dude?” he said.
You didn’t put the slide or the glide on Clete Purcel.
Chapter 7
ON OUR WAY back to rendezvous with Helen, we stopped at the second-story apartment where Jude LeBlanc lived with the Hispanic woman by the name of Natalia Ramos. But the apartment door was locked and the shutters latched. A neighbor, a Cajun woman who had ridden out the storm, said Jude had left the apartment for the Ninth Ward on Friday afternoon and Natalia had decided to join him. “I heard there’s bad t’ings happening down there. Maybe they ain’t coming back, no,” the neighbor said.
“Do you know where they went in the Ninth?” I asked.
“There’s a church down there that don’t ax no questions about him. Natalia said it’s made of stucco and got a bell tower,” she replied.
“Thank you,” I said, and started to go.
“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 people eating from plastic packages of mustard and ketchup they had looted from a cafe, 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.”
She twisted out of my hand and faced me. Her sundress was glued against her skin, her forehead bitten by insects. A helicopter mounted with a searchlight swooped by overhead, chasing looters in the business district.
“Where’s my brother? You using him to get to Jude?” she said.
“You want to lose the attitude or go back on the chain?”
Her eyes roved over my face, one tooth biting on the corner of her lip. “He was trying to get people at Mary Magdalene to evacuate. But a lot of them didn’t have no cars. So we all went up to the church because it’s got a big attic. Jude saw a boat floating by, one with a motor on it. He swam after it, in the dark. That was two nights ago.”
I saw Helen waving at me. A fight had broken out on one of the buses and through the windows I could see men in silhouette flailing at one another.
“Go on,” I said.
“I saw him start up the boat and drive it back toward the church. I shined a flashlight on him so he could see better. It was a green boat, with a duck painted on the side, and I could see him sitting in the back, driving it straight for the church. He was gonna take everybody out of the attic. He’d got an ax from somebody and was gonna chop a hole in the roof, because the window wasn’t big enough for a lot of the people to go through.
“I could hear him chopping up on the roof. The water was rising and I didn’t know if he could cut through the boards quick enough. Then the chopping stopped and I heard lots of feet scuffling and somebody cry out. I think maybe it was Jude.”
The incessant blast of airboats, the idling diesel engines of buses and trucks, the thropping of helicopter blades were like a dental drill whirring into an exposed nerve. Helen clicked a flashlight on and off in my direction to get my attention, her tolerance waning.
“I have to go now,” I said. “After you get your feet treated, I want you to get on that truck over there. In a couple of hours it’s going to a shelter in St. Mary Parish. I’m writing my cell phone number on my business card. I want you to call me when you get to the shelter.”
“The ones who couldn’t get out the window drowned,” she said.
“Say again?”
