Craig and Alice both reached for the knob at the same time; Craig got there first and turned it off. For the kids’ benefit, he said, “They say that every time. Hey, who wants to go to the bookstore in Oxford?”
“I do!” Annie said.
“Good!” Craig said. “We’re there. And we’ll have breakfast at Proud Larry’s.”
“Yay!”
Craig pulled out his cell phone and tried Bobby’s number, got a “circuits busy” message, hit “end” and then immediately hit redial and the phone started ringing. After a ring and a half, Bobby’s voice came through the phone, saying, “Ranger Rick.”
“Where you at, Daddy-o?”
“Living the high life at Pam and Mike’s in Baton Rouge. Where you at?”
“We’re doing the big slog trying to get to the causeway. It took us like an hour and a half and we’re just past Bucktown.”
“Shit. Where are you going? Oxford?”
“That’s the plan.”
“Wait a second; Jen wants to say something to you.”
This was good. As long as Craig had the lifeline to his friends, he knew he could maintain. The shallow banter was the signal that things were still normal. He glanced quickly at Alice, who was looking out the side window, in her own world.
“Hey,” said Jen’s voice, cocky, challenging. “Sorry we’re gonna miss our weekly fuckfest.”
“So Bobby knows about that?”
“He’s been videotaping them from the closet.”
Craig let himself laugh at this; he needed it. He laughed at it more than it deserved.
“Listen,” she said, “if it’s really bad come stay in Baton Rouge. Seriously. We checked with Pam and Mike and they have an extra bedroom.”
“That’s great,” Craig said. “Thanks. Let’s hope we don’t need to be gone that long.”
“Right, but I’m just saying…What…?” she pulled the phone away and Craig heard Bobby’s voice saying something and then Jen laughing. “Bobby says we would have to cut out the Sunday-afternoon ‘appointments’ though.”
“No deal,” Craig said.
“How’s Alice?”
“She’s fine. You want to talk to her?”
“Put her on for a second.”
Craig handed the phone to Alice and continued the slow, stop-and-barely-go progress driving. Now that the phone wasn’t in his ear he looked out the windshield at the sky, which was overcast. There was no breeze, apparently. Not quite an hour later, just before noon, they had moved the next half mile it took to put their front wheels on the causeway that would take them across Lake Pontchartrain and out of New Orleans.
Wesley never showed up at SJ’s house that morning. SJ thought to take a break from securing his house to go to Joe Brown park and see if he could find Wesley playing his Sunday-morning football game, but there wasn’t enough time.
As the exodus went on, those who had stayed in the city prepared, knowing that they were in for a long night at the least. The block was a little quieter than usual, but it was never crazy on a Sunday morning to begin with. SJ drove to Lucy’s house on Tennessee Street to put up plywood. He let himself in the front door, assuming that his sister would still be asleep in her back room. To his surprise, he heard movement from the rear of the house, the kitchen, and he walked in, announcing himself in advance so as not to scare her. She was standing at the stove in a housedress, wearing a hairnet and pushing some scrambled eggs around in a skillet with a spatula.
“Samuel, hand me that Crystal sauce from over by the toaster,” she said, as if in greeting. “There’s more if you want me to put you on some.”
Wordlessly, SJ handed his sister the small bottle and walked to the refrigerator to pull out the egg carton.
“I know you wondering, Samuel,” Lucy said. “Wesley by his friend’s house in Gentilly. He didn’t want to tell you, but I’ll tell you. So you don’t need to be worrying. I think he worried about this other boy Chantrell been seeing and just trying to stay back some, see what’s happening.”
“Why didn’t he tell me himself?” SJ said, feeling the anger rising. “Why did he have to tell me he would help me this morning, be at your house, and then he’s someplace else?”
Lucy stood at the stove, quiet for a moment, poking at the eggs with the spatula, thinking. “You set a hard example sometime, SJ.”
“What is that supposed to mean?” SJ said.
Now Lucy looked at him, frowning. “I mean you got a way that you go that you think is right.” She paused and looked at him.
“What’s wrong with that? Somebody got to keep things together.”
“Sometimes shit can be too damn together. Like it don’t give anybody any room to…to make a mistake or nothing. That boy look up to you—who the fuck else he got to look up to Samuel?”
“Then why does he…”
“Don’t talk now,” she said. “Ain’t a motherfuckin’ answer for everything. He doesn’t want to look bad, you understand? To you, I’m saying. He don’t want to look bad to you. We adults, or trying to be…”
“Better be,” SJ offered.
“…and we know when you try and avoid some shit it catch up with you. Wesley still finding that out. It not like he making mistakes out of trying to fuck over somebody, Samuel. He don’t know if he can be who he thinks he supposed to be. Or who you want him to be. Fuck,” she said, turning the gas burner off quickly and scraping at the eggs, which were smoking in the pan. “Forgot I was cooking.” She eyed the eggs. “They be all right.”
SJ sat quietly, knew his sister was telling the truth. “I knew something was going on. Is this boy threatening him?”
“I don’t think is a threat exactly,” she said. “Get out a couple of plates and knife and fork. I think it just something he’d rather not deal with.”
They got the food into the plates and Lucy set the skillet back on the stove and came back to the small kitchen table and started to eat with her younger brother. As he sat eating, SJ realized that it was one of the rare times that Lucy actually felt to him like the older sister she was. She was thoughtful and present, and he realized that it was, odd as it seemed, a relief to hear her talking to him in the way she had.
They didn’t talk about the question anymore; SJ got the plywood up and Lucy said she would come over in the late afternoon. She wanted to wrap up some things and stash them in closets. When he left he stood out front, looking around, looked at the Industrial Canal levee two blocks away, looked at the neighborhood full of people going about their business. And for just a fleeting minute he had the thought that it might be a good thing that Wesley wasn’t staying there. Then he headed back to his house.
Bootsy came over from across the street and they dragged the large sheets of plywood around front from SJ’s backyard shed, along with his roofers’ ladder. Each window had a special technique for attaching the plywood, depending on how the window was exposed to potential winds and flying objects. A few sheets had been stolen from the back of his truck earlier that year, so he had enough to cover only the most necessary windows. The ones on the side facing downtown and the canal he left open because that side was protected somewhat by Mrs. Gray’s house. They put up the specially fitted ones on the lee side on the second-floor camelback, with hooks that could be disengaged from inside.
Then they went to Bootsy’s and secured his place as well as they could; it was a less complicated job, as it was only one story, low to the ground. When they were finished with Bootsy’s they looked in on Mrs. Gray, who was being picked up in an hour or two by her son, who would take her to the home of some cousins in Laplace. SJ assured her he’d keep an eye on her place. They made a few more rounds and then around one o’clock stopped into Happy Shop over on North Claiborne to get a sandwich. Minh, the owner, was outside, hammering up wood.
“Close at noon,” he said, over his shoulder, at their approach, meaning the store was closed. Then, seeing who it was, he nodded twice to himself, and climbed down, saying, “Mista Jay, you leave?”
“Nothing to leave for, Minh. Can we get a sandwich?”
Shaking his head, Minh preceded them into the darkened store, muttering to himself in Vietnamese. “All we got ham sandwich rye bread. Cooler shut down.”
“Put some mustard on mine, Minh,” Bootsy said. “Brown mustard if you got it. Where you stay at for the storm?”
“Only French yellow mustard. We stay cousin Westbank,” Minh said.
When they had their sandwiches, Minh said he would put it on account, he had to hurry, and SJ and Bootsy thanked him and walked down the street together, enjoying their sandwiches.
“I love a goddamn ham sandwich, J,” Bootsy said. “Only thing I like better be a liver cheese sandwich, and a Big Shot pineapple soda. I wish they had the brown mustard though.”
They walked along, slowly, the occasional car passing on North Claiborne. They talked some about the Saints game Friday night, about this and that.
“Lucy staying by you?” Bootsy asked.
“Yes,” SJ said. “I put up wood by her house earlier.”
“Man, you were here for Betsy?”
“I rescued people in a boat with my daddy.”
“Mmmh,” Bootsy said. “We was in Kenner. Of course, being significantly”—he took pains to articulate the word despite the sandwich still in his mouth—“younger than you, I have less memory of those days.” There was a two-year age difference in Bootsy’s favor, which was a reliable source of pleasure for Bootsy when things got slow.
Poker-faced, nodding slightly, SJ replied, “And it is impressive how you managed to put on so much more weight than I have in such a limited time.”
“Look here, I still got my hair.”
“Gray as it is.”
They walked along North Claiborne, laughing occasionally, until they had finished the sandwiches and thrown the wrapping paper away in a garbage can at the corner of Reynes Street. They walked the neighborhood streets, through all the memories, which did not need to be spoken of because they were in them. The day was starting to cloud over just a bit.
Around three in the afternoon Lucy came over to SJ’s house and they watched the television some. SJ made calls to his crew members and a few other people to make sure they were okay, told them to come by his house if they lost electricity. Around six o’clock SJ fried up some fish and he and Lucy got ready for the weather to roll in.
It took the Donaldsons ten hours to reach Jackson, Mississippi, ordinarily less than a three-hour drive and less than half the way to Oxford. Cars broke down along the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway every half mile, it seemed, and traffic would need to merge and squeeze into one lane or another to get around them. At one point, traffic stopped completely for twenty-five minutes. Midway through the four-hour ride across the lake toward Mandeville, with all the stopping and go
ing, Malcolm threw up in the backseat. The vomit smelled of soured milk and rotten vegetables, and the smell filled the car and Craig began to retch but fought the reflex back. They crawled along, when they were able to move, at five to ten miles an hour in the bilious heat, with all the windows open, Alice and Craig arguing about what to do. Alice reached back to clean Malcolm’s face and hands with some of the wet wipes she had brought, but they were no match for the magnitude of the problem. Craig refused to pull over, saying that the cops needed the breakdown lane clear to get past and handle the accidents and breakdowns, and besides, what were they going to do, just wipe out the seat and leave the wipes out there in a pile on the road? They needed to get across the lake, and he would not stop.
When they finally made it across the causeway and put their front tires on solid ground again, they stopped along with hundreds of other evacuees at the first service station and waited on line for twenty minutes to use the clogged, fouled toilets. The attendant had given up refilling the paper towel dispenser and had left a few dozen banded bunches of paper towels there, many of which, used, littered the floor like piles of soggy leaves around the overflowing wastebaskets; you had to kick them aside to walk to the one toilet or one urinal in the men’s room. Craig tore open one of the paper bands and took three handfuls of the fresh ones, wet half of those with water from the faucet, and did his best to clean the backseat and get Malcolm clean. He got a couple of long looks as he came out of the restroom with all the towels, and he had been on the verge of asking one man what the fuck he was staring at, but he resisted the impulse.
After half an hour they headed out again, and it was clear before long that they would not be spending that night in Oxford. The smaller roads they had to take through Mandeville and Covington to get eventually to I-55 were squeezed to stoppage like capillaries by edema, circulation choked, apoplexy on the near horizon. The Donaldsons spent hours in stopped traffic on small tree-shaded roads,
single file, and then in go-five-feet-and-then-stop traffic, and then go-twenty-feet-and-then-stop traffic, and then traffic halted completely for ten minutes because of a car with a dead radiator blocking both lanes, then only one lane, and finally on I-55 north of McComb the traffic a steady twenty-five miles an hour until another accident halted things completely for twenty minutes.
Pine barrens of Louisiana and southern Mississippi for hours, nothing to be seen but the endless line of red taillights stretching off into the afternoon as the light slowly drained from the sky. Craig and Alice agreed that they would not try for Oxford and would spend the night in Jackson, assuming they could find a place to stay. Oxford was another three hours past Jackson, even with no traffic, and they had no steam left; they were exhausted.
At 7:30 p.m., ten hours after they had set out, the Donaldsons followed the curve of I-55 into Jackson, took the first exit possible, and drove around Jackson’s streets for fifteen minutes, twenty minutes, until they hit an arterial road that they followed north, hoping and praying to find some kind of small hotel that had been overlooked in the rush. Finally they topped a rise in the road and, from a distance, saw a sight that almost made them weep with gratitude, the bright lights of the Best Host Inn, nationwide beacon of comfort from coast to coast, with its familiar logo in pulsing neon out front, power, solidity, warmth, light…
“What do we do if there are no rooms?” Craig said, thinking out loud.