Tony Dunbar - Tubby Dubonnet 07 - Tubby Meets Katrina (11 page)

In a few minutes the fire in his ankle subsided and his powers returned. Crawling about, he retrieved as much as he could of his booty. Most important were the matches, and he bared his teeth in a hideous grimace when his hand clutched those again. It was pitch black now, though the sky was full of stars. Gagging from the pain, he hopped, falling sometimes, with his groceries to the trees, and then he used them to support himself, jumping from trunk to trunk, until at last he regained his camp. Cursing himself for not collecting firewood while it was daylight, he lumbered about in the sand, pulling in dry branches and vines to make a pile. He tried one match, then two, then three, before he got it lit. He knew it would be a struggle to keep it going, but he needed the light to eat his peanut butter. The damn fish would have to wait. Even hurricanes had their bad days.

The evidence of civilization’s collapse was everywhere. Flowers would point out a plywood sign promising that looters will be shot, and Hope would point out a convenience store with all the plate glass smashed leaving empty shelves visible inside. Approaching the parish line they could see ahead a blockade of police vehicles, lights flashing. Flowers had his badge ready in his hand.

“Where are those guys from?” Tubby asked. One of the police cars was maroon with a white roof; the other was white.

“Beats me. Hello, officer,” Flowers said through the open window. He slowed and prepared to stop.

The middle-aged cop waved them through.

“Lexington, Kentucky, Sheriff’s Department,” Tubby read as they passed. “They didn’t seem too interested in us.”

“I guess we don’t look like looters,” Christine suggested.

“What’s a looter look like?”

They crossed the railroad tracks, and they were in. The city was drab, and trash was strewn everywhere. They stuck to the levee road, carefully navigating around pieces of tin and roof shingles, until they reached St. Charles Avenue where it ends at the river.

“Jeez, look at that!” Streetcar poles were down on the neutral ground. Trees were totally upended, their root balls taller than a bus. Muddy cars sat crookedly on the trolley tracks. The entire way to Tubby’s street they spied only one other moving vehicle, a pickup truck coming the other way on the Avenue, its windows smoked.

“I wonder who cleared all the trees off the street?” Tubby asked.

“The Corps of Engineers?” Flowers suggested.

It would be months before they learned that it had been one crazy freelance landscaper with a Bobcat.

“Let’s try Nashville Avenue,” Flowers said. His tires began crunching over branches when he made his left turn. There was a path of sorts down the middle of the pavement, as if other cars might have passed this way in the week since the hurricane. In a few more blocks they encountered the edge of the flood. Slowly, Flowers maneuvered into the water.

Power lines dangled from the poles.

“I think it’s receded some. We might be able to reach my house.”

They got close, about a hundred feet short. The water was only a few inches deep, but what stopped the parade was a magnolia tree lying across the street.

Tubby sighed and got out. The tide, now a pale sickly green, wet him to the ankles. The dog splashed happily into the water. Gamely, the three of them unloaded the truck and carried the provisions around the tree and onto Tubby’s porch. His whole tree-strewn lawn was now above the water line. The generator was the hardest item to transport since the two men had to keep from stumbling in tandem, but they got it done. Even the gas cans and the water purifier made the trip. Exhausted, they looked at the plastic Port-O-Let.

“Let’s just dump it here in the street. I’ll figure out how to get it later,” Tubby said.

“Nope,” Flowers declared. “We can do this. It will float, don’t you think?”

It did, a little bit, and eventually they had dragged it where they wanted it.

“Now ain’t that beautiful.” Flowers admired the bright yellow toilet perched on the Dubonnet porch. “All the privacy a man could want. Just don’t fill it up too fast.”

Hope groaned and rested on the rail. “I guess this is a good idea,” she said.

“At least it’s home,” Tubby told her. “But if it gets too bad, we can always go out the same way we came in.”

“That’s what I need to do, folks,” Flowers said. “It’s time for me to report to work. I’ll try to get over here every day or so and check on you.”

It took some maneuvering to get the truck turned around and the trailer hitched back up.

Hope and Tubby watched their ship sail away. “Marooned,” he said in a low voice. He meant it as a joke, but that was the way they both felt.

All alone in the ’hood, they went back to the porch to unpack. Christine had gone upstairs to try to nap in her old room. She was unusually quiet. Tubby longed for the old racket of jam boxes and televisions he had once complained about. The silence bugged him. There weren’t even any squirrels in the trees. And it was hot.

A twenty-five foot tall palm, the pride of Tubby’s yard, had fallen and taken with it the power lines running from the pole to his house. They, in turn, had torn his electrical service box, breakers, and meter off the building. He was stumbling around in the jungle of palm fronds and wires trying to figure out how he could attach the generator to his house lights when he was addressed sternly from his front yard.

“Sir!”

The homeowner was so startled that he almost toppled over. Looking through the brush he saw soldiers, M-16s at the ready, black smudges under their eyes like football players. This was it. He was about to be rousted or shot. He clambered out of the palm, wiping his dirty hands on his pants. Rex bounded off the porch swing, the hair on his back bristling.

“Do you live here, sir?” the leader asked. There were four men with him, all dressed in green and black camouflage uniforms and all were strangely suntanned. Tubby noticed another squad watching his arrest from the corner where a stop sign used to be.

“Yes, I do live here. My name is Dubonnet. This is my house. I’m trying to get my electricity working.”

“What is the address here, sir?” the leader wanted to know, and Tubby told him. He knew there was a mandatory evacuation order in effect and was deflated, considering all of the work he and Hope had put in readying his house for occupancy.

“There’s supposed to be a high school right here, Saint Ing…” The soldier couldn’t pronounce it.

“Sure,” Tubby said. “Saint Ingnatyranius Prep. It’s two blocks that way and hang a right.”

“Our GPS puts it right here.”

“The map’s wrong,” a soldier behind him observed.

“The map must be wrong,” the leader conceded. “What are your plans, sir?” he asked Tubby.

“My plan is to try to get my house operating and to protect my property,” he replied staunchly.

“Well, sir,” the soldier informed him. “Saint whatever-it-is school will be our base. We will be your force in the neighborhood.”

“That’s great,” Tubby said.

The soldiers turned away and clomped off.

“Where are you guys from?” Tubby called to their backs.

“San Diego. California National Guard,” the leader yelled.

“Glad you’re here!” Tubby told them. I wish you could have been here a week ago.

He went inside to tell Hope that they had a force in the neighborhood. She was in the back, dragging branches away from the patio doors so that they could be opened. He could see that a rather large wax myrtle from his neighbor’s yard had knocked down the fence between them.

“They didn’t tell us to leave?” Hope asked, surprised.

“No, they just wanted directions.”

“Do you smell smoke?”

“Kind of. I’ve been smelling something burning for a while.”

“Shouldn’t we, like, check on it or something?”

“I guess so. I could use a break anyway.”

The two of them ventured out onto the street again.

“I think it’s coming from that direction,” Hope said, and Rex led the way.

The smell grew more obvious as they proceeded, and they had only gone a block when they both exclaimed “Whoa!”

Five houses on the corner were completely gone, burned to the ground. Just brick porch columns and the iron fences around the edge of the properties remained standing. The lots were heaps of smoking rubble.

“It’s still burning,” Hope said, pointing to a bright red flame dancing three feet into the air above the pile and roughly in the middle of the carnage.

“That could catch the whole neighborhood on fire,” Tubby said. “I’ll go get the National Guard.”

Leaving the woman behind, he jogged the three blocks to St. Ignatyranius Prep. He found the soldiers, including the very one who had spoken to him, sitting on the front steps eating chips. They still had their weapons slung on their shoulders.

“There’s a fire,” he gasped, almost done in from the exercise. “There’s a fire,” he repeated, pointing.

The guardsmen took him seriously enough to walk with Tubby back into the neighborhood, but they wouldn’t run.

Yes, indeed, there was a fire still smoldering.

The leader went into a private conversation on a walkie-talkie. He frowned at his spectators.

Tubby began to get paranoid. There was, after all, a mandatory evacuation in effect, and he and Hope were not evacuated.

“Let’s get back to our house before they run us all out,” he said to Hope. “These guys can take care of things, and if we stay here they might arrest us.”

“The flame is coming from that gas pipe,” she told him.

“Yeah?” Tubby asked. He was impressed by her deduction. “I wonder why they can’t just turn it off.”

Half an hour later, he saw the National Guard march back past his house, returning to base. Tubby slipped out to reinspect the fire, and nothing had changed. The eternal flame burned brightly. The rubble smoked. The intersection was empty of people.

He decided to try to find where the gas meter was. Perhaps he could turn it off. But most of the places between the sidewalk and the foundation were covered in hot coals, so he did not get very far. Several cars parked beside the building had been incinerated. Beside one of these was a silver puddle shaped somewhat like an electric guitar. He touched it gingerly. Wait, it was melted aluminum. One of the car’s sporty wheels. At what temperature does cast aluminum melt, he wondered. A thousand degrees? He took the sculpted guitar home to show off to his new family unit.

Their first night together was a little bit awkward. Christine was unsure what the relationship between her father and Hope was. Tubby tried to make it clear that they were just hurricane friends, and he installed Hope in the guest room. There was a girls’ room upstairs for when any of them visited, and Christine staked that out. She even found some of her old things in the closet. The problem of who would cook was solved when Tubby volunteered to heat up the Petrofoods Rice-a-Roni himself on the Coleman propane stove. They ate by lantern light because his first attempts to hook up the generator had been cut short by the National Guard, the fire, and darkness. He suggested a game of Hearts, but the ladies were yawning. Christine took matters into her own hands and went to bed.

“The guest room is made up,” he told Hope. “Nobody’s slept there since I went down to Bolivia.”

“Bolivia? That must have been interesting. Did you just get back?”

“Yes, the day before the hurricane. It seems like a year ago, but it’s only been a week.”

“Whatever were you doing down there?”

“Just some business,” Tubby said vaguely. “Have you ever been to South America?”

“I went to Rio once for Carnival. It was a long time ago when I was single. Now I’m just a school teacher who can’t afford to go anywhere.”

“But you’ve obviously had some memorable experiences. Want a drink?”

“Sure,” she said. “And then it’s off to bed.”

“How about some of Flowers’s rum? It’s ten years old.”

She nodded. Tubby brought her a glass with a little warm Coke. She sipped it quietly.

“Lost in thought?” he asked, almost asleep himself. They were sitting in his kitchen on Home Depot stools.

“That man who kidnapped your daughter, what did he look like?” she asked.

“He was tall. He was lean and had a long gaunt face. Of course, he hadn’t shaved so he looked like a derelict, except his clothes were new. But they clashed, like Steve Martin or something. His eyes are deep in his head. He had big ears. I’d say he was barely twenty. He looked strong.”

“I think I saw that man,” she said after a moment. “On the bridge. He took my blanket. Then I think he beat up some man and threw him into the water.”

“Then I guess we’d both like to see him brought to justice,” Tubby said.

“Justice.” She savored the word. “That sounds so complicated. Brought to justice. When our whole world is falling apart. In Biblical days, the bad were just swept away. Temples fell on them. Plagues carried them off.”

“I know what you’re saying. Only I’ve been a lawyer for so many years I think about justice…”

“You look very tired,” Hope told him.

They both fell asleep. Much later, Hope tapped Tubby on the shoulder, and they both dragged off to bed.

The days passed. And life was not dull. Tubby got into the physical side of cleaning up things. He chainsawed the trees out of the street, and out of his yard, and off of his neighbor’s roofs. They made friends with the National Guard and tried their first MREs. “Cajun Style Rice with Beans and Beef Sausage Smoke Flavor Added” wasn’t bad. “Chicken Casserole” drew complaints. The only way to make the dry crackers taste good was to coat them with cheese sauce sizzled up in the heating pouch. Hope pointed out that between the pretzels and dip and cheese, they had used up seventy-eight percent of their daily salt intake requirements before even getting to the main course.

Menfolk who had evacuated their families returned one-by-one to see the damage, and they brought care packages of groceries, beer, and soft drinks. When they had more than they could use, Tubby and Hope invited the Guardsmen over for dinner. By now the Californians had left, replaced by Louisiana militia happy to be home from Iraq. A girlfriend of Christine’s, Samantha, showed up without any fanfare. She moved into Christine’s room and hardly ever came out. The generator worked much of the time, and Tubby got a big security light working that could light up the back yard like a football stadium.

He was actually as happy as he could remember being. The hurricane had given him back a family and a sense of usefulness. True, Christine moped around sometimes. That was natural considering what she’d been through. But the manual labor felt good. It was as though they were all pioneers together. Christine did not speak about her ordeal with Rivette very often, but she pitched in around the house and seemed to be getting okay. She didn’t talk as much as she used to—as much as her mother did.

Tubby was bittersweet when Christine announced that she and Samantha wanted to get back to civilization and school. But they were right. Life goes on. So Tubby connived a pass from his neighborhood Guardsmen so he could not only travel out of New Orleans but also get back in. He left Hope in charge of what he called Camp Dubonnet, borrowed a car from Flowers, and drove the girls to Jackson, Mississippi, where his ex-wife was staying with some of her friends. They owned a house in a gated community beside a small private lake. When he got there he joked that the security reminded him of New Orleans, but of course it was far better. The sense of safety in his city was derived solely from the fact that New Orleans was basically deserted of everybody except soldiers and engineers.

On the drive to Jackson the lawyer learned that Samantha had lived after the storm in an apartment over a bar in the French Quarter, sharing the space with the owner. They hid from the looters and police, ate peanut butter and bottles of cherries, bathed in club soda, and used a beer stein for a chamber pot which they emptied out the window into the courtyard. “Just like in the old days,” she said, recalling legends of the time when all of the Vieux Carre’s waste was deposited into open ditches flushed mainly by rain. Samantha had lived this way for nine days, lasting that long because she and her roommate consumed tubs of warm Bud Lite. But it was so dank and smelled so bad that they finally decided to flee. In the course of their lodging they had lost all romantic interest in one another. On his robin’s egg blue Vespa, they snuck out of the Quarter at dawn when they hoped the Guardsmen and looters would all be asleep and took back streets Uptown. With the luck of the young, they reached Camp Dubonnet unmolested. There the boyfriend bade Samantha a hasty farewell and set off for a better place in Houma. She was grateful to see him leave. All of this was related by Christine, because Samantha didn’t want to speak about it.

Though she had cleaned up for the trip north to Mississippi, Samantha was obviously subdued and confused by her recent ordeal. The raucous welcome the party received upon landing at the lake house in Jackson drove her into the bathroom, and Tubby never saw her again on that trip.

It was not just Tubby’s ex-wife, Mattie, and his other two daughters who greeted them at the door, it was also Mattie’s hosts, two well-heeled, well-lit good-timers in the real estate business, and a half-dozen of their neighbors and friends busy drinking chocolate martinis and grilling enormous pork chops out by the dock. For the first time, Tubby let some of his hurricane intensity go and just allowed himself to be hugged and yakked at by Debbie and Collette. Though the TV in the den was turned to CNN and still carried non-stop Katrina news concerning the future of evacuees in the Houston Astrodome, and the belated plugging of the holes in the New Orleans levees by the Corps of Engineers, there were drinks aplenty and a noisy, affectionate, air conditioned atmosphere that blended perfectly with Tubby’s new and euphoric embrace of human fellowship. Their host donned a white yacht-captain’s hat and took most of the group out onto his party barge for a swing around the lake.

Tubby stayed behind and found himself talking to an attractive realtor from Ocean Springs who had just that day arrived from the Coast. Her home, set a mile back from the beach on the bay side, had been partially smashed by a tree, while she bravely braced herself against the wind in her second-floor bedroom. After the storm had passed and she was outside assessing the damage, and thanking heaven for her survival, something in the house ignited and the entire structure blazed to the ground in half an hour. Though a couple of weeks had passed, she was still in a mild state of shock and awe, but was drinking Scotch and exhibiting the brave and unflappable character that is bred into some Southern women. Many of her friends had also lost their homes. Why, she had heard, all six federal judges in southern Mississippi had been totally wiped out. Her friend, the Senator, had seen his own house swept away. Maybe it was time for her to just buy a condo. She really didn’t need a five-bedroom home. All the children were grown up anyway. Tubby liked her. They flirted. The hurricane was somewhere else.

When the pontoon boat returned and the pork chops were devoured, Tubby left. After-dinner drinks were still being served, and he was offered a couch to sleep on, but it seemed too cozy, with his ex-wife in the guest room. He drove back to the Interstate and inquired at the Holiday Inn Express, the first motel he saw. They were full. So was the Ramada across the street. He had been afraid this would be a problem since the hurricane winds had also plastered Jackson, since gas was hard to come by south of the city, and since recovery workers were hogging all the rooms. But he was lucky at the Hampton Inn. He enjoyed his first good night’s sleep since, when? Sometime back in Bolivia, maybe. He woke up in the morning so late that all the sausage and biscuits were gone at the free breakfast buffet in the lobby, and he had to make do with an English muffin and a banana. Carrying them back to his room, he shared an elevator with a guy wearing a FEMA T-shirt. Tubby smiled politely. The government man flinched as if he’d been struck. Tubby made a small pleasantry to reassure him. The lawyer was reaching out and touching everybody. Before Tubby left the world, he loaded up on supplies—frozen steaks and toilet paper and a box of oranges, and a case of wine and everything else he could think of and could pay for with an American Express card. He got all the things that he used to take for granted at his local Winn-Dixie which, sad to say, had been picked to the bones by marauders. He had to wait in line for half an hour at an Exxon station for gas, but the automated pump also obliged him by accepting his credit card. This was great. Where was AMEX going to send the bill? He kept pumping until he had filled up his two red spare containers in the back, and then he stomped on the pedal and rolled on down that Interstate highway pointed south. He raced along with caravans of electric company cherry-pickers from Indiana, military convoys from Michigan, and fire trucks from Ohio. Every last one of them was going eighty miles an hour, and they were en route to rebuild New Orleans. Tubby felt the love. Blasting down the highway he knew he was part of something glorious and big.

Bonner Rivette got used to living in the woods, just a convenient hop, skip, and a jump from a dozen blocks of flooded and abandoned houses. They were loaded with food and booze and clothes and he even found a lid of marijuana hidden in a bread box behind a moldy loaf of Arrowhead rye. Of course, he had to slip around patrolling sheriff’s cars and, after about a week, soldiers, but he only went out at night, had no vehicle to mark his presence, and took one small load at a time. He was hard to spot. There was no river traffic, so no one noticed him from the water. He did not know it, but because of downstream hurricane silting, the Mississippi River was closed to navigation. He supposed the occasional helicopters overhead or the passing police car on top of the levee might spot his fire back in the brush, but no one ever came to investigate. His ankle healed, and now that his internal energy was building he felt ashamed at the weakness he had formerly displayed. Had he offended the woodland spirits? He meditated about this to re-secure his place among his pantheon. Nevertheless, even with the spirits present, he was lonesome. Camping out was not getting him closer to realizing his yearnings. He hoped to locate the source of Katrina’s power. It was almost time for the storm to get busy destroying things again.

One morning while Rivette sat meditating by the river, seeking strength from the wind, he heard an unfamiliar noise through the broken stand of willow trees that sheltered his lean-to. He crept to the edge of the woods to investigate. It was the sound of honking cars. He took a chance and sprinted up to the crest of the levee and saw below him a long line of traffic moving down the river road. Individual vehicles peeled off onto the side streets. He quickly dismissed the idea that this was a manhunt for him. What it was, he realized, was the return of the rightful owners of these houses. Something had happened to allow them to come back to Bonner’s world.

This would be the end, he knew, of his wilderness experience. He prepared himself mentally to reengage in his battle with society. It was time for the knight of disruption to return.

He dressed himself for the occasion, in a pair of crisp Dickey work pants he had taken from a laboring man’s closet, pressed neatly by some hard-working wife. Bonner also had a stack of clean T-shirts he could carry in a child’s school backpack. They advertised everything from the Grand Canyon to Blackmon’s Tree Service. He’d found a nice leather shaving kit, loaded with toiletries he could use. He was deficient in, but not without, ID and cash. For the former, he had a Jefferson Parish voter registration which he had found in the drawer of a man’s home-office desk. For cash he had a kid’s piggy bank. He had found it stuffed with nearly fifty dollars worth of coins and tooth fairy money. He also had some old silver dollars, set in Plexiglas squares, but he recognized these as items more valuable sold than spent. And he had some papers he had taken from Tubby Dubonnet’s law office and his handgun.

Bonner carefully washed himself and shampooed his sandy brown hair in a plastic bucket. He shaved himself well.

Everything he needed went into the backpack. Rivette cleaned up his camp by throwing the rest of the stuff he had touched into the river. Pots, pans, the five-gallon paint buckets he had used for chairs, dirty socks, all joined the great flow toward the Gulf of Mexico. He doubted that anyone was actively hunting him for now, what with the overwhelming confusion of the last two weeks, but his mantra was to leave nothing but his footprints behind.

Satisfied that his camp had been erased, he marched over the levee and across the road as if he were a taxpayer, moving quickly to avoid the trucks and trailers of homeowners, men driving, wives looking anxiously out the window, kids fighting in the back, all streaming back to reclaim their simple lives. He hiked up Newman Avenue past houses he had vandalized and nodded to people getting out of their vehicles and assessing their damage for the first time. Out came the ice chests with water and juice. The men were shaking their heads at smashed roofs. The kids were running for the door while mom tried to keep them back.

Jefferson Highway had previously been the outer boundary of his deserted realm. Now it was jammed with cars. The traffic lights still weren’t working, so the scene was a little tense. Many of those behind the wheel had been inching along at ten miles an hour all the way from Baton Rouge or wherever they had been jammed in with family or in-laws, or in motel rooms paid for with maxed-out credit cards, and they were beyond ready to get home. No matter that home might be funky with water or exposed to the weather.

All of the stores and gas stations were boarded up or blown empty as Easter eggs, and Bonner wondered if he might have made his move too quickly. It was all very noisy. He felt a little dizzy. This land looked too barren to support him. He successfully crossed three crowded inbound lanes of cars and trucks and sat down on the curb for a few minutes, considering his next step.

He was in front of a gas station. Its canopy had fallen down and knocked over the pumps. He took a package of hard candies out of his pack and ate a few, enjoying the cherry-red ones best, while he watched the cars bump along. He noticed a man working his way down the grassy median between the two halves of the roadway, sticking signs into the ground. They were small, chessboard-sized, affixed onto wire stands, and the man was putting one in about every ten feet. He had a big stack of them, and he had to keep going back to his car for more.

The signs said, house gutting, followed by a telephone number.

Bonner sensed an opportunity and walked over to see what the man was doing. “You need any help, mister?” he asked.

The man was middle-aged, with a large belly, a big mustache, and hair parted down the middle. He straightened up.

“You want to gut houses?” he asked.

“What’s that mean?” Bonner was curious.

“That’s what you call stripping out all the stuff that got wet. The moldy sheetrock, the furniture, the floors, whatever got flooded.”

“What’s it pay?” Bonner asked.

“Six fifty an hour, all cash,” the man told him, ready to haggle for more.