Wading Home: A Novel of New Orleans (20 page)

He smiled, remembering.
Someday you’re gonna appreciate this place, son. I hope it ain’t too late when you do.

Velmyra sat down on a patch of grass at the water’s edge and drew her knees to her chest.

“Daddy tried to get me to fish, but all I wanted to do was get back to town. Play my horn.” Julian exhaled a slow breath. He removed the mouthpiece and placed it against his lips, buzzed softly through it.

He lifted his chin to the moonlit sky, closed his eyes. Then opened them and looked at her. “I got a feeling he tried to get here,’cause that’s what he would do. But he just didn’t make it.”

Velmyra looked down at her bare feet. “Maybe you’re right.”

“You know, even if Daddy had made it, I’d almost hate to see him now. I don’t think I could stand to tell him what happened to this place. Crazy, I know.”

“I don’t blame you. Next to you, this place was the most important thing in his life.”

“I feel like it’s my fault.”

“No. Don’t even go there.”

Julian opened the spit valve of his trumpet and let the condensation run onto the ground. He lifted the horn again and played a long, slow, loose-lipped note at the bottom of his range, then let the tail of the sound disappear into the trees. He sat down on the wet grass next to Velmyra.

“I didn’t love the place like he did—he knew that—but at least I could have been on top of the legal stuff. I could have gotten him to get a lawyer so something like this wouldn’t have to happen.”

Velmyra put a hand on his shoulder. “Stop it. Stop being so hard on yourself. You couldn’t know. Maybe things happen...”

She stopped, but he knew where she was going.
Maybe things happened the way they did for a reason.
If Silver Creek was fated to fall into strangers’ hands, maybe it was best that Simon wasn’t around to see it.

He reached an arm around her.

“Thank you, for coming with me,” he said, and bit back the urge to say,
What happened to us?
Since the night he’d first seen her at Sylvia’s, he’d been thinking about the way they’d been before. Sure, there’d been a storm or two in their time together—that was normal—but even their roughest tempests had calmed after heart-to-hearts over red wine, misty-eyed apologies, and nights of make-up passion. He remembered earlier, the heat of her hand on his back as his body convulsed with grief, and thought to himself that only a fool would have let this woman get away. He’d been that fool, for sure. Some way, he had blown it. If only he could remember how.

In the far corner of the sky, he thought he saw a glimmer of the new day, but realized it was just the moon’s lingering light. He looked down at his hands, fingered a chromatic scale on the valves. Finally, looking at her profile, he said, “I hate we couldn’t make it work. I just don’t know what happened.”

A quizzical light filled her eyes as she looked at him, then turned away. “There were reasons.”

“Like?”

She examined a hangnail on her index finger. “We were…different, you and me. We were headed different places, had different dreams. Sometimes, things just don’t work.”

In his recollection, the differences between them had best played out one evening in May. They hadn’t been together long when he and Velmyra were window shopping at the Riverwalk shops and ran into Mr. Martrel, his old junior high school band teacher. Sporting his favorite red plaid jacket and too-long 60s Afro, Mr. Martrel was a well-known local pianist, on his way to a gig at one of the local courtyard cafés in the French Quarter.

Julian hadn’t seen this man who’d most inspired him—one of the main reasons he’d become a musician—since he’d retired years before. Martrel’s slumped shoulders and graying hair contrasted sharply with Julian’s memory of the youthful teacher sprinting across the field and yelling orders to the marching band. Over the years, the stressful classroom days and jazz club nights that found his arthritic back hunched over an upright piano had clearly taken their toll.

Still, Mr. Martrel wore his usual jovial smile and acted as if life could not be better. His smile stretched even wider when Julian introduced Velmyra. He put an arm around them both.
Come on over to the café, and I’ll buy your pretty young lady a drink!
Martrel’s youthful eyes gleamed. While Velmyra sat crossed-legged at the bar sipping a potent peach daiquiri, Julian and Martrel cranked out one upbeat standard after another—“Cherokee,” “Caravan,” “Donna Lee,” “Salt Peanuts
.
” With lightning-quick fingers and an equally quick mind that still blazed at full power, Martrel had not lost a step—the ivory keys still dipped beneath his genius touch like magic, flooding cascades of sound from the wooden upright. At the end, the dozen or so customers were on their feet cheering.

Julian and his teacher hugged when they’d finished, and when he and Velmyra walked to the streetcar stop, Velmyra was still clearly under the older musician’s spell.

“He’s an amazing player.” Her eyes sparkled with excitement. “Unbelievable.”

“Yeah.” Julian grabbed her hand as they crossed the street. “Folks oughta be bustin’ down doors to hear him play. What a waste.”

Velmyra’s eyes narrowed as she pulled her hand back. “A waste? How was it a waste to do what you loved and were good at?” Julian stuttered, backpedaling. He’d planned a quiet dinner for two at his place featuring homemade lasagna and a pricey Valpolicella. This was no way to start the evening.

He had gone on to explain that when Martrel was young he had unwisely forfeited a shot at real success; turning down offers that could have paved a path to wealth, he’d decided to stay in New Orleans. She’d flinched, cut him a look. “But then where would you be?” she threw back at him. They had gone around and around—about the city and its limited opportunities for so many brilliant artists, the merits of nurturing talent and of preserving culture, the selfless passion of the teacher versus the ambition of the performer, and so on, until finally, picking over her Caesar salad, she let drop a revelation that pumped a rush of blood to his face.

How was he supposed to know she’d recently turned down an offer to work in the art department of one of Boston’s top advertising firms, so that she could keep her low-paying teacher’s job in the New Orleans school district? After that, the romantic wine-andcandles evening that Julian had staged descended into strained, sparse conversation with gaps of silence as wide and dark as the Mississippi. But the message was clear to both of them: as much as Julian loved the city, he was not about to wind up in a café in the French Quarter when he was sixty, playing for scale and tips.

Had that been the beginning of the end? He’d found a way to calm the waters stirred by that unfortunate misstep, cajole his way back into her good graces. But they’d never had that discussion again.

Velmyra looked up from the creek to the starry sky. She turned to him, an uneasiness dimming her eyes.

“Julian, there is something I want to tell you. About why I got married so soon after we broke up.”

Now he turned away. “Not important. Old business.”

“Well…”

He got up and dusted off his jeans.

“Let’s go back.” Whatever she had to say about her marriage, he didn’t think he could hear it. Not now, and possibly never. He reached for her hand and helped her up, turning his thoughts back to the land, his father, the things presently at hand.

A southward breeze from the creek cooled the air as they walked toward the cabin. For tomorrow, his to-do list seemed endless: call the California Fortiers, meet with the insurance agent about the New Orleans house, check in with his house sitter in New York, pay bills (as many as he could), and meet again with Kevin to discuss the legalities of fighting for the Silver Creek land. He’d promised to call the guys in the band, who he hadn’t talked to since Tokyo, to let them know what was going on. And even though he was no longer hopeful about Simon’s survival, he had to find out what happened to him. Had he struggled, suffered? Had anyone tried to help him? He needed to know.

But now, the desperate urgency had passed; the tears had calmed him, ushered in resignation, acceptance. Simon was gone. But he had Vel with him, and was suddenly aware of the difference one person—the right person—could make when the rest of your life was as off-course as a storm-tumbled boat at sea.

As they neared the house, Julian stopped, reached for Velmyra and pulled her into his chest. Her face was moist, cool. The tender, soft kiss was as natural as breathing, without awkwardness or effort.

“I’m just now figuring out something.” He leaned his cheek against her forehead.

“What’s that?”

“How much I missed you all this time.”

The quiet of the creek gave way to the faint crowing of a rooster somewhere in the distance. He reached again for her hand, and as soon as they had walked up the steps to the porch, the
pop, pop, pop
of gunshots, each one closer than the one before, fired in the night.

T
he door to 291 on the East Wing was half closed, but the young, Latina nurse heard the groan of the electronic equipment, the rhythm of the heart monitor, and the hum of the oxygen machine before she’d entered. An IV bag hung next to his bed, feeding him through the one bulbous vein in his bony left hand, while his right hand lay across his chest as if he were pledging allegiance to an unseen flag. His thin face was a parched landscape of patchy white stubble. His eyebrows arched upward in a nuanced frown and his dry lips gapped slightly, as if he were organizing his thoughts to begin a speech of major importance.

“Hello, mister, how you doing today?” the young nurse whispered as she leaned toward the old man’s ear. She smiled, patted his hand, then looked at the chart at the foot of his bed and checked his numbers. His blood pressure, though still high, was down considerably, and his oxygen saturation oscillated from soso to fairly good, but from what she could tell, he still hadn’t had a moment of true consciousness. Clearly, he wasn’t in the best shape, but something about him told her this one was a fighter, unlike so many of the John Does that drift into the emergency room of Mercy.

She’d been there the day they brought him in, took one look at him, and said, “He’ll never make it.” She’d asked about him and learned he’d been found a mile from the hospital, passed out on a bench near the access road to the highway that led into town. A middle-aged white couple, sixties hippie types, had pulled their van over onto the shoulder. Seeing he was still breathing, they hauled him into the back seat of their van and made tracks to the emergency room.

So many stories like that since the flood—people wandering away from torn lives like nomads in search of terra firma, some dry plot of earth not threatened by broken levees and rising water. When he had been placed in a room on Two East, though he wasn’t her patient, she’d still gone in to check on him. His face, weathered and rough from what must have been an extreme ordeal, still possessed an angelic calm, and his chest rose and fell ever so slightly with each faint, steady breath.
Somebody’s looking for him,
she’d thought. This man was no vagrant. She’d imagined him in a dining room full of laughter, sitting at the head of a Thanksgiving table, great-grands bouncing on his knee.

No one else was there, so in a moment of impulse, she had squeezed his hand.

His fingers were callused, steel-wool rough and dry. “Squeeze back.” She’d whispered. “Tell me you hear me.”

She knew it was harder for the ones like this, the ones with no family present, no memory-triggering voices to remind them of blood bonds and guide them through the wilderness of their barren minds.

She’d said it over and over again—
Squeeze my hand, tell me you hear me
—and kept clenching his hand, even through part of her lunch break. After fifteen or twenty minutes, she was about to give up when she felt a tiny, feeble pressing into her palm.

“Dios mio,”
she had whispered. “Do it again! Do it one more time.”

She’d needed to know that it wasn’t just her imagination, it had really happened. But the next time she’d gotten nothing. She’d told the nurse supervisor, who’d also tried, and gotten nothing.

“Well, he might be in there somewhere.” The nurse supervisor had released his hand and shaken her head. “But if he is, he’s still got a long road ahead. He’s so thin. And besides his blood pressure getting a little better, he’s not showing us much.”

That had been weeks ago. The young nurse was barely in her twenties—new to the routine—but had seen enough to know his chances were not good; his age worked against him and her supervisor had been right. His breathing, though steady, was shallow. At first figuring him to be in his late sixties, the young nurse remembered the jokes of her black girlfriends in nursing school whose racial bragging rights included phrases like “black don’t crack,” referring to the age-defying complexions of African Americans. She had a feeling he could be older than he looked.

Now, she looked up to see a round-figured, chubby-faced black nurse, her thick braids piled atop her head like a swirl of soft-serve ice cream, enter the room. They exchanged silent smiles.

“He a friend of yours?” The black nurse reached up to replace his IV bag.

“No.” The young R.N. shook her head. “I just saw him when they brought him in.”

“Well, he belongs in ICU, except with the flood and everything there’s no beds down there,” the black nurse said. “Somebody said they thought this one walked all the way from New Orleans or somewhere down there. In this heat, can you believe it? But I guess you do what you gotta do, you know?”

“Do they still not know who he is?”

“No. Nobody’s even called about him. So many folks missing down that way, and a lot of folks don’t even know where to look. He didn’t have any ID on him. All he had was an old Bible.”

“May I see it?”

“I don’t know what they did with it. Check the drawer on the night stand over there.”

The young R.N. walked to the side of the bed near the large window and opened the drawer to the oak night table. The Gideon Bible? Surely she couldn’t have meant that. She placed it aside and kept looking. Housekeeping had apparently washed his clothes; a neatly folded shirt of bright red flannel, a sleeveless undershirt, and a pair of khaki pants lay beneath the Gideon Bible.
Odd that he would have worn a long-sleeve shirt in such heat
. She ran her fingers along the smooth cotton of the red shirt; it was thick, not at all the weight for these humid summer months. Maybe he’d grabbed something to wear that would make him most visible, attract the attention of passers-by. Or perhaps he was thinking of protecting his arms from the blazing sun.