Wading Home: A Novel of New Orleans (31 page)

A man in his twenties cruised by on a ten-speed bike, and three girls in shorts and tank tops, no doubt volunteers from some distant city, walked by. One of them, the youngest-looking one, with shoulder-length brown hair and freckles, stopped and asked Grady for a cigarette. He fished in his pocket and offered her his pack.

“Where y’all young ladies from?”

A tall blond girl wearing a red baseball cap smiled. “We came down from St. Louis.”

They were members of a United Methodist Church group who had come to help gut houses in St. Bernard Parish.

Grady smiled. “Long way from home.”

“We drove all night,” she said. “Got a light?” The younger girl held the cigarette up to her lips.

“Oh, here you go.” Grady found his matches and lit one.

The girls had come to the city when they read an article in the
Post-Dispatch
about one of their church member’s relatives, whose newly built house in St. Bernard had taken on eight feet of water. They’d gotten permission to miss a week of classes to help with the friend’s house and others in the neighborhood.

The third member of the group, a brown-skinned girl with a round face, a silver nose ring, and a puffy Afro highlighted with blue dye, joined in the conversation. “I like it down here,” she said. “I think I might come back and stay longer, when things get better.”

An SUV full of young people who clearly knew the church trio pulled up alongside them. “We’re gonna go find some food!” one of the girls in the vehicle yelled out. The three girls said goodbye to Julian and Grady and got in.

Grady and Julian waved as they pulled away. Before they reached the corner Grady yelled to them, “Thank y’all for coming down to help!”

“Well, at least somebody thinks this place is worth bothering with.” Grady reached in his pocket for another cigarette. “You wouldn’t believe all what I been hearing, man, stuff about the city never coming back, or coming back with none of
us
in it. Crazy.” He shook his head.

“Maybe Cindy’s right,” he said. “Maybe it’s not worth trying to make it here.”

“Hey, come on, man. Sure it is.” Julian’s words tumbled out like a reflex, but landed without conviction. He wasn’t at all sure he believed them. The truth was, he’d been so consumed with Simon, Silver Creek, Velmyra, and even Parmenter, that he’d thought little lately about the future of this place where he had been born and raised.

“I don’t know, man.” Grady shifted his weight to one foot and leaned a hand against one of the posts supporting the wrought iron balcony above. “You know what they’re saying up in Texas? Dude told my wife he heard the city was dead. All gone.” He shrugged. “I ain’t gonna lie, I thought the same thing myself, a time or two. It’s like one of those disaster flicks, where the dude knows the world is over, like, everybody’s done for and he’s the last dude on earth, but he still goes around searching for food.”

Grady looked at Julian. “But you wanna stop the guy and ask him, ‘Why?’”

Julian nodded thoughtfully at the movie analogy, a comparison he’d made himself just a couple of days ago.
Why?
It was a question he’d asked himself every day as he prayed for good news about Simon. Giving up just wasn’t in his blood; he’d figured out it felt… unnatural. But keeping on—hoping—that was a natural thing.
Hope.
Maybe it was something that folks were just born with, the real proof that you were alive. It’s what his grandfather’d had, for sure, and no doubt his daddy too. And it was the only thing that kept him going now, searching for Simon.

Grady lifted his head back and blew a long, slow stream of smoke up toward the balcony. “What do you think, bruh? You think this place can come back?”

Julian turned up the collar of his shirt as a cool breeze floated by. He looked out toward the outlines of buildings and sky across the street where he’d spent many a summer evening hanging out, playing his horn. He felt a slight chill as he imagined the most dire predictions coming true.
Did he? Really?

“Guess we gotta believe so.”

A silver van pulled up to the front of the building and a stocky white man with a full salt-and-pepper beard got out, his keys jangling. “Sorry guys,” he said. “Been waiting long?”

“Hey! Man! You made it!” Grady grabbed the man’s hand and shook it. They had only gotten there fifteen minutes ago, Grady told him. “Hey, thanks a lot for letting us use your place.”

The man, Charley Graviere, had owned the small bar for seventeen years, and had hired the band often. “Charley’s Sweet Spot,” like many of the businesses along the street, had not suffered flood damage but was still closed, since few of the employees had returned, and those who had tried couldn’t find a place to stay.

Fifteen minutes or so after Charley unlocked the door, the musicians of the Soul Fire Brass Band began to arrive and crowded into the wood-paneled, slightly musty space. Grady was right. Every one of them showed up.

They all had been fairly close when Julian was with the band, but two of the guys, Dereek Bradford, trombonist, and bass drummer Thaddeus “Easy Money” Church, had been among his closest friends during his dues-paying days of marching bands, second-line parades, and jazz funerals. Yet they had given him as much grief as the others had the night he announced his departure, not so much with words but snide grunts and cold, silent stares.

Of all the men, the one he most regretted disappointing was Dereek, the youngest in the group, who’d been in his late teens when Julian had played with them, and had shadowed Julian like a fawning little brother. When he’d phoned Dereek to say goodbye, his young friend had never returned his call. And when he dropped Easy Money a postcard from New York—
Come on up, you always got a place to stay
—he’d never heard back.

But this was no time for holding grudges—they had bigger things on their mind than whatever ax they had to grind with him. Each one had lost his home to flood water, and three had lost their instruments. But Parmenter, generous in death, had provided for the purchase of new instruments for those who needed them. It had taken Grady three days to locate and contact all of them—some had been scattered across the country as far away as California, New Mexico, and even Massachusetts.

They all shook hands with Julian, some grabbing him in a bear hug—
Thanks for the gig, man!
—and the warm reception was a relief. In minutes, cases and instruments—trumpets, trombones, drums, a sax, a slightly tarnished sousaphone—lay strewn about the room, and the men ran through the standard New Orleans funeral and second-line music quickly. The minute they began to play, the music exploded, and Julian remembered: there was nothing like the sound of a New Orleans brass band. Thick, raucous, hot and free, with a life of its own. It pounded the walls of the small room, bursting it at the seams and spilling into the street.

After an hour or so, they adjourned to one of the few reopened bars about a block away. Once inside The Spotted Cat, already high on the music, they ordered a round of beers and shared flood stories.

Casey’s tale of being trapped on the balcony of his apartment for forty-eight hours paled next to what they heard from the others. Dereek had watched the rolling sea from his rooftop for five days after sleeping in on the morning of the levee breach and waking to water floating his bed. The snare drummer, Claude Joubert, swam through neck-high currents to rescue his cousins from a burning house, only to bring them back to the dubious safety of his boiling hot rooftop, where they waited two days for the sweet music of U.S. Coast Guard helicopter blades. And Easy Money, the diminutive postal worker, silenced the table with his story of trudging miles through a river of oil, waste, and slime up to his chest and making a makeshift raft out of a mattress to rescue four elderly women from the brackish waters of his drowned neighborhood.

Once away from the flooded city, all had watched the tragedy play out on the TV screens of spare bedrooms, shelters, and church basements around the country. As the men talked, the noise level rose with the alcohol levels in their blood. There was so much anger, so much that needed to be said, as the winds of betrayal had blown powerfully from every direction. The mayor. The governor. The president. The heads of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, who had bungled the aftermath of the flood, and for days had turned a blind eye to the chaos in the city. The Army Corps of Engineers, architects of the poorly built levees that had been ignored for decades by uniformed commanders whose chests bulged with bars and stripes.

All had let them down, then passed the blame from one to the other like a Christmas fruitcake. The blame was so abundant it would have taken the bandsmen days to dispense it fairly, but after a couple of therapeutic hours of drinking and venting, the men breathed easier, their joints loosened, their nerves calmed. Bonded by the music and the memories of growing up in the city, they reminisced and even laughed and joked as the dark closed in, the wood paneling holding the comforting scent of stale beer, a precious sign of normalcy in an abnormal world.

Miraculously, none of the other men had suffered the loss of loved ones, but all fell silent when Grady brought up the subject of “Pops,” their nickname for Simon. “I sure will miss him, man.” Easy Money looked over at Julian, bowed his head in reverence. Simon had fed them many a late night after gigs; sometimes, after a parade with his buddies in the Elegant Gents, Simon would open his door to find seven or eight pairs of young legs stretched across the furniture in his living room. As if that were his cue, he’d reach deep into a cabinet, grab his best iron pot, and start up the stove, still whistling “When the Saints Go Marching In.” When one of the boys, knowing how much Simon loved Louis Armstrong, had called him “Pops,” the name stuck—Simon loved nothing more than sharing a namesake with the greatest jazzman the city had ever produced.

When the evening wore on into the next morning, the men got ready to head back to their motels; the funeral was only a few hours away. When Julian headed to his car, Dereek called out to him.

“Hey! Wait a minute.”

He caught up with Julian just before he got into his car.

“So sorry, man,” he said. “About your daddy.”

“Thank you.”

“Hey, look. If there’s anything I can do.”

“Yeah, thanks, man.”

He put his hands in his pockets, looked up toward the sky, then leveled his gaze at Julian. “I was pretty pissed at you when you left, you know.”

“I know. I don’t much blame you.”

“I just want to say that, you know, it’s OK. I get it now. I get why you left.”

Julian’s heart sank. He knew what his old friend was saying.

He looked Dereek in the eye. “No, man. I love this place. This is home. I just…at the time, I just had to get away. To try something new.”

Dereek nodded, looked across the street at the vacant buildings. “I know. Everybody got to do his own thing, right?”

Julian clapped his friend on the shoulder. “How you making it, man? You dealing with everything OK?”

Dereek told him again about his last day in the Ninth Ward house he’d grown up in, which, having lasted through four previous generations in his family, was swallowed in minutes by the flood. When the helicopter’s rescue basket lifted him high above the neighborhood, he had looked down at the horror. As he rose higher, so did the water, it seemed, engulfing the house as it collapsed and floated in the current, disappearing from view. He knew his house and every other house of the block would not survive this. The world he’d known was gone.

He had promised his father years before when he died that he would take good care of the house and pass it down the line. Children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren. Each new generation of Bradfords born with a house waiting for them. He had plans to bump out the kitchen the way his mother, who years before lost a mid-life battle with diabetes, had always wanted. But now, the rumors about the future of the Lower Nine kept him awake at night.

“My granddaddy owned that land, free and clear, and so did his daddy before him,” he said shaking his head. “That piece of land is all I got, you know what I’m sayin? It’s like family. It’s
mine.
They got no right to it.”

Julian had heard the rumors, floating mostly from meetings held around town as city officials grappled with the fragile future of New Orleans. To many, it seemed the close-knit black community was as disposable as the land near his father’s house in the Treme that had been destroyed forty years ago to make way for the 1-10 overpass. He understood who “they” were: the planners and players, movers and shakers who, now that so much of the city was uninhabitable, talked of reshaping it with a different footprint, one that left out the lower-lying neighborhoods of the working class. The guys in the suits didn’t seem to know much about how their ancestors—freed slaves, many of them—had all sweated blood over their own patch of land for the future of their children and children’s children, and they didn’t much care.

Julian’s life in New York was far removed from the thrust and parry, the pull and give of precious family land. His thousand square foot co-op over a Brooklyn Wash-a-teria was free of the ties of ancestral history. But hearing Dereek’s words, he thought of Silver Creek. That plot of land had placed him, alongside his old friends, square in the middle of a struggle to preserve the past. His father had tried so many times to tell him—land meant history, and history meant you knew who you were. It was the legend that helped decipher the map of your life.

Even if you were poor and didn’t have, as his father used to say, two dimes to rub together, land meant you always had a place in the world. Julian had grown up with folks who owned little more than a ragged patch of dirt, but held their heads up high. At least they had
that
.

With the street lamps not working, the only light on the block was the glimmer of the pale autumn moon. Dereek had always had a youthful face, and usually looked younger than his twentysomething years. But now, washed in hard angles of light and shadow, it glowed with the deep pallor of a man in struggle, the young eyes aged by a reflection of all he had seen. It was a look that had become too familiar in New Orleans lately: lost, despairing, stunned. But somehow, Dereek’s large, dark eyes still reflected the faintest trace of hope.