Salvation Row (7 page)

The waitress looked at him: unshaven, soaked, dirty. “You can’t just sit in here, buddy. I know it’s raining, but this ain’t a shelter. You got to eat something.”

“Don’t worry. I’ve got money.”

“You want to show me?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Your money, you want to show me you got some money?”

She stopped, her scepticism very evident. Milton reached into his waterproof money pouch and took out his roll of notes. He peeled off a twenty and laid it on the table. “There. All right?”

Her disapproval was ameliorated by the sight of the cash. “Sorry, honey. We get people here, no money, think this is a shelter.” She took a copy of the large laminated menu and handed it to him. He ordered ham and eggs and hash browns, a stack of pancakes with maple syrup, a large glass of orange juice and a pot of coffee.

He stretched out his legs and let the warmth seep into his bones.

Milton had been on the road for a month since the trouble in the Upper Peninsula. The bullet wound in his bicep had healed nicely, just a puckered little scar that joined the collection of other scars that decorated his body. Just another story to tell, although, he admitted, that was a particularly good one. He had tramped west from Truth, making it to Minneapolis with two days to spare for the concert that he had been intending to attend. The Arctic Monkeys were good and well worth the trek to get there.

He ended up staying for a week, hiring a car and driving up to Mille Lacs Lake, and then, when he was ready to move again, he loaded up his pack and went on his way. He walked for ten hours a day, usually managing four miles an hour if the weather was good. He had covered a thousand miles and had seen Bismarck and Billings and Missoula. He had camped along the route, tarrying for a little longer near Kalispell to explore the Flathead National Forest. It had been a pleasant trip, with perfect solitude for days at a time, and Milton felt renewed, the bulwarks against his drinking reinforced and sturdier than they had been for months. Doing it alone was against everything that the Fellowship ordained, and his sponsors wouldn’t have approved, but Milton had decided that since his way worked, why change it?

Being able to spend time in one place, without the urgent necessity of exfiltration, was a luxury that he had never expected and one of which he didn’t think he would ever tire. He had travelled to dozens of countries during his career with Group Fifteen, but those stays had all been brief. A quick in-and-out was necessary for his safety and the integrity of the operation. As soon as the job was done, he had hurried away again lest he find himself a person of interest in the inevitable investigations that followed in his wake. His resignation from the Group had opened up a whole world of possibilities, and he intended to savour them as much as he could. Even a day like this, wearing cold and clammy clothes in a second-rate diner in the middle of nowhere, had its own peculiar attractions.

The waitress returned with his food. He took up the cutlery and set about it hungrily. He cleared the plate in five minutes and ordered another stack of pancakes and a refill of the coffee pot.

The short order cook aimed a remote at the old TV that had been positioned on a ledge above the door and flicked over to the news. It was near the end of the bulletin. The screen showed the footage from a helicopter: a grid of flooded streets, houses swept away, cars propped upside down, debris bobbing through fast-flowing currents. Archive footage. He recognised New Orleans and what Katrina had done to it.

The report cut to an outside broadcast. A reporter, blinking in the bright sun, inky shadows painted on the street behind him, was interviewing a young woman. She was black, had thick, lustrous hair, a bright smile, and steel in her lively eyes.

Milton sat up as if he had been prodded.

“Turn it up?” he called over.

The cook aimed the remote again.

“—and, Miss Bartholomew, what do you say to those who say that a mall down here, with all the jobs that it would create and all the prosperity it would bring, is better for the area than what you’re doing?”

“I’d say that all those people who they’d want to work in the mall would need somewhere to live. You seen these houses? You think a few shops selling things no one around here could ever afford, you think that’s a better use for this land than houses to bring back the people Katrina forced away?” She shook her head and her eyes flashed with passion. “No, you can’t say that.”

“So what would you say to city hall, bringing proceedings against your charity so that they can force you to sell this land?”

Isadora Bartholomew smiled. “I’d say they ought to bring it on. And I’d say they better like a fight, because I’m gonna give them more than they can handle.”

The cook switched channels to a rerun of a NASCAR race from the weekend. Milton was about to complain, but bit his tongue. He had seen enough.

“What’s the nearest airport to here?” he asked when the waitress came back to see if he wanted anything else.

“What, you going on a trip, now?”

Her grin faded as he levelled his gaze at her.

“Nearest airport, that’d be Spokane. You want to get there, assuming you don’t wanna walk, there’s a bus runs twice a day from the other side of the road. Takes two hours from here.” She looked at her watch. “Next one goes in an hour.”

“Thank you,” Milton said. “Can I get the check, please?”

MILTON GOT off the bus and went through into the airport terminal. He bought a fresh pair of jeans, new underwear and three white T-shirts. He went through into the bathroom, took off his shirt, and washed in the sink. He lathered his face, and using the cut-throat razor that he had inherited from his father, he carefully and precisely removed the straggled whiskers that he had allowed to grow out over the course of his trek. He combed his hair. He took off his muddy jeans and dumped them, along with his damp shirt, in the bin. He changed into fresh underwear and dressed in his new clothes. By the time he was done, he felt clean and revived.

He checked that his ruck was properly packed, slung it over his shoulder with the case for his rifle, and went to the ticket desk. He beamed a big smile at the clerk—his cheeks aching from the unnatural exercise—and asked for a one-way ticket to New Orleans. He paid, cash, and went to check-in. He smiled, again, at the agent, and waited for her to allot him a seat.

“Any luggage, sir?”

“Two bags. One with an unloaded firearm.”

The agent looked him over. Milton concentrated on maintaining a relaxed, confident expression. The woman satisfied herself that this smart, well-groomed man was responsible and could be trusted, and handed him a tag that recorded that the bag contained an unloaded gun. Milton slipped it into the cylindrical TuffPak carrying case and put it, and his ruck, onto the belt. They disappeared into the cargo area hidden behind the clerk.

“Enjoy your flight, sir.”

MILTON SLEPT on the flight. It was busy and it looked as if plenty of his fellow passengers were flying down to Louisiana for Mardi Gras. A couple of them were rowdy, already drunk. He heard the jangle of the drinks trolley after lunch, and not wishing to put unnecessary temptation in his way, he put on his eye mask, pushed his earbuds into his ears, and reclined his seat. He heard the first two songs from the Queens of the Stone Age compilation he had put together, but fell asleep soon after that.

It was a four-hour flight with a fifty-minute layover in Denver. He slept through all of it and when the stewardess woke him by gently touching his shoulder, telling him to raise his seat as they circled for their landing slot, he felt refreshed. Milton did as he was told, pushed up the blind and gazed out through the porthole window as they began their approach.

Milton hadn’t been back to New Orleans since Katrina. He had not been in the habit of taking holidays during his time with Group Fifteen. His work sent him around the world anyway, and he had no inclination to travel during his infrequent down time. In the early days, when he had been enthusiastic, he had spent all of his time in training. Latterly, consumed by his demons, he had sought solace in the nearest bar.

The last time that he had been in a jet above the city, nine years ago, the landscape had been very, very different. The dividing line between Lake Pontchartrain and the streets and houses that he could see now had been simply absent then, as if erased. He remembered the water, lapping over the roofs of the houses, a green and blue mantle that stretched for miles in all directions. Now, the waters had been pushed back. The levees had been rebuilt. Milton looked at the unyielding weight of the water that the berms were holding back and wondered, when a hurricane bore down on the city again, whether they would hold. It was difficult to ignore the notion that New Orleans had been built on a promise, that the city existed at the whim of Nature and that, one day, she would wipe it all away.

The jet touched down at Louis Armstrong International Airport and rolled up to the gate. Milton had no carry-on luggage and had been at the front of the plane. He made quick progress through the building and collected his pack and his rifle from the carousel. He got a ticket for a luggage storage locker and stowed his gun, then he stepped out of the terminal and into the warm broil of the tropical heat outside.

He waited in line for a cab.

“Where we going, man?” the cabbie asked.

“The Lower Ninth.”

The man looked up in the mirror, glancing back. “You sure, dude? You not here for Mardi Gras?”

“No. There, please.”

“What you want, going over there?”

“There’s a project. New houses being built by a charity. You know about that?”

“Sure,” the man said. “That’s Salvation Row. Everyone knows about that.”

THEY DROVE east on I-10, into the city, the increasing affluence reflected in the grandiosity of the buildings. Soon, though, the buildings became older and shabbier, the money scarcer and less obvious. They took the Claiborne Avenue Bridge over the Industrial Canal, and then bounced along fractured asphalt into the poorer districts of the city.

Into the Lower Ninth.

Milton looked out onto an alien landscape.

The homes had been reduced to husks. Some of them were choked with vines, others still bore the spray-painted Xs that meant that a body had been found inside them. There were piles of construction debris that had been dumped on the sidewalks. Milton had read about contractors who just drove down into the Lower Ninth to get rid of their unwanted materials rather than taking them to the city dump. Auto shops, instead of paying the fee to dispose of used tires, brought trailers of them down here and pushed them off the back.

“What you think?” the driver said, looking at Milton in the mirror.

Milton was distracted. “What?”

“About this. What the storm did.”

“It’s unbelievable.”

“You telling me, brother. We got snakes here. Long, thick snakes. King snakes. Rattlesnakes. I seen raccoons. Egrets. Pelicans. It’s like the jungle, and I’m not kidding.”

There were burned piles of household trash, clumps of insulation foam, stained PVC pipes, waterlogged couches that were bloated like sea sponges and covered in lichen.

“See the cars?” the driver said. “You never know what you gonna find if you go looking in them too closely. I remember there was a Dodge Charger, down on Choctaw and Law. The police found this corpse in it, all burned up and shit. Car been there for months before someone thought to look into it. By the time they did, it was hidden inside all this grass, taller than a man. Animals had eaten that poor sucker up. What else they gonna find in the grass and jungle?”

They moved on, the driver slowing so that Milton could look out and soak in the whole scene. They passed a handwritten sign: “Tourist. Shame on you. Driving by without stopping. Paying to see my pain. 1600 died here.” An entire stretch of street was no longer visible. It had been devoured by forest. Every housing plot on both sides of the street for two blocks, between Rocheblave and Law, was abandoned.

The driver gestured out the window with flicks of his fingers. “And we got packs of wild dogs. Some of them, beautiful Rottweilers, they owners either dead or don’t care for them no more. They been roaming around, scaring the shit out of folk. First time I see them, they were nice looking animals, inside-the-house animals. Now they just look sad, they ribs all showing and shit.”

Vast stretches of the land had been abandoned. Sometimes, it was possible to see the ghostly marks of old foundations, all that was left of the houses that had once stood here. In other places, more often, the vegetation had grown up so much that it was impossible to see where one plot ended and the next began. There was Southern cut grass, giant ragweed, Chinese tallow trees. It was all totally out of control.

The driver was watching Milton’s reaction in the mirror.

“What you think?”

He said nothing.

The parish no longer resembled an urban environment. Where there had once been rows of single-family homes with driveways and front yards, all in apple-pie order, now there was jungle. The vegetation had all sprouted since Katrina. Trees that did not exist before the storm now stood taller than the broken-backed street lamps. The asphalt was buckled and twisted with spreading roots. The inhabited lots, about one per block, looked out of place. Their owners kept their lawns mowed, the fences painted, the houses well maintained. But they were fighting back the wilderness on all sides.

“What you doing down here, then? You just come to look around?”

“No.”

“Reason I ask, we got people coming here now just to look. You saw that sign, right? Tourists, can you believe that? They got buses and shit running around here like it’s some sort of freak show.”

“I’m here to help.”

“You got a billion dollars?”

“I read about the Build It Up Foundation. The new houses.”

“Yeah,” the man said. “They’ll do a good job, if the city let’s ’em.”

“What do you mean?”

“Lot of bureaucracy. Lot of people trying to line they pockets, take advantage of others’ misery. You see. Same old N’Awlins, buddy. Same old, same old.”