Wading Home: A Novel of New Orleans (30 page)

Julian knew it had been rough for Kevin in there; at the end of the meeting, his young friend had been visibly shaken by the encounter with his estranged grandfather. He was closemouthed on the way to the creek, but as he reached for a cigarette in his truck’s glove compartment and lit up (Julian didn’t know he smoked), his thin fingers twitched like a palsied old woman’s.

Kevin had pulled two brand-new graphite fishing rods from the bed of his truck and a tackle box full of plastic lures. Within a few minutes they were both sitting on rocks in the breezy shade near the first bend of the creek, Kevin with his shirt off and feet dangling in the water, and Julian, shirt unbuttoned to the breeze, sitting next to him.

They had been there for fifteen minutes, both lines in the water, an occasion zephyr rustling the high grasses, before either one of them mentioned the meeting.

“Well, now, that was something, huh?” Kevin scoffed a little, then looked across the creek as the rippling water lapped against the earthen bank. “Man, I hate him for what he’s putting y’all through.”

Julian said nothing. He was thinking about the last time his father had brought him here to fish. Or try too. It was his twelfth summer, and he’d come here only to humor Simon. To his surprise and his father’s delight, he’d caught a catfish, a huge one big as his arm. “You got Caesar!” Simon beamed, elated, but made him throw it back. “He’s as old as this creek, let him live a while longer.” But for the next few years, Simon bragged about how Julian had snagged “ol Caesar,” his first time out. It was the only fish he’d ever caught in his life.

Kevin stood up, reeled his line in, and cast it further across the water. When he sat back down, he blew out a long puff from his cigarette, his fourth since he’d gotten out of the truck. “You know, my mama’s a Creole woman, and her great-granddaddy was as black as the bottom of this creek at midnight, they tell me.” He paused, as if waiting for Julian to show surprise at his mixed ancestry. Julian nodded thoughtfully, and Kevin went on. “When my daddy took up with her, ol’ Nathan liked to had a fit. Not
his
son, by God. Never said more than two words to her the whole time Daddy and Mama were married. But then Nathan took up with a woman he’d been seeing on the sly, and guess what
she
was.”

Julian’s eyes widened. “A Creole?”

Kevin smirked, nodded. “
Black
and Creole. Ain’t that something? Hypocritical bastard.” He reached into his wallet and pulled out a photograph of a woman, black-eyed with long curly black hair and skin the color of cantaloupe rind. “That’s my mama. She lives in Montana now. Moved there when she married again after Daddy passed.”

“Beautiful lady,” Julian said.

Kevin nodded. “I grew up hating Nathan, the way he treated my daddy and my uncle, and then my mama. The way he’d run off sometimes and leave Daddy and his mama and brother when they were little, then come back the next month like nothin’ happened. He and my daddy hardly ever spoke the last few years of his life, before Daddy’s stroke. But sometimes whenever Nathan’s name came up, I’d see Daddy staring off into space, thinking. I always wanted to ask him what he was thinking about. But I knew.” Kevin picked up a smooth stone and skipped it across the water. It hopped four times before disappearing beneath the surface as Julian watched in awe. He had never gotten a stone to hop more than twice.

Kevin looked at Julian, his brows arched up in the middle of his forehead apologetically. “I have to tell you this. So far, we don’t have much. The truth is, after Prof died, I haven’t had much luck with these cases. I keep tryin’. But when they get this far along…” He let his sentence disappear into the sound of the water.

Julian looked out over the creek. “I know.”

“I was thinking about your cousin, Miss Genevieve? Didn’t she say your great-great granddaddy won Silver Creek on a bluff in a poker game?”

Julian nodded. “Right. That’s what she said.”

“And that your great-granddaddy, what was his name—Moses—that he got the land when his brother had to leave the state after almost getting shot?”

“Right.”

“Well, I hope that poker-face luck runs in the family, ’cause we’re looking at one lousy hand.”

“Yeah,” Julian said, feigning attention, still lost in thought. He was hot and the air was sticky, but the breeze of the oak that cooled his face and billowed the soft cotton of his shirt away from his skin was as pleasing as fine spring rain. And he realized he hadn’t had a headache in two days.

When Julian was in college after his mother died, Simon would take off for Silver Creek after a long week at the restaurant, just for a day or two, to “get his mind right.” He’d always return looking a little younger, Julian remembered, with a little more spring in his step. Now he knew why. As much as his father loved New Orleans, it was a city. And this was a place where a man could open his chest to the sweeping air, look across a field unhemmed by buildings and see a landscape of possibility.

Leaning back, his elbow on the rock, his head resting on his fist, he looked straight up through the leaves of the live oak at the gauzy glare of filtered sun. He closed his eyes to it, stared at the warming orangey glow behind his eyelids. For a moment, he had not a care in the world.

Kevin stood up and found a fist-sized rock to balance his rod while he reached in his pocket for another cigarette.

“Gotta quit this smoking thing before little Suzy, that’s the baby’s name, before she comes.”

Julian sat up and took a drink from one of the beers in the six pack of Bud they’d gotten in Local. He tried to imagine a little girl looking like Kevin.

“So what do we do now?”

Kevin shrugged. He’d spent hours poring over the land dispute cases in Pointe Louree Parish. Not one case had been decided in favor of the plaintiff, the original landowners, in the last three years. For decades, families had lost acres and acres of land, gas, oil, and mineral rights, all through the shenanigans of companies like Nathan’s.

Even the case with the Parette family had quietly gone away, Kevin said. The accident had been officially determined as just that—an accident, despite the second set of tire tracks near the ditch that would have indicated Parette had swerved to avoid a collision. After he died, the family, who lived out of state, had sold the land to Nathan for a song.

“We can buy a little time maybe, but what we need is some kind of a will. I know you said before y’all don’t have one. But it doesn’t have to be anything fancy. Just something written down somewhere saying who the land’s intended for. Judges can be pretty liberal in these kinds of cases.”

He explained that in Louisiana they had something called “olographic” wills. It could be hand written on a napkin for all the judge cared, but if it’s written by the decedent who owned the land, and dated, it could be binding in court.

Julian frowned. Nothing like that existed as far as he knew. Even Genevieve said so. His father hadn’t yet written a will (with only one son, he hadn’t seen the need), and Julian’s grandfather Jacob, as far as he knew, hadn’t either.

Kevin pulled his line in and recast it in deeper water. “Well, like you said, we’ll keep his lawyers busy as long as we can. Maybe something will come up.”

“Maybe so.” Julian had an odd feeling in his gut. It may have been the comforting sun, his easeful mood, but the fleeting assurance that in time, everything would work out as it should, warmed him like a gentle, steadying hand. He looked across the bank of the creek to the groves of pines and poplars and cypresses in the distance as far as his eyes could see.
This could all be mine
, he thought. Then he corrected himself.
Is mine.
And for a brief moment he felt as if the whole thing with Nathan Larouchette had never happened.

“Hey, look!”

Kevin pointed to Julian’s bobber, which bounced in the water while the tug at the line ripped wide shimmying circles across the surface.

“Grab it!”

Julian, who had been leaning back against the rock, jumped up on his feet. He grabbed the rod while the line loosened, the bobber trailed farther out into the water, and the crank of the reel spun. It was a good, solid strike. Not a big fish, but it had an impressive pull.

He let the line go a little slack, then cranked it in tighter to set the hook.

“By God I think you got that sucker!” Kevin stood next to him, grinning. “If I didn’t know better, I’d swear you knew what you were doing.”

He worked with the catch for minutes, reeling it in, letting it run, then reeling again. Stepping down on the bank closer to the water, bare feet tracking the grit of rock and sand, he repeated it over again as sweat beaded on his forehead and his heart raced.

Kevin’s eyes opened wide, gleeful as a child’s. “Damn! The little son of a gun wants to give you a fight.”

Julian bit his bottom lip as the rod bowed with the tension.
I’ve got him hooked. If I can just outlast him, he’s mine.

And then he saw his father’s eyes light up like the blaze of sun that flashed through the live oak leaves above. “Just hold on,” Simon was telling him, as he had before. “He’s already yours, you just gotta fight to keep him.”

Sometimes that’s the hardest thing. Holding on to keep what you’ve got.

With a splash, something broke the surface of the water. Julian slowly reeled in the catch. The line much shorter now, Julian lifted the rod, smiling the way he had when he was twelve, as a catfish, no bigger than his hand but feisty with life, twitched and danced and dangled in the late summer light.

B
y mid October, the city of New Orleans, like a prizefighter pummeled and pressed to the mat, strained to raise its head from an unconscious, near-death state. Its pulse, though faint, was steady, its prognosis in doubt, and even the struggle back to its knees would be long and arduous. Six weeks after the biggest disaster it had ever seen, a stream of residents, armed with faith, hope, and whatever courage they could muster, still flowed in daily to face an uncertain future in the city that had broken their hearts.

But while the city crawled to life, every hour news stations reported stories of struggle and tragedy as the death tally spilled beyond the flooded city’s limits—infirm or elderly citizens, ferried to outposts of safety in distant towns survived the storm and flood, only to die in Houston, or Atlanta, or Dallas or dozens of other places, from lack of critical medicine or some long standing illness worsened by heartbreak. And even some who were healthy when they left perished as their bodies buckled under the shock of tragedy and the load of loss.

But stories of impossible survival and answered prayers softened the hearts of the most hardened cynics: a three-year-old boy, helicoptered out of harm’s way and leaving his tearful father behind, reunited with him after weeks alone and lost in a shelter in Colorado; an unlikely pair—a five-year-old black girl and her white, eighty-nine-year-old wheelchair-bound neighbor—braved three harsh nights on an overpass before being transported to safety, a journey that involved three cities and nearly every known mode of transportation.

For days Julian had poured over these happy-ending stories in the online edition of the
Times-Picayune
in the computer room of the Best Western, still holding on to hope. As much as his mind worked to accept Simon’s death, his heart could not, and would not until he had proof. Each TV news dispatch, radio story or newspaper photo cut line of a happy reunion bubbled in him like a tonic, so he combed the pages one by one, praying to find a story of a seventy-six-year-old black man, maybe wearing a brown straw hat, with or without a big leather Bible and carrying a hand-carved African cane.

Standing in front of a bar in the Faubourg Marigny section of the city, a rock’s throw from the French Quarter, Julian watched the fading light of the October sky and thought about those stories. Anything was possible in this bizarre netherworld that had replaced his hometown on the other side of the nightmare. He looked at Grady standing next to him, lighting up, then taking a long drag on his cigarette. Grady was the only man he knew who could smoke like a fiend and still play the hell out of the trumpet. And though Julian had never smoked a cigarette in his life, he thought of asking him for one. There was something about the comfort it seemed to bring, like a child’s pacifier, that looked appealing.

“Don’t even think about smoking these things, man,” Grady eyed him as if he’d read his mind. “I thought I was done with them but since all this mess happened…”

He let the unfinished sentence dangle in the drift of the breeze from the river. Julian gave him an understanding look, then glanced down at his watch.

“So you told them eight, right?”

“Yep.”

“So you sure Little D’s coming?”

“Little D. Yeah.”

He nodded, looked at his watch again. “Easy Money, too?”

Grady tossed his cigarette on the ground and smashed it with his foot. “Quit worrying, man. They’ll be here. Every one of ’em said they would. Don’t forget, don’t none of the clocks in this town work anymore.”

“Besides,” he added, “I told ’em what the gig pays.”

Julian nodded. They had only been waiting a little while and it was only a little past eight. The autumn sky still held faint traces of blue, the shadows lengthening on the street. Wood and glassfronted shops on Frenchmen Street—a hookah bar, a tattoo parlor, a coffee house, a tiny café/deli, more than a few night clubs and other small businesses—stood mostly in shadow like hollowed ruins. On a normal weekday night, music would have blasted from every other doorway while college-age kids, musicians, and a few hip locals and tourists streamed from the bars and milled in the streets, their laughter a tickle in the air, pulsing with a rhythm of its own. A brass band might be tuning up to jam. A jazz trio from one of the colleges might be setting up for a late set, or a guitarist might sit crosslegged on the sidewalk, playing some good Texas blues for tips. But on a street that had once been the pulse point of the city’s music scene, every noise that resembled the sound of pleasure had been drowned by the flood.