usual, and few of them really believed in their heart of hearts that after all the false alarms this could really be as bad as the worst projections had it.
On Monday morning, large parts of the roof blew off in the astonishing wind. When the storm had passed and electricity was out, more people came, and as the flooding filled the city even more came, wading through the water in the surrounding streets, and by late Monday the facility was overwhelmed; when the crowd edged toward 30,000, on Tuesday, the authorities, in disarray themselves and worried about a complete breakdown of order, began routing people to the Convention Center, which had no provisions at all—no water, no food, no toilet paper, no medical personnel. Inside, the Convention Center was impossibly hot, airless and dark; its cavernous exhibition rooms and dark halls served primarily as a giant bathroom where people squatted in corners and then cleaned up as well as they could.
Hundreds preferred to camp on the sidewalks in front as the long and incomprehensible days of that week went by—Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday—and no help arrived. Afternoons melted into sundown, then the long night amid the moans and curses and weeping of everyone around you, then sunrise again and still no food, and no information, no news, no visit from any representative of a coordinated authority to give you the comfort of what to expect or the sense that anyone even knew you were there
or cared, in the brutal, stunning heat, as people suffered all around, and you wondered how long you could last after your blood pressure medicine ran out, or your insulin, or your oxygen…
Everything was on overload, and what would be the use of trying to construct a sequential story when, as one day went by, and then another, and another, time itself was perverted, turned into a garbage dump under the hot blue sky. The drawers had been pulled out of every dresser and the contents dumped on the floor; every narrative was twisted and mocked, torn out of any context and flung down next to the grandmother of someone else’s narrative; elderly people in open-backed hospital gowns, ripped out of their own story and set down with their IVs in wheelchairs in the middle of the street, hungry, deposited by someone who left to save themselves, not even wished good luck, madness dragging at the cuffs of your pants, dragging like devils in the pit, hissing at you, beckoning, the palsy in that old lady’s face, the old man with a plaid short-sleeve shirt and a green suitcase. You can’t construct a sequential narrative; the parts don’t fit together; characters are in the wrong place; Prince Hamlet plays the sitar on a cooler full of body parts, Santa Claus has lice, Rosa Parks is having a heart attack on the curb and Mister Rogers blows Paul Robeson for a cigarette and the Andrews Sisters and the Supremes lift their skirts in a darkened corner and hope for the best. Oh yes, they have lice, too. What are they trying to tell us? Why have they all been placed together in this narrative? What do they all have in common? If the Depression didn’t reveal it, or the Holocaust, or the photographs of Emmett Till, or Goya’s Caprichos, why should these mismatched socks, this salvage, mean anything now? Why should it make any sense? Don’t you know garbage when you see it? And, no, you can’t leave, because your mother, your own mother—yes, her in the wheelchair, there, look at her, the one with the large stain under her, and the bedsores forming from being in her own fluids for a day and a half—is senile and frightened, and at least here there are other
people around. And besides, if you could see far enough up in the sky, that little flashing sliver, that is Air Force One; the president of the United States is up there looking out the window at the pretty designs made by the water—
That’s the Mississippi River? That sorta squiggle there?
—wondering what he is supposed to do and if he will have time for a nap and an hour with the video games before having to face the cameras again and say something to make it sound as if there is still a narrative in place.
If you are in it you don’t see the news coverage, the anchorman, the commercials for Dodge trucks, any more than Job saw God and Satan make their wager at his expense. The mind cannot process all the disjunction, the endless din echoing in the Superdome halls and the sour itch in your clothes, the booming echoes overhead in the Dome, with its patch of sky visible, the intolerable hallways clogged with people sitting on the floor, waiting for the bathrooms, through the endless stretch of ruptured time, on lines that wind off into the gloomlight as if following the curve of the rings of hell, but a perverted inferno, set up by the guilty for the innocent. The mind goes on overload and only scraps adhere, like rags caught on sticks and flapping in the wind—a baby’s bib, let’s say, white with yellow piping around the edges and a Teddy bear printed on it, crumpled and left on the floor in the sweltering, darkened toilet stall, barely visible next to your foot, caked with feces among the paper towels and fouled underwear, amid which you squat over the bowl full to overflowing with a sickening stew, laced with blood, that made you retch to look at it, let alone to smell it, trying to position your legs so that you can add to its contents without touching what is already there, a shirt over your shoulder that you will use to clean yourself afterward and leave on the floor with the rest of it, and this is the shelter provided you, the emblem of the quality of thought and caring devoted to your fate, and you will remember that bib, it is your new flag, and where is the baby it had belonged to?
And, outside, the lines of people waiting to take your place once you are finished, or the rest of them camped out in the generator-lit halls dark as twilight, sprawled against the cinder-block walls next to water fountains that do not work, overweight women in tight blouses, frail old women in hairnets, uptown men trying to read by the dim light, children in their last disposable diaper, long since full, running a toy truck along the floor in fierce concentration among the bags and garbage, the heat like a poisonous liquid and the stink like a throbbing, deafening noise you can’t escape, and more are camped two feet away, and even more past them, and on down the hall as it makes its curve into the hellish twilight gloom, or through the passageways that lead out into the stands and cantilever into the cerulean realms of the artificial sky, the great wounded vault of the Superdome, sleeping, feeding, staring into space, unaware of the flooding, the levee breaks, the Dome and the entire city and maybe the entire nation a ship without a pilot, battered and headed for disaster.
In the midst of it, with up and right and green and there and down and left and here and red jabbering incoherently, you did what you could until help arrived, whether you led a child by the hand through the ruined streets, or endured the blazing sidewalk heat in the crowd outside the Convention Center, or sat trapped in a wheelchair in your living room, abandoned by the nurse, as the water crept up around your ankles, and then your knees, praying, knowing that God never sent you nothing that you couldn’t handle, so it must have been someone else sent all that water that rose mercilessly past your lips and nose (they found you later, out of your wheelchair, under your refrigerator, which had floated and come to rest on top of you), or squatted with hundreds of others in the red haze of afternoon amid the other garbage by the side of the empty interstate, waiting for a helicopter, or a bus, or a truck, waiting for passage up and out to some city of refuge waiting on a strange horizon.