City of Refuge Read online

  Neither of them had any idea of what was going on in the rest of the city. They had no idea that New Orleans East, where so much of SJ’s business was, had also flooded, miles of houses and town houses and condos occupied mostly by the black middle class, soaked and ruined, and beyond it St. Bernard Parish, full of working-class and middle-class white people, and descendants of Islenos from the Cape Verde Islands, fishermen and oil-rig workers and dock-and ship workers, all gone—the levees had failed up and down the line and drowned Chalmette and all the rest of St. Bernard in water and oil from catastrophic spills, the water up nearly to the top of the Wal-Mart off of Judge Perez Drive.

  And they couldn’t have known that the levees had failed along the canals that stretched into the heart of the city from Lake Pontchartrain, as well. They didn’t know that both the design and construction of the levees had been flawed, misreckoned by the United States Army Corps of Engineers, so that badly designed flood walls had not been driven deeply enough into levees made of soil that was too soft and unstable to support them in the first place. For years, the upperclass white folks who lived in Lakeview regularly saw water seeping through the levees and the flood walls along the 17th Street Canal, and the middle-class white and black folks who lived in Gentilly reported the same along the London Avenue Canal; both of those neighborhoods were now in the process of being obliterated by catastrophic breaches in those levees, which would go on to flood eighty percent of the city of New Orleans before the water level in the city became even with that of Lake Pontchartrain.

  And they very likely did not know that this exact scenario had been predicted in detail a year before Hurricane Katrina in a computer simulation dubbed “Hurricane Pam,” conducted by Louisiana State University, nor that the study’s conclusions and recommendations had been shrugged off by most of the officials who should have been listening, nor that the federal funding to implement the study’s recommendations was cut off by President George W. Bush, who needed the money for other things. And so they couldn’t have known exactly how despicable a lie it was when the president told the news media later that week that nobody could have predicted the levee breaks.

  Two hours had gone by and no rescue teams had arrived, nothing except one or two helicopters that passed over. SJ had spent the better part of an hour on the front roof, made a sign from the top of a box in the storage room and Magic Marker: “TWO OF US HERE.”

  Now he looked down at the dark and oily water, where clumps of fire ants floated here and there, drifting, and he tried to think what a next step could be. He had looked, scanning, off to the left and right, toward the front of the house, the back of the house, he had done this at least a few dozen times over the last two hours, before noticing the small boat, a dinghy—unmistakable—maybe thirty yards off from the rear corner of his house. It appeared to him like an optical illusion popping into focus, it suddenly bespoke itself out of all the detail, in the middle of one of the ubiquitous floating islands of smashed wood and tree limbs. Many people in the neighborhood kept boats, which they could put in their pickups and drive ten minutes and go out into Lake Pontchartrain. Immediately it became the most important thing conceivable for SJ to retrieve it. There was no way to do this but to swim for it.

  SJ climbed in the window, pulled both sheets off his bed and tied them end to end with a double knot. He wet the knot with water from one of their bottles so that it would hold better. Then he carried the long sheet to the front window and, stooping under, carried the sheet out with him, stepping carefully up to the roof ridge and straddling it with his back to the street, facing the plumbing vent pipe that he had checked earlier. He looped one end of the sheet around the pipe and pulled it back to himself, enough so that he could make a good tight double knot in it. Then he let the rest of the two tied sheets hang down—they were plenty long enough to reach the edge of the roof and help him get into and out of the water.

  SJ climbed back inside and stripped down to his boxer shorts.

  Lucy had been watching wordlessly. Now she said, “Samuel, what are you going to do? You’re not going away and leave me?”

  SJ told her about the rowboat, and that the sooner they got themselves to safety the better off they would be. “Make sure you got your bag packed. Pack you a bag with some things you need, Loot,” he said. “Get you a couple water bottles, some underwear, your medicine, some kind of change of clothes, allright, and be ready.”

  “I did that already Samuel,” she said. “You ain’t going off the roof?”

  He said, “No other way to do it.” She stared at him as he turned away and headed for the window.

  Out on the roof, barefoot and naked except for his shorts, SJ took hold of the long, knotted sheet and tested it several times with increasing weight to make sure that it would hold if he used it to hoist himself back out of the water when he returned. Then, holding on to it, taut all the way to the pipe, he crouched and duck-walked his way backward, squatting, letting himself hand-over-hand down the length of the sheet, to the edge of the roof. There he crouched and peered down into the water, which had risen to within a foot of the gutters. What made him most nervous about this expedition was the inability to know what was under the water’s surface—floating debris, fences, glass windows lodged upright—the one thing SJ could not do was get a long gash in his leg from a rusty car bumper as he swam, his foot catching on something…

  He shook his head, looked up at the clear sky, breathed. You prepare as well as you can, and then once you are prepared you stop worrying and you act. He scanned the surface of the filthy, mirrored water, reflecting trees, house gables, the sky, followed its surface down to where he imagined Caffin Avenue was. Then he turned and lowered himself to his stomach on the shingles, with his legs dangling out over the water—he would have to get clear of the gutter. He let the long end of the sheet drop into the water, and, slowly, he lowered his legs so that he was jackknifed around the gutter with his legs in the water, feeling with his feet for any debris. Then, with a push, he let himself fall backward into the warmish soup with the side of his camelback looming above him and Lucy looking down from the side window.

  Stay shallow, he thought. The best thing for him would be to swim with a breaststroke rather than plunging arm strokes that might inadvertently strike something; he would try and keep his entire body as close to the surface as possible. Move like a tadpole.

  Turning onto his stomach, he began swimming toward where he knew the dinghy was. Five strokes and shallow kicks and he came to what appeared to be the floor of a porch with part of a screen attached, sticking up at a crazy angle out of the water. He pushed against it and swam around, careful of the wavy, serrated edge of the ripped screen. A few more strokes and he was up against the edge of a logjam of smashed wood, mostly weatherboard but also some elements he could clearly identify as window sashes, jammed up with a waterlogged down comforter and what looked like a dresser drawer, clothes floating. The whole mess formed a cataract maybe fifteen feet wide.

  SJ made his way carefully to the right along the edge of the mess, watching for nails in the wood, the side of his camelback towering on his right and shadowing the water. He knew there was the spiky top edge of a hurricane fence somewhere beneath him; if the fence was five feet high and the water was about twelve feet deep, judging by the level it had reached on his house, he had plenty of room. He pushed the twisted comforter out of his way to get past it but it was caught on the edge of something, it was out of whack, and, looking across two feet of water at the flowered-patterned comforter he was pushing he realized that a person was tangled in it. He was pushing against a person’s close-cropped hair, a brown head, the body underneath it motionless and floating upright in the water like a buoy.

  SJ yelled out—reflexively, without thinking, startled, shocked, backstroked to get away from the body.

  “SJ. What’s wrong? You allright?” Lucy above him, in the window.

  “Go on inside, Lucy, get packed. Leave me do this.” He wi
lled himself to keep his mouth quiet, his body taut, nerves screeching, shivering in the water. He said to himself sternly that he knew he would find this. Go to the boat. Worry later. Go around it and go to the boat.

  Giving the comforter a wide berth, he swam along the edge of his house until it opened out into the area where his backyard would have been. Both sheds were gone, or underwater. Somehow a car had gotten back there and was floating. The boat was thirty yards over to the left, as he had estimated it, in another cataract of smashed wood.

  Seven or eight long strokes, floating as close to the surface as he could, and he was at the island of debris where he believed the dinghy to be. Carefully, he pushed himself to the right along the edge of the spiky wood, being careful about the nails he saw, twisted and dangerous, sticking out from the flotsam. He could see the edge of the dinghy rising above the wood perhaps two feet above the surface of the water. The problem would be how to get into the boat, and how to propel it. He had provisionally decided that a piece of lightweight weatherboard would be the most likely choice for a paddle. But getting the dinghy all the way back to his roof by swimming and pushing it would be tough. Maybe he could push it ahead and then swim after it. It would get jammed up with all the other junk. How about first getting to the boat, Williams.

  Pushing the floating garbage carefully out of his way was unpredictable since it wasn’t all on the surface. SJ found that pulling at it was more effective than pushing, which only pushed him away. By pulling apart tangled pieces of wood he tended to pull himself in toward the center of the tangle. This was slow work, and the pieces had been threaded together, nails catching on other pieces, sometimes four and five ragged-edged slats almost woven together, interlocking with other pieces, with rough, splintered edges that pushed against SJ’s arms and legs and back. Under the surface he could feel his legs bumping up against objects. As much as possible he tried to keep his legs drawn up; he did not want to get a puncture from a rusty nail, although he realized that was almost inevitable.

  It took twenty minutes for him to reach the side of the dinghy, which he grabbed on to with both hands, resting from the exertion. The metal boat was painted light green. It had a large dent in the side but it seemed otherwise sound. How to get into the boat was the question. There was an oak tree not too far away with limbs low over the water’s surface, and he pushed against the side of the boat, trying to push it toward the tree. He would place one hand against the side of the boat and shove it through the smashed wood and floating debris. He had no leverage, though, and the progress was minimal. At one point he felt a longish flat surface under his feet, which could have been the roof of a car, or a refrigerator, something metal, and he used it to brace his feet and push the boat; this helped free the boat from the huge tangle in which it had been trapped, and he headed now for the tree by pushing the boat just enough, and then swimming after it.

  In five minutes, SJ had moved the dinghy adjacent to one of the oak tree’s limbs. Carefully he positioned the boat just to one side of the limb, then, reckoning the distance up to the limb as well as he could, SJ lunged up out of the water and grabbed on to the limb with one hand, but his hand slid off with some loose bark and he felt his palm go raw. He fell back into the water, water in his nose and eyes, and a sharp pain in his foot. Steady, Williams, he thought. He knew that was inevitable at some point. Back to the top, shook his head, blew the water out of his nose and tried it again. This time he got a hold of the limb and hoisted his other hand up so that he had hold of the limb just over his head, hanging from it the way he used to hang underneath the diving board when he was a kid, at the one public pool that was open to “colored” people…In pulling his other hand up, however, his belly had inadvertently pushed the dinghy, which started wandering off. Quickly SJ pulled himself up and—his stomach muscles were still strong—got one leg out of the water and snagged the edge of the dinghy with his heel, pulled it back into position, and, pushing the edge of the boat down, into the water almost and pulling the dinghy under his body, he was able to get himself over and into the boat’s cradling metal interior, wobbling side to side in the water.

  The abrupt change of perspective took a moment’s adjustment. He gave a quick look around and the dinghy seemed fine. About three inches of water in the bottom, maybe it had been under a shed that had finally blown away, maybe it had been upside down and rolled. It did not matter. He checked his foot, which appeared to be all right, to his surprise.

  Over the edge, now, SJ reached his hand to paddle toward the clot of wood to find a slat of weatherboard to use as an oar. He rejected the first two before finding a section about four inches wide and three feet long; the weatherboard felt solid, and it had a place where he could work it with his hands with no nails. Lucy was watching from the window of the house, and he waved at her as he started back.

  SJ pulled the dinghy as close to the side of his roof as he could get it. From his perch on the seat of the dinghy he saw chests of clothes floating, sneakers, plastic water jugs. SJ knew very well what was necessary, which was to cauterize some faculty of speculation that had anything to do with emotion or empathy and concentrate on necessary action. This was another gift from the army. That was the only way to get through. The bill would come later, and it would be steep in proportion to the material you did not think about initially. But it was the only bargain available.

  At the edge of his roof—the water seemed to have risen by some inches during his expedition—he took hold of the end of the sheet that he had left dangling into the water and looped it through the eyelet bolted to the front of the dinghy, tied a half-hitch to secure the boat and then, grabbing hold of the sheet as high as he could, stood carefully, pulling the boat under the eaves, got one foot up on the roof over the gutter and pulled against the sheet to hoist himself up.

  His plan was to get Lucy, and anyone else he could get along the way, to the Claiborne Avenue bridge. It went over the canal, and he considered it to be the most likely staging area for any rescue efforts. In any case, it, and the St. Claude Bridge, were the highest structures around. Neither he nor anyone else had any idea of the extent of the flooding, but he reasoned that if the Upper Nine was allright across the canal, rescue buses would be there waiting to take people to shelters. Surely everyone knew by now about the Lower Nine flood. He could drop her off and use the boat to rescue as many as he could before his hands gave out.

  Lucy had the shopping bag that she had packed earlier. “I feel like I need to take something else, Samuel,” she said to him as he put on dry underwear, trousers, and shirt, and then a sweatshirt on top of that.

  He was shivering. “It so hot, why I’m shaking like this?” He said this out loud and realized he didn’t need to be saying anything that might make Lucy worry. There was a slight distortion, a bleed out the edges of his sense of timing, and he recognized this as a symptom of shock, and one that he could not afford. A slight crazy which would not under any conditions be admitted, thank you; dismissed. Ha ha ha ha. Willing himself to change the subject back to her remark, he said, “Like what you think you missing?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I’m glad you allright, Samuel.” He turned and saw that she was standing in the same place she had been, weeping.

  “Okay, Loot,” he said, stepping over to her and embracing his sister. “It’s going to be okay. We will find our way through. Why you don’t take this here.” He let go of her and went to the dresser and picked up the small painted plastic statuette of St. Christopher that had belonged to Rosetta. He looked at it closely; some paint had come off the shoulder and baby Jesus’ halo had cracked in the middle, but he was the patron saint of travelers. “Here.”

  “This belong to Rosetta?”

  “She want you to have it,” he said.

  “Allright,” she said, and placed the statuette inside the shopping bag, on top of the clothes.

  “We need to set out,” he said.

  “You ain’t bringing a bag with you?” Lu
cy said.

  “I need to save space in the boat. Listen to me,” he said, at the expression of fear in her eyes. “I’m going to get you someplace safe, I won’t leave you till you safe. But then I have to help get people. People trapped, doesn’t look like nobody doing nothing about rescue.”

  “Don’t leave me someplace alone, Samuel.”

  “You’re not going to be alone. You going to be all right. I won’t leave you till I know that and you know that.”

  She nodded.

  “Come on, Loot.”

  11

  All over the city, people started walking. They carried duffel bags and backpacks and suitcases; they dragged plastic coolers and red wagons and pushed shopping carts full of whatever they could salvage. They waded through knee-deep or waist-deep water from their submerged front steps to their flooded car, or they came out of their dry house onto their unflooded street to find their car buried under a collapsed tree. More than a quarter of a million people had evacuated New Orleans; those left in the city had radically disconnected experiences one from another; communications had failed completely—phone lines and cell phone connections, all down—and the citizens walked around feeling their way as if blindfolded, pitched forward into a radically altered moment-to-moment continuity of which it was impossible to make reliable sense. Everyone began to improvise using whatever information or tools they were able to get. People streamed out into the streets, blinking, setting out for the unknown, as if on some perverted version of Mardi Gras, in which all bets were off and anything could happen.