Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 133, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 805 & 806, September/October 2008

Storm Surge by Meenakshi Gigi Durham

© 2008 by Meenakshi Gigi Durham

A professor of creative writing at the University of Iowa, Meenakshi Gigi Durham got her start as a fiction writer in our Department of First Stories in 2004. Her new tale for us is set in what (as a result of her long marriage to a New Orleans native) she calls her “adopted hometown.” She uses the momentous events of Hurricane Katrina as a backdrop to her fictional murder.

I saw Riley on TV the other day. I am sure it was Riley; there could be no mistaking that knobby head of slicked-down Snoop Dogg braids, the red plastic glasses, the wonky eye with the scar blazing from brow to cheekbone — a souvenir of the time his stepdad threw a steak knife at him when he was a toddler.

He was slouching between two respectable-looking white people, a man and a woman, and some cleft-chin TV announcer was saying something about how they had befriended him while they were Red Cross rescue workers in the Dome. How the two white people were going to adopt him. His name was not Riley anymore, it seemed. “Antoine,” he said into the microphone. “Antoine Dupree. My family all drowned in the storm.” His good eye twitched, the way it always does when he is lying. But the adults around him were beaming, hugging him around the shoulders, talking about his bravery and his sweetness.

I wanted to call to him, Riley, it’s me! — knowing that I could not, knowing he could not hear me. Knowing full well what our rules were. Knowing that we were never supposed to see each other again, or even admit that our paths had ever crossed. (Swear on your mama’s life, Kiran? I swear, I swear.) If ever I saw him in real life, he would look away, he would feign ignorance. Neither one of us could betray, with the slightest flicker of emotion, that we were linked in any way.

It was important for Riley not to know me, I reminded myself. It is important sometimes for deep bonds forged in childhood to remain masked, especially when the real reason for the bond is murder.

Riley and I entered the same orbit two weeks before that storm, the storm, hit New Orleans. It was not our choice; children’s lives are inevitably governed by force of circumstance, and we were, at the time, in the same circumstances. Ordinarily, that could not have happened, for we inhabited different worlds, Riley raised in the slough of the St. Thomas project, I in the effete elegance of Uptown. But our similar situations gave rise to our unlikely convergence.

It was Sister Olivia who took us into her home — a “safe house,” they had called it when they whispered the address to my mother, a shotgun cottage on Calhoun. All of this was bewildering and terrifying to me; I knew, of course, why we were going there, but I had not known it would happen. I was aware that my mother’s life was in constant peril in our elegant Uptown villa, but not that my mother would ever actually leave my handsome, rich, and sadistic father.

Oddly, coming to this house, this “safe house,” unhinged her. Until then she had been invincible, to my way of seeing. She had taken the blows and the invective stoically, unflinchingly, hiding her bruises and her pain from the world; doing this for me, I knew, though I also knew that I was never in any danger — I was flesh of his flesh, the fruit of his loins. She was his target, not I. It was she who had finally made the arrangements to leave, after weeks of whispered telephone conversations and furtive glances and silent tears. We had brought nothing with us, except the small images of Hindu gods that she now lined up on the battered dressing table in our bedroom, praying incessantly to them as the sun beat down on the streets outside. She abandoned me to Sister Olivia’s care, submerging herself in her new isolation, in the solace of her babbled prayers.

She didn’t know that Sister Olivia was in fact keeping her own vigil, at Riley’s mother’s Charity Hospital bedside. “I had to drag Ma here,” said Riley. “He found out we were gonna leave, and he beat her till she like to died. But I knew where this was, and I got her here.” He was tall for thirteen, but thin as a live-oak sapling; he looked at me expressionlessly from his seat in front of Sister Olivia’s old computer.

“Are you playing games?” I asked timidly, approaching the computer.

“Nah,” he said contemptuously, “not games,” and he covered the screen with his body so I could not see.

I wondered later if my mother had even registered his presence, or whether Sister Olivia had ever thought of the potential perils of leaving a teenage boy alone in the house with a little girl. I know now, of course, that there was nothing to fear: Riley was not an ordinary, libidinous boy; Riley saw me only as an irritant, and later, as a not-very-useful accomplice. But he missed nothing; if I thought at first that he barely knew we were there, I discovered quickly that he had an intimate and detailed knowledge of us, that he tracked our every move with characteristic sensitivity.

“That’s Sanskrit, isn’t it?” he asked me once, as we sat in the kitchen eating untoasted Pop-Tarts from Sister Olivia’s sparse pantry. “That language your mother chants in?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “It’s Indian. We’re from India. Well, my parents are. I was born here.”

“There’s no such thing as Indian,” he retorted with scorn. “The prayers are in Sanskrit.” I found out later that he was right. He was always right.

“You’re rich, too, ain’t you?” he asked. “I can tell by your teeth. You have good teeth. What do your dad do?”

“He’s a securities attorney,” I said, parroting the phrase I had been taught without any conception of its meaning or implications.

Riley whistled between the gap in his large front teeth. “You was real rich, then,” he said. “You all lived Uptown?”

I nodded, assailed with a pang of homesickness for my pale pink room, my canopied bed, my schoolmates in their pristine uniforms.

Riley watched me, his eyes glinting.

“You can’t go back,” he said. “Once you here, you can’t go back.”

At first it was unbearably lonely and dull in that house, without company or diversion. I spent hours lying on the moth-eaten sofa in the front room, watching the geckos chase bugs through the dust on the floor. Riley spent all his time at the computer: Sister Olivia had an Internet connection, though there was no telephone, no mailbox, no other links to the outside world.

“Can I play a game?” I asked him once, not moving from the sofa but craning my head so I could see him.

“What I do’s more important than games,” he said. “No little girl games on this computer.”

Hacker. I learned the word later, from Riley. He was smart about it; he could put extra money into his school lunch account; he could fix his friends’ parking tickets. He did other stuff, too. He was a news junkie, but not like my father had been. Riley read everything, and he told me about the cool stuff: about shortages of chocolate-dipped ants in China, or house burglars who asked their victims for rides home, or proposals to put voting booths in bars in New Orleans. He told me about corrupt politicians and crazy socialites. But he never read about the crimes. “Too much bad stuff goin’ on in this city,” he said to me. “You don’t need to know no more about that. Not after what we been through, you and me.”

Occasionally Sister Olivia would return to check on us, to restock the pantry and the refrigerator, and to report on Riley’s mother’s progress. Not that she was making any.

“Her skull was fractured, Riley,” she told him gently, her eyes luminous with sorrow. “We are not sure if she will live. She may have to go to Our Father in Heaven soon.”

“I figured,” said Riley. “He beat her head against the wall. She a small woman and he was drunk.”

“He was always drunk,” he told me later. “That man could drink like a skink.” He paused. “You know what a skink is? One of them little lizards.”

Did skinks drink a lot? I wondered. But it didn’t matter, it was just something from Riley’s repository of trivia, just Riley’s way of talking.

“I thought my dad would hurt my mom that bad, too,” I confided by way of sympathy.

“I shoulda got her out in time,” he replied, almost to himself. “I shoulda stood up to that bastard. He wasn’t my real dad even. All she had in the world was me, and I didn’t do nothing to help her.” He turned to his computer, fingers tapping restlessly across the keyboard. “All I know how to do is this, and that didn’t help her none.”

Riley knew the storm was coming, maybe before anyone else in New Orleans did. He tracked it on the National Weather Service for a week before it came. “This is gonna be the big one, Kiran,” he said. “This the one that’s gonna break the levees.”

“So then what?” I asked. “What if the levees break?”

“The city drowns,” he said soberly. “You ever heard of Atlantis?”

I had seen a cartoon movie about a pretty, crystalline underworld kingdom populated by big-eyed humanoids. “Yes!” I responded excitedly.

“It was a lost city,” said Riley. “The water covered it and it disappeared. New Orleans is gonna be Atlantis.”

The idea thrilled me; I envisioned living underwater, like a mermaid. I didn’t know what the storm would really bring. I couldn’t fathom the death and destruction that would attend the wrath of the wind and the water. I couldn’t imagine the screaming mayhem that Katrina would deliver. Instead, I rapturously pictured my beautiful city sinking whole into the ocean’s depths. It was a lovely idea.

“The river levee ain’t gonna break,” said Riley. “They been workin’ on that. We’ll pretty much be okay Uptown.” He pointed to the map on his screen. “Gentilly, that’s goin’ away. Jeff Parish is toast. Serve that racist pig Harry Lee right.”

He squinted at the screen. “We’ll be okay here on this block of Calhoun,” he said. “But down here, where my dad be hidin’, the water will come up.”

He sat back in the rickety dining chair, his eyes half shut, so that I thought he was falling asleep at the screen.

“Huh,” he said suddenly. “Huh. Bastard deserves to die.”

I am not sure how long it took Riley to hatch the plot. But he timed it perfectly; I think he had calculated exactly when the storm would hit, and he knew — the way almost no one else seemed to — what would happen afterwards. “We got to get out on Sunday, Kiran,” he said. “That’s likely when she’s gonna come, this Katrina ’cane. Your mom, can she drive?”

“Yes,” I said with surprise. “But we don’t have a car.”

“My dad’s got a car,” he said. “It’s a old junker but it goes. If we do this thing on Saturday, I can drive it back here. Then your mama got to get us out on Sunday.”

“If we do what thing?” I asked.

“I gotta take care of some business before we leave,” he said. “You’re gonna help me. You’re small, but you’re strong for your age, and I may need you. It’s gonna take two of us. You ain’t scared of blood or nothing, are you?”

“Blood?” I repeated. “Blood?”

“This ain’t no time to be stupid, Kiran,” he said tersely. “You gotta do what I say. Your dad got away with it, but I ain’t gonna let mine.”

His dad was in hiding, having disappeared after the near-fatal beating of Riley’s mother; he knew the cops would want to talk to him, he knew it would be trouble worse than any he’d been in before. “But I found out he’s with his cousin George down on Calhoun,” said Riley. “Not six blocks from here. He don’t know I’m here or he’d kill me, too. He’s tried before. That’s how come I got this scar. He threw a knife at my head when I was a baby.”

“Did it hurt?” I asked.

“I don’t recall,” replied Riley. “Your brain can erase memories like that. If they’re too bad, you forget them. But I reckon I won’t forget a lot of it.”

“I won’t either,” I said.

“We can change our lives,” said Riley. “Things can get better from now on. Especially after the storm, we can, like, invent ourselves. Be new inventions. Somebodies new.” Somebodies we didn’t know yet: Antoine Dupree, involuntary orphan of the storm, and Kiran Kesavan, nine-year-old murderer.

The shack on Calhoun was almost invisible. Its peeling yellow paint, and the general grime and garbage of its surroundings, rendered it unremarkable in that part of New Orleans. No one noticed two grubby children picking their way along the sidewalk toward it. In our time at Sister Olivia’s, Riley and I had showered only sporadically, combed our hair when we felt like it, and failed to do any laundry at all. But street urchins are common in that part of the world, and on that day — August 28, the Saturday before the storm, the day everyone in New Orleans was preoccupied with more important matters — we went unnoticed. I have only vague memories of it now. As Riley said, your brain can erase things, or perhaps just suppress them until they aren’t as terrifying to recall.

The door of the shack was locked.

“Let’s check the windows,” said Riley. “You’re smaller than me so you are gonna have to go in.”

I felt a stab of fear, but there was no use arguing with Riley when his jaw was clenched with resolve, when he was driven by demons. A small window at the rear of the shack was partially open. The backyard was an overgrown mass of weeds that grew taller than our heads and swarmed with shrill insects.

“This is good,” said Riley. “No one can see us get in. This is gonna work.” That was the first time I had heard emotion in his voice: It rose with excitement and cracked on the word work. When he looked at me, his eyes were gleaming. “I’ll give you a leg up,” he said. “You go on through and then open the front door for me.” He saw my face. “It’s a shotgun,” he said impatiently. “Like Sister Olivia’s. You just go straight through from the back to the front. Just go. He’s gotta be drunk out of his brains anyway. Just be quiet and try to hide.”

I stepped on his linked fingers and thrust my head through the window, which opened into a filthy bathroom that smelled of soap and sewage. Wriggling through was painful, but I could hold on to the sink to ease my descent. Alone in the house, I trembled, but I knew that Riley would be furious if I didn’t obey him. And I knew there was no other way out but to let Riley in.

Negotiating my way to the door was the most harrowing experience of my life. I have nightmares about it still. I tried to tread softly and lightly, but the floorboards were uneven and I stumbled across debris. As I made my way into the living room, I met the bloodshot gaze of Riley’s father.

The events that followed are a blur to me. I froze in my tracks, but although his eyes were on me, he did not seem to make any sense of me. He was drunk, I realized; he was so drunk he did not know what he was seeing. Riley was right again. Riley was always right, would always be right. Gathering courage, I walked to the door and opened it to my friend.

To this day, I don’t know where Riley got that wrench. Did it belong to Sister Olivia? Had he stolen it or found it in the debris outside the house? I had never seen one so big; it was thicker than Riley’s bony arm, and I wondered how he could lift it as high as he did, how he could bring it down with such force on his father’s head.

“I’m gonna fracture your skull,” he panted. “Fracture your skull. Now you know.”

I had not known how much blood there would be, had not known that Riley’s father would react, roaring, struggling against Riley, his bulk knocking the boy over so that for a moment it looked as though Riley and I would be the victims of this wretched plan of revenge. But Riley sprang up and his demons were suddenly in full power; he swung the wrench again and again, so that bits of bone and brain and blood went flying, covering him, splattering me. Long after his father lay on the floor, his head shattered and his body heavy in death, Riley kept swinging the wrench.

When at last he stopped, he was sobbing. The tears were streaming down his face and his thin chest was wracked with spasms. I wanted to put my arms around him. I did not. I stood silently watching him cry. I wanted to cry, too, but found I could not. Have not yet.

“Get me some clothes,” he said at last, without looking at me. “I can’t go out in these.”

I found a pair of shorts and a T-shirt on a bed in the back and brought them to him. The shirt almost swallowed him. The shorts were huge but had a drawstring that kept them up. The shirt had a Saints logo on it. He was wearing a Saints shirt on TV when I saw him, but it was a different one — I could tell because it fit him. I wondered later if he had chosen it on purpose, if it meant something, if it was perhaps a secret code for me.

“The car’s out by the curb,” he said. “Let’s go. We gotta lock the door behind us. My cousin George won’t be back. He works the night shift and the storm’s gonna hit before he can get here.”

Riley was right. Riley was always right, would always be right.

My mother and I drove out of the city the next day, hours before the storm came. She did as Riley told her; she was too dazed in her own sorrow and confusion to argue. Riley packed water and food for us.

“What about you?” I asked. “Come with us. We can take you, there’s room in the car.”

“Best if I don’t go,” he said. “Just in case. I can’t be in that car. I’ll head over to the Dome, that’s where you go if you ain’t got no way out. I’ll get over there before it hits.”

We looked at each other, and then unexpectedly Riley leaned over and kissed me on the forehead.

“You a good kid, Kiran,” he said. “And don’t worry. Everything’s good, everything’s gonna be okay.” He looked at me closely. “Your brain might erase this. But if it don’t, and if it don’t erase me, then you can’t ever tell. You can’t ever tell that you knew me, or what happened, or why we did it. You can’t, Kiran. You know that, don’t you?”

“I know,” I said.

“Swear on your mama’s life?”

“I swear, I swear.”

We drove out of the city in the rain. As the car crawled toward Baton Rouge, my mother’s mood lightened. She turned the radio on and we listened to the weather. She laughed for the first time I could remember in weeks.

“Looks like we’re going to get away, Kiran,” she said.

“Yes,” I agreed. The storm would come that day. The water would rise over the levee, just as Riley had said it would. The storm surge would wash down Calhoun Street and pour into the shack where Riley’s dad’s body lay. It would cover him up and cleanse away the blood and the bone fragments, the globules of brain. And then the sun would beat down for weeks so that when they found him, blackened and bloated, there would be no telling who he had been or how he had died, which is just what Riley had known would happen. They would mark an X on the door, with a 1 in the left corner — the body count. There would be no record of the savagery of that death, no way for anyone to know what we had done. Riley was right.

Riley would always be right.

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