destiny, annexing Lakeview and flooding on into Mid-City, Carrollton, Gentilly, City Park…
Fifty-two other levees were breached, over 80 percent of the city now flooded or flooding.
So much water. And it kept on coming.
A few hours later, Trinity’s entrance hall was completely submerged, the water halfway up the staircase. Outside was still silence, occasionally punctuated by the whirring blades of a Coast Guard helicopter and the patter of distant gunfire. A dead German shepherd floated down the street. A few minutes later, a ten-foot gator swam by.
“OK, joke’s over,” Trinity said aloud. “This shit ain’t funny no more.” He’d planned on camping out for a few days, was well provisioned, but now he just wanted the hell out. He could come back later.
Trinity set up on the balcony off the front guest room, and the next time he heard a helicopter nearby, he started shooting flares into the air.
No luck.
The pistol fire continued in the distance, more frequently now, and the radio said New Orleans had slipped into a state of anarchy. The radio said tens of thousands were stranded on rooftops, and no one was picking them up. Where the hell was the government?
It was a long night.
The next day passed like the first. Trinity ate canned food and drank warm bottled water and fired a flare whenever a helicopter came close. Then, as the sun settled on the horizon, another helicopter came near, and this time they spotted the flare, lowered a line, and raised him into the sky.
Below him, the city—
A young man in a Coast Guard uniform got Trinity strapped into the copter, and the side door slid shut, cutting off the din of the blades. He gave a thumbs-up to the pilot, and the bird veered west. The young man took a long look out the side window and yelled to the pilot, “Incredible, isn’t it?”
The pilot yelled back, “Incredible don’t come close. It’s fuckin’
The helicopter flew low over Trinity’s ruined city, but he kept his eyes shut until they put down at Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport, in the suburb of Jefferson Parish, where a triage center had been established. Trinity was quickly examined by a medic and put on a refugee bus to Baton Rouge, where he sat next to a very old black woman who’d lost her wig and apologized profusely for her bald head.
“Not a thing,” Trinity said as the bus rocked into gear. “Hell, if ’Fess were still alive, he’d be signing songs about you.” He laughed with good nature and held his hand out to her. “Tim Trinity.”
The old woman gasped. “Oh, lordy, you’re Reverend Tim!”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She took his hand. “Thought you looked familiar, but I gots me some bad cataracts, can’t see for shit no more.” She smiled at him, lips pulled back from dark gums. She’d lost her dentures in the storm too. “I’m Miss Carpenter. You call me Emogene.”
“Good to know you, Miss Emogene.”
Miss Emogene looked out the window at the dark road ahead. “You got kin in Baton Rouge? I’m blessed with a daughter, lives up this way.”
“No, ma’am. But I’m not staying long, couple days maybe. Soon as they let me, I’ll be back to doing the Lord’s work. Got me a soup kitchen in the Lower Nine.”
The old woman’s face grew haunted, and her smoky eyes filled Trinity with great terror. “I just came from there. I mean to tell you, you ain’t going back there.”
“Sure I am.”
“Boy, you don’t understand. There
Miss Emogene retreated into her sadness and they rode on in silence. Trinity looked around and now saw that he was the only white person on the bus. A middle-aged man across the aisle turned on an old transistor radio, and the bus went quiet as all strained to hear the latest.
It was bad news on top of bad news. The old woman was right—the Ninth Ward had been wiped off the map, and the list of devastated neighborhoods included most of the lower-income parts of town.
It was at that moment Trinity realized he was finished as a prosperity preacher in New Orleans. His income base had been cut off at the knees. The market had collapsed. They say there’s no man so poor he can’t find a few dollars to spend on whiskey and salvation, but this was something else entirely. This was about survival.
The Lower Nine was gone, but now the whole city needed a soup kitchen. Sure, Trinity could go back in a few days and look like a hero on CNN, but what would it gain him? There’d be no income from the locals, probably for years. And the infrastructure was decimated. How long before he could get his show back on the air to draw money from the rest of the country?
A long time, if he stayed.
By the time they reached Baton Rouge, Trinity had made the decision to start over in Atlanta. He had plenty of money in the bank, could be up and running in a month or two. And he’d always flattered himself he could compete with the big boys in the big city. This was his chance to prove it.
In Atlanta, Trinity bought a large warehouse in the impoverished Vine City neighborhood. Within a month it was decorated with a stage pulpit and audience seating, outfitted with cameras and lighting and a video control room. He was back in business. In the second month, he built his flock, and by the end of the third month, he was back on the air. His new church was an instant hit, and the money poured in like never before.
But he hadn’t counted on the voices.
When they started, he put it down to stress, and an Atlanta doctor prescribed Valium. When that didn’t work, the doctor tried him on Ativan, then Xanax, then Serax. When none of the anti-anxiety drugs worked, he moved on to anti-depressants: Prozac, Zoloft, Effexor. They didn’t work either.
After over a year of pharmaceutical futility, Trinity resigned himself to living with the voices. But then the voices strengthened, and soon they brought the tongues. Tongues that came upon him like epileptic fits, completely beyond his control. The fits often came during his sermons, and they were good theater, but they also came upon him when he wasn’t doing his act. In the shower or driving his car, seemingly at random. They often woke him in the night, and he became exhausted. He knew he couldn’t keep going this way much longer. Something had to give.
Then one night, Trinity sat in front of the television, flipping channels, afraid to fall asleep. He stopped on a documentary about addiction, and he heard a cocaine addict say that coke silenced the voices in his head.
Trinity had never wanted anything to do with illegal drugs, had never even smoked grass, but he’d never in his life felt this desperate. He made his first drug buy the very next morning. And that night, when his head started pounding and the voices came upon him, he snorted his first line.
The voices disappeared.
Daniel stood in the shadows of Tim Trinity’s backyard, snapping photos through the window of his uncle’s den. Snapping photos of his uncle taking cocaine. He lowered the camera slowly, thinking:
But whatever he’d expected, he sure as hell hadn’t expected this.
Daniel had seen enough, and it was getting late. Time to terminate surveillance. He scaled the fence, dropping down into the wooded ravine that backed onto Trinity’s property. He moved quietly through the brush, listening to the singing of frogs and crickets, the chatter of distant coyotes. Moved to the ravine’s public access way, at the end of the street.
He walked among silent mansions to where he’d parked his rental car, wondering what could’ve gone so
