City of Refuge (3 page)

“Maybe I don’t want to have to ‘ask’ my wife if she’ll make love to
me,” Craig shot back, without losing a moment. “Maybe I don’t want to have to climb over a fucking catalog to make her notice me.”

Alice was quiet for a moment because she was so angry she didn’t know what to do or say.

“I mean,” Craig went on, knowing that he should drop it right there, “just write me a script if there is a way I have to say it.”

“I don’t want to have to write you a script,” she spat.

“No, you just want me to say what you want me to say in the way you want me to say it, without having to tell me.”

“No—I want you to act like a man instead of like a little boy who doesn’t know how to get what he wants.”

“Fine. Maybe I can order ‘what I want’ from a catalog.” Lame, he thought, but…whatever. He turned toward the TV. As Craig did this, Alice let her catalog fall forward onto her lap and stared straight ahead for a moment, a sign to Craig that she might be getting ready to get out of bed and go downstairs to read and maybe even sleep on the couch. And since being left alone in bed would be intolerable to him, he preemptively got up himself, put on his slippers and walked around the bed to the door. He would go to his study for half an hour or so. As he passed he saw out of the corner of his eye that she was still staring straight ahead. He walked out of the room.

Twenty minutes later he opened the door to their dark bedroom; the lights were off, the TV off. He padded quietly around the bed to his side, took off his slippers and slid under the covers next to Alice. She had been asleep, but she stirred slightly as he got into bed. She lay there with her eyes closed, and Craig tried to think whether to say anything or just to go to sleep.

“Are you okay,” she said, half-asleep, eyes still closed.

Craig, suddenly grateful beyond measure for the overture, the excuse to drop the guns and swords, said, “Yeah.” Then, not wanting it to sound curt, wanting to keep the door open, he added, “I’m really sorry.”

“I hate fighting,” she said. She shifted again.

“I do, too,” he said, and he found that hot tears were coming out of his eyes. When he sniffed reflexively, Alice heard it and reached up to touch his face, felt the wetness, wiped it away, said, “Oh…” and brought his face down to kiss her. Craig slid his hand along her warm waist and felt Alice’s hand go up behind his head, and they drew closer together, embracing and kissing, and for the first time in two months, or was it three?, he pulled the bottom of her nightgown up and touched her with his middle three fingers and heard her familiar soft groan, and they made love quickly and quietly, and afterward as Craig lay on top of Alice, spent and satisfied, swimming in a warm salt lake in the dark, floating, Alice looked up at the ceiling and cried tears of her own, silently. When Craig noticed them and asked, alarmed, what was wrong, she shook her head and said, “I’m just tired and this was a hard day.” She patted him on the back. “That was nice, making love,” she lied. They kissed a little more, then she got up and went into the bathroom to wash; Craig rolled to his side and went to sleep, and Alice came back to bed and quietly turned on her reading light.

Every year as August wanes and the new school year looms, New Orleans can expect to see at least one or two storms. They are as much a part of the calendar as Thanksgiving or Easter. Many people who can leave town do so, driving to Baton Rouge, or Lafayette, or Jackson, or Houston, just in case the weather does enough damage to pull down the electrical grid for a couple of days. Many others choose to stay.

The Winn-Dixie on Tchoupitoulas Street and the Sav-A-Center on Carrollton and the old Schwegmann’s on Elysian Fields, all the Walgreens and the Rite-Aids and the little corner stores everywhere sell out of gallon jugs of water, and three-gallon jugs of water, and twenty-four-packs of half-liter bottles, and they sell out of flashlights and candles and batteries of all sizes for the flashlights and the radios. If it looks really bad, the Home Depot and Lowe’s and every small lumber yard and hardware store will sell out of plywood for covering windows, and during the day before landfall you will hear hammers going in neighborhoods that are to some degree quieter than usual because half the people have gone.

Friends call friends to see if they are staying in town. The old-timers miss Nash Roberts, the fatherly WWL weatherman who always seemed to have a better sense of a storm’s direction than the slick
new weathermen with their computers. People know, in principle, what is possible with a hurricane—the flooding, the tidal surge, the wind damage, the power failures. But they had lived through Betsy, or they had stayed by their cousin for Camille, or Ivan, or Georges, and they had come through allright. Maybe they had to replace a window, or some roof shingles, or they sat with no electricity for a couple days, cooked with sterno and ate by candlelight and had block parties on the street with the beers they had stockpiled in their coolers. New Orleanians knew how to turn deprivation into an asset; they had the best gallows humor going, they danced at funerals, they insisted on prevailing. They had heard it all before, and most of the time it turned out to be a false alarm. The regular challenge made them defiant. Especially in the working-class neighborhoods. The poorer the neighborhood and the harder people had to fight to stand their ground through the years, the less likely they were to jump ship and head for higher ground, even if they had the means to do so.

Evacuating was expensive. It cost money for gas, money for hotel rooms. Those who had family had a leg up, but if you didn’t have the cousin in Baton Rouge or Brookhaven or McComb or Holly Springs, it was a hotel, and it was expensive, not just the hotel but eating out every meal. And lucky to find a room, because everybody else was trying to squeeze into the same hotels. The traffic was horrible. If you had children, or aged parents, preparing them for the several-days’ trip under unpleasant circumstances was no fun, especially when it was a false alarm time and again. What if you run out of Pampers? What if you run out of Depends? What if Mama Stel goes to the bathroom in the backseat again while you’re stuck in traffic on I-10 for eight hours? And what about the pets? You just going to leave them leashed in the backyard to fend for themselves? You have to bring the pets. Never had a carrier for them, and the hotels don’t want a bunch of dogs barking and cats peeing in their rooms. Then you get wherever you’re going, and after a day or two when the storm passes
you have to pack everybody up again and make the drive back, sitting in traffic. Maybe you had to miss a couple days’ work, besides, and your boss doesn’t like that and hires someone who doesn’t leave town every time the wind blows. Wasn’t a mandatory evacuation.

That’s if you have a car in the first place. If you depend on the bus, which is most of working-class New Orleans, then it isn’t even a question, unless maybe your nephew comes by, or your daughter, and insists on taking you out of town in his or her car. A way of dealing with it, an attitude, begins to set after a while. You don’t really want to be the only family in your neighborhood evacuating all the time; that smells funny. Especially if it’s a neighborhood where people watch and notice things and wait for a house to be vacant for a couple of days, a house with a nice TV or sound system, since generally the people who have the money to leave have the money for things that might be valuable at resale. So you stay and stick it out, and then you tell stories about it, and that becomes part of the texture of life, too. Someone with no stories to share is suspect. You prepare as well as you can, and you ride it out.

In neighborhoods where people expect to be comfortable all the time, where they are used to having services and attention, the prospect of being without those services and that comfort and attention, without electricity and a steady flow of electronic information, without refrigeration and air-conditioning, is not a badge of honor. The badge of honor is being able to ride above the discomfort, arranging things so that you and your family are not sweating it out in the grease pit with everyone else. Who can blame them? If you could get out of 100-degree heat and spoiled food and no lights for a few days, why not? The boss usually understands; hell, the boss has left town himself, and shut the business down prudently. The question is not usually whether to evacuate, but where.

Storms are a regular feature of late summer and fall, but they have to compete for attention with all the other regular features—
the children starting school and needing help with their homework, the social aid and pleasure clubs planning their annual fall parades (getting outfits made, hiring cars and bands, arranging for police permits), the uptown Mardi Gras Krewes starting to plan their winter balls and debutante events, the Mardi Gras Indians resuming Sunday night practice at neighborhood bars all over the city.

Other modern American cities have their holidays, their First Night celebrations and film festivals, but they are contained, and discrete. They happen, then they are over. In New Orleans, on the other hand, geography and time, food, music, holidays, modes of dress and ways of speaking, are part of an integrated fabric. People dress in certain ways for certain events, and certain foods are eaten on certain days, and neighborhood is connected to neighborhood by parades that traverse the length and breadth of the city, accompanied by music that everyone knows and, in most cases, dances to. On Labor Day the Black Men of Labor will start their parade at Sweet Lorraine’s on St. Claude Avenue and wind their way, dancing, through the streets, with their patterned umbrellas, followed and surrounded by hundreds of people from all over town. On Sunday Miss Johnson and her mother are dressing in white for services at the AME Zion church, and Lionel Batiste will go to Indian practice (on Mardi Gras his suit will be purple and this week he is sewing a beaded patch that Little Boo, who lost a leg in Vietnam, drew for him—an eagle with a rabbit in its claws), and Bill and Ellen are going to the Cajun dance at Tipitina’s up on Napoleon and Tchoupitoulas, and the Scene Boosters are having their parade, and that’s how you know it’s Sunday. Monday is red beans and rice, at home or at some neighborhood restaurant—the Camellia Grill or Mandina’s or Family Tree or Dunbar’s or Liuzza’s, maybe with smoked sausage on the side. On Thursday you go to zydeco night at Rock ’N Bowl, or Kermit Ruffins at Vaughan’s or Ellis Marsalis at Snug Harbor. Friday night is an end-of-the-week drink with friends at the
Napoleon House or Junior’s or the Saturn Bar or Madigan’s or Finn McCool’s, and Saturday night is Saturday night all over the world. And if it’s any other night you could go to Brigtsen’s or Herbsaint if you have the money, or Upperline or Clancy’s or the St. Charles Tavern, or the Acme Oyster House or Henry’s Soul Spot or Crescent City Steaks or Frankie & Johnny’s or Casamento’s or Pascal’s Manale, and you know that street, or you don’t know the street but it has a smell and a rhythm and a personality, and getting there is part of the experience, and you form a map in your heart of all the places that make you so happy, and there are always other people there being happy, too. No matter what you may be dealing with in life, you can still enjoy a bowl of gumbo or some shrimp creole, can’t you? Of course you can.

And Bobby stay by his mama house on Soniat Street down the other side of Magazine and we live up Back O’Town Gert Town Pigeon Town and every Sunday we go by Chantrell house after church and did you remember to pick up the chicken at Popeye’s? And Father purchased that house on State Street from Grandfather for one dollar; he attended Tulane, as did the three generations before him. Or he went to LSU, or Loyola, or Xavier, Jesuit or Newman or Holy Cross or Ben Franklin or St. Aug or Warren Easton, and he worked for Hibernia Bank or the Sewerage and Water Board, or Fidelity Homestead or the Post Office or Avondale or he washed dishes at some joint in the Quarter.

And when Brother Joe or Ray or Cool Pop goes on to glory we can carry him through those same streets where he rambled and rolled, and we can have a little taste in his honor, as he so often did in others’ honor. And the band will play “Old Rugged Cross,” and everyone will follow the pallbearers as they carry the casket along that pavement one halting step at a time, slowly at first, guided by the bass drum, with the trumpets wailing out the melody and the clarinets answering in liquid streamers of descant, and then, at the
signal, the drum tattoo and, like Christmas-tree lights switched on, the mourners jump and the street explodes in sliding, turning, prancing, strutting steps, men and women alone or in fleeting partnership, and maybe you are there with a bandanna wrapped around your head as you pull up the cuffs of your pants to execute a particularly intricate set of crisscross steps up on the sidewalk, up on the porch, up on the light pole, up on the car, and that song and that sound and that rhythm seeps into everyone’s knowledge of that street, and those houses, and of life and death and space and time itself.

And in September it’s school and in October it’s the Jolly Bunch anniversary and November it’s Thanksgiving and the Fairgrounds open and December it’s Christmas and January it’s getting ready for Mardi Gras and February it’s parades and Mardi Gras, and in March you catch your breath, and then it’s St. Joseph’s Day and then Jazz Fest and then school-letting-out time and then it is the hot months and things get slower and thicker and oppressively hot, and usually in August or September you will have to deal with one or two storms.

Nobody in the Williams family had ever evacuated for a hurricane.

On Thursday evening Lucy leaned against the kitchen counter at SJ’s house, a half-finished can of cold Colt 45 in her hand, regarding the weatherman on the TV with antagonism. Across the room, SJ shook cornmeal from a bag onto three folded paper towels; on the stove oil was heating in a skillet, and in the sink a one-pound plastic bag of chicken tenders slumped against itself. Between the two windows over the sink hung a small crucifix, supporting a dry and faded bow of palm frond still left up from Palm Sunday.

“That motherfucker better stay in Florida,” Lucy said, draining the can. “I’m supposed to start working over at the Hair Stop.” She set the can down on the counter. “Jaynell tell me I can help her with the braiding.”

“When she told you that?” SJ said. “You didn’t tell me.”

“Last week. She called and asked could I come and help her out.”

“Is she still doing the dinners?”

“Yeah, but that don’t pay nothing.”

Lucy, like many others, pieced together a living for herself by keeping expenses low and weaving thin filaments of income into a web that could support her even when one or two of those filaments dropped out. On the first of each month she got a regular disability check from Social Security. She had worked for her friend Jaynell when Jaynell was serving plate suppers at her shotgun on Dorgenois, and she worked washing and folding at the Spin-N-Clean on Law Street, and she had worked in the booth at the parking lot all the way on Elysian Fields by the river until they put her on overnight the same week one of the other cashiers got held up twice. She waited tables for a year at the Coffee Pot in the French Quarter, and she had been a chambermaid at the Maison de Ville but had gotten fired for drinking on the job, just one little beer. She didn’t have to pay rent because they owned the house, and her income was too low for taxes and Medicaid paid for the medications that SJ insisted she get and which she never took.

She walked to the refrigerator to get another beer, stopping to look at the photos attached to the door with magnets. Two different studio portraits of her niece Camille in graduation robes—one from high school and one from North Carolina State. Camille’s senior prom picture with the corsage on her wrist next to that boy who got killed; one of Wesley from three or four years earlier in a football uniform, kneeling on one knee and holding a football upright on the other, looking proudly at the camera; a sepia-toned photo of their father in his World War II uniform, which they had had copied from the curled, brittle original they found in a box in the old house after he had died; a color snapshot from the early 1980s of their
father and mother together at the anniversary party they had at the catering hall on Franklin Street; and a square black-and-white photo of SJ and Lucy standing shoulder to shoulder, they must have been maybe seven and eight, in front of the old house on Lizardi Street—SJ frowning, squinting, into the sun, and Lucy with a giant grin on her face, wearing a little blouse with a big tulip their mama had sewed onto the front. Lucy opened the refrigerator door and pulled out another Colt 45.

“Camille look so pretty in that picture,” she said, opening the can. “Samuel, why you don’t find a woman? You need you a woman’s touch. Put some flowers around.”

“Feel free, sister,” SJ said, rinsing the raw strips of chicken under the tap. “Anytime you want to bring some flowers is allright.” He flicked a small wad of the cornmeal into the oil to see if it was hot enough yet.

“You know what I’m saying, Samuel,” she said, watching the weatherman with his bad toupee gesturing at a swirl of clouds on the radar screen. “They need Nash Roberts back on,” she said. “Where he went?”

“I imagine he retired.” SJ stopped what he was doing at the sink and walked over, drying his hands on a dish towel, to watch the weatherman with Lucy. Footage from Florida—trees down, a million people without power. “They saying it’s headed to the Gulf?”