I’m not sure what they’re talking about exactly, but they both seem pleased with each other, and an hour after dawn we paddle into the thin daylight, into the muggy heat, knowing it will get hotter as the sun rises. Flood level looks about the same, with one-story houses showing only their roofs above the water. The water itself glistens, filthy and clotted with the things it has carried away. Crows complain from the crooks of half-drowned trees. Small white seagulls swoop just above the water, fighting over scraps. Out at the blurry edge, where the sky meets the water, smoke rises in black billows, as if the water itself is burning.
Suddenly a hot breeze wrinkles the floodwaters, followed by the rush of an orange helicopter charging sideways through the sky. “Coast Guard!” Mr. Tru shouts in approval. “Somebody finally show up!”
The helicopters become a familiar noise. Can’t always see them but we can hear them coming and going all day long, chugging across the sky. Along the way we spot other boats. Some of the boats have motors, some have oars, and some are barely floating, but they’re all loaded with survivors. Rowboats and motorboats and noisy airboats with big props pushing wind, and a flat kind of boat that Mr. Tru calls a “pirogue.” “Cajun style,” he explains. “Cajuns know the water. So they helpin’, too. Is all good.”
The boat people wave and we wave back, but Mr. Tru steers away, paddling with a purpose. “Can’t play no hero game,” he explains warily. “Got all we can do to rescue ourselves.”
We glide along, and for a while the only sound we make is the paddle slipping into the water, pulling us forward. The sun burns a hot white hole in the sky. Bandy sits in my lap as if hypnotized, never barking or whining. It’s kind of uncomfortable, but I can’t push him away, not after what we’ve been through. I wonder what a dog sees. Does he see a city crushed and ruined, with rows and rows of wooden houses dissolving into the flood, and roofs like sad, broken party hats? Or is it a blur of things he can’t quite figure out except for the smell part? A mind-wrinkling stink of rot and mold and garbage and smoke, and something worse, something I’d rather not think about. Maybe Bandy knows, and that’s what makes him so quiet.
Far in the distance a siren wails and wails. I’ve never heard a sound so lonesome.
Malvina says, “Tru? What you say about dry land and a phone? That mean we can call my mom?”
He lifts the paddle out of the water, pausing to consider the question. “We get a message to her, let her know you okay,” he decides, finally.
“Promise?”
“Do my best.”
Makes me wonder what that means, exactly — get a message to her — but I don’t ask. Not my business, that’s for sure.
Brightened by the prospect of a phone call to her mom, Malvina keeps up a steady commentary as we glide through the neighborhood. “Oh, I know that house! Old lady, Miss Henderson, she own it till she die, and now it gone to her nieces, with all they kids, and they made it two houses, up and down. And over there, that rusty roof? That a store, they sell food in the back, dirty rice and kettle fry? Real tasty. Owner, he let us buy candy for a penny even though it supposed to be a dime. They got good sno-balls, too.”
“Sno-balls,” Mr. Tru says. “Oh, yeah, I remember. Cold enough to freeze yo t’roat.”
“Uh-huh, it hurt good. And over there, that was Salon Elisha. Lisha, she do my mom’s hair. When I was little she had a parrot in a cage that say, ‘Who dat?’ First time, I thought it was a person in the other room, that’s how good that parrot talk. You know Lisha, Tru, she most as light skin as Zane?”
He shakes his head and chuckles. “Boy won’t be light skinned for long, with this sun and no hat.”
Malvina points. “See over to there? Around the corner from Miss Henderson, you can’t see it now ’cause the water too deep, I used to know these twin girls, one year older than me, we sing on this karaoke box they had, with a pink microphone? We pretend like we auditioning for American Idol.”
Malvina goes on and on, describing everybody that lived in the neighborhood, all the family connections, hardly pausing to take a breath. She talks different from me, like she says “doe” instead of “door,” and “stow” instead of “store,” and “troot” instead of “truth,” but I understand her pretty good. It helps that she talks with her hands, shaping the words, but mostly I get it because she wants me to. My own mom would say she’s full of beans, but for all I know that’s an insult in New Orleans. You might better say she’s full of sparks. You know how sparklers can burn you sometimes, but you don’t mind because the sparks are fun? Like that.
“You like jokes?” she asks, and without waiting for a reply goes, “What kind of dog keep the best time? A watchdog! How you make an egg roll? You push it! Where do bees go to the bathroom? At the BP station!”
The jokes are really dumb, and I’ve heard most of them before, like in fourth grade, but the way she tells them, so pleased with herself, you can’t help but laugh.
The jokes may not be funny, but she is.
“What the judge say when a skunk walk into the courthouse? Odor in the court! What you call a pig that does karate? A pork chop!”
“You killin’ us, dawlin’,” Mr. Tru says, smiling indulgently. “Girl want to be a stand-up comic, but she better not stand up in this canoe!”
“Good one, Tru!” she says. “Next joke, here it come. Which side of the leopard has the most spots? The outside!”
“She on a roll, watch out.”
“What do clouds wear under their shorts? Thunderpants!”
“Easy, dawlin’, you gone hurt yo’sef like you hurtin’ us.”
“We gotta laugh, right, Tru?”
“Oh yeah, for sure we do. Go on and drink some water, dawlin’. Bottle there behind you, see it? Zane? You best have one, too.”
The mood changes from funny to scary all at once. I’m sipping at the warm plastic bottle, wishing it was cold, when the dirty floodwater ahead of us starts to wrinkle. That’s what it looks like at first, like a wrinkle when you shake out a blanket. Like a bunch of wrinkles tangled up together, but moving on their own.
“Keep your hands inside,” Mr. Tru says in a warning tone.
The fear hits like something electric, shooting up my spine and into the back of my neck. Lots of people are afraid of certain things. For instance my mom is totally afraid of spiders. Whenever she sees a spider she makes me get it out of the room for her. I don’t mind because spiders don’t scare me, they’re kind of interesting with their webs and all. What does scare me, long as I can remember, is snakes. And there are snakes in the floodwater. Dozens of snakes, uncountable snakes, all writhing together.
Makes me want to scream, but I can’t.
“Keep hold a that dog,” Mr. Tru says. “We gone sit real still, let ’ em pass on by.”
Bandy growls deep in his throat but I hold him still as the water around the canoe boils with snakes. Some as thick as my wrist, others as small around as my little finger, but all of them undulating and angry, as if they’d like to bite one another, but they can’t tell where one snake ends and the next begins. Heads and tails all knotted up like a slithering mass of oily ropes. Coiling and uncoiling in a frenzy, thumping soft and wet against the sides of the canoe.
I want to close my eyes and wish them away, but I’m too scared not to look. Just when it seems the worst is over a glistening tail slips up over the side and the rest of the snake curls itself out of the water and into the bottom of the canoe, neat as you please.
The snake has a thick, scaly body and shiny black eyes and a white mouth with fangs like white needles. The open mouth is an inch from my bare toes, as if tasting the air, or maybe smelling how afraid I am.
Something touches my shoulder. Mr. Tru with the blade of the paddle, silently urging me to be still. He gives me a tight smile, and then in one deft move he slips the paddle under the snake and flips it high in the air, out of the canoe.
An hour or so later I’m still a little shaky inside, like there’s a cold p
lace where a snake has slithered into my brain and won’t go away.
“Very unusual,” Mr. Tru says about the incident. “Big mess of cottonmouth all up together? Must be the flood drove ’em crazy. Never seen such a thing before, likely won’t see it ever again.”
He’s trying his best to reassure me, saying how rare it is for a snake to come into a boat. But if it can happen once it can happen again, right? And next time he might not be so quick with his paddle. So I keep seeing wrinkles in the water and tensing up. And he keeps on paddling, slow and steady. We pass away from the drowned neighborhood into a wide place with a couple of big, wrecked barges laying half-submerged. The shipping channel, he says. And on the other side of the shipping channel the flood only comes up to the lower windows of the houses instead of the roofs.
Mr. Tru says the water is no more than three or four feet deep and he could get out and walk the canoe along if he had to, but me and Malvina beg him not to, and that’s when I realize that despite all the joking around she’s just as scared of snakes as me.
“Stay in the boat, Tru,” she pleads. “Stay in the boat!”
He promises he won’t get out until the canoe bumps into dry ground. “Come to that it don’t have to be zactly dry,” he adds, musing. “Soggy will do.”
“How long we get there?” Malvina wants to know.
“Long as it takes. But I ’spect before this day end we find us a good place.”
Maybe we would have, too, if it wasn’t for the smell of a cookout, which comes along about an hour later. Bandy sniffs it first, lifting his head and making hopeful little whines in the back of his throat. Then we all nod pretty much at the same time, and Malvina goes, “Smell that? Somebody grillin’.”
“Uh-huh. You can see where they at,” Mr. Tru says, pointing with his paddle.
Thin white smoke rises behind a brick school building. The school is on high enough ground so there’s only a few inches of water pooled around it. I’m a thousand miles from home, but somehow it seems so familiar that it could be my own school, right down to the old sign posted by the main entrance that says All Visitors Must Sign In at Main Office.
Mr. Tru paddles over, nudging the canoe up to the front steps. That’s the first time I notice his foot hurts, because as he gets out of the canoe he grabs his leg and grimaces in pain.
“Tru!” Malvina cries.
“Ain’t nothing, dawlin’. Sore foot is all. Bumped it a little when the flood came.” He takes a deep breath, forces a smile. “You wait here while I check it out.”
He limps through the door, into the school.
So we sit there waiting, smelling that hungry smell. Pretty soon my stomach starts growling, and it growls so loud and so long that Bandy perks up his ears, as if he thinks there’s another dog somewhere nearby.
Malvina gets to giggling and can’t stop. “You real funny, ya know that?” she says. “Sound like you gots the Lion King in yo tummy.”
It is pretty funny, if you think about it, how your body makes noises whether you want it to or not — some of them way worse than stomach growls — so I get to laughing, too, and Bandy joins in with a couple of happy yips.
We’re still laughing when Mr. Tru limps out of the school.
“You ain’t gonna believe this,” he says.
* * *
Inside, the school smells kind of moldy and damp. But that’s only like the bottom layer of all the smells. The top smell, the cooking smell, gets stronger and stronger as we head toward daylight at the end of the dark hallway. The fire doors have been propped open to a paved area behind the school, with an old rusty basketball hoop at one end. On the pavement, lined up like cars revving at a stoplight, are three gas cookout grills with delicious-smelling smoke pouring out from under the covers, and a bunch of folks crowding around with big smiles on their faces.
These are the first happy faces I’ve seen since before the hurricane, and all those smiles make me want to smile, too. My mom always says a smile is easier to catch than a cold and as usual, she’s right.
Mr. Tru takes off his top hat and makes a little bow to the crowd. “Thank you all. Yo hospitality much appreciated.”
The people gathered around the grills don’t seem the least bit closed off about a few more hungry strangers crashing their cookout. “The more the merrier,” they keep saying, handing us plates. What happened is, they’ve been using a local elementary school as an unofficial shelter. Unofficial because the doors had been locked and they had to break in at the height of the flood, when it was the only dry spot for miles around. With the power out it made sense to empty the cafeteria freezers before the food thawed out and spoiled, so they’re grilling up enough chicken wings and fish sticks for the whole neighborhood, or those that stayed behind. Those that couldn’t evacuate, or chose not to, and managed to survive the wind and the rain and the rising waters.
Mr. Tru asks if we can make a few calls, but the phones are dead here, too. “Cell towers got blown out like everything else,” one of the men explains. “On the radio it said they got some landlines still good in Gretna, and could be some cell reception out to Jefferson, but who knows? Most of the city flooded, that’s what they say. Gentilly, Metairie, Treme, Ninth Ward, St. Bernard Parish, all underwater.”
Mr. Tru nods to himself, as if this confirms what he suspected. “Levees failed,” he says. “Nobody did nothing to fix them old levees. They mostly nothing but dirt and they finally failed.”
“Ya bra, they fail. We in the flow now.”
“Police?”
“Ain’t seen no po-lice. Ain’t seen no National Guard. Ain’t seen no Red Cross. Nuh-uh. We on our own.”
Malvina gets quiet in the company of all these adults, barely parting with her name when asked, and I realize she’s pretty shy around strangers. Which is kind of a surprise, considering how talkative she’s been with me and Mr. Tru. But even so, she’s not so shy that she won’t dig into a plate heaped with grilled chicken wings, quietly urging me to do the same. “Better feed that lion, boy,” she whispers.
Bandy’s having a good time, too. He doesn’t stray far from my side, but people keep coming over and feeding him little scraps and saying what a good dog he is, which makes him shiver with pleasure. After a while I kind of get it that talking about my dog is an excuse for people to check me out. Probably wondering what a light-skinned New Hampshire boy is doing in this particular neighborhood, with these particular people, although they’re too polite to ask directly. Mr. Tru mentions about my great-grandmother, and how Gerald Dupree was my father, but nobody around here seems to know them, and the local folks sort of pull back, not wanting to push the subject, which is fine with me.
Finally Malvina leans over, speaking low. “Maybe you an alien dude from outer space. Got the ears for it. Like Mr. Spock.”
My hands automatically check my ears, which are mostly under my hair, and then I realize she’s laughing softly, her sparkling eyes full of mischief.
“Got me,” I say, dropping my hands.
“Oh, you easy,” she says, giving me a little bump with her skinny shoulders.
Thinking about it later, after all the bad stuff went down — and the good stuff, too — that’s the moment when me and Malvina started to be true friends. Sitting there eating our fill and joking around like we’d known each other for years. I even ate some fish sticks, which normally I hate, because she says New Orleans–style fish sticks are really good as long as you got some dipping sauce, and they did, in little plastic packets like from McDonald’s only way better.
We eat until we can’t swallow another bite and I’m starting to feel pretty good about everything. Like now that it’s over all the scary stuff that happened was really just part of an exciting story I can tell my friends, and soon the phones will start working and I’ll call my mom and tell her to come get me, and everything will be fine.
That part, the feeling-good part, ends when this fearsome-looking dude with designer shades and thick gold chains slides
up to us and goes, “Well now, this a soo-prise. Malvina Rawlins, as I live and breathe. Too bad about yo momma.”
Malvina looks at him the way she looked at the snake that slipped into our canoe.
This one time I was riding home on my bike and a doe stepped out of the woods and just stood there, motionless. The sun was setting and everything sort of blended together, the woods and the leaves and the little speckled deer and probably me on my bike, too. Maybe that’s why the doe didn’t bolt back into the woods, because she thought standing completely still would make her invisible. It’s like that with Malvina when the fearsome dude mentions her mom. She freezes. No expression on her face, like she’s hiding somewhere deep inside herself.
Right away Mr. Tru comes over, a look of concern on his face. “What’s going on? You say something ’bout this girl’s momma?”
The dude in the cool shades and gold chains, he smiles, showing his strong white teeth. “Look who it is,” he says. “True blue Trudell, the trumpety man! You in luck, Tru, that I happen to run into you and the girl.”
“You scaring Malvina. That ain’t right.”
The man moves a little closer. He’s not that much taller than Mr. Tru, but he’s twice as big around, all edge and muscle. “I ain’t scare nobody,” he says, very quietly. “All I do, mention how unfortunate it is that her mom can’t be here to look out for her. Which is tragic, you know? On account of her situation.”
“What you want?” Mr. Tru says, looking worried.
The man picks something from his teeth, flicks it away with his little finger. “You awares who I am, old man?”
“Got an idea.”
“Then you already know me and Malvina’s mom, we have some interest in common.”
“She work for you,” Mr. Tru says grudgingly.
“Naw, naw. Nothin’ formal. Person do me a favor, I do them a favor, like that. When Malvina’s momma went away I wonder where her child might be at, case I could be of use, you know? But it like she disappear. They say you want to find something, stop lookin’ and there it be.”