and he saw on TV about the hospitals losing power and thought his mom died. He felt guilty for leaving her there. He shot himself. But Dorothy made it fine.”
I stopped walking.
“What the fuck. If anybody was doing his damn job, this wouldn’t be going on so long,” I said. “People’s minds are breaking.”
Mom was silent.
“I’m sorry I’m cursing. I can’t help it. I need to do something.”
“There’s nothing you can do. You have enough to worry about. I just thought you’d want to know. I have to go. Roberta’s coming in a minute to drop off stuff. I’m washing state trooper underwear.”
“Why are you washing state trooper underwear?” I asked, feeling a million pointless miles away.
“They need me to. Other people are going to hand out toothbrushes for the Red Cross.”
“We’re going in as soon as the water goes down. Maybe sooner.”
“How are you going to get in?” Mom said. “Just stay put where you are. There’s nothing you can do.”
“Did Harvey and them go over there with their fan boats?” I asked.
“I haven’t heard if they did or not,” she said. “I wouldn’t be surprised.”
I had read online that Cajun and fishermen types had heard the call and were chugging into the city with their outboard motors and fan boats to help. I pictured my father’s best friend, a Cajun alligator and turtle farmer and swamp man whom I’d always liked but, as a child, been vaguely afraid of, steaming over from Lake Maurepas down my street to rescue left-behind neighbors. It was surreal to think of my whole known universe folding up on itself like that. Like Raid Man—the bald man who lived alone with ten cans of Raid lined up near his front door for macing kids who walked too close to his porch. I pictured Raid Man stranded and lonesome on his roof, his cans of Raid bobbing down the street. Would Raid Man take the hand of Swamp Man and step into his boat?
“Just stay put,” Mom said. “I think Roberta’s here. I have to go.”
The dogs and I strolled around the corner. Near the cracked and empty racquetball court that shielded the neighborhood from the cars whizzing by, Buster peed on the grass. Not to be outdone, Clo squatted and let loose a stream on top. Across the street, an old, pale man with slicked-back gray hair and suspenders came rushing out of his house. The day before, Jake and I had walked by a house and been amazed to see a small bag of dog poop hanging in effigy from a nasty sign in the middle of a lawn. What kind of people hung dog poop in effigy? “Florida people,” Jake had said.
“We have a real problem around here with dog waste,” the old man yelled. “Real big problems.”
I took a deep breath. I looked at the square lawns lined up in a rigid row. Forever in a drought and loosening their belts only on game day, the stucco-over-cinderblock houses full of mean, mean north Florida people. I could not wait to get back home to New Orleans. The old man stepped off his curb toward us and blocked the street. An aging country bully and sadsack us—his last viable targets.
“We don’t live here and I pick hers up anyway,” I said, waving my empty white plastic bag like a flag. “She just peed.”
“That’s what I’m saying. Urination! All dog waste!”
In New Orleans, you could walk your dog for miles without getting yelled at. In New Orleans, strangers would roll down their car windows and tell you about the first basset they had and how his feet smelled like popcorn. Old men would stop their bicycles, tip their hat, and pet your dog. In New Orleans, people who knew how to live were dying and in Florida the life misers and sapsuckers of this world dragged on and on.
“How can I pick up pee?” I yelled. “Get a real problem!”
I was surprised to see the old man backing up and going into his house. Maybe I seemed unhinged. I was embarrassed. I had never before wanted to punch an old man in the face.
“I yelled at your neighbor,” I confessed to Jack when I walked in the door. “I’m very sorry, but he really deserved it.”
The edges of Jack’s white mustache sagged. He had already set up a scrubby, shade-friendly native plant habitat under the towering trees in his yard instead of clear-cutting and rolling out a neat lawn carpet. He had told his neighbors that this was because he was an entomologist, but he was probably mounting a one-man restoration of Florida’s hardwood hammock habitat. Now he had gone and introduced two bassets and New Orleanians to the mix, upsetting the delicate neighborhood ecosystem.
“Which neighbor?” he said.
“On the corner. Maybe you shouldn’t walk in that direction anymore.”
“Which corner?”
“By the highway,” I said. “The old dog poop nazi. In suspenders.”
“Okay then,” Jack said. “Well. I never liked that direction anyway.”
Sometime after the frat guys started to line their kegs up along Main Street and break out their jumbo blue-and-orange foam fingers and their perma-tanned girlfriends started to back-that-ass-up behind them, we went to stand in the Red Cross line with the other victims. We had our dogs, our laptops, one car, a weekend’s worth of clothes, a flooded house, and, being freelancers, no idea when we would have work again. We had bills due and savings I was hoping not to touch unless absolutely necessary.
I don’t know when the white envelopes started arriving, but they were worse than the Red Cross line. Family friends started giving us envelopes with money like at a Southern funeral. Someone is in big trouble, I thought, seeing the handwritten checks for $20 or $30. Something about the white envelopes made our totally-fuckedness seem more official. The first envelope Brenda pressed into my hand, I did not want to take.
Because the house was small and walls were thin and Jake was tired of seeing his mom crying, we were whispering a lot by then.
“Hey,” I whispered to Jake in bed one night, pointing to the small but growing pile of envelopes on the nightstand. “They must think we’re really bad off. We’re not that bad off.”
“How do you figure?” he asked.
It was not that I thought the whole flooded house and flooded van and dubious employment outlook of dead city thing was just a mild setback, it was that I knew other people were worse off. True, we might have to start over from scratch somewhere we didn’t want to be with next to nothing, but we had college degrees with which to hopefully quickly get emergency jobs we hated.
“We’re not dead,” I said. “We’re not on a roof or in a shelter. We have a car left. We evacuated and didn’t have to swim to the interstate and heatstroke in the sun and see firsthand the shit that is going to ruin people’s lives.”
At moments the TV and the WWL Internet radio blow-by-blow rendered our real disaster virtual and creepy, an electronic port-hole with a very real sea whipping on the other side of the glass.
What you saw out that window might rob you of something. But the glass also buffered you from it.
“We don’t
