Wading Home: A Novel of New Orleans (6 page)

They found a shady pecan tree at the edge of the lot to stand under while they talked, Julian throwing back another iced drink, Grady taking long drags on a cigarette, and in minutes they were laughing. Casey brought up the time Julian had stepped in a steaming horse pile when they paraded down Canal with the brass band one Mardi Gras Day and never lost a beat, scraping the soiled shoe against the pavement in a footdragging, pimp-limp rhythm.
I was cool, though, wasn’t I?
And there was the time they had dropped beer-filled balloons from a French Quarter balcony onto a group of white college boys during Sugar Bowl weekend, then ran like hell when the students spotted them later. They’d hid in an alley off Dumaine, and when the coast was clear, doubled over in laughter. Good times in a city made for little rusty-butt boys with an itch to be free. They talked and laughed on and on, as the misadventures of two cocky kids growing up together poured out in a cathartic litany.

They exchanged cell phone numbers, promising to keep in touch.

“You tell your lady I said ‘hey,’” Julian said.

“Will do.” Casey nodded. “You married yet?”

“Naw, man.”

Casey grinned. “Aw, that’s right. You had that one close call, but you got away.”

Julian blinked twice, embarrassed as a surge of blood warmed his face. He imagined round eyes set in nut-brown skin, soft, curly spirals of natural hair, and that unmistakable low-pitched, blues-song voice. Vel was the reason, he believed, he was where he was, was
who
he was. Long after it was over, every now and then at night, some old memory intruded, kept him awake, disturbed his peace. And even on his best days before the accident, it would crimp his good mood into a throbbing knot of frustration and remind him of how he had been, when there was more to his life than playing the trumpet.

But that was history,
she
was history. He had moved on, long ago.

He let out a resigned sigh, shrugged.

“Yeah.” Julian’s composure slipped back intact. “No big deal.”

Casey put the card with Julian’s number in his shirt pocket. “Look here, bruh. Cindy and me got us a gig at the Embassy Suites in Baton Rouge over by the river. Ain’t much, but it pays the bills, you know what I’m saying? You know you got to come on by and check us out.”

“You working this week?”

“Got to, man. Life don’t stop just because of no storm.”

Julian looked away at a sapling tree bowing in the breeze, and a baby cardinal taking flight from the lowest branch. It didn’t? No, of course not. Life did not stop. No matter how much you wanted it to. No matter what happened to you, no matter how much you lost and how much you hurt about what you’d lost, you still had to get up in the morning, go out there, and do it again.

No, life did not stop.
Except when it did
.

He tried to banish Simon’s face to the edge of his mind.

“Every night through the weekend, in the lounge.” Casey looked over at his car and the attendant, busy under the hood, then back at Julian as he opened the door to the Neon.

“And bring your horn.”

Julian’s eyes glazed over. He hadn’t played any place as smalltimey as The Embassy Suites lounge since he had left Louisiana. But he would have given anything to be able to do it now. Even if he’d wanted to, there was just no way.

Julian reached up a hand to touch his jaw, a reflex now whenever he thought of playing the horn, then placed it on the steering wheel. Maybe he should just tell him.

The station attendant yelled something across the distance, signaling Casey to come and look at the meter.

“Think about it, man.” Casey took off his shades. “And I’m sorry about your daddy. Hope you find him.”

Julian looked at Casey’s eyes. As boys, their lives together had been one long spitting contest, competition lighting the spark that gave them life, oxygen to the fire of two blazing young egos. But somewhere over the growing-up years, his rival’s eyes had become soulful, generous even. Or maybe it had only happened since the storm. They were all in this madness together.

Julian looked away.
Not now, later maybe
.

He reached out the car window and shook his old friend’s hand.

“Thanks, man,” he nodded, started his car, and drove toward the high sun and New Orleans.

O
n St. Charles Avenue in the Garden District, the grand houses still shone in the metallic wash of the sun like prim, white-haired matrons, as if nothing had happened. Sweeping turfs of green fronted the century-old, wrought-iron-gated mansions, their spines erect, their clapboard unstained, the giant bathtub ring that roped most of the lowlying city having faded with the rising, higher ground. But the St. Charles trees remembered. The nightmare music of the killing winds had stunned them, and the panicked trunks of the cypresses and live oaks still leaned against the memory, the way children flinch away from the hand of pain.

Julian steered the Neon down the avenue, cutting a slalom path around severed limbs and trash. Along the neutral ground of the town’s wealthiest street, where the untraveled streetcar tracks lay rusting in the shadows of overgrow grass, the signs of chaos were few; a spotted hound loped along the rails in search of food, and from further down the street an electric saw hacked away at the broken limbs of a battered oak. Spanish-speaking workmen tossed damaged shingles from rooftops while a utilities truck fitted with a cherry picker crawled alongside the loosened telephone lines.

Like the French Quarter and Uptown, the Garden District’s flooding had been measured in inches, not feet: no weeks of waiting for head-high water to drain and muddied rooms to dry. Not like his father’s neighborhood, where two centuries of history marinated for weeks in four or five feet of brackish muck, or the Ninth Ward, where all life not washed away completely was suspended indefinitely.
Wasn’t it always this way?
he thought.
The peasants struggling down in the valley, the rich safe on higher ground.

He parked across from the Catholic church, dug into his gym bag for a clean T-shirt, and put it on. Getting out of the car, he swabbed at his forehead with an overused handkerchief and stared at the brass numbers 1924, the clean white columns of Matthew Parmenter’s Victorian-style house, the gate that fenced in a yard of only slightly overgrown juniper grass. The house looked even more impressive than he remembered. He turned up his bottled water for a last swig, tossed the empty onto the car seat, and tried to brush back a nagging thought:
If things had worked the way they should have, Daddy could have lived on this street. Daddy would be safe.

Simon’s double shotgun was comfortable enough, a sturdy, handmade house of cedar, maple, and cypress erected by a grandfather Julian never knew. But Julian opened the latch of the massive gate of 1924—a hand-forged system of wrought iron posts in an elaborate crisscross pattern, built by the father of one of Simon’s oldest friends in his Social Aid and Pleasure Club—and remembered years ago watching his father’s best friend’s enormous house being renovated as he rode by on the streetcar. Steps of marble, a huge wrap-around porch, French doors leading to eighteen rooms. Even then he wondered—his father and Parmenter, best friends, business partners. Equals. Except somehow, they weren’t.

He climbed the steps to the gallery, glancing into the darkened windows of leaded, beveled glass. Austere and private, the St. Charles houses had never offered visible clues of life inside even
before
the storm, but Julian guessed the old man was inside. Older than his father and many years retired, the former restaurateur rarely left the house. Like two stubborn and embattled sea captains, neither man would have jumped ship for a mere storm.

This would not be easy; his father’s horrible business deal—all that lost money—still smarted like a glancing wound. But he pulled the mold-stained note from his pocket and read it again, then tucked it back.
Matthew Parmenter is Daddy’s friend.
For Simon’s sake, he rang the bell, sighed deeply, and waited.

An hour earlier, he had met with Sylvia at Ondine’s Oysters, a little dive at the edge of the French Quarter not far from the French Market—a bar, really, with a cardboard sign outside that had boasted, throughout the entire storm and evacuation, WE NEVER CLOSED! A narrow, red brick-fronted place at the end of a shady courtyard, it sat wedged between a touristy T-shirt shop and a used bookstore, both vacant. In the mostly dark, windowless room, a long, brass-railed bar skirted the west wall and generatorpowered pendant lamps swagged from the tin ceiling, lighting the square, laminate tables.

He took a seat in the back and ordered a coffee, then another as he waited. The dark interior seemed normal; the only sign of post-catastrophe afterlife was the clump of National Guardsmen gathered around the bar in severe haircuts and khaki fatigues, some sitting on backless swivel stools turning up glasses of warmish beer and mugs of tepid coffee.

He stood and waved when Sylvia entered, the opened door allowing a momentary flush of rectangular sunlight into the room.

“Morning.” He held out her chair as she sat. With no makeup, her hair tied in a scarf, she looked, for the first time since he’d seen her that first Sunday afternoon in town after the storm, close to her age. Her eyes were puffy, red-rimmed by worry and insomnia.

“Morning, baby,” she said wearily, untying her scarf and patting her curl-less, gray-rooted hair. “You drinking coffee? Shoot. I need me something stronger than
that
.”

Julian smiled. When his father had introduced him to Sylvia, one sunny Labor Day after he and his buddies in The Elegant Gents had second-lined through Treme, a seldom-seen sparkle had seemed to backlight Simon’s eyes. Clearly, it had been Sylvia who, after Ladeena had died, lifted Simon out of his quicksand of grief and got him interested, once again, in living. There was a natural kindness about her, Julian had noticed, and from then on, her bluesy, motherly warmth and nurturing nature had spilled over onto him, helping to fill the gap in Julian’s life that his mother’s passing had left.

“Stronger? I’m sure they can help you with that.” He nodded toward the bar. “If you’re hungry, somebody brought a whole box of muffalettas for the National Guard and the cops and the volunteers. They’re telling everybody to help themselves.”

Sylvia glanced toward the bar where the guardsmen and volunteers stood, a big cardboard box on the counter between them.

“They deserve a lot more than that for trying to clean up this mess of a city,” she said, pinching the bridge of her nose. “Lord, have mercy. I tell you I haven’t had a decent night’s sleep since all this happened. I’ll split a sandwich with you. But, baby, I got something to show you.”

Julian went to the bar and returned with a Bloody Mary for Sylvia, a plastic cup of water for himself, and a ridiculously large muffaletta sandwich sliced in half on a paper plate.

Sylvia ignored the sandwich and the drink and reached into her purse. The folded paper she handed Julian was wrinkled and stained the color of tea.

She exhaled a huff of air. “Well, I went back to Simon’s,” she said, leaning forward with her eyebrows arched up and her eyes bright and brimming with something he hoped was hope. “I just felt like we missed something. So I took my nephew with me, Rashad. You know him.”

Julian remembered the gangly six-foot-six kid, a star forward at one of the high schools in the city. He unfolded the paper. The handwriting was unmistakable—the dramatic, forward-leaning slant, the longish serifs. It was Simon’s.

Julian’s heart jumped. He looked up, his eyes wide. “Where’d you…?”

“Rashad climbed up to the attic through a little door in the ceiling of the bedroom closet. Simon must have been up there for hours. Days, maybe.”

“This note was wedged in between the beams in the attic ceiling.” Sylvia reached for his arm and squeezed it. “This is it, baby. Simon got out! He’s safe somewhere.”

Julian flinched at the thought of his seventy-six year old father having to climb up into a hole in the ceiling. He read the note slowly, his eyes brimming.

Julian,

I don’t know where I’m going but I got to get out of here. I don’t know if I will make it because there is so much water out there. Find me if you can or what’s left of me. If something bad happens then take me back home to Silver Creek and lay me down besides your mama.

I love you son no matter what.

Your dad.

Julian looked up from the letter, his eyes glazed, his throat tight. The last two lines sank and burned like a sharp knife pressed to his chest, and would have hurt even if he hadn’t wasted his last conversation with his father being disrespectful.

Julian rubbed his temple and looked down at the letter again. This didn’t necessarily mean his father was alive. “He could be anywhere. He could have…anything could have happened after he wrote this.”

“But this tells us that he tried to get out. He
tried
, baby.”

Julian cleared his throat, took a long drink of the coffee, and stared at the sandwich, the spicy olive salad over sliced salami on the huge, thick roll. He tapped his knuckles on the table. Suddenly, he wasn’t hungry. As a child, and then more proficiently as a young man, he’d learned to freeze his mind—block out every thought—to steel himself against erupting emotions that might trigger tears. He did that now.

Sylvia went on, telling Julian about the hole Rashad had found in the roof, probably made with a pickax. Simon must have gotten out onto the roof and waited for help from one of the helicopters or good Samaritans in makeshift boats, who’d trolled the murky waters looking for people in distress.

“Did your father ever talk to you about Silver Creek?” Sylvia took a long sip from her Bloody Mary, then put it down.

He almost laughed. When had Simon missed a chance to burn Julian’s ears about Silver Creek? “There was five feet of water in the street.” Julian said. “Silver Creek’s farther than Baton Rouge. No way he could have gotten there without his car. And his car is still at the house. Rusting away.”