Salvation Row (5 page)

“Ain’t right, is it?”

It was Alexander.

“How do you mean?”

“I mean, how is it fair that the poorest get hit the worst? Tell me how that’s fair.”

“It’s not,” Milton said.

He went back inside.

ELSIE BARTHOLOMEW made herself busy in the kitchen. Alexander had suggested that he would drive home, but she had stopped him with the offer of breakfast. “Like you like it,” she said, and Milton had watched the first honestly spontaneous smile break over his face. He went over to his mother, stroked her arm and said that she’d persuaded him. She puffed herself up, pretended to be indignant when she said that there wasn’t any way a son of hers was going to go outside in
that
without a full belly, but Milton could see that she was happy to be teased by him.

Alexander had said that he would take a look at Ziggy when they all heard a deep, resounding boom. It could have been an electrical transformer, popping in the distance.

“What was that?” Isadora said.

There came another boom, and now Milton thought it sounded more like an explosion.

The old man looked concerned.

“What was it, Pappy?”

“I been in New Orleans all my life,” he said. “I was in the city in ’65 for Betsy. I’ll never forget it. They blew the levees back then. Bombed them, flooded the Lower Nine to save some of those rich white folks’ houses in Lakefront. I reckon it sounded just like that.”

“You sure?”

“Can’t be sure, but it sounded awful similar.”

Milton looked to Alexander. “We need to get him upstairs.”

The two of them carefully lifted Ziggy from the sofa and took him up the stairs. There were two bedrooms on the first floor. Elsie bustled ahead of them, opening the door to the room that she evidently shared with her husband, and insisted that they lay Ziggy on the bed.

Isadora shrieked, “There’s water in the street!”

Milton went over to the window and pulled the drapes aside.

She was right.

A torrent of water was pouring down the street, already a foot deep and lapping around the foundations of the houses. Milton knew that there were a series of canals close at hand in this part of the city and that the waters of Lake Pontchartrain were held back by a grid of levees. If the levees were broached or overtopped, this whole area stood to be flooded. As they watched, the torrent appeared to gather strength as more and more water gushed between the houses and down the road. It was already up to the porches on the neighbouring properties, and the level continued to climb. The water was chocolate brown, the surface refracting the light with a blue-green sheen of oil and industrial pollutants.

No one spoke.

No words would have done justice to what they were watching.

There was a shocking power to the water, matched by their complete inability to do anything to stop it.

“Shit!” Alexander said. “My car!”

Milton looked down to where the Acura had been parked. The water washed up over the hood, lapping up against the windshield. The front started to twitch and then the chassis lifted as the water picked it up from below. The car lifted all the way up and glided serenely away down the street.

“Shit,” Alexander said again, the anger crushed out of him.

Milton felt it, too: the dawning realisation that the hurricane was nothing compared to what was happening now, and what was about to happen.

“We need to get higher,” he said.

Alexander’s hostility had disappeared. “There’s the attic? Pappy?”

“Lot of stuff up there,” the old man said. “But, yeah, sure.”

Milton left Ziggy with Alexander and followed Solomon out into the hall. There was a wooden hatch in the ceiling and, climbing onto a chair, he reached up and pushed the wooden panel up and then away from the opening. He reached up for the lips of the opening and pulled himself inside. Solomon had found a flashlight and passed it up to him. Milton switched it on and shone its beam around. The attic was small, formed beneath the angle of the pitched roof. It was used as a storage area for bits and pieces of furniture, luggage, and black garbage can liners full of old clothes. Milton swung the torch up to the roof to look for another hatch that would allow access outside. There was nothing.

“Any way to get out onto the roof?”

“No, sir,” Solomon called back up to him. “Not that I can recall.”

“Do you have a hammer?”

“Downstairs. I’ll go get it.”

“Water’s coming in,” Alexander said. “You stay upstairs. I’ll get it.”

Milton walked to the sloping roof and aimed the torch along it, looking for an area that might be weaker than the rest. He tore off a sheet of insulating foam to expose the sheet rock beneath. It had been constructed well and repaired regularly over the years.

“Here,” Alexander said, boosting himself into the attic and handing Milton a claw hammer. His trousers were soaking wet.

He inserted the hammer into a space between the sheets and yanked hard. The boards splintered, nails popping out. Milton drove the hammer into the widened gap and levered it hard for a second time. One of the boards was pulled right back and he was able to use his hands to tear it away, discarding it behind him. He used the hammer to smash through the shingles, admitting shafts of light into the dusty attic. Alexander came alongside and helped, both of them tearing the shingles away and tossing them out through the ever-widening hole.

“How deep is it down there?” Milton asked him.

“Up to my thighs and still coming.”

“We need to get them all up in here.”

Alexander looked around. “There’s no space.”

“All this stuff, we’re going to need to throw it out.”

“Ah, man.” Alexander looked at it. Milton could see that he knew there were plenty of childhood memories in those bags and, after a moment of hesitation, he nodded resolutely. “Ain’t nothing else we can do. Come on, then. Let’s do it before Mom and Pop know what’s going on.”

They heaved the furniture out first of all, listening as the chairs and then a bureau thumped and rumbled down the shingles, hitting the water with a splash. When they were done, Milton thought that there would probably be enough space. They took the rest of the bric-a-brac and pushed it up into the shallow corners, out of the way of the exit that they had torn in the ceiling.

Milton lowered himself through the hatch and dropped down into the hallway. He went to the stairs and looked down. The water was already four or five feet deep in the front room. The furniture was floating on the tide, the chairs and the table bumping against each other and the walls. There was a series of louder and louder cracks, and then the weight of the water shattered the glass and flowed out through the windows.

Milton went to the bedroom. Isadora was sitting next to Ziggy, mopping his brow with a wet sponge that she had taken from the bathroom. Solomon was looking out of the window, a disconsolate expression on his face. Elsie was at the dresser, hurriedly putting items of clothing into a bag.

“We all need to get into the attic,” Milton said. “We’ll move Ziggy first, then Elsie, then Solomon, then you, Isadora. All right?”

“Yes,” Elsie said.

“You need anything?”

“Solomon’s pills? He has medicine for his heart. Can’t leave that.”

“Get anything like that as quickly as you can. The water is still rising. We can’t stay here.”

Milton went to Ziggy and slid his arms beneath his recumbent body. He cradled him easily enough and carried him to the hatch. Alexander was waiting at the top. Milton wrapped his arms around Ziggy’s waist and climbed onto the chair, then boosted his body up until Alexander could grab his wrists and pull him into the attic. If he did have broken ribs…Milton shook his head, no point thinking about that now. Elsie hurried out of the bathroom with her bag. Milton helped her onto the chair, put his hands around her waist and boosted her up to her son. Alexander heaved, Milton pushed, and the woman clambered through the hatch. Solomon was next, insisting that he could manage but baulking when he got up onto the chair. Milton boosted him, too.

Isadora was last. The water was lapping against the top tread of the stair now and, as they waited for her father to be pulled clear of the hatch, it pooled over and started to creep down the wooden floor to them.

“I don’t believe this,” she said quietly. “Their house. How are they going to manage?”

“That’s for worrying about later,” Milton said firmly. He nodded to the water. “There’s nothing we can do about that now. We just have to stay above it.”

She looked at him with wet eyes.

“Come on,” he said. “I’ll make sure they’re all right. But we need to get up there with them, okay?”

She nodded.

Milton helped her onto the chair, climbed on after her, and then put his hands around her narrow waist. She was not heavy, and he had no difficulty lifting her so that her brother could snag her hands and haul her the rest of the way.

The boards on the landing window had been peeled off. Milton went back to the window, sloshing through ankle-deep water, and looked out. The water was halfway up the sides of the houses now, and still it was coming. Waves were rolling down the street, debris carried on the tide. Milton saw pieces of furniture and sheets of paper in the water. And then he saw a car, its windshield wipers incongruously flicking back and forth. The Chevy that Ziggy had been driving last night was long gone, as was the car that Milton had boosted to come after him. As he watched, the house opposite the Bartholomews’—which had been barely more than a shack—was crumpled as the weight of the water proved too much for the thin walls. First one side collapsed, then another, and then the roof came splashing down. The current devoured it greedily, snapping the sides into smaller pieces and then swallowing them away. Milton saw furniture snatched out of the opened structure and then, as he watched impotently, he saw the elderly man who must have owned the property as he grabbed onto a plank from one of the two surviving walls. He managed to hold on for ten seconds, but then his grip failed him and he, too, was swept away.

Milton went back to the hall and pulled himself up into the attic.

THE WATERS had swelled and deepened all the way through the morning. The level in the house continued to climb and, when it was just a few inches away from the opening to the attic, Milton suggested that now was the time to get out onto the roof.

The roof had a steep pitch, but there was a dormer that protruded up, away from the house, offering an easier spot for them to wait. Ziggy rested against the dormer, his legs dangling over the edge of the roof. Solomon and Elsie clung onto one another, and their children stared out into the grey murk with expressions that flickered between anger, shock and fear. They sat there in silence for the most part, just looking out at the awesome devastation that had been wrought around them.

The electric grid had been one of the flood’s first victims. They watched the transformers blow, one by one. Without power, the pumps that should have sucked water out of the storm sewers had failed, and then they had become flooded themselves. Gas mains had been wrecked, some of them ignited, staining the dark waters with a greenish glow that burned from beneath.

Milton sat on the pitched roof of the house, straddling it, and looked out onto the grim vista. He could see the humped shapes of the houses that had not been washed away and the figures of people sheltering atop them. One family had taken a bed sheet and painted HELP on it in wide stripes of red paint. Men and women called out for help that wouldn’t come for hours. He heard the sound of a baby’s cries, close at hand, and then the desperate sobbing of its mother. There was nothing that he could do. Nothing that anyone could do.

“Man,” Solomon said, speaking into the stunned silence. “Being born black in New Orleans is like being black twice.”

The hurricane had moved away, leaving behind a margin of comparative calm that was more like an autumnal storm. The palm trees that had not been torn out of the ground or submerged had stopped their frantic jerking, their fronds swaying limply in the lessening wind, bedraggled from their soaking. Most of the neighbourhood was now hidden beneath ten feet of water, deeper in places. The alignment of the street was only discernible from the rooftops and the tops of yard trees that broke the waterline like an apology.

Isadora shuffled next to him.

“I was supposed to have an exam today,” she said.

“For what?”

“My studies.”

“You didn’t say you were studying. What is it?”

“Law. These folk, they get a rough deal a lot of the time and there aren’t too many places they can go for help. When I pass the bar, I want to set up a practice to help people from around here.”

“She’s always been like that,” Alexander interposed.

“Like what?” his sister said.

“A bleeding heart,” he said. “Liberal.”

“My brother thinks that people around here should be able to help themselves. He thinks it should have nothing to do with the government.”

“That’s what we did,” he said. “We didn’t get help.”

“You think they’ll be able to help themselves now?” she asked him.

He turned away and looked out over the flooded vista, the awful devastation of what had happened in just a few short hours and, swallowing hard, he chose not to answer.

Milton looked down and saw the body of a fat black woman in the water. Her colourful dress had inflated with air, spread out on the water around her like the petals of a flower. She bumped against the side of the house, spun off and continued down the street. Isadora was looking up into the sky, her face streaked with drying tears, and Milton said nothing. The body of the woman, rotating with perverse grace, continued on its way until it had passed from view.

Solomon was mumbling about how this was it, the fulfillment of the prophecy about how nature was going to swamp the bowl that New Orleans was built in. No one disagreed.

“How long are we going to be stuck up here?” Alexander muttered.

“Long as it takes,” his father said. “They ain’t gonna be hurrying down here. Make sure the French Quarter is good first. Ain’t gonna want anything to happen up there.”