City of Refuge Read online

  “This my Uncle J,” Wesley said to his friend, a smiling young man with very dark skin wearing a white T-shirt with one of the ubiquitous airbrushed legends on it in lurid pink and black script, this one reading R.I.P. BOONIE—SUNRISE SEPTEMBER 18, 1988—SUNSET JUNE 3, 2005—NEVER FORGET YOU deployed around a silk-screened photo of a young man, smiling, a gold cap shining on his front tooth, holding his hand up with two fingers sticking out at angles…They had the T-shirts made up to memorialize friends, brothers, cousins, classmates who went down usually from some violence.

  “I didn’t catch your name,” SJ said.

  The young man laughed for no particular reason, as if SJ had made a joke, and said, “I’m Tyrell. My mama Minnie.”

  “You Minnie’s son?” SJ said, genuinely surprised. He had not seen this young man for years. He hadn’t seen Minnie for a couple of years either, for that matter. “Where you been hiding?”

  “Oh, I been out of town for a couple year.” Saying this, he smiled, almost boyishly, embarrassed, because it probably meant prison.

  “But you back now,” SJ said.

  “Yes, sir,” Tyrell said.

  “Your mama all right?”

  “She all right,” Tyrell said. “She stay in San Antonio by her cousin.” He turned over his shoulder at something someone said, laughed, turned back to SJ. For a fleeting moment SJ saw the eleven-year-old he had known, peeking out from that hardening face with the two gold caps on the front teeth. There was that mixture in his manner, SJ thought, the childhood that never got a chance to come to a natural close, and the guardedness, the mask, that they all developed now.

  “I’m going to talk to Wesley for a minute,” SJ said.

  “Allright,” Tyrell said, slapping Wesley’s fingers with his own, giving a little twist and then snapping at the end. “SQUEET!” he said in parting, in a high voice, and Wesley laughed as he turned to talk to his uncle.

  “I can use some help boarding up your mama’s house tomorrow morning. You can come by my house.” He did not ask where Wesley had been. That would have implied that that place, whatever it was, was more important than where he, SJ, was.

  “Okay Uncle J.”

  “Around ten, mid-morning. We’ll take the truck and do your mama’s and then do mine. If the storm hits, come stay by my house.”

  “Where Mama going to stay at?”

  “With me. We got the second floor.”

  “I’m-a stay by Mama’s make sure nobody loot it.”

  SJ considered this for a moment. Wesley was looking over his shoulder at where the young men were.

  “You got everything you need over there? You got you water, batteries?”

  “I’ll get ’em tomorrow from you Uncle J.”

  “You sure?” SJ was watching his nephew, noticing the distraction, no way to be sure what it was about.

  “Yeah,” Wesley said. Then, focusing back on his uncle, meeting his eyes, he said, “Don’t worry, Unca J; I be allright.”

  They looked at each other, gaze to gaze. Then SJ said, “Allright. Tomorrow morning, hear?”

  “I’ll be there.”

  “I shouldn’t have turned on the news,” Alice said. She had taken a break around two o’clock to eat a quick sandwich; the mayor was on TV urging everyone to leave the city as quickly as possible, saying, “This is the one we feared.” Now they knew they would have to leave the city no matter what kind of shape Malcolm was in. He seemed to be feeling somewhat better, but he was still sick. Under any circumstances he would do better out of New Orleans if the city was going to be without power for several days.

  It was late Saturday afternoon; the storm was predicted to hit late Sunday night or early Monday morning. They discussed the question at some length and decided that they would prepare everything and leave at dawn the next morning. Late as it was, and with the traffic as heavy as it doubtless was, they could easily end up stuck for hours in the dark on unfamiliar roads. Craig called the motel in Oxford and was told that he couldn’t cancel only that night’s reservation; the hotel was anticipating too many people. The only thing to do was to pay for all three nights’ reservations, eat the charge for that night, but at least they would have a room when they got to Oxford the next afternoon.

  While Alice started getting dinner ready, Craig went upstairs to his study. He wrapped a plastic bag around his Association of Alternative Newsweeklies award, a clear resin cube with his name and Gumbo embossed on it, and put it in the closet at the top of the stairs. Into that closet he also moved his parents’ wedding picture (“You want this thing?” his mother had asked him, cavalierly, as she was cleaning out one of her various apartments years before), and some other framed photos from his desk. On his office floor, a cheap oriental rug that had been his since boyhood. His father had given it to him for a birthday, with no explanation, a strange present to give an eleven-year-old, but Craig had come to find its dark brown and black and ivory sawtooth optical-illusion pattern absorbing and comforting, and he had taken the rug with him to college and then journalism school. His poor father. Craig rolled up the rug tightly, to protect it, and placed it on end in the far corner of the closet.

  Then he noticed the book Annie had made for his last birthday—construction paper stapled together with photos pasted into it of musicians, cut out from magazines, and on the front, drawn in Magic Marker, a line drawing recognizable as a trumpet. He also placed this in the closet and began looking around his office, anxiety blowing up in him like a sudden squall. He took a break to get another Benevol.

  Downstairs, Craig heard Annie telling Alice, “Mommy, I think I have a stomachache, too.” Alice, frazzled and worried herself, sized up her daughter, said, “Stop it. No you don’t. Drink this,” and poured her half an inch of scotch in a juice glass, telling Annie to drink it down in one shot and get into bed.

  Around nine o’clock that evening, crawling out of his skin with restlessness and anxiety, Craig decided to take a run down to the French Quarter and go to Rosie’s to see who was still around. There was always something going on in the Quarter, and Craig felt as if he could use a boost. Alice was okay; they had their place, the kids were stable, and it was okay for him to head down for an hour or so.

  Rosie’s On Decatur was a no-frills bar frequented by the city’s journalists and criminal lawyers, news cameramen and housepainters, a combination gossip hive, pressure valve and sandbox much like the no-frills journalist bars you can find anywhere in the U.S., with some significant modifications, including the giant moose head over the bar mirror that ran almost the length of the room’s right side, its antlers festooned with Mardi Gras beads, the twinkling Christmas lights encircling a coffin that hung suspended from the ceiling over everyone’s heads, the video poker machine right next to the pinball machine in the back, and the jukebox full of New Orleans music. It had the usual framed book jackets on the walls, to which nobody paid attention, and it had two TVs going, one on ESPN and one on a news channel, usually CNN. Craig liked to stop into Rosie’s at least once a week. If you skipped for too long you weren’t up to date on the latest scandals and gossip. Craig was not a bar type of guy in his heart, but he liked the gossip, he liked seeing people; showing up there was almost a professional obligation.

  Rosie’s front wall opened onto the Decatur Street sidewalk through a window that functioned as an open-air bar behind which denizens could sit with their drinks and look out on people as they passed, offering their commentary. It was always occupied. Craig walked in and surveyed the handful of people at the three raised tables on the left, silhouetted against the gaming machines in the back. A little quiet, but the room felt reassuringly ordinary. As he looked around he heard a familiar voice lacerate the air in angular Balkan cadences.

  “Craik! Sit down and haf a drink. Whatever you are looking for you will not find it. You are gettink morose.”

  Serge Mikulic was as much a fixture at Rosie’s as the moose head over the bar. His twice-weekly column in the Times-Picayune came at
local questions from his own peculiar sound and experience as an émigré from Serbia. “Growing up in a corrupt pestilential backwater has given me invaluable insight into other corrupt pestilential backwaters,” he once famously remarked. “I was made for New Orleans.” Serge also taught journalism at the University of New Orleans, but no one would guess it to see him sitting at Rosie’s bar chain-smoking, arguing, with his peculiar sardonic superiority, with the various politicos and fellow journalists at the bar and, on the rare occasions when there was no one present to argue with, arguing with the television commentators on the news shows, or the coaches and commentators on the sports shows. Serge Mikulic turned attendance at Rosie’s into an art form.

  “Where’s Dave?” Craig asked as he pulled out a bar stool and sat. Dave was Serge’s best friend and constant foil at Rosie’s, a news cameraman for WYAT-TV and Vietnam vet.

  “He’s throwink his money away on video poker. Now he has a system which will make him rich. I asked him to advance me enough for another scotch.”

  “I’ll have an Abita,” Craig said to the much-pierced bartender. When she went to get the beer Craig said, “She new?”

  “She’s been fillink in for Martine this week. She’s afraid of magnets.” Serge took a long pull on his drink as Craig paid for his beer. They clicked bottle to glass and as Craig took his first long swallow Dave walked over. Serge regarded him balefully.

  “Where’s my next scotch?” Serge said.

  “It’s in the poker machine.”

  Dave approached the bar, leaning against it with the palms of his hands and doing pushups against it. “Hey Meena…”

  “He thinks he is going to haf sex with the bartender,” Serge said to Craig. “He is under a misapprehension.”

  “So, Serge, what do you think about the noise bill?” Craig asked, referring to one of the perennial efforts on the part of some French Quarter residents to ban music from the streets.

  “It doesn’t matter because Hurricane Katrina is goink to come to town and reorganize city government for us.”

  “You think it’s coming?” Craig said, trying to sound more amused than alarmed.

  “No question.”

  “Are you going to leave?”

  “Can a cypress tree leave a swamp? I am a live oak in a swamp of scotch. I am like termites who die if you cut off their water source…”

  “Man, why don’t you shut up,” Dave said, coming over with his drink.

  “He is frustrated because the bartender has repulsed his middle-aged efforts.”

  “You should have seen him the other night,” Dave said. “Some guy who works at a Radio Shack on the West Bank came in and started talking about how forty years ago he had heard Clay Shaw plotting the Kennedy assassination. Serge calls him a retrograde fellow traveler and starts ranting about conspiracy theories and how if the guy had grown up in Transylvania or someplace he would really know about government conspiracy.”

  “I wanted to see how steady he was on his feet. I am afraid I offended him slightly.”

  “Just slightly,” Dave said. “Hey I liked the piece you wrote on Irma Thomas.”

  “Thanks,” Craig said.

  “Fuckink prick,” Serge said, vehemently. He was looking up at the television over the pass-through to the street, which was the one that always had the news or political shows on it. Craig and Dave followed Serge’s gaze up to it, where an interview was in progress with Bobby Wise, the radio talk-show host. He had been in the news lately for some remarks he had made on immigration and border patrols, advocating a shoot-on-sight rule along the entire Mexican border.

  “That son of a bitch,” Serge went on. “He said the other day ‘Why should we let them come here and work for minimum wage when we can pay them sixty cents an hour if they stay home?’ Look at them—it’s a fuckink love fest. No wonder—it’s Fox…Bartender…”

  The bartender came over and Serge said, “Put the channel back on CNN. What is Fox News doing on there?”

  “That’s what was on when I turned it on, Serge,” she said, grabbing the remote and searching for CNN.

  “It’s channel twenty-nine,” he said, disgustedly. After she had changed it and walked away to serve another customer, Serge said, “Fuckink replacement bartender.”

  “Hey,” Dave said. “I have a date with her next Tuesday.”

  “That is science fiction,” Serge said, looking at Craig. “So aren’t you evacuating for the comink cataclysm?”

  “You mean the hurricane?” Craig said. “We’re leaving tomorrow.”

  “Good luck with the traffic,” Dave said, looking up at the TV. “Serge called Nash Roberts at home. In Mississippi. Called him out of retirement.”

  “Are you writing a column about it?”

  “No,” Serge said. “I just wanted to see where God, in the person of Nash Roberts, thought I would be most likely to witness the apocalypse with my own eyes,” Serge said.

  “Even Nash Roberts can’t predict a storm’s path this far in advance,” Dave said.

  “Wait and see,” Serge said.

  Another half hour went by amid the banter, the familiar mode, and toward the end of it Craig noticed a foaming feeling in his stomach, a carbonation of fear, or dislocation, like what he had felt earlier at the Gumbo office, as if he were looking at all this normalcy and familiarity from outside, from somewhere in the future, after it had all been wiped away. It came up unbidden, like a sudden and overwhelming wind. Craig told himself to relax, that they had been through this many times. Somehow, the familiarity of these surroundings was upsetting him. He waited for the feeling to pass, and when it didn’t he took his leave. As Craig said goodbye to his friends and walked toward the door, Serge called after him, “See you downriver.”

  6

  Even before daylight on Sunday morning the traffic had thickened and slowed to a crawl along the roads leading out of the city. The hurricane was headed directly for New Orleans, and at the last minute, now, even people who had never before evacuated finally packed bags, threw blankets and bottled water in their car, or their neighbors’ car, or their brother’s, along with one or two toys for the kids, their medicines, their pets, all grabbed in an escalating urgency, along with last-minute things that struck them—either heirlooms (Oh, get the wedding album…take the wedding album…) or odd choices that crossed their field of vision at some final moment and were suddenly irradiated with meaning—that old lamp that had sat for decades on their mother’s nightstand, or a favorite picture from the wall—and started out of town, faintly dazed with a sense that this might in fact represent the end of everything they had ever worked for, or taken for granted, heading toward some undefined future. Countless copies of that day’s Times-Picayune sat unsold all over town, with the headline KATRINA TAKES AIM.

  Some headed northeast, across the water toward Slidell and on to eastern Mississippi and Alabama. Others headed north across the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway to Mandeville and Covington, or out Interstate 10 to Laplace and then north through Manchac toward Hammond and McComb, up toward Jackson. And many more than that were bound straight west on I-10, toward Baton Rouge, or Lafayette, and then north to Shreveport or straight west through the long stretches of eastern Texas and finally to Houston, or up to Dallas. They had a hotel reservation, or they had a brother or a second cousin or an old college roommate somewhere where they could stay for a night, or a few nights if they needed to.

  New Orleans is surrounded by water. The Mississippi River forms the crescent-shaped southern border, where the city’s highest ground rises to meet the levees along the cuticle-shaped riverbank. To the east of the city is Lake Borgne, and to the north is Lake Pontchartrain, a 630-square-mile brackish lake. Off to the west is swampland that had been partially tamed decades before; pilings had been sunk into the mud and the lake bottom, and causeways had been built heading north, northeast and west, and bridges had been built across the Mississippi River to the suburbs of Gretna and Marrero and Terrytown on the Westbank
.

  The city proper forms a kind of shallow bowl, half of which sits technically below sea level. Most of New Orleans would flood even in a heavy rain if it were not drained by a network of pumps, built nearly a hundred years ago, that suck the water out of the city’s subterranean drainage system and push it into canals at 17th Street and London Avenue, and into the Industrial Canal that divides the Upper and Lower Ninth Wards. The water level in these canals is higher than street level in many places alongside neighborhoods like Lakeview and Gentilly, and it is held back by levees, built decades ago by the United States Army Corps of Engineers. Residents near these levees had been alarmed, for years, by evidence of seeping water around the giant earthen banks, with no identifiable source. In other places, concrete walls, which had been driven down into the humped levees and extended up above them to hold back the water in the canals, had buckled slightly and shifted out of line, like teeth in need of straightening. The residents’ alarm had caused some investigation, which had concluded that there were structural problems with the levees and the flood walls, which bore further investigation and, most likely, extensive and expensive repair. The reports were made, and nothing ever happened. By Sunday morning, most of the city’s population was trying to get out of the cracked bowl ahead of the hurricane.

  Police and state troopers had blocked off most roads leading into the city, and they routed traffic on the interstates so that all lanes were pointed outbound. This helped to a degree, but all it takes is for one badly serviced car to break down and block a lane, and traffic slows sharply. If another breaks down a bit farther on, it will cause a monumental snarl. People who are rattled, distracted, scared and in a hurry often do not drive well, and even minor accidents slow traffic for hours.

  By eight o’clock Sunday morning, an apparently endless river of traffic crawled along Interstate 10 westbound under a withering sun, toward Baton Rouge and Lafayette and Texas. Cars inched along at ten miles per hour, and five miles an hour, past the shopping malls and chain stores of suburban Metairie and Kenner, all of them locked and shuttered now in advance of the storm. In Kenner, an accident blocked a lane of traffic, and cars merged, inched in, slowly, haltingly, squeezed into already engorged lanes, past the airport, which would shut down operations at five p.m., and into the causeway above the swampy area set aside for a spillway should the Mississippi River threaten to rise dangerously high. Police cars parked at angles, their red and blue lights flashing; occasionally one would zoom along the fire lane, siren hooting and burping, toward some invisible emergency. Across the long swamp between there and Boutte and Laplace and farther on toward Gonzales and Baton Rouge, the two eastbound lanes on the raised concrete roadway had been converted into westbound lanes as well, and in all lanes people sat at their steering wheels, or in passenger seats, staring straight ahead, grateful when they could move forward twenty feet without stopping.