City of Refuge (19 page)

The phone rang again. Craig felt faintly nauseated, in need of a walk, but on the third ring he checked it, saw a local number he didn’t recognize, and decided to answer.

“Yeah.”

“Have I reached the Swiss Family Donaldson?” the voice said.

“Who is this?” Craig said.

“Ah, how quickly they forget old friends. Craig, It’s Peter. Morehead.”

“Peter!” Craig said. His friend from the
CHI EYE
, his old friend…vertigo in the stomach, the shift from the magnetic field of the Anger to this avatar of the Lost World, the Old World, of friendship and family and continuity…Peter…“How’s it going? I’m sitting
here in my new coffee shop in trendy OffWabash…” shifting into the familiar mode, the deflective cleverness mode, the old-friends mode…

“Well the question is how’s it going for you? Is your house allright? Bring me up to date.”

Craig liked Peter’s voice; it was a cultivated voice, yet a vernacular one, familiar yet without any unwarranted breaches of good manners. How was he supposed to give a measured, civilized answer to this direct question? He did the best he could to tell his friend what he knew, how he was, how Alice and the kids were, what he knew about their house and neighborhood. Like everyone, Peter wanted to know what Craig thought about the mayor of New Orleans, Ray Nagin, what he had heard about the various parts of town, about the reports of police looting and deserting, about Craig’s job. Craig told him as much as he could, and even before he had a chance to ask Peter about whether there was any work at the
EYE
, Peter brought up the topic himself.

“Well,” he said, as Craig spun out an extended cadenza about the evacuees and the potential political meaning of the diaspora that was under way, “before you waste any more of this insight in conversation with me, how would you like to write something for the
EYE
about it?”

“Seriously?”

“Well, yes, in fact. Let me tell you what we had in mind. I’ve already spoken about it with Lee Binner, our editor. We’d like you to think about doing a series for us on the storm, the diaspora. One a week, say fifteen hundred words each. Longer if you want. There are at least a couple thousand evacuees in the Chicago area right now, and there are sure to be more. We’d like to hear what they have to say, and we would like you, as at least a temporary transplant to Chicago yourself, to report on what the city is like over the course of, say, the next two months or so, more or less anything
you want to do. And we’ll pay you a thousand dollars a column. Not a princely sum, but maybe it will help a little.”

After expecting at most to be offered an article or two, or some freelance copyediting work, Craig was overwhelmed. Craig had chafed at not having sufficient opportunity to do his own writing while at
Gumbo
. Borofsky kept him too busy editing nightlife supplements. This was almost too good to be true.

“Peter…” Craig stammered for a little equilibrium. “Are you serious?”

“Stop asking me that. We consider this a good opportunity for us. Okay?”

“Of course. I feel like I’ve been going crazy not being able to do anything…this is just…amazing.”

“Well, don’t go crazy. And let’s have lunch once you have a clear day next week. Does that sound good?”

“It sounds better than anything I’ve ever heard in my life.”

Peter chuckled and said, “We’ll trim that out of the final version. I’m sure it’s a bit of an overstatement. You always had a flair for the dramatic.”

“Says the former secretary of Theater Arts.” This was the college drama organization, to which they had both belonged.

“I’ll start the paperwork going for your first check; I’m sure you can put it to good use. Do you think you can write the first one for us by Friday? Just sort of introducing yourself and letting the readers know how you got here?”

“Friday?” Craig said. “Sure. Sure I can do that.”

“Good. If you can get that in I’ll edit it over the weekend and we can get rolling.”

After he got off the phone Craig closed up shop at Brew Horizon for the day and went back to tell Alice about this good luck.

Craig titled his column “Down In The Flood,” after the Bob Dylan song. Following Peter’s suggestion, he wrote the first one about their evacuation and how they got to Chicago, and what they were struggling with in thinking about the future and the present and the past. It was a solid, lyrical column, which he wrote at Brew Horizon in two days. He could as easily have written five thousand words as the fifteen hundred he turned in. Peter did very little to it in the way of editing, published it and got him a check in the middle of his second week there. A thousand dollars a week was almost too good to be true, but Peter meant it, and Craig took Alice out to dinner with the first check when it came, while Gus and Jean babysat the kids.

Lucy awoke, heard breathing as if someone asleep next to her, sat up heart racing. Milky light gave a dim, bluish cast to an interior, a room. She had been dreaming about something that was already beyond retrieval, and she had no idea where she was. Obviously others in the room, sleeping.

“
Samuel
,” she said in a stage whisper, propping herself up on her elbows, then quiet to see if an answer would come. There was a bunk above her; she was in a bunk bed. She looked down at her legs under the sheet; there she was.

By then she was remembering, and she didn’t call her brother’s name again. She lay back down on the thin mattress. After a few moments looking up at the bottom of the bunk above, she sat up again, carefully, legs over the side of the bed, still in her clothes from the night before, ran her hand over her face a couple of times. People sleeping in another bunk bed maybe six feet away, and in a cot set crossways by the small window that let in the day’s first light. Heavy funk of bodies that had spent five or six days unwashed in the Superdome or the Convention Center, then on that bus, and the almost palpable heaviness of sleep filled the small space.

She stood up, slid on her shoes and walked to the door, opened it as quietly as she could, and stepped outside into the humid Mis
souri morning air. They hadn’t been able to see much of the place the night before. Their bus had pulled in, near midnight, after long hours on interstates through Texas and Arkansas, and state roads, and then county roads, and finally on gravel and dirt, through a countryside hooded in darkness, dark farming country with no face, no landmarks. Under lights strung up on poles they were greeted by anxious-looking white folks who brought them into a low cinder-block hall, took their names and addresses, and assigned them places in cabins, where they set down whatever they had managed to bring with them and fell asleep.

Their destination was this place, Little River Camp, used for one week a year as a Bible study camp by Methodist youth, and for another two by ministers for annual retreats, a collection of twenty-eight small cinder-block cabins, a larger cinder-block dining hall and another cinder-block common building, all bare of anything but the hardware of beds and no-frills chairs. There was also a chapel building with pews, and two trailers that could serve as offices. It took up no more than four acres in the middle of miles of fields stretching off as far as you could see. They had ended up here by the merest chance, after being turned away from two facilities, one in Texas and one in Arkansas, that were full. The bus driver’s cousin was a minister and he thought he had heard of this place and the driver had called him and the Red Cross was contacted. They told them to come on, and then ran around putting together the basics of bedding and hygiene and food on about ten hours’ notice.

Lucy walked out of the tiny cabin, which was shaded by tall trees of a type she had never seen, and stood on the small, crumbling lozenge of cement in front of the door. In the distance someone walked deliberately across a stretch of gravel, probably one of the Red Cross. Other than that, nothing stirred. From one of the cabins in the distance she heard a baby crying.

She didn’t want to go back inside, so she decided to take a little
walk around, see if she could find a cigarette. She had no idea what time it was, couldn’t remember what they had said about meals; they had said a lot of things very quickly, and not much of it stuck. Lucy walked across the sandy area in front of her row of cabins, toward the low building where they had taken their names the night before. It was hot already.

She came out into the gravel parking lot where they had gotten off the buses and looked past another row of cabins, across what seemed at first a great emptiness, planted with what looked like dead shrubbery. As she walked to the edge of the brownish field it came into focus for her, and she said the word to herself: “Cotton.” She let herself look around, 360 degrees, and all she saw was cotton fields. That was the emptiness they had been driving through the night before. The camp was a small, tree-shaded island in the midst of it all.

The door of the low building was open, and there seemed to be some kind of activity going on inside, so she walked over and poked her head in.

“Oh!” a voice said, one of the white people in charge of the camp, a short lady with light brown hair, wearing a white polo shirt and khaki shorts. “We have a customer,” she said merrily, walking over to Lucy. “Come in, come in! At least someone was listening last night when we gave out the mealtimes. How are you? Did you have a good sleep? You must be exhausted. My name is Shauna.”

“Allright,” Lucy said, nodding at the lady and putting out her hand to shake the hand the lady proffered. “I’m Lucy.”

“The food is over there at that window. Just get you a plate on that table and head right on through. Doesn’t look as if you’ll have to fight the crowds!”

Lucy smiled politely and looked over to the serving window where a large white man in a yellow T-shirt stood. “I might eat in a while,” she said. “I was hoping I could find a cigarette. You don’t have no cigarettes here?”

“Oh no,” the woman said, pursing her lips and putting a naughty sparkle in her eyes. “I’m not a smoker. I’ll bet you Steve might let you have a cigarette. He’s from the EMS, but I don’t think he comes in until eight-thirty.”

“Uh-huh,” Lucy said. “Well thank you. I’m-a take a walk around. Y’all have phones?”

“We’re working on getting them,” the woman said, her tone contracting just a bit because of what she took to be Lucy’s abruptness. “We should have some phones for you to use later on today.”

“Okay,” Lucy said, starting to walk off. “Thank you.”

“Don’t miss breakfast,” the woman said, with some alarm. “We have a lot of food that’s going to go to waste if people don’t eat it. We stop serving at eight-thirty on the dot.”

“What time it is now?”

The woman looked at her wristwatch and said, “It’s ten after eight…”

“I’ll be back,” Lucy said. “Is that cotton?”

“Yep, it surely is,” the woman said. “We’re about a month away from harvest!”

“Allright,” Lucy said, walking off. The woman frowned, puzzled, then turned to the man behind the serving window and shrugged.

Lucy was already making plans for what she needed to do. First and foremost was to figure out how to start finding Wesley. And SJ. And, second, she needed to know who the person was who could make her time at this place as smooth as possible. She needed some fresh clothes sooner than soon. With any luck she would not be there long. But however long it would be, she needed to hook things up. It looked to her more or less as if she was starting at zero.

Lucy Williams was nothing if not a survivor. She had barely started eleventh grade in 1966 before she quit school, pregnant with
her first son, Albert, born severely handicapped. Albert had been the beneficiary of Lucy’s extended family, which took him in and took up the slack and found a way and filled out the forms and called cousins and made sure he was clean and fed during those times when Lucy was out of control. But the boy had died when he was nine, from a respiratory ailment that came out of nowhere and killed him in two days.

Wesley had been a surprise for thirty-seven-year-old Lucy, an accident; his dyslexia and slight hyperactivity may or may not have been a result of the cocaine she had been smoking at the time and which had exaggerated the recklessness that resulted in his conception. Her decision to keep him was questioned by everyone except Lucy herself, who reasoned, to her friends, that the welfare money that his arrival would generate would be a help around the home. That’s what she told her friends, but there was something else, harder to define, in the mix; she just had a feeling that this baby wanted to live. She kept him for good and bad reasons, both. One set or the other would be in the forefront, depending on how high she was.

After Wesley’s birth she straightened out for a while; SJ had rehabbed the house on Tennessee Street for her and the baby, and she moved back to the Lower Nine in 1989 with her two-year-old, from a depressing apartment building off of Jackson Avenue. But the rocks and the bottles continued to be an undertow for her, and she would go in and out of that life, unpredictably. In recent years her weakness had been alcohol. She loved Wesley, and Wesley loved her. And yet there was a part of her that was separate from him and everybody else, that needed to be dissolved in drink or smoke, answerable to nobody, and that part had made her be absent for Wesley at important times.

Lucy was tough. She had an old-time habit of carrying a straight razor, and once in the middle of some partying that had gotten out of hand, serious freakishness in a house that all she could remember
was somewhere around the Brown Derby on Washington Avenue, threesomes, trains, very depraved shit, which she did not go in for, and a guy named Joseph, who was always around on the fringes, came up to her where she was having a good time just being high on a couch. He had his pants off and he walked right up to her and pulled his drawers out over his thing and put it right up to her face. When she told him to get his thing the fuck out of her face he slapped her and grabbed the back of her head and tried to force her to take it in her mouth and she was not so high that she couldn’t slide her razor out of her right pocket, flick it open and draw it, hard, across the back of his thigh just above his left knee. He howled, and with good reason, because she had nicked his femoral artery and blood was squirting out as he jumped backward, zip zip zip, and it sobered her up rather quickly and a friend of hers got her out of there and to the friend’s house where Lucy stayed for a few days. The guy she cut survived, which was very lucky for him since you can bleed to death easily that way. Those were different times; everyone knew that Joseph was brutal and acted crazy and they figured he more or less got what he deserved.

Long years, making it however you could. Her salvation was that she also had this other world she could walk into. SJ and Rosetta, Camille, family dinners. She loved Rosetta deeply, as everyone did; there was in Rosetta not a trace of condescension toward Lucy, or superiority or judgment. Wesley had a second mother in Rosetta during those times when Lucy was unable to take care of him properly, and an older sister in Camille; they had bought his football uniform for him in high school, and had taken him on vacation with them once to Disney World. There were years when Lucy was healthy and present and they would have great Christmas celebrations at SJ’s, where everyone joined in and Lucy could manage to get something for Wesley that he really wanted, and Uncle SJ and Rosetta would get him something good, too—a football, a bicycle, clothes. Camille
was the one who would occasionally get her cousin a book or some music. They would all go to church.

Then there were other years when Lucy was out somewhere at the end of a long string, when she couldn’t even get it together to buy him anything. One year it was a red plastic truck from the Dollar Store, still in its plastic on a cardboard back, with one corner slightly open, not even wrapped. Wesley always managed, with Rosetta’s help, to get something for his mother. The boy was always so happy when his mother was there for the holidays, a smiling little boy in a short-sleeve white shirt with a red bow tie, his mouth always with that muscle tension as he smiled for the photos.

They decided to keep the kitchen window at Little River Camp open for an extra hour, since it was, after all, the first day, especially after Steve got there from the EMS and insisted they do so, although the Red Cross woman in charge, Betsy, was against the idea. “It immediately sends the wrong signals.” Steve reminded her that these people had just spent three days on buses with no change of clothes, after being flooded out of their houses and in many cases sleeping on the side of a bridge or at the Convention Center. “We can cut them some slack,” he said, laconically and pointedly.

Steve, a skinny twenty-three-year-old who looked like a skinny seventeen-year-old, was an unlikely seeming liaison for these hundred and thirty African-Americans from New Orleans. Unlike the others in his family, he had spent a little bit of time outside of the Missouri Bootheel, a tab of land in the southeast corner of the state that extended down into what might otherwise have been Arkansas. He had spent two years at Southeast Missouri State in Cape Girardeau, on the Mississippi River, north of Sikeston, so he had a slightly cosmopolitan aspect that was not immediately discernible to outsiders, nor was it particularly appreciated by the other members of his family.

He wore a faded EMS T-shirt, shorts frayed along the bottoms and metal-rimmed glasses. His skin was so pale as to appear almost translucent, and the traces of a persistent adolescent acne inspired little faith, initially, in many of the evacuees.

But Lucy, standing outside, taking stock of things in the hazy morning, noticed the skinny kid walking from the dining hall to the office trailer, because three different Red Cross people approached him, one at a time, to confer about something, and afterward the skinny youngster would walk away, only to be stopped by another Red Cross. He, she assumed, was the man to talk to.

When he disappeared into the trailer, Lucy gave it about one minute and then walked over and knocked on the door. A voice said, “Come in.”

Inside, the young man was kneeling on the floor behind a computer, connecting some wires. When he saw Lucy, he put down his screwdriver and stood up, pushing his glasses back up his nose.

“Hi,” he said, friendly, but looking at her as if taking her measure quickly. “We’re not quite open for business, yet.”

The first thing she noticed was something fleeting and correct in the young man’s presence. A mix of friendliness and reserve, unlike the kind of unwarranted familiarity she often encountered from people who looked like him.

“Allright,” Lucy said. “I don’t mean to bother you.”

“No bother,” he said. “We’re just playing some catch-up ball here pretty fast. How can I help you?”

“You’re Steve?”