Recovering Charles (18 page)

Chapter
24

The plastic ball had a grinning Dora the Explorer on its side.

We floated right by it. The urge to pick it up and try to find its owner was irresistible. I scooped it up and forced it under my seat. But I never found a child to give it to.

Jez smiled.

Bela handed me hand sanitizer.

“I’ve got gloves in my bag for everybody,” Tater said from the front of the boat.

The water was a floating yard sale with items no one wanted anymore.

Plastic lawn chairs, a yellow-and-blue Connect Four game, an Allstate Frisbee, tires for bikes, and tires for cars. Broken Big Wheels. An empty Mountain Dew bottle, an open
Pirates of the Caribbean
DVD case. A 5x7 picture of a gorgeous, smiling black girl cradling her infant brother who was wrapped in a blue blanket, crying.

I picked that up, too.

Bela gave me more hand sanitizer.

I asked Tater for a pair of gloves.

The others asked as well.

Jerome pointed out landmarks as we floated through the streets in water that ranged from a few feet to ten, judging by the waterlines on front doors.

“They say Marshall Faulk grew up right there.” Jerome pointed to his left.

“The football player?”

“Uh-huh.”

We passed a series of houses, maybe a full block long of them, that all had orange Xs on the doors with writing in each of the four sections of the letter.

“Slow down a little, Tater,” Hamp said. “See that one? When they leave a house, they paint an X to say it’s been searched. At the top of the X they put the date; in the right section, the right part of the X, they put the unit that did the search. On the left you see what danger they found to warn others—gas lines, stuff like that. At the bottom, they put the number of bodies.”

The X we were looking at had a four.

We moved from the tragic orange X to one of the most striking images from all the coverage I’d seen before leaving New York: a barge in the Lower Ninth—flooded houses all around it, crushed houses under it, missing houses in its path from the Industrial Canal. The nose of a school bus was visible right against the barge, as if the driver had parked it there.

“It’s like a disaster movie,” I heard Bela say into the wind behind me. I turned around in my seat in the middle of the boat and saw Jez put her arm around her.

I took a dozen photos, including one of Joe and Cherie. They shared a bench with Jerome and hadn’t spoken since we launched.

Tater turned left and steered us across a pool of chemicals, or oil, or something else unnatural, floating like a poisonous lily pad. When we cleared it, I looked down to see us passing directly over a submerged teeter-totter.

“Look.” Jerome pointed to the charred remains of a home. “Burned not a month before Katrina. I knew those people. They were goin’ to rebuild.”

I took more photos.

We sailed on.

A snake slithered by gracefully, cutting a perfect wake through the shiny brown water next to our boat.

A rescue team in a much larger boat was smashing in the door of a three-story home with the words,
Help! 3 still alive
! painted on the front door. I doubted it. We were out of sight before I would ever know.

“Over there. That’s Fats Domino’s place.” Jerome pointed.

“That’s right, I remember seeing him on TV being rescued by a helicopter.”

“One of New Awlins finest,” Jez said.

Jerome said an amen and fished a life preserver out of the water with an oar.

From behind me, Bela gasped and cried out.

“What?”

To our right, we saw a white man floating faceup in sweatpants and a yellow T-shirt. He was tied to a telephone pole by two ropes around his ankles. The corpse was so bloated that its shirt stretched tight across the chest and belly as if five sizes too small, ready to burst at the seams.

I felt my chest tighten and I nervously cracked my knuckles.

“Closer, Tater. Please.”

He maneuvered the boat in a wide circle and pulled up close to the body, carefully avoiding the ropes that kept it from drifting onto someone’s porch.

I think my cell phone rang inside my front pocket.

Tater stepped over me and past Bela and Jez to the transom. He killed the motor.

Jerome stood.

“Careful,” Jez said.

Not him,
I thought when we were close enough to see.

Jerome looked down at the dead man’s face.

“You know him?”

“No,” Jerome answered.

“Nine or ten days, I bet you,” Jez said. “That’s how long that poor man has been there.”

I watched Joe lean over and throw up over the side of the boat.

Jerome closely examined the ruins of nearby houses. “No way of knowing how far he walked—or drifted—before being tied up here.”

I put my camera to my eye and pushed the shutter halfway down. The image was more clear and colorful and moving than anything I’d seen through my lens in a long time.

I put the camera back in my lap.

Bela was crying. I turned around again. She had her head down as Jez rubbed her back.

“It’s OK, he’s in a better place, sweet girl. Don’t cry. It’s OK.”

“Familiar to anyone else?”

No, no, and no.

“Start it up,” Jerome said.

As we chugged away, Jerome pointed to the sky and whispered a prayer whose words I could not hear.

Another flat-bottom boat passed by us. Two men in Coast Guard jackets stood inside. Four body bags lay across the boat’s benches.

No waves, no hellos, no salutes, just a solemn nod. An acknowledgement.

You’re doing work few men or women could,
I thought.

A helicopter flew overhead. Then another. Then a third. The last flew low enough to send ripples through the water. I wondered if they’d reach the corpse behind us.

“There,” Jerome said. He pointed with the oar to a two-story house three houses down on our right and sitting on a corner lot.

Again I turned. Bela was rubbing her forehead, adjusting her cap. “That’s it,” she said.

“My dad’s?”

“Mm-hmm.”

This time Hamp came back and turned off the motor just as we cleared what I judged to be a four-foot chain-link fence. We crossed over the edge of what should have been a front lawn.

The water covered the raised porch and lapped about two feet up against the front door. The water had receded in this area more than most, but was still easily eight feet deep. Most of the home’s shingles were gone. A gutter hung vertically in a tree, its bottom some fifteen feet off the ground.

Tater guided the boat up to the porch railing and tied it securely.

“I found fishing waders for three.”

“Bela, Jez, and Cherie should have them.” I spoke up quickly.

They didn’t argue.

I steadied Bela so she could put on the military-green waders that came to her hips. “You don’t have to come in,” I said.

“I know. But I am.”

I took Bela’s hand and helped her out of the boat.

Then I helped Jez don her pair of waders.

Cherie pulled hers on so quickly and with such ease everyone but her husband Joe stopped to gawk.

“Fly-fishing,” she said.

We each put on our industrial-strength gloves.

Tater had opened a window in the front that led into the living room. The men climbed through first. The water was cold and murky, but the smell I’d expected to knock me over was actually tolerable.

We helped the women through the window.

I surveyed the living room. Nails in plaster where pictures had hung. Overturned furniture. Lime-green plastic plates. An upside-down microwave. A container of Tupperware filled with red beans was still sealed tight.

“A lot of stuff was taken upstairs, I figure.” Jerome’s husky voice seemed even more authoritative inside the house. “Your dad lived in a room upstairs.”

“Did he have roommates?” I asked as Jerome led us up the stairs.

“He did. The guy who owned the place, Jardine, was a Corvette mechanic, of all things. His specialty, I guess. And another guy, but he hadn’t been here very long.”

There were more empty nails on the walls near the bottom of the stairs, but three photos closer to the top had survived.

One was of Dad, beaming, clear-eyed, and standing behind a group of children holding instruments and kneeling in a line across the foot of a dimly lit stage. Dad had less hair than I’d remembered.

The second, hanging almost sideways on the nail, showed me, Dad, and Billy Crystal in a parking lot. I was clutching an autographed pennant.

The third, and closest to the top of the stairs, was of Dad and a radiant Jez showing off a very modest diamond ring. They were sitting on a step at the same fountain where I’d met the British couple. In the professionally printed photo they’d added the text:

Charlie and Jez: just engaged

“I love that one,” Jez said, walking by it and putting her left hand lightly on the glass. She admired her ring again. “I’ve got a copy of that one, too.”

I had just barely arrived at the top of the stairs when Jerome called our attention.

“Oh, my,” Jerome said. He stood in an open doorway at the end of the hallway, staring into a room with a stunned look on his face.

He’s dead.

I don’t know quite why, but I looked at my watch and slowly walked down the hallway. I looked at Jez in front; she seemed unfazed. Behind me Bela was walking with her gloved hands thrust deep in her pockets.

Tater and Hamp were farther down the hallway.

Joe and Cherie had waited downstairs.

It was not as I had pictured the moment, but not so far removed from my imagination that it felt like a dream.

I continued walking. Other doors were shut. The attic access door was open, but the ladder had been folded back onto itself.

Rest in peace, Dad.

I arrived at the open door and Jerome stepped to the side, allowing me access.

I stepped inside. The room was empty.

I saw only a bed without sheets and a dresser with the drawers hanging out and empty.

“This was your dad’s room,” Jerome said.

It looked like someone had become bored with the Big Easy and moved out on a weekend whim.

I looked back to the doorway. Jez stood with her hands on her hips and the most puzzled look on her face.

“What happened, Jerome?” I asked. “You sure this was my dad’s room?”

“Of course,” Jerome insisted. “Helped him get this dresser up here.”

“You said you looked in his room.”

“We did, son. Castle checked it himself. It looked like a regular room. His belongin’s were here. Everythin’.”

From the hallway we heard the attic ladder being lowered. I barely had time to walk down the hallway, considering why my dad’s room was bare, before Tater and Hamp were disappearing into the dark hole in the ceiling.

“Jerome!” Tater yelled. “Go get a flashlight from the boat. In the box under the seat up front.”

“I’ve got one,” Bela said, tossing it up to Hamp.

His big hands cradled and caught it perfectly. “Luke,” he said.

“Yeah?”

“Climb up.”

Halfway up the stairs, I was high enough to see what Tater illuminated in a single column of light.

Groups of plastic bags, sealed tightly with duct tape. Two suitcases, a Rubbermaid tub I knew held letters from my mother, a guitar case, and several small, unlabeled cardboard boxes.

I was looking at every single thing my father owned.

Wrapped in Dad’s emergency trash bags and duct tape.

Dry.

Chapter
25

It took half an hour to load everything on the flat-bottom boat.

    Hamp, Jerome, Joe, and Cherie all insisted on staying back, willing to wait for a second run, so we could take Dad’s belongings in one trip. Jerome gave Jez the keys to the van and gave us a shove off the porch.

I sat between Jez and Bela on the last bench. Bela held my hand and Jez once again looped one of her arms through mine.

Tater got us back to the staging area in just ten minutes.

We loaded the bags, boxes, and guitar into the van, and Tater returned to pick up the others. Jez suggested I remove my shoes and socks, throw my socks away, and wash my feet in bottled water.

Jez drove Bela and me back down to Rampart, past the police command posts and Red Cross tents, past the mountains of trash, and right through the red lights. It crossed my mind I hadn’t seen anyone stop for a red light or stop sign since I’d arrived.

Jez maneuvered the van with ease down the narrow alley, and we quickly unloaded everything through the kitchen onto several tables in the bar.

“Back soon. I’ll get the others.” Jez hugged me again. I didn’t think she’d ever left or entered a room without putting her arms around me.

Bela found a box cutter and a steak knife and we each began surgically cutting away at the duct tape and plastic bags.

“I don’t think any of us expected this,” Bela said.

“Finding his things?”

“Yeah.”

“Isn’t that the truth,” I said. “I’m beginning to wonder if he’s not still alive after all. Twenty thousand-plus people went to Houston. Others to New Mexico, Arizona, Georgia, the Carolinas—they’re everywhere.” I felt excited, even hopeful.

Bela continued cutting away layers of tape on a shoebox.

“Don’t you think?” I asked.

“I don’t know what I think anymore.”

“I thought you were the confident one. The optimist.”

“I am.” She looked up at me, but only long enough for our eyes to meet, then she concentrated on her box again. “But I’m also a realist.”

“How do you explain this? How do you explain Jerome and the others checking Dad’s place and seeing his stuff one day, then nothing the next. Maybe he came back home as the water was
rising, bagged up his things, saving his stuff like he always thought he would, and ended up getting taken on some boat or bus or plane out of the city.”

Bela had her back to me. But her shoulders said she was crying.

“Bela?” I turned her around. “What’s wrong?”

She was holding a photo of my father and Jezebel in Jackson Square surrounded by a giddy-looking group of kids toting trumpets, trombones, and tubas. Dad had an arm around his fiancŽe and a smile on his face that dominated the photo.

I put my arms around Bela and whispered, “Shhh. It’s all right.”

After a minute or two, Bela pulled away and wiped her eyes. She missed a tear that stopped on the edge of her perfect jawline.

I wiped it away for her.

We returned to the task of discovering what Dad had left behind.

More pictures, a hundred or more, in a Ziploc bag in a shoebox that had been taped shut and then wrapped in plastic that had
also
been taped shut.

CDs, mostly jazz.

A journal I’d never known he kept during Mom’s last year.

Two watches.

Newspaper and magazine clippings of wire-service photos.
Mine.

A Troy Aikman autographed mini-football.

Mom’s keychain collection with a tiny guitar from Nashville, a hand-carved wooden bear that said
San Fran
, and others from Tallahassee, Tampa, Atlanta, San Antonio, Chicago, Phoenix.

A burgundy, leather-bound scrapbook. I untied the white ribbon keeping it closed.

“Jez made that for your dad.”

“Jez?”

“Uh-huh. We sat right over there.” She pointed to the farthest corner table under a picture of Archie Manning.

I opened the book to an 8x10 of Dad and Jez on a swamp boat. I flipped the page to concert tickets. “Snoop Dogg?”

Bela snickered. “Yeah, Jezebel has eclectic taste.”

I flipped a page. Two soft-drink labels from plastic twelve-ounce bottles were placed next to a picture of my father and Jez standing in front of the JW Marriott on Canal during Mardi Gras. They were both holding Pepsi bottles.

I turned another page. NBA tickets and an extremely long shoelace under a plastic page protector. I looked at Bela questioningly.

“Shaq. Your dad took me to a Hornets game on my birthday.”

“That’s quite a gift,” I said.

I turned more pages. A restaurant menu, a chord chart, an ace of spades, a handwritten poem on a Verses napkin. A picture of Dad and Castle standing and smiling outside a nondescript
building with a sign that was too small to read. Every piece of Dad’s treasure was safely guarded behind the thick page protectors.

A feather. An empty bag of Planters peanuts. A white sheet of paper with the Alcoholics Anonymous’ well-known Twelve Steps written out by hand.

“Take it out,” Bela said.

I did, and she took it from me and turned it over.

“That’s his list. Step Eight,” she said.

I read aloud. “‘Number Eight: Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.’” Beneath those words were names scribbled in Dad’s handwriting. “Kaiser, Erin, Lee, Jamie, the Halladays, Spencer, Roberta, Mrs. Robitaille, the Bellamys, Patrick, John R., Tiff, Lonnie, Summer, the Mangums, Laurie S., the Fleeks, Mary Ann . . .” I didn’t read the last name aloud.

Luke.

“I don’t recognize most of these,” I said.

“Me either, though I’ve heard about Lee. He was one of your dad’s A.A. sponsors in Texas.”

“Didn’t go so well?” I asked.

“Ask Jez,” she said. “And John”—she put her finger on his name for emphasis—“John was a sponsor too, but only for a couple of meetings. I met him when Charlie first hit New Awlins. Nice guy.”

I scanned the list again. “We had a neighbor in Texas—the Bellamys, this must be them. I wonder what Dad needed to make right.”

“Not for us to know. But I’ll tell you why this list is in a scrapbook and not in his pocket.” She smiled wisdom. “Because he had these names memorized, and he’d tried to find time for every one of them to make things better.”

“Did they accept?”

“Jez would know better than me, but I don’t think everyone returned his calls.” She hesitated. “I know he’s sure been trying.”

I slid the paper back into the scrapbook and flipped the page.

I saw a collage of Dad and Jez in every imaginable New Orleans setting with the location written in Jez’s careful handwriting below each picture. It covered two pages.

The zoo. Armstrong Park. Louisiana Children’s Museum. Houmas House Plantation and Gardens. The French Market. A WWII museum. Wearing masks aboard the Creole Queen. Inside the Pharmacy Museum.

“The Pharmacy Museum?” I asked.

“Yep, it’s right down the street.”

“I can’t believe some of the things Jezebel got my dad to do.”

“You have no idea,” she said. “True love, I guess.” She stood. “You thirsty? I’m hiding some Sierra Mist in the back.”

“Is it warm?”

“Very.”

“Perfect.”

She walked into the kitchen and returned a moment later with two cans and two glasses.

“Hey, Luke, tell me about your dad’s premonitions.”

“Haven’t we had this conversation?”

“No, we haven’t.”

That’s right,
I remembered.
That was Jordan.

“Is this one of those routines where I tell you a story you already know?”

She smiled. I was beginning to like it when she smiled in my direction.

“Fair. How about I tell one
you
don’t know.”

I poured my soda and took a drink. It made me realize how hungry I actually was. I opened the second can and poured it in Bela’s glass.

“Your dad had a premonition—”

“Dream.”

“Whatever. They’re inseparable, aren’t they?”

I let it go. After all, I
was
sitting at a table covered with boxes wrapped in plastic bags and duct tape.

“Keep going.” I took another drink. The sugar tasted terrific on my tongue.

“Your dad had one. About you.”

“I think he had a lot about me, Bel.”

I liked that.

She rolled her eyes.

I think she did, too.

“Maybe he did. But this was recent. He told the whole club about it. Heck, I bet he told his roommates, his guys at Jackson Square. Everyone. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’d called Jim Haslett.”

“The Saints’ head coach? Please.” I snickered. “I get it. He told people.”

“He said he’d had the strongest premonition, or dream, or inspiration—you pick—of his life.”

I sat a little straighter in my chair.

“He said that one day he’d show you the city he’d come to love.”

“That could be any—”

“No. It was
this
one. He said one day you’d come. He’d take you around town just like Jez has taken you around. Take the pictures and build a page for your scrapbook just like this one.” She placed her hand on the open page. “He said you’d see him differently, see what he’d done here, see who he’d become . . .” Bela’s eyes welled up with tears. This time she didn’t wipe them away.

I reached across the table and took her hand in mine.

“Luke, your dad, Charlie—he was not the man you remember.”

“Does that mean he was sober? Designing buildings again? Free from guilt about my mother?” The answers suddenly mattered.

Bela’s breathing was labored.

“I’m getting it, Bel, that’s why I think he’s out there. I think maybe he’s out there
waiting
to work it out. Somehow, somewhere. Maybe there’s a second chance for us after all. I can’t help but think what an idiot I’ve been . . .”

Bela stood and this time engaged me in a long, warm hug that lasted forever and yet, somehow, not nearly long enough. If either of us smelled of Katrina, we wouldn’t have known it.

“Luke, I want you to know how much it helps me to think that even though we lost your dad, we found you.” She paused. “I found you.”

“Not so fast, Bela. This isn’t over yet.
I still believe.
”

She took both my hands and squeezed “You’re a good man. . . . I’ll be back later.”

“Soon?”

She nodded and wiped her nose on the back of her hand with as much grace as possible.

“You’re OK by yourself?”

She nodded again and left.

I opened the rest of the boxes and bags, at least enough to tell what was inside. Clothes, another scrapbook I set aside to open later, more photos, A.A. pins marking numbers of days sober. An 8
1
Ú
2
x11 pencil rendering of our home in Dallas. The home he dreamt he’d build for Mom.

I found a baseball cap in another Ziploc bag. Yankees.

The one thing I most wanted to see, the thing I’d considered
praying
to find in one of the larger boxes, was missing.

“Dad’s sax,” I said aloud.

I pushed the worry aside, picked up the baseball cap, and hiked the spiral staircase to my bedroom in the hallway. I powered up my laptop to download the day’s pictures. My battery was down to fifty percent and I’d forgotten to bring a spare. I hoped I’d either see power again or maybe a turn at the generator on the patio behind the club.

At such high resolution, the photos imported slowly. I set the computer down on the couch and went back downstairs to find something dry and edible. I helped myself to some Pop-Tarts and a single-serving package of Fig Newtons. I hated Fig Newtons.

I returned upstairs and gave myself a two-minute sponge bath in the bathroom. Then I put on the cleanest clothes I had left. Comfortable slacks and a long-sleeved shirt I had worn on my trip to Peru. It was a surprisingly comfortable outfit for a hot, humid climate like Louisiana. I used the restroom and said a humble prayer of thanksgiving that there was still toilet paper. Then I covered my wet-mop hair with Dad’s baseball cap and shut the bathroom door behind me.

It was time to settle in to view the pictures from our Lower Ninth expedition. A few weren’t usable, or at least not of
professional reprint quality, but a dozen or so jumped off the screen and begged to be sent to Kirky, my agent back in Manhattan.

I scrolled backward to the pictures I’d shown Bela earlier. A few were good enough, I expected, to end up on the wire or in a magazine. I’d get the whole bunch to Kirky as soon as I found my father.