Orleans people who would probably not call themselves bohemian but who nonetheless do not spend their lives clawing tooth and nail to compete! compete! conquer! conquer! and otherwise lock, stock, and barrel the American Dream.
These are people for whom That’s a great idea! is a much finer way to live than the standard American sour of Why in the world would anyone want to do a thing like that?
Chapter 1
cast out
“Hold it tight!” Jake said.
“I’m holding it as tight as I can,” I replied.
Jake and I balanced on a two-and-a-half-foot ledge on the second story of our raised house, each balancing an end of a huge half-wet plywood sheet that was heavy as shit. Jake had nails pressed between his lips and a hammer jammed in his back shorts pocket. My neck started to feel like taut rubber bands. I tried not to look over my shoulder and envision my plummet to the ground below. The night before I had done a rare thing: I had watched the local evening news and seen the angry red blob in the Gulf. And so here we were.
“Just try.”
“I am trying!” I said, plopping my end down a second.
“Jesus! Tell me when you’re going to do that! You’re going to kill us.”
“Don’t talk about it,” I said. “Or I’ll be too freaked to stand out here.”
The shutters on our Mid-City house were not of the High-Velocity-Miami-Dade-Category-5 variety. They were French and louvered and about a hundred years old. Every hurricane season since the scary 1998 Georges evacuation seven years earlier, I had wanted to do something about those shutters, but never had. I liked the way the sun slanted through when I was reading books in bed, and new ones for our entire double-camelback would have cost the amount of a small car. But most of the iron hardware had rusted off and, for this evacuation as for the Hurricane Cindy one the month before, I twisted some pantyhose and a plastic grocery bag to cinch them tight. I wasn’t proud of this. The day-of-reckoning aspect of evacuation always made me feel like a loser.
“Come on, pick it up. We still have to pull the other one out from under the house and haul it up here, too.”
“Let’s just leave it,” I said. “It’s not going to cover the whole hole.”
“We can’t leave it. Half the clapboards are off. The wind will blow out the walls. That tarp isn’t gonna do jack.”
“If the winds are that bad the side windows are going to blow in anyway,” I reasoned. Some of those had air conditioners drooping out of them and the rest had no shutters. Not even louvered ones. I pictured the heavy old window units dropping like cartoon anvils through the next-door neighbor’s roof.
“Come on,” he said.
I gave the plywood another heave. I leaned in closer to the wall and tried to ignore the wood cutting into my fingers. Out of the corner of my eye I could see our two basset hounds, Aunt Clotilde Robichaux and Buster, on the other side of the eight-foot bedroom window. Their two curious noses greased the bottom panes.
Wham! went Jake’s hammer. I jumped slightly on the ledge. Wham! Wham! Clo started barking.
“We should never have let Tim take out that post,” I said.
“It was termite eaten,” Jake grumbled around the nails in his mouth.
“Then we shouldn’t have hired the other guy.”
Our friend Tim the indie rock carpenter had announced that he would not help us on any tasks that were outside and required the forty-foot extension ladder. He had not retired from the Southern band semi-famous for throwing fried chicken for nothing. He was in the midst of learning the pedal steel guitar. He had too much to live for.
So the old-timer carpenter had seemed like a find. The old-timer had laughed at heights. Yes, he brought his bored young nephew with the shiny gold grill and repeatedly attempted to school him on how a nail gun fired. But then he fired the lackadaisical nephew and started afresh. The old-timer’s new partner was his elderly wife who wore a neat Jackie-O wig. She came with him to work and made a picnic of it, setting up a transistor radio and a chair. She sat in our backyard under the breezy banana trees listening to the soul station and eating chips from a small bag, occasionally standing to hand an icy Coke up the ladder. I was pretty sure this was nonstandard, but it was also charming—someone’s grandmother still so in love that she wanted to sit on a foldout chair and gaze up at her husband all day.
But then the picnic was over. The old-timer and his wife suddenly stopped coming. Tim made a rare altitude exception and scrambled part way up to check the old-timer’s work. He pointed out that for a major structural beam of our back wall, the old-timer had used slim finishing nails not much thicker than fishhooks. And so when the storm warning came down, our back wall was not only still open but also in places little more than tacked together.
“We got hustled,” I said. “Tim sucks and the old-timer sucks and we suck. This is bullshit.”
“Jeez, will you stop talking? I can’t concentrate.”
Complaining about the predicament took my mind off the lack of railing between me and my twenty-foot bellybuster to the cement patio below. This seemed like exactly one of those situations I had brought on myself by continuing to live in New Orleans. If instead of moving from a small Louisiana town to New Orleans at seventeen I had fled the South like forward-looking modern careerist girls without money are all supposed to, and moved into one of those New York or Metroanywhere cubbyholes off a subway entrance, then I would not be on the back balcony about to fall to my death now. I would be in my little cubbyhole for nine hours until I got on the train to go back home to my other cubbyhole. Bored maybe. Filled with the famous “inexorable sadness of pencils / neat in their boxes” and crammed with “all the misery of manila folders and mucilage” like in that choking Roethke poem perhaps, yes. But safe!
We nailed and nailed until we were half-assed boarded up. I packed my laptop containing my just-finished novel. Jake had his computer, his bass, and originals of the documentary we had just finished about America and Louisiana’s first and oldest developmentally disabled rock band. A few changes of clothes and two basset hounds and two dog beds, and my small car was crammed full.
Rumor was our next-door neighbor used to be a songwriter for Motown. Now he lived behind barbed wire with his wife and two small children. We usually nodded hello and good-bye when we passed in the alley. For some reason, his five-year-old son called Jake “Donkey Donk.” Because Jake played music, on occasion they talked Pro Tools plug-ins across the barbed wire that we had been told a “crazy white family” had erected in the sixties. A few nights before, I thought I had seen his little girl twirling modern dances with some other leotard girls on public access TV. He was getting out of his car with some morning doughnuts and we were rushing to leave. We were alarmed by his breezy, breakfast gait.
“Didn’t you see the news?” Jake asked.
Our neighbor stopped cold with his doughnuts. “What news?” he said.
The big red blot had looked bad, we confided. Bright red like a blob movie and scary. We were afraid. Almost a decade living next door, and we’d never spoken to each other this way. His eyes grew wide.
“I’m gonna
