City of Refuge (9 page)

He leaned on the iron railing on the steps going up to their small porch, where they had a cooler out.

“How is Marvin coming along?” SJ asked.

“See, that’s what I’m talking about,” Jawanda said, taking a big slug off her beer.

“He supposed to be rotated out,” Delois said, “but now I don’t know. They got him on extra rotations.”

“That’s what I’m talking about.”

“See, that ain’t right. When your time up is supposed to be
up
. Reserves ain’t supposed to be but one goddamn weekend a month. And Marvin on his third rotation straight through.”

SJ lifted his cap with one hand, ran the other over his smooth scalp and replaced the cap. “They trying to fight a war like there’s no war going on. They need to put in the draft again.”

“What good the draft gonna do, J?” Delois said. “They just need to get out of that motherfucker…”

A man in his fifties walked up to their little group, wearing an oversized black T-shirt with the words
GHETTO CASH
on it over a picture of a gun. “Allright,” he said, and SJ put out his hand to the man, who took it in an old-fashioned soul handshake, forearms at right angles and thumbs pointed upward. The man had graying hair and a goatee and eyes that slanted downward slightly at the sides, giving him a look somewhere between laughing and crying. He and SJ had been in Vietnam at the same time.

“Shan-DRA,” Delois yelled to someone in the distance. “Tell Tee-Bo get out that street.”

“What the draft does,” SJ said, “is if everyone had to send they son or daughter over wouldn’t be no more war in Iraq.”

“Yeah, you right about that,” the man, whose name was Alfred, said.

“How’s your mama?” SJ said. “She doing allright?”

“The diabetes got on her,” Alfred said, “and they amputated her leg. She in a wheelchair. But she allright. She steady getting stronger. When she start hollering about she want her hair done I’ll know she allright.”

“Are you going to move her for the storm?”

The man shrugged. “She won’t go. She stubborn. Don’t want to leave the house.”

“Where Lucy at?” Jawanda said.

“I don’t know,” SJ said. “She’ll probably come by later. Lucy’s on her own clock.”

“I know that’s right.”

Down the block children played in an inflatable house filled with brightly colored plastic balls. At the far end was a platform with a couple of turntables, and some of the neighborhood young men were playing hip-hop over the speakers. Up and down the street people had their own little hibachis and grills going.

“You got your house boarded?” SJ asked the woman named Delois. “What I’m protecting, J? I can’t be lifting that wood, take it up, put it down once twice a month. Ain’t nothing ever happen anyway. What they say about this one.”

“Mayor said on TV this one going to be big,” Jawanda said. “They telling people get out. Oliver Thomas was walking around here early talking about get out of town.”

“That all C.Y.A.,” Delois said. “They really thought something gonna happen they make it mandatory and have buses lined up all on Claiborne. Shit. You can’t get up and run every time somebody say Boo…You don’t hear nobody talking about evacuation plan, meet here, do this. They just covering they ass for the white folks and the insurance. Plus my check coming on Thursday; I ain’t about to leave.”

“I’ll come by tomorrow and put up some wood,” SJ said.

“No, SJ,” Delois said. “I ain’t want to sit around in the dark listening at the wind. I want to be able to get out if I got to get out.” SJ looked around him, and he remembered an image from when he was barely in his teens, of the streets flooded during Hurricane Betsy, and helping his father pull his mother and Lucy in a dinghy they had gotten from somewhere.

“Well…” SJ said, straightening up, brushing off the side of his slacks, “you call me, let me know if you want me to come over and board you up, hear?”

“Thank you baby,” Delois said, reaching her arms out and hugging SJ.

“I’m-a walk over and see what they got at the truck.”

“Hey SJ, that’s good. They got Italian sausage cooking there by Charles.”

Alfred took his foot off the ladies’ steps and said, “Y’all see Tina, I’m just down here.”

“Allright, baby.”

The two men walked off to get some food. They never talked about the army at all, or even brought it up. They talked some about the sad Saints game the night before, but mostly they just walked along enjoying being there. The street was full of life; groups of girls stood talking and eyeing groups of boys who pretended not to be eyeing them back, or who communicated with them by pantomime and facial expression until the girls turned away, giggling or with expressions of exaggerated nonchalance and even dismissal. Older people sat out on steps, leaned on railings, talking to one another or just watching the activity in the street. They knew the story behind the story of everyone on that street. They had seen neighborhood adults turn into the old people who sat behind their walkers; they had seen their friends’ and cousins’ babies turn into these young men and women, had seen the young men and women in band uniforms and cars, in graduation robes and caskets.

SJ and his friend stopped and got hot sausage at one of the grills, and while he was waiting SJ noticed Wesley, down toward the end of the block, talking to a couple of other young men by the turntables. Behind the turntable platform he could see a couple of the motorbikes they rode around on.

When they had finished eating, SJ said goodbye to his friend and walked down to where his nephew was. Wesley and another young man were talking, shoulder to shoulder, conspiratorially, Wesley looking from under his brows at the other young man as SJ ap
proached. Then Wesley acknowledged his uncle with his eyes and a short head bob, finished whatever it was he was saying to the other young man, and as SJ walked up to them Wesley turned and gave his uncle a quick one-arm hug, a sign of affection, but delivered in a self-assertive manner of which SJ took note.

“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, say
ing, “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.