John Ames - Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, Vol. 128, No. 5. Whole No. 783, November 2006

“It doesn’t. Then my brother Tom offered to put us up in New York City.”

“New York City!” Caroline clapped her hands. “Yes!”

“...in a two-bedroom apartment he shares with his wife and teenaged daughters. We would get the couch in the living room.”

“Oh.” Her hands dropped. “Well — how were those cows?”

“They mooed a lot.”

She shrugged. “You were safe and dry, anyway. — Wasn’t it terrible about old Angus Crawford?”

“Angus?” I sat up straight. “What happened to him?”

“The poor soul died in his house on Maya Street, like so many others.”

“But he had a two-story!”

“I know.”

“We tried to take him with us.”

Julian and I were on our way out early that Sunday morning, him at the wheel and me beside him with the map. Catherine, our Catahoula hound, panted over our shoulders. A city bus passed us with a loudspeaker exhorting residents to climb aboard and be taken to a shelter at no cost. I didn’t see anyone get on.

We stopped for some road food on Maya Street and happened to pass Angus Crawford’s place. The old man himself was in the front yard picking up his lawn furniture, his thick brush of hair looking whiter than the Greek Revival house behind him. We knew him from our Civic Pride meetings as the most vocal of the anti-development faction.

Julian pulled up to the curb and waved.

“Mr. Crawford?! Is your son coming to pick you up?”

“Doug?! That flowerpot?!” The old man screwed up his face and spat in the grass. “I haven’t talked to him in a year!”

“Never mind him, then.” I leaned out the window. “Throw a few things in a bag and ride with us!”

Catherine wagged a welcome, happy to have company in the backseat. I remember that Crawford just frowned and shook his head.

“We’re driving north and west,” Julian persisted. “We’ll take you anywhere you want to go: Gonzales?... Baton Rouge?... Alexandria?”

“I’m not going anywhere! I sat out Betsy and Camille right up there in my living room. I’ll do the same for Katrina.”

“But this will be three times the size,” I warned. “The mayor is calling it mandatory.”

“No bald-headed mayor is going to make me leave my home!”

Then we watched him stride up his steps, across the porch, and back inside.

As Julian turned the wheel to head down toward I-10, I looked out the rear window. “I’m glad the old buzzard isn’t coming along. He’s so disagreeable.”

“Yes, he could have ruined the disaster for all of us.”

“But what if there is a flood, and the water gets in his house?”

“Then he’ll just go upstairs.”

We spent the next nine hours in evacuation traffic, being “counter-flowed” all over creation, and didn’t think about Mr. Crawford again.

Now I turned back to Caroline. “We were hoping the old man’s son, Doug, would drive by and carry him to safety.”

“I’m sure he would have, but Doug Crawford was busy in Lakeview all week.” She fluttered her kidskin glove. “He and his friend Steve rode around in a flatbed boat, plucking people off their roofs. You might have seen them on the national news.”

“Maybe we did. We watched the network coverage on a portable TV in our camper.”

“That’s the saddest part. By the time he and Steve rode their boat to his father’s house, some National Guards from New Jersey had already been there. The code was on the door.”

“The code?”

“They had spray-painted a ‘1 D’ for ‘One Dead Inside.’ That’s how Doug found out about his father. Isn’t that the blackest irony? He had saved a hundred lives only to lose the one dearest to him.”

* * * *

I drove home by way of South Claiborne. Feel like stopping at one of the dozens of fast-food places that line the avenue for a roast beef sandwich? Milkshake? Fried chicken? Pizza? Nyah, nyah, you can’t have any of them. All of those franchises are closed and dark along with the drugstores, service stations, supermarkets... everything.

You know what I miss most? Miss more than electricity? More than my microwave? More even than phone service so I wouldn’t have to hike to the Fair Grinds cafe to read my e-mail? Traffic lights, that’s what I miss. Most of them in the city are still down, so we observe the protocol of a four-way stop. Whoever hits the intersection first gets to go. But what if it’s a tie to the intersection? What if it isn’t clear who was first? What if someone doesn’t want to wait his turn? I could get seriously killed around here.

I parked my car at the house, between piles of rubble, wrote out checks to pay some bills, and went walking through “Debris City” to the one post office that’s still open, built high up near Bayou St. John. Why not wait for the mailman, you ask? What mailman? I haven’t seen one on my block since August. Have you?

I waved to my neighbor, Thelma, who was still in her robe and sticking her head out her front door for a breath of fresh air. The flood didn’t cause her any structural damage, but the mold growing in her house is making her sicker by the day.

I passed the horrendously expensive coffee place where a giant yellow banner declares “NOW OPEN” in foot-high letters. If a thirsty believer parks his car and hurries over to grab a hot morning java, he will see the banner’s smaller print with the address of the company’s other franchise way across town that actually is open. This location is closed, locked, and bare to the walls.

As he fumes and curses, the thwarted customer can read that the place across town is hiring “barristas.” From the name, one might surmise a “barrista” to be a little lawyer, or maybe someone who builds prisons for Chihuahuas. But it’s actually a person who makes a living pouring horrendously expensive coffee.

Ubiquitous as blue tarps on roofs are the “NOW HIRING!” signs. With the city’s working poor scattered among forty-two states, there is no unemployment here anymore. Anyone willing to get up in the morning can have a job.

Most of the eager laborers who have poured into town are Hispanic, some in the country legally, others not. The change in the makeup of our population is audible. Streaming from screened doors and car radios are Mexican harmonies instead of rap rhythms.

I passed piles of debris ten feet high: dented “white goods” (refrigerators and washing machines, not sheets and pillowcases), soggy Sheetrock, faded furniture, muddy children’s toys, and felled giant live oaks that would make enough firewood to power the whole city till summer if only Entergy could burn it for fuel.

I passed a skeleton propped up in a window holding a crude cardboard sign: “WAITING FOR FEMA.”

I smelled something dead, bigger than a cat, smaller than a person, and crossed the street.

The supermarkets are boarded up for miles around, but a mom-and-pop Italian grocery is back in business on a cash-only basis. They can’t process credit cards without a phone.

Walking along Orleans Avenue, I trod on multiple stencils of an invective directed toward a certain public figure. The public figure’s name has four letters and so did the invective.

I detoured down narrow side streets looking for watermarks. The one at our house is about the height of the front porch. But this neighborhood was considerably below sea level and the grainy brown lines were almost as high as the rafters. I passed blocks of abandoned houses and stopped at one to decode the graffiti on the door. There was spray-painted a large X. The space on top had the date, “9–6.” To the left were the initials or ID number of the rescuers. “AZ” for the Arizona National Guard, for example. Or “TX”: There’s Texas. “NJ”: Yay, New Jersey!