City of Refuge Read online

  City of Refuge

  A Novel

  Tom Piazza

  For Mary

  “Can you live without the willow tree? Well, no, you can’t. The willow tree is you. The pain on the mattress there—that dreadful pain—that’s you.”

  —JOHN STEINBECK, The Grapes of Wrath

  “Pilate saith unto him, What is truth?”

  —JOHN 18:38

  Contents

  Epigraph

  I

  1

  Deep mid-August in the New Orleans heat. Not even much…

  2

  Craig Donaldson finished a cup of lemon ice, which he…

  3

  Every year as August wanes and the new school year…

  4

  The next morning, Friday, Craig awoke with a warm fizz…

  5

  Overnight, the National Weather Service revised its projections for the…

  6

  Even before daylight on Sunday morning the traffic had thickened…

  7

  SJ fell asleep on the couch just as the sky…

  8

  Craig woke up slowly, feeling as if he had had…

  9

  Wesley awoke from a fitful sleep on his friend Roland’s…

  10

  Through the morning they huddled in the sweltering dark. Outside,…

  11

  All over the city, people started walking. They carried duffel…

  12

  Midday on Tuesday, and SJ probably should have taken a…

  13

  They took him to the Convention Center, eventually, a large,…

  II

  14

  They pulled in just after seven-thirty on Wednesday evening, the…

  15

  Lucy awoke, heard breathing as if someone asleep next to…

  16

  The Albany airport is small, and Wesley was hard to…

  17

  Okay, you’re on the air, Bill from Grafton, Wisconsin, Get…

  18

  Through the mid-morning traffic, Alice drove Craig to O’Hare Airport,…

  19

  Silence.

  20

  They were some long days, in Texas.

  21

  SJ looked at his shirt, felt it between his fingers,…

  22

  A bright Wednesday in mid-October, and Alice stood at the…

  23

  When Craig was back in Chicago, the old routine reasserted…

  24

  Wesley had driven under the expressway, twice, as the directions…

  25

  It was still dark when SJ awoke in his apartment,…

  26

  Craig and Alice arrived at Gus and Jean’s around two…

  III

  27

  Some version of Mardi Gras has been held in New…

  28

  The van turned onto what had been North Derbigny Street.

  About the Author

  Other Books by Tom Piazza

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  With gratitude: Cal Morgan, Amy Williams, Mary Howell, and Lillian Piazza. For precious time and space: Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Jean Howell, David Mayberry, Leslie Gerber, and John and Carrie Brown. And in memory of Norman Mailer and Harold Cavallero.

  I

  Parade coming. Could be any Sunday, just about, especially in the fall. People on the steps of shotgun houses, shoulder to shoulder on the sidewalk, watching everyone passing by, ice chest just inside the door full of beer and wine coolers and lemonade, people all out on the grassy neutral ground cooking up food—SJ, too, with his converted oil drum. That’s their place, across from Shawnetta’s house, where they stake out when they steak out. Hot dogs, too, for the kids, burgers.

  Lucy up on the second step, drinking that wine cooler she likes, shaking her hips in time to the band in the distance, salt-and-pepper pincurls plastered flat to her forehead, waving to friends, high-spirited, “Hey baby.” Shawnetta right up there next to her wearing her new lime-green matching top and bottom, shaking it in time.

  “Hey SJ,” Lucy shouts, loud and raucous, trying to get his attention, but he’s across the street, across that river of shouting, talking humanity and of course he doesn’t hear and she waves a couple of times and Bootsy sees her from his beach chair over in the little area they roped off and she’s going to point to SJ when someone bumps into her and almost knocks her off her place and she says, “What the fuck you bumping into people?” and Shawnetta says something to her that makes her laugh and the anger is gone as quickly as it arose, and that was Lucy—mean and evil one moment, but then gone just as quick.

  Always a few white folks mixed in, threading through, making their way along, old hippie-looking types with weathered faces, or youngsters wearing military fatigues and dreadlocks and what SJ calls a pocketful of metal in their face; they don’t bother anybody and nobody bothers them. You wouldn’t see many down where she and SJ live, on the other side of the other side of the tracks, unless they were driving down to Caffin Avenue to take a picture of Fats Domino’s house.

  Now along come something you don’t see every day, a sweet-looking white boy in his late thirties probably, wearing nice-looking, respectful clothes, leading a little blond girl can’t be more than seven by the hand. Pointing at things and bending down talking to her.

  Lucy on the steps laughing at something and notices this nice white boy looking up at her, smiling, and the little girl, too. “Hey white folks,” she hollers at them, raucous and unsmiling, holding up her bottle of wine cooler. The man laughs at this and says a hearty “Hi,” and the little girl—listen at this—says plain as water, “Hey black folks!” with this big smile on her face. Lucy and Shawnetta, both startled, laugh and laugh at this, and Shawnetta says to the man “You need you something to drink? What about something for your girl?”

  “Sure,” the man says, and tells the girl to say thank you. Shawnetta opens the door and bends down to the cooler and Lucy tells her, “Give him a Crystal Mist. You ever had Crystal Mist, white folks?”

  “Nope! But I’m looking forward to trying it…” Before he finishes his sentence Lucy has turned away and is telling Shawnetta to get the little girl one of the lemonades.

  “You like lemonade, baby?” she says, bending down to the little girl, who looks back up right in Lucy’s eyes and nods a big, exaggerated nod, and Lucy says, “Good. Everybody like lemonade.” She opens one of the cans of lemonade and hands it down to the girl. Then Shawnetta passes her the bottle of Crystal Mist, which Lucy hands to the man, saying “Welcome to the ghetto!” He holds his bottle out to click, and Lucy does, then she notices the little girl doing the same thing and clicks with the girl. The man takes a swig and raises his eyebrows and says, “Wow.”

  “Yeah, it’s good, baby,” Lucy says. “Y’all having a good time?”

  “We always do.”

  “Good. Y’all be careful.”

  And the man takes the cue to head along, and the little girl says “Thank you” one more time but the nice woman’s attention has already turned elsewhere, and the girl walks off with her father down Galvez Street through the crowd, to find Mommy at the corner of Canal and wait for the band to come.

  1

  Deep mid-August in the New Orleans heat. Not even much traffic a block away on North Claiborne, a Saturday afternoon, and the sound of SJ’s hammer going in the stupefying thick air. SJ was almost finished framing the new shed he was building in his backyard. Wiring and Sheetrocking would be for after Labor Day. Way off in the distance, past the Industrial Canal and the reaches of the Upper Ninth Ward and the Bywater, the skyscrapers of d
owntown and the iridescent blister of the Superdome roof lay naked under the brilliant sun.

  Out front, SJ’s truck and his van sat in the curved cement driveway he had laid in front of his house (he had moved the structure back seven feet to make room for that driveway), with the magnetic sign on the door—New Breed Carpentry and Repair, and his phone number. It had been cheaper than getting it stenciled on the door itself, and it worked fine, he got calls off of it. He had, however, painted his own name in script on the front fender, the way the taxi drivers did, for an extra touch of distinction. Most of his work came from out in New Orleans East, a sprawling area of new houses and curving, landscaped streets in the subdivisions, reclaimed from swampland in the 1970s, where he could certainly have moved, if money were the only question and he had wanted to leave the Lower Ninth, which he didn’t.

  SJ’s father had built his own house in a vacant lot on North Miro Street, five blocks away, when he came back from World War II, with two-by-fours and weatherboard and nails that he salvaged from all around and saved up by his mama’s house. He pulled the nails out of scrap wood, carefully, or found them on the ground, and sometimes even straightened them if they could be straightened, one nail at a time. He kept them in what his mother called put-up jars, sorted roughly by size and thickness and purpose. SJ had kept that old house, although his father was dead and gone, and he rented it out to a widow lady. Sometimes when he wanted to get off by himself he would walk those five blocks to the old house and sit on the side steps and think.

  He hammered some finishing nails into a line across the bottom of a small French cornice. He was trying something different with this shed, which he had seen in one of the books his daughter, Camille, sent him from North Carolina, something a little more decorative in a different way, not just utilitarian. His thin, ribbed undershirt, with thin straps over his shoulder, was soaked through with sweat, which glistened on his shaved head, shoulders and upper arms. Around his neck on a thin chain hung a St. Christopher medal. In his mid-fifties, SJ was still a powerful, compact man. He loved to build things, to work with his hands, and he loved to cook, especially outside, and he liked to read. After Rosetta, his wife, had died of an aortic aneurism six years earlier, he had read less and built more.

  He would finish the line he was working on and then stop for the day and get some food going. He would go out to find Wesley later if he could; he had left his nephew to finish up a part of the job the day before and Wesley had left the tools sitting outside and SJ had come out in the morning to find them slick with overnight wet. He had wiped them down and put them in the oven to sweat them out, but he didn’t understand that carelessness at all. His nephew was a smart young man, nineteen years old and teetering on the edge of something anyone in the Lower Nine knew all too well. Lately he had been riding around at night on these motorcycles where you had to hunch way over, weaving in and out of stopped traffic. Where he got the money for the bike SJ didn’t know and Lucy, SJ’s sister, would not say. At least, SJ thought, they had the bikes to work on. Working with your hands kept you focused on the real world. Still, you could hit a pothole on of those bikes and end up in a wheelchair for life.

  Two weeks earlier the police arrested Wesley for beating on his girlfriend. SJ had drilled into his nephew many times the importance of surviving the encounter with police when you had one. Wesley had a quick mouth and a mannish attitude, but he had done allright, at least he hadn’t gotten the police mad, and SJ got the call from the jail at 3:30 in the morning and SJ and Lucy had to go down and get him out on bond and later on SJ had demanded an accounting from his nephew.

  “Uncle J she slap me and I didn’t hit her. I’m not lying.” They were sitting in SJ’s living room, the sky just getting light outside. Wesley had on jeans with the crotch halfway down to his knees, and an oversize T-shirt hanging out, and he had taken off his Raiders cap at his uncle’s request. His reddish skin seemed to be breaking out, and his hair was uneven and untended. “Then she slap me again and called me a pussy. What I’m supposed to do?”

  “Walk out the room, nephew. You already paying for another man’s baby. How she going to respect you? You need to find a woman who gonna watch your back and not put a knife in it. It doesn’t matter how good that pussy is, you got to stay alive.”

  Wesley looked up at his uncle then, sly smile, the charming look, “It is good, Uncle J.”

  SJ allowed himself a small laugh. He knew as well as anyone. He remembered one of the old blues records his father liked to play, something about “Some people say she’s no good, but she’s allright with me.”

  “Well,” SJ said, “don’t be beating on no woman, nephew.”

  “But it’s like you have to or her girlfriends be talking about how she play you.”

  “Why you care what they say?”

  Wesley shook his head, looked at the floor. And anyway SJ knew the answer. You care because you are young, and that is your world, and most of your understanding of who you are comes from how other people act toward you. That is the whole thing until you get the ground under your own feet. Some of them found it in the military. Young men had to prove themselves. They could do it in healthy ways or unhealthy ways. The range of options had a lot to do with where you were born and what color your skin was. That was an old story.

  SJ had gone through his own foolishness back in the day, the mid-seventies, after he came back from the army, drinking and gambling, rolling dice, which was what he had liked. Wearing the old Shaft pimp clothes for a while, and staying out and acting foolish and getting into arguments and coming home drunk—the street wasn’t as bad then as it was today, but you could still get cut or shot very easily. And one day he awoke at noon, and Rosetta had packed two suitcases full of clothes and was dressed to leave. SJ jumped up and immediately started to fall over, dizzy from the night before, and he had to take a knee on the floor before he could get up and say, “What is this?”

  Rosetta was calm as could be. She told him quietly that he worked very hard for his money and had a right to do with it as he pleased. She didn’t want to stand in the way if this was how he wanted to spend his money and his life; he had worked very hard and she would not stand in his way; she loved him too much. She would always love him and wish him the best…and she was zipping up one of the suitcases as she said this, and each profession of love felt like a slap in the face and made a panic rise in him.

  If she had told him to stop what he was doing he could have started hollering about how it was his money and he would do what the goddamn hell he pleased with it, but she had covered all that before he said a word and now there was nothing to holler about, nothing to grab on to. Half an hour later he was promising that he would not gamble a dime again and drink neither, and he had kept those promises. Well, in fact he liked to taste a beer every now and again on a hot day, during a cookout or a second line, or on a rare occasion after a workday, especially if he had company working. But not two beers, not ever.

  He was no choir boy, though. SJ knew how to take care of himself, and how to take care of his family, and one needed to know that. He didn’t make a show of it or act tough. When he went out he carried his father’s old straight razor in his right sock, and a derringer in his pocket. There was a saying: “Lower Nine, don’t mind dyin’…” But SJ did mind dying, or at least dying over nothing. If it came down to it he would rather see the other fellow die. Yes he would.

  Around front, SJ set his carpenter’s apron down in the bed of his pickup and went into his van to straighten some things he had left in disarray earlier. The inside of the van was a portable workshop, and SJ always had his tools in order before he ate dinner, unless he was going to work later on in the night. He still kept his nails sorted in jars, the way his father had. He loved this time of day in the summer, six-thirty or so, when in some other time of the year it would be dark already, people walking and bicycling by. The heat didn’t bother him. Across the way Bootsy and his wife and sister-in-law always sitting out
in front talking and laughing, and the sweet-olive tree by Mrs. Gray’s fence next door throwing off all that scent. A woman named Sylvia who lived two blocks down toward the canal passed by, wearing a dark green crotcheted hat and pushing a grocery cart, and said, “Allright,” with that slow New Orleans drawl, and SJ looked over at her and smiled and said, “Allright. Joe finish that siding?”

  “He’ll get it.”

  “I know that’s right.” Finished with the van, he went around to put some of his materials inside the steel lockbox that sat behind the cab of his pickup and lock it down. A young man with a long T-shirt and dreadlocks walked by, throwing a gum wrapper on the ground, and smiled at SJ and said, “Allriiight.” SJ nodded briefly back at him and said, “Allright” in a short rhythm, without being rude but without any invitation to more closeness. The speech patterns in certain New Orleans neighborhoods approach the complexity of Chinese in the shades of meaning that can be extracted from the tiniest gradations of inflection and timing. Sometimes these gradations can mean the difference between life and death. SJ recognized this young man as one of the group that Wesley had been spending too much time around, and SJ’s “Allright” conveyed: “I see you, I recognize you, I have no reason to be rude to you or more than basically polite, either; I am secure where I am, and I will be watching you as you continue down the street,” which SJ did.