He peels her off the way you’d flick at a bothersome bug, and hands her to me. I can feel her heart slamming in her chest, and the tightness of her anger.
“Keep hold of this little hellion,” he commands. “As a legally contracted security force we have the right to defend this property from the predations of looters, using whatever force deemed necessary. Meaning we can shoot you dead. And that’s exactly what’s going to happen unless you answer my questions. You, the light-skinned boy! Look me in the eyes, son. No hemming and hawing, no lies, are we clear? You lie and I’ll know. This is my lie detector, right here.”
He smiles an evil kind of smile, touches the end of the shotgun barrel to my chin, and says, very softly, “Bang. You lied.”
It’s not like I’ve never seen a shotgun before. In New Hampshire lots of kids have deer rifles and shotguns, and they go hunting with their fathers and uncles. Shooting deer and ducks and like that. But I never had a shotgun aimed at me. Certainly not by a man who sounds like he’s looking for an excuse to pull the trigger. I should be deathly afraid — and part of me is — but mostly it doesn’t seem quite real. Like I’m in my own personal movie, playing the victim, and any minute the director is going to yell, “Cut!”
Bandy believes it, though. He’s flat on his belly, whimpering. To be truthful, I’m more afraid they’ll shoot my dog than me. Grown men don’t shoot unarmed boys, right?
Right?
“Who else is with you?” the man demands, prodding me with the shotgun. “Simple question, boy. You scoutin’ for your ‘posse’ or your ‘crew’ or whatever you people call ’em?”
The question doesn’t make any sense. All I can do is shake my head in confusion. From the ground Mr. Tru says, “Just us, suh! We ’lone.”
“I’m talkin’ to the boy.”
But Mr. Tru insists on speaking, despite the shotgun aimed at his head. “We found him in a attic, him and that little dog. Boy from up north, he don’t know nothin’ about nobody in New Awlins. No gang, no posse, no crew, nuttin’ like dat.”
“Is that a fact.”
The man looks down the long gun into my eyes, his forefinger caressing the trigger guard.
“Boss,” another man says. “He’s only a boy.”
“Boy can murder and steal just like a man.”
“They’re unarmed.”
“Uh-huh. Maybe they hid their weapons in the bushes.”
“We checked, boss. Nothing.”
Boss Man lowers the shotgun. With a smirk on his face he turns to Mr. Tru. “So you just a sad old man with two orphan chillun, is that your story?”
The way he says “chillun,” he’s obviously making fun of Mr. Tru, who shakes his head and looks away.
Malvina pipes up, defiant. “Hey mister, why you so mean?” she asks. “Must be something wrong in your brain, to make you so mean.”
Boss Man ignores her. “Here’s the question,” he says, concentrating on me and the old man. “The moment of truth. Are you all as ignorant as you look? You expect me to believe you don’t know what’s going on out there?”
On his knees, Mr. Tru says, “We know what the flood done. That’s what we tryin’ to ’scape from.”
“Uh-huh. And you just so happen to ‘’scape’ into a wealthy parish. Rich homes for thugs to rob and steal.”
Mr. Tru shakes his head. “Ain’t no thug! Ain’t no thief!”
“People on the rampage, looting whatever they can carry. Stealing from honest folk, you don’t know anything about that?”
“No, suh.”
“We ain’t steal from nobody!” Malvina says hotly.
“Malvina, you hush now,” the old man says, looking at the guns. “This on me.”
“People resentful of what others might have. So they rise up when the opportunity presents itself. In this case a flood.”
Mr. Tru lifts his chin. “We’re not looters,” he says. “We lookin’ for help is all.”
“Everybody know Tru!” Malvina says, protesting. “Trudell Manning ain’t no thief, he a famous music man!”
Boss Man rolls his eyes. “A musician. God help us. I suppose that explains the hat.”
Another man approaches. “Boss? We about done here? Pilot doesn’t want to stay any longer if he can help it.”
“Cargo loaded?”
“One more rug,” the man says. “But it might put us over the weight limit.”
Mr. Tru hears this and says, in disbelief, “Rugs? That what this all about, rescuin’ some kinda rugs?”
Boss Man says, “For your information the owner has a very valuable collection of Oriental carpets. Hired our service to protect them from the likes of you.”
Behind him, the men in green polo shirts drag a rolled-up carpet from the big house and carry it out to the waiting helicopter.
“Leave the rug and take these children,” Mr. Tru suggests.
“So they can sabotage the helicopter, is that your plan?”
“No ways! I’m asking you, suh, to do the right thing. Never mind me, long’s you do right by these children.”
Boss Man says, “Our mission is to secure the premises and remove the inventoried carpets. Mission accomplished. Contract fulfilled. We will not be deterred from our purpose. Your kind want a free ride in a shiny helicopter, apply elsewhere.”
The old man sighs and shakes his head in disgust.
Boss Man doesn’t like his attitude. He uses the end of his shotgun to push the hat from Mr. Tru’s head. Then he steps on it, crunching the hat under his boot heel.
Mr. Tru freezes, not reacting, except to warn us with his eyes. Don’t do nothing, keep you still.
We all of us, including Bandy, keep still.
Grinning at our fear, Boss Man says, “A squad will remain on the premises, fully armed and ready to respond with deadly force. Is that understood?”
We nod silently. He turns and marches to the waiting helicopter.
As the big machine takes off, the downdraft from the screaming blades blows Mr. Tru’s straw top hat over the flattened grass, like an animal crawling away with a broken spine.
So that was when I started to really get it, how one bad thing can lead to another. The first bad thing might be, say, a hurricane, and it crashes into the world and starts other bad things happening, like the power going out, and trees crushing houses, and then the levees fail and the water rises and suddenly a million other things are going bad all at once, and some people are suffering, and some are dying, and some are helping, and others are acting wicked superior and pleased with themselves, like Boss Man with his shotgun, trying to make us feel small and stupid.
I figured they were all like that, the team of private security guards in matching green polo shirts and camo pants and shiny black combat boots, but as usual I’m wrong. Because we’re a couple of blocks away, moving slow to keep pace with Mr. Tru, when one of them hurries to catch up with us.
“Hey, wait! I got something for you all.” He holds out a bulky gym bag. “Isn’t much but what I could grab. Water, some canned goods, like that.”
Malvina’s face is as tight as a clenched fist. “Oh yeah,” she says with a sniff. “Now you tryin’ to help. Probably some kinda joke, makin’ fun of us. A bag of rocks or somethin’.”
The man unzips the gym bag, revealing bottled water and tins of tuna and canned goods. “The boss, he can be a real jerk, okay? Obviously you’re not criminal types, but he can’t see it.”
“He sees we po’ and black,” Mr. Tru says.
The nice dude nods in agreement. “Oh yeah he does. But the boss, he’s right about one thing. This area is no place for strangers. We’re not the only security team on the ground in this parish. There are others, less disciplined. Trigger happy, you might say. Plus some owners have holed up, armed to the teeth and intent on defending their property. Trust me, everybody is stressed. You don’t have to be a looter to get shot on sight. Any stranger will do.”
Malvina goes, “Why you work for a man like that, i
f you ain’t mean like him?”
The nice dude shrugs. “It’s a job. All I’m sayin’, keep moving.” He turns to leave.
“Hey, wait up,” Mr. Tru says, as if he just remembered something important. “Got you a cell phone?”
And that’s how I finally get to call my mom. The nice dude keeps looking behind him, worried about Boss Man, but he allows me to use his cell. The connection is full of static and it never rings, exactly, but suddenly my mother’s voice is going, “Zaney, if that’s you, leave a message, honey, please?”
Then a beep sending me to voice mail.
I turn away to hide my tears. Thinking, Zane Dupree, you total moron, you’ve been wanting to call home for two of the longest days that ever there were, and when you finally get the chance you can hardly keep from bawling like a baby. Totally demented! But somehow I calm down enough to leave a message on Mom’s voice mail, which is that me and Bandy are okay and this nice old guy, Mr. Trudell Manning, is helping us, me and this girl, Malvina, and we got a canoe, and I’ll call again as soon as we’re someplace safe, and not to worry, and how sorry I am for being so dumb about everything. And then I can’t talk anymore and Mr. Tru gently takes the phone and hands it back to the nice dude, who marches away without a backward glance.
Bandy, catching on to my mood, pushes his nose against my leg, wanting to be petted, and that helps some. Also Malvina starts cracking these lame jokes to make me laugh, and that makes it even better.
Stupid stuff like, “Why the teacher cross her eyes? She couldn’t control her pupils! What you call a train loaded with gum? A chew-chew train! Why do dogs run in circles? ’Cause it hard to run in squares! Why the turkey cross the street? ’Cause he wasn’t chicken!”
Bandy gets pretty excited, hearing us laugh, and somehow I let go of the rope around his collar. He’s off like a shot, legs a blur as he races back to the big house, like he can’t wait to return to the scene of the crime. Barking like a maniac, as if to let them know he’s coming.
I try to make a grab for that skinny yellow rope, but Mr. Tru grips me by the arm, hard enough to hurt.
“No,” he says, very firm. “Keep by me.”
“They’ll shoot Bandy!”
“Might shoot you,” he says. And then adds, gently, “Dog will come back on his own. See if he don’t.”
Bandy streaks on like a ground-hugging missile, the rope flapping from his collar. He skids past whatever he’s headed for, kicking up clods of grass and dirt. Then he picks something up in his grinning mouth and races back and drops it at Mr. Tru’s feet.
“Pretty good dog,” he admits, picking up his battered top hat.
I wrap Bandy’s rope around my wrist, and vow never to drop it again, hat or no hat.
By now Mr. Tru is limping so bad he’s got no choice but to rely on me and Malvina for balance. She’s dragging the gym bag of goodies, I’ve got the dog, and Mr. Tru is leaning on our shoulders. We’re keeping to the middle of the street so nobody can accuse us of trespassing.
He advises us not to look at the boarded-up houses we pass along the way.
“You see a crazy man in the street, you don’t meet his eye, lest he throw his fear on you,” Mr. Tru explains. “Same thing applies in this case, ’cept the crazy men are hiding inside their own homes, intending to shoot anyone comes too close, or looks too interested. We get back to the canoe, we gone stick by the flooded area from now on.”
“Uh-huh,” Malvina says. “Gone find you a foot doctor, too.”
He doesn’t respond to the suggestion, exactly, but he doesn’t fight it, either. “I’m tending to the notion of Algiers,” he says, changing the subject. “We’d have to cross the river, with the dangerous currents and all, but I got this cousin in Algiers, Belinda? Her place might be dry. It higher where she at, I know that much. Ain’t seen her in some time, we both busy and all, but we on good terms.”
“Whatever you say, Tru, that’s what we gonna do.”
Takes a while, but we make it back to where the houses aren’t quite so big and the ground leaks water at every step, and crazy-sounding dogs are still howling off in the distance. Back to where we pulled the canoe out of the water. We can see the skid mark it made in the soggy grass as we came ashore.
What we can’t see is the canoe, because it’s gone.
Glaring at the boarded-up houses, Mr. Tru says, “One of them stay-behinds musta took it.” He cups his hands to his mouth and shouts: “That my canoe you stole! My own canoe, bought and paid for!”
His powerful voice echoes through the neighborhood. In the distance the crazy-sounding dogs bark a little higher, but from the boarded-up houses, nothing but the steady hum of generators.
Malvina collapses on the gym bag, skinny arms resting on her knobby knees. “Ain’t fair,” she says, so furious her eyes are practically glowing.
Meanwhile Bandy plops his head on my feet with a heavy sigh. Like if we want him to move from this spot he’ll have to be carried. Which is not going to happen. “I think we should get out of here,” I say, my own anger rising. And fear, too. Fear of what might happen if we stay.
The old man gives me a thoughtful look and nods in agreement. “I expect you right. Folks’d steal a canoe from the likes of us, who know what they do once the sun go down?”
“Ain’t fair!” Malvina repeats.
“Get you up, dawlin’,” he says, voice going soft. “Fair don’t figure. What’s done is done.”
She takes his hand. “Where we go now, Tru?”
“Where I been tryin’ to avoid. The Superdome. The mayor, he say don’t even think about going to the dome lest you got nowhere else. ‘Shelter of last resort’ he call it. Ha! ‘Last resort’ mean they got no food, no water, no beds, no nothin’. Last time, Hurricane Georges, I think it was, the dome got tore up and trashed real bad. But since we been deprived of our transportation, we got no choice: we got to stop there for a night. Be okay. Somebody at the dome bound to help this boy find his family. We rest up to get our strength, then you and me, dawlin’, we cross the river and go on to Algiers, visit with my cousin. Belinda’s a real nice woman, she run an animal shelter, there by her house. I expect she’ll give us shelter, too, till we get on our feet. So, you with me on my plan?”
“I’m with you, Tru.”
“Thank you, dawlin’.”
He takes a deep breath and we set off, away from the big white houses and the shotguns and the stealers of battered old canoes.
“Easy now, one step at a time,” he says. “Got us a good plan, we gone be okay.”
No choice but to keep moving, slow as that might be with an old man limping, and two kids trying to hold him up, and a little dog that doesn’t understand why the humans are so unhappy. Our eyes stinging with the stench of filthy floodwater, bugs eating us alive in the fearsome heat.
The true fact is, I never felt so miserable or hopeless. But Mr. Tru says if we get to the Superdome there might be help.
Might be.
We keep to the soggy edge of the floodwaters, winding through blocks of small, drowned houses. Some crushed to soggy splinters, some tipped from their cinder-block foundations, as if the muddy ground wants to swallow them up but can’t quite choke them down.
The stink is so awful it hurts, and Mr. Tru says there must be dead bodies trapped inside some of the houses, but there’s nothing we can do about it. “Their troubles over,” he says softly. “They in heaven now.”
“Heaven smell like that? Eww!”
“Show some respect, child.”
“Why nobody come to get ’em?”
“I don’t know, dawlin’. World gone crazy I guess. ’Nother block we have a little rest, okay?”
On the next block the stench isn’t quite so bad. Just regular garbage smells. The sky is dirty, too, with plumes of ugly smoke, and everywhere you look there is wreckage from the flood, like some monster barfed up all the garbage in the world and coated it with mud and slime.
Progress is slow. Partly bec
ause the flood doesn’t leave us a straight path, and partly because Mr. Tru can’t hardly walk. His ankle is swollen up to about twice normal size. Every step makes him groan in pain, although he tries to hide it.
“Pay no heed,” he says, wincing. “Ain’t as bad as it looks.”
Oh, but it is. Probably much worse, according to the worried eyes behind his clunky, black-framed glasses.
“Maybe we could get some ice,” I suggest. “My mom sprained her ankle once, and ice cubes made the swelling go down.”
He chuckles. “Good idea, but ice cubes be rare as icebergs in New Awlins in this heat, with the power out.”
“They had some ice in the coolers back at the school!” Malvina says excitedly. “We could get some of that.”
“Uh-huh. We a long way from that school. And a long way from Dylan Toomey. Least I hope we is.”
“I could sneak in,” she offers. “They never see me.”
“Sure you could. And you an angel to offer. But we closer to the dome. Maybe they got ice at the dome. Or leastways a doctor fix me up. Now, you children stop worryin’, hear me? Old Tru been through worse and he get through this, too.”
We keep going, but real slow, and not just because Mr. Tru is limping so bad. The ruined streets, all the junk and damage, make the going difficult, and we’re still finding our way through the wreckage as the sky starts to dim.
Night is coming, and fast.
Malvina says, “Where that dome? How far we go, Tru? It gone be all the way dark soon. And no streetlights.”
“You right, dawlin’. Takin’ longer than I expect. Guess we best find a place to rest our bones.”
“I’m afraid of them houses, Tru,” says Malvina, her voice hushed.
What she really means is she’s afraid of the dead bodies that might be inside.
Me, too.
We start looking for shelter, keeping away from the scary houses.
“See over that way?” Mr. Tru says. “Maybe try that.”
He indicates a small garden shed that’s washed up on the shore of the floodwaters. Tilted a bit, but more or less intact. An old thing with plywood sides and a battered metal roof. Big enough to hold, at most, a lawn mower or two. And that’s exactly what’s inside, an old push mower and a bunch of rakes and shovels and just plain junk.