Floodgates (2 page)
There were no waterlines. The gutted-out houses stretched as far as Faye could see in all directions. If there had been trees before the storm, the water or the wind had taken them. There was nothing to obscure her view of one brick shell after another, each dead home centered neatly on its rectangular plot of ground.
She wanted to get a mental picture of the kind of cataclysm that could do this, but she couldn’t tell how high the floodwaters rose until she found a waterline.
“When the storm breached the Lake Borgne levees,” Matt said, “The Wall of Water hit, and the whole town of Chalmette went under.”
That was the way people around here said it—The Wall of Water—as if every word were capitalized. They didn’t use the word Katrina often, either, preferring the simplicity of “the storm” or the outrage communicated by “The Levee Failures.” More often than not, people added editorial commentary like “The Goddamn Levee Failures.” Sometimes, the colorful modifiers were in French. At the very first opportunity, Faye intended to find out what those cool-sounding words meant.
“The levees in that direction didn’t do a damn bit of good. The waves washed them away like they weren’t there. Then they just went over the top of the next batch of levees, which is a recipe for a bad breach,” he said, with a careless wave not directed toward the river.
It wasn’t the Mississippi that had nearly killed Chalmette. It was the loss of the Lake Borgne levees, said to have been constructed from soil dug out of the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, a shipping channel made personal by its familiar name, “Mr. Go.” Faye was no engineer, but she thought she’d want more than sandy dredge spoil between her and a hurricane. For whatever reason, those levees breached, and Chalmette went under.
Matt was still talking. “The Wall of Water was fifteen feet high here. ’Course, you didn’t have to be anywhere close to the levee for things to get real bad, real quick. All of St. Bernard Parish was underwater.”
Fifteen feet. That explained the lack of waterlines. The water had washed right over the tops of these houses. Without even a roof to perch on, people caught in the maelstrom would have simply had to ride where the water took them, hoping they weren’t sucked under or crushed by floating debris.
“I know you wanna see the Lower Nine,” Matt said.
Faye, who had been too overwhelmed by the scene to be thinking about much else, said, “What?”
“You know. The Lower Ninth War. It was all over the TV after the levees broke. Everybody that comes to town always wants to go there and see the houses Brad and Angelina are putting up for folks. You want to go. I’ll take you.”
Faye wasn’t so sure she did want to go. The destruction of Chalmette seemed quite enough to take in one day, but Matt was her tour guide, so she got in the car.
***
The Lower Ninth Ward was a work-in-progress. There were houses that still sagged and sported blue tarps over their shingles. There were whole blocks shorn of houses that had left no trace but their bare foundations. And, here and there, a few new houses offered hope for renewal.
Some of the abandoned houses were adorned with yellow signs, each marked with a big red “X,” marking them as slated for demolition. Faye looked around, puzzled. “Um, Matt. I don’t see much difference between the houses that are condemned and the ones that aren’t. They all look pretty bad.”
“The parish condemned any building messed up by the flood that wasn’t gutted out and secured. That makes it tough on people waiting for insurance money or government money, but it’s gotta be done. A building just sitting open is gonna attract kids or vagrants, and that’s dangerous. And a houseful of stuff that’s been rotting this long is a health hazard, for true.”
Faye looked up and down the residential street. Only some of the driveways sported the FEMA trailers that had been the roof over the heads of thousands of people for years now. The other homeowners must be living somewhere else, and that somewhere else could be anywhere. Baton Rouge. Houston. Phoenix. Boston. Any place they could find a job and a place to stay.
“What about the people who haven’t been able to come home yet? How do those people get their houses up to snuff, so they won’t be condemned and torn down?”
“There’s different ways to get the work done.” He pointed to a house that was buzzing with exuberant teenagers wearing face masks and protective clothing. “That’s one way. Church groups are still coming from all over to help out. God bless ’em.”
Some of the kids waved as they walked past. Others were too absorbed in clowning around in front of a friend wielding a camera phone. Faye smiled. Even amid tragedy and destruction, a fifteen-year-old was still a fifteen-year-old.
“A few streets over, there’s a house where a shrimp boat sat in the driveway for months. The tour buses drove by every day so people could point and gawk. And over there,” he gestured in the direction away from the levee breach, “there’s a house that’s still got an airplane in the back yard, leaning over on its nose. It’s a little bitty plane, but it’s still kinda cool. Wanna go take a look at it?”
There was no constructive reason for Faye to go look at a plane that had floated from God-knows-where until it came to rest on somebody’s patio. But she was human enough to want to see it, anyway.
“Yeah. Let’s go see the plane.”
Matt grinned. When he did that, he looked as young as the kids behind them, light-heartedly gutting out somebody’s drowned home. For some reason, Matt made Faye think of the soldiers who fought with Andrew Jackson. He was out of college, so he had to be 22 or 23, at least. Some of Jackson’s soldiers—most of them, maybe—had been even younger than he was right now. Probably even as young as the ebullient church kids.
Faye and Matt had hardly gone five steps when a shriek behind them turned into a chorus of screams. Turning quickly, Faye saw seven people bolt out of the house where they were working, running like the very devil was on their tails, and they weren’t all teenagers. This was no stampede of silly children scared by a ghost story. Whatever had caused that shriek, it was something that had scared the group’s adult leaders as badly as it had scared the kids.
It was the real thing.
Faye’s work boots weren’t made for running, but she got there quickly, even faster than young Matt. The panicked crowd clustered around the two of them, even the adults. This happened to Faye a lot, and she couldn’t say why.
Women who were five feet tall and scrawny certainly didn’t command respect from a physical standpoint. Still, something in Faye’s demeanor made people who hardly noticed her in good times turn to her for help when things went south. Having a man in uniform at her side didn’t hurt, either, even if a park ranger who didn’t look old enough to shave wasn’t quite the same thing as an armed and experienced officer of the law.
“What is it?” Faye barked. “What has happened here?”
“Somebody’s dead in there,” wailed a girl wearing braces on her teeth.
“Bones…” A curly-haired boy paused, and the sun gleamed on his dark, beardless cheeks. “I saw some bones.”
One of the group’s leaders had recovered herself. She spoke in the calm, motherly tones of an elementary school teacher. “Now we don’t know that it’s a person dead in there. It could be an animal.”
A young man whose insolent face was belied by his trembling hands said, “Marissa said she saw a leg bone. Marissa’s an idiot, mostly, but I reckon she knows how long the bones in her legs are. What else around here is big enough to have bones that big? Deer? What would a deer be doing in a house, buried under garbage?”
“I saw stranger things after the storm.” The young people grew quiet when Matt spoke. Every head turned his way. Sorrow lent gravity to his voice. “I saw…”
He turned and walked quietly away from the nervous crowd of teenagers, and Faye couldn’t blame him. How could he possibly describe what he’d witnessed to these children?
Faye, who had persisted in thinking of Matt as a boy when he wasn’t, was impressed by his composure. A nervous quiet settled in the aftermath of his words, and the silence gave Faye a chance to think.
“Did anybody call 911 yet?”
A tall graying man wearing a clerical collar nodded and pointed to the cell phone he was holding to his ear.
Matt turned and spoke to the group, though he was still backing away as he did. “Nothing to do now but sit and wait. They’ll be here soon enough. I’ve seen this happen before.”
Faye was reminded that, though this situation was unsettling and bizarre for her and the church group, finding dead bodies had been a way of life in parts of New Orleans during the first weeks and months after Hurricane Katrina.
As if he’d read her mind, Matt said, while still backing away, “I really thought we were done with this.”
Faye could see him retreat into himself right in front of her. He turned and walked quickly down the sidewalk, hands clasped behind his back and eyes focused on a spot of sky just above a distant rooftop. She knew what it was like to need to be alone, so she let him go.
Faye, being who she was, was drawn to the pile of garbage that the kids had pulled out of the house. History was history, even if it was only a couple of years old. When she and her crew began excavating at the battlefield park, one of the first strata they encountered was the layer of silt and debris deposited by Katrina’s floodwaters. Gutting this house was archaeology, in its way, as surely as her own day-to-day work was. Looking over this pile of rotting artifacts was as good a way as any to spend her time until the police showed up.
The garbage pile stank. There was no other word for the stench. Everything in it was covered in mildew and filth, even things that would themselves never rot. The plastic parts of the electric iron atop the pile, for example, could be buried and forgotten for many years, yet still be recognizable if a future archaeologist uncovered them. The heavy wooden beam lying next to the iron probably wouldn’t be, although those future archaeologists could probably see where it had been by the dark prints it left behind in the soil that eventually accumulated here.
Faye squinted at the electric iron for a minute, wondering when she last did something so drastic as to iron any clothes. Then three words popped into her head.
Irons don’t float
.
Since the kids were still working, she assumed that they hadn’t reached the bottom of the garbage, where she would expect an iron to be. And there were a lot of other things in this garbage pile that were too heavy to float. Not the broad wooden beam, though it was plenty heavy. The storm had washed away whole houses made of wood. But that sewing machine? And that dumbbell next to the iron—it had to weigh twenty pounds. Yet if they were the last things removed before finding the bones, the odds were good that they had been on top of the corpse.
The water had done weird things, including leaving an airplane in somebody’s back yard. It could have washed away a whole house with a sewing machine in it. She could picture that. But once the house was just splintered wood, the sewing machine would have dropped to the bottom. It beggared imagination to picture any other scenario. So how had it gotten on top of a body that was probably pretty buoyant itself?
It was possible. She could think of a number of ways such a thing could happen, but something about this pile of junk didn’t smell right to Faye. Actually, it smelled really wrong, but its stench was not the point. She just didn’t think this situation looked natural and Katrina, though she embodied forces completely outside normal human experience, was at rock bottom a natural phenomenon.
Faye turned to the insolent-faced boy because, beneath the attitude, she sensed another rational soul. “Where was all this stuff before you hauled it out here? Right on top of the body? In the same room? Or somewhere else in the house entirely?”
“We’ve only been working on the sun porch today. It’s a little room, really.” He was still slouching, but he was also sizing Faye up through his dark, slitted eyes. “Sort of like a patio somebody closed in. If you laid down on the floor in that room, you’d stretch nearly wall to wall, and you’re pretty short. Anything that was in there before we started working was on top of the corpse, or close to it.”
He said “corpse” with a bit of relish. Faye remembered being a teenager. A certain morbid air came with the territory.
“Walk around to the back of the house with me,” he said, nodding in that direction. “I’ll show you.”
Faye found that the boy had described the room accurately. It was small—maybe eight by eight, possibly even less—and it protruded awkwardly from the back of the house. There had been a group of three narrow windows on each of the three exterior walls. Now, there were just empty openings.
Standing outside one of those windows and looking in, Faye could see the interior of the small room almost as well as if she’d actually been inside. Part of a long white bone, a femur, could be clearly seen, its femoral head poking out of the top layer of debris. It sure looked human to Faye. If it was, then another dumbbell rested right where the person’s pelvis should be, completely entangled in the festering pile of garbage. The dumbbell looked like it had sat in that spot for years. But how could it possibly have gotten there?
Her morbid young friend was right about one thing. No deer could have stepped through one of these little windows to die, nor floated in with the floodwaters. These bones had been part of a person, not a wild beast, and everybody in the vicinity knew it.
The sun porch seemed to have served as a hobby room, where the owners of the house exercised and sewed and did other things that would have cluttered up the main living areas. Thinking of the regular, everyday life this person had lived brought the reality of death home. She turned away from the window.
Faye had a very strong feeling that this was no ordinary victim of the storm that was slowly receding into the past, but she was afraid the police would come in and whisk the skeleton away. Retrieving the remains of drowning victims had been depressingly routine not so very long ago. Why would they waste time and money determining the circumstances of this person’s death when those reasons were so very obvious?
Except they weren’t. Faye could think of a handful of ways for that dumbbell to come to rest on top of a dead person’s pelvis, but one of those ways bothered her. It bothered her an awful lot.
What if that dumbbell was resting on top of a corpse because somebody put it there?