Hurricane Rita contained winds of 185 miles an hour and originally had been projected to make landfall somewhere around Matagorda Bay, northeast of Corpus Christi. Then its direction shifted farther to the east. Officials in Houston, fearing a repeat of Katrina in their own city, effected a massive evacuation, choking highways all the way to San Antonio and Dallas. Then the hurricane shifted direction again, this time almost certainly zeroing in on Beaumont and Port Arthur.
Texas was going to take the hit. Our exposure would be marginal, nothing more than minor wind damage, trees knocked down, a temporary power outage. We breathed a sigh of relief. Providence had given us a free pass.
Then the National Hurricane Center in Miami disabused us of our hubris. In fact, the forecast was unbelievable. Louisiana was about to get pounded full-force, with twenty-foot tidal surges and wind that would rip off roofs from Sabine Pass to the other side of the Atchafalaya River. More unbelievably, we were being told the storm would probably make landfall in Cameron Parish, just south of Lake Charles, the same place the eye of Audrey swept through in 1957. The tidal wave that preceded the ’57 storm curled over the courthouse and downtown area like a giant hammer and crushed it into rubble, killing close to five hundred people.
“Weren’t you around when Audrey hit?” a deputy asked as I stared up at the television screen.
“Yeah, I was,” I replied.
“On an oil rig?”
“On a seismograph barge,” I said.
“It was pretty bad, huh?”
“We got through it okay,” I said.
He was a crew-cut, martial-looking man, with too much starch in his uniform and a toothpick in the corner of his mouth. He removed the toothpick and dropped it in a waste can and focused his attention on the television screen. I could hear a wet sound in his throat when he swallowed.
No one wants to go to the same war twice. You pay your dues in order to enter the dead zone and you’re supposed to be safe. Unfortunately, that’s not the way it works. Chapter 13
N EW IBERIA AND LAFAYETTE were now filled with evacuees fleeing Hurricane Rita as well as those who had fled Katrina. Firearm and ammunition sales were booming. The original sympathy for the evacuees from New Orleans was incurring a strange transformation. Right-wing talk shows abounded with callers viscerally enraged at the fact evacuees were receiving a onetime two-thousand-dollar payment to help them buy food and find lodging. The old southern nemesis was back, naked and raw and dripping—absolute hatred for the poorest of the poor.
AT SUNSET Friday evening the air was as gold as pollen, as though Indian summer were upon us. The decrease in barometric pressure seemed to signal little more than a shower. What appeared to be rain rings were bream dimpling the surface on the edge of the lily pads. I could hear my elderly neighbor playing the piano behind an open window. Then the air grew cool and moist, and leaves began stripping from the trees in the yard, whirling in vortexes down the slope to the water. As the sky filled with dust, a shadow spread over the yards and gardens of the homes along East Main, and the bayou was suddenly wrinkled by a hard wind blowing from the southeast. My neighbor got up from her piano and began slamming down windows.
From my back steps I saw the aluminum roof of a picnic shelter in City Park peel away like the top of a sardine can and tumble end over end across the grass. I saw a man continue fishing when lightning struck an oak tree in the center of the park. I saw a man stripped to the waist in an airboat roar past our property, smiling serenely at the heavens. I heard a civil defense siren blowing at City Hall.
I went on duty at midnight and was given the opportunity to meditate once again on the biblical admonition that the sun is made to rise upon both the evil and the good, and the rain is sent to fall upon the just and unjust alike. Except for ripped shingles or tree limbs crashing on telephone or power lines, East Main was spared. But in south Iberia Parish, twelve feet of water surged into trailers and low-lying homes. That was nothing compared to the fate of the coastal parishes.
A tidal wave of salt water, mud, dead fish, oil sludge, and organic debris literally effaced the southern rim of Louisiana. Farther inland, what it did not efface, it ruined. Throughout the wetlands, almost every home was made uninhabitable, every telephone pole broken at ground level, every road made impassable. The rice and sugarcane fields were encrusted with saline, the farm machinery buried in mud, the settlements down by the Gulf reduced to twisted pieces of plumbing sticking out of grit that looked like emery paper.
The greatest suffering was incurred by animals. An estimated hundred thousand cattle drowned in Vermilion and Cameron parishes alone. They crowded onto galleries, tried to climb onto tractors and cane wagons, and even ended up on rooftops. But they drowned just the same.
I stood on top of a hay baler with a pair of binoculars and, facing south, made a one-hundred-eighty- degree sweep from east to west and back again. I could not see a living creature. Not a
dog or a cat, not even a bird. The trees had been stripped to the bark and looked like gnarled fingers. Brick houses were blown into birdshot. Fifty-foot shrimp boats lay upside down a hundred yards from water. Drowned sheep were stacked inside the floodgate of an irrigation lock, like zoo animals crowding against the bars of their cage. Cemetery crypts were obliterated, and the coffins washed into residential yards and in one instance through the broken front window of a country store. I saw at least thirty head of Herefords tangled in a barbed-wire fence, their stomachs bloated in the heat, swarms of gnats hovering above them.
By Monday morning I was used up.
“Go home, Streak,” Helen said.
“Nope,” I said.
“Why not?”
“I’ll go home when you do,” I said.
“I went home last night and came back. I ate supper and put on fresh clothes. I also took a nap. I put you in charge while I was gone.”
I stared at her emptily.
“Go home, bwana,” she said.
As I drove into New Iberia, the streets were drying in the sunshine, the sidewalks plastered with wet leaves. I parked my truck in my driveway and went inside the house. But Alafair and Molly and Clete were gone. I stripped off my clothes in the emptiness of the house and got in the shower, like the war veteran returning from a place that is still locked in his head but which he will never tell anyone about. Then I sat in the bottom of the stall, the water splaying on my back, and fell sound asleep.
WHILE RITA WAS shredding the coast of Louisiana, Eddy Melancon lay propped up in a bed close by a fourth-floor window at Our Lady of the Lake in Baton Rouge. He had a fine view of the night sky and the elevated interstate highway and the sheets of rain sweeping across the lines of cars entering and leaving the city. But Eddy cared little about the view or the fact a nurse had gone out of her way to move his bed and prop him up so he could look out upon the city and the light show in the sky. The truth was, Eddy Melancon could not stop thinking about his own person. It lay there, in the bed, as though dropped from ten thousand feet, disconnected from all motor controls, insentient, flaccid, and fed by tubes whose needles punctured his veins without Eddy’s feeling them.
It was like being buried alive inside his own body. Each time he fell asleep, he saw broken images in his head leading up to the moment somebody had locked down on him with a high-powered rifle. He heard the sound of the tiny emery wheel striking dryly on his cigarette lighter, then he both heard and smelled the flare of lighter fluid inside the flame guard. Just as he sucked the smoke deep into his lungs, he saw a needle-nosed projectile zipping over the floodwater, flying through the fire, making a thropping sound as it entered and exited his body, splintering his spinal cord like it was dried tuber.