City of Refuge Read online

  “Bathroom’s on the second floor; I forgot to tell you that,” Uncle Gus said. “Over there you have your air unit,” he said, pointing to a grill set into the wall.

  After a moment or two, Alice said, “It’s perfect, Uncle Gus.”

  “It’s not home; I know that. I just hope you will make yourselves at home and stay as long as you like.”

  “Thank you so much,” Alice said, putting her arms around the old man and, Craig could see from her back, starting to weep. Annie looked up at Craig with her eyebrows raised slightly, questioning, and Craig tried to pantomime that Mom was tired. He rubbed Alice’s back as she hugged her uncle.

  “We can’t tell you what this means right now, Uncle Gus,” Craig said.

  “Oh, don’t even think about it. We’ve all just been so worried for you. Jean’s got some supper ready for you she just has to heat up; you come on down whenever you’re ready.”

  Malcolm had started to fuss after seeing his mother crying, and Alice picked him up to comfort him. When Uncle Gus had gone back downstairs, Annie walked right over with her little pink-and white suitcase to the bed on the left, bounced down on it and said, “Daddy can I have this bed?”

  “Sure, Annie, but let’s ask Malcolm if that’s all right. Malcolm, can Annie sleep in that bed?”

  Malcolm, sleepy, in his mother’s arms, nodded his head and then turned it away and lay it on Alice’s shoulder. Alice looked at Craig and indicated that she wanted him to take Malcolm, which he did.

  “I’m going to start setting up camp,” she said.

  Grateful for the fun-adventure overtones of the remark, Craig hefted Malcolm in his arms and brought him over to the other bed, saying, “Come on, Malcolm; let’s see how your bunk is.” Craig remarked to himself, as he had many times in the past, how strong Alice could be. Sometimes it meant shutting out some sensitivity. But when the chips were down, she could deal. As he carried his son to the other end of the room he cast his eye back to Annie, who was unpacking her clothes, like her mother.

  “Where should I put my clothes, Mommy,” she asked.

  “We’ll get that figured out in a minute, Annie Fanny.”

  Setting Malcolm down on the bed, Craig leaned to look out the small window under which the bed lay. Blocks and blocks of houses, lights coming on, against the dark blue evening sky, the pre-Depression beginnings of suburbia, when Chicago was rolling in money. How were they going to do this, he thought?

  “Look, Malcolm,” Craig said. “That’s a pretty good view.” His son lay on his back, waiting passively to be undressed for bed. Craig would not let himself think what a long and difficult period lay in front of them, and at the moment he didn’t blame his son a bit for being tired and wanting to be taken care of. He bent down and kissed the boy and said, “You know I love you, and we are going to get through this.” Malcolm put his arms around Craig’s neck and hugged, and Craig was very, very grateful that they were all there together.

  After they got situated, the four of them came downstairs and ate steaming plates of beef and cabbage, with horseradish—or Craig and Alice did; Annie and Malcolm both opted for peanut butter sandwiches—and watched the nonstop coverage on the small TV on the kitchen counter. They switched back and forth between CNN and Fox, as well as the networks. They watched the images from the Convention Center and the Superdome, the incompetence of the government agencies. Craig glimpsed Peanut, a waiter at the Camellia Grill, talking to one of the reporters, just a flash as he turned on the news, and he wondered about the other guys who worked the counter there and who always made a fuss over Annie and Malcolm when Craig or Alice brought them in—Marvin, Donald, Michael, Matt the cook, Darryl, Ray, Cool Pop, old Mr. Bat who had retired…

  The only bright spot on television that evening was an hallucinatory moment that took them by surprise amid the nightmare scenes at the Superdome and the Convention Center. It was a crowded bar, apparently, and Craig watched in stunned amazement as the sardonically smiling face appeared, next to the woman reporter for CNN, who was saying, “Here at Rosie’s on Decatur Street, you could almost think that nothing has changed in New Orleans. This, we believe, is the only bar in the city to have stayed open for the entire duration of Hurricane Katrina. The power is out, but Nicole is dispensing drinks by candlelight and we are talking to New Orleans Times-Picayune columnist Serge Mikulic. Mr. Mikulic…”

  “Please call me Serge,” he said, twinkling, charming.

  “You seem to have a pretty merry crew here. Were you surprised to find Rosie’s open?”

  “No,” Serge said. “Closing Rosie’s would be like turnink off the lights on the Statue of Liberty. And anyway there has been a certain continuity, since we have not left Rosie’s since the beginning of the apocalypse.”

  “Have you been here the entire time?” the reporter asked.

  “What better place could one be?” Serge said. “In New Orleans we celebrate disaster; we drink and dance at funerals…”

  From the background, a voice—clearly belonging to Serge’s friend Dave—saying, “There’s gonna be a lot of people lined up to drink and dance at yours,” and Serge allowed himself to laugh at this. Craig felt like diving through the television screen to be there with them.

  “Is this your funeral for New Orleans?” the reporter asked, idiotically.

  Little lines formed around the corners of Serge’s eyes, signaling an especially barbed response on the way, but before he could get it out he was interrupted by a commotion, what sounded like a clattering of hooves, and Serge turned, camera lights on the back of his head now, and through the open window onto Decatur Street they saw first one mule, then two more mules, trot by, halters on their heads, then another lone straggler, clop clop clop, heading toward Esplanade.

  “They have cut loose the carriage mules. Look at that.” Serge said. In the background, people in the bar rushed to the front window to look out at the street. Turning back to the puzzled reporter, Serge said, “The carriage mules from Jackson Square, apparently. It is the end of civilization as we know it.” He held up his glass of scotch, toasting the camera, and said, “Cheers.” And as the camera pulled back for the reporter’s wrap-up, Craig could clearly see Dave sitting at the bar next to Serge. Serge and Dave at Rosie’s! How bad could things be?

  The mild, twisted exhilaration did not last long, as the coverage turned from that small island of gallows humor to the deluge of misery surrounding it. The water was still rising steadily in the city, although hard information about exactly where or how much was hard to find. The Coast Guard helicopters had so far been unable to stop the breach at the 17th Street Canal. The Superdome was in a shambles, and they had been sending people all afternoon to the Convention Center, where no provisions had been made at all. Television cameras cruised past hundreds of people sitting on the sidewalk outside the Convention Center, white and black, in wheelchairs, with IV tubes on stands next to them, all of them stunned, angry, afraid.

  The interviews on the street were hard to watch. At one point a reporter spoke to a middle-aged black man wearing only a black T-shirt that said GHETTO CASH with a gun under it, holding a boy of about six by the hand, wandering the street. The cameraman asked where they were going, and the man said, “I don’t know.”

  “In what part of town do you live?”

  “We in the Ninth Ward,” the man said, looking around as if hoping to see someone he knew. The boy stood next to him, frowning. “All we got is what’s on our back. There’s nothing left. My wife…My wife…” And the man broke down in tears, in front of the camera, and the newsman, plainly unsure what to do or say, said, “Is your wife all right?” The man shook his head and stood crying in front of the camera, holding his boy by the hand, and the newsman said, “Well…we will hope and pray that your wife will be all right…” Then he turned back to the camera with a grim expression, saying, “As you can see, Gina, there is no shortage of misery and confusion in New Orleans this evening, as residents await some word from the loc
al authorities about where to go for help, food, or the most basic information. This is a chaotic and increasingly desperate scene here.”

  In that kitchen west of Chicago, and the living room, with its shut-in old folks’ close smell, they watched the nonstop coverage, that night and for the following days. They relied on reflexes to help them establish order and coordinates for themselves. By phone, and via the Brunners’ creaky dial-up computer Internet connection, they tried to track down friends. There was no way to have any idea of how the house had fared, the Gumbo offices, Boucher School.

  In those first days it was all but impossible to get an accurate idea of where the floodwater was, or how deep it was, in most neighborhoods. The official word by Thursday was that eighty percent of the city was underwater. But what did “underwater” mean? Did it mean ten feet in the street? Did it mean two feet? What would happen to the water system? What would happen to the sewers? They found Internet addresses with satellite photos of the city and pored over them, trying to figure out how far the flooding had reached into which areas. When they had finally gotten in touch with a handful of friends, they shared sites, chat groups, blogs that offered information. Boucher set up an information clearinghouse for the parents and teachers.

  Jean watched the news, shaking her head, repeating phrases like “those poor people.” Gus’s reaction was a little beefier. A Korean War veteran, a photo of him in uniform still hung in the living room. “Where the hell is the National Guard? They need to start laying down the law in there.”

  “They’re all in Iraq,” Alice said, and her uncle declined to respond.

  Occasionally images of looters would flash across the screen, the same three or four brief clips, usually black males with their arms full, glancing sideways at the camera or, shirtless, up against a storefront being detained by police. Gus’s anger at these images was palpable. “Now, I have to ask,” he said, “isn’t that just…animalistic? Don’t those people have any sense of right and wrong at all?”

  Craig took a deep breath. “Those people” could, of course, be read in a couple of different ways. “I think it’s a little hard to tell,” he said, “how many of them are taking things they need and how many are actually ‘looting.’”

  “Well, it’s kind of hard to figure how anybody down there in that situation needs an armful of shirts and a TV…Look at that one there—they’re laughing.”

  “Okay; hush up now Gus,” Jean said, clearing the plates off the coffee table where they were watching.

  “Well, I guess I’ll just go and be quiet,” Gus said, scowling at the television.

  Alice started making phone calls the day after they arrived to see about getting Annie into school, since there would be no school in New Orleans for the fall semester, at least. Alice had a couple of college friends in the Chicago area. One, Stephanie, who was married to an architect and lived in Winnetka, told Alice about a Montessori school in Winnetka, which was too far away for Annie, but the Montessori network was banding together to try and provide space for displaced New Orleans children. Two phone calls put Alice in contact with a school less than ten minutes away, St. Lawrence Montessori, and she made an appointment to visit with Annie on Monday.

  The principal, a tall, vigorous woman in her thirties with a mane of wavy red hair swept back and fastened with an elastic band, was appropriately solicitous about the fate of New Orleans and assured Alice that there would be a place at the school for Annie. They were offering a complete tuition waiver, in addition, for children displaced by Katrina. The building was bright and cheerful, on an oak-lined street; full of vivid construction-paper cut-outs, and books arrayed neatly on shelves underneath the classroom windows. The children looked smart and happy and well-cared-for on the playground, and Alice loved it. It reminded her of all the best of Boucher School, except that it was much smaller than Boucher. And it was private. They worked out the logistics easily, and Annie was scheduled to start school at the beginning of the next week.

  When watching the televised news became too much, and when he began to feel badly about tying up the Brunners’ land line, Craig walked around the neighborhood to burn off nervous energy and to take his mind, even if only for a few seconds at a time, off of what was happening to the life they had known. Up and down the alleys of Elkton Craig walked, subliminally astonished by the solidity of this neighborhood, the tiered fire escapes behind the houses, the garbage cans set out for the trucks on their dawn runs up and down the hidden arteries of the town. The walks grounded him somewhat, even if just in his own body, but they also took on an oddly distorted aura. The disjunction between what had happened to his own reality and the continuity in this new place created a strange and pervasive sense of unreality, a kind of paranoia, as if nothing he saw was what it appeared to be.

  Craig knew he needed to get to work on something, although he wasn’t sure just what. The Brunners had generously offered Craig the use of the dining room table as a desk, but he couldn’t get Internet reception there on his laptop, and Aunt Jean couldn’t resist talking to him as she went through, even if it was just to say that she wasn’t going to talk to him. He needed some space to himself.

  On Friday of that first week, Craig found a solution, half a mile away, in the gentrifying neighborhood everyone called OffWabash, a string of three blocks that had apparently been dipped in money and on which new, trendy-looking stores were growing like crystals among the old Czech grocery stores and dusty tailor shops. Women’s clothing stores with inscrutable and vaguely South American or French-sounding names (La Bahía, Alizé…), a brilliantly lit fine stationery store right next to a Chinese laundry, a bookstore (Sister Carrie’s). Most important, he found a coffee shop called Brew Horizon, which had wireless Internet service and where he could set up, do e-mail and establish some kind of base.

  Brew Horizon was eerily similar to every other independent coffee shop in gentrifying old neighborhoods around the country—the coffees listed in colored chalk on blackboards hanging on the walls under pressed-tin ceilings and expensive track lighting, large burlap bags of coffee beans here and there for effect, auxiliary items—coffee carafes, teapots, chai—for sale on shelves, art by an employee or a friend of an employee for sale on the walls, people lined up to give drink orders to tattooed baristas…The whole combination made him feel momentarily and unreasonably elated, as if it were the possible base for a new life, as Maple Street had been back in New Orleans, with its shops, and the Riverbend so close by with the levee, and the Camellia Grill. Predictably, the balloon of his elation began to deflate as soon as he thought of New Orleans.

  But he knew to expect that, and Brew Horizon was exactly what he had been hoping to find. For several days, Craig felt as secure as one might feel in a weatherproof harness securely lashed to the side of a mountain in a snowstorm. He was able to get a start on whittling down a pile of unread e-mails that had grown by over three hundred in less than a week. They came from friends, family members, old schoolmates, people he had met once seven years ago, and no matter how quickly he answered them the number never seemed to shrink. Everybody wanted to know not just how he was, and the family, but how it was, what it was like to live through what he was living through, something to make it comprehensible on a human level. All of America, it seemed through the window of his laptop, was overwhelmed with awe at the scale of what had happened, and the suffering they were witnessing on television. Over a table halfway back, Craig sat, with his laptop plugged in, writing, answering e-mails, drinking coffee. He would go back to the house for lunch and to see Annie and Malcolm. Some days he would get a panini right there at B Hor, his new private nickname for the place, which he used in e-mails to friends and to Alice.

  He also began making phone calls to generate some work. Gumbo had suspended publication for the indefinite future; the restaurants and other businesses whose advertising revenue underwrote the paper were closed; the offices were unusable, the staff was scattered across six states—and he would need to sta
rt making some money. And, too, he knew, he needed to keep himself from going crazy from the overwhelming sense of powerlessness. He wanted to make some kind of contribution. And he wanted to find a way to respond to what some public officials were saying. The Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Dennis Hastert, a man with the face of a malevolent toad, if toads were pink and flabby, had said that large parts of New Orleans should be bulldozed, and that it didn’t make sense to save it. Remarks like that made an aurora of heat and anger collect around Craig’s head. He wanted to do something to answer.

  Like Alice, Craig had several college friends in Chicago, one of whom was Peter Morehead, an editor at CHI EYE, one of Chicago’s alternative newsweeklies. They had stayed in loose touch since college largely because they were both involved in the alt newsweekly business. According to Peter’s office voice mail, he was out of town until Monday, September 5, and Craig left a message in the hopes that there might be some freelance editing or proofreading he could pick up, maybe even some kind of guest editorial. He called other friends, left messages, sent e-mails.

  He and Alice bought Tracfones at a nearby Wal-Mart and set about trying to contact their New Orleans friends. Everyone he spoke to was in shock. He finally reached Bobby and Jen in Baton Rouge, and he managed to track down Doug Worth, who had joined Connie and their kids in Hammond. Doug told him that the floodwater had apparently not reached their immediate neighborhood, and this was important news. It meant that their house might be livable.

  After the initial elation at finding a base during those first days of free-fall, Craig began to notice odd symptoms in himself of something he couldn’t name at first. He had started to find the people who came into the café irritating, for no reason at all that he could tell, except that they looked happy. They looked as if they took their coffee shop and their safe, dry streets and houses for granted. As if this were the way things were. Also, after living in a place that was so multiracial, the rarity of black faces struck him as odd. He would look around at the housewives waiting on line for their four-dollar lattes, with their kids in strollers, talking to one another about all the stuff of day-to-day life, entitlement oozing out of their scrubbed pores all over the floor, and Craig would find himself thinking about the Café Rue de la Course on Oak Street, or maybe about Vaughan’s or Little People’s, or Shakespeare Park. Then he would start thinking about the people who lived around Shakespeare Park, and Kemp’s Lounge, and all those little grocery stores, and that soul food place that used to be right on the corner of Washington and LaSalle that had the great macaroni and cheese that Bobby had shown him when he had only been in the city a month, and the other restaurant in the lady’s living room that had the jukebox with all the gospel records on it, and the parades going up Washington, and he thought about the images he had seen the night before, and that morning, on television as he ate his dinner or ate his breakfast, and that his children had to see it and live through it, and anger began to coil around his heart like a snake, irrational anger at everyone around him who was going on as if life hadn’t been interrupted, as if the greatest single forced migration in American history since the Dust Bowl hadn’t just happened, as if their little arguments, their irritations and snits added up to even an ounce of shit…