The church up the street is made out of pink stucco and has bougainvillea growing up one wall. The water is up to the little bell tower now, and the big cross in the breezeway with the hand-carved wooden Jesus on it is deep underwater. The priest tried to get everybody to leave the neighborhood, but a lot of people didn’t have cars, or at least cars they could trust, and because it was still two days till payday, most people didn’t have any money, either. So the priest said he was staying, too. An hour later the wind came off the Gulf and began to peel the face off South Louisiana.
This morning, I saw the priest float past the top of a live oak tree. He was on his stomach, his clothes puffed with air, his arms stretched out by his sides, like he was looking for something down in the tree.
The levees are busted and a gas main has caught fire under the water and the flames have set fire to the roof of a two-story house on the next block. Miles is pretty disgusted with the whole business. “When this is over, I’m moving to Arizona,” he says.
“No, you won’t,” I say.
“Watch me.”
“This is the Big Sleazy. It’s Guatemala. We don’t belong anywhere else.”
He doesn’t try to argue with that one. When we were kids we played with guys who had worked for King Oliver and Kid Orey and Bunk Johnson, Miles on the drums, me on tenor sax. Flip Phillips and Jo Jones probably didn’t consider us challenges to their careers, but we were respected just the same. A guy who could turn his sticks into a white blur at The Famous Door is going to move to a desert and play “Sing, Sing, Sing” for the Gila monsters? That Miles breaks me up.
His hair is still black, combed back in strings on his scalp, the skin on his arms white as a baby’s, puckered more than it should be, but the veins are still blue and not collapsed or scarred from the needlework we did on ourselves. Miles is a tough guy, but I know what he’s thinking. Tony and him and me started out together, then Tony got into the life, and I mean into the life, man—drugs, whores, union racketeering, loan-sharking, maybe even popping a couple of guys. But no matter how many crimes he may have committed, Tony held on to the one good thing in his life, a little boy who was born crippled. Tony loved that little boy.
“Thinking about Tony?” I say.
“Got a card from him last week. The postmark was Mexico City. He didn’t sign it, but I know it’s from him,” Miles says.
He lifts his strap undershirt off his chest and wipes a drop of sweat from the tip of his nose. His shoulders look dry and hard, the skin stretched tight on the bone; they’re just starting to powder with sunburn. He takes a drink of water from one of our milk jugs, rationing himself, swallowing each sip slowly.
“I thought you said Tony was in Argentina.”
“So he moves around. He’s got a lot of legitimate businesses now. He’s got to keep an eye on them and move around a lot.”
“Yeah, Tony was always hands-on,” I say, avoiding his eyes.
You know what death smells like? Fish blood that someone has buried in a garden of night-blooming flowers. Or a field mortuary during the monsoon season in a tropical country right after the power generators have failed. Or the buckets that the sugar-worker whores used to pour into the rain ditches behind their cribs on Sunday morning. If that odor comes to you on the wind or in your sleep, you tend to take special notice of your next sunrise.
I start looking at the boat and the water that goes to the horizon in all directions. My butt hurts from sitting on the spine of the house and the shingles burn the palms of my hands. Somewhere up in Orleans Parish I know there’s higher ground, an elevated highway sticking up on pilings, high-rise apartment buildings with roofs choppers can land on. Miles already knows what I’m thinking. “Wait till dark,” he says.
“Why?”
“There won’t be as many people who want the boat,” he says.
I look at him and feel ashamed of both of us.
A hurricane is supposed to have a beginning and an end. It tears the earth up, fills the air with flying trees and bricks and animals and sometimes even people, makes you roll up into a ball under a table and pray till drops of blood pop on your brow, then it goes away and lets you clean up after it, like somebody pulled a big prank on the whole town. But this one didn’t work that way. It’s killing in stages.
I see a diapered black baby in a tree that’s only a green smudge under the water’s surface. I can smell my neighbors in their attic. The odor is like a rat that has drowned in a bucket of water inside a superheated garage. A white guy floating by on an inner tube has a battery-powered radio propped on his stomach and tells us snipers have shot a policeman in the head and killed two Fish and Wildlife officers. Gangbangers have turned over a boat trying to rescue patients from Charity Hospital. The Superdome and the Convention Center are layered with feces and are without water or food for thousands of people who are seriously pissed off. A bunch of them tried to walk into Jefferson Parish and were turned back by cops who fired shotguns over their heads. The white-flight crowd doesn’t need any extra problems.
The guy in the inner tube says a deer was on the second floor of a house on the next street and an alligator ate it.
That’s supposed to be entertaining?
“You guys got anything to eat up there?” the guy in the inner tube asks.
“Yeah, a whole fucking buffet. I had it catered from Galatoire’s right before the storm,” Miles says to him.
That Miles.
Toward evening the sun goes behind the clouds and the sky turns purple and is full of birds. The Coast Guard choppers are coming in low over the water, the downdraft streaking a trough across the surface, the rescue guys swinging from cables like anyone could do what they do. They’re taking children and old and sick people out first and flying without rest. I love those guys. But Miles and me both know how it’s going to go. We’ve seen it before—the slick coming out of a molten sun, right across the canopy, automatic weapons fire whanging off the airframe, wounded grunts waiting in an LZ that North Vietnamese regulars are about to overrun. You can’t get everybody home, Chuck. That’s just the way it slides down the pipe sometimes.
A guy sitting on his chimney with Walkman ears on says the president of the United States flew over and looked down from his plane at us. Then he went on to Washington. I don’t think the story is true, though. If the president was really in that plane, he would have landed and tried to find out what kind of shape we were in. He would have gone to the Superdome and the Convention Center and talked to the people there and told them the country was behind them.
The wind suddenly blows from the south, and I can smell salt and rain and the smell fish make when they’re spawning. I think maybe I’m dreaming.
“Tony is coming,” Miles says out of nowhere.
I look at his face, swollen with sunburn, the salt caked on his shoulders. I wonder if Miles hasn’t pulled loose from his own tether.
“Tony knows where we are,” he says. “He’s got money and power and connections. We’re the Mean Machine from Magazine. That’s what he always said. The Mean Machine stomps ass and takes names.”
For a moment I almost believe it. Then I feel all the bruises and fatigue, and the screaming sounds of the wind blowing my neighborhood apart drain out of me like black water sucking down through the bottom of a giant sink. My head sinks on my chest and I fall asleep, even though I know I’m surrendering my vigilance at the worst possible time.
I see Tony standing in the door of a Jolly Green, the wind flattening his clothes against his muscular physique. I see the Jolly Green coming over the houses, loading everyone on board, dropping bright yellow inflatable life rafts to people, showering water bottles and C-rats down to people who had given up hope.
But I’m dreaming. I wake up with a start. The sun is gone from the sky, the water still rising, the surface carpeted with trash. The painter to our boat hangs from the air vent, cut by a knife. Our boat is gone, our water jugs along with it.
The night is long an
d hot, the stars veiled with smoke from fires vandals have set in the Garden District. My house is settling, window glass snapping from the frames as the floor buckles and the nails in the joists make sounds like somebody tightening piano wire on a wood peg.
It’s almost dawn now. Miles is sitting on the ridge of the roof, his knees splayed on the shingles, like a human clothespin, staring at a speck on the southern horizon. The wind shifts, and I smell an odor like night-blooming flowers in a garden that has been fertilized with fish blood.
“Hey, Miles?” I say.
“Yeah?” he says impatiently, not wanting to be distracted from the speck on the horizon.
“We played with Louis Prima. He said you were as good as Krupa. We blew out the doors at the Dream Room with Johnny Scat. We jammed with Sharkey and Jack Teagarden. How many people can say that?”
“It’s a Jolly Green. Look at it,” he says.
I don’t want to listen to him. I don’t want to be drawn into his delusions. I don’t want to be scared. But I am. “Where?” I ask.
“Right there, in that band of light between the sea and sky. Look at the shape. It’s a Jolly Green. It’s Tony, man, I told you.”
The aircraft in the south draws nearer, like the evening star winking and then disappearing and then winking again. But it’s not a Jolly Green. It’s a passenger plane and it goes straight overhead, the windows lighted, the jet engines splitting the air with a dirty roar.
Miles’s face, his eyes rolled upward as he watches the plane disappear, makes me think of John the Baptist’s head on a plate.
“He’s gonna come with an airboat. Mark my word,” he says.
“The DEA killed him, Miles,” I say.
“No, man, I told you. I got a postcard. It was Tony. Don’t buy government lies.”
“They blew him out of the water off Veracruz.”
“No way, man. Not Tony. He got out of the life and had to stay off the radar. He’s coming back.”
I lie on my back, the nape of my neck cupped restfully on the roof cap, small waves rolling up my loins and chest like a warm blanket. I no longer think about the chemicals and oil and feces and body parts that the water may contain. I remind myself that we came out of primeval soup and that nothing in the earth’s composition should be strange or objectionable to us. I look at the smoke drifting across the sky and feel the house jolt under me. Then it jolts again and I know that maybe Miles is right about seeing Tony, but not in the way he thought.
When I look hard enough into the smoke and the stars behind it, I see New Orleans the way it was when we were kids. I see the fog blowing off the Mississippi levee and pooling in the streets, the Victorian houses sticking out of the mist like ships on the Gulf. I see the green-painted streetcars clanging up and down the neutral ground on St. Charles and the tunnel of live oaks you ride through all the way down to the Carrollton District by the levee. The pink and purple neon tubing on the Katz & Besthoff drugstores glows like colored smoke inside the fog, and music is everywhere, like it’s trapped under a big glass dome—the brass funeral bands marching down Magazine, old black guys blowing out the bricks in Preservation Hall, dance orchestras playing on hotel roofs along Canal Street.
That’s the way it was back then. You woke in the morning to the smell of gardenias, the electric smell of the streetcars, chicory coffee, and stone that has turned green with lichen. The light was always filtered through trees, so it was never harsh, and flowers bloomed year-round. New Orleans was a poem, man, a song in your heart that never died.
I only got one regret. Nobody ever bothered to explain why nobody came for us. When Miles and me are way out to sea, I want to ask him that. Then a funny thing happens. Floating right along next to us is the big wood carving of Jesus on his Cross, from the stucco church at the end of my street. He’s on his back, his arms stretched out, the waves sliding across his skin. The holes in his hands look just like the petals from the bougainvillea on the church wall. I ask him what happened back there.
He looks at me a long time, like maybe I’m a real slow learner.
“Yeah, I dig your meaning. That’s exactly what I thought,” I say, not wanting to show how dumb I am.
But considering the company I’m in—Jesus and Miles and Tony waiting for us somewhere up the pike—I got no grief with the world.
The stories included in this collection have previously appeared in a number of publications. “Winter Light” was published in Epoch (1992); “The Village” is excerpted from the novel Burning Angel, published by Hyperion (1995), and also appeared in Image (1995); “The Night Johnny Ace Died” was published in Esquire (2007); “Water People” was published in Epoch (1994); “Texas City, 1947” was published in The Southern Review (1991) and is excerpted from the novel A Stained White Radiance, published by Hyperion (1992); “Mist” was published in The Southern Review (2007); “A Season of Regret” was published in Shenandoah (2006); “The Molester” was published online in Amazon Shorts (2005); “The Burning of the Flag” was published in Confrontation (1995); “Why Bugsy Siegel Was a Friend of Mine” was published in The Southern Review (2005); “Jesus Out to Sea” was published in Esquire (2006).
James Lee Burke, Jesus Out to Sea
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