City of Refuge (17 page)

They pulled in just after seven-thirty on Wednesday evening, the sky a deepening blue behind the silhouetted trees. They had exited the expressway west of the city and followed Uncle Gus’s directions through a progressively aging exurban landscape, the rusting entrails of the nation, with Chicago itself little more than a muted glow against the darkened eastern sky. Initially they drove along the broad commercial strips, the shining neon arteries of chain restaurants and motels and auto equipment stores, then the directions took them through the older, two-story brick downtown areas of several towns, until they began to have to keep an eye out for Wabash Avenue, where they would make a left and go up the small hill, making another left on Saginaw, onto a street of close-together single-family homes built in the 1920s, most of them two-story wood-frame houses with an additional floor up top for a finished attic, and almost all with a wooden porch out front.

Craig had met Gus and Jean ten years before, at the wedding, and he had not seen them since. He remembered Gus as resembling his idea of a teamster, a short man with a lined face and a graying crew cut, wearing a rough gray herringbone jacket and a dark blue cloth tie. Jean didn’t say much. Craig was unaccountably anxious, now, about arriving at their house for this indeterminate stay. Alice,
at least, seemed relaxed; he could easily imagine what the emotional climate in the car would have been had they been about to stay with her parents in Michigan.

A driveway consisting of two pebbly parallel cement ribbons ran through the inclined alley along the right side of the house, but Craig parked on the street at curbside and sat for several long moments behind the wheel. Alice immediately set about getting Annie and Malcolm out of the car. After a minute, Craig pitched in, while also taking in what he could of the working-class neighborhood, and the house he was getting ready to enter for the first time.

Alice’s Aunt Jean, a thin woman with short, steel-gray hair and wearing an apron, greeted them at the door, hugging Alice as they squeezed in through the front vestibule. Gus waited just inside the living room and shook Craig’s hand as he entered. Craig noted the same crew cut, all gray now, plaid flannel shirt. The house smelled of cooking. Craig greeted Gus as “Mr. Brunner.”

“Feel free to call me Uncle Gus,” the older man said to Craig. “I’ve been called worse.”

“We have been watching and praying for you,” Jean said. “It’s just terrible what happened to all those people.” The small living room was snug with upholstered furniture, fringed lamps, wall-to-wall carpeting. At the far end, an old television set in an oversized maple console; facing it, a couch and a chair with an antique lace antimacassar.

Jean gave Craig a hug, too, and then turned a wide-eyed enthusiasm loose on Annie and Malcolm; Annie was polite but shy, and Malcolm showed Jean his Smurf pillow. “Which one of the Seven Dwarfs is that?” Aunt Jean said, bending down toward Malcolm. Craig watched Alice hug her uncle and say, “It’s great to see you two.” Gus hugged her back, and Jean said, “You must all be exhausted. You can just go right upstairs if you want; Gus’ll get you settled. I have some boiled beef and cabbage in the kitchen; it’s ready
when you are.” Looking at the kids, she stooped down slightly and said, “I’ll bet you two are hungry.” Annie nodded dutifully and Malcolm hugged the Smurf pillow.

Gus walked outside with Craig to help with the suitcases, and Craig felt around in his mind for a way to make conversation, anxious at the same time to get to a computer and see what he could find out about where the flood water was uptown. “How long have you lived in this house?” he managed to ask.

“Forty-five years next March,” Gus said. “The house is right about eighty years old. Almost as old as me.”

“You’re not eighty,” Craig said, stopping in his tracks, genuinely surprised.

“No, you’re right; I’m not.” The older man gave Craig a comradely clap on the shoulder. “Just wanted to see if you’d give me an argument.” He hoisted one of the heavy suitcases out of the trunk.

Inside, Gus led his four guests up the stairs. “We’ve done a little remodeling since you’ve been here, Allie,” Gus said. “It’s a climb. Hope you’re in shape, Craig!”

“Oh, don’t worry about me!” Craig said, in what he hoped was a hearty voice. “I’ve been doing my aerobics.” He wondered if the man knew what aerobics were.

They slogged up the carpeted stairs to the second floor, following the landing around to the left. The walls were hung with studio portraits of their two sons in college graduation robes, and smiling with their families. At the end of the second-floor landing, a table with a vase of cloth flowers. They made the turn and Gus led them up a narrower staircase to the newly finished attic where they were to stay. At the top of the stairs, Uncle Gus halted the caravan momentarily to feel for the light switch.

“Here she is,” he said.

Craig followed his two children and his wife into the fluorescent-lit converted attic and stood beside them, taking it in. The room was
the size of a large tent, with bright white, bare walls. Craig could stand upright in the middle of the room, where fluorescent light panels formed the flat apogee of the ceiling, but on either side of the panels the ceiling sloped sharply down toward the eaves, where Gus and Jean had put two small cots for the kids under the small dormers, one on either end of the room. The head of the grown-ups’ bed was up against the bare wall opposite the door, a double bed with a light green chenille spread on it and a slight body-size depression in the middle. A small round wooden table next to it, supporting an empty green ceramic bud vase. The only light in the room seemed to be the overhead fluorescent panels.

“Bathroom’s on the second floor; I forgot to tell you that,” Uncle Gus said. “Over there you have your air unit,” he said, pointing to a grill set into the wall.

After a moment or two, Alice said, “It’s perfect, Uncle Gus.”

“It’s not home; I know that. I just hope you will make yourselves at home and stay as long as you like.”

“Thank you so much,” Alice said, putting her arms around the old man and, Craig could see from her back, starting to weep. Annie looked up at Craig with her eyebrows raised slightly, questioning, and Craig tried to pantomime that Mom was tired. He rubbed Alice’s back as she hugged her uncle.

“We can’t tell you what this means right now, Uncle Gus,” Craig said.

“Oh, don’t even think about it. We’ve all just been so worried for you. Jean’s got some supper ready for you she just has to heat up; you come on down whenever you’re ready.”

Malcolm had started to fuss after seeing his mother crying, and Alice picked him up to comfort him. When Uncle Gus had gone back downstairs, Annie walked right over with her little pink-and white suitcase to the bed on the left, bounced down on it and said, “Daddy can I have this bed?”

“Sure, Annie, but let’s ask Malcolm if that’s all right. Malcolm, can Annie sleep in that bed?”

Malcolm, sleepy, in his mother’s arms, nodded his head and then turned it away and lay it on Alice’s shoulder. Alice looked at Craig and indicated that she wanted him to take Malcolm, which he did.

“I’m going to start setting up camp,” she said.

Grateful for the fun-adventure overtones of the remark, Craig hefted Malcolm in his arms and brought him over to the other bed, saying, “Come on, Malcolm; let’s see how your bunk is.” Craig remarked to himself, as he had many times in the past, how strong Alice could be. Sometimes it meant shutting out some sensitivity. But when the chips were down, she could deal. As he carried his son to the other end of the room he cast his eye back to Annie, who was unpacking her clothes, like her mother.

“Where should I put my clothes, Mommy,” she asked.

“We’ll get that figured out in a minute, Annie Fanny.”

Setting Malcolm down on the bed, Craig leaned to look out the small window under which the bed lay. Blocks and blocks of houses, lights coming on, against the dark blue evening sky, the pre-Depression beginnings of suburbia, when Chicago was rolling in money. How were they going to do this, he thought?

“Look, Malcolm,” Craig said. “That’s a pretty good view.” His son lay on his back, waiting passively to be undressed for bed. Craig would not let himself think what a long and difficult period lay in front of them, and at the moment he didn’t blame his son a bit for being tired and wanting to be taken care of. He bent down and kissed the boy and said, “You know I love you, and we are going to get through this.” Malcolm put his arms around Craig’s neck and hugged, and Craig was very, very grateful that they were all there together.

After they got situated, the four of them came downstairs and ate steaming plates of beef and cabbage, with horseradish—or Craig and Alice did; Annie and Malcolm both opted for peanut butter sandwiches—and watched the nonstop coverage on the small TV on the kitchen counter. They switched back and forth between CNN and Fox, as well as the networks. They watched the images from the Convention Center and the Superdome, the incompetence of the government agencies. Craig glimpsed Peanut, a waiter at the Camellia Grill, talking to one of the reporters, just a flash as he turned on the news, and he wondered about the other guys who worked the counter there and who always made a fuss over Annie and Malcolm when Craig or Alice brought them in—Marvin, Donald, Michael, Matt the cook, Darryl, Ray, Cool Pop, old Mr. Bat who had retired…

The only bright spot on television that evening was an hallucinatory moment that took them by surprise amid the nightmare scenes at the Superdome and the Convention Center. It was a crowded bar, apparently, and Craig watched in stunned amazement as the sardonically smiling face appeared, next to the woman reporter for CNN, who was saying, “Here at Rosie’s on Decatur Street, you could almost think that nothing has changed in New Orleans. This, we believe, is the only bar in the city to have stayed open for the entire duration of Hurricane Katrina. The power is out, but Nicole is dispensing drinks by candlelight and we are talking to New Orleans
Times-Picayune
columnist Serge Mikulic. Mr. Mikulic…”

“Please call me Serge,” he said, twinkling, charming.

“You seem to have a pretty merry crew here. Were you surprised to find Rosie’s open?”

“No,” Serge said. “Closing Rosie’s would be like turnink off the lights on the Statue of Liberty. And anyway there has been a certain continuity, since we have not left Rosie’s since the beginning of the apocalypse.”

“Have you been here the entire time?” the reporter asked.

“What better place could one be?” Serge said. “In New Orleans we celebrate disaster; we drink and dance at funerals…”

From the background, a voice—clearly belonging to Serge’s friend Dave—saying, “There’s gonna be a lot of people lined up to drink and dance at yours,” and Serge allowed himself to laugh at this. Craig felt like diving through the television screen to be there with them.

“Is this your funeral for New Orleans?” the reporter asked, idiotically.

Little lines formed around the corners of Serge’s eyes, signaling an especially barbed response on the way, but before he could get it out he was interrupted by a commotion, what sounded like a clattering of hooves, and Serge turned, camera lights on the back of his head now, and through the open window onto Decatur Street they saw first one mule, then two more mules, trot by, halters on their heads, then another lone straggler, clop clop clop, heading toward Esplanade.

“They have cut loose the carriage mules. Look at that.” Serge said. In the background, people in the bar rushed to the front window to look out at the street. Turning back to the puzzled reporter, Serge said, “The carriage mules from Jackson Square, apparently. It is the end of civilization as we know it.” He held up his glass of scotch, toasting the camera, and said, “Cheers.” And as the camera pulled back for the reporter’s wrap-up, Craig could clearly see Dave sitting at the bar next to Serge. Serge and Dave at Rosie’s! How bad could things be?

The mild, twisted exhilaration did not last long, as the coverage turned from that small island of gallows humor to the deluge of misery surrounding it. The water was still rising steadily in the city, although hard information about exactly where or how much was hard to find. The Coast Guard helicopters had so far been unable
to stop the breach at the 17th Street Canal. The Superdome was in a shambles, and they had been sending people all afternoon to the Convention Center, where no provisions had been made at all. Television cameras cruised past hundreds of people sitting on the sidewalk outside the Convention Center, white and black, in wheelchairs, with IV tubes on stands next to them, all of them stunned, angry, afraid.

The interviews on the street were hard to watch. At one point a reporter spoke to a middle-aged black man wearing only a black T-shirt that said
GHETTO CASH
with a gun under it, holding a boy of about six by the hand, wandering the street. The cameraman asked where they were going, and the man said, “I don’t know.”

“In what part of town do you live?”

“We in the Ninth Ward,” the man said, looking around as if hoping to see someone he knew. The boy stood next to him, frowning. “All we got is what’s on our back. There’s nothing left. My wife…My wife…” And the man broke down in tears, in front of the camera, and the newsman, plainly unsure what to do or say, said, “Is your wife all right?” The man shook his head and stood crying in front of the camera, holding his boy by the hand, and the newsman said, “Well…we will hope and pray that your wife will be all right…” Then he turned back to the camera with a grim expression, saying, “As you can see, Gina, there is no shortage of misery and confusion in New Orleans this evening, as residents await some word from the local authorities about where to go for help, food, or the most basic information. This is a chaotic and increasingly desperate scene here.”

In that kitchen west of Chicago, and the living room, with its shut-in old folks’ close smell, they watched the nonstop coverage, that night and for the following days. They relied on reflexes to help them establish order and coordinates for themselves. By phone, and via the Brunners’ creaky dial-up computer Internet
connection, they tried to track down friends. There was no way to have any idea of how the house had fared, the
Gumbo
offices, Boucher School.