City of Refuge (26 page)

The heat was amazing, and the masks got irritating with sweat and Craig slipped his off for a moment until he took a breath of the air without the mask, then he slipped it back on again. They walked upstairs, and, miraculously, the upstairs rooms were unharmed, except for the rear one, where a tree had fallen and broken a window and some glass had smashed on the floor and some books in a case under the window had gotten wet.

It was more than the mind could take in. Every house on that block and the next and every other block for miles in each direction contained some version of this scene, marinating in the murderous heat. Craig felt a gaping pain for his friend, who walked next to him surveying the wreckage of the life he had led. What could he say to help? He was there with Bobby; they would do some work, but what was there to say? He also noticed in himself an unmistakable feeling of guilt. He and Alice had been spared this scene.

Back downstairs, as Bobby examined something in a corner, Craig leaned against a wall, allowing his mind to coast for a minute or two, staring at Bobby’s poster of Professor Longhair, playing piano in the yard of the parish prison, a famous image, hanging on the wall above the waterline in the dining room. Suddenly it occurred to him consciously that the poster was intact. Professor Longhair was all right; this was a good omen…

“Hey,” Craig said. He looked around for Bobby, who was still crouched in the corner, looking at something he had picked up. “Hey, your poster is good to go, man. Check it out.” A moment or two. “You okay?”

He walked across the room to where his friend was.

“You okay?”

Bobby was holding something in his hands, crouching and staring at what looked to Craig like a limp, browned slice of sau
téed eggplant. Craig leaned slightly to put his hand on his friend’s shoulder.

Without looking up, Bobby said, “My mom’s gloves, from her wedding.”

Bobby stayed in a crouch, looking at his mother’s gloves, and Craig stood with his hand on Bobby’s shoulder. Bobby’s mom had cooked the first Thanksgiving meal Craig had eaten in New Orleans. A large, sunny woman whose working-class family went back generations in the city; she liked to laugh and to cook, and she adored Bobby and she had died a long, horrible death from emphysema and diabetes, four years before. Craig noticed a filigreed picture frame on the floor, facedown. He stayed there with his hand on his friend’s shoulder, feeling the slow rise and fall of his friend’s breathing. It was the best he could do.

They spoke very little on the ride out of town. As they left Bobby’s house they had been stopped by four members of the 82nd Airborne patrolling the streets in a Jeep. The soldiers asked them for identification and to state their business. Bobby and Craig ended up having a cordial three-minute conversation with the young men, none of whom had ever been to New Orleans before. But after thanking the soldiers and heading out, they got quiet. Some strange discomfort had entered the car, as if they had seen something shameful and were embarrassed to look at each other. What was that, Craig wondered? Where could shame have possibly entered the picture?

As he drove, Craig realized that, for the first time in his life, he was happy to be leaving New Orleans. He was aware, to his surprise, of a voice inside himself saying, “Get me out of here.” Some unlicensed neural channel was broadcasting subversive propaganda, insisting that New Orleans, as he knew it, was over
with. “Much as you love it, New Orleans is not your whole life. You can get away; you have the resources. Save yourself and your family.”

Craig was astonished and repelled by this reflexive, seemingly autonomous, and nearly overwhelming voice. Leaving New Orleans was, in fact, an option for Craig. He had lived for many years before moving there. But New Orleans was Bobby’s entire life. The streets they drove, the corner stores they passed, the churches and schools, all of it carried echoes for Bobby of childhood adventures, playground fights, first Communion, early girlfriends, funerals of grandparents, holiday dinners…If New Orleans had been an exoskeleton for Craig, which conferred meaning from outside, for Bobby it was his very bone structure. It wasn’t a refuge; it was life itself, from the inside out. And that difference, which, under normal circumstances, created a nice tension, a fruitful source of mutual stimulation and interest, had settled into the car and was the source of the embarrassment he was feeling. The fact was that Craig could, in principle, walk away, but Bobby couldn’t leave. It was like driving with a condemned man.

Bobby gave no evidence of those feelings, nor of much else. Craig wondered how he felt, but to ask him questions about it would only underline the fact that they were having very different experiences. In New Orleans, the one place where Craig had come to feel like an insider, he was suddenly an outsider.

Or was he? If he shifted positions in his mind just a bit, reminded himself that he owned a house, that they were raising children there, and that they had a stake in the city even if they didn’t go back generations, Craig could bring himself back up in the mix enough to take a deep breath and feel his own sorrow, his own shock and anger, and his own set of questions about the future. Yet even as he rehearsed these steps, the other voice slithered in again, saying, “You need to establish an alternate plan.”

He would not be able to speak about this with Alice. Such thoughts were her end of the tug-of-war, and if he began to slacken his hold on the other end, the game would be over with. He wasn’t ready for that, and he would need to sort it out. But the thoughts would not leave him alone all the way back to Baton Rouge.

They were some long days, in Texas.

Breakfast at the table in the kitchen; one end of the table up against the paneled wall, under a travel poster for Jamaica, picturing a sand beach stretching off into the distance. “I like looking at that,” Aaron said. “We ought to all go down there for a break, maybe January.”

If SJ agreed or disagreed, there was no way to tell. Dot set a plate of eggs and country ham down in front of him. The only thing that could get SJ to smile or focus much was when Ali, their Pomeranian, would come into the room, with its bulging eyes and bodacious attitude. The dog would get on her hind legs and put two paws on SJ’s thigh and stare at him, and if SJ didn’t acknowledge her she would let out a sharp yap at regular intervals until he did. When Aaron and Dot were off to work at the post office SJ would often hang out with Ali on the couch. SJ couldn’t seem to focus on a book; he tried a few times, but he couldn’t concentrate. But he could talk to Ali for a long time.

“Where’s your mama?” SJ would say. Ali’s head would cock to one side, staring at SJ on high alert, as if he were transmitting important messages. “Where she, Ali?” Ali would snort and shake her head a little, maintaining that eye contact. “You talking, Ali? You trying
to talk with me?” No response, just holding SJ’s gaze, until SJ’s attention would get distracted by something, maybe the TV, and he would look away for a moment and Ali would issue a quick bark to draw SJ’s attention back to the important business at hand. At those times SJ would smile and might even chuckle slightly. Eventually SJ would get caught up watching the TV and Ali would curl up next to him and go to sleep and SJ would go to sleep, too.

Hammer, drill, sander, saw…his tools were phantom limbs. SJ would sometimes wake up almost physically hungry for his tools, for his truck. But even if he had them, what would he do with them? What would he work on? And why? As the long days and weeks went by, there seemed no answer to that question. Aaron’s house was all of twelve years old and needed no work. The whole subdivision could have been dropped down by a spaceship for all it had the character that SJ was used to, and used to caring for.

There was work if SJ wanted it, or needed it. Aaron had a friend with a carpentry and construction business something like SJ’s own, and he could have used SJ’s expertise “in a New York minute,” as Aaron said. But SJ wasn’t ready to go to work on a small team of people he didn’t know, in a place he didn’t care about. And even the possibility that he could begin to care about any of it was something to be avoided. He was in no way ready to have a stake in some other place not his own, meeting the new people, explaining why he didn’t go out to the bars…He wasn’t ready at age fifty-seven to start thinking of himself as a Texan. It would have been like turning away from his father and his grandfather and the houses they had built, Claiborne Avenue, memories of Camille as a girl, cookouts on the neutral ground, the Mardi Gras Indians, Mr. Doucette and Mr. Broussard and Ronald Riley and Bobby Encalarde and Sister Neeta and Charmaine Thomas and St. Claude Avenue, the Second Lines up on Galvez, sitting with Bootsy out on the porch, Rosetta. But it was all gone anyway, the houses they had built gone, Bootsy gone,
Sister Neeta gone, breathed in all that water with her head knocking on the wood beams in her attic, her feet all wet…Thrown away like garbage, floating like garbage for the animals to eat, what did it matter where he was if that was all gone? And if it didn’t matter where he was, then what did it matter if he was anywhere? What was the point in living if it didn’t matter where he was? If there were something left to build on…but how could there be? It was all gone. And he would never be a Texan…There was no point.

“SJ,” Dot said, taking his plate, “looking toward the future isn’t giving up. You can’t live in the past. Not looking into the future is giving up.”

“Where’s the future?” SJ said.

“I don’t know the answer to that, SJ. But I do know that flood was God’s will. Nothing happen without it have a reason. You have to live so God can use you.”

“That flood was not God’s will,” SJ said, anger flaring up in him with startling and frightening speed, as if he were talking to a stranger who had threatened him. “How can you tell me that was God’s will? That flood was somebody’s mistake. The hurricane was God’s will, if you want to see it like that, but that flood was man’s mistake.” His veins, tensed, muscles, in his mind, it ran out of control: God has a goddamn plan? What kind of plan involved a three-hundred-pound paraplegic drowning in her own attic in motor oil and human shit? Where’s the motherfucking plan in that? People seventy years old been together their whole life, owned the house, holding hands while they die? Where’s the fucking plan? “They going to find out. Some motherfucker didn’t do his goddamn job.”

“Samuel.” Dot said, sternly. “Please.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “But they will find out. And what man has broken, man can fix.”

“It don’t look like nothing left there to fix, SJ.”

SJ stood up from the table, shaking his head. But what if it was
so? All the streets he ran on as a boy, as a young man, he lived on as an adult, had bodies of his friends and neighbors floating in them. They were finding bodies all over. Sometimes it was too much for him and he would not talk for an entire day at a time. The stress sometimes triggered other memories and feelings and responses that felt almost physical to him, things he had known for a long time, from after his time in the army, and he would sometimes lie on his back at night in bed practicing breathing, thinking about Rosetta, thinking about good times he could remember, but every thought of a good time stabbed like a knife that said, gone, gone, gone…

On the phone one day with Camille. Camille had made a good life, with two sons, in Raleigh-Durham; her husband was a good man with whom SJ had not much in common, but he was good to Camille; SJ and Rosetta had raised their only child to know the difference between fool’s gold and real gold, to look for a man who respected her. They had a beautiful new house there; their boys were in Catholic school, well behaved and bright.

“Daddy, you know what Mama would have said. ‘You got to get in that church.’”

SJ standing in Aaron’s living room, looking out over his driveway at the house across the street, somebody’s child riding a tricycle past, a beautiful, sunny day and him inside with no lights on. They had all gone to church until Camille had made her confirmation and SJ even kept on after Rosetta had died and he lost his own faith, until Camille had graduated high school and went off to college. All those streets, those neighborhoods, the stores, the people…how did the entire population of your life disappear? Anyone he thought of from those days he thought of in wet clothes wondering where help was, wheelchair-bound, taking water in their mouth. He knew he had to control it and sometimes he could and sometimes he couldn’t. Why the mouth, he thought? Why was it always the water at the corners of their mouth, and what was the last thing they saw.

“Daddy, may I speak with Aaron for a minute?” SJ handed the cordless phone to his cousin, who stepped outside with it onto the back patio.

Days and weeks of waiting, of drifting.

One late September day he woke up feeling allright, for no reason he could think of. He looked at himself in the mirror, put on a light-green ribbed shirt he had gotten at Target with Aaron and Dot who took him shopping one day, and some slacks, clothes he had never even taken out of the bag. He went downstairs for breakfast, and Aaron and Dot brightened to see him looking fresh.

They had a fine time over breakfast, talking about nothing in particular, a break in the clouds, relief for everyone. At one point SJ was drinking some orange juice and something unfamiliar came over him; he spit the juice back in the glass, looking down into the glass, and then he was sitting with his head bowed down and his lips pressed together and shaking, trying to contain it. His neck muscles rigid. Some of the juice dripped down the front of his new shirt and Dot stood up and went over to him and put her arms around his shoulders; his body rigid and shaking.

He would go two or three days without shaving, sometimes more. He noticed one day that part of his beard had started coming in gray. He had never had any gray at all, anywhere. It didn’t seem to matter much.

Aaron would get him to go out for walks. Aaron, who had also been in Vietnam, knew a fair amount about the traumatic syndrome that SJ was struggling with, and exercise and talking through things could be important. Some days they would walk and SJ was silent, some days he would talk for a while, and then get silent. Often he had violent fantasies that would crumble apart into debilitating grief. “I don’t want to be angry like this A,” SJ said. “I spent long enough dealing with it. I never thought I’d have to be back in this.”

“You know more now,” Aaron said. “You equipped more to deal with it.”

“I get imagery, just like after discharge. Just like it. But it’s different. I can’t get some of it out of my mind.”

“You could go see counseling section down at the V.A.”

“I don’t want to talk to nobody about it who wasn’t there, Aaron. Except you. I’m not going to act out nothing, A. Even if I was going to take me a mad moment, A—who I’m gonna shoot? Who’s responsible?”

One thing that did help was that Lucy and Wesley were around. It had felt to him like a miracle, really, when he saw them each again for the first time. Lucy had come in first, on the plane; he went to the airport with Aaron to meet her. They saw her before she saw them, as she walked down the concourse looking around for them, and then when she saw them her face first expanded in recognition, her eyes widening, and then she walked toward them quickly, carrying some heavy bag, and she fell apart in SJ’s arms, sobbing as SJ embraced her and said, “It’s all right. It’s all right. We together now.” Wesley arrived two days later, and they all stayed at Aaron and Dot’s for a week and a half, Wesley on the day bed in the den. After the initial excitement of reunion, though, SJ sank back into his numbed, paralyzed state.

Through FEMA, which Lucy had a knack for dealing with, Lucy and Wesley got “relocated” to an apartment just outside of Houston in the third week of September, half an hour from Aaron’s on the bus, a second-floor two-bedroom place in a glum four-story apartment house of ochre-colored bricks on a long tree-lined, arterial boulevard of apartment buildings in a residential neighborhood a mile or more from any stores. Grateful for the space, the perch, still Lucy didn’t know what to do with herself.

“It nice, Samuel,” Lucy said. “It ain’t that. It just like being on the moon. Shopping malls all over but no place I can walk to.”

“They have the bus,” SJ said, sitting next to her on the couch at Aaron’s, watching TV.

“Where I’m a take the bus to? I can’t walk two blocks to the Tip-Top and buy me a pack of Kools and walk back. It like going to the North Pole if I want to get a beer.”

Lucy was being dramatic for effect. In fact, two friends of hers from back home had also been relocated in that group of buildings, and they had cooked up some gumbo the best they could with what they could find in Houston. One of them, Wandrell, had gotten a car and they would drive to the mall and walk around like visitors from another planet among the cool, smooth, bright stores, the fountains, the lush plants watered by hidden watering systems. They would get looks sometimes from the slightly more cosmopolitan Houston women. Many of the New Orleans transplants still had some country clinging to them, even if their families had lived in the city for generations, and Houstonians, welcoming as they had been by and large, had taken to identifying the New Orleanians by their dress, their speech, their tempo. Of course the New Orleanians noticed the Houstonians noticing them, too.

Aaron had delivered mail to Buddy Ermolino, a white guy who worked for Westco Cable, and through him Wesley was able to get a job training with the cable company to do installation in people’s homes. Wesley was a very quick study. “Basics” class took two weeks, after which Wesley had a full command of the basics of cable installation. The carpentry aspect was easy for him—drilling the holes in floors and walls with a kind of auger, threading the cables through, splicing…Wesley was coordinated and he was dexterous, and through his uncle he had already had plenty of carpentry experience. The day after the class ended he was out making calls on his own, and he was quickly up to four or five a day.

In the truck, one of three floaters the company had on hand (after four months you were expected to get your own), Wesley got
to know the city, studying his Hagstrom city map book for Houston and suburbs. Driving around, he kept his cell phone on and talked to Lucy three or four times a day. A week into the training he got his hair trimmed neatly and his beard shaved to a thin, sharply defined ridge along his jaw. For the first time in his life he was making decent money, acquiring a skill and dealing with the discipline of a real job. In the evening he would sit in the living room in the apartment he shared with Lucy and watch sports on the television, which he had hooked up himself.

One day a large package arrived at Aaron’s house addressed to Wesley, with the words “Please forward” written on it, and that evening Wesley came over and opened it and it was from Art and Ell Myers, wrapped in newspaper and masking tape. Inside was what looked initially like a flat, jagged, random piece of wood. Flipping it over, Wesley saw painted lettering and, righting it, the random piece became a silhouette of Louisiana, carved, Wesley knew, by Art in his shop downstairs. Along the wide bottom of the boot was the word
LOUISIANA
, with a couple of musical notes and hot peppers, and coming down the top, stacked one-two-three, were the names
WESLEY, LUCY, SAMUEL
.

There was a folded-up note with it, too, but Wesley left the room quickly, without reading it, while they all stood looking at this message from people they didn’t know. “Isn’t that something,” Dot said, picking up the wooden artifact. “Those people went to all that trouble.”