City of Refuge Read online

  Those who kept their radios on were bombarded by exhortation:

  “If you have not yet left the city we have one word for you: Leave. You can come back and rebuild later.”

  “That’s right, Jerry. This is a Category Five storm, it’s not just a puddle-jumper to ride out by candlelight. We’re looking at these images right now on the screen and you just can’t believe the size of this thing.”

  “We’re going to go now to Andrea, who’s in our storm center…”…and its audience sat at a standstill, staring into the distance past the heat vibrating above the hoods of their cars, waiting to move another ten feet away from home, away, out, gone.

  It was nine-thirty before the Donaldsons had thrown the last pillow in the backseat and found the one toy that Malcolm wanted to take, which they could not locate anywhere, and obsessively double-checked on the refrigerator and the lights and the other appliances. Finally, packed with pillows and water and blankets and towels, and everyone’s special bag and clothes and toiletries, they set out through their neighborhood’s eerily silent streets, rounding the corner onto Willow, and up to Carrollton, where they made a right turn and headed for the interstate.

  Craig knew that they would hit terrible traffic. He assumed it would take them close to half an hour to get out of the city. Oxford was usually a six-hour drive; figuring an extra two or three hours, maybe they would pull in around seven that evening…Once they were out of the New Orleans bowl he could relax. They had hotel reservations; they would be all right. He had taken one Benevol to steady himself, but he had tanked up on coffee as well, to stay alert and focused.

  In the backseat Annie and Malcolm sat in an unusual silence as they drove past the familiar houses and street signs—Jeannette, Spruce, Hickory, Panola—along Carrollton, which was almost empty of other vehicles, deserted feeling under the beautiful sheltering oak trees. Alice, next to him, was silent as well, and Craig fought to keep a hovering panic at bay. They clipped along, away from the river and toward the interstate, past the familiar restaurants and stores, but as soon as they passed Claiborne Avenue traffic began to back up from the entrance to I-10, still a mile or so away. A double line of cars, vans, trucks, and SUVs fed slowly past the fast-food places and the Pep Boys store and Xavier University, and into the overloaded evacuation route.

  Alice had tried putting in a cell phone call to her mother, but she had difficulty getting through. After two attempts she gave up and sat silently as well. Craig drove with his foot on the brake: roll for ten feet; stop. Roll for seven feet; stop. Stopped, stopped, roll for ten feet, stop…the traffic was slowing to a near standstill as they approached Five Happiness, the Chinese restaurant where they liked to eat on Friday nights, just past Pep Boys.

  As he nursed the car along a few feet at a time, Craig felt claustrophobia entering him, stealthily, like a force of commandos in black, spreading out down the unlit backstreets of his body, his stomach, his chest, his legs. His clothes felt intolerably tight along his shoulders, his ankles. He realized that he would lose it if he had to sit in the long line just to get on the westbound interstate. The prospect was equivalent to contemplating a slow death by suffocation. His forehead and chest were wet with sweat. He considered taking another Benevol, but that would have made driving hazardous.

  “We can’t do this,” Craig said. “We’ll never get out of the city this way.”

  “Craig,” Alice said, “we just have to deal with it at this point.”

  “Why are we stopped?” Annie said.

  “There’s just a lot of traffic, honey,” Alice said.

  Craig ran through the possibilities in his mind. He knew that if the traffic was this bad on Carrollton it would be impossible on the interstate. His plan had been to take the interstate west to where I-55 peeled off heading north toward Mississippi. That was beginning to seem like a bad idea. The rains at the leading edge of the storm were probably no more than a few hours away. Airline Highway, with its traffic lights, would likely be just as bad as, or worse than, the interstate. He could head out Carrollton, make a left at Canal and snake around the cemeteries and out Metairie Road, but they would still have to deal with the interstate. The Earhart Expressway would be the same story, eventually. The interstate was the bottleneck.

  He decided to head for the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway. That led from the western suburb of Metairie straight north across the lake to Mandeville. If they could drive out Carrollton, and then Wisner, all the way to the lake, then cut across on some of the smaller streets and hit Causeway just north of I-10, they would at least bypass the westbound mess on the interstate. It would be better to be moving slowly on backstreets than to be stuck at a standstill on the highway. Once they were across the lake and out of the New Orleans bowl, they could make their way west to I-55 either on Route 190 or I-12 and continue north into Mississippi. The main thing was to get out of the bowl as quickly as possible; after that they could consider their options.

  “We can’t do this,” he repeated. “It’s going to take us two hours just to get on the interstate.” Rolling his window down, Craig gestured to the car on his left that he wanted to maneuver out of the line, and started nosing out to the left. Alice noticed and said, “What are you doing? We can’t get out of line…”

  The car let him in, and Craig yelled “Thank you!” to the driver, pulled in front of her almost perpendicularly and, with a deep breath, swerved into the left lane, around all the cars merging right for the interstate entrance. From the backseat Malcolm’s voice said “Stop it!” and Craig could hear Annie trying to shush him.

  More emphatically than she intended, Alice said, “What are you doing? How are we supposed to get out of town?”

  Craig swung the car crazily to the curb, across Carrollton from Thrift City, and brought them to a lurching halt. His hands were shaking on the steering wheel. “I am going to get us out of here,” he said, struggling to keep his voice steady. “I want us to get out of here as badly as you do. But I can’t do anything if you won’t let me do it without yelling at me.” He felt tears coming and he ordered them back.

  They all four sat there, suspended for a long moment, silent and alert, and then, looking carefully in the side-view mirror, Craig pulled the car out onto the road and headed up Carrollton through deserted Mid-City, flying along at 50 mph with no problem, passing Banks Street, Canal Street, Venezia, Brocato’s, the Gumbo offices—the streets all so quiet. They passed City Park and the New Orleans Museum of Art behind its long avenue of oaks and then drove out along Bayou St. John all the way to Robert E. Lee, where Craig allowed himself a small sense of satisfaction; they had clipped off a portion, at least, of the impossible traffic by doing this.

  At Robert E. Lee they turned west, with the neighborhood called Lakeview to their left, and made their way past Bucktown through the traffic that was slowing and thickening once again, with cars heading for the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway. They crossed the bridge over the 17th Street Canal that separated Orleans Parish from Jefferson Parish, where the traffic now started to constrict and halt again, making its way through construction lanes, and snaking through residential streets en route to Causeway. By picking his way through the backstreets, Craig got them almost to the Bonnabel Canal, eventually turning left and coming to West Esplanade, and a glacial crawl, once again.

  It took another thirty-five minutes to drive the half mile from the Bonnabel Canal along West Esplanade to Causeway, and the line of cars crawling north across the lake. That was an hour and a half for a trip that usually took fifteen minutes. At that rate they would get to Oxford, Craig calculated, at dinner time the next day. But of course the traffic wouldn’t stay this bad all the way to Oxford.

  Once he knew there were no other, better options and they were committed to the plan, Craig relaxed a little and was able to try lightening things up a little. “Okay,” he said. “How are we doing?” Annie was in the backseat playing some kind of little game with Malcolm. Without looking up, she said “Fine.�
� He looked at Alice to see if they were friends again yet, and she stared straight ahead out the front window.

  “Once we get across the lake,” he said, “we can hit 190 or I-12 and take that west to I-55.”

  She nodded. After a few moments Craig turned on the radio, switched it to AM looking for a news station, and pulled in an amped-up announcer who was saying, “…Hurricane Katrina, now a monster Category Five storm. The folks at the National Weather Service tell us that you’d rather live through a nuclear attack than a Category Five hurricane. So if you are out there, batten down the hatches, secure what you can, but get to someplace on high ground, away from the shore. We are hearing predictions of a tidal surge of up to twenty-five feet along the Gulf Coast, so you need to find a place now. As we say, this is the big one…”

  Craig and Alice both reached for the knob at the same time; Craig got there first and turned it off. For the kids’ benefit, he said, “They say that every time. Hey, who wants to go to the bookstore in Oxford?”

  “I do!” Annie said.

  “Good!” Craig said. “We’re there. And we’ll have breakfast at Proud Larry’s.”

  “Yay!”

  Craig pulled out his cell phone and tried Bobby’s number, got a “circuits busy” message, hit “end” and then immediately hit redial and the phone started ringing. After a ring and a half, Bobby’s voice came through the phone, saying, “Ranger Rick.”

  “Where you at, Daddy-o?”

  “Living the high life at Pam and Mike’s in Baton Rouge. Where you at?”

  “We’re doing the big slog trying to get to the causeway. It took us like an hour and a half and we’re just past Bucktown.”

  “Shit. Where are you going? Oxford?”

  “That’s the plan.”

  “Wait a second; Jen wants to say something to you.”

  This was good. As long as Craig had the lifeline to his friends, he knew he could maintain. The shallow banter was the signal that things were still normal. He glanced quickly at Alice, who was looking out the side window, in her own world.

  “Hey,” said Jen’s voice, cocky, challenging. “Sorry we’re gonna miss our weekly fuckfest.”

  “So Bobby knows about that?”

  “He’s been videotaping them from the closet.”

  Craig let himself laugh at this; he needed it. He laughed at it more than it deserved.

  “Listen,” she said, “if it’s really bad come stay in Baton Rouge. Seriously. We checked with Pam and Mike and they have an extra bedroom.”

  “That’s great,” Craig said. “Thanks. Let’s hope we don’t need to be gone that long.”

  “Right, but I’m just saying…What…?” she pulled the phone away and Craig heard Bobby’s voice saying something and then Jen laughing. “Bobby says we would have to cut out the Sunday-afternoon ‘appointments’ though.”

  “No deal,” Craig said.

  “How’s Alice?”

  “She’s fine. You want to talk to her?”

  “Put her on for a second.”

  Craig handed the phone to Alice and continued the slow, stop-and-barely-go progress driving. Now that the phone wasn’t in his ear he looked out the windshield at the sky, which was overcast. There was no breeze, apparently. Not quite an hour later, just before noon, they had moved the next half mile it took to put their front wheels on the causeway that would take them across Lake Pontchartrain and out of New Orleans.

  Wesley never showed up at SJ’s house that morning. SJ thought to take a break from securing his house to go to Joe Brown park and see if he could find Wesley playing his Sunday-morning football game, but there wasn’t enough time.

  As the exodus went on, those who had stayed in the city prepared, knowing that they were in for a long night at the least. The block was a little quieter than usual, but it was never crazy on a Sunday morning to begin with. SJ drove to Lucy’s house on Tennessee Street to put up plywood. He let himself in the front door, assuming that his sister would still be asleep in her back room. To his surprise, he heard movement from the rear of the house, the kitchen, and he walked in, announcing himself in advance so as not to scare her. She was standing at the stove in a housedress, wearing a hairnet and pushing some scrambled eggs around in a skillet with a spatula.

  “Samuel, hand me that Crystal sauce from over by the toaster,” she said, as if in greeting. “There’s more if you want me to put you on some.”

  Wordlessly, SJ handed his sister the small bottle and walked to the refrigerator to pull out the egg carton.

  “I know you wondering, Samuel,” Lucy said. “Wesley by his friend’s house in Gentilly. He didn’t want to tell you, but I’ll tell you. So you don’t need to be worrying. I think he worried about this other boy Chantrell been seeing and just trying to stay back some, see what’s happening.”

  “Why didn’t he tell me himself?” SJ said, feeling the anger rising. “Why did he have to tell me he would help me this morning, be at your house, and then he’s someplace else?”

  Lucy stood at the stove, quiet for a moment, poking at the eggs with the spatula, thinking. “You set a hard example sometime, SJ.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?” SJ said.

  Now Lucy looked at him, frowning. “I mean you got a way that you go that you think is right.” She paused and looked at him.

  “What’s wrong with that? Somebody got to keep things together.”

  “Sometimes shit can be too damn together. Like it don’t give anybody any room to…to make a mistake or nothing. That boy look up to you—who the fuck else he got to look up to Samuel?”

  “Then why does he…”

  “Don’t talk now,” she said. “Ain’t a motherfuckin’ answer for everything. He doesn’t want to look bad, you understand? To you, I’m saying. He don’t want to look bad to you. We adults, or trying to be…”

  “Better be,” SJ offered.

  “…and we know when you try and avoid some shit it catch up with you. Wesley still finding that out. It not like he making mistakes out of trying to fuck over somebody, Samuel. He don’t know if he can be who he thinks he supposed to be. Or who you want him to be. Fuck,” she said, turning the gas burner off quickly and scraping at the eggs, which were smoking in the pan. “Forgot I was cooking.” She eyed the eggs. “They be all right.”

  SJ sat quietly, knew his sister was telling the truth. “I knew something was going on. Is this boy threatening him?”

  “I don’t think is a threat exactly,” she said. “Get out a couple of plates and knife and fork. I think it just something he’d rather not deal with.”

  They got the food into the plates and Lucy set the skillet back on the stove and came back to the small kitchen table and started to eat with her younger brother. As he sat eating, SJ realized that it was one of the rare times that Lucy actually felt to him like the older sister she was. She was thoughtful and present, and he realized that it was, odd as it seemed, a relief to hear her talking to him in the way she had.

  They didn’t talk about the question anymore; SJ got the plywood up and Lucy said she would come over in the late afternoon. She wanted to wrap up some things and stash them in closets. When he left he stood out front, looking around, looked at the Industrial Canal levee two blocks away, looked at the neighborhood full of people going about their business. And for just a fleeting minute he had the thought that it might be a good thing that Wesley wasn’t staying there. Then he headed back to his house.

  Bootsy came over from across the street and they dragged the large sheets of plywood around front from SJ’s backyard shed, along with his roofers’ ladder. Each window had a special technique for attaching the plywood, depending on how the window was exposed to potential winds and flying objects. A few sheets had been stolen from the back of his truck earlier that year, so he had enough to cover only the most necessary windows. The ones on the side facing downtown and the canal he left open because that side was protected somewhat by Mrs. Gray’s house. They put up the spec
ially fitted ones on the lee side on the second-floor camelback, with hooks that could be disengaged from inside.

  Then they went to Bootsy’s and secured his place as well as they could; it was a less complicated job, as it was only one story, low to the ground. When they were finished with Bootsy’s they looked in on Mrs. Gray, who was being picked up in an hour or two by her son, who would take her to the home of some cousins in Laplace. SJ assured her he’d keep an eye on her place. They made a few more rounds and then around one o’clock stopped into Happy Shop over on North Claiborne to get a sandwich. Minh, the owner, was outside, hammering up wood.

  “Close at noon,” he said, over his shoulder, at their approach, meaning the store was closed. Then, seeing who it was, he nodded twice to himself, and climbed down, saying, “Mista Jay, you leave?”

  “Nothing to leave for, Minh. Can we get a sandwich?”

  Shaking his head, Minh preceded them into the darkened store, muttering to himself in Vietnamese. “All we got ham sandwich rye bread. Cooler shut down.”

  “Put some mustard on mine, Minh,” Bootsy said. “Brown mustard if you got it. Where you stay at for the storm?”