James Burke: Pegasus Descending

Slim Bruxal? He not only got a free pass, since there was no substantive evidence against him in the death of Crustacean Man, he also got a job as a card dealer at a casino in Las Vegas. But I think Slim has his own appointment in Samarra waiting for him, at which time he’ll get to see Crustacean Man again.

But actually within days after Clete’s hospitalization, our concerns about his future and all the events that had ensued since the death of Yvonne Darbonne seemed to telescope into the distant past. Hurricane Katrina, the nightmare that New Orleans had feared for years, struck the city with an intensity that was greater than the destructive force of the nuclear weapons visited upon the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

The levees broke and the great bowl that surrounds New Orleans filled with water, untreated sewage, and petrochemical sludge. On rooftops and in windowless attics, the residents of the Lower Ninth Ward in Orleans Parish drowned by the hundreds if not thousands. If you have ever heard tapes of those who called on cell phones from those attics and rooftops, you will never forget the desperation in their voices as the water rose around their heads.

If there are saints who walk among us, many of them wear the uniform of the United States Coast Guard. They flew without rest or sleep day after day, suspended from cables, holding the infirm and the elderly and the helpless against their chests, with no regard for their own safety, with a level of courage that others might equal but never surpass.

As of this writing, January 29, 2006, the death toll is over 1,000 souls, and 3,400 are still officially listed as missing.

The irony is that the National Hurricane Center had forecast that New Orleans would be hit head-on by a category five storm. That didn’t happen. In the last hours before landfall, the storm shifted direction to the northeast and its full brunt struck Gulfport, Mississippi, rather than New Orleans. Had the forecasters’ prediction proved correct, the levees surrounding New Orleans would have been turned into little more than strings of silt and the loss of human life would have been incalculable.

Weeks later, Hurricane Rita churned ashore at Cameron, Louisiana, just south of Lake Charles, the exact same place Audrey made landfall in 1957 when my half brother and I worked on a seismograph barge west of Morgan City. It is no exaggeration to say the southern rim of Louisiana is gone. Fishing villages, towns, hundreds of square miles of sugarcane and rice fields look like surreal footage from a film depicting an apocalyptic event.

But as Clete suggested, you don’t surrender the country of your birth to either the forces of greed or natural calamity. The songs in our hearts don’t die. The spring will come aborning again, whether we’re here for it or not. Clete Purcel always understood that and as a consequence was never defeated by his adversaries.

Southern Iberia Parish was under twelve feet of water after Hurricane Rita. East Main, where we live, was virtually untouched. The flowers along the street are blooming, our lawns green, the days balmy, the bayou hammered with a brassy light through the trees. Why is one person spared and another not? Why do the Yvonne Dragoons of the world suffer? If age brings either wisdom or answers to ancient questions, it has made an exception for me.

But I don’t dwell on the great mysteries anymore. Alafair will be home for Christmas, and Molly and I greet each day as lovers just discovering one another. I live in a place where Confederate soldiers in ragged uniforms hover on the edge of one’s vision, beckoning from the mist, calling us back into the past, reminding us that the mythos of winged horses and Grecian warriors was fashioned in our collective souls, that our story is one of ancient gods and peoples, inseparable from our own.

I think it’s not bad to be a player against a backdrop like that.