Zeitoun (16 page)

The pastor and Beulah had waited out the storm but had now exhausted their supply of food and water. Zeitoun had never seen them look so weary.

“It’s time to go,” Alvin said.

*    *    *

Given the rain and the wind, it was impossible to try to evacuate them in the canoe. Zeitoun told them he would find help.

He paddled up Claiborne, the wind and rain fighting him, to the Memorial Medical Center, where he knew there were police and National Guard soldiers stationed. As he approached, he saw soldiers in the alleyway, on the roof, on the ramps and balconies. It looked like a heavily fortified military base. When he got close enough to see the faces of the soldiers, two of them raised their guns.

“Don’t come any closer!” they ordered.

Zeitoun slowed his canoe. The wind picked up. It was impossible to stay in one place, and making himself heard was difficult.

“I’m just looking for help,” Zeitoun yelled.

One of the soldiers lowered his gun. The other kept his trained on Zeitoun.

“We can’t help you,” he said. “Go to St. Charles.”

Zeitoun assumed the soldier hadn’t heard him correctly. The wind was turning his canoe around, veiling his words. “There’s an old couple down the road that needs to be evacuated,” he clarified, louder this time.

“Not our problem,” the soldier said. “Go to St. Charles.”

Now both guns were lowered.

“Why not call somebody?” Zeitoun asked. Did the soldier really mean that Zeitoun should paddle all the way to the intersection of Napoleon and St. Charles when the soldier could simply call another unit on his walkie-talkie? What were they doing in the city, if not helping evacuate people?

“We can’t call nobody,” the other soldier said.

“How come?” Zeitoun asked. “With all this technology, you can’t call someone?”

Now the soldier, only a few years older than Zeitoun’s son Zachary, seemed afraid. He had no answer, and seemed unsure of what to do next. Finally he turned and walked away. The remaining soldiers stared at Zeitoun, holding their M-16s.

Zeitoun turned his canoe around.

He paddled to the intersection of Napoleon and St. Charles, his shoulders aching. The wind was making the work twice as difficult. The water grew shallow as he approached the intersection. He saw tents there, and military vehicles, and a dozen or so police officers and soldiers. He stepped out of his canoe and walked up to a man, a soldier of some kind, standing on the grassy median—New Orleanians called it the
neutral ground
.

“I have a situation,” Zeitoun said. “I have a handicapped man who needs help, medical attention. He needs help now.”

“Okay, we’ll take care of it,” the man said.

“Do you want the address?” Zeitoun asked.

“Yeah, sure, give me that,” the man said, opening a small notebook.

Zeitoun gave him the exact address.

The man wrote it down and put his notebook back in his pocket.

“So you’ll go?” Zeitoun asked.

“Yup,” the man said.

“When?” Zeitoun asked.

“About an hour,” the man said.

“It’s okay. They’re on their way,” Zeitoun said. “They said one hour.”

The pastor and his wife thanked Zeitoun and he returned to the
Claiborne house. He picked up Nasser, and they set out to see what they could do. It was just after one o’clock.

A thousand miles away, Yuko’s husband Ahmaad was driving the Odyssey. Kathy was resting and the kids were in the back as they barreled through New Mexico. Ahmaad had been at the wheel for seven hours without a break. At this pace, they would make it to Phoenix by Saturday afternoon.

Ahmaad discouraged Kathy from listening to any news on the radio, but even on the rock and country stations snippets of information were leaking through: President Bush was visiting New Orleans that day, and had just lamented the loss of Trent Lott’s summer home in coastal Mississippi. Heavily armed National Guardsmen had just entered the Convention Center, and though they had been led to believe their entry would be met with something like guerilla warfare, they had found no resistance whatsoever—only exhausted and hungry people who wanted to leave the city. Kathy took comfort in this, thinking that perhaps the city was coming under control. The military presence, one commentator was saying, “would soon be overwhelming.”

Making their rounds, Zeitoun and Nasser found an abandoned military jeep and in it, a box of meals, ready-to-eat—MREs. Shortly after, they encountered a family of five on an overpass, and gave them some water and the box of MREs. It was a tidy coincidence. Zeitoun didn’t like to carry anything of value at all, and welcomed any opportunity to unload anything he’d found.

It was about five o’clock, the sky darkening, when Zeitoun and Nasser made their way back to the Claiborne house.

Zeitoun was sure that the pastor and his wife would have been rescued by that point, but just to be certain, he and Nasser made a detour and paddled over to Robert Street.

Alvin and Beulah were still there, on the porch, their bags still ready, a light rain still falling on them. They had been waiting for four hours.

Zeitoun was furious. He felt helpless, betrayed. He’d made a promise to the pastor and his wife, and because he had been lied to, his promise had not been kept.

He apologized to the couple, explaining that he had first tried the hospital, where he was sent away at gunpoint, and then gone to St. Charles to tell the soldiers and the relief workers about their plight. The pastor expressed confidence that help was still on its way, but Zeitoun didn’t want to take any chances.

“I’ll figure something out,” he said.

When he and Nasser returned to the Claiborne house, they saw a small motorboat tied to the front porch. Inside the house, they found Todd Gambino sitting inside with a new dog. With the boat—which Todd had seen floating under a ruined garage and figured he would put to use—he’d been making his own rounds around the city, plucking people from porches and rooftops and bringing them to the overpasses and other points of rescue. He’d even found this dog, which was now happily eating food at Todd’s feet, on a roof and had taken him in.

Again Zeitoun felt the presence of some divine hand. The Williamses needed help immediately, help he had not been able to provide, and here was Todd, with precisely the vehicle they needed, at precisely the right moment.

Todd did not hesitate. Zeitoun agreed to care for the dog while he was gone, and Todd was off. He picked up Alvin and Beulah, cradling
them one by one into the motorboat. Then he sped off toward the staging ground at Napoleon and St. Charles.

The mission took all of twenty minutes. Soon Todd was back, drinking a beer and relaxing again on the porch, his hand stroking the rescued dog’s matted fur.

“Some things you just have to do yourself,” he said with a smile.

Zeitoun had known Todd to be a good tenant, but he didn’t know this side of him. They talked for a time on the porch, and Todd told him stories of his own rescues—how he’d picked up dozens of people already, how he’d been shuttling them to hospitals and staging grounds, how easy it was with a motorboat. Todd had always been, to Zeitoun’s mind, a bit of a wanderer, something of a playboy. He liked to have a good time, didn’t want to be too tied down with rules and responsibilities. He smoked, he drank, he kept irregular hours. But here he was, his eyes alight, talking about carrying people to safety, how his arrival at any given house or overpass was met with cheers and thanks. A time like this could change a man, Zeitoun knew, and he was happy to see it happening here and now to Todd: a good man made better.

That night Nasser came back with Zeitoun to the house on Dart. They removed the last of the lamb from the freezer and barbecued on the roof, recounting what they had seen and what they had heard. But Nasser was exhausted, and faded quickly. He crawled into the tent and was soon fast asleep.

Again Zeitoun was restless. He was still angry about the pastor and his wife. Nothing upset him more than someone breaking a promise. Who had that man been, at Napoleon and St. Charles, who had said he would send help to the Williams couple? Why had he said he would
come if he did not plan to come? Zeitoun tried to be generous. Perhaps he had been pulled away to another emergency. Perhaps the man had gotten lost along the way. But it was no use. There was no excuse that could suffice. The man had abrogated a simple agreement. He had promised help and he had not kept that promise.

Unable to sleep, Zeitoun went back inside and sat on the floor of Nademah’s room. Her smell, the smell of his girls, was faint now, replaced by rain and the beginnings of mildew. He missed them already. He could not think of more than a few times when he had been apart from them this long. It was always like this: the first day alone afforded a welcome sense of calm and quiet, but slowly the missing would begin. He would miss their voices, their bright dark eyes, the rumble of their feet up and down the stairs, their squeals and constant singing.

He opened one of the photo albums he’d saved and lay down on Nademah’s bed, smelling her strawberry shampoo on the pillowcase. He found a picture from his first year at sea, aboard a ship captained by Ahmad. He marveled at his hair, so much of it then, and such vanity. He was about thirty pounds lighter then, a constant grin on his face, a man tasting the full feast of youth. His brother Ahmad had saved him, had opened to him worlds upon worlds.

Ahmad left home a year after their father’s death, traveling to Turkey to study medicine. This was the presumption in the house, at least. Though Mahmoud had forbidden his sons from pursuing a life on the sea, Ahmad wanted nothing else. So he took a bus to Istanbul, telling his mother that his intention was to become a doctor. And for a while he did study medicine. But soon Ahmad left college and enrolled in a naval officer’s training academy. When his mother learned Ahmad was
to become a ship captain, she was surprised, but did not stand in his way. Two years later, Ahmad had graduated and was crisscrossing the Mediterranean and the Black Sea.

Zeitoun found one of Ahmad’s photos. He had more pictures of Ahmad than he did of himself—it was almost comical how many photos his brother took and kept and distributed to family members. He documented every port, every ship. In this one, he and his crew were grilling something, some kind of animal. Zeitoun stared at it. It looked like a greyhound.
Could it be?
No. Zeitoun hoped it was not a dog. The banner above the men said E
ASTER
1978. In another picture, Ahmad was standing in the middle of downtown New Orleans. When he saw this photo, and so many others of Ahmad standing in front of this city or that monument, Zeitoun always thought of the people Ahmad had asked to take the pictures. Ahmad must have met a thousand people during these trips, chiefly in the pursuit of someone to help him document that
Ahmad Zeitoun, of Jableh, Syria, was here
. Here in Tokyo. Here in America. Here in India.

While Ahmad was seeing every corner of the world in rapid succession, Zeitoun was back home in Jableh, and he wanted out. It was a hollow home, and Zeitoun couldn’t stand it. During the days he worked at his brother Lutfi’s construction-materials store, hearing the stories of Ahmad’s continuing adventures, his trips to China, Australia, South Africa, Holland. Zeitoun knew his father would not have approved when he was alive, but he was gone now, and Mohammed was gone, too. Zeitoun did not want to be stuck in Jableh.

His mother knew his feelings. She had heard him pace back and forth on the second floor, had seen his eyes’ longing look when he talked to Ahmad on the phone. So on her own accord, she called Ahmad one
day and asked him to take his younger brother with him. It was time, she said, for Abdulrahman to leave Jableh and get away, if only for a spell, from their home so full of melancholy.