Water Lessons (4 page)

Jim shouted, though he knew his voice was lost in the din of the vast spinning blades. The chopper leveled out one hundred feet above the water. Jim pointed repeatedly to the word "INSULIN" and then at the spot just beneath the limb where Freddy lay.

The rescue officer was a young white man, helmeted, and with his upper chest clad in a harness. The man gave Jim a thumbs-up and yelled something to the pilot. They seemed to argue for a few moments. Then the rescue officer pointed to his watch and made a motion with his thumb and index finger signifying "small." The man withdrew inside the cabin and the chopper ascended, then departed toward the north.

Jim cursed wildly, stomping his feet onto the roof. He walked up toward the limb, the drooping, hangdog look of defeat all about his face and shoulders.

Now he knew what he must do. Jim had to swim for it. LSU Medical Hospital and Charity Hospital were twenty and twenty-five or so blocks away. He had to cover all bases. If the helicopter did not return in time, he didn't want Freddy to be helpless.

"I'm swimming for it, Freddy. If the chopper returns, because of what I sprayed there on the roof, they know where to find you. But I can't have you helpless if it doesn't. I'll rest every few minutes. It's twenty blocks or so, but I'll get there. Probably find someone in a boat on the way. And I'm coming back with insulin."

Freddy just shook his head. A weak voice, weaker than minutes before, escaped.

"Ahh, Jim. Nuttin' good can come o' that. Just you rest here. Chopper will be back in no time."

Jim held the water jug above his mouth and drank deep. Then he set it down, knelt and embraced the old man and kissed him once on the forehead.

"You'll never see me sittin' idly by while your life's on the line," Jim said. He rose and saw the old man's face full of worry.

"No, Jim! Jim!" the old man gasped, but it was too late. Jim ran and leapt off the roof and hurtled into the dark waters just feet below.

CHAPTER FIVE

He swam for over an hour, holding fast to trees and walls every few minutes to rest. Soon he saw something familiar moving just a hundred feet away: a tall, slender man in a canoe.
 

"Beau! Beau!" Jim yelled.
 

Becky's husband paddled away from him. Jim tried to swim faster after him, but couldn't. He yelled once more, as loudly as he could, and the canoe turned around and moved toward him. Jim held fast to the trunk of an oak. Seconds later, he saw the relieved face of his neighbor. But within this expression was something indescribable. Beau was holding something back.

"I'm pulling you into here, Jim. Come on. Grab my hand. Push yourself in when I pull."
 

Beau gripped Jim's hand, steadied the boat, then leaned quickly back, pulling with all of his might as Jim pushed himself up into the canoe, which wobbled wildly in the murky water.

After a moment to catch his breath, Jim said, "Now we can go for Freddy's insulin. He's runnin' out of time."

Beau allowed his broad shoulders to droop and he wiped each cheek with a palm of his hand and exhaled loudly. He looked at the floor of the canoe.

"Jim, I checked on y'all a few minutes after we heard the splash. Thought one o' y'all fell off the roof. Freddy was gaspin'. I saw him pass, man."

"No, Beau. Don't just tell me that to get me back to the roof. Tell me the truth."

"It is the truth, Jim. I'm as serious as this storm. He's gone. I came to find you."

It felt like an entire day passed before they reached the roof. Beau paddled away as Jim ran up to the peak.

Freddy's eyes were shut. His chin was pulled up, his mouth gaped wide, his hands contorted in some horrible agony, like photos Jim had seen of the dead mummified by ash and lack of air in Pompeii, or the dead photographed after the liberation of Auschwitz. The eyes were shut. Jim imagined the death rattle sounding, then a second later the final, surrendering breath rushing out of the lungs, past the voice box, like the one he heard many years ago at his Maw Maw Laforet's deathbed.

Jim knelt and hugged his friend's shoulders, realizing the old legend's great heart had suffered such a shock Jim's had never felt. That heart had given way, probably hours before his body depleted its last stores of insulin.

The chopper returned an hour later, hovering two hundred feet over the house. A cord lowered the rescue officer to the roof. Jim would not move or speak. The officer, not much younger than Jim, walked toward the spot under the limb.

"Sorry, sir, we were ordered back to base," the soldier shouted with a thick twang. "We took on gunfire just south of here. Gangs, addicts maybe. Drugs ran out."

The officer stopped cold just under the branch. The man's eyes widened, if only for a second. "Is this man dead?" the officer yelled over the din of the blades, pointing at Freddy. The officer knelt, and felt for a pulse in Freddy's neck. He turned to Jim with a look of deep solemnity.

"He must have been dyin' when you were signalin' to me earlier," Jim shouted above the roar of the rotor. Jim nearly vomited, but felt compelled to mention one more thing to the stranger. "Know who this was?"

The man watched with sudden interest, an eyebrow rising slightly into the helmet.

"That was Freddy 'Foghorn' Beasley, man. Ever hear
Rampart Rag
? The band
Gris Gris
? He was King of Zulu, 1974. He was in the '84 World's Fair here and—"

"Sorry, sir, I ain't heard of him," the man shouted. "I'm Oklahoma National Guard. But we gotta go. Someone'll retrieve him. But you've gotta come now. It ain't safe for us just hoverin' up there! There's lotsa others to save."

Jim nodded at the broken shell at their feet, the remnant of his neighbor who that year had become such a close friend. Jim pulled off his own shirt, reached down, and lifted the old man's head, wrapping it with tenderness. He stood up just before the rotor's winds blew the shirt off the roof.

Jim cursed and grabbed the bulky white canvas bag, checking the contents. Among the cans of tuna and framed photos of his grandparents was the plastic case holding Freddy's white Fender guitar. Jim squeezed the canvas hard in his hands and nodded at the officer, who slipped the other harness around him.

The officer led Jim to the center of the roof, locked his own harness, and gave the chopper a thumbs up. He assumed a firm grip on Jim as the cord yanked taut. "We're goin' up!" the officer yelled.

As the cord lifted Jim, he cried out like a newborn infant. Below lay the expired, ruined body of his friend, the Fourchon family sitting on their roof, the gasoline-splotched canals where there had been streets. The school a few streets away burned. A corpse floated down his street, bloated in its clothes like a discarded sausage. The Central Business District loomed ahead, with its multitude of blown-out windows. The Superdome appeared in the distance, its roof membrane peeled back like the hide of a skinned doe.

"I'm comin' back for you, Freddy! We're comin' back to get you!" Jim shouted into the wind as he glanced down again at the corpse.

Jim lifted his watery gaze toward the helicopter, just as the cord pulled Jim and his rescuer inside the open door.

As the officer unharnessed him and fastened him into his seatbelt, Jim glanced around the cabin. An elderly white couple sat just feet away, their eyes locked onto his with an expression of terror. Nearby sat a sixty-something Vietnamese woman and what appeared to be her daughter, perhaps in her mid-thirties. The younger woman was slender; her face had delicate features but was scratched and bruised. Dried blood caked the collar and lap of her blue blouse. She wept without sound, staring at Jim with seething outrage. Her mother's dry-eyed gaze, angled toward the floor, held a combination of the deepest sadness, weariness, even recognition and knowing—she was half-present in the moment, half-immersed in something, somewhere beyond.

CHAPTER SIX

In the near darkness, Jim moved in silence between the several thousand sleeping or nearly sleeping forms, wrapped in blankets on cots. Though it was just past two in the morning, Jim, gripping the stack of thin wool blankets, was surprised at the silence in the auditorium. It reminded him of funerals he had attended, before the music or service started: all silence and whispering within a cavernous edifice. The Maravich Center had not been so silent in his memories of graduate school.

To some of the evacuated, should they still be awake, he would hand out blankets. To those sleeping, he would lay a blanket on top of each person.
 

Jim was shocked at how many were women, children, and elderly. Earlier that night, medical teams whisked certain elderly away. Jim had learned the shock of the storm and the evacuation had actually killed some of them.

He had long before noted that the crowds were overwhelmingly black. Only rarely did he see a white, Hispanic, or Asian person. He had spotted the older Asian woman he sat across from yesterday in the medevac chopper. He had asked about her daughter, but she just shook her head and turned away. Hours later he learned from a volunteer from Oregon that the young woman had been taken to a hospital there in Baton Rouge for treatment. As he had guessed, she had been raped before her evacuation. Jim remembered her tears and bloody dress and mouth.

Jim came to a young African-American boy of perhaps fifteen, slight and short and curled up asleep. Once the boy felt the blanket touch his skin, he half sat up, grinned, and nodded as if impressed. "I'm gonna dance at yo' weddin'," he said.

Jim smiled and walked toward the next row. What a beautiful expression. He had never heard it before.

Some of the sleeping woke as well when Jim lowered the blankets onto them. Some noticed his eyes, brimming with tears, and uttered words of blessing. Jim could not control it. Never had he seen such a degree of desperation, and in one confined place.

Between trips to distribute blankets, Jim passed out plastic water bottles to those still awake. Children, pregnant women, elderly men, all sorts of people thanked him profusely as he handed them the water. Eventually, Jim broke for a snack and a moment to rest.

Some of the volunteers were huddled in the corner at an office table. They invited Jim to share some water and sandwiches with them and listen to the radio. Jim heard how Army and National Guard convoys were hours away from reaching the thousands of refugees in the Morial Convention Center, where corpses both lay in open view and stacked in the basement.
 

The desperation and mayhem had grown so great in the city that two NOPD police officers perished by their own hands. One was Sgt. Paul Accardo, the spokesman for the entire force. Three people in the Superdome leapt to their death from its top tier.
 

The Maravich Center volunteers met all of this news with curses and gasps. More of an apocalyptic film than reality, but that it was real made it all the more horrifying.

Through conversation, Jim learned these twelve volunteers originated from all over North America, from California, to Oregon, to Illinois, to South Carolina, even Canada. One young man hailed from Salem, New Hampshire. Jim remembered his good college friend Liam.

"What do you think of Exeter? Exeter, New Hampshire?" he said.

"Exeter? Oh, yes," said the young man, somewhere in his early twenties. "Beautiful town. My family would go apple picking there every year when I was growing up. It's not too far from the ocean, either, a few miles. Sometimes you can smell the salt air in the breezes."

"I've always wanted to visit," Jim mumbled, half lost in thought.

Minutes later, one of the volunteers allowed Jim to check his email on her laptop. Among the many emails asking about Jim's condition—from everyone from his parents to his cousins to ex-girlfriends—was a note from Liam himself. He invited any of his friends living in the New Orleans area or affected Gulf Coast to stay with him in his house in Exeter while New Orleans was "cleaned up, and order is established."

Jim put his fist to his mouth in surprise. Starting in the helicopter ride from his grandfather's house over the city to the previous evacuation center, Jim had hoped his friends in New England or Chicago or Memphis would call and extend an invite. Freddy was gone. His grandfather's house was destroyed. He did not want to concede defeat and move in with his father and his mother. He must stay for a bit to bury Freddy. But now he sensed an opening.

Jim shot off a few reassuring lines to his parents, telling them of his location. He thanked the laptop's owner, a young girl from Colorado, and grabbed a case of water bottles and walked back into the rows of the refugees, many of them no doubt dreaming pure nightmares.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Jim Scoresby's gaze drifted earthward to the once-bustling waters of Boston harbor, its wavelets leaping in the spring wind. His vision seized upon something he had seen only in old black and white photos. Just out past the harbor sailed a lone yacht, a schooner of perhaps one hundred feet. By the shape of it, it has to be a Herreshoff, he thought. Other than an oil tanker farther out in the waves, just south toward Dorchester Bay, it was the only craft in sight.

Jim could make out its features from his seat on his apartment balcony on Atlantic Avenue. The nine sails, three quite large, billowed in the wind, full and proud. He admired the hull, wooden and walnut-hued, the coded, multicolored flags in the rigging, the crow's nest.

He leaned forward and brought his face closer to the balcony's old black cast iron rails. His eyes widened, his mouth opened slightly. His lips poised to form a sentence but at that moment his twenty-three year old girlfriend Maureen Henretty paused from her reading, placed the laptop on the stool between them, and exhaled deeply in frustration. Jim Scoresby stared into the cloudless azure expanse of the Atlantic sky. She again took up the laptop and reread the passage aloud.

I, James Ewell Scoresby III, am writing this to fulfill a promise: many times in my life, my long-ill father has made me swear that he would see my first novel in print before he passed on. Here I am nearly thirty years old. A half-finished manuscript lingers in my desk drawer (a different tale than this). And I would still go another few years concentrating on living, voyaging to this and then that far-off land, sailing across that ocean, walking in those mountains.