“Hey, you?” the neighbor said.
“Yes?”
“Maybe he ain’t doing right, a priest living wit’ a woman and all, but that’s a good man, yeah.”
That night was one of surreal images that I suspect have their origins more in the unconscious than in the conscious mind. People looked and behaved as they do in our sleep—not quite real, their bodies iridescent with sweat, their clothes in rags, like creatures living out their destinies on moonscape.
I saw a man rowing a boat, vigorously pulling on the oars, his back turned toward two bodies that were piled in the bow, his face set with stoic determination, as though his efforts could undo fate’s worst cut.
I saw a black baby hung in the branches of a tree, its tiny hands trailing in the current, its plastic diaper immaculate in the moonlight. I saw peo
ple eating from plastic packages of mustard and ketchup they had looted from a café, dividing what they had among themselves. Ten feet from them a dead cow matted with flies lay in the back of a wrecked pickup, a lead rope twisted around its neck.
A gelatinous fat man wearing boxer trunks and mirrored sunglasses floated past us on a bed of inner tubes, a twelve-pack of beer balanced on his stomach, one hand held high in a toast to a passing airboat.
“You want a ride up to high ground?” I said.
“And miss the show? Are you kidding?” he replied, ripping open another beer.
I saw kids running from an antebellum home they had just torched, silhouetted against the flames, like pranksters trick-or-treating on Halloween. When the gas lines exploded, sparks showered down on the entire neighborhood. Two blocks away vigilantes with shotguns and deer rifles prowled the flooded streets in a bass boat powered by an electric motor. One of them wore a headlamp, another a safari hat with a leopard-skin band. They were all sharing drinks from a silver flask and happy as hogs rolling in shit. I don’t know if they found their prey or not. In fact, at the time I was too tired to care.
We heard rumors that teams of elite troops, Special Forces or Rangers or Navy SEALs, were taking out snipers under a black flag. We heard that an alligator ate a deer on the second story of a flooded house by the Industrial Canal. Some NOPD cops said the personnel at Orleans Parish Prison had blown town and left the inmates to drown. Others said a downtown Mob rushed a command center, thinking food and water were being distributed. A deputy panicked and began firing an automatic weapon into the night sky, quickly adding to the widespread conviction that cops were arbitrarily killing innocent people.
The number of looters and arsonists and dangerous felons in custody was growing by the hour, with no place to put them. We kicked looters loose, only to see them recycled back into a temporary holding area two hours later. Some of those in custody were probably murderers—drug dealers or sociopaths who had taken advantage of the storm to eliminate the competition or settle old grudges. When a chain-link jail was created at the airport, we started packing the worst of the bunch into school buses for the trip up I-10 into Jefferson Parish.
That’s when I heard a woman on a wrist chain screaming at an Iberia deputy who was trying to push her up onto the steps of a waiting bus. She sat down heavily on the curb, pulling others down with her.
“What’s going on, Top?” I asked the deputy.
“She spit on a fireman and scratched his face. She started yelling about a priest on a church roof,” the deputy said. “I think she’s nuts. She was also holding a few pharmaceuticals.”
The woman looked Hispanic and wore a filthy purple sundress with bone-colored flowers printed on it. Her hair and skin were greasy with oil, her bare feet bloody.
“Who’s the priest?” I asked her.
She looked up at me. “Father LeBlanc,” she answered.
“Jude LeBlanc?” I asked.
“You know him?” she said.
“I knew a priest by that name in New Iberia. Where is he?”
“In the Lower Nine, at St. Mary Magdalene. He filled in there sometimes because they ain’t got no regular priest.”
“Can you kick her loose?” I asked the deputy.
“Gladly,” the deputy said, leaning down to the chain with his cuff key.
She was off balance when she stood up. I steadied her with one hand and walked her toward a first-aid station. “What happened to your feet?” I said.
“I lost my shoes two days ago. We were on a roof that didn’t have no shingles. The nails were sticking out of the boards.”
“Where’s Jude, Natalia?”
“How you know my name?”
“Your brother is Chula Ramos. He’s a member of MS-13. He told me about you and Jude.”