Wading Home: A Novel of New Orleans (5 page)

He spotted a Shell station not far down the road with a single bay for car repair, and pulled up to it as the attendant, a short, brownskin man in his mid-thirties with tightly braided hair and wearing overalls without a shirt, took a drag from his cigarette and flicked it on the ground.

“Help you?”

“Just need to have my flat fixed.”

Barely looking at the man, Julian tossed him his keys and went inside the air-conditioned store. An oasis of soft drink coolers consumed one wall, and he opened the door wide and let the clouds of iced air wash over his face. He pulled a bottled lemonade from the shelf and headed toward the front.

An older man, frail-looking with slicked-back silver hair and stooped shoulders, took up the bills Julian placed on the counter.

“Need any cookies or chips with that?” he said.

“Naw. Thanks.” Julian opened the bottle and took a long drink. On a high shelf above the counter a boom-box radio blared a news report about the state of the battered city thirty miles east, weeks after the hurricane.

They say it’s kinda bad over there in New Orleans.” The man put Julian’s change on the counter. “National Guard everywhere. I hear they’re not even letting folks back in yet.”

Julian nodded.
Kinda bad?
The understatement was almost comical.

“They just started,” he said. Truth was, he’d sneaked around checkpoints weeks ago to get to his father’s house.

He thought about his father, and wondered how long he would have to shoulder the burden of regret over that last phone conversation.
Do you even understand what mandatory evacuation means?
The minute the words were out, he’d felt the blood leave his face. The silence and hangup afterwards had stung Julian worse than the hickory switch spankings that welted his legs during his father’s rare moments of childhood disciplining.

He stepped back outside the air-conditioned store, and the choking heat and humidity enveloped him again. The Neon was now stripped of the spare and the attendant was rolling the damaged tire against the cement.

“Nail, right there,” he said, looking up at Julian and pointing to the bent metal jutting out of the tread. “I’ll patch it up. It’ll be a few minutes.”

Julian nodded, and walked across the grassy lawn between the off-ramp strip of businesses (a Food Mart, a cell phone store, a laundromat) and the highway, as a rare breeze floated through the fronds of a nearby stand of palmettos. He took a long swig from the iced lemonade. The sky was a brilliant, electric blue and the late morning sun was burning into the concrete. The traffic along the I-10 corridor was still clotting now and then as convoys of cars and trucks, semis, and even government jeeps paraded east, a steady stream toward New Orleans.

He rubbed the slick bottle against his forehead, and breathed rough, deep breaths. The days since the storm had been mindnumbing, and his nerves still jittered just beneath his skin. He’d arrived in Baton Rouge a month ago—after a blur of airport concourses and security checkpoints, rental car counters and baggage claim belts—as quickly as he could, but not quickly enough. Over the phone, his father’s friend Sylvia McConnell, her voice wobbly with grief, had spoken in frantic and teary bursts. Like the banging of sharp, dissonant chords, her words exploded in his head. Simon missing. Maybe dead. After that, it was as if those words had damaged his nerves and left him deaf—he heard nothing more as they spun around his brain.

Later, when he could take in the details, he braced for each one. The city was uninhabitable, flooding from the broken levees having left most of it sitting in water that would take weeks to drain. Tens of thousands who hadn’t evacuated had been ordered to leave, rescue efforts were slow and chaotic, hundreds had drowned and many more were missing. And while his old neighborhood of Treme had not been wiped out like others near the broken flood walls (in fact, most of Treme suffered only a little flooding), the house where he’d grown up sat in four, maybe even five feet of water. And there was no sign, or word, of his father.

With Sylvia’s house bone dry on the high ground of Uptown just off Magazine Street (the little bit of water stopped at the second porch step), she and Julian fixed their minds on the search for Simon, taking back streets into town past phalanxes of Guardsmen to meet at Simon’s house. They had opened the door, looked as far as they could for signs of Simon, then backed out, silent.

Nothing was recognizable. It was as if the whole house had been dropped to the bottom of the river, then lifted up a year later. The stench, like nothing they’d ever experienced, was as violent and jarring as a body punch. Viney branches of mold shot up the walls like ivy up a high fence. A blanket of brown sludge draped everything. Furniture lay strewn about like dice after a powerful shake and roll. It was not the place Julian knew, not the place where he’d grown up. That place was gone.

But the house didn’t matter; what mattered was Simon. They exhausted every possibility—the Red Cross lists, the Superdome. The Convention Center, where hot, angry masses huddled in the days during and after the storm. The churches. The endless lists of buses that had taken survivors to shelters as far away as California, Utah, Missouri. They posted fliers with Simon’s picture on every telephone pole left standing in the neighborhood, an ironic task, since no one was there to see them. They located one of the men in Simon’s Social Aid and Pleasure Club, The Elegant Gents, but he knew nothing—he hadn’t seen Simon since a week before the storm. They walked the streets looking for anyone who might have seen him, but came up with nothing.

At the end of each day, Julian went back to his Best Western room in Baton Rouge, turned up a minibar bottle of Jack Daniels, and dialed up the A/C. Then he flopped on his squeaking bed and let the liquor slide him into sleep.

Every day for the next few weeks he and Sylvia inhaled bland Food Mart lunches at highway gas stations and downed quarts of black coffee while mapping new strategies. Riding a caffeine buzz, Sylvia’s mind raced with ideas—they should get a list of all the hospitals in the state, the clinics, the A.M.E. and C.M.E. and Baptist churches in the bordering states, and maybe even hire someone to help locate him.

They logged so many hours on the phone that their arms became numb. They refused to discuss the obvious possibility—just let it float like a balloon, unacknowledged, in the fragile air between them. If they ever were to consider the worst possible fate, it was still a ways off.

They weren’t heading in that direction until there was nowhere else to go.

“Got it ready for you, man.” The attendant was handing him an invoice. “That’ll be eight dollars.”

Julian pulled four folded bills from his jeans pocket, and on second thought, took another two and folded it inside the others.

“Thanks, man.” The attendant handed him his keys and Julian headed toward the car.

From behind him he heard another car pulling off the ramp and into the lot of the station. A vintage Camaro, painted a dull and rusting blood-red, heaved and sputtered, then died a few feet from Julian.

Its owner got out, a tall, slender man in worn jeans and a sweatsoaked white T-shirt, his shoulders sagging, a sickle-shaped scar across his cheek, his blue baseball cap cocked down against his brows.

Julian gave the man a nod. “Sounds like you could use an alternator maybe.”

The man gave him a long hard look, then his face opened into a smile.

“Fortier? You don’t recognize me, man?”

Julian stared at the man, mining his memory for some recollection of those features. The deep brown eyes, what he could see of them beneath the cap, were familiar. And the scar. And the drooping shoulders and the angle of that cap. And suddenly, from Julian’s forgotten past emerged the sound of a sizzling trumpet.

“Casey?” he said. “Grady Casey?”

The man’s smile flared into a wide grin that made the scar look like an extension of it. He stuck out his hand and Julian grabbed it, pulling him in for a chest-bump hug.

“Been too long, man.” Still grinning, Casey dug his hands in both pockets and rocked his weight from foot to foot. “Guess I dropped a few pounds since I seen you last.”

“Whoa. I guess you sure did.” Julian nodded, smiling, looking him up and down. “I almost didn’t recognize you. Good to see you, man. You playing much?”

Casey hunched both shoulders. “Well, you know…,” he started, and glanced over his shoulder in the direction of the highway marker:
New Orleans, 30 miles
.

“I
was
.”

Julian’s mind hurled back to the seventh grade, Mr. Martrel’s band class. Grady had been a pudgy kid with protruding ears and a girl’s high-pitched voice, alternately Julian’s best friend and worst enemy as the two clashed over bragging rights, each claiming musical dominance over the other. In a town where trumpet players ruled, they had both followed in the city’s great tradition, but since their late teenage years, their lives had evolved into opposing sides of a coin. Julian: hardworking, serious, with a passion for music that bordered on obsessive. Casey: careless, unfocused, but with a talent that dazzled, seeming to draw from some limitless source. As a musician, Grady Casey was, as the close-knit community of horn players in town acknowledged,
fierce
.

Their rivalry, mostly friendly but sometimes strained, had carried underpinnings of one-upmanship. Their cutting sessions, intense battles where riffs shot back and forth between the bells of their horns like topspinning tennis balls, usually resulted in a draw, but while Julian would pull out every stop, lips numbed and forehead lathered in sweat, Casey, at the end, always appeared cool and unchallenged.

But it had been Julian who had left for New York in search of a spot on the big stage while Casey manned the home turf: he married a local jazz singer, a white woman twelve years his senior, Julian had heard, and taught at a local music school by day and gigged at night. While neon marquees back east heralded Julian Fortier as the jazz world’s emerging star (a Grammy followed a top spot on the
Downbeat
readers’ poll, while club dates and tours crowded his calendar), his brilliant rival was barely known outside the limits of New Orleans, and had no ambitions there.

Hey, seen you on TV a few weeks back, man,” Casey said, nodding.

Julian didn’t know what the nod meant—a compliment maybe, but not necessarily. He shrugged, not inclined to mention that the
Tonight Show
airing was a repeat from two years ago, back when he could still
play
. Before Japan, he hadn’t played a gig in almost a year. The run-in with a wayward Yellow Cab in downtown Manhattan that totaled his two-seater, broke his chin, and spoiled his dream-like career, had humbled Julian in a way that still felt unfamiliar, unnatural, and uncovered a sensation that was totally new—embarrassment.

Julian saw no need to go into all of this with Casey; it was hard enough to admit it to himself.

Casey squinted from the sun, shading his eyes with his hand. “Your daddy and them do all right?”

Julian looked away from Casey toward the bend where the highway disappeared into a grove of cypresses, then turned back to meet his old rival’s eyes. “He stayed through it, man. We haven’t found him yet.”

“Aw, man.” Casey pulled a pair of black plastic sunglasses from his sweaty shirt pocket and put them on. “I got three cousins still missing. I think they went to Atlanta, at least I hope. Everybody else, just, you know, trying to deal.”

Casey shook his head, his brow furrowed, his eyes glassy. He looked toward the highway. “Man I cain’t even believe this mess. It’s like…judgment day or something, you know what I’m saying? You been there? Whole city is wasted, man. You seen your daddy’s house?”

Julian nodded, turned up the last of his drink, and tossed the can into a nearby trash barrel.

“The house is a bust, man. I just want to find my father.”

“I know, man. I know.”

An awkward silence passed between them. Finally, Julian said, “What’s the deal with your car?”

Relieved to turn the conversation to mundane car troubles, Casey smiled and tapped the hood with his fist. “This piece of crap? This ain’t mine, man, it’s my brother’s. Mine’s six feet under water.”

Casey told Julian about his adventure in the storm. His wife had fled to Dallas while he’d stayed in their apartment in the Seventh Ward, got trapped on the second floor, and after a day and a half on a balcony, was airlifted to safety by a National Guard helicopter.

“Got my horns out, though, man!” Casey smiled. “I left everything else there, just grabbed my two B-flats and my cornet and my flugelhorn.”

Julian smiled. “I heard that.”

The two men talked a while longer until the station attendant came out to Casey’s car, a filterless cigarette clenched between his teeth.

“Let’s have a look.” Casey raised the hood and the attendant leaned under it. After a moment, he left to find a battery tester. Just then, another car drove up. An elderly couple, their steps slow and their backs slumped in fatigue, walked toward the store. The woman’s arms flailed as she ranted about her ruined refrigerator, while the man mumbled something about the government as he opened the door for her.

Casey turned to Julian. “You know what, man?”

“What?”

“You were smart to leave.”

His head hanging and eyes downcast, Julian felt less like a smart man and more like a traitor. When he’d left for New York, Casey had all but called him that, since Julian was so willing to ditch the brass band they had recently formed together in favor of a possible solo recording date and a slim shot at a big-time career.

“Record?
We can do that
here
, man,” Casey had pleaded. But even before he’d packed, said goodbye to his father, and boarded the last night flight out of Louis Armstrong, Julian was already gone.

A lifetime ago, or so it seemed. Now, the reminder of his betrayal piled on top of everything else he was feeling: anger, regret, confusion, helplessness. He was mad at the city, mad at his father, mad at himself, mad at the world. And now Casey’s eyes, aged beyond their years, threw Julian’s frustrations back at him like twin mirrors. It was the same look he’d seen in the eyes of everyone as they returned to the battered neighborhoods, the drowned streets of the failing city, a look of utter disorientation, as if the world you once knew had suddenly and sharply tilted, and you were holding on to whatever you could to walk upright.