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?”
“No, I didn’t. Step outside with me.”
“It was Air Force One. After three days the Shrubster did a fly-over. Gee, I feel better now.”
“Did you hear me?”
He leaned over the counter, filled his mug from the tap, and poured a jigger of Beam into it. He upended the mug, drinking it to the bottom, his eyes fastened on mine. He smiled, his face suffused with warmth. “This is our country, big mon. We fought for it,” he said. “I say screw all these cocksuckers. Nobody jacks the Big Sleazy when the Bobbsey Twins from Homicide are on the job.”
I had no idea what he was talking about. But in AA you do not try to reason with drunks. In Clete Purcel’s case, you did not invade the private cathedral where he sometimes lived.
“I’ll tell Helen you’ll catch us later,” I said.
He laid the full weight of his big arm across my shoulders and walked with me to the door. The cloud of testosterone and beer sweat that rose from his armpit was suffocating.
“Give me an hour. I just need to clean up and fix some supper for me and Dominique,” he said.
“Supper?”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“That woman isn’t from France. She used to work in a massage parlor in Lafayette. She was one of Stevie Giacano’s whores.”
“Who’s perfect? You’ve got something negative to say about every woman I meet.”
“That’s a comment on your judgment, not mine.”
I saw the hurt flicker in his face before I could take back my words. He took his arm from my shoulders and stepped out on the sidewalk. The street was strewn with plaster, broken glass, chimney bricks, beer cans and red plastic beer cups, roofing shingles, and thousands of water beetles that had been forced up through the sewer grates and that snapped under your feet when you stepped on them. But in the waning of the afternoon, in the pool of shadow made by the building at our back, in the popping of a Mardi Gras flag someone had hung on a staff from a balcony, I felt for just a moment that an older and fonder vision of New Orleans might still be available to us.
“I’m sorry for what I said, Clete.”
His eyes crinkled, threading with white lines at the corners. He pulled a slip of paper out of his shirt pocket with two fingers and offered it to me. “Aside from her painting career, Dominique coincidentally knows every working girl in the Quarter. You still want to find that junkie priest who’s hooked up with the sister of the MS-13 dude?” he said.
You didn’t put the slide or the glide on Clete Purcel. Chapter 7
O N OUR WAY back to rendezvous with Helen, we stopped at the second-story apartment where Jude LeBlanc lived with the Hispanic woman by the name of Natalia Ramos. But the apartment door was locked and the shutters latched. A neighbor, a Cajun woman who had ridden out the storm, said Jude had left the apartment for the Ninth Ward on Friday afternoon and Natalia had decided to join him. “I heard there’s bad t’ings happening down there. Maybe they ain’t coming back, no,” the neighbor said.
“Do you know where they went in the Ninth?” I asked.
“There’s a church down there that don’t ax no questions about him. Natalia said it’s made of stucco and got a bell tower,” she replied.
“Thank you,” I said, and started to go.
“Hey, you?” the neighbor said.
“Yes?”
“Maybe he ain’t doing right, a priest living wit’ a woman and all, but that’s a good man, yeah.”
That night was one of surreal images that I suspect have their origins more in the unconscious than in the conscious mind. People looked and behaved as they do in our sleep—not quite real, their bodies iridescent with sweat, their clothes in rags, like creatures living out their destinies on moonscape.
I saw a man rowing a boat, vigorously pulling on the oars, his back turned toward two bodies that were piled in the bow, his face set with stoic determination, as though his efforts could undo fate’s worst cut.
I saw a black baby hung in the branches of a tree, its tiny hands trailing in the current, its plastic diaper immaculate in the moonlight. I saw peo
ple eating from plastic packages of mustard and ketchup they had looted from a café, dividing what they had among themselves. Ten feet from them a dead cow matted with flies lay in the back of a wrecked pickup, a lead rope twisted around its neck.
A gelatinous fat man wearing boxer trunks and mirrored sunglasses floated past us on a bed of inner tubes, a twelve-pack of beer balanced on his stomach, one hand held high in a toast to a passing airboat.
“You want a ride up to high ground?” I said.
“And miss the show? Are you kidding?” he replied, ripping open another beer.
I saw kids running from an antebellum home they had just torched, silhouetted against the flames, like pranksters trick-or-treating on Halloween. When the gas lines exploded, sparks showered down on the entire neighborhood. Two blocks away vigilantes with shotguns and deer rifles prowled the flooded streets in a bass boat powered by an electric motor. One of them wore a headlamp, another a safari hat with a leopard-skin band. They were all sharing drinks from a silver flask and happy as hogs rolling in shit. I don’t know if they found their prey or not. In fact, at the time I was too tired to care.
We heard rumors that teams of elite troops, Special Forces or Rangers or Navy SEALs, were taking out snipers under a black flag. We heard that an alligator ate a deer on the second story of a flooded house by the Industrial Canal. Some NOPD cops said the personnel at Orleans Parish Prison had blown town and left the inmates to drown. Others said a downtown Mob rushed a command center, thinking food and water were being distributed. A deputy panicked and began firing an automatic weapon into the night sky, quickly adding to the widespread conviction that cops were arbitrarily killing innocent people.
The number of looters and arsonists and dangerous felons in custody was growing by the hour, with no place to put them. We kicked looters loose, only to see them recycled back into a temporary holding area two hours later. Some of those in custody were probably murderers—drug dealers or sociopaths who had taken advantage of the storm to eliminate the competition or settle old grudges. When a chain-link jail was created at the airport, we started packing the worst of the bunch into school buses for the trip up I-10 into Jefferson Parish.
That’s when I heard a woman on a wrist chain screaming at an Iberia deputy who was trying to push her up onto the steps of a waiting bus. She sat down heavily on the curb, pulling others down with her.
“What’s going on, Top?” I asked the deputy.
“She spit on a fireman and scratched his face. She started yelling about a priest on a church roof,” the deputy said. “I think she’s nuts. She was also holding a few pharmaceuticals.”
The woman looked Hispanic and wore a filthy purple sundress with bone-colored flowers printed on it. Her hair and skin were greasy with oil, her bare feet bloody.
“Who’s the priest?” I asked her.
She looked up at me. “Father LeBlanc,” she answered.
“Jude LeBlanc?” I asked.
“You know him?” she said.
“I knew a priest by that name in New Iberia. Where is he?”
“In the Lower Nine, at St. Mary Magdalene. He filled in there sometimes because they ain’t got no regular priest.”
“Can you kick her loose?” I asked the deputy.
“Gladly,” the deputy said, leaning down to the chain with his cuff key.
She was off balance when she stood up. I steadied her with one hand and walked her toward a first-aid station. “What happened to your feet?” I said.
“I lost my shoes two days ago. We were on a roof that didn’t have no shingles. The nails were sticking out of the boards.”
“Where’s Jude, Natalia?”
“How you know my name?”
“Your brother is Chula Ramos. He’s a member of MS-13. He told me about you and Jude.”
She twisted out of my hand and faced me. Her sundress was glued against her skin, her forehead bitten by insects. A helicopter mounted with a searchlight swooped by overhead, chasing looters in the business district.
“Where’s my brother? You using him to get to Jude?” she said.
“You want to lose the attitude or go back on the chain?”
Her eyes roved over my face, one tooth biting on the corner of her lip. “He was trying to get people at Mary Magdalene to evacuate. But a lot of them didn’t have no cars. So we all went up to the church because it’s got a big attic. Jude saw a boat floating by, one with a motor on it. He swam after it, in the dark. That was two nights ago.”
I saw Helen waving at me. A fight had broken out on one of the buses and through the windows I could see men in silhouette flailing at one another.
“Go on,” I said.
“I saw him start up the boat and drive it back toward the church. I shined a flashlight on him so he could see better. It was a green boat, with a duck painted on the side, and I could see him sitting in the back, driving it straight for the church. He was gonna take everybody out of the attic. He’d got an ax from somebody and was gonna chop a hole in the roof, because the window wasn’t big enough for a lot of the people to go through.
“I could hear him chopping up on the roof. The water was rising and I didn’t know if he could cut through the boards quick enough. Then the chopping stopped and I heard lots of feet scuffling and somebody cry out. I think maybe it was Jude.”
The incessant blast of airboats, the idling diesel engines of buses and trucks, the thropping of helicopter blades were like a dental drill whirring into an exposed nerve. Helen clicked a flashlight on and off in my direction to get my attention, her tolerance waning.
“I have to go now,” I said. “After you get your feet treated, I want you to get on that truck over there. In a couple of hours it’s going to a shelter in St. Mary Parish. I’m writing my cell phone number on my business card. I want you to call me when you get to the shelter.”
“The ones who couldn’t get out the window drowned,” she said.
“Say again?”
“Almost all the people in the attic drowned. I dropped the children out the window, but I didn’t see them again in the water. Most of the others was too old or too big. I left them behind. I just left them behind and swam toward a big tree that was floating past. I could hear them yelling in the dark.”
I started to speak, to offer some kind of reassurance to her, but there are times when words are of no value. I walked away and rejoined Helen and the other members of my department, all of whom were dealing with problems that were both tangible and transitory.
When I looked for Clete Purcel, I could not see him in the crowd. Chapter 8
O TIS BAYLOR WAS proud of the way his home had withstood the storm. Built of oak and cypress, with twin brick chimneys, by a clipper-ship captain who would later fight at the side of the Confederate admiral Raphael Semmes, the house lost no glass behind its latched shutters and developed no leaks in the ceilings, even though oak limbs weighing hundreds of pounds had crashed down on the roof. Otis’s neighbors were without power or telephone communication as the hurricane’s center plowed northward into Mississippi, but Otis’s generators worked beautifully and lit up his home with the soft pink-white radiance of a birthday cake.
By midday Tuesday he was clearing his drive of broken tree limbs, lopping them into segments with his chain saw, preparing to get his car out of the carriage house and make contact with his company’s state headquarters in North Louisiana. His street was still flooded, the water way up in his and his neighbors’ yards, but Otis was convinced the city’s storm-pump system would eventually kick in and drain all of uptown New Orleans. Why wouldn’t it? The city had gone under in ’65 and had come back better than ever. You just had to keep the right perspective.
But as the piles of sawed limbs grew higher and higher in his backyard, he realized it would take a cherry picker to clear the biggest pieces of debris from his drive and he also realized that probably eighty percent of his neighbors had evacuated, leaving their homes to whoever wished to enter them. He
didn’t condemn them, but he couldn’t understand a man who would give up his home either to the forces of nature or to lawless men.
The sky turned purple at sunset and hundreds of birds descended into his backyard, feeding on the worms that had been flooded to the surface. Otis went into the kitchen and poured a glass of whiskey, put a teaspoon of honey in it, and sipped it slowly while he stared out the back window at the gold strips of sunlight that clung with a kind of fatal beauty to the ruined branches of his trees.
“The toilet won’t flush,” Thelma, his daughter, said.
“Did you fill the tank from the bathtub?” he asked.
“It won’t flush because everything is backing up. It’s disgusting,” Thelma said.
“The sewer system will be back online in no time. You’ll see.”
“Why didn’t we leave like everybody else? It was stupid to stay here.”
“This is one time I agree with her,” Melanie, his wife, said from the kitchen doorway. She was smoking a cigarette, her shoulder propped against the doorjamb, every gold hair on her head neatly in place.
“I’ve fixed a cold supper for us—chicken sandwiches and cucumber salad, with ice cream for dessert,” Otis said. “I think we have a lot to be thankful for.”
“Like our visitors out there,” Melanie said. She nodded toward the front of the house, blowing smoke from the corner of her mouth.
Otis set down his glass of whiskey and went into the living room. Through the front windows and the tangle of downed tree limbs in the yard, he could make out four young black men in a boat farther up the street. They had cut the gas feed and tilted the motor up on the stern of the boat, so the propeller would not catch on the curb as they drifted onto the flooded lawn of a darkened house.
One of them stepped down into the water and pulled the boat by its painter toward the front door.
“Why not give our black mayor a call?” Melanie said.