The Tin Roof Blowdown

Chapter 6

BY MIDMORNING NEWSCASTERS all over the country were announcing that Hurricane Katrina had changed direction and had dropped from a category 5 storm to a category 3 just before making landfall, devastating Gulfport but sparing the city that care forgot.

New Iberia ’s streets were clogged with traffic, as were those of every other town and city in southwest Louisiana, the Wal-Mart parking lot a coordination center for fundamentalist churches that unhesitatingly threw open their doors to anyone in need of help. But the sun was shining, the wind flecked with rain, the flowers blooming along East Main, more like spring than summer. We all took a breath, secure in our belief that we had faced the worst and that the warnings of the doomsayers had been undone by our collective faith.

But the newscasters were wrong and so were we. New Orleans ’s long night of the soul was just beginning.

During the night hurricane-force winds and a tidal surge had driven oceanic amounts of water up the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, nicknamed the “Mr. Go” canal, all the way through St. Bernard Parish into Orleans Parish and the low-lying neighborhoods along the Intercoastal Canal. After sunrise, residents in the Lower Ninth Ward said they heard explosions under the levee that held back the waters of Lake Pontchartrain. Rumors quickly spread from house to house-either terrorists or racists were dynamiting the only barrier that prevented the entirety of the lake from drowning the mostly black population in the Lower Nine.

The rumors were of course false. The levees burst because they were structurally weak and had only a marginal chance of surviving a category 3 storm, much less one of category 5 strength. Every state emergency official knew this. The Army Corps of Engineers knew this. The National Hurricane Center in Miami knew this.

But apparently the United States Congress and the current administration in Washington, D.C., did not, since they had dramatically cut funding for repair of the levee system only a few months earlier.

I had been successful in obtaining the address of my friend the junkie priest, Jude LeBlanc, from one of the MS-13 gang members. But at 9:00 a.m. Monday all of my priorities were rearranged for me when Helen Soileau walked into my office, her shield already hung on a lanyard from her neck. “Throw your shit in a bucket, Pops. Half the department is being assigned to the Big Sleazy,” she said.

“What’s going on?”

“Take your choice,” she replied.

WE DIDN’T SEE the first large-scale wind damage until we were well east of Morgan City. The sugarcane was crushed flat in the fields, as though it had been steamrolled and matted into black dirt. Telephone poles were snapped in half, sections blown out of signboards, roofs ripped from stores in rural strip malls. The four-lane highway was patina-ed with leaves and gray mud from the flooded woods that lined each side of the roadway, and thousands of shrieking birds freckled the sky, as though they had no place to land. Helen was driving, her face somber, a dozen more departmental vehicles behind us, their flashers rippling with color. Some of the vehicles were towing boats that were packed to the gunwales with first-aid kits, gasoline-powered generators, donated food, clothing, and bottled water, all of it tarped down and swaying on bumper hitches.

Helen was an attractive, muscular woman whose intelligence and integrity I had always admired. She had started her career as a meter maid at the NOPD, in an era when a female officer had to pay hard dues among her male colleagues. The fact she didn’t try to hide her androgynous nature had made her a special target for several members of the department, in particular a plainclothes by the name of Nate Baxter, a degenerate and former vice cop I genuinely believed belonged in a soap dish.

One morning at roll call, just after a sniper had opened fire on pedestrians from a hotel rooftop in the Quarter, Nate took over from the watch commander and addressed all the uniformed patrol personnel in the room.

“I want every swinging dick out there on the firing line, in vests and with maximum ordnance,” he said. “We’ve got one agenda. That guy gets cooled out. Nobody else gets hurt, civilians or cops. Everybody clear on that?”

So far, so good.

Nate turned his gaze on Helen, the skin denting at the corner of his mouth. “Helen, can you tell us whether ‘swinging dick’ includes you in or leaves you out?” he said.

Several cops laughed. Helen was in the second row, bent forward, her eyes still fixed on the notepad that was propped on her thigh. There was a cough or two, then the room fell silent.

“Glad you brought up the subject of genitalia, Detective,” she said. “A couple of weeks ago a transvestite CI told me you made a few cross-dressers cop your stick in the backseat of a cruiser when you were in Vice. Back then, the transvestite was using the name Rachel. But actually Rachel is a man and his real name is Ralph. Ralph said you’d undergone penile enhancement. Since I don’t get to use the same restroom as the swinging dicks, I can’t really say if Ralph is lying or not. Maybe these other officers know.”

She stared thoughtfully into space. Nate Baxter’s career never recovered from that moment. He launched a vendetta against Helen through the departmental bureaucracy and as a consequence was always looked upon by his fellow officers as a malicious coward who couldn’t cut it on a level playing field.

We were on the bridge over the Mississippi now, the wide brown expanse swollen and breathtaking down below, an upside-down houseboat spinning in the current as it floated out from under the bridge. Helen tore the wrapper on a granola bar with her teeth and spit the paper out on the steering wheel.

“What’s bothering you?” I asked.

“Nothing,” she replied, one cheek tight with chunks of granola.

I didn’t pursue it. We came down the other side of the bridge, swinging out on an elevated exit ramp above flooded woods whose canopy was stripped of leaves and strung with trash.

“We’re supposed to coordinate with a half-dozen agencies down here, including NOPD. I say screw that,” she said. “I’m going to have a talk with all our people before we go in. We do our job and we maintain our own standards. That means we don’t shoot looters. Let the insurance companies take their own losses. But if somebody fires on us, we blow them out of their socks.”

She looked at my face. “What’s funny?” she asked.

“I wish I had still been with NOPD when you were there.”

“Want to elaborate on that?”

“No, ma’am, I really don’t,” I replied.

She bit down on her granola bar and gave me another look, then drove on into the city. None of us was quite ready for what we would see.

IT WASN’T THE miles of buildings stripped of their shingles and their windows caved in or the streets awash with floating trash or the live oaks that had been punched through people’s roofs. It was the literal powerlessness of the city that was overwhelming. The electric grid had been destroyed and the water pressure had died in every faucet in St. Bernard and Orleans parishes. The pumps that should have forced water out of the storm sewers were flooded themselves and totally useless. Gas mains burned underwater or sometimes burst flaming from the earth, filling the sky in seconds with hundreds of leaves singed off an ancient tree. The entire city, within one night, had been reduced to the technological level of the Middle Ages. But as we crossed under the elevated highway and headed toward the Convention Center, I saw one image that will never leave me and that will always remain emblematic of my experience in New Orleans, Louisiana, on Monday, August 29, in the year of Our Lord, 2005. The body of a fat black man was bobbing facedown against a piling. His dress clothes were puffed with air, his arms floating straight out from his sides. A dirty skim of yellow froth from our wake washed over his head. His body would remain there for at least three days.

Any semblance of order at the Convention Center was degenerating into chaos. The thousands of people who had sought shelter there had been told to bring their own food for five days. Many of them were from the projects or the poorest neighborhoods in the city and did not own automobiles and had little money or food at the end of the month. Many of them had brought elderly and sick people with them-diabetics, paraplegics, Alzheimer’s patients, and people in need of kidney dialysis. The sun was white overhead, the air hazy and glistening with humidity. The concrete apron outside the Center was teeming with people trying to find shade or potable water. Almost all of them were yelling angrily at police cars and media vehicles.

“You going to set up a command center here?” I said.

I could see Helen biting her lower lip, her hands clenching on the steering wheel. “No, they’ll tear us apart,” she said. “The streets in the Quarter are supposed to be dry. I’m going to swing down toward Jackson Square -”

“Stop!”

“What is it?”

“I just saw Clete Purcel. There, by the entrance.”

Helen rolled down the window and squinted into the haze. The gush of superheated air through the window felt like steam blowing from the back of a commercial laundry. “What’s Clete doing?” she said.

It took a moment for both of us to assimilate the scene taking place against the Convention Center wall. A huge, sunburned man, wearing filthy cream-colored slacks and a tropical shirt split at the shoulders, was trying to fit an inverted cardboard box over the body of an elderly white woman who was draped in a wheelchair. Her body was flaccid in death, and Clete could not get the box around her without knocking her out of the chair.

“Hang on, Helen,” I said, and got out of the cruiser before she could reply.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw her make a U-turn, pause briefly, and head toward the French Quarter, the rest of the caravan trailing behind her. But Helen was a good soul and she knew I would hook up with her soon, probably with Clete in tow. She also knew you don’t leave your friends behind, regardless of what the rest of the world is doing.

I held the old woman upright in the wheelchair while Clete covered her head and upper body with the box. Then I smelled an odor from her clothes that brought back memories of a distant war that I wanted to forget.

“You think that’s bad. Go inside the Center. All the plumbing is broken. There’re dead people piled in the corners. Street rats are shooting guns in there and raping anybody they want,” Clete said. “You got a spare piece?”

“No, where’s your hideaway?”

“Lost it on Royal, I think. A whole balcony came down on the street. I got hit with a flying flowerpot.” He wiped the sweat out of his eyes with the flat of his hand and stared out at the wreckage of the city and the looters sloshing through the streets, their arms loaded with whatever they could carry. “Who needs terrorists? Look at this shit, will you?”

FOR THOSE WHO do not like to brood upon the possibility of simian ancestry in the human gene pool or who genuinely believe that societal virtue grows from a collective impulse in the human breast, the events of the next few days would offer their sensibilities poor comfort. Helen had been worried she would have to give up command of her department to either NOPD or state or federal authorities. That was the least of our problems. There was no higher command than ourselves. The command structure and communication system of NOPD had been destroyed by the storm. Four hundred to five hundred officers, roughly one third of the department, had bagged ass for higher ground. The command center NOPD had set up in a building off Canal Street had flooded. Much to their credit, the duty officers didn’t give up their positions and wandered in chest-deep water outside their building for two days. They had no food and no drinking water, and many were forced to relieve themselves in their clothes, their handheld radios held aloft to keep them dry.

From a boat or any other elevated position, as far as the eye could see, New Orleans looked like a Caribbean city that had collapsed beneath the waves. The sun was merciless in the sky, the humidity like lines of ants crawling inside your clothes. The linear structure of a neighborhood could be recognized only by the green smudge of yard trees that cut the waterline and row upon row of rooftops dotted with people who perched on sloped shingles that scalded their hands.

The smell was like none I ever experienced. The water was chocolate-brown, the surface glistening with a blue-green sheen of oil and industrial chemicals. Raw feces and used toilet paper issued from broken sewer lines. The gray, throat-gagging odor of decomposition permeated not only the air but everything we touched. The bodies of dead animals, including deer, rolled in the wake of our rescue boats. And so did those of human beings, sometimes just a shoulder or an arm or the back of a head, suddenly surfacing, then sinking under the froth.

They drowned in attics and on the second floors of their houses. They drowned along the edges of Highway 23 when they tried to drive out of Plaquemines Parish. They drowned in retirement homes and in trees and on car tops while they waved frantically at helicopters flying by overhead. They died in hospitals and nursing homes of dehydration and heat exhaustion, and they died because an attending nurse could not continue to operate a hand ventilator for hours upon hours without rest.

If by chance you hear a tape of the 911 cell phone calls from those attics, walk away from it as quickly as possible, unless you are willing to live with voices that will come aborning in your sleep for the rest of your life.

The United States Coast Guard flew nonstop, coming in low with the sun at their backs, taking sniper fire, swinging from cables, the downdraft of their choppers cutting a trough across the water. They took the children, the elderly, and the sick first and tried to come back for the others later. They chopped holes in roofs and strapped hoists on terrified people who had never flown in an airplane. They held infants against their breasts and fat women who weighed three hundred pounds, and carried them above the water to higher ground with a grace we associate with angels. They rescued more than thirty-three thousand souls, and no matter what else happens in our history, no group will ever exceed the level of courage and devotion they demonstrated following Katrina’s landfall.

After sunset on the first day, August 29, the sky was an ink wash, streaked with smoke from fires vandals had set in the Garden District. There were also electrical moments, flashes of light in the sky, heat lightning or perhaps sometimes the igneous trajectory of tracer rounds fired from automatic weapons. The rule books were going over the gunwales.

Looters were hitting pharmacies and liquor and jewelry stores first, then working their way down the buffet table. A rogue group of NOPD cops had actually set up a thieves headquarters on the tenth floor of a downtown hotel, storing their loot in the rooms, terrorizing the management, and threatening to shoot a reporter who tried to question them. New Orleans cops also drove off with automobiles from the Cadillac agency. Gangbangers had converged on the Garden District and were having a Visigoth holiday, burning homes built before the Civil War, carrying away whatever wasn’t bolted down.

Evacuees in the Superdome and Convention Center tried to walk across the bridge into Jefferson Parish. Most of these people were black, some carrying children in their arms, all of them exhausted, hungry, and dehydrated. They were met by armed police officers from Jefferson Parish who fired shotguns over their heads and allowed none of them to leave Orleans Parish.

An NOPD cop shot a black man with a twelve-gauge through the glass window of his cruiser in front of the Convention Center while hundreds of people watched. The cop sped away before the crowd attacked his vehicle. Some witnesses said he ran over the victim’s body. The cop claimed the dead man had tried to attack him with a pair of scissors.

A half block from a state medical clinic I counted the bodies of nine black people, all of them floating facedown in a circle, like free-falling parachutists suspended on a cushion of air high above the earth.

We heard stories of gunfire from rooftops and windows. Emergency personnel in rescue boats became afraid of the very people they were supposed to save. Some people airlifted out by the Coast Guard in the Lower Nine said the gunfire was a desperate attempt to signal the boat crews searching in the darkness for survivors. Who was telling the truth? What cop or fireman or volunteer kneeling on the bow of a rescue boat, preparing to throw a rope on a rooftop, wanted to find out? Who wanted to eat a round from an AK-47?

Charity and Baptist Memorial hospitals had become necropolises. The bottom floors were flooded, and gangbangers turned over rescue boats that were trying to evacuate the patients. Without electricity or ice or unspoiled food or running water, hospital personnel were left to care for the most helpless of their wards-trauma victims with fresh gunshot wounds, those whose bodily functions depended entirely upon machines, patients who had just had organs surgically removed, and the most vulnerable group, the aged and the terrified, all of it inside a building that was cooking in its own stink.

But a lot of NOPD cops were loyal to their badge and their oath and worked tirelessly alongside the rest of us for the next seventy-two hours. Among their number were many of Clete’s longtime detractors and enemies, but even the most vehement of them had to concede that Clete Purcel was a beautiful man to have on our side-the kind who covers your back, tightens your slack, and humps your pack. He knew every street and rat hole in New Orleans, and he had also fished every bayou and bay and canal from Barataria to Lake Borgne. He was on a first-name basis with hookers, Murphy artists, petty boosters, whiskey priests, junkies, skin bar operators, transvestites, disgraced cops, strippers, second-story creeps, street mutts, bondsmen, journalists, and old-time Mobsters who tended their flower gardens in the suburbs. His bravery was a given. His indifference to physical pain or verbal insult was vinegar and gall to his enemies, his loyalty to his friends of such an abiding nature that with conscious forethought he would willingly lay down his life for them.

But even Katrina did not change Clete’s penchant for the visceral and the sybaritic. On August 31 he said he was going to check his apartment and office on St. Ann in the Quarter. Two hours passed and no Clete. It was afternoon and Helen and I were in a boat out in Gentilly, surrounded by water and houses that were beginning to smell from the bodies inside. The combination of heat and humidity and lack of wind was almost unbearable, the sun like a wobbling yellow balloon trapped under the water’s surface. Helen cut the engine and let us drift on our wake until we were in the shade of an elevated stretch of Interstate 10. Her face and arms were badly sunburned, her shirt stiff with dried salt.

“Go find him,” she said.

“Clete can take care of himself,” I said.

“We need every swinging dick on the line. Tell him to get his ass back here.”

“That’s what Nate Baxter used to say.”

“Remind me to scrub out my mouth with Ajax,” she replied.

I caught a ride on another boat to high ground, then walked the rest of the way into the Quarter. The Quarter had taken a pounding from the wind and the rain, and ventilated shutters had been shattered off their hinges and the planked floors of whole balconies stripped clean from the buildings and sent flying like undulating rows of piano keys down the street. But the Quarter had not flooded and some of the bars, using gasoline-powered generators, had stayed on the full-tilt boogie for three days-their patrons zoned and marinated to the point they looked like waxworks figures that had been left under a heat lamp.

I found Clete in a corner dump two blocks from his office, his tropical shirt and cream-colored slacks black with oil, his skin peeling with sun blisters, his face glowing from the huge mug of draft beer he was drinking and the whiskey jigger rolling around inside it. A brunette woman in a halter and cutoff blue-jean shorts and spiked heels was drinking next to him, her thigh touching his. The tops of her breasts were tattooed with chains of roses, her neck strung with purple and green glass beads, her mascara running like a clown’s.

“Time to dee-dee, Cletus,” I said.

“Lighten up, big mon. Have a soda and lime. The guy’s got cold shrimp on dry ice,” he said.

“You’re shit-faced.”

“So what? This is Dominique. She’s an artist from Paris. We’re going over to my place for a while. Did you see that big plane that flew over?”

“No, I didn’t. Step outside with me.”

“It was Air Force One. After three days the Shrubster did a fly-over. Gee, I feel better now.”

“Did you hear me?”

He leaned over the counter, filled his mug from the tap, and poured a jigger of Beam into it. He upended the mug, drinking it to the bottom, his eyes fastened on mine. He smiled, his face suffused with warmth. “This is our country, big mon. We fought for it,” he said. “I say screw all these cocksuckers. Nobody jacks the Big Sleazy when the Bobbsey Twins from Homicide are on the job.”

I had no idea what he was talking about. But in AA you do not try to reason with drunks. In Clete Purcel’s case, you did not invade the private cathedral where he sometimes lived.

“I’ll tell Helen you’ll catch us later,” I said.

He laid the full weight of his big arm across my shoulders and walked with me to the door. The cloud of testosterone and beer sweat that rose from his armpit was suffocating.

“Give me an hour. I just need to clean up and fix some supper for me and Dominique,” he said.

“Supper?”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“That woman isn’t from France. She used to work in a massage parlor in Lafayette. She was one of Stevie Giacano’s whores.”

“Who’s perfect? You’ve got something negative to say about every woman I meet.”

“That’s a comment on your judgment, not mine.”

I saw the hurt flicker in his face before I could take back my words. He took his arm from my shoulders and stepped out on the sidewalk. The street was strewn with plaster, broken glass, chimney bricks, beer cans and red plastic beer cups, roofing shingles, and thousands of water beetles that had been forced up through the sewer grates and that snapped under your feet when you stepped on them. But in the waning of the afternoon, in the pool of shadow made by the building at our back, in the popping of a Mardi Gras flag someone had hung on a staff from a balcony, I felt for just a moment that an older and fonder vision of New Orleans might still be available to us.

“I’m sorry for what I said, Clete.”

His eyes crinkled, threading with white lines at the corners. He pulled a slip of paper out of his shirt pocket with two fingers and offered it to me. “Aside from her painting career, Dominique coincidentally knows every working girl in the Quarter. You still want to find that junkie priest who’s hooked up with the sister of the MS-13 dude?” he said.

You didn’t put the slide or the glide on Clete Purcel.