Dispatches from the Edge: A Memoir of War, Disasters, and Survival (17 page)

Pretty soon they’ll have finished cleaning up the Superdome, and the debris at the Convention Center will be swept away. It seems that a lot of people want the evidence, the memory, simply to disappear, the slate to be wiped clean. One day there will be football games played in the Superdome once again, and all of us will forget the lessons we’ve learned.

“Mark my words, man,” a cop tells me one day, “it’s all going to be cleaned up and forgotten. It’s all going to be for shit. People are going to cover up things. And you know, these people are poor. No one’s going to speak for them.”

“You really think people will forget?” I ask.

“I’ve had family members tell me, ‘Why don’t you just leave, why don’t you just leave? You didn’t sign up for this.’ But my father was at D-day, and what if he had said ‘Forget it, I’m not doing this. I didn’t sign up for this. There’s too many people dying. There’s too much carnage.’ You just don’t leave. You can’t just forget.”

I TRY NOT
to imagine my brother hanging from the ledge. Try not to picture him pressed against the balcony, his legs dangling fourteen stories above the concrete sidewalk. Did a couple out for a summer stroll catch a glimpse of him before he let go? Did a family gathered around the dinner table see him plunge past their window? What was he thinking right before he hit the ground?

That’s the thing about suicide. No matter how much you try to remember how that person lived his life, you can’t forget how he ended it. It’s like driving by a car smashed on the side of the road. You can’t resist craning your neck to take stock of the damage.

“Will I ever feel again?”

That was the question my brother asked moments before he let go of the ledge he was hanging from. It didn’t make sense to me at the time. I’d even forgotten he said it until my mother recently reminded me.

We both had tried to cauterize our pain, push our pasts behind us. If only I could have told him that he wasn’t the only one. I abandoned him long before he abandoned me. I see that now. I could have reached out to him, talked with him, but he didn’t make it easy, and I was a kid, and had myself to worry about.

Several months before he died, my brother went back to Quitman, Mississippi, back to our father’s hometown. I didn’t know it at the time. I found out only after his death. I went to his apartment and noticed a roll of film he’d never developed. The pictures were from his trip. My father’s sister Annie Laurie was still living in Quitman at the time. Carter could have gone to visit her. He didn’t. He simply wandered around the town. I realize now that in those last months of his life, he was searching for feeling, but he just couldn’t reach out.

IN EVERY DISASTER
I’ve ever been to, there’s always been someone making money. Even in Somalia, some people got rich running guns, selling khat, providing security and cars to reporters. Who knows how many people continue to get rich off Iraq, with shady deals and crooked contracts? In New Orleans, while parts of the city are still underwater, investors are already circling, looking for properties to buy up on the cheap.

“I’ve been doing real estate for twenty years, and I’ve never seen anything like it,” Brandy Farris says, maneuvering her silver SUV through New Orleans’ Garden District. “It’s just crazy. We have a lot of investors calling; they’re wanting to buy New Orleans property, wherever it is. They’re buying them even underwater.”

Farris is a broker with Century 21 in Baton Rouge, and she’s come back to New Orleans for the first time to put
FOR SALE
signs up on some new listings. She has buyers in Miami, Seattle, and New York.

“They say, ‘I want to buy land sight unseen.’ If it’s flooded they don’t care. They did this with Hurricane Andrew—bought up all the properties that were flooded and they rebuilt the houses when it was time.”

On her business card is a photo of Farris, long blond hair and a startling white Southern smile. In person she looks the same, except she wears a wireless cellphone headpiece attached to her ear at all times. Her phone seems to ring every few minutes.

“There are a lot of
ifs,
” she says, momentarily wrinkling her nose. “We have to assess what the damage is, see if we can even change title from the courthouse. We don’t even have a way to file anything in the courthouse. A lot of people say their paperwork is underwater. They have no way to show who they are, what their mortgage is. We may just take purchase agreements and see what happens.”

Her trunk is full of Century 21 signs attached to stakes, which she hammers into what remains of some people’s yards. She also has another sign with her name on it and her commission—4 percent for a ninety-day listing.

“We’re certainly not trying to take advantage of anyone losing their home,” Farris says, concerned about how all this may look. “In any situation, you’re always going to have the vulture investors, but there’s something for everyone here. Rich, poor—investment, rentals. I hope it’s going to be great.”

We get out of the car and head toward a home she’s just listed. Her high heels wobble precariously on the cobblestone street.

“Seriously, what is that smell?” she asks me.

“Probably a dead dog, maybe a person,” I tell her.

“It’s really bad. It’s a lot worse than I thought,” she says.

“Will the smell be a problem for buyers?” I ask.

“We’re just going to have to take one case at a time,” she tells me, not blinking an eye. “Everybody has a different need right now. It’s very emotional. It’s very traumatic.”

In the past few weeks, Farris estimates, Century 21 has sold some 1,500 homes in Baton Rouge, a big rise from what the agency would normally sell—and prices are moving up. Farris is not sure what will happen in New Orleans, but she’s positioned herself to benefit either way.

“I hope it’s going to be great,” she says, flashing the smile that’s helped her sell many properties over the years. “President Bush says he’s rebuilding New Orleans. We think it’s going to be great. We’re looking forward to it.”

Brandy Farris is nothing if not optimistic.

IT’S TWO AND
a half weeks since the storm, and at the daiquiri bar the music is pumping. Outkast sings “Hey Ya.” The bar is not very crowded, and for the first time I notice that white police officers sit on one side, African American officers on the other.

One of the cops I’m sitting with is angry at CNN. We aired a story about some police who were allegedly looting after the storm. He’s not disputing that it happened, but he wishes we’d done more to point out that it was only a handful of cops.

The police officer has just had two days off. He drove out of state to visit his kids. He went in a police cruiser, which New Orleans cops are allowed to use on their days off. Every couple of hours, however, he was stopped by state police, who thought he was a deserter.

“The first cop who stopped me gave me a card with his name on it and his phone number, in case I got stopped again. But the next time it happened, they just ignored the card. They’d stop me and make me go through the whole explanation each time.” Even their own seem to have turned on them.

Another cop, who’s been on the force more than a dozen years, says he plans to leave. A few years ago he’d been offered a job with a small-town police force in the midwest, but turned them down. Now he says he’s going to call them back. “I’ll work anywhere. I don’t care. I just want out.”

“With 9/11 they treated it like a crime scene,” he says, holding his beer by the neck. “With 9/11 they sifted through the wreckage, every piece. Here, they’re simply going to bulldoze some of those buildings, which still have people in them. Months from now, people are going to be sitting around and they’ll say, ‘Yeah, whatever happened to old Joe. Where’d he go?’ And no one will know. People will simply disappear.”

His neighbor was dead for two weeks before anyone realized she was missing. “I went and found her body,” he says, his voice clipped. “I took a forensics class a couple months ago, and they told us, in a situation like this, to always look for the flies. I actually found my neighbor by listening to the beating wings of flies.”

Drinking with these police officers, I can’t help but feel they’re the only ones who’ll really remember what happened here. I saw pieces of the horror; they saw it all—who was here, who wasn’t. They know who the real heroes are.

A cop says, “You can tell, it’s the people who do this”—with one hand he mimicks someone talking—“the people who are talking big, they are the ones who ran.”

When the storm hit, his fiancée told him to leave. “‘Fuck them,’ she tells me, ‘fuck the police,’” he says clutching a beer. There are nearly a dozen more on the table. “I told her, ‘I was a cop before I met you, and I’ll be a cop after you leave. Fuck you.’”

Like a lot of cops, he tried to look after family members while still doing his job. He used a wave runner to help rescue his partner’s mom. As he took her out, he realized how many more people still needed help.

“We turned a corner, and there were just dozens of people on roofs, and they were all crying out. You could hear some of them trapped in their homes, all screaming. Just driving away, leaving them in the dark, that was the hardest part.” His voice is quiet, plaintive. “I’m only twenty-three,” he says.

In disasters, in war, it isn’t governments that help people, at least not early on. It’s individuals: policemen, doctors, strangers, people who stand up when others sit down. There were so many heroes in this storm, men and women who grabbed a bandage, an axe, a gun, and did what needed to be done.

Well past midnight, I stroll down Bourbon Street with a half-dozen cops. The street is empty and dark. The cops are off duty, out of uniform. A Louisiana state trooper pulls his car over and demands their IDs. He knows they’re New Orleans police, but it’s past curfew and he wants to prove a point.

“Fuck you,” one of the police officers yells. “You’re in my city, telling me I’m violating curfew? Fuck that.” The trooper drives off. We walk back to the bar. There’s no place else to go.

BLACK HAWK HELICOPTERS
still pass overhead, the sound crushing, comforting. The cavalry’s come; help has arrived. They’re still occasionally plucking people off rooftops and porches. Now it’s the holdouts who decided to stay but have finally had enough.

Since the storm, the hallways at the Coast Guard command center at Air Station New Orleans have been crowded with cots—pilots and mechanics crashing between flights. Hundreds have come from all over the country, flying sparkling red choppers, angels from the sky.

Lieutenant Commander Tom Cooper flew the first rescue mission over New Orleans, hours after the storm. He joined the Coast Guard straight out of high school, and has been to a lot of disasters, but this one he’ll never forget.

“Their images stay with you, you know?” he says of the people he rescues, and I know exactly what he means. “You never get to talk to them because the helicopter’s so loud. You hear them yell thank you every once in a while, but most of the communications is just done looking in their eyes.

“It’s like an out-of-body experience, you know? To see that, to see it in person, to see it live—people crawling out of their attics on to their rooftops and signaling you for help.”

Underneath the hovering chopper, the rotor blades create a mini-storm, hot air whips your face, water sprays all about. When he hovers, Cooper is unable to see the people below him. Normally he has a copilot, but there are so many missions that at times he flies alone. A flight mechanic squats behind him, helping him line up the helicopter. The mechanic holds onto a handle, controlling a hoist used to lower the Coast Guard diver. The diver is attached to a cable, and the hoist can lower him as much as two hundred feet.

The day after the storm, Cooper flew with Lieutenant Junior Grade Maria Roerick, who had just been certified as a Coast Guard pilot. It was her first rescue mission.

“Everywhere you’d look, you’d turn, there’s somebody over there, there’s somebody over there,” she remembers. “You had to start sorting people out, saying, ‘There’s kids,’ or ‘There’s elderly. I think they need medical attention over there.’”

In the six days after Katrina, Coast Guard pilots out of Air Station New Orleans saved 6,471 lives—nearly twice as many as they’d saved here in the past fifty years combined.

When she sleeps, Roerick still sees the faces of people waiting to be rescued. “You go to bed at night completely exhausted,” she says, “knowing there are still thousands of people out there. You can’t get them all. You want to scoop them all up.”

WE WAKE EACH
day unsure what lies ahead. Early in the morning, we gather in the lobby of the hotel. Few words are spoken before we head out. We climb into our SUV, a small platoon searching the city. The water recedes, new streets emerge, the map is redrawn every day.

Some residents still refuse to leave. On the street outside her two-room rental, I spot an elderly lady, overweight, overtired. She sits on a rusty metal chair and leans on a cane with the words
LOVE MINISTRIES
crudely carved into the wood. She stares straight ahead, but her eyes are clouded and seem to be focused somewhere just above the horizon. Her name is Terry Davis, but she says around here everyone calls her Ms. Connie.

“I’m legally blind,” she tells me, “and they won’t let me take my service dog with me.”

On the corner, Los Angeles police officers are fanning out, trying to get everyone on the block to leave. It’s been three weeks since the storm, and the mayor has announced that everyone has to get out of the city. Forcible evacuations, some are calling it, but the truth is, they aren’t really forcing people out.

“It’s just temporary,” a police officer says to Ms. Connie.

“No, no, dear,” Ms. Connie says, slowly standing up. “I don’t mean to be a hard case, but my dog goes where I go, or I don’t go.”

Normally, I wouldn’t intervene—I’d just stand back and observe—but in this case it doesn’t feel right. I’ve just talked to some National Guard troops who told me they have changed their policy and are now allowing people to take their pets on board the evacuation helicopters. I tell the police officer that the policy has changed. He goes back to talk with his superiors.