Floodgates (5 page)
There was an element of convenience to an apartment so small. If Joe leaned over and reached out one of his long arms, he could fetch a couple of slices of pizza out of Faye’s little refrigerator without getting off the bed. And if he reached up, he could slide them into the microwave that sat atop that refrigerator.
The ancient television was within reach of Faye’s side of the bed, which was nice, since the remote was long-gone, if it had ever had one at all. Needless to say, the apartment wasn’t wired to accept cable transmissions, even if Dauphine had been the type of landlady to provide that level of decadence. No matter. Faye was looking for the local news.
It didn’t take long to surf four channels. Faye quickly recognized the newscaster who’d been the lucky recipient of Nina’s telegenic outburst.
Since the live broadcast earlier, someone had taken the interviews and edited them well. The story began with a short moment devoted to Jodi, as she calmly communicated something official and vague about the skeleton that had been uncovered in the Lower Ninth Ward.
Louie Godtschalk, the author, rated a few more seconds as he talked about his upcoming book chronicling the underpinnings of New Orleans history. The reporter had then inserted footage of herself giving the details of his book, smoothly compensating for the fact that Nina had interrupted the man in mid-sentence.
“Louie Godtschalk has a daunting task ahead of him. He’s planning to make engineers interesting.” She paused for an ironic grin. “As a lifelong resident of Orleans Parish, it has never occurred to me that I have pocket-protector-wearing science guys to thank for the ground beneath my feet. But the construction of a city in a strategic but inhospitable spot like this one was a job for brilliant innovators, and Mr. Godtschalk wants to tell us their stories.”
Then the scene cut to Godtschalk as he continued explaining his work. After that, the editor had made no more cuts, choosing instead to run Nina’s entire tirade. Faye was chagrined to see herself in the background, filthy field clothes and all. There she stood, looking out of the TV at all of New Orleans, wearing a blank deer-in-the-headlights face.
Joe smiled and squeezed her hand, as if he thought she looked just beautiful. Love was truly blind.
The reporter wrapped up her story with a sound bite proving that she might well have gone to journalism school. “The impassioned speech you just heard is not Nina Thibodeaux’s first attempt to air her views on post-Katrina politics. She is the founder of an advocacy group for residents with grievances against their insurance companies or FEMA, and she blogs regularly on issues related to the levee failures and the politics of our city’s recovery. Whether her efforts will change governmental policy remains to be seen. I, for one, admire her guts.”
So did Faye.
***
Where was Joe?
The worn cotton bedsheets were cool, so he’d left her a while ago, and he’d done it quietly. Joe did everything quietly.
His moccasins were still tucked underneath the bed. One of them was resting sole-up, and she could see dirt ground into the places where the ball of his foot and his heel and each of his toes dug into the ground for support. The supple skin had stretched to the shape of his long narrow feet.
If she held the shoes to her face, she would smell leather and soil and salt water and Joe. She knew this because she had done it before. When he went home, her sheets would smell like Joe until she washed them and hung them on Dauphine’s clothesline to dry. Then she would be truly alone. Maybe Joe had brought an extra pair of moccasins that he wouldn’t mind leaving behind to keep her company. She could sniff them now and then, when she got lonely.
She raised up on one elbow, looking for him. Moonlight and night air streamed through open windows. The bedroom was empty. The bathroom door was open, revealing no one. When she noticed that a battered pot was missing from its usual spot atop her hot plate’s single burner, she was pretty sure she knew where Joe was.
Checking the open shelving above the hot plate, she saw that a large pottery bowl was also missing. Dauphine had made it, so it was glazed in a half-dozen saturated colors. She’d painted a woman in the bottom of the bowl, with warm brown hair and opaque green eyes. Faye had presumed it was a self-portrait, until she complimented Dauphine on her work.
“Me? Oh, the lady’s not me, no. The lady is
La Sirene
. She rules the sea. And she rules me, too.” She’d cocked her head and looked closely at Faye before saying, “I have served the lady since she stole me from my
maman
at the seaside. It was my doing. I put my whole head in the water.
Maman
told me not to do it, but I was hard to tame even then. I heard the lady calling and dove in to find her. She wrapped me in seaweed, like
l’Enfant Jésus
, and sang to me. We sat in a great whirlpool while her fishes swam like jewels around us, and she just sang.”
Faye lived on an island. No warm day passed without a plunge into the Gulf of Mexico. Her whole head had been in the water countless times, and no water goddess had ever carted her away. It wasn’t that Faye didn’t believe in magic. Magic had just never happened to her.
“What did
La Sirene
sing to you?”
“I hear the melody when I sleep, but the words slip through my mind like the lady’s shimmery fish. One time she stopped singing and spoke to me. Her voice was like music even when she wasn’t singing. It rumbled and moved the water. I do remember what she said then. Four words. Just four words that held my life and death.”
Faye waited for the words, until she realized that Dauphine wanted her to ask for them.
“Please tell me what she said.”
“She said, ‘Do you eat fish?’”
“Do you?”
“I did, oh, yes, I did. But after resting in a clear sea that was working alive with fishes, I knew that I never could eat them again, so I said, ‘No.’ When I got home,
Maman
said that the lady would have eaten me if I had said, ‘Yes.’”
“How did you get away, if you were all wrapped up in seaweed?”
“Oh, the lady let me go. There would have been no other way. After she had taught me all there was to know about healing and water magic, she let me go. She opened her arms and the seaweed dropped to the bottom of the ocean. I swam home and learned what my magic had cost me.”
“What?”
“Seven years. I came home to find
Maman
and
Papa
gray-headed, and my
grandmère
in the grave. Still, I long to go back to that place where the water carries away all pain. I will go there when I die, if the lady wills it.”
Rational Faye had chosen a strict and meticulous science for her life’s work. She could not imagine that Dauphine’s story was literally true. But even though she thrust her head under the ocean every chance she got and nothing bad had ever happened, she had no trouble believing that the sea was wise and old and deadly.
“You know I am a mambo, don’t you,
ma chère
? I have gone to Haiti for training, so that I can use the magic given me by
La Sirene
. You have a young man, yes?”
Faye had nodded, reminding herself not to be too impressed with such lackluster psychic abilities. Knowing that she had a “young man” didn’t require any voodoo at all. Faye was pretty sure Dauphine had overheard her at least once when she was on the phone with Joe.
“I can tell you how to hold him to you.”
Faye had waited for a sales pitch, followed by a request for a small monetary donation. Neither of these things had come. Dauphine was feeling generous.
“Here’s what you do. On a Monday morning, take your first urine and put it in a jar. Put it under your bed for nine days, and your man will never stray.”
There had to be a sensible response to this suggestion, but Faye couldn’t honestly think of one. Dauphine didn’t seem to care, because she was bubbling with yet more woman-to-woman advice.
“I can also give you what every woman’s body tells her she wants. You want it more than most, I think. You want it in your body and in your head and in your heart and in your soul. You want a child.”
This, too, was not an awe-inspiring feat of psychic prowess, though the words “You want it more than most,” echoed a bit for Faye. She thought she probably did want a child more than most, though you sure couldn’t tell it, based on her life choices so far.
Dauphine seemed to have intuited that this was not the best time for calling up a baby, so she just handed her the bowl, saying, “Keep this in the room where you sleep. When you are ready, we will do what is needed to bring the child. Until then,
La Sirene
will care for you.”
Right this minute, though, the
La Sirene
bowl was missing, and so was Joe. He had taken it for his own rituals. The lady would be staring out of the water at him tonight, when he poured steaming water over purifying herbs and dipped his hands for cleansing. Her bowl would sit on the ground in front of Joe’s crossed legs while he sat beside his ceremonial fire and communed with the dead girl’s soul.
Faye wondered how she could have forgotten that Joe would do this lovely thing. She’d seen his ceremony for the dead before, and she should have known that she’d see it again tonight.
Joe’s parents had never taught him Creek ways, so he’d cobbled together his own spirituality, learning what he could from an assortment of Native American tribes, then putting his own stamp on their religious practices. If a soul could be ushered into peace after all this time alone, then Joe could do it.
Faye crept to the window. She could see Joe, lit by the flickering firelight. He was motionless, alone with his thoughts and with a spirit that had waited with its drowned body until someone like Joe found her and set her free.
It hadn’t occurred to Faye that Joe wouldn’t be alone. Dauphine moved in and out of the shadows around him, dancing with a loose-limbed and aggressive freedom. Perhaps this was a voodoo mambo’s version of his ceremony for the dead.
She leapt and crouched and swung her hips to imaginary music. Her shoulders undulated as she shimmied past Joe, leaning forward as if to brush her large breasts against his back, then pulling away. If he noticed any of this, Faye couldn’t tell.
Dauphine’s quavering voice soared high. It was rough with passion, so rough that it didn’t sound like Dauphine at all. The lyrics of her song made Faye cold in the marrow of her bones.
Seven stabs of the knife, of the dagger
Seven stabs of the knife, of the dagger
Lend me the basin, I must vomit my blood
Lend me the basin, I must vomit my blood
My blood pours down
Come, Lady…
Dauphine’s right hand reached high above her head then, in rhythm, swung down toward the ground. She was clutching something in that hand—gazing at it, singing to it, caressing it—but it was a dark blur until she moved nearer to the fire. She raised it up again into the moonlight, and Faye got a better look at this thing that had passed so close to Joe’s head, time and again.
It was a knife.
Excerpt from
The Floodgates of Hell
by Louie Godtschalk
I want to tell you the story of a city that has thrived in a spot where no city should ever be. How do you start a story like this one?
Fortunately, when you’ve studied history as long as I have, you realize that someone has already said the very thing that you want to say, and they’ve said it better than you possibly could. So I will reach back a century or two or three and let some grand old gentlemen explain their life’s work: helping an irreplaceable city stay alive.
I have become rather attached to the men—and engineering in those days
was
the purview of men—who were gracious enough to write down their stories. When I pick up a memoir or diary, it is as though the writer still lives. He has merely been waiting, asleep, for the hundred or more years it has taken me to seek his companionship. Even his friendship.
Of all those gentlemen, my favorite is Colonel James McGonohan. We are such kindred souls in this timeless friendship that I have used…stolen…borrowed…okay, we’ll say that I appropriated the title of his memoirs. He and I are telling two facets of one tale—the parting of endless waters to make way for a magical city. What better title could either of us choose?
Here is the opening chapter of the reminiscences of a man who was a friend to both Andrew Jackson and Jean Lafitte. I hope you enjoy his friendship as well as they did. I know I have.
Excerpt from
The Floodgates of Hell, The Reminiscences of Colonel James McGonohan
1876
I had served more than two years in the Army of the United States prior to January 8, 1815, yet I mark that day as my first as a true soldier. My entire military career, before that day, was a series of mere skirmishes by comparison. On the plains of Chalmette, a pleasant walk downriver from the romance of New Orleans, I saw the unfathomable desolation that war can wreak for the first time.
Thunder cannot compare to the din of constant cannon fire. The sound of a mortar discharging death swamps everything. The roar of artillery on that day drowned the crack of our Dirty Shirts’ rifles, but it couldn’t stop those shots from finding their targets. Dirty Shirts…I haven’t thought of those words in so very many years. By the time the battle began, the red coats of our British foes were well-nigh as dirty as those of our most raggedy Kaintuck, yet still they called our brave boys Dirty Shirts.
At the Battle of New Orleans, the culminating conflict of the War of 1812, the British learned that brass buttons do not fend off grape shot, and intricate marching maneuvers do not outrun death. When the cannons fell silent, 2,000 dead and wounded—but very well-dressed— British soldiers lay on the battlefield. Nay, 2,000 dead and wounded British soldiers
covered
the battlefield.
Their red coats gave the impression of a vast field of blood, even when viewed from so great a distance that their spilled blood could not possibly be visible. Yet behind the American rampart, a stout wall of earth more than a mile long and as much as eight feet high, lay less than a hundred casualties.
New Orleans erupted in effusive gratitude after that great victory. Her citizens thanked General Jackson for their city’s salvation with parties and balls and pageants and fêtes, all presented with an oddly French flair, considering that the celebrations honored the victory of an American army in defense of an American city. Yet when I returned to the battlefield, I walked down the mighty bulwark that had protected our men from the army of the most powerful nation in existence, and I gave credit in my own mind to the less storied soldiers—the ones who built that wall.
I was one of those military engineers. I served under General Jackson in the Indian Wars and the War of 1812. When the battle was done and the remnant British army had withdrawn through the hellish Louisiana swamps and sailed home, I returned to the Chalmette battlefield. I stood atop the wall of earth that had protected thousands of Americans—some of them my friends. Without that wall, they would have suffered the same end as that great bloody sea of British soldiers. The Redcoats’ bodies were long gone by then, but I could still see them. I can see them now.
When I realized that my skills with life’s practical inventions—bridges, roads, dikes, and berms—could save so many of my countrymen’s lives, I at first thought to devote my own life to serving the army as a military engineer, doing just that. In my twilight years, I realize that the soldiers on the other side of that rampart had fathers and mothers and wives and sweethearts, just as our soldiers did, but even the most brilliant human alive lacks perspective at age eighteen.
I have built roads to move an army through a trackless wilderness. I have built bridges to bring that army across that wilderness without getting their feet wet. At Chalmette, I even held power over floodwaters, if only for a time. I helped breach a levee wall, splashing a little piece of the great Mississippi River onto the Redcoats’ path, forcing them to wade for miles in a Louisiana winter that was as bitter cold as many a December day at my Ohio home.
The Battle of New Orleans taught me that sometimes a military engineer’s job is simply to make the enemy’s life just a little more miserable than it already is. But I also learned at Chalmette, on the banks of the fickle and roaring Mississippi, that we frail human beings can guide water, but we can never control it.
I have not left New Orleans for any significant period of time since General Jackson saved the city and the river and all the land that the river drains—half a continent!— for the United States of America. When I have visitors from more ordinary climates, they marvel at our fair city’s talent for housing extreme beauty, unmatched graciousness, and unrivaled debauchery in a single compact and low-lying spot. I think their admiration would be better placed if they were to marvel at the work of my engineering brethren.
New Orleans must be where it is. Geography dictates it, and I watched many soldiers die for no reason other than that geographical imperative.
But it can’t be where it is. Water rolls past the city’s face in the form of a river. Lakes cradle the city’s sides and back. Water falls from the sky in torrents. Water lurks so close below that the ground is merely a floating crust.
Any port city is defined by water, but New Orleans is bathed in it. How could we expect anything else here, where the Mississippi washes the whole continent’s wealth to sea?
If we are to maintain a city in such a place, then an army of men vain enough to think that they can hold back a river—men like me—will be required to keep its buildings and the people in them above water. I turned my back on my career as a military engineer, because I would rather help a city live than help my enemies die.
Now it is time to pass the responsibility to a new generation. For those who would take on this challenge, an old soldier offers a few words of advice gleaned from seventy-nine years of hard experience:
Never underestimate your enemy.
Never play the odds. You will eventually lose, because your enemy can be lucky just as easily as you can.
Always seek to make your enemy
want
to do the things you
need
him to do.
And, most of all, remember that, in these wet climes, water is your enemy. You can guide water, but you can’t control it. Keep it in the river and out of the streets.