Zane and the Hurricane: A Story of Katrina

  It usually does.

  In the evening, when it was a little cooler, we’d sit out on the wooden porch they call a “gallery” and drink sweet iced tea and Miss Trissy would tell stories from the old days, about when my father and his brother were little and they played Superman in this very yard.

  “That was they favorite — Superman, because he could fly. Don’t matter he was a white man, them two wanted to be Superman just the same. They tie towels around their necks for capes and stand on the gallery rail and make whooshing noises like they was flying. Gave me fits! What if they fell off and broke they heads? Couldn’t stop ’em, though. They was determined to be Superman, and when Henry, he my husband at that time, when Henry say there only one Superman, how can you both be Superman, they say Superman can be anything he wants, even two people. They was that close, them two. Peas in a pod.”

  I keep waiting for her to tell me what happened, how my uncle James got killed and why my father ran away, but she never quite gets to that part.

  “Bye and bye,” she says, “bye and bye.”

  That’s mostly all we do, really, is sit around and talk, because Miss Trissy is so old she doesn’t like to leave the house except to go to church. The true fact is, even though she turns out to be nice and all, it’s really pretty boring with no games and no TV, and I’m thinking only a few more days and this will be over and then school starts, which I’m sort of looking forward to, even though I’d never admit it to anyone.

  Saturday morning the old phone rings. Bandy starts barking and I’m shushing him when Miss Trissy hands me the receiver and says, “Oh my Lawdy. Yo momma, child.”

  Mom calls my cell phone every day, usually in the morning, and for the past couple of days she’s been concerned about this hurricane out in the Atlantic somewhere, which was supposed to be over once it hit Florida, but the weather channel has got her all riled up. Something about a bull’s-eye.

  “I tried your cell but it won’t go through! Too many calls, I guess, which is no surprise. The storm track changed! The storm didn’t die out like they thought. It came back to life when it crossed over Florida and hit that warm water in the Gulf. It got big — really big and now it’s a huge big storm, aiming straight for New Orleans. They say the storm surge might be twenty feet high! High enough to flood the whole city! You got to leave, Zaney. You and Miss Trissy, you’ve got to get out of there!”

  I explain that Miss Trissy doesn’t have a car, but of course Mom already knows. She has a plan, which is totally typical because my mom always has a plan.

  “You’re coming home,” she tells me. “You and Miss Trissy both. All you have to do is get to the airport. Can you do that?”

  Going home a few days early seems like a great idea to me, even if we had to blame it on a hurricane. New Hampshire won’t be as hot and muggy as New Orleans, that’s for sure. And home has a real TV and my PlayStation and I’ll have my friends and Bandy will have all the familiar places where he sniffs around and does his business. Plus I won’t have to feel guilty about Miss Trissy because she’s coming with us. That way Mom can deal with the old lady while I’m getting ready to go back to school.

  Perfect. Selfish, maybe — okay, totally selfish — but I’m so psyched about going home that I get my stuff packed in like five minutes and carry it out to the porch — excuse me, the gallery — and check with Miss Trissy to make sure she’s called for a taxi.

  “Take ’em an hour at least to fetch us,” she explains. “They busy.”

  She’s at her little telephone table in the hallway and her hands are kind of fluttering around, like she’s trying to touch invisible things. She always looks old but now she looks kind of sick, too.

  “What’s wrong, Grammy?”

  Her ancient, wrinkled eyes are wet with tears. “Nice you call me ‘Grammy.’ Oh my yes, just like your father. Did you know that? That your daddy called me ‘Grammy’? Course you didn’t.”

  “But why are you crying?”

  “The stoam,” she says, which is her way of saying storm. “Already worried my way through that Hurricane Dennis that barely missed us, and now comes along this Katrina. One after another. You get settled from one stoam they comes another. Stoams gonna be the end of me.”

  “No, no, don’t worry. We’ll be fine. You’re gonna love New Hampshire, Grammy, promise! Come on, sit down in your favorite chair and rest until the taxi gets here.”

  I help her settle into the easy chair but her hands are shaking so bad she loses her grip and the canes skitter to the floor, which sets the dog to barking.

  “Bandy! Hush!”

  “Ain’t the wind I’m feared of,” she explains. “It the water. Water take all this away, like Betsy did, and leave me no place to live in my last years.”

  “Betsy?”

  “Hurricane of 1965. Forty years ago it flood this house up to the windowsills. Rising water drove us up into the attic. Imagine me climbing through that little hole in the ceiling? Well, I did! Had to! My husband Henry brung him a little hatchet in case we had to chop through the roof. Then the water went back down, and we never did need that hatchet, but we was cleaning out and fixing up for the most part of a year, after that stoam, me and Henry. Don’t got it in me to go through nothing like that again.”

  I say, “On TV they always make it sound worse than it is. Probably it’ll blow down a few trees, that’s all.”

  The old woman shakes her head sorrowfully. “We can’t know that, child. Nobody knows but the Lawd, and He not sayin’.”

  Right about then my cell phone rings. Mom again, but the connection is so bad I can barely hear her.

  “There’s a problem,” she says, her voice all crackly and distant.

  The call fades away into static, but not before she gives me the bad news.

  The really bad news.

  Grammy goes, “What’s wrong, child? Look like you ate a bug.”

  There’s a lump in my throat not because I’m afraid of the storm — which is probably stupid — but because the promise of going back early has been snatched away, and it makes me more homesick than ever. “Delta canceled our flight,” I finally manage to explain. “They canceled all flights for the next few days. Mom is trying to get us on standby with another airline, but so far she can’t get through.”

  The old woman doesn’t seem the least bit surprised. She hums to herself for a while and then gives me a big smile and goes, “You said it yourself, Zane Dupree. We gone be okay.”

  “I guess.”

  “Today is Saturday and the stoam don’t be comin’ till Monday soonest, right?”

  “That’s what they say.”

  “So we got all of Sunday,” Grammy says. “Here’s what we gone do. Tomorrow morning we go to church and see what da Lawd provide.”

  * * *

  I must have walked past the New Mission Zion Baptist a bunch of times with Bandy and didn’t even notice the place because at a glance it looks like the rest of the houses in the neighborhood. Just another long narrow building with white clapboards and a saggy front porch. But if you look closer there’s a little wind-vane kind of steeple tacked onto the peak of the roof, and a hand-lettered sign is set out on the sidewalk that says Worship with the Reverend W. B. Daniels, Jr., Pastor, Special Service Today 11:00 a.m. and under that, Sunday School Canceled.

  Grammy walks to church on her two canes and won’t let me help her. She’s made me put on my only white shirt and an old tie that belonged to Henry and smells of mothballs. She doesn’t approve of my Nikes, but I don’t have any dress shoes with me and her husband’s old shoes don’t fit, so the Nikes will have to do. Still, she’s all got up in a blue satin dress, and what she calls her church shoes, and a wig that looks kind of purple, and a lacy blue hat on top of the wig. Sounds funny when I tell it like that, with the wig and all, but somehow she looks right, like a proper old lady on Sunday morning, all fixed up for church.

  A man in a dark suit stands on the steps outside the church, looking up and
down the street and checking his watch. He’s a big dude with shiny dark skin and friendly eyes and gold-rimmed reading glasses that hang on a cord around his neck. When he catches sight of us his face lights up. “Miss Trissy! Welcome. Wasn’t sure to see you this morning of all mornings,” he says, leaning down to kiss her cheek. “Many of our parishioners have already gone.”

  “I come to sing for my great-grandchild I never knew I had,” she says all in a burst, like she’s been saving it up and has to get it out fast.

  As the pastor shakes my hand he sort of looks me over, then back and forth between me and my great-grandmother. Finally he goes, “You know what? I do see it. Yes, I do, in the eyes and nose. Can you sing, too, young Mr. Dupree? Did the gift pass to you?”

  I shake my head.

  “Might be he does sing,” Grammy says, smiling at me.

  No way am I going to sing in church and make a fool of myself.

  Totally no way.

  Okay, try going to church in New Orleans and not singing. They won’t let you. It’s practically against the law not to sing in church there. It starts right off the bat, too. Pastor Daniels reads a few lines of scripture and then he turns to a keyboard set up alongside the podium, and as soon as his fingers touch the keys the whole room is singing this old-fashioned hymn about storm clouds and strong winds and finding the Savior and how sweet He is. The pastor, he’s got a big voice that fills the place, and soon we’re all kind of swaying back and forth in our seats and you don’t even have to know the words, they’re already there in the air, waiting for you to sing them.

  Then at the end of the first chorus the pastor sets off a drum machine, changing the beat, and suddenly that old hymn turns into a stomping blues-rock kind of thing, and that’s when Grammy stands up in the pew and opens her mouth. What comes out really floors me. Because she’s got this clear, uplifting voice that’s almost as big as the pastor’s, a voice so young and beautiful it makes you want to cry and laugh at the same time, coming out of a little old lady like that.

  Everybody in the church is clapping together — clap! dah-dah-dah clap! dah-dah-dah clap! — and swaying from side to side, shouting out, “Tell the Lord, Miss Trissy!” and singing like an echo on the chorus, and it’s enough to make me want to jump out in the aisle and start dancing like a maniac, which of course I don’t. I just clap along and maybe sing a little bit, keeping kind of quiet so nobody will notice my froggy voice that keeps missing notes. Not that anybody does notice, and the nice thing is that when the hymn is over my great-grandmother takes my hand and holds it like something precious, and that’s when I really understand how cool it is that Mrs. Beatrice Jackson is still alive in the world for me to know, even if it meant coming all the way to Smellyville to find her.

  After the one song Pastor Daniels calms us down and leads us to say the Lord’s Prayer and then he thanks us all for coming and tells us this will be the end of the special service. Because the time has come to leave. “I pray we will all be in attendance next Sunday, and that the sun will be shining and that no harm will have come to us, or this ward, or our little church, but you heard me right, brothers and sisters, you all must go now. This very morning the mayor has issued a mandatory evacuation! They called most every church and every pastor to make sure the word gets out. They saying the hurricane may push a great wave of water, overtopping the levees and flooding the city, and some of you are old enough to recall the last time it happened, when much of our Lower Ninth neighborhood was flooded. We pray that this hurricane passes us by, as so often they do, and that our Lord’s merciful hand will calm the waters so harm comes to no one. But brothers and sisters, make no mistake. We must take action as well as lift our voices in prayer. We must lift ourselves from these pews and go out and find transportation. Pack your bags and leave! Lock your doors and leave! Go to family, go to friends, but go you must. Bad winds are coming, brothers and sisters, and the waters may rise. Get thee to higher ground. Go, go, go!”

  That does it. The church empties until there’s no one left but me and Grammy and the pastor.

  “Is there no one to carry you?” he asks.

  The old woman shakes her head.

  “Best come with me,” he says. “We’ll make room in the bus.”

  An hour later we’re on the highway, stuck in traffic and barely moving. What the pastor calls his “church bus” is really more like a passenger van with extra seats in the back. And no AC — he says running the AC will overheat the old engine — and we’re jammed in there with nine people plus tons of luggage.

  Nine people plus Bandit. At first the pastor didn’t want to take a pet along, but Grammy insisted the dog was part of the family and couldn’t be abandoned, no more than a child could be left behind, and the pastor relented. Bandy is curled up on my lap, trying to behave himself.

  We’ve got the windows rolled down but there’s no breeze — wouldn’t you know it with a hurricane on the way? — and it looks like the whole city of New Orleans is stuck on the same on-ramp with us, even though every single lane of the highway is heading north.

  “They call it ‘contraflow,’ ” Pastor Daniels explains. “Supposed to make it faster to evacuate. What that really means is no turning back!”

  We’re headed for Baton Rouge and will be given shelter at another church where Pastor Daniels’s cousin is the preacher. He says it’ll be an adventure and we’ll all learn something, but I’m still wishing I could just go home. Last time I talked to Mom she was trying to look on the bright side and said it was for the best, evacuating to Baton Rouge, and that I’d get to meet all kinds of new people.

  Sorry, but I don’t want to meet new people, okay? I know that’s mean and awful and ungrateful and everything, but I’d rather be in my own house, just me and Mom and Bandy.

  So there I am, all stuffy and sweaty from the heat and feeling sorry for myself, when this big SUV with dark tinted windows edges along next to us. Can’t be a foot away, with a big engine growling. I bet they got the AC on. I bet they do. And then one of the dark windows slides down a few inches and these sleek, nasty Dobermans poke their heads out and start barking and snarling. Vicious kind of snarling, like they can’t wait to shred something to pieces. Something small and alive, like the little dog in my lap.

  I should have known what would happen, soon as I saw the black gleam of those Doberman eyes. I should have clung to Bandy like my life depended on it, which — as it turns out — it did. But everything happens so fast. One second Bandit is curled in my lap, the next he leaps clear across the van and out the opposite window, as far away as he can get from those snarling Dobermans.

  “Bandy!”

  I shout for him, but the way he exploded out of the van I know he’s not coming back as long as those Dobermans are barking. And now they’re barking worse than ever, slavering and biting at the window glass, trying to chew their way out of the SUV to chase after Bandy.

  As for me, I’m in a panic yelling stuff like, “Stop! Please stop the van!” and “Turn around, we have to go back!”

  The pastor stares at me in the rearview mirror, shaking his head. “Can’t stop, boy. Everything headed north, like it or not. We got the traffic inching up on us from behind and there’s no place to pull over. Folks are driving in the breakdown lane.”

  “Turn around,” I beg him. “Please?”

  “Can’t turn around neither,” he says. “No room to maneuver. That little dog’ll find you, son. Keep where you’re at, he’ll find us.”

  All around, horns are honking like mad, popping off at those crazy dogs in the big SUV, and we’re lurching along at less than a mile an hour, bumper to bumper, so close you can’t even open a car door, and I know in my heart why Bandy jumped out of the van. I can feel what he’s feeling. He’s running away from what frightens him, trying to get to a place that’s safe. And now he’s all alone in traffic, with a million cars on the highway and drivers who are frustrated and angry and frightened of what may happen to everything they’ve le
ft behind. Drivers who won’t be looking out for some little dog, that’s for sure.

  If he gets under those angry wheels they’ll squish him like a bug.

  I can’t let it happen, can’t let Bandy get run over. No way! So I wriggle out through the open window, inches from those awful snarling Dobermans. Save my dog, that’s all that’s in my brain.

  Grammy starts wailing my name before my feet hit the pavement.

  “I’m gonna get Bandy!” I shout back to her. “Don’t worry! We’ll catch up! I’ll be right back, promise!”

  I duck under the snarling Dobermans, feel their angry spit on my neck, and then I’m running low in the narrow gap between the moving cars, with everybody honking. A few vehicles behind the church van, a tinted window rolls down and a man in a straw cowboy hat says, “Fool! Leave the dog!” and makes to swipe his big hand at me — he’s seen everything that’s going on, obviously — but I duck away and he has to put his pickup truck in gear and go forward with the flow.

  I squeeze around between the moving cars, slipping from bumper to bumper and finally make it over to the guardrail, hoping to catch sight of Bandy. I’m shouting, “Here boy! Bandit, come back!” but with all the cars and trucks and the big SUVs I can’t see a little dog dodging between the tires, and maybe he can’t hear me above all the horns and engine noises.

  I’m so scared for Bandy that my heart feels like it might jump right out of my chest. What if I’m too late? What if he’s already been run over? I keep ducking right and left, peering between the lines of traffic, all of it coming right at me, but I can’t see him anywhere. We’re on an elevated section of the highway, an on-ramp kind of deal, so he can’t have run off to the side because there’s nowhere to go. He can’t really get away from all the cars and trucks, not here, not for a long way back, so he has to be somewhere on the highway. Where is he? Why can’t I see him?

  Then it starts to rain — a warm drizzly rain — and that makes it even harder to see. I’m starting to think he really has been run over and killed when I hear hi-hi-hi, that silly little bark, letting me know where he is. There! Bandy, sitting on his haunches by the side of traffic maybe fifty yards away, peering at me from around a tire. Sitting on his butt in the rain and barking at me hi-hi-hi. So of course I run along the guardrail, intending to scoop him up and tell him what a bad boy he is. Then we’ll turn around and catch up with Grammy and the pastor in slow-moving traffic, no harm no foul.