“I don’t have much of an appetite,” I say.
Her face looks dry and empty, her cheeks slightly sunken. She lets out her breath. “God, those poor people,” she says.
HURRICANES DO NOT lend themselves to description, no more than do the pyrotechnics of a B-52 raid at ground zero. I have seen the survivors of the latter. Their grief is of a kind you never want to witness. They weep and make mewing sounds. Any words they speak are usually unintelligible. I have always suspected they have joined a group the Bible refers to as Heaven’s prisoners, anointed in a fashion most of us would resist even if we recognized God’s finger reaching out to touch our brow.
A category 5 hurricane carries an explosive force several times greater than that of the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. But unlike a man-made weapon of mass destruction, a hurricane creates an environment that preempts our natural laws. Early on the air turns a chemical green and contains a density that you can hold in your palm. The lightning and the thunder arrive almost like predictable friends, then fade into the ether and seem to become little more than a summer squall. Rain rings chain the swells between the whitecaps and the wind smells of salt spray and hard-packed sand that has warmed under the sun. You wonder if all the preparedness and alarm hasn’t been much ado about nothing.
Then the tide seems to shrink from the land, as though a giant drainhole has formed in the center of the Gulf. Palm trees straighten in the stillness, their fronds suddenly lifeless. You swallow to stop the popping sound in your ears, with the same sense of impotence you might experience aboard a plane that is dramatically losing altitude. To the south, a long black hump begins to gather itself on the earth’s rim, swelling out of the water like an enormous whale, extending itself all across the horizon. You cannot believe what you are watching. The black hump is now rushing toward the coastline, gaining momentum and size, increasing in velocity so rapidly that its own crest is absorbed by the wave before it can crash to the surface in front of it.
It’s called a tidal surge. Its force can turn a levee system into serpentine lines of black sand or level a city, particularly when the city has no natural barriers. The barrier islands off the Louisiana coast have long ago eroded away or been dredged up and heaped on barges and sold for shale parking lots. The petrochemical companies have cut roughly ten thousand miles of channels through the wetlands, allowing saline intrusion to poison and kill freshwater marsh areas from Plaquemines Parish to Sabine Pass. The levees along the Mississippi River shotgun hundreds of tons of mud over the edge of the continental shelf, preventing it from flowing westward along the coastline, where it is needed the most. Louisiana’s wetlands continue to disappear at a rate of forty-seven square miles a year.
It’s 1:00 a.m. and I can hear the wind in the oaks and pecan trees. The ventilated shutters on our house are latched, vibrating slightly against the jambs. The only s
ign of a weather disturbance is a flicker of lightning in the clouds or a sudden gust of rain that patterns our tin roof with pine needles. Two hours to the east of us the people of New Orleans who have not evacuated are watching their city ripped off the face of the earth. Why is one group spared and one group not? I don’t have an answer. But I am determined that two newly arrived members of our community will not enjoy the safety of our jail, at least on their terms, while decent people are drowned in their own homes.
I call the night jailer and tell him to separate the two MS-13 members.
“What if they ax me why?” he says.
“Tell them we have a policy against homosexuals sharing the same cell in Iberia Parish,” I reply.
“Tell them what?”
A half hour later I drive to my office and read again through the faxes and computer printouts on the two MS-13 members. There are always dials on the perps. It’s just a matter of finding them. The perps might be con-wise and they may have the cunning of animals, but when it comes to successfully confronting the system, they’re charging uphill into a howitzer.
I check my firearm at the entrance to the lockup area and ask the night jailer to bring Felix “Chula” Ramos to the interrogation room. When Chula arrives, his body is clinking with waist and leg chains. He is wearing only a pair of white boxer undershorts and they look strangely innocuous against his tattooed skin.
“Lose the restraints, Cap?”
The night jailer is old and has gin roses in his face. He is not interested in either the thespian behavior of others or saving them from themselves. “Holler on the gate,” he says.
Chula sits at the government-surplus metal table and takes my inventory, one hand relaxed on the tabletop. “I could rip out your throat. Before you could even beg, that fast,” he says, snapping his fingers.
I pinch the fatigue out of my eyes. “Your fall partner, what’s-his-name, Luis, is an ignoramus, but I think you’re even dumber than he is.”
The skin twitches under Chula’s left eye, as though an insect is walking across it. “Say that again?”
“You guys dissed me and the sheriff because you have outstanding federal warrants on you and you thought you’d be blowing Bumfuck for an upscale federal facility. It’s not going to happen.”
“You’re sending us to ’Gola, you’re saying?”
“Eventually, but right now we’re transferring you to Central Lockup in New Orleans. Notice I said ‘you,’ not ‘you all.’ Orleans Parish has warrants on both you guys. It’s chickenshit stuff, but we’ll be honoring the protocol and shipping you off before dawn.”
“The whole City is getting blown off the map. Who you kidding, man?”
“With luck the prisoners at Central Lockup won’t be deserted by the personnel. But who knows? The salaries of civil servants in Orleans Parish suck. Can you tread water in a flooded room full of other guys doing the same thing?”
“That ain’t funny, man.”
“The sheriff and I had a big laugh about y’all’s jackets. Your fall partner boosted a bank in Pennsylvania, but a dye marker exploded in the bag and queered all the bills. So your idiot of a friend took seventy-five thousand dollars in hot money to a coin laundry and washed the bills over and over until they were pink. Then he tried to buy a forty-thousand-dollar SUV with them. This lamebrain not only outsmarted you, he cluster-fucked you six ways from breakfast. You’re going to do double nickels at Angola, half of it for him. If you think I’m lying, call me after you go into lockdown with the Big Stripes. Know what the Midnight Special is up there? Think of a sweaty three-hundred-pound black dude driving a freight train up your ass.”
I wink at him. He stares at the opaque whiteness of the door, a shadow-filled crease forming across his brow. I can hear him breathing in the silence. A bolt of lightning crashes outside and the lights in the building flicker momentarily. “What you want, man?”
“You said your sister was in the sack with a junkie priest.” Chapter 6
B Y MIDMORNING NEWSCASTERS all over the country were announcing that Hurricane Katrina had changed direction and had dropped from a category 5 storm to a category 3 just before making landfall, devastating Gulfport but sparing the city that care forgot.
New Iberia’s streets were clogged with traffic, as were those of every other town and city in southwest Louisiana, the Wal-Mart parking lot a coordination center for fundamentalist churches that unhesitatingly threw open their doors to anyone in need of help. But the sun was shining, the wind flecked with rain, the flowers blooming along East Main, more like spring than summer. We all took a breath, secure in our belief that we had faced the worst and that the warnings of the doomsayers had been undone by our collective faith.