After sunset on the first day, August 29, the sky was an ink wash, streaked with smoke from fires vandals had set in the Garden District. There were also electrical moments, flashes of light in the sky, heat lightning or perhaps sometimes the igneous trajectory of tracer rounds fired from automatic weapons. The rule books were going over the gunwales.
Looters were hitting pharmacies and liquor and jewelry stores first, then working their way down the buffet table. A rogue group of NOPD cops had actually set up a thieves headquarters on the tenth floor of a downtown hotel, storing their loot in the rooms, terrorizing the management, and threatening to shoot a reporter who tried to question them. New Orleans cops also drove off with automobiles from the Cadillac agency. Gangbangers had converged on the Garden District and were having a Visigoth holiday, burning homes built before the Civil War, carrying away whatever wasn’t bolted down.
Evacuees in the Superdome and Convention Center tried to walk across the bridge into Jefferson Parish. Most of these people were black, some carrying children in their arms, all of them exhausted, hungry, and dehydrated. They were met by armed police officers from Jefferson Parish who fired shotguns over their heads and allowed none of them to leave Orleans Parish.
An NOPD cop shot a black man with a twelve-gauge through the glass window of his cruiser in front of the Convention Center while hundreds of people watched. The cop sped away before the crowd attacked his vehicle. Some witnesses said he ran over the victim’s body. The cop claimed the dead man had tried to attack him with a pair of scissors.
A half block from a state medical clinic I counted the bodies of nine black people, all of them floating facedown in a circle, like free-falling parachutists suspended on a cushion of air high above the earth.
We heard stories of gunfire from rooftops and windows. Emergency personnel in rescue boats became afraid of the very people they were supposed to save. Some people airlifted out by the Coast Guard in the Lower Nine said the gunfire was a desperate attempt to signal the boat crews searching in the darkness for survivors. Who was telling the truth? What cop or fireman or volunteer kneeling on the bow of a rescue boat, preparing to throw a rope on a rooftop, wanted to find out? Who wanted to eat a round from an AK-47?
Charity and Baptist Memorial hospitals had become necropolises. The bottom floors were flooded, and gangbangers turned over rescue boats that were trying to evacuate the patients. Without electricity or ice or unspoiled food or running water, hospital personnel were left to care for the most helpless of their wards-trauma victims with fresh gunshot wounds, those whose bodily functions depended entirely upon machines, patients who had just had organs surgically removed, and the most vulnerable group, the aged and the terrified, all of it inside a building that was cooking in its own stink.
But a lot of NOPD cops were loyal to their badge and their oath and worked tirelessly alongside the rest of us for the next seventy-two hours. Among their number were many of Clete’s longtime detractors and enemies, but even the most vehement of them had to concede that Clete Purcel was a beautiful man to have on our side-the kind who covers your back, tightens your slack, and humps your pack. He knew every street and rat hole in New Orleans, and he had also fished every bayou and bay and canal from Barataria to Lake Borgne. He was on a first- name basis with hookers, Murphy artists, petty boosters, whiskey priests, junkies, skin bar operators, transvestites, disgraced cops, strippers, second-story creeps, street mutts, bondsmen, journalists, and old-time Mobsters who tended their flower gardens in the suburbs. His bravery was a given. His indifference to physical pain or verbal insult was vinegar and gall to his enemies, his loyalty to his friends of such an abiding nature that with conscious forethought he would willingly lay down his life for them.
But even Katrina did not change Clete’s penchant for the visceral and the sybaritic. On August 31 he said he was going to check his apartment and office on St. Ann in the Quarter. Two hours passed and no Clete. It was afternoon and Helen and I were in a boat out in Gentilly, surrounded by water and houses that were beginning to smell from the bodies inside. The combination of heat and humidity and lack of wind was almost unbearable, the sun like a wobbling yellow balloon trapped under the water’s surface. Helen cut the engine and let us drift on our wake until we were in the shade of an elevated stretch of Interstate 10. Her face and arms were badly sunburned, her shirt stiff with dried salt.
“Go find him,” she said.
“Clete can take care of himself,” I said.
“We need every swinging dick on the line. Tell him to get his ass back here.”
“That’s what Nate Baxter used to say.”
“Remind me to scrub out my mouth with Ajax,” she replied.
I caught a ride on another boat to high ground, then walked the rest of the way into the Quarter. The Quarter had taken a pounding from the wind and the rain, and ventilated shutters had been shattered off their hinges and the planked floors of whole balconies stripped clean from the buildings and sent flying like undulating rows of piano keys down the street. But the Quarter had not flooded and some of the bars, using gasoline-powered generators, had stayed on the full-tilt boogie for three days-their patrons zoned and marinated to the point they looked like waxworks figures that had been left under a heat lamp.
I found Clete in a corner dump two blocks from his office, his tropical shirt and cream-colored slacks black with oil, his skin peeling with sun blisters, his face glowing from the huge mug of draft beer he was drinking and the whiskey jigger rolling around inside it. A brunette woman in a halter and cutoff blue-jean shorts and spiked heels was drinking next to him, her thigh touching his. The tops of her breasts were tattooed with chains of roses, her neck strung with purple and green glass beads, her mascara running like a clown’s.
“Time to dee-dee, Cletus,” I said.
“Lighten up, big mon. Have a soda and lime. The guy’s got cold shrimp on dry ice,” he said.
“You’re shit-faced.”
“So what? This is Dominique. She’s an artist from Paris. We’re going over to my place for a while. Did you see that big plane that flew over?”
“No, I didn’t. Step outside with me.”
“It was Air Force One. After three days the Shrubster did a fly-over. Gee, I feel better now.”
“Did you hear me?”
He leaned over the counter, filled his mug from the tap, and poured a jigger of Beam into it. He upended the mug, drinking it to the bottom, his eyes fastened on mine. He smiled, his face suffused with warmth. “This is our country, big mon. We fought for it,” he said. “I say screw all these cocksuckers. Nobody jacks the Big Sleazy when the Bobbsey Twins from Homicide are on the job.”
I had no idea what he was talking about. But in AA you do not try to reason with drunks. In Clete Purcel’s case, you did not invade the private cathedral where he sometimes lived.
“I’ll tell Helen you’ll catch us later,” I said.
He laid the full weight of his big arm across my shoulders and walked with me to the door. The cloud of testosterone and beer sweat that rose from his armpit was suffocating.
“Give me an hour. I just need to clean up and fix some supper for me and Dominique,” he said.
“Supper?”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“That woman isn’t from France. She used to work in a massage parlor in Lafayette. She was one of Stevie Giacano’s whores.”
“Who’s perfect? You’ve got something negative to say about every woman I meet.”
“That’s a comment on your judgment, not mine.”
I saw the hurt flicker in his face before I could take back my words. He took his arm from my shoulders and stepped out on the sidewalk. The street was strewn with plaster, broken glass, chimney bricks, beer cans and red plastic beer cups, roofing shingles, and thousands of water beetles that had been forced up through the sewer grates and that snapped under your feet when you stepped on them. But in the waning of the afternoon, in the pool of shadow made by the building at our back, in the popping of a Mardi Gras flag someone had hung on a staff from a balcony, I felt for just a moment that an older and fonder vision of New Orleans might still be available to us.
“I’m sorry for what I said, Clete.”
His eyes crinkled, threading with white lines at the corners. He pulled a slip of paper out of his shirt pocket with two fingers and offered it to me. “Aside from her painting career, Dominique coincidentally knows every working girl in the Quarter. You still want to find that junkie priest who’s hooked up with the sister of the MS-13
