“This is police business. Go back inside your house,” Clete said.
“You don’t have to take that attitude,” Claggart said.
“Ease up,” I whispered to Clete.
“Did you catch those guys?” Claggart asked.
“Which guys?” I asked.
“The ones who got away. The ones who should be in a cage. You should be here at night. They’re like rats crawling out of a trash dump.”
“Who is?” I said.
“Who do you think? What’s wrong with you people? This is a tragedy. No one is safe,” he said. “All I did was ask a question and that man with you ordered me back in my house. This isn’t the United States anymore.” he went inside and slammed the door behind him.
“I think I’ve seen that guy before,” Clete said.
“Where?”
“I don’t remember.”
A few minutes later, when we were getting back in my truck, I saw Claggart watching us from the upstairs window. When he saw me look back at him, he pulled the shade.
“What’s with that dude?” Clete said.
“He’s a gun nut with loose wiring.”
“This was a mistake coming here, Streak. But you won’t listen to your old podjo, will you? No sirree, that’s not going to happen.”
“I want to go down to the Lower Nine.”
“Never think of me as the voice of reason. I couldn’t stand it,” he said.
He pulled a silver flask from the poc
ket of his slacks and unscrewed the cap and let it swing from its tiny chain. He took a sip, then another. I could see the warmth of the brandy spreading through his system, the tension going out of his face. He screwed the cap back on the flask and slipped the flask back into his pocket. He brushed at his nose and grinned.
“You’re not mad at me?” I said.
“Wouldn’t do any good. One day our luck is going to run out. I think you’re pushing that day closer to us than it should be, Dave. But that’s the way it is. You won’t ever change.”
IT WASN’T THE individual destruction of the homes in the Lower Ninth Ward that seemed unreal. It was the disconnection of them from their environment that was hard for the eye to accept. They had been lifted from their foundations, twisted from the plumbing that held them to the ground, and redeposited upside down or piled against one another as though they had been dropped from the sky. Some were half buried in hardened rivers of mud that flowed out the windows and the doors. The insides of all of them were black-green with sludge and mold, their exteriors spray-painted with code numbers to indicate they had already been searched for bodies.
But every day more dead were discovered, either by search dogs or returning family members. The bodies were sheathed like mummies in dried nets of organic matter, compacted inside air ducts, and wedged between the rafters of roofs that had filled to the apexes. Sometimes when the wind shifted, an odor would strike the nostrils and cause a person to clear his throat and spit.
Feral dogs prowled the wreckage and so did the few people who were being allowed back into their neighborhoods. Clete and I found the church where Father Jude LeBlanc had probably died. It was made of tan stucco and had a small bell tower and an apse on it and looked like a Spanish mission in the Southwest. Before the storm, bougainvillea had bloomed like drops of blood on the south wall and a life-size replica of Jesus on the Cross had hung in a breezeway that joined the church to an elementary school. But the bougainvillea was gone and the replica of Jesus had floated out to sea.
I could find no one who had any knowledge of Jude LeBlanc’s fate. It was almost evening now, and the sky was purple and threaded with smoke that smelled like burning garbage. On a house lot behind the church I saw an elderly black man pulling boards from what used to be his house. I made my way across a chain-link fence that had been twisted into a corkscrew, my shoes breaking through an oily green crust that had dried on top of mud and untreated sewage.
I opened my badge holder. “I’m a friend of Father Jude LeBlanc,” I said. “He was at this church when the storm hit.”
“I know he was. I was on the roof yonder. I seen a woman dropping children out the attic window into the water,” he said. He had stopped his work to talk with me, one hand grasped on a weathered plank flanged with nails. His face was work-seamed, his eyes an indistinct blue, as though the sun had leached most of the color from them.
“You saw Father LeBlanc? You know what happened to him?”
“Mister, I ain’t had time to do nothing except get my wife out of my house. I ain’t pulled it off, either.”
“Sir?”