Zeitoun (7 page)

Zeitoun and Kathy woke late, after eight. When they turned on the TV they saw Michael Brown, director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, telling all residents of New Orleans to leave as soon as they could, to head inland with all possible haste. The National Hurricane Center had issued a watch for central Louisiana and warned that the hurricane could become a Category 5 by the time it made landfall. Category 5 hurricanes had only struck the United States mainland three times before, and never New Orleans.

“Honey,” Kathy said, “I think we should go.”

“You go,” Zeitoun said. “I’ll stay.”

“How can you stay?” she asked.

But she knew the answer. Their business wasn’t a simple one, where you could lock an office door and leave. Leaving the city meant leaving all their properties, leaving their tenants’ homes, and this they couldn’t do unless absolutely necessary. They had job sites all over the city, and any number of things could happen in their absence. They would be liable for damage if their equipment caused harm to clients’ property. It was yet another hazard of the company they’d built.

Kathy was leaning strongly toward fleeing, and watching the news throughout the day it seemed that there were so many new indicators that this storm was unique that she didn’t feel she could even contemplate staying in the city. They’d already closed down most operations at Louis Armstrong International Airport. The Louisiana National Guard had called four thousand troops into service.

Mid-morning, it was at least ninety-five degrees, the air leaden with humidity. Zeitoun was in the backyard, running around with the kids
and Mekay, the dog. Kathy opened the back door.

“You’re really staying?” Kathy asked him. Somehow she thought that he might be wavering. She was wrong.

“What’re you worried about?” he said.

She wasn’t worried, in fact. She didn’t fear for her husband’s safety, really, but she did have the feeling that life in the city would be very trying during and after the storm. The electricity would go. The roads would be covered with debris, impassable for days. Why would he want to struggle through all that?

“I have to watch the house,” he said. “The other houses. One small hole in the roof—if I fix it, no damage. If not, the whole house is wrecked.”

By the early afternoon Mayor Nagin and Governor Blanco had called for a voluntary evacuation of the city. Nagin told residents that the Superdome would be open as a “shelter of last resort.” Kathy shuddered at the thought; the year before, with Hurricane Ivan, that plan had been a miserable failure. The Superdome had been ill-supplied and overcrowded then and in ’98, with Hurricane Georges. She couldn’t believe the place was being used again. Maybe they’d learned from the last time and better provisioned the stadium? Anything was possible, but she was doubtful.

Kathy planned to leave as soon as the contraflow took effect, supposedly around four o’clock. The contraflow would allow all lanes of every highway to flow outward from the city. By then Kathy would have the Odyssey packed and ready in the driveway.

But where would she be going? She knew well that every hotel within two hundred miles would be booked already. So it was a matter
of deciding which family member she’d impose on. She had thought first of her sister Ann, who lived in Poplarville, Mississippi. But when she called, Ann was considering leaving, too. Her home was technically within the area that would be affected by the high winds, and it was surrounded by old trees. Given the likelihood that one of them might fall through her roof, Ann wasn’t sure she should stay there herself, let alone with Kathy and her kids.

The next option was the family headquarters in Baton Rouge. Owned by her brother Andy, it was a three-bedroom ranch in a subdivision outside the city. Andy traveled frequently and was currently in Hong Kong, working on a construction project. While he’d been gone, two of Kathy’s sisters, Patty and Mary Ann, had moved in.

Kathy knew they would allow her family to stay, but it would be cramped. The house wasn’t so big to begin with, and Patty had four kids of her own. With Kathy’s family there, all told there would be eight kids and three sisters living together in a house that would likely lose electricity in the high winds.

Still, it had been some time since the families had gotten together. This might bring them closer. They could all eat out, maybe go shopping in Baton Rouge. Kathy knew her kids would endorse the plan. Patty’s kids were older, but they got along well with the Zeitouns, and anyway, eight kids always found something to do together. It would be cramped and loud, but Kathy found herself looking forward to it.

Throughout the afternoon, Kathy tried to convince her husband to come with them. When had officials suggested an all-city evacuation before? she asked. Wasn’t that reason enough to go?

Zeitoun agreed that it was unusual, but he had never evacuated
before and he saw no need to do so now. Their home was elevated three feet above the ground, and rose two stories on top of that, so there would be no danger of getting stuck in an attic or on a roof, even if the worst happened. Zeitoun could always retreat to the second floor. And they lived nowhere near any levees, so they wouldn’t get any of the flash flooding that might hit some of the other neighborhoods. It was East New Orleans, or the Lower Ninth, with its one-story houses so close to the levees, that were in the gravest danger.

And he certainly couldn’t leave before he secured all his job sites. No one else would do it, and he wouldn’t ask anyone else to do it. He’d already told his workers and his foremen to leave, to be with their families, to get a head start on the traffic. He planned to go to every one of the nine job sites to gather or tie down his equipment. He had seen what happened when a contractor failed to do this: ladders careening through windows and walls, tools damaging furniture, paint all over the lawn and driveway.

“I better go,” he said.

He set out, visiting the work sites, tying down ladders, packing up tools, brushes, loose tiles, Sheetrock. He was through about half the sites when he headed home to say goodbye to Kathy and the kids.

Kathy was loading up a few small bags in the back of the Odyssey. She had packed enough clothes, toiletries, and food for two days. They would return on Monday night, she figured, after the storm had come and gone.

Kathy had the minivan’s radio on and heard Mayor Nagin repeat his instructions for residents to leave the city, but she noted that he had stopped short of a mandatory evacuation. This would embolden her husband, she was certain. She switched to another station, where they were issuing a warning that anyone who planned to ride out the storm in New Orleans should be prepared for a flood. Levee breaches could happen,
they said. Storm surges might cause flooding. Ten or fifteen feet of water would be a possibility. Any diehards staying home should have an axe, in case they needed to chop through their attic to reach the roof.

Zeitoun pulled up and parked the van on the street in front of the house. Kathy watched him approach. She never doubted his ability to care for himself in any situation, but now her heart was jumping. She was leaving him to fend for himself, leaving him to chop holes in the attic with an axe? It was insane.

He and Kathy stood in the driveway, as they had many other times when she and the family were leaving and he was staying.

“Better hurry,” Zeitoun said. “Lot of people leaving at once.”

Kathy looked at him. Her eyes, much to her own frustration, teared up. Zeitoun held her hands.

“C’mon, c’mon,” he said. “Nothing’s going to happen. People are making a big deal for no reason.”

“Bye, Daddy!” Aisha sang from the back seat.

The kids waved. They always waved, all of his children, as he stood on the driveway. None of this was new. A dozen times they had lived this moment, as Kathy and his children drove off in search of sanctuary or rest, leaving Zeitoun to watch over his house and the houses of his neighbors and clients all over the city. He had keys to dozens of other houses; everyone trusted him with their homes and everything in them.

“See you Monday,” he said.

Kathy drove away, knowing they were all mad. Living in a city like this was madness, fleeing it was madness, leaving her husband alone in a home in the path of a hurricane was madness.

She waved, her children waved, and Zeitoun stood in the driveway waving until his family was gone.

*    *    *

Zeitoun set out to finish securing the rest of his job sites. The air was breezy, the low sky smudged brown and grey. The city was chaotic, thousands of cars on the road. Traffic was worse than he expected. Brake lights and honking, cars running red lights. He took streets that no one fleeing would use.

Downtown, hundreds of people were walking to the Superdome carrying coolers, blankets, suitcases. Zeitoun was surprised. Previous experiments using the stadium as shelter had failed. As a builder, he worried about the integrity of the stadium’s roof. Could it really withstand high winds, torrential rain? You couldn’t pay him enough to hide there from the storm.

And anyway, in the past it had been little more than a few hours of squealing winds, some downed trees, a foot or two of water, some minor damage to fix once the winds had passed.

He already felt good. New Orleans would soon be largely vacated, and being in the empty city always felt good, at least for a day or two. He continued to make his rounds, secured the last few sites, and arrived home just before six.

Kathy called at six-thirty.

She was stuck in traffic a few miles outside the city. Worse, between her own confusion and the unprecedented volume of cars, she had gone the wrong way. Instead of taking the I-10 west directly to Baton Rouge, she was on I-10 heading east, with no way to correct her error. She would have to cross Lake Pontchartrain and swing all the way back through Slidell and across the state. It was going to add hours. She was harried and exhausted and the trip had barely begun.

Zeitoun was sitting at home, his feet up on the table, watching TV. He made a point of telling her so.

“Told you so,” he said.

Kathy and the kids were expected at her brother’s house for dinner, but at seven o’clock she’d traveled less than twenty miles. Just short of Slidell, she pulled into a Burger King drive-through. She and the kids ordered cheeseburgers and fries and got back onto the road. A little while later, a foul odor overtook the Odyssey.

“What is that?” Kathy asked her kids. They giggled. The smell was fecal, putrid. “What
is
that?” she asked again. This time the girls couldn’t breathe they were laughing so hard. Zachary shook his head.

“It’s Mekay,” one of the girls managed, before collapsing again into hysterics.

The girls had been sneaking the dog pieces of their cheeseburgers, and the cheese was clogging her pipes. She’d been farting for miles.

“That is awful!” Kathy wailed. The kids giggled more. Mekay continued to suffer. She was hiding under the seat.

They passed Slidell and soon met up with I-190, a smaller road Kathy figured would have less traffic. But it was just as bad, an endless stream of brake lights. Ten thousand cars, twenty thousand lights, she guessed, extending all the way to Baton Rouge or beyond. She had become part of the exodus without entirely registering the enormity and strangeness of it. A hundred thousand people on the road, all going north and east, fleeing winds and water. Kathy could only think of beds. Where would all these people sleep? A hundred thousand beds. Every time she passed a driveway she looked at the home longingly. She was so tired, and not even halfway there.

She thought again of her husband. The images she’d seen on the news were absurd, really—the storm looked like a white circular saw heading directly for New Orleans. On those satellite images the city looked so small compared to the hurricane, such a tiny thing about to be cut to pieces by that gigantic spinning blade. And her husband was just a man alone in a wooden house.

Zeitoun called again at eight o’clock. Kathy and the kids had been on the road for three hours and had only gotten as far as Covington—about fifty miles. Meanwhile, he was watching television, puttering around the house, enjoying the cool night.

“You should have stayed,” he said. “It’s so nice here.”

“We’ll see, smart guy,” she said.

Though she was exhausted, and was being driven near-crazy by her flatulent dog, Kathy was looking forward to a few days in Baton Rouge. At certain moments, at least, she was looking forward to it. Her family was not easy to deal with, this was certain, and any visit could take a wrong turn quickly and irreparably.
It’s complicated
, she would tell people. With eight siblings, it had been turbulent growing up, and when she converted to Islam, the battles and misunderstandings multiplied.

It often started with her hijab. She’d come in, drop her bags, and the suggestion would come: “Now you can take that thing off.” She’d been a Muslim for fifteen years and they still said this to her. As if the scarf was something worn under duress, only in the company of Zeitoun, a disguise she could shed when he was not around. As if only in the Delphine household could she finally be herself, let loose. This was actually the command her mother had given the last time Kathy had visited: “Take that thing off your head,” she’d said. “Go out and have a good time.”

*    *    *

There were times, however, when her mother’s loyalty to Kathy trumped her issues with Islam. Years earlier, Kathy and her mother had gone to the DMV together to have Kathy’s license renewed. Kathy was wearing her hijab, and had already received a healthy number of suspicious looks from DMV customers and staff by the time she sat down to have her picture taken. The employee behind the camera did not disguise her contempt.

“Take that thing off,” the woman said.

Kathy knew that it was her right to wear the scarf for the photo, but she didn’t want to make an issue of it.

“Do you have a brush?” Kathy asked. She tried to make a joke of it: “I don’t want to have my hair all matted for the photo.” Kathy was smiling, but the woman only stared, unblinking. “Really,” Kathy continued, “I’m okay with taking it off, but only if you have a brush …”