Zane and the Hurricane: A Story of Katrina

  “Ain’t exactly home sweet home,” he says.

  “We fix it up, good as new,” Malvina says, sounding determined.

  Mr. Tru keeps hold of Bandy’s leash while I drag the mower and rakes and stuff out of the shed. Malvina gets busy with a shovel, clearing out the stinky mud. She’s moving so fast I can’t hardly keep up with her, and by the time the last of the daylight fades from the sky we’re jammed inside that little shed. Three people and a dog, and glad to be there. Glad to be anywhere other than out in the black darkness of the drowned city.

  Huddled inside the shed we can’t see one another’s faces, but that doesn’t matter. The shed is good. There are less bugs than outside and it feels safer to be hidden away for the night. To tell you the truth, Malvina isn’t the only one scared of the dark. The dark wouldn’t be scary at home, in my own room, but in the heat of a drowned city the darkness is like something alive, rubbing up against you. Or worse, something dead.

  Stupid thoughts! Get real, you moron. The real stuff is bad enough without being spooked by stupid scenes you remember from stupid horror movies. The only thing coming to get you tonight is hungry mosquitoes. Keep that in mind. And be glad you’re not alone.

  “We good?” says Mr. Tru.

  “I’m fine,” I say. “You?”

  “It’s all good. Tomorrow gone be better. Has to be.”

  Malvina hums a tune as she roots around inside the gym bag, cans clinking.

  “Suppertime,” she announces, pressing a plastic bottle and a tin can into my hands. The bottle is easy — water — but I don’t know what to do with the can. It doesn’t have a pop-top lid, so how am I going to open it without a can opener?

  Mr. Trudell Manning to the rescue. “Patience,” he says. “I got my little knife, if I can reach into my pocket.”

  In the dark we pass him our cans. He has to feel along the edge, find what he calls the “sweet spot” for the blade on his jackknife. Didn’t know I could be so hungry, after all the grilled food I stuffed down at the school, but that was hours and hours ago — seems like days, really — and my stomach is making a fuss by the time Mr. Tru finds my hands and carefully places the opened can in my clutching fingers.

  I dip in and find not the vegetables I’ve been expecting — anything edible would have been okay, no problem there — but the slippery deliciousness of cold raviolis. Okay, not cold exactly, more like air temperature, which is practically hot, but it doesn’t matter, because these are the most delicious raviolis ever, in the history of the planet. So good and satisfying that it pains me, physically pains me, to save a few for Bandy, huddled in my lap and waiting patiently for whatever I’m willing to spare.

  He nibbles at the raviolis delicately, licking my fingers as he licks the sauce from my hand and makes a contented noise.

  “Good dog, Bandy.”

  But I’m thinking, Zane Dupree, what a rotten crud you are, not wanting to share with your own dog.

  After we finish eating we’re sitting in the steamy dark, kind of quiet for a while. Can’t help it, I’m expecting something bad to happen because bad things keep happening to us, and there’s no way to know what it will be, the next bad thing, because that’s the way it works, I can see that now. That’s part of what makes it bad, that you don’t know what it will be or when it will happen.

  Mr. Tru must have picked up on my dark mood. “I expect you children worried. Troot, I’m worried, too. But no matter what, we stick to the plan. Sun come up, get you to the dome, find a phone that works. People there to help you, bound to be. Zane get with his family, Malvina let her momma know she okay.”

  “What about you, Tru?” Malvina says.

  “I be fine.”

  “Get you to the dome, they fix you up, right?”

  “Uh-huh. And in case I forget, dawlin’, after you call yo momma, I want you to call my cousin Belinda Manning in Algiers. Her number listed in the book. Last Chance Animal Shelter, can you remember that?”

  “I remember,” Malvina says in a very small voice.

  “Say it for me, dawlin’.”

  “Last Chance Animal Shelter.”

  “And Zane, while I’m thinkin’, Belinda knew your daddy, Gerald Dupree, and his brother, James Dupree. At the time we all live in the same neighborhood as Miss Trissy and her boys, and Belinda she just about their age. I’m older, see, so I wasn’t payin’ much attention to them boys, but Belinda, she knew ’em.”

  “She knows what happened, how James got killed and why my father ran away?”

  “I expect she does. No doubt Miss Trissy tell you the story in her own good time, but in case she don’t and you want to know, call Belinda Manning at the Last Chance Animal Shelter and tell her you a friend of mine. Son should know about his daddy, even if he gone. ’Specially if he gone. Maybe you think it don’t matter, but it do.”

  “Okay,” I say.

  * * *

  Late in the night I wake up to the sound of a running motor and for a moment I think there’s a big car outside. My mom, come to find me. But it’s not a motor, it’s the old man snoring loud enough to shake the walls of the garden shed. Snoring and moaning a little, between the snores.

  “You awake?” Malvina whispers urgently.

  “Yeah.”

  “I been thinking.”

  “Uh-oh,” I say.

  “Oh, you funny. Serious, though. You and me, we got to make a promise. Whatever happen, we take care of Tru like he take care of us. Because if his foot bad in the morning, he gone tell us to go on ahead, not to worry none about him, that he be okay. Which he won’t. So, you promise?”

  “Sure.”

  “You mean it? Whatever happen, whatever he say, we don’t leave Tru behind. You down with that, New Hampshire boy? You promise on your heart?”

  “I promise on my heart.”

  Her hand finds my hand.

  “You my brother,” she whispers. “We blood.”

  Next morning, just like she figured, Mr. Tru says the plan has changed and we’re to go on ahead without him.

  “Get you to the dome, you can tell ’em where I’m at,” he says. “They send an ambulance.”

  Malvina rolls her eyes. “You seen an ambulance? Ain’t no ambulance. Forget it, Tru, you comin’ with us. Me and Zane, we carry you.”

  “Naw, naw. That ain’t gonna work. Too far. I’m a draw you a map.”

  They go back and forth like that for a while, one getting more stubborn than the other. Him not giving up on the idea that we should go on without him, and Malvina shaking her head and saying nuh-uh, no way, forget about it.

  All the time I’m looking at the girl and thinking, How did she know? Then I remember how sometimes I know exactly what my mom is going to say or do, so maybe it isn’t so strange that Malvina would guess what the old man was thinking, since she’s known him all of her life.

  “Dawlin’, I promised your momma I take care of you, and that’s what I’m ’tempting to do.”

  “Don’t mention my momma! This ain’t about my momma! This about me knowing what I ain’t gonna do, and that’s leave you behind.”

  He appeals to me, suggesting I should talk sense to her. When I look away and start muttering excuses he goes, “What, oh no, you in this together? You part of this willfulness, boy? No respect for your elder?”

  “Sorry, sir.”

  “Don’t fight it, Tru,” Malvina says. “We made up our mind.”

  She gets on one side and I get on the other and together we raise the old man up. He keeps muttering about disobedient children but doesn’t fight us too much and we manage to get him clear of the garden shed. Progress is slow, one shuffling step at a time, and Malvina keeps trying to distract us with her dumb jokes.

  “Why the tomato turn red? It saw the salad dressing! What did the ocean say to the ship? Nothing, it just waved! Why do elephants never forget? Because nobody ever tell them anything!”

  After an hour or so — and it seems like a million years — the old man asks can
we stop and rest. As we help him sit down on the curb he almost faints from the pain.

  Malvina, hands on her hips, says, “Man needs a wheelchair.”

  I want to say, duh, no kidding, but the fiery look in her eyes keeps my big mouth shut. Then her expression brightens and she makes another stupid joke. “What’s a wheelchair? A chair with wheels!”

  “Not funny,” I say, feeling grumpy and discouraged.

  “Not funny,” she agrees. “But it might work. Zane, you stay by Tru.”

  And then she takes off, scampering back in the direction we came from, and soon she’s out of sight.

  I don’t know what to think, except she’s gone crazy.

  Mr. Tru shouts after her to no avail and then turns to me. “Go with that girl. Make sure she okay.”

  “She told me to stay.”

  He snorts. “What are you, a dog? Somebody say ‘stay’ and you stay?”

  “I can’t leave you alone. I promised.”

  “I won’t be alone,” he says. “That little dog will keep me company.”

  I hand him the leash.

  * * *

  How do you find your way in a wrecked city when you didn’t know the place before it was turned upside down by a flood? Last time I was on my own, before the storm hit, I was following Bandy and he knew where he was going even if I didn’t. But on my own, within about five minutes I’m lost. Some things look familiar — we passed that little house with the missing roof, right? Other things I don’t recognize, like a bicycle hanging from a spike on a telephone pole. But then I was probably looking at the ground, helping the old man find his way, or anyhow not paying close attention to where we were going.

  I’m starting to feel more than a little panicked when I hear Malvina yelling, not far away.

  “Come on out of there! Let go! Don’t you fight me, don’t you dare!”

  Her agitated voice is coming from a storefront building. Most of the aluminum siding has been ripped off and the windows smashed, but the sign over the broken door still says Crescent City Insurance, Home & Vehicle.

  Before running into the building I grab a hunk of wood from the street, fearful that she’s fighting with somebody, right? But when I step into the storefront, waving a length of two-by-four, I feel like a complete idiot. Because Malvina is all alone inside, yelling at a tangled pile of furniture that has washed up into a muddy corner.

  She’s yelling at a chair, actually. An office chair. A skinny girl with arms about as big around as toothpicks, she’s struggling to get the chair free from the pile like her life depended on it.

  And then I get it, the answer to “What’s a wheelchair?” Because this is a chair with wheels, the kind you can scoot and spin around in, like I used to do with my mom’s chair at her desk.

  I drop the hunk of wood and give her a hand.

  “You’re really smart, you know that?” I say, tugging at the chair.

  The grin lights up her whole face.

  * * *

  The streets aren’t exactly smooth, so the ride for Mr. Tru is pretty bumpy, but he’s able to keep his bad foot off the ground, and that’s the only thing that matters. It’s just a dumb old office chair, a cheap one with five plastic wheels, but it makes all the difference in the world. We probably look stupid weaving our way through the streets, a boy pushing an old man in a battered top hat, and a girl dragging a bulky gym bag, and a little dog trotting along behind us, but we don’t care. It’s like the chair gives us hope that things will get better, if we give them a chance.

  The sun is bright, the sky is blue, and Malvina Rawlins is full of beans.

  “What you get when you cross a rooster and a duck? A bird that gets up at the quack of dawn! Why are musicians so cool? Because they have so many fans! How you make an egg laugh? Tell it a yolk!”

  “How many jokes do you know?” I ask her.

  “Too many!” Mr. Tru answers in her place, and we all laugh so hard we have to stop and get our breath back.

  We sit there for a while, me and Malvina on the curb and the old man in his chair, looking at us and shaking his head, like he can’t believe what he’s seeing. “Tall and mostly white,” he says. “Short and mostly black. Couldn’t be more different ’cept you both got the same grin. Now why is that?”

  “ ’Cause my jokes are infectious!”

  That gets us laughing again. When we finally do start moving, Mr. Tru waits until we make it to the end of the block — the buildings aren’t quite so wrecked here — and then he raises his arm and points.

  “There it is,” he says. “Peekin’ over the top of the Ten.”

  By “Ten” he means the elevated highway that cuts through the city. And there, floating like a giant flying saucer in the ripples of heat rising from the interstate, is the roof of the Superdome.

  Before my trip to Smellyville the most people I’d ever been around was probably the day before Christmas at the Mall of New Hampshire. Mom is really into it and always makes me go. Okay, that’s not quite true, because I like it, too, all the sparkly decorations and the fake presents piled high in the store windows, and the trees decorated with blinking lights, and phony Santas with their fake beards and padding, and so-called normal people wearing elf hats and ringing bells, and even the goofy songs they play over and over again in the background. But after an hour or two, waiting in lines and stuff, the crowd starts to bother me. Mom says it’s about my personal boundaries, but does anyone really enjoy being shoved up against strangers, knowing what they had for lunch because you can smell the salami or whatever on their breath? Eww, right?

  Okay, maybe that’s stupid, because what’s going on at the Superdome is so far from Christmas in New Hampshire that it might as well be on another planet. The closer we get, the more people are wandering around, looking like zombies on a long walk to nowhere. Some are trudging through nearby streets still covered by a foot of water. Some are huddled wherever they can find shade, fanning themselves with pieces of paper or cardboard, their eyes kind of stunned or empty. Some are pushing shopping carts full of stuff they saved from their houses, photo albums and suitcases and clothing and like that. This one guy in a torn T-shirt and pajama bottoms is shaking his fist at the sky and shouting out a tumble of words that don’t make any sense, and Mr. Tru suggests we cross to the other side of the street. “Ignore the poor man,” he says. “He broken.”

  There are lots and lots of broken people. Old people, young people, kids, babies. Mostly black folks, but some white people, too, and a few in between who probably look a lot like me. Not that I’d want to check myself in a mirror, not after days without a shower, and wearing clothes that are baked in sweat and soaked in floodwater and crusted with dirt from spending the night in a garden shed.

  Come to think of it, me and Malvina and Mr. Tru, we probably look like zombies, too.

  The closer we get to the dome, the worse the smell.

  Okay, this is really gross, but the whole Superdome reeks of pee and poop. And if the outside is this bad, Mr. Tru says, the inside must be worse.

  “All them folks crammed together in this heat? I dunno, dawlin’, maybe this dome plan a mistake.”

  “But they got doctors, right?” Malvina says. “Must be doctors and medicine inside. Somebody fix your foot. Bound to.”

  “I hope so,” says Mr. Tru, but he doesn’t sound like he believes it.

  When we get around to the main entrance, there are even more people. Hundreds or maybe thousands — too many to count. Some gathered in family clumps and some on their own. Some in wheelchairs or sitting on plastic milk crates. Some are crying and wailing and begging for help and some are drenched in silence. Many are standing in a long, long line that snakes partway around the building and doesn’t seem to move.

  Men in uniform guard the entrance. City police, some of them, but mostly army-looking dudes with helmets and combat rifles, looking like they’d rather be anywhere but here.

  “National Guard,” Mr. Tru says. “They in charge.”
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  Looking around at the crazy scene, Malvina says, “Ain’t nobody in charge.”

  She turns to this older woman propped up in a lawn chair, holding a rain umbrella over her head, attempting to shade herself from the sun. All alone with her belongings in a grocery bag at her feet.

  “Scuse me, ma’am,” Malvina says. “You know if they got doctors inside?”

  The woman shrugs. “If they do I didn’t see none. Old folks dyin’ in there from the terrible heat and no medicine, that’s why I come back out to the street. They tryin’ to do right, those that can, but there’s too many people and not enough National Guard. Some of the young mens getting violent, making threats and smashing up the soda machines and stealing what they can. Got so bad the Guard don’t want nobody more inside.”

  “They closed the dome?”

  “Seem like it. Might change their mind, they been doin’ that, too.”

  “Is that why all these people are in line?”

  The woman points with her umbrella. “That the line for buses. They keep saying wait for the buses. Buses supposed to take us away, make us someone else’s problem. Houston, they say, or Atlanta — anywhere but New Orleans. We been waitin’ and waitin’, but they ain’t no buses.”

  Hearing the old lady describe the situation, Mr. Tru gets so discouraged he seems to shrink in his chair. He starts apologizing about how he’s messing us up, but Malvina cuts him off. “You sayin’ this your fault?” she says. “Did you make the hurricane? Huh? Did you make the levee fail? Did you make the flood? This ain’t on you, Tru.”

  “Yeah, it is,” he insists. “I should have got you out of New Awlins like they told us to.”

  Folding her skinny arms in defiance, Malvina goes, “Was that old car of yours broke? Yes, it was. Broke and wouldn’t run. Did we have money to get us to Baton Rouge, or rent a motel somewheres? No, we didn’t, ’cause you give all yo money to help my momma. Did you save me from the rising water? Yes, you did. So do me a big fat favor and stop sayin’ it your fault. It ain’t your fault!”