But the newscasters were wrong and so were we. New Orleans’s long night of the soul was just beginning.
During the night hurricane-force winds and a tidal surge had driven oceanic amounts of water up the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, nicknamed the “Mr. Go” canal, all the way through St. Bernard Parish into Orleans Parish and the low-lying neighborhoods along the Intercoastal Canal. After sunrise, residents in the Lower Ninth Ward said they heard explosions under the levee that held back the waters of Lake Pontchartrain. Rumors quickly spread from house to house—either terrorists or racists were dynamiting the only barrier that prevented the entirety of the lake from drowning the mostly black population in the Lower Nine.
The rumors were of course false. The levees burst because they were structurally weak and had only a marginal chance of surviving a category 3 storm, much less one of category 5 strength. Every state emergency official knew this. The Army Corps of Engineers knew this. The National Hurricane Center in Miami knew this.
But apparently the United States Congress and the current administration in Washington, D.C., did not, since they had dramatically cut funding for repair of the levee system only a few months earlier.
I had been successful in obtaining the address of my friend the junkie priest, Jude LeBlanc, from one of the MS-13 gang members. But at 9:00 a.m. Monday all of my priorities were rearranged for me when Helen Soileau walked into my office, her shield already hung on a lanyard from her neck. “Throw your shit in a bucket, Pops. Half the department is being assigned to the Big Sleazy,” she said.
“What’s going on?”
“Take your choice,” she replied.
WE DIDN’T SEE the first large-scale wind damage until we were well east of Morgan City. The sugarcane was crushed flat in the fields, as though it had been steamrolled and matted into black dirt. Telephone poles were snapped in half, sections blown out of signboards, roofs ripped from stores in rural strip malls. The four-lane highway was patina-ed with leaves and gray mud from the flooded woods that lined each side of the roadway, and thousands of shrieking birds freckled the sky, as though they had no place to land. Helen was driving, her face somber, a dozen more departmental vehicles behind us, their flashers rippling with color. Some of the vehicles were towing boats that were packed to the gunwales with first-aid kits, gasoline-powered generators, donated food, clothing, and bottled water, all of it tarped down and swaying on bumper hitches.
Helen was an attractive, muscular woman whose intelligence and integrity I had always admired. She had started her career as a meter maid at the NOPD, in an era when a female officer had to pay hard dues among her male colleagues. The fact she didn’t try to hide her androgynous nature had made her a special target for several members of the department, in particular a plainclothes by the name of Nate Baxter, a degenerate and former vice cop I genuinely believed belonged in a soap dish.
One morning at roll call, just after a sniper had opened fire on pedestrians from a hotel rooftop in the Quarter, Nate took over from the watch commander and addressed all the uniformed patrol personnel in the room.
“I want every swinging dick out there on the firing line, in vests and with maximum ordnance,” he said. “We’ve got one agenda. That guy gets cooled out. Nobody else gets hurt, civilians or cops. Everybody clear on that?”
So far, so good.
Nate turned his gaze on Helen, the skin denting at the corner of his mouth. “Helen, can you tell us whether ‘swinging dick’ includes you in or leaves you out?” he said.
Several cops laughed. Helen was in the second row, bent forward, her eyes still fixed on the notepad that was propped on her thigh. There was a cough or two, then the room fell silent.
“Glad you brought up the subject of genitalia, Detective,” she said. “A couple of weeks ago a transvestite CI told me you made a few cross-dressers cop your stick in the backseat of a cruiser when you were in Vice. Back then, the transvestite was using the name Rachel. But actually Rachel is a man and his real name is Ralph. Ralph said you’d undergone penile enhancement. Since I don’t get to use the same restroom as the swinging dicks, I can’t really say if Ralph is lying or not. Maybe these other officers know.”
She stared thoughtfully into space. Nate Baxter’s career never recovered from that moment. He launched a vendetta against Helen through the departmental bureaucracy and as a consequence was always looked upon by his fellow officers as a malicious coward who couldn’t cut it on a level playing field.
We were on the bridge over the Mississippi now, the wide brown expanse swollen and breathtaking down below, an upside-down houseboat spinning in the current as it floated out from under the bridge. Helen tore the wrapper on a granola bar with her teeth and spit the paper out on the steering wheel.
“What’s bothering you?” I asked.
“Nothing,” she replied, one cheek tight with chunks of granola.
I didn’t pursue it. We came down the other side of the bridge, swinging out on an elevated exit ramp above flooded woods whose canopy was stripped of leaves and strung with trash.
“We’re supposed to coordinate with a half-dozen agencies down here, including NOPD. I say screw that,” she said. “I’m going to have a talk with all our people before we go
in. We do our job and we maintain our own standards. That means we don’t shoot looters. Let the insurance companies take their own losses. But if somebody fires on us, we blow them out of their socks.”
She looked at my face. “What’s funny?” she asked.
“I wish I had still been with NOPD when you were there.”
“Want to elaborate on that?”
“No, ma’am, I really don’t,” I replied.
She bit down on her granola bar and gave me another look, then drove on into the city. None of us was quite ready for what we would see.
IT WASN’T THE miles of buildings stripped of their shingles and their windows caved in or the streets awash with floating trash or the live oaks that had been punched through people’s roofs. It was the literal powerlessness of the city that was overwhelming. The electric grid had been destroyed and the water pressure had died in every faucet in St. Bernard and Orleans parishes. The pumps that should have forced water out of the storm sewers were flooded themselves and totally useless. Gas mains burned underwater or sometimes burst flaming from the earth, filling the sky in seconds with hundreds of leaves singed off an ancient tree. The entire city, within one night, had been reduced to the technological level of the Middle Ages. But as we crossed under the elevated highway and headed toward the Convention Center, I saw one image that will never leave me and that will always remain emblematic of my experience in New Orleans, Louisiana, on Monday, August 29, in the year of Our Lord, 2005. The body of a fat black man was bobbing facedown against a piling. His dress clothes were puffed with air, his arms floating straight out from his sides. A dirty skim of yellow froth from our wake washed over his head. His body would remain there for at least three days.
Any semblance of order at the Convention Center was degenerating into chaos. The thousands of people who had sought shelter there had been told to bring their own food for five days. Many of them were from the projects or the poorest neighborhoods in the city and did not own automobiles and had little money or food at the end of the month. Many of them had brought elderly and sick people with them—diabetics, paraplegics, Alzheimer’s patients, and people in need of kidney dialysis. The sun was white overhead, the air hazy and glistening with humidity. The concrete apron outside the Center was teeming with people trying to find shade or potable water. Almost all of them were yelling angrily at police cars and media vehicles.
“You going to set up a command center here?” I said.