James Burke - The Tin Roof Blowdown

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.

After sunset on the first day, August 29, the sky was an ink wash, streaked with smoke from fires vandals had set in the Garden District. There were also electrical moments, flashes of light in the sky, heat lightning or perhaps sometimes the igneous trajectory of tracer rounds fired from automatic weapons. The rule books were going over the gunwales.

Looters were hitting pharmacies and liquor and jewelry stores first, then working their way down the buffet table. A rogue group of NOPD cops had actually set up a thieves headquarters on the tenth floor of a downtown hotel, storing their loot in the rooms, terrorizing the management, and threatening to shoot a reporter who tried to question them. New Orleans cops also drove off with automobiles from the Cadillac agency. Gangbangers had converged on the Garden District and were having a Visigoth holiday, burning homes built before the Civil War, carrying away whatever wasn’t bolted down.

Evacuees in the Superdome and Convention Center tried to walk across the bridge into Jefferson Parish. Most of these people were black, some carrying children in their arms, all of them exhausted, hungry, and dehydrated. They were met by armed police officers from Jefferson Parish who fired shotguns over their heads and allowed none of them to leave Orleans Parish.

An NOPD cop shot a black man with a twelve-gauge through the glass window of his cruiser in front of the Convention Center while hundreds of people watched. The cop sped away before the crowd attacked his vehicle. Some witnesses said he ran over the victim’s body. The cop claimed the dead man had tried to attack him with a pair of scissors.

A half block from a state medical clinic I counted the bodies of nine black people, all of them floating facedown in a circle, like free-falling parachutists suspended on a cushion of air high above the earth.

We heard stories of gunfire from rooftops and windows. Emergency personnel in rescue boats became afraid of the very people they were supposed to save. Some people airlifted out by the Coast Guard in the Lower Nine said the gunfire was a desperate attempt to signal the boat crews searching in the darkness for survivors. Who was telling the truth? What cop or fireman or volunteer kneeling on the bow of a rescue boat, preparing to throw a rope on a rooftop, wanted to find out? Who wanted to eat a round from an AK-47?

Charity and Baptist Memorial hospitals had become necropolises. The bottom floors were flooded, and gangbangers turned over rescue boats that were trying to evacuate the patients. Without electricity or ice or unspoiled food or running water, hospital personnel were left to care for the most helpless of their wards-trauma victims with fresh gunshot wounds, those whose bodily functions depended entirely upon machines, patients who had just had organs surgically removed, and the most vulnerable group, the aged and the terrified, all of it inside a building that was cooking in its own stink.

But a lot of NOPD cops were loyal to their badge and their oath and worked tirelessly alongside the rest of us for the next seventy-two hours. Among their number were many of Clete’s longtime detractors and enemies, but even the most vehement of them had to concede that Clete Purcel was a beautiful man to have on our side-the kind who covers your back, tightens your slack, and humps your pack. He knew every street and rat hole in New Orleans, and he had also fished every bayou and bay and canal from Barataria to Lake Borgne. He was on a first-name basis with hookers, Murphy artists, petty boosters, whiskey priests, junkies, skin bar operators, transvestites, disgraced cops, strippers, second-story creeps, street mutts, bondsmen, journalists, and old-time Mobsters who tended their flower gardens in the suburbs. His bravery was a given. His indifference to physical pain or verbal insult was vinegar and gall to his enemies, his loyalty to his friends of such an abiding nature that with conscious forethought he would willingly lay down his life for them.

But even Katrina did not change Clete’s penchant for the visceral and the sybaritic. On August 31 he said he was going to check his apartment and office on St. Ann in the Quarter. Two hours passed and no Clete. It was afternoon and Helen and I were in a boat out in Gentilly, surrounded by water and houses that were beginning to smell from the bodies inside. The combination of heat and humidity and lack of wind was almost unbearable, the sun like a wobbling yellow balloon trapped under the water’s surface. Helen cut the engine and let us drift on our wake until we were in the shade of an elevated stretch of Interstate 10. Her face and arms were badly sunburned, her shirt stiff with dried salt.

“Go find him,” she said.

“Clete can take care of himself,” I said.

“We need every swinging dick on the line. Tell him to get his ass back here.”

“That’s what Nate Baxter used to say.”

“Remind me to scrub out my mouth with Ajax,” she replied.

I caught a ride on another boat to high ground, then walked the rest of the way into the Quarter. The Quarter had taken a pounding from the wind and the rain, and ventilated shutters had been shattered off their hinges and the planked floors of whole balconies stripped clean from the buildings and sent flying like undulating rows of piano keys down the street. But the Quarter had not flooded and some of the bars, using gasoline-powered generators, had stayed on the full-tilt boogie for three days-their patrons zoned and marinated to the point they looked like waxworks figures that had been left under a heat lamp.

I found Clete in a corner dump two blocks from his office, his tropical shirt and cream-colored slacks black with oil, his skin peeling with sun blisters, his face glowing from the huge mug of draft beer he was drinking and the whiskey jigger rolling around inside it. A brunette woman in a halter and cutoff blue-jean shorts and spiked heels was drinking next to him, her thigh touching his. The tops of her breasts were tattooed with chains of roses, her neck strung with purple and green glass beads, her mascara running like a clown’s.

“Time to dee-dee, Cletus,” I said.

“Lighten up, big mon. Have a soda and lime. The guy’s got cold shrimp on dry ice,” he said.

“You’re shit-faced.”

“So what? This is Dominique. She’s an artist from Paris. We’re going over to my place for a while. Did you see that big plane that flew over?”