“What’s bothering you?” I asked.
“Nothing,” she replied, one cheek tight with chunks of granola.
I didn’t pursue it. We came down the other side of the bridge, swinging out on an elevated exit ramp above flooded woods whose canopy was stripped of leaves and strung with trash.
“We’re supposed to coordinate with a half-dozen agencies down here, including NOPD. I say screw that,” she said. “I’m going to have a talk with all our people before we go in. We do our job and we maintain our own standards. That means we don’t shoot looters. Let the insurance companies take their own losses. But if somebody fires on us, we blow them out of their socks.”
She looked at my face. “What’s funny?” she asked.
“I wish I had still been with NOPD when you were there.”
“Want to elaborate on that?”
“No, ma’am, I really don’t,” I replied.
She bit down on her granola bar and gave me another look, then drove on into the city. None of us was quite ready for what we would see.
IT WASN’T THE miles of buildings stripped of their shingles and their windows caved in or the streets awash with floating trash or the live oaks that had been punched through people’s roofs. It was the literal powerlessness of the city that was overwhelming. The electric grid had been destroyed and the water pressure had died in every faucet in St. Bernard and Orleans parishes. The pumps that should have forced water out of the storm sewers were flooded themselves and totally useless. Gas mains burned underwater or sometimes burst flaming from the earth, filling the sky in seconds with hundreds of leaves singed off an ancient tree. The entire city, within one night, had been reduced to the technological level of the Middle Ages. But as we crossed under the elevated highway and headed toward the Convention Center, I saw one image that will never leave me and that will always remain emblematic of my experience in New Orleans, Louisiana, on Monday, August 29, in the year of Our Lord, 2005. The body of a fat black man was bobbing facedown against a piling. His dress clothes were puffed with air, his arms floating straight out from his sides. A dirty skim of yellow froth from our wake washed over his head. His body would remain there for at least three days.
Any semblance of order at the Convention Center was degenerating into chaos. The thousands of people who had sought shelter there had been told to bring their own food for five days. Many of them were from the projects or the poorest neighborhoods in the city and did not own automobiles and had little money or food at the end of the month. Many of them had brought elderly and sick people with them-diabetics, paraplegics, Alzheimer’s patients, and people in need of kidney dialysis. The sun was white overhead, the air hazy and glistening with humidity. The concrete apron outside the Center was teeming with people trying to find shade or potable water. Almost all of them were yelling angrily at police cars and media vehicles.
“You going to set up a command center here?” I said.
I could see Helen biting her lower lip, her hands clenching on the steering wheel. “No, they’ll tear us apart,” she said. “The streets in the Quarter are supposed to be dry. I’m going to swing down toward Jackson Square -”
“Stop!”
“What is it?”
“I just saw Clete Purcel. There, by the entrance.”
Helen rolled down the window and squinted into the haze. The gush of superheated air through the window felt like steam blowing from the back of a commercial laundry. “What’s Clete doing?” she said.
It took a moment for both of us to assimilate the scene taking place against the Convention Center wall. A huge, sunburned man, wearing filthy cream-colored slacks and a tropical shirt split at the shoulders, was trying to fit an inverted cardboard box over the body of an elderly white woman who was draped in a wheelchair. Her body was flaccid in death, and Clete could not get the box around her without knocking her out of the chair.
“Hang on, Helen,” I said, and got out of the cruiser before she could reply.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw her make a U-turn, pause briefly, and head toward the French Quarter, the rest of the caravan trailing behind her. But Helen was a good soul and she knew I would hook up with her soon, probably with Clete in tow. She also knew you don’t leave your friends behind, regardless of what the rest of the world is doing.
I held the old woman upright in the wheelchair while Clete covered her head and upper body with the box. Then I smelled an odor from her clothes that brought back memories of a distant war that I wanted to forget.
“You think that’s bad. Go inside the Center. All the plumbing is broken. There’re dead people piled in the corners. Street rats are shooting guns in there and raping anybody they want,” Clete said. “You got a spare piece?”
“No, where’s your hideaway?”
“Lost it on Royal, I think. A whole balcony came down on the street. I got hit with a flying flowerpot.” He wiped the sweat out of his eyes with the flat of his hand and stared out at the wreckage of the city and the looters sloshing through the streets, their arms loaded with whatever they could carry. “Who needs terrorists? Look at this shit, will you?”
FOR THOSE WHO do not like to brood upon the possibility of simian ancestry in the human gene pool or who genuinely believe that societal virtue grows from a collective impulse in the human breast, the events of the next few days would offer their sensibilities poor comfort. Helen had been worried she would have to give up command of her department to either NOPD or state or federal authorities. That was the least of our problems. There was no higher command than ourselves. The command structure and communication system of NOPD had been destroyed by the storm. Four hundred to five hundred officers, roughly one third of the department, had bagged ass for higher ground. The command center NOPD had set up in a building off Canal Street had flooded. Much to their credit, the duty officers didn’t give up their positions and wandered in chest-deep water outside their building for two days. They had no food and no drinking water, and many were forced to relieve themselves in their clothes, their handheld radios held aloft to keep them dry.
From a boat or any other elevated position, as far as the eye could see, New Orleans looked like a Caribbean city that had collapsed beneath the waves. The sun was merciless in the sky, the humidity like lines of ants crawling inside your clothes. The linear structure of a neighborhood could be recognized only by the green smudge of yard trees that cut the waterline and row upon row of rooftops dotted with people who perched on sloped shingles that scalded their hands.
The smell was like none I ever experienced. The water was chocolate-brown, the surface glistening with a blue-green sheen of oil and industrial chemicals. Raw feces and used toilet paper issued from broken sewer lines. The gray, throat-gagging odor of decomposition permeated not only the air but everything we touched. The bodies of dead animals, including deer, rolled in the wake of our rescue boats. And so did those of human beings, sometimes just a shoulder or an arm or the back of a head, suddenly surfacing, then sinking under the froth.
They drowned in attics and on the second floors of their houses. They drowned along the edges of Highway 23 when they tried to drive out of Plaquemines Parish. They drowned in retirement homes and in trees and on car tops while they waved frantically at helicopters flying by overhead. They died in hospitals and nursing homes of dehydration and heat exhaustion, and they died because an attending nurse could not continue to operate a hand ventilator for hours upon hours without rest.
If by chance you hear a tape of the 911 cell phone calls from those attics, walk away from it as quickly as possible, unless you are willing to live with voices that will come aborning in your sleep for the rest of your life.
The United States Coast Guard flew nonstop, coming in low with the sun at their backs, taking sniper fire, swinging from cables, the downdraft of their choppers cutting a trough across the water. They took the children, the elderly, and the sick first and tried to come back for the others later. They chopped holes in roofs and strapped hoists on terrified people who had never flown in an airplane. They held infants against their breasts and fat women who weighed three hundred pounds, and carried them above the water to higher ground with a grace we associate with angels. They rescued more than thirty-three thousand souls, and no matter what else happens in our history, no group will ever exceed the level of courage and devotion they demonstrated following Katrina’s landfall.
