This morning, I saw the priest float past the top of a live oak tree. He was on his stomach, his clothes puffed with air, his arms stretched out by his sides, like he was looking for something down in the tree.
The levees are busted and a gas main has caught fire under the water and the flames have set fire to the roof of a two-story house on the next block. Miles is pretty disgusted with the whole business. “When this is over, I’m moving to Arizona,” he says.
“No, you won’t,” I say.
“Watch me.”
“This is the Big Sleazy. It’s Guatemala. We don’t belong anywhere else.”
He doesn’t try to argue with that one. When we were kids we played with guys who had worked for King Oliver and Kid Orey and Bunk Johnson, Miles on the drums, me on tenor sax. Flip Phillips and Jo Jones probably didn’t consider us challenges to their careers, but we were respected just the same. A guy who could turn his sticks into a white blur at The Famous Door is going to move to a desert and play “Sing, Sing, Sing” for the Gila monsters? That Miles breaks me up.
His hair is still black, combed back in strings on his scalp, the skin on his arms white as a baby’s, puckered more than it should be, but the veins are still blue and not collapsed or scarred from the needlework we did on ourselves. Miles is a tough guy, but I know what he’s thinking. Tony and him and me started out together, then Tony got into the life, and I mean into the life, man—drugs, whores, union racketeering, loan-sharking, maybe even popping a couple of guys. But no matter how many crimes he may have committed, Tony held on to the one good thing in his life, a little boy who was born crippled. Tony loved that little boy.
“Thinking about Tony?” I say.
“Got a card from him last week. The postmark was Mexico City. He didn’t sign it, but I know it’s from him,” Miles says.
He lifts his strap undershirt off his chest and wipes a drop of sweat from the tip of his nose. His shoulders look dry and hard, the skin stretched tight on the bone; they’re just starting to powder with sunburn. He takes a drink of water from one of our milk jugs, rationing himself, swallowing each sip slowly.
“I thought you said Tony was in Argentina.”
“So he moves around. He’s got a lot of legitimate businesses now. He’s got to keep an eye on them and move around a lot.”
“Yeah, Tony was always hands-on,” I say, avoiding his eyes.
You know what death smells like? Fish blood that someone has buried in a garden of night-blooming flowers. Or a field mortuary during the monsoon season in a tropical country right after the power generators have failed. Or the buckets that the sugar-worker whores used to pour into the rain ditches behind their cribs on Sunday morning. If that odor comes to you on the wind or in your sleep, you tend to take special notice of your next sunrise.
I start looking at the boat and the water that goes to the horizon in all directions. My butt hurts from sitting on the spine of the house and the shingles burn the palms of my hands. Somewhere up in Orleans Parish I know there’s higher ground, an elevated highway sticking up on pilings, high-rise apartment buildings with roofs choppers can land on. Miles already knows what I’m thinking. “Wait till dark,” he says.
“Why?”
“There won’t be as many people who want the boat,” he says.
I look at him and feel ashamed of both of us.
A hurricane is supposed to have a beginning and an end. It tears the earth up, fills the air with flying trees and bricks and animals and sometimes even people, makes you roll up into a ball under a table and pray till drops of blood pop on your brow, then it goes away and lets you clean up after it, like somebody pulled a big prank on the whole town. But this one didn’t work that way. It’s killing in stages.
I see a diapered black baby in a tree that’s only a green smudge under the water’s surface. I can smell my neighbors in their attic. The odor is like a rat that has drowned in a bucket of water inside a superheated garage. A white guy floating by on an inner tube has a battery-powered radio propped on his stomach and tells us snipers have shot a policeman in the head and killed two Fish and Wildlife officers. Gangbangers have turned over a boat trying to rescue patients from Charity Hospital. The Superdome and the Convention Center are layered with feces and are without water or food for thousands of people who are seriously pissed off. A bunch of them tried to walk into Jefferson Parish and were turned back by cops who fired shotguns over their heads. The white-flight crowd doesn’t need any extra problems.
The guy in the inner tube says a deer was on the second floor of a house on the next street and an alligator ate it.
That’s supposed to be entertaining?
“You guys got anything to eat up there?” the guy in the inner tube asks.
“Yeah, a whole fucking buffet. I had it catered from Galatoire’s right before the storm,” Miles says to him.
That Miles.
Toward evening the sun goes behind the clouds and the sky turns purple and is full of birds. The Coast Guard choppers are coming in low over the water, the downdraft streaking a trough across the surface, the rescue guys swinging from cables like anyone could do what they do. They’re taking children and old and sick people out first and flying without rest. I love those guys. But Miles and me both know how it’s going to go. We’ve seen it before—the slick coming out of a molten sun, right across the canopy, automatic weapons fire whanging off the airframe, wounded grunts waiting in an LZ that North Vietnamese regulars are about to overrun. You can’t get everybody home, Chuck. That’s just the way it slides down the pipe sometimes.
A guy sitting on his chimney with Walkman ears on says the president of the United States flew over and looked down from his plane at us. Then he went on to Washington. I don’t think the story is true, though. If the president was really in that plane, he would have landed and tried to find out what kind of shape we were in. He would have gone to the Superdome and the Convention Center and talked to the people there and told them the country was behind them.
The wind suddenly blows from the south, and I can smell salt and rain and the smell fish make when they’re spawning. I think maybe I’m dreaming.
“Tony is coming,” Miles says out of nowhere.
I look at his face, swollen with sunburn, the salt caked on his shoulders. I wonder if Miles hasn’t pulled loose from his own tether.