Tony Dunbar - Tubby Dubonnet 07 - Tubby Meets Katrina (15 page)

There was some concern in the camp about the missing Wire Nut. Bonner was in the can and heard men cursing about their clothes still being dirty. Doug didn’t come out of his tent. Bonner suited up and went to work as usual, though. He didn’t think anybody had seen anything. Doug was too scared to talk, and today was payday.

His crew made good progress at the library. They took all the metal book shelves apart and stacked them neatly in the brown grass outside the building. Most of the shelves were rusty from sitting in seven feet of water for a week or so, but someone thought they might be salvageable, so onto the lawn they went. The men kept all the doors to the building open for ventilation, and a big generator-driven fan was running, so all the fungal spores could blow outside. The walls inside the reading room were quite pretty, Bonner thought, intricate patterns of blue, orange, silver and green, little life forms spreading out to eat the city.

When four o’clock came, they gathered around the boss’s pickup truck on Canal Boulevard, all in white suits like North Pole explorers, and got their checks.

“Dubonnet,” the boss called.

“Here.” Rivette accepted the envelope.

Of course all the banks were closed on a Friday evening. There was a check cashing service run out of the back of a van at City Park, but the money-changers’ servants charged nine percent. Rivette knew where there was a branch bank open uptown, by the Daiquiri Shop, and since tomorrow was Saturday and he didn’t have to work, he decided to go there in the morning and get everything coming to him.

Now that Bonner had money coming in, a plan for the future was forming. It involved buying a car and traveling over to Mississippi, where he had heard there was a lot more hurricane work a man could get lost in. He wanted to see more of the storm. He could always steal a car, but he would still need money for gas, meals, and a regular grub stake The plan also involved his friend, Christine, coming along with him. Exactly how he would find her, and what it would take to persuade her to go, hadn’t been worked out quite yet, but so far he had accomplished everything he had set his mind on doing. Just like his daddy had told him he would.

He saw Doug that evening, when they were both collecting their styrofoam platters of beef tips and noodles from the Salvation Army trailer, but the electrician avoided his eyes and slunk away to eat in his tent.

“Smart man,” Bonner thought, but he didn’t think that Doug would just forget about the whole thing. He would eventually tell about the fight, leaving out the part about who started it, and point a finger at yours truly.

Bonner began toying with ways to eliminate the problem. He didn’t want anybody standing between him and getting the money he needed to clear out of Louisiana. It was great being allowed to walk around all day with a mask on his face. Nobody was ever going to catch him around here. But mucking out the public library was not his ultimate goal in life. Understanding the hurricane was.

On Saturday morning Bonner was up early. He put on his camouflage pants and a black T-shirt, then covered these with the same soiled white chemical suit and hat he had worn the day before on the job. No sense unwrapping a brand new suit. Management was starting to dock the men twelve bucks for each new outfit they needed. Most of the guys just kept using the same old ones, no matter how funky with mold and fungus they got. Most of them even used their coveralls for pillows at night. You couldn’t wash them at the laundry trailer because they would disintegrate. Of course, there was also no attendant in the laundry trailer now, so no one used the machine unless he had time to stand guard over his clothes for fear they might get dumped on the floor or stolen. And there was no one around to sell detergent. Rivette thought he could move into that job if he didn’t have a loftier ambition.

He grabbed his Saturday morning coffee from the Salvation Army mobile kitchen. Today there was a fresh-faced young girl he hadn’t seen before handing out the cups. She said she was from a church group in Kansas, and would just be here for a week. She asked if Bonner had been displaced by the storm.

He said, “Yes, ma’am. You want to take a tour of the city?”

“I’ve already seen a lot,” she said.

“I could show you a lot more,” he told her.

Paycheck in his pocket, Bonner set off for Carrollton Avenue, the route to the good part of the city that was above the flood. He was armed, as he always was when he ventured out into the wilderness. The gun he had taken from the Place Palais security guard was in his real pants covered by his white suit, and he carried a Buck knife taped to his ankle under his sock.

The walk took him past lots of restaurants he wished were open, because he was hungry. There was Angelo Brocato’s Italian Ice, and K-Jean’s Seafood, and New York Pizza, and Venezia Pizzeria, and the Flying Burrito, and the Lemon Grass Vietnamese, and Manuel’s Hot Tamales, and the Tastee Donuts, and the Five Happiness Chinese, and a Popeye’s, a Rally’s, a Wendy’s, and Ye Olde College Inn for po-boys.

Every one of them was messed up, crusty brown flood lines midway across the doors, plywood in some of the windows. There really were no signs of life anywhere, except for some “gutting guys” like himself who were clearing out the Catholic Book Store. They said
“Buenos dias, mi amigo.”

Bonner ignored them and walked on. The face protector hung around his neck on its elastic band. The day was warming up, and he was hot inside his suit, but these white garments were his identity. No, they concealed his identity. In any case, white suits were where it’s at.

Eventually he reached a string of businesses, set among the trees and residences which lined the street. His paycheck was drawn on the First Alluvial Bank, and he knew right where that was.

The bank was open, and there was a line of cars half-way around the block trying to access the drive-up windows. Bonner paused to check that he had his ID, then he walked into the branch and got in line.

It wasn’t a bad wait, about ten minutes. The man in front of him tried to get into a conversation about the white suit Bonner was wearing, asking him if he were contaminated, ha ha, and should they keep their distance, ha ha.

Bonner shrugged, pretending not to speak English. Nothing unusual about that in New Orleans these days.

The little girl behind the counter gave him a strained smile and said good morning. She was already stressed, though only half an hour into the job, because her Friday night had been a late one, spent at the just re-opened Tipitina’s listening to Sunpie, and because every one of her customers so far had presented a problem such as an out-of-state check, a third-party check, a complaint about a service charge wrongly assessed while the account-holder was evacuated to Timbuktu, or wherever. The teller was also living with her sister in a one bedroom apartment in Harahan because her own apartment in Mid-City got flooded, and… the list went on.

But she was glad to see that Bonner was trying to cash a paycheck drawn on her own bank, which was about as simple as a transaction could get.

“Do you have an account with us, sir?” she asked politely.

Bonner had to clear his throat to say no. There was a painting on the wall behind her. It showed palm trees and golden sand. It was the beach. There were whitecaps, a blue sky, big clouds, and it came to him. That’s where the hurricane belonged. That’s where it came from. The beach. That’s where he wanted to go.

The teller interrupted this revelation. “Could I please see your identification?”

“Sure,” he managed to say. He slid his library card and deputy sheriff’s permit under the bar and through the little window.

“You are Mr. Dubonnet?” she asked, staring at the name for the first time.

“Yeah, that’s me,” Bonner said.

The girl looked at the check.

“I’ll be just one minute, sir. I have to see how much is in this account.”

She took the check and Bonner’s ID to her supervisor who was trying to fix one of the printers at the drive-up window.

Bonner watched this nervously.

It happened that this particular teller knew who Tubby Dubonnet was.

“And the signatures don’t even match,” she whispered to her supervisor. “It could be a stolen check.”

The supervisor looked at the endorsement and compared it to the specimen on file at the bank. She wiped her hands on one of the paper napkins stacked next to the box of Krispy Kreme donuts one of the girls had brought.

“I see,” she said, and pinched the documents in her fingers and led the way back to the teller window.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Dubonnet,” she said in an overly polite tone. Her glasses wiggled above her nose. “But do you have a driver’s license or any other form of identification?”

The young teller stood close behind, waiting to see how this would turn out.

Bonner knew right then the jig was up. They were not going to give him his money. They probably were not even going to give him back his check. He needed to go to the beach.

“I think I got what you want somewhere,” he said while he slowly adjusted his chemical escape mask over his mouth and nose. Now there was nothing visible about him except his eyes and ears, and not much of them.

“It’s right here.”

He whipped the revolver out of his pocket and pointed it straight between the supervisor’s eyes.

“This is a bank robbery, lady,” he wheezed through his mouthpiece. “Put all the money you got right here in my hand.”

“Give him the drawer, honey,” the supervisor said.

“Dat man’s robbin’ da bank,” the customer behind Rivette informed everyone in line around him. The normal decorum of the lobby disintegrated. The customers bashed into one another scrambling for the exits, and the ladies in the side office ran out to see what was happening. The other tellers ducked behind their counters, and the ones serving the drive-though customers screamed for help into their speakers and ran for the back room.

The girl in front of Rivette was nervously counting out twenties into his hand.

“Just give it all to me!” he demanded, admiring the scene he had created.

She gave him stacks of bills with paper wrappers, presenting Bonner with the problem of how to carry his loot.

“Give me a bag!” he yelled.

The teller looked blank.

“We don’t have any bags,” the supervisor explained. “Or maybe there’s something in the back room. Would you like to wait while I go look?”

Bonner realized this was getting out of hand. The lobby was now empty except for one woman whose high-heeled shoes stuck out from under the customer service desk. He could practically feel the police on the way.

“Get on the floor, you!” he commanded the teller and her boss. Frantically he crammed the packs of bills under his jump suit and into the pockets of his regular pants. Some missed and slid down his leg where they were trapped by his elastic anklets.

Bonner discharged his gun one at one of the wall cameras zooming in on him, and, clumsy with money, he burst out of the bank.

He ran down a side street into what in normal times was a busy residential neighborhood. Now it was uninhabited because of the flood, except for one roofing crew and some men gutting out one of the homes. A fire had taken out a couple of houses on the block, and only their brick porches and solitary chimneys remained, towering over collapsed piles of burned timbers and rubble.

That is where Bonner hid himself, in one of the burned-out shells. He immediately stripped off his white suit and tossed it aside. The money came pouring out. No sooner did it hit the ground than one of the packages of money exploded and showered his legs and much of the cash with blue dye. Now he looked like a house painter which was not such a bad disguise, but a lot of the bills looked like the fifty dollar play-money in a Monopoly game.

He kicked all of the cash, good and bad, under some roofing shingles and hid his white suit in the crawl space underneath what had been the porch. He heard sirens in the distance.

Rivette climbed out of the burned-out house and ambled down the block to where some men wearing little white dust masks were hauling wet sheetrock out of a home.

“Y’all need any help?” he asked.

The men spoke no English, but they pointed upstairs where he found the contractor sitting in the living room talking on his cell phone. He waited patiently until the man’s call was finished, then asked him for a job.

“It’s dirty work,” the contractor said.

“I don’t mind,” Bonner told him, and nobody looking at him would doubt that. He had on a sweaty T-shirt, green and brown duck-hunters’ pants, and blue paint stains from his knees to his toes. There were also white booties around his shoes, which gave him that professional “gutting” look.

“What’s the job pay?” he asked.

“Ten bucks an hour.”

“Can I start now?”

“Sure. Go on downstairs and pitch in.”

Which is what he did, moving in step behind the other men who were tearing chunks of wet sheetrock off a wall and dumping it into wheelbarrows. He quickly got in the rhythm. The boss poked his head in the door and said he would be back in one hour. Bonner and one of the Latinos each took charge of a full wheelbarrow and rolled them out to the street where they were building a great pile of refuse.

A patrol car approached. A police lady wearing aviator sunglasses leaned out the window.

“You see anybody in a white suit come running by here,” she asked.

The Latino worker almost bolted. Seeing no escape, however, he controlled himself and smiled
“No hablo Ingles,”
he said and pointed at Bonner.

“I didn’t see anything,” Bonner said.

“If you see anyone strange, call us. There was a bank robbery in the next block.”

“Will do,” Bonner replied. The police car drove slowly away.

The Latino smiled at him and shrugged.

Bonner shrugged back. No, there weren’t any strange people around here.

Tubby got a personal visit from Detective Johnny Vodka. The lawyer was on his stomach, replacing another wall outlet he thought might have gotten wet in the hurricane.

“The door’s unlocked,” he called out when he heard the knock.

Vodka obliged. “Are you all right down there?” he asked, standing over Tubby.

“Oh, it’s you. Yeah, I’m just doing some wiring.” He got to his feet and dusted his trousers off.

“Have you been robbing banks, Mr. Dubonnet?” the policeman asked.

“No, I’m too dumb for that, except that I have represented banks and charged as much as I could get away with. Why the question?”

“At 9:58 this morning a man presented a check made out to you at the First Alluvial Bank on Carrollton, and when they wouldn’t cash it he stuck up the place.”

“It wasn’t me.”

“I knew it wasn’t you. The teller says she knows you, and that’s why she wouldn’t cash the check. Besides, the robber was described as tall and thin. That lets you off the hook.”

Tubby knew it was true. He considered himself reasonably tall, but since he started wrestling in the 180-pound class in high school, nobody had ever called him thin.

The policeman filled Tubby in on what had happened.

“Why was he using my name?”

“Don’t you see? He’s bound to be your boy. I got a description from the people he worked for, some clean-up crew over in City Park, and he sounds just like Bonner Rivette. We took some prints from the bank, and I’ll bet you a bag of beignets they come back a match.”

“So he is still around,” Tubby said. He wiped his brow,

“Sure is, and close by, too. He’s still on the loose, and get this. They found the security man at your office building, the Place Palais, across the street in the Bunny Biscuit with a concussion. He’s in a coma. The man’s name is Manuel…”

“Manuel Oteza. I’ve known him for years. He let me into my office the day before the storm hit.”

“Right. Of course, it could be a coincidence, but I make Bonner Rivette a suspect. He hasn’t tried to contact you?”

“Hell, no!” It was now apparent to Tubby that this Rivette individual was a banshee that had been released by the storm.

“Or your daughter? What’s her name?”

“Christine. No. There’s been no contact.”

“Do you think he might know where you live?”

“Of course he could. He’s been in my office. Christ, I’m in the phone book.”

“Then you might want to lock your doors and not just let people like me come walking in.”

That was helpful. “Sure, I see what you’re saying.” Tubby’s mind was seething. Maybe his somber imagination was right. Maybe there was evil afoot, and just maybe it had the Dubonnet family’s number.

Not an hour after Vodka had left, the call came in. It was from Christine, and she was hysterical.

“He phoned me, Daddy. That same man.”

“Rivette?” Tubby knew whom she meant.

“Yes,” she shrieked. “I answered the phone, and there he was. He asked me if I had a place where he could stay.”

“If you had a place?” Tubby knew he sounded dumb.

“Yes. He said he didn’t have a place to stay. And then he said we could take a trip together.”

“Where are you now?”

“I’m driving back to town with my friend, Samantha. We’re on the Interstate coming home.”

“To this house?”

“Actually, I was planning to stay with Samantha in an apartment she’s got on First Street. The landlord told her the electricity was turned on and she had to start paying rent.”

Christine was calming down. “She asked if I would move in and share.”

Tubby’s mind raced nowhere. Was Christine safer back in Jackson, Mississippi? Would she be safer with him where he could keep watch? Had Samantha started talking again?

“Has Samantha begun to talk yet?”

“She’s starting to, Daddy. I think she’ll be normal soon.”

“Who knows her address?”

“Huh? Well, I guess she does. I’ll ask her.”

“No! No!” Tubby shouted. “I’m not being clear. What I mean is, Rivette’s been involved in a bank robbery and possibly killing people. He’s very dangerous. If you stay at Samantha’s, is there any way he would know where you are?”

“I don’t see how. I didn’t know where I was going until today.”

“Look, you call me every hour until you get here. There’s a policeman interested in this case. I’ll ask him what he thinks you should do.”

“Okay. He sounded real creepy. It was just the strange way he acted like there was nothing wrong. Like it was the most natural thing to call me out of the blue. Like he was asking me out for a date.”

“What did you say to him?”

“I told him no, he couldn’t stay with me. I asked him if he thought I was nuts.”

“And?”

“He laughed and said he’d bet I would like the beach.”

“The beach?!” Now Tubby was shouting.

“Really. Who goes to the beach in October?”

Tubby counted to three silently. “If he calls back, don’t speak to him, okay?”

“It might be one way to find him, Daddy, if I do talk with him some.”

“Yeah, well don’t.”

“I’m scared of him. I think about his ‘I am Katrina’ thing all the time.”

“Well, he’s not Katrina,” Tubby said. Or maybe he was—just as senseless, just as out of control. “I’m going to hang up and call the police.”

“Okay. Love you.”

Tubby told her he loved her, too.

He called the number Johnny Vodka had given him. It rang, but no answer. He called the number of the First District Police. Detective Vodka was not in. They would give him a message.

He opened the front door and looked outside. It was nighttime now. He had the yard almost cleared of branches. Only one twenty-foot length of magnolia trunk still lay across the lawn. It was more than a foot in diameter, and he had not had a chance to whack it up into manageable pieces with his chain saw. There were lots of places to hide in his yard, lots of places he couldn’t see. None of the streetlights on the block were working yet. His daughters meant so much to him. Even though he might not be such a prize, his daughters made up for it. They had to be shielded from harm. Christine had already had a narrow escape from Rivette’s clutches. He didn’t believe she had even told him the whole story of what the man had done to her. She was such a sweet smart girl. Nothing more could happen to her.

He had always derived great strength from his place in New Orleans, his network of friends, his seat at the bar. Now it was broken, dispersed, in disarray. He had never felt so powerless, so all alone, so angry.

Bonner Rivette put in a good day’s work, and the boss handed him three twenty-dollar bills out in front of the house they were gutting, two blocks away from the First Alluvial Bank he had robbed.

“Tomorrow morning, eight o’clock, right here,” he told his crew, and everybody said yes, sir. With the downstairs stripped almost to the walls and the upstairs green with creeping mold, the contractor did not bother to lock the place. There was nothing inside anybody would want to steal.

“I’m waiting for my ride,” Bonner informed everybody and sat on the steps. After the rest of the men left, he remained there for another half an hour picking dirt off his clothes. When it started to get dark he ambled down the sidewalk to the burned-out shell of a building where he had hidden his money. He climbed back into the charred ruin and kicked aside the roofing shingles that covered his hoard.

A lot of the money was stained with the blue dye and he didn’t feel safe carrying it around. But there also were many uncontaminated bills, and he collected those into his pockets. The white chemical suit was his ally, so he retrieved that as well.

Attempting to be as inconspicuous as possible, he went back to the house where he had been working all day. He went upstairs to investigate.

There was some furniture—a sofa, mattresses on the bedroom floor, the ubiquitous kitchen refrigerator. The homeowner had apparently already removed everything he desired, like tables and bed frames, consigning the rest to curbside pick-up by the disaster contractors. Among the abandoned tins of spices and bottles of Log Cabin syrup in the pantry, he found a few edibles. There was an unopened jar of Tabasco pepper jelly, a can of Campbell’s Split Pea with Ham and Bacon soup, and even a vacuum-sealed canister of cashew pieces and bits from Walgreens. Whatever he didn’t take was going onto the street tomorrow. This place fit him, and he bedded down for the night.

He thought about lighting a candle, but decided that he preferred the darkness and the solitude of an empty house in an empty neighborhood. Two blocks away there was light, and the glow reminded him of the human race at the gates. If they invaded his space, he would invade theirs. Given just a little time, he would be moving on anyway, further east on the Gulf Coast where the waterfront was blown clear of inhabitants, where the houses had been reduced to piles of splintered lumber and stone and the woods were full of furniture. To the beach. Where the storm was still strong. Christine would be with him there. As long as she could stay away from that preacher. No, that was his sister. He had momentarily mixed them up. Christine would be there with him, and together they would keep the energy of the wind alive.

He slept on the floor, and he was meditating outside the front door the next morning when the boss showed up.

“Man, I like this,” the boss said. “It’s good to have someone you can count on.”

Since it was Sunday, they only put in half a day. In the course of clearing out a bedroom, Bonner had found a cardboard box of clothes. A pair of pants fit him well enough that he was able to discard his blue leggings into the trash heap. He still had a clean white suit in a bag, but he would save that.

When they broke off at lunch, Bonner packed his gear. The boss told him to be sure to show up tomorrow morning, and he said he would, though he had an entirely different plan.

He knew where Christine’s father lived. The address was on the library card, and it was an easy walk away.

His route took him past a neighborhood restaurant that had just re-opened. Only one of the tables outside was occupied, and the man there was drinking coffee behind his
New York Times
. Bonner felt safe enough to go inside and order a ham and cheese sandwich to go. The Middle Eastern proprietor tried to start a conversation about the Saints game he was watching on television—a Saints game from their new home in San Antonio—but Bonner played dumb. He paid for his sandwich and took it with him to eat while he walked.

He passed a house where some college-student types were sunning in lawn chairs in the yard, using storm debris, decorated with Mardi Gras beads, as a table for their beer. Bags of trash and two old refrigerators were on the curb in front. There was a Suzuki motorcycle sitting in the driveway with a “For Sale” sign taped to its handlebars.

Bonner kept going for half a block while the scene percolated around in his head, and then he reversed course.

“Who’s selling the bike?” he asked.

One of the boys raised his sunglasses. “That would be me,” he said.

“How much do you want?” Bonner asked.

“It’s in good shape. Didn’t even get wet in the flood. I’m asking $3,900.”

“I can see the mud on the spokes, dude. Does it run?”

“Oh, yeah. I wouldn’t sell it but I need the cash ’cause I lost my job at Commander’s. They’re closed, so what can I do? No, this bike is a honey.”

“Let’s hear it crank up.”

The guy was barefoot and in a bathing suit, but he managed to fire his Suzuki up. It made a great blast, with only a couple of erratic coughs.

“Might be some bad gas,” he said.

“Let me try it out,” Bonner said.

“Sure.” The boy tried to relieve Bonner of his pillow-case pouch, but his customer jerked it back and glared.

“We be cool, dude,” the athlete said. “Just bring back my bike.”

Bonner took it for a spin around the block. The motorcycle ran okay as long as it was above 4,000 RPMs. It had a hard time idling. And he did bring it back.

“I’ll give you $2,000.”

“Oh, man…”

They settled at $2,700.

Bonner went into his pack and pulled out the money.

The kid was surprised but not averse to be receiving cash money. He even had a title to the motorcycle. “How shall I fill it out?” he asked.

“Just sign it,” Bonner said.

“I guess we’re supposed to have a notary do this.”

“Don’t sweat the small stuff. I ain’t worried about it.”

And he did a wheelie roaring off down the street.

Tubby did not think there was anything amiss when he went to visit Christine’s new apartment in the Garden District. It was about a ten-minute drive away in one of the city’s nicest sections. To say that the area had been spared by the storm would be incorrect. Elephant-sized trees lay dead on the sidewalk, waiting for the heavy-duty equipment to arrive and truck them away. Roofing slate was piled high on the curb, and refrigerators were everywhere, but there had been no flood here. Most of the houses showed signs of life.

The building where Christine lived was a duplex, finished in mauve stucco. Its two entrances were announced by boxwood hedges and framed charmingly by once-functional gas lights. He rang the bell, and was momentarily surprised that the chimes worked. He had become unused to normal electrification. Samantha answered the door in pajamas and a robe. She apologized for not being dressed at two o’clock in the afternoon, but said that they were cleaning house today. Christine was upstairs vacuuming. Come on in.

Tubby went, inhaling with satisfaction the air of an old house scented with young ladies’ soaps. He was so used to the mustiness and rot of his own part of the city that he felt as though he were on a vacation to some wonderful resort far away on the globe.

“We have some coffee, and there may be some croissants left over, Mr. Dubonnet,” Samantha said, leading him up to their clean and orderly kitchen. She spoke quite distinctly as if each word were important to her.

Not once had Tubby noticed the motorcyclist trailing him on Prytania Street. The fact that the bike had stopped when he did and pulled into a parking spot down the block had completely escaped him.