4 Shelter From The Storm (9 page)

Ignorant of his daughter’s plight, Tubby relaxed when his client walked out of his office at 4 o’clock. Touched by her story but glad to be rid of her, he waved and went back to his desk to stare at the downpour outside the window. He toyed with the $2,000 check she had given him as a retainer and thought it was going to be hell driving home.

Once he got there, however, a warm house and a big pot of chili he had made on Saturday afternoon from his special recipe awaited him. He might catch a basketball game on TV or track down his friend Raisin Partlow and see what he had on his mind for Fat Tuesday. He could take care of Mrs. Lostus’s problem on Wednesday, if he could find a judge, that is.

“Mr. Dubonnet?”

He jumped and came close to injuring his nose where he had pressed it against the window glass.

“The elevators don’t seem to be working,” Mrs. Lostus announced in a soft voice.

Neither were the phones, it turned out.

This had happened before in the Place Palais building, and it had taken a long time to get fixed. On a holiday, the outlook was dismal.

“How about a drink?” Tubby suggested.

“Well, maybe a Coke,” she said.

“I’m having something stronger,” Tubby said. He opened the small oaken cabinet beside his sofa that hid a bar and extracted a bottle of W. L. Weller with a couple of inches left in it.

“Not much of a party,” he said, opening her can of Coke and pouring it over ice.

With a faint wheeze and a click, the air conditioning shut down.

A wave washed against the window, and it visibly vibrated.

“At least we’ve got lights,” he said.

They flickered.

“Who would think life could be so complicated,” she added.

Tubby knocked back his drink and collected his briefcase.

“C’mon,” he said. “There’s nothing to do but start walking down the stairs. Maybe the elevators are working on another floor.”

“Okay, but my feet aren’t so good. I’ve got a fungus in my big toenail.” She made that point again after they had opened the door marked “Emergency Exit” which let them into the bare concrete stairwell and descended two flights.

“Just forty-one more to go.” Tubby tried to cheer her up.

* * *

Nothing had ever seemed so monotonous. Nothing had ever taken so long. Mrs. Lostus held tight to the handrail and took one careful step at a time, leading off with her left foot and waiting for her right to catch up.

Tubby tuned out her complaints at floor 38, his own sore hamstring at 31, and decided to desert her at 25.

They had been joined for part of the journey by two young travelers, law school types, Tubby judged, forced to stay late in the office after all the partners had long since departed. They all swapped stories about where they had come from and theories about what they might find at the bottom. But the strangers were moving at a faster pace, and soon their voices could no longer be heard below.

Finally, at the thirteenth floor, Tubby and Mrs. Lostus encountered a security guard who confirmed that the building was not working due to extraordinary flooding in the streets. He guided them through normally locked doors to the parking garage and left them to continue their slow walk downward.

Tubby sprawled on the hood of his car on the third floor. He unlocked the door with fumbling fingers, and gratefully collapsed in the driver’s seat. He leaned over to push open the passenger door for Mrs. Lostus when she closed the hundred step gap between them. In time, she flopped beside him with a loud “Whoowee! I’m pooped!”

He cranked the engine and flipped on the air conditioner. He instantly felt better to be in charge of machines that worked again. Joyfully, he drove them to the ground floor, where they found out what all the trouble was about.

“This is big,” Tubby said.

Mrs. Lostus bent over the dashboard and peered through the windshield. Inches from the LeBaron’s front tires was a swirling soup of impure water floating plastic cups and Pepsi cans. It reminded her of something she had seen growing up in Goose Creek, Kentucky, and about which she had had nightmares most of her life.

She started screaming.

Unprepared, Tubby jumped so that his head hit the roof and he nearly screamed himself.

“For goodness sake,” he pleaded. “It’s just a rainstorm. It happens all the time here.”

“Like that?” she pointed hysterically at the main channel, which to Tubby appeared to be about two feet deep in the middle of the street.

“Well, that sure is a lot of rain,” he conceded. “Lemme go take a closer look.”

He got out of the car and stood in the garage driveway at water’s edge, trying not to get his shoes soaked.

A woman, blouse pasted to her body, was pressing through the stream with determination in the vicinity of where the sidewalk should be, water just below her knees.

“C’mon in,” she invited Tubby. “You won’t melt.”

“What’s the temperature like?” he asked.

“Not too bad. A little cool maybe.” She splashed on.

“What should we do?” Mrs. Lostus called out the car window.

The rain was still pouring down. In Tubby’s experience floods, once begun, did not end until at least a couple of hours after the rain stopped. It took that long for the mammoth pumps that guarded the city to suck the overflow out of the reclaimed swampland that constituted the Big Easy and push it uphill and over the levee to Lake Pontchartrain. Once it got there it would nurture blue crabs and nutria and all manner of other local delicacies before flowing back into the Gulf of Mexico.

The choices as he saw them were to stay put in the garage for, quite possibly, the rest of the night, with Mrs. Lostus, minus any food or drink— or, wade four or five blocks to the French Quarter where there were restaurants, bars, Mrs. Lostus’s hotel, and more diverting companionship. This overflow must be localized in the downtown area because everyone knew the French Quarter never flooded.

“Let’s take the plunge,” Tubby said.

He had to talk her into it, but she wanted to go to the bathroom and surely did not want to remain in the garage and miss all her shows.

While Tubby parked the car again a little higher up the ramp and locked his briefcase in the trunk, he tried to buoy his client’s spirits with anecdotes about past floods and hurricanes. Her expression was troubled when he strung his shoes round his neck and rolled his pants legs above his white knees.

Mrs. Lostus said she was game for the trip, but she had no interest in taking off her Nike’s which she had recently purchased at the Payless Shoe Source near her home. They could just get wet. Same with her orange J. C. Penny’s slacks. She expected her lawyer to demand reimbursement for her dry-cleaning bill from the time-share people.

“Ready, my dear?” Tubby asked gallantly.

Hand in hand, like a pair of bad school children, they stepped out of the sanctuary of the Place Palais garage and waded into the storm, guided through the drenching rain by the distant flashing neon of Canal Street.

“I don’t like this,” Mrs. Lostus said immediately. “Oh, this water is cold.” Memories of Goose Creek were coming back.

Tubby tried to comfort her, but her complaints did not stop. He had not realized, standing back in the garage, that there was a current in this water, and it was running against them. Their progress was very slow, and before they had made the first block Mrs. Lostus gave a shriek and plopped down backwards into the grimy water. She floundered about, unsuccessfully trying to keep her purse above the surface, while Tubby strained to help her get erect.

“I stepped off the curb, I think,” she sobbed when she regained her feet.

Tubby got his arm around her waist and propelled her forward once more.

“Oh, oh,” she moaned with each step. Whiskey and dry clothes seemed very far away. Two more miserable, sodden humans would be hard to imagine.

“It’s a boat!” Mrs. Lostus screamed, pointing out a canoe bearing down upon them.

“It sure is,” Tubby said. “Hey, guys!” he hailed the vessel.

There were three men in the canoe. They heard Tubby calling but kept paddling on a course down the middle of the street.

“Hey, guys! Help this woman!” Tubby yelled.

The men kept stroking, and even veered toward the far side of the channel. Clearly these fellows did not plan to rescue a pitiful damsel in distress.

“C’mon men,” Tubby pleaded. “Those bastards are going to pass us up,” he said to Mrs. Lostus.

“Like hell they will,” she exclaimed. Breaking free from Tubby she plunged into the street, where the water quickly rose above her waist. Hands waving in the air, she leaned into the flow and struggled to intercept the passing boat.

“Hey, Mrs. Lostus,” Tubby yelled. Swearing, he stepped off the curb to follow her.

He saw her make a grab for the aluminum gunwale and get her hand on it.

He heard one of the men say, “Let go, lady.”

He saw the man in the back raise a gun and point it at Mrs. Lostus and pull the trigger.

He heard the report, quickly dampened by the rain, and he saw Mrs. Lostus sink beneath the surface. The canoe sailed on.

Tubby dove headfirst into the stream and thrashed about blindly, groping for his companion.

He felt a shoe and latched onto it, but the foot slid out. He came up for air, holding a wet brown Nike.

Desperately, he went under again, reaching here and there for Mrs. Lostus. Between dives he could barely make out the faraway canoe sailing across Canal Street; then it was gone. He could not find his client.

Tubby stood in the middle of the flood, clutching her shoe, yelling incoherently at the rain.

Oblivious to the state of his clothing and the dazed stares of other refugees flattened in doorways, Tubby splashed and swam to Canal Street. Here the many bayous converged to form a shallow brown sea. Stalled buses lined the neutral ground. The drivers were still in some of them, faithfully guarding the Regional Transit Authority’s property, and a few passengers had remained aboard others. There was a pay phone outside Rubenstein’s, and Tubby pressed 911. It rang and rang, but there was no answer.

He hung up and sagged against the pole. Absently, he patted his pockets and found that he still had his wallet, checkbook and keys, and the trainman’s pocket watch his father had given him. He couldn’t make himself open the case to see how soaked it was. He still had his shoes, tied together and draped over his neck. All he had lost was his client, who had been murdered.

Assessing his situation while he caught his breath, he could think of nothing to do but keep going and bring the problem back to Dan the doorman, where it had all begun.

He took a first step, but a white flash, followed immediately by a crash of thunder, sent him jumping back for the telephone pole, which stuck out of the water like the mast of a sunken schooner. More rain came down in sheets. It was hard to find air to breathe. This fact intrigued him, as an old student of New Orleans precipitation, but he was too agitated to dwell on it and cupped his hands over his mouth to create a pocket for oxygen. Urged on by new lightening crashes and the relentless wetness that enveloped him, he forced himself into the street and began making a ford toward the far shore which had become completely invisible. This might be more than a normal rain storm, he thought.

Though some of the store lights still shown brightly, there was evidence everywhere of a growing disruption. Dozens of cars were stranded in the street, empty as far as Tubby could tell, and some of them were slowly floating northward. He was not alone. There were other people wading purposefully through the tide, on emergency errands of their own. Passing a dead traffic light, he realized that he had reached the mid-point of the neutral ground. He clung to the cast-iron light pole, then fixed his sights on a flashing neon Dixie Beer sign in a drug store, and waded on.

At last he was on Royal Street, in the old city, built on certifiably higher ground. It never flooded in the Quarter, they said, but today was different. Water covered the slate sidewalks, and shopkeepers were frantically erecting plywood barriers to try to keep the stuff out of their stores. In contrast to the practically deserted business district, the Quarter was packed. It was standing room only in the bars and groceries— anyplace that sold beer. Urchins, Mardi Gras revelers, and the rest of the city’s cosmic debris cavorted mindlessly in the street.

The sounds of Bix Bieiderbecke played from a hand-cranked Victrola on a balcony. Tubby knew he was losing his grip, but he focused on a single objective. His glare was fixed on the hazy outline of the Royal Montpelier Hotel. He was going to get the highest room his plastic could buy and deal with this situation from way up there.

The towering entrance was guarded by tall men whose stove pipe hats were covered by plastic bags. In case he was needed, a uniformed security guard was leaning against one of the marble pillars, sheltered by the portico, smoking a cigarette.

“You got a room, sir?” A liveryman blocked Tubby, who resembled a half-dead escapee from Angola.

“No, but I’m about to, ” Tubby replied, straightening up. He tried to brush past.

“Sorry, sir,” the man said, his hand gently upon Tubby’s heaving chest. “We’re all full.”

“I’m sure I can arrange something,” Tubby said desperately.

“We’re all booked, sir,” the man repeated. “Sorry.” He was not going to yield.

“Listen, you know Dan Haywood?” Tubby pleaded.

“Who?”

“Dan Haywood. He works here.”

“The bellman?”

“Right. Big tall guy with a mustache?”

The gatekeeper nodded.

“Look, could you get him for me? Hey…” Tubby pulled a spinach-like bill from his smelly wallet. He offered it to the man. “Tell him his lawyer is out here and needs help bad.”

The warden of the gate looked disdainfully at the green wad in Tubby’s hand and sniffed.

He flicked his head in rebuke.

“Wait here,” he said and withdrew into the dark dryness of the hotel lobby.

“Hell of a storm,” the uniformed guard said to Tubby, making conversation.

“I can’t remember anything like it,” Tubby said. He wished he could stand under the awning beside the guard.