Tony Dunbar - Tubby Dubonnet 07 - Tubby Meets Katrina (17 page)

The sky began to brighten. Tubby held that thought, watching the sun come up over the stubble of his trees. Christine and Gastro, after he had got his nose splinted at Touro Hospital, came to stay with him for a few days to recuperate. Camp Dubonnet now had electricity, water, and gas, and was starting to seem like a real home again.

“This is a really nice place you got, Mr. Dubonnet,” Gastro told him while they were cleaning the breakfast dishes together. Tubby had fixed a big cheese omelet for everybody, and now Christine was upstairs showering and getting dressed.

Using a brick on Bonner Rivette might have restored something in her. She did not avoid your eyes anymore when she spoke to you. She talked confidently about the forthcoming semester at Tulane. She had found some old jogging shoes from high school and taken them out for a run.

“Yeah, I guess things are getting better, Gastro. A little bit better each day.”

“That’s what Steve’s folks say down in the country. Except they don’t have jobs.”

“I don’t actually have a job, either. That’s still a problem.”

“Don’t you have clients? I mean, you’re a lawyer, right?” Gastro couldn’t believe that a lawyer would ever encounter any real hardships in life.

“I had clients, buddy, but I don’t know where most of them are. A lot of their houses got flooded, and I’m sure they’re spread out all over the country. Some of them have probably found something better than they had here. They’d be smart not to come back.” And truth was, Tubby wasn’t really sure that he still wanted to be a lawyer.

“You mean that? Why wouldn’t they come back? New Orleans is a great place to live. It’s pretty. It’s very interesting.”

“I didn’t know you had those kinds of ideas Sid, I mean Gastro. You think it’s pretty? Hey, you lived in the gutter, right?”

“Close,” Gastro said. “But I’ve been noticing the scenery lately. And the people around here aren’t so bad.”

“Maybe it’s that post-hurricane friendliness,” but Tubby knew that wasn’t true. People in New Orleans had always called you “honey” and “darling” even if you were just buying a loaf of bread.

Since the phones were working pretty well now, he called Hope.

She answered, and he liked hearing her voice.

“Uh,” he paused, then charged ahead. “I thought you might want to come over for dinner tonight,” he said.

“Well, maybe.”

“I’ve got Gastro and Steve Oubre here, and Christine’s here, and if you came it would be kind of like a reunion.”

“All the refugees in town at once.”

“Not all. That would be way too many to feed. But I’ve got a sack of oysters.”

“Yuck. From the Gulf? After the hurricane? No way?”

He was a little bit disappointed, but he had anticipated this eventuality.

“I’ve also got a couple of pounds of smoked sausage I’m gonna toss on the grill.”

“That sounds great for you men. I’ll stop at a store on the way—I think there’s one open on Tchoupitoulas Street—and pick up some chicken breasts.”

“Sure, that’ll be fine.” My favorite, he thought, boneless, skinless white meat. “Come on over.”

It was a nice party, in Tubby’s cleaned-up back yard, decorated with flowers from the Green Parrot nursery which was up and running, on a warm winter evening in the City That Got Forgot. Tubby had decided to toast his suspicious oysters on the grill, and he had Steve with him outside testing them. Everybody else was in the house watching an old Clint Eastwood video. The television worked, but Cox had yet to turn the cable on.

Gastro saw something in Clint he didn’t like and wandered out of the living room. Hope, who had been curious about this “boy-in-black” who kept a journal, gave him a minute or two and then followed. He was at the dining room table scratching away in a little notebook.

“What are you writing?” she interrupted.

The pen shot from his fingers and hit the floor. The notebook went into his shirt.

“I guess it’s a diary,” he said.

“And diaries are private.”

Gastro nodded.

Hope sat down.

“Not all diaries are,” she said. “A great many people’s diaries have been published. Sometimes you might as well call them journals. Have you ever heard of the
Journals of Lewis and Clark
?”

Gastro admitted he had not.

“Really. They’re famous around here because one of our local professors wrote about them, and of course they were exploring the Louisiana Purchase.”

“I’ve heard of that,” Gastro said. He ran his fingers nervously through his black hair.

“I’d like to read something of yours. You know, see if it’s any good. I’m a teacher and I can’t help being curious.”

“It’s mostly about the hurricane and the people I’ve met.”

“We’re all in that together, aren’t we honey. Anyway…”

“Okay,” he said eagerly, “there’s something I wouldn’t care if you read.”

“Yes?”

Gastro retrieved his book and flipped through the pages.

“It’s a poem,” he explained, and shoved the bent and weather-worn pad across the cherry-wood table.

I am warm and I am growing strong

For your arms I am wrong.

I am free, it’s meant to be

Hot sea

Hot sea coming into me

Alive and strong with jade water

The blue sky empty of all but me

Swirling, whirling, wetter, how much faster can I go?

Thunderbolts hurled in all directions

Bring the waves up to perfection

Land and sea make our connection

I feel like I’m getting a big…

“That’s as far as you wrote?” she asked. “I think you’ve been around nothing but men for too long.”

“Yes, ma’am, but I’m going to change the ending.”

“To what?”

“I’m a really big creation?” he improvised.

“It shows great promise,” she told him.

Christine wandered out in the yard. Steve had dragged a bucket of oysters over to a faucet beside the house and was washing them off.

Tubby was beside the warm grill.

“Everything all right?” she asked to start the conversation.

“Going great. Do you want to try an oyster?”

“Maybe just one,” she said, and her father handed her a nice toasty, craggy shell.

“It’s already opened by the heat,” he said. “You can just pry it apart with your fingers.”

“I know how to eat a grilled oyster, Daddy,” she said. And in fact she split it open expertly and sucked out the steamed morsel within with a fine slurp. He watched admiringly.

“Ummm. Not bad,” she said.

“We got lots,” he told her. “I forgot you knew how to do that.”

“You showed me years ago. We had a barbecue with the Fraparoules.”

“I forgot about that. I’m such an old man I think I’ve lost track of some of the things we did together.”

“You’re not that old, Daddy.”

Sure he was. Forty-something was old.

“How did you get to be so strong?” he blurted out.

She blushed, but he couldn’t see it.

“I’m not so strong,” she laughed.

“Sure you are. You went through this whole thing with that madman who kept saying his name was Katrina, and he hurt you, which makes me start to cry, and you haven’t complained about it or blamed me for it…”

“Why would I blame you for it?” she exclaimed.

“Because he used me to get you. You were coming to try to save me.”

“You’d do the same for any of us.”

“Sure I would, but you’re just a kid. How’d you get to be so smart that you could talk your way and fight your way out of everything he did to you, and you’re still upbeat about life?”

“Daddy, I wasn’t so smart or so strong, and in a way I felt sorry for Bonner.”

“Get over that, please,” Tubby objected.

“Maybe he could have been helped.”

Tubby exploded. “If that man wanted help, he sure picked the wrong time to come to New Orleans!”

“I guess,” she said. “I have thought about this a lot, and smashing Bonner on the head did make me feel a lot better personally.”

“I would think so,” Tubby agreed.

“I’m learning not to let things get me so far down I can’t get back up again.” Christine said. “A lot of it is just your attitude.”

“How did you learn that?” he wanted to know.

“From you, I think. You never got too low, even when you and mom got divorced. And you took me to those jazz funerals, don’t you remember?”

“I guess I did,” he said, bringing back pictures from a decade before. He remembered taking his other daughters to those. Now he remembered Christine.

“That’s the spirit of New Orleans, isn’t it? To dance away death. To carry on with joy in the face of despair.”

“Whoa, baby,” Tubby exhaled.

“So I think I got a lot of my survival instincts from you.”

Hope found them out there, staring at each other. Her arrival broke the spell. Christine went off to wash her hands, and Tubby had to mop his eyes with a paper towel.

“I guess I interrupted you,” she said.

“Families, wow,” was all he could say.

“It looks like you’ve got yours together, and some new members named Gastro and Steve.”

“I don’t know what to do with them all. Listen, I know I was kind of in a deep pit when I saw you the last time. I understand now why you moved out.”

She laughed. “I moved out because I had to get back to my own life, but, yes, it wasn’t easy to be around you.”

“Maybe I’ll be better. It’s just that this whole city is such a damned wreck.”

“You’ve made your own home come back. That’s all anybody can do.”

“But so many people aren’t able to do that.”

“That’s true, but we’ve all got to play the hand we’re dealt. And if we can get the politics straightened out around here, we can help everybody return home.”

“That all sounds extremely pie-in-the-sky,” he said, not convinced.

“That’s the only way you can be. I’m already thinking about parading in Muses again at Mardi Gras this year.”

“Do you think they’ll have Mardi Gras?” Tubby asked, brightening. “I’m already regretting every parade I ever missed back in the old times.”

“Sure we’ll have Mardi Gas. We have to parade in New Orleans. It’s what we do. It’s our triumph over poverty and pain.”

“Really?”

“I read that in a book,” she said.

He took some deep breaths of cool fragrant air.

“It’s a nice winter,” he said.

“It’s about the most pleasant I can remember,” Hope agreed. “Maybe it has something to do with the hurricane.”

“Everything does. I probably could have got him off.”

“What?”

“Rivette. If I’d been his lawyer. Despite all he did. I probably could have got him off.”

“If you’re interested in new cases, I heard about one,” Steve said, toweling off the grill for the chicken.

“Yeah, what’s that?” Tubby asked. He wasn’t much interested in handling somebody’s dispute with his landlord or his insurance company.

“While I was hanging with Gastro we took a walk and met a guy I know. He’s a black guy and he lives by where the levee broke and flooded all the neighborhoods in our part of Plaquemines Parish.”

“Okay.”

“He said it wasn’t just an act of nature, or anything. He called it a curse.”

“Great.”

“But what really caused the levee to break, he said, was the government built it over an old graveyard, so you know, like, the soil was weak and gave way.”

“The Corps of Engineers put a levee on top of a cemetery?”

“Uh, huh. Years ago. And some of the big wheels down in the parish stole the land from these black people I’m talking about and sold it to the government. They even bulldozed a church.”

“And the soil was weak, and the levee gave way and hundreds of homes got flooded?”

“That’s what he said happened.”

“And some local people got rich off the deal?”

“I don’t know that many details.”

“Can you find the man who told you that?”

“I guess I can easy. His name is Mister Plauche, and he lives right by my auntie’s.”

Tubby contemplated a budding dogwood tree, fooled into thinking it was spring. There was a sudsy beer mug in his hand.

“So that could be a good case, right, Mr. Dubonnet?”

Tubby felt the gray fog lifting, blowing away.

He got a call late that night, after everyone had turned in, from his pal Raisin Partlow, still stuck in Bolivia.

“The whole group’s okay, man? You getting it all back together?”

“Yes. Everybody’s safe and accounted for,” Tubby said. But then it occurred to him, he didn’t know where Cherrylynn was.

“How’s it going in New Orleans these days?”

“Not too bad. Katrina’s gone. You ought to come back home.”

“Has life sort of returned to normal?” The music in the background was salsa. Raisin was at the Russian bar, in Santa Cruz.

“After what we’ve been through, my friend, I don’t ever want things to return to normal.” Tubby said. “I don’t expect a prize, but I think we deserve everything to be a whole lot better than it ever was before.”

I can never repay the dear friends and total strangers who helped my family during our exodus from the storm, a journey of many weeks across several states. Those who fed, housed and schooled us, and offered good cheer when we needed it most, are too numerous to mention, yet, an attempt: Special thanks to the Mississippians, Linda and Michael Raff, David and Whit Waide, Claiborne and Marian Barksdale, Lisa and Richard Howorth, and Mary Hartwell and Beckett Howorth; and to the Tennesseans, Mary Grey James, Don and Alice Schwartz, Ann and John Egerton, Donna and Webb Campbell, Karla and Andy Griffin, Rebecca and Joe Ingle, and “Miss (Camille) Gift.” Without the long-term hospitality of Will Robinson and Elizabeth and Jack Wallace, I have no idea what we would have done. They gave us the happy memories of our life on the road.

New Orleans-based attorney and writer Tony Dunbar is the Lillian Smith Book Award-winning author of books about Mississippi, Appalachia, migrant workers, and the Southern labor movement as well as the acclaimed Tubby Dubonnet mystery series.

To learn more about Tony Dunbar and
Tubby Meets Katrina
, visit
www.newsouthbooks.com/tubbymeetskatrina
.