Rexanne Becnel: Blink Of An Eye

But they were great guys, helping their fellow New Orleanians any way they could. I hoped I’d see them again. After many hugs, goodbyes and admonitions, it was just me, Lucky and a damp garbage can full of food and water.

How can I possibly describe the devastation? Everyone has seen pictures of flooded neighborhoods or burned-down houses. Or even bombed-out neighborhoods, usually in the Middle East. But no one has ever seen anything like this. The vastness of the destruction. Blocks and blocks and blocks of emptiness and debris. It was bad enough in the flooded areas. But I saw now that the water hid the worst of it. I was viewing the complete shambles of a great American city. And this was only the Gentilly area.

Elysian Fields Avenue is about five miles long from the lake, south to the river. A good four miles of it was flooded. I walked the final mile to my house, partly in knee-deep water, the rest on dry ground.

On the entire boat ride we’d only seen three people on their porches. On my walk I saw a few more, but they weren’t the normal New Orleans folks you expect to see. They were fearful and shell-shocked. Wild-eyed. But they all shared whatever information they had.

“The police are making everybody leave.”

“The National Guard’s taking over.”

“Don’t give anybody any back talk. They’ll arrest your ass so fast and throw you in the jail.”

The new jail, that is. The old one was flooded, so the train terminal had been taken over as a temporary prison.

I thanked them and kept moving. My dinky apartment on Dauphine Street had never seemed so appealing. But as I approached my block, I started to cry. The crepe myrtles at the corner house were both down. The awnings on the second floor of another house dangled from one remaining support, threatening to decapitate someone in the next strong wind. Slates and shingles littered the street, as did cable, electric and telephone lines. A three-block section of utility poles leaned like drunken men, and a sycamore tree on the opposite corner had toppled onto two cars, completely blocking the street.

It was like looking at a dead place, and I felt this sickening hole expand in my chest. What were we going to do? How could anybody recover from such devastation? And this neighborhood hadn’t even flooded.

I guess I must have been working on autopilot, pushing my garbage can like some old bag lady and holding tight to Lucky’s leash. Once we’d gotten out of the water, he’d become much happier, treating our trek like some long overdue walk in a new park full of new sights and new smells and new places to explore.

But as we negotiated the trash-strewn block and stopped in front of my house, he seemed to sense how overwhelmed I was. And panicked. I was home, but it wasn’t home. It was a scary place that looked more or less the same. Only nothing seemed familiar anymore. If a Hollywood director could capture the chilling unreality of this surreal gray place, he’d have an Oscar-worthy horror flick. If he could do it. Somehow I didn’t think anyone could.

I shoved aside a plastic lawn chair and a piece of shiplap siding to open the gate, then muscled the garbage can in. As I slammed the gate, though, and looked out at my ordinary New Orleans block of shotgun houses, both singles and doubles, I burst into tears. That’s when Lucky bumped his bony shoulder against my thigh and started to whine.

“It’s okay,” I said, dropping to my knees and hugging his neck. “It’s okay. We’ll be fine.”

But I was lying to him and to myself. At least it felt like a lie. Because it didn’t seem as if anything could ever be fine again.

My apartment was relatively unscathed, just one broken window in the kitchen. I found the culprit: a roofing slate shattered in the sink. A young pecan tree in the next yard leaned against the house, blocking my bathroom window. But other than that, I was very fortunate.

Yet my house still felt dead. Lifeless. There was no whir from the air conditioner, no hum from the refrigerator. No chronic drip from the kitchen faucet. And boy, was it hot.

I opened all the windows. Then poured a bowl of water for Lucky from the stash I’d brought. I was home, such as it was. Now what? It had only been one week since Katrina hit, but from what I’d seen, the city would be years recovering.

Depressed anew, I decided to go to bed. It was only one-thirty, but two Tylenol PM took care of that. When I woke up it was weirdly dark and weirdly quiet, as if I was in some Twilight Zone city. I should have been used to it by now, but I wasn’t.

I took Lucky outside to relieve himself, but I carried a flashlight and a gun that had belonged to my ex. So much for my fear of guns. It wasn’t loaded, though. I didn’t even own any ammunition for it. But it was big, shiny and very scary looking. When I got back inside, I fed the dog, took three Tylenol PM and crawled back into my sweaty bed.

I wished I had something stronger: Valium, Xanax, Dilaudid. But after my spectacular crash and burn seven years ago, due to the overuse of said pharmaceuticals, I’d confined my substance abusing to alcohol in all its various incarnations. And unfortunately I’d finished off pretty much everything I had prior to the storm.

So I slept another eight hours and woke up the next morning, wet with sweat and excruciatingly conscious that if not for Lucky, I’d have been dead for well over a week by now.

I’d been a nurse for a long time, so I knew a little bit about death and dying. How the body deteriorates and falls apart. But I’d always heard that floaters were different. By now I would have been a bloated carcass, discolored and distended. Maybe nibbled on by enough fish to be indistinguishable as either a man or a woman.

“Ugh.” I didn’t like the thought of being mistaken for a guy, even in death. I sat up. Lucky was still beside my bed. He’d become amazingly loyal to me.

Since the water wasn’t working, which meant no flushing, I went into the yard with the dog. That’s when I noticed that the fence had collapsed between my yard and the one behind me. The one with the swimming pool. So I got a bucket, a towel and a bar of soap, and in short order I was bathed, my hair was clean, and I had two big buckets of water sitting next to my toilet, ready for action.

Now what?

I knew there were some people still around. I’d heard voices this morning, and the sound of a truck engine. But I’d lain low. That’s because I’d also heard gunshots last night, and whether it was the good guys or the bad guys, I didn’t want to be a part of it. So I sat in my front window and peeped through the blinds, not sure what to do with myself until I saw old Mr. French open his shutters and lean out his door to peer up and down the street.

I yanked up my mini-blinds and waved to him. He shrank back at first, then waved when he recognized me. “You okay?” I yelled.

“Yeah. But there’s no water to flush the toilet.”

“I’ll be right over.”

I brought him my pail, then took two buckets he gave me and filled them from the pool. It turned out that he and I, plus the hippie couple on the corner, were the only ones still in our block. I knocked on their door and told them about the swimming pool. In turn they told me that Washington Square Park in the Marigny had become a sort of Rescue Central. There wasn’t a lot of food and water, but what there was, people were sharing. Despite the panic and looting during the first few days after the storm, things were calmer now, and the vibe in the park was good.

“What about the evacuation order?” I asked.

Enoch, skinny and dreadlocked but with a baby face, grinned. “As long as you have ID with a valid address and a dog, they don’t hassle you. They don’t know what to do with the dogs, so most of the time, unless you’re homeless, they just look the other way. The National Guard dudes are cooler than NOPD, though. The cops are, like, totally wigged out.”