It took Cruz to say it aloud. “Tonight never happened. We’re solid. There’s no other choice.” She pointed to the construction site next to the canal. “Lets get some help with the motor. Maybe get a lift. Check on Joe and Sad Lisa.”
Beau started to follow, but his legs wouldn’t move. And he realized he knew why it bothered him. It was right there in front of his eyes. There was no going back. Nothing would ever be the same again.
This was New Orleans, A.K.
Copyright © 2006 O’Neil de Noux
The Code on the Door
by Tony Fennelly
Edgar Allan Poe Award nominee Tony Fennelly came to New Orleans in 1969 and on her first night in town “spotted a beautiful French-speaking Cajun boy,” to whom she has now been married for over 30 years. Her Margo Fortier mystery series is set in NOLA, where the actress/writer returned after Katrina.
City officials are bragging that murders in New Orleans have gone way down since Katrina.
Yeah, big deal. Now, five months later, our population is still less than one-third of the pre-storm number. Fewer folks to kill and fewer ill-wishers to kill them. But while the crime rate has dropped here, it has hurtled upward in Houston and Baton Rouge where so many of our lowlifes landed.
With most of the drug dealers and gangsters still out of town, the usual shootings and stabbings over turf have given way to more sensible killings done by respectable people. I learned about one of those while waiting in line at a FEMA facility.
I chose the one in the Jewish Community Center on St. Charles Avenue because I could park nearby for free, and gathered documents proving my ownership of a once-great car, now a flooded-out derelict rusting in the driveway.
The door was guarded by a brawny employee of a private security contractor. I thought him overqualified for a job entailing no more serious a confrontation than, “Sir, would you please take that orange juice outside?” and was curious enough to elicit that he was only deployed here briefly between tours of Iraq. Well, good for him, I thought. I’d hate for all the muscles and military comportment to be wasted on the likes of us here.
I was settled in with a flier about sorting “hurricane-related debris” for pickup when I heard, “Hey, Margo Fortier!”
It was my Uptown friend, Caroline, waving her reptile purse from a middle row of chairs. She gave up her place in line to sit with me in the rear.
“Oh, Margo! I’m so glad you’re back!”
That’s the common greeting these days. We’re all glad anyone is back, even if we didn’t know them before.
“Almost two weeks,” I told her. “Julian is working at the LaBorde Gallery, cleaning flood-damaged artwork. — How did you ride out the storm?”
“Our insurance handled the damage, but it was awful for us.” Caroline fanned herself with a kidskin glove. “On August twenty-seventh, we saw the report that Katrina was coming and decided it was a good day to fly up to our summer place in Charlotte. Then we had to watch all that devastation on the cable news.” She clasped her hands. “We felt just terrible. — How about you and Julian?”
“Taillights on I-10, like the rest of the masses. We left the twenty-eighth with our dog and enough clothes for the three days we expected to be away.”
“That’s what everyone thought, three days. So where did you go when you couldn’t return to New Orleans?”
“We had a choice,” I said. “Julian’s Cajun cousin, Verbus, volunteered a camper on his farm in Turkey Creek. The road was a half-mile away through the cow field and we would always have to watch where we stepped.”
“That doesn’t sound very tempting.”
“It doesn’t. Then my brother Tom offered to put us up in New York City.”
“New York City!” Caroline clapped her hands. “Yes!”
“...in a two-bedroom apartment he shares with his wife and teenaged daughters. We would get the couch in the living room.”
“Oh.” Her hands dropped. “Well — how were those cows?”
“They mooed a lot.”
She shrugged. “You were safe and dry, anyway. — Wasn’t it terrible about old Angus Crawford?”
“Angus?” I sat up straight. “What happened to him?”
“The poor soul died in his house on Maya Street, like so many others.”
“But he had a two-story!”
“I know.”
“We tried to take him with us.”
Julian and I were on our way out early that Sunday morning, him at the wheel and me beside him with the map. Catherine, our Catahoula hound, panted over our shoulders. A city bus passed us with a loudspeaker exhorting residents to climb aboard and be taken to a shelter at no cost. I didn’t see anyone get on.
We stopped for some road food on Maya Street and happened to pass Angus Crawford’s place. The old man himself was in the front yard picking up his lawn furniture, his thick brush of hair looking whiter than the Greek Revival house behind him. We knew him from our Civic Pride meetings as the most vocal of the anti-development faction.
Julian pulled up to the curb and waved.
“Mr. Crawford?! Is your son coming to pick you up?”
“Doug?! That flowerpot?!” The old man screwed up his face and spat in the grass. “I haven’t talked to him in a year!”
“Never mind him, then.” I leaned out the window. “Throw a few things in a bag and ride with us!”
Catherine wagged a welcome, happy to have company in the backseat. I remember that Crawford just frowned and shook his head.
“We’re driving north and west,” Julian persisted. “We’ll take you anywhere you want to go: Gonzales?... Baton Rouge?... Alexandria?”
“I’m not going anywhere! I sat out Betsy and Camille right up there in my living room. I’ll do the same for Katrina.”
“But this will be three times the size,” I warned. “The mayor is calling it mandatory.”
“No bald-headed mayor is going to make me leave my home!”
Then we watched him stride up his steps, across the porch, and back inside.
As Julian turned the wheel to head down toward I-10, I looked out the rear window. “I’m glad the old buzzard isn’t coming along. He’s so disagreeable.”
“Yes, he could have ruined the disaster for all of us.”
“But what if there is a flood, and the water gets in his house?”
“Then he’ll just go upstairs.”
We spent the next nine hours in evacuation traffic, being “counter-flowed” all over creation, and didn’t think about Mr. Crawford again.
Now I turned back to Caroline. “We were hoping the old man’s son, Doug, would drive by and carry him to safety.”
“I’m sure he would have, but Doug Crawford was busy in Lakeview all week.” She fluttered her kidskin glove. “He and his friend Steve rode around in a flatbed boat, plucking people off their roofs. You might have seen them on the national news.”
“Maybe we did. We watched the network coverage on a portable TV in our camper.”
“That’s the saddest part. By the time he and Steve rode their boat to his father’s house, some National Guards from New Jersey had already been there. The code was on the door.”
“The code?”
“They had spray-painted a ‘1 D’ for ‘One Dead Inside.’ That’s how Doug found out about his father. Isn’t that the blackest irony? He had saved a hundred lives only to lose the one dearest to him.”
* * * *
I drove home by way of South Claiborne. Feel like stopping at one of the dozens of fast-food places that line the avenue for a roast beef sandwich? Milkshake? Fried chicken? Pizza? Nyah, nyah, you can’t have any of them. All of those franchises are closed and dark along with the drugstores, service stations, supermarkets... everything.