I could feel the blood tingle in the back of my neck.
THE HIGH SCHOOL gymnasium in Franklin, down the bayou in St. Mary Parish, was lined with row upon row of army-surplus cots. Children were running everywhere, inside and outside, sailing Frisbees that a local merchant had brought from his store. I found Natalia washing clothes by hand in the lee of the building, her arms deep inside an aluminum tub, the tails of her denim shirt tied under her breasts. I asked her to tell me again of her last moments with Jude LeBlanc.
“He brought the boat to the church roof. He was up there chopping a hole with an ax to get everybody out. Then I heard a fight up there. I didn’t see him again.”
It was warm in the shade, but her face looked cool and dry, her ribs etched against her dusky skin. She wore sandals and baggy men’s khakis and looked like a Third World countrywoman who was washing the clothes of children who were not her own. She did not look like a prostitute or a junkie.
“Did you bring any dope into the shelter?” I said.
“You drove here to ask me that?”
“You were holding when you got busted. I got you off the wrist chain and sent you here. That makes you my responsibility. So that’s why I’m asking you if you brought any dope into the shelter.”
“I been trying to get clean. There’s some people in the gym putting together a Narcotics Anonymous group. I’m gonna start going to meetings again.”
She had managed to answer my question without answering my question. “Ms. Ramos, if I find out you are using or distributing narcotics in this shelter, I’m going to get you kicked out or put in jail.”
She squeezed out a pair of children’s blue jeans and laid them on the side of the tub. “I got to go back to New Orleans.”
“I think that’s a mistake.”
“I keep seeing Jude drowning there in the dark, without no one to help him.”
“Jude is a stand-up guy. My advice is that you don’t treat him as less.”
“He used to say a special reconciliation Mass on Saturday afternoon for all the whores and junkies and street people. He gave everybody absolution, all at one time, no matter what they done. Somebody attacked him to get his boat. I think they killed him. I got to find out. I just can’t live without knowing what happened to him.”
“Ms. Ramos, tens of thousands of people are missing right now. FEMA is trying to-”
“How come nobody came?”
“Pardon?”
“People were drowning all over the neighborhood and nobody came. A big, fat black woman in a purple dress was standing on top of a car, waving at the sky. Her dress was floating out in the water. She was on the car a half hour, waving, while the water kept rising. I saw her fall off the car. It was over her head.”
I didn’t want to hear more stories about Katrina. The images I had seen during the seven-day period immediately after the storm would never leave me. Nor could I afford the anger they engendered in me. Nor did I wish to deal with the latent racism in our culture that was already beginning to rear its head. According to the Washington Post, a state legislator in Baton Rouge had just told a group of lobbyists in Baton Rouge, “We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn’t do it, but God did.”
How do you explain a statement like that to people who are victims of the worst natural disaster in American history? The answer is you don’t. And you don’t try to fix a broken world and you don’t try to put Band-Aids on broken people, I told myself.
“I believe Jude would want you to remain at the shelter. You can do a lot of good here. I promise I’ll do my best to find out what happened to him,” I said.
“I think he talked about you,” she said.
“Excuse me?”
“Jude said he used to deliver the newspaper to a policeman who owned a bait shop. He said the policeman was a drunk but he was a good man who tried to help people who didn’t have no power. Isn’t that you he was talking about?”
She knew how to set the hook.
AFTER LUNCH I drove to the Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Department and went upstairs to my office. The contrast between the normalcy of my job in Iberia Parish and the seven days I had just spent in New Orleans was like the difference between the bloom and confidence of youth and the mental condition of a man who has been stricken arbitrarily by a fatal illness. The building’s interior was spotless and full of sunshine. Cool air flowed steadily from the wall vents. One of the secretaries had placed flowers on the windowsills. A group of deputies in crisp uniforms and polished gunbelts were drinking coffee and eating doughnuts on the reception counter in front. From my second-story office window I could look out on a canopy of palm and live oak trees that cover a working-class neighborhood, and behind the cathedral I could see a cemetery of whitewashed brick crypts where Confederate dead remind us that Shiloh is not a historical abstraction.
Helen glanced through the glass in my door, then opened the door without knocking. “You look sharp, Pops,” she said.
“I hear that a lot,” I replied.
She walked to my window and gazed at the Sunset Limited passing down the railroad tracks. She wore a pair of tight slacks and a white shirt with the short sleeves folded in neat cuffs. A four-by-seven yellow notepad was stuffed in her back pocket. She hooked her thumbs in the sides of her gunbelt. “You rested up?”
I squeezed my eyes shut and opened them again. “Say it, Helen.”
“I just got off the phone with FEMA and the FBI. The civil service and governmental structure of New Orleans has been destroyed. We’re about to get hit with a shitload of casework we don’t need.”
“Shouldn’t you be telling this to the entire department?”
“This particular case involves one of Clete Purcel’s bail skips. It also involves a guy you know by the name of Otis Baylor.”
“An insurance man?”
“That’s the guy. The Feds believe a number of homicides may have been committed by vigilantes who decided they’d have some fun during the storm. They think Otis Baylor may have popped some looters who had just gutted Sidney Kovick’s house.”
“Home invaders hit Sidney Kovick?”
“Yeah, evidently four of the dumbest shits in New Orleans. One got his head blown off and one will be a quadriplegic the rest of his life. The Feds believe Baylor had a grudge against blacks for raping his daughter and he probably used the opportunity to take a couple of pukes off the board.”
“It doesn’t sound like him.”
“The Feds are taking heat about going after gangbangers and letting white shooters skate. The Baylor investigation will probably be a lawn ornament for them. Anyway, we’re supposed to do what we can. You okay with that, bwana?”
“What’s Clete Purcel’s role in all this?”
She pulled the yellow notepad from her back pocket and looked at it. “The brother of the quadriplegic is named Bertrand Melancon. Clete had him in custody but lost him in the handover at the chain-link jail. Here’s the irony in all this, Dave. Clete told the Feds he thinks the Melancon brothers and a friend of theirs named Andre Rochon might actually be rapists.”
“Based on what?”
“Clete says Rochon’s panel truck contained evidence that might link Rochon and possibly the Melancons to an abduction and rape in the Lower Nine.”
“Yeah, he told me about these guys. They’re the ones who ran over him right before the storm. You want me to see Baylor?”
“You mind?”
I once knew a door gunner in Vietnam who wouldn’t go on R amp; R out-of-country for fear he would desert and not return to duty. So he stayed stoned in the door of his Huey, stoned in the bush, and stoned in Saigon, and finished his tour without ever leaving the fresh-air mental asylum of Indochina. As Helen waited for my answer, my friend’s point of view seemed much more reasonable than I had previously thought.
