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Lost In The Water

Trey R. Barker

The man's face swells out of the darkness and it is Michelle's face.  My heart melts and I want to hug her; kiss her and make everything better.  But maybe holding her would only make me better.

Ultimately it doesn't matter because in an instant she is gone, replaced by a rounded thing, a face bobbing in the water like a fish head, catching just a bit of light.

"Yo."

I scrabble for the .45 I lifted from the dead man at the 'Dome.

"Yo yo yo, my man," Fish-Face says.  "Got no desire to get shot."

"What do you want?"

"The question is what'choo want?"  His teeth are so nicotine-yellow they're darker than his pale skin.  "Sellin' whatever you looking for.  Whatever you needing.  Food.  Water.  Hell, I got boats get'choo right outta town."

Boats out of town, probably the single greatest industry the Easy's got right now.  But I'm not quite ready to leave.

"Right out of town, huh?" I say.  "Then why are you still here?"

"Making me some Benjamins."

I snort.  "Jacksons, if anything."

"Green is green, dollars is dollars."

Behind him, the water swirls.  In the bright moonlight, the water is brilliantly iridescent, like trapped neon.  Reflections off the oil and gas, chemicals, piss and blood. 

"Hell, I got so much I can even get'cha that ear you're missing."

Sliced away -- nothing left but a riot of scars -- and lost in a raging river; surrounded by a tangle of bodies and trees and garbage a helluva long way from here.

Gritting my teeth, itching to find Mr. Tim, I flash Fish-Face the picture.  Dark.  Dingy.  Hard to see.  There hadn't been much light when I took it, just enough to see four kids, arms draped around each other, clothes tattered and torn, wet, bloody.

Fish-Face's mug, lit by the moonlight and the handful of fires burning from second story windows or from the tops of single story homes, twists in disgust.

"Ain't dealing no kids."  He swims into the darkness.  Or maybe he floats away, on some bit of driftwood or a dead boater's life jacket; hell, maybe on the dead boater.

"Anything I'm looking for, huh?" I say as he leaves me alone, in the water.

Alone in the water.  Again.  And what I've swallowed, what I continue to try and swallow, along with the polluted water, is guilt.  Because I was able to hold on and she wasn't.  Because I could hold on and she couldn't.

Because I was not able to hold on to her.

It smelled just like this, that first flood.  The same chemical tang, the sweet wetness of rotting vegetation.  The same stench of bodies fattened up by their own gases, exploded by those gases, eaten by maggots and left-behind Rovers.

My gut roils and I'm sure I'm going to puke -- again -- so I lean over the side of this stolen dingy and wait.  Long enough to hear some trapped person call for help and to hear the distant whump whump of a Blackhawk helicopter searching for survivors.  Long enough to realize a sexless voice is banging around in my head.  Maybe it belongs to Michelle and maybe it belongs to this new guy -- Mr. Tim -- but maybe it belongs to both of them. 

It's nearly impossible to tell where I am.  The few landmarks I know are covered in water.  Rooftops, which I had always thought distinguishable, aren't when the rest of the building can't be seen.  They are just red or black or brown, shingle or tar, over and over and over.  Yet I know I'm near the burst levee because I can hear water rushing through the levee's ragged edges.

And if I'm near that broken levee, then I'm near the new gin joints; the ones that have cropped up in empty and abandoned rooms like syphilitic lesions. 

The flooded streets, now like the waterways of poverty-ridden Venice, are filled with people.  Those who never left.  Those who come from their homes and dumpsters, from tents beneath highway overpasses, from trees and tenement buildings.  A man floats on a sheet of plywood, his wheelchair tied to it.  A woman with no arms, in a portable bathtub, sings like a failed Ella Fitzgerald.  A set of dwarf twins, female and fat, are inside dented trash cans.  They've tied to trash cans together and anchored them with empty milk jugs to keep from rolling forward or backward.

I ignore them and head for a joint I see peeking out above a balcony.  I've been told Mr. Tim is here.

Mr. Tim.

And through him, the kids.

***

The barman -- the homeowner is dead I've been told, his body long since floated out the first floor window and down the street -- raises a single eyebrow.  "Go through a broken window to get here?"

"What?"

He nods at my arm.  I've bled on his bar.  "Got some bandages.  Cheap."

Ignoring the blood, I tap the picture.

He chuckles.  "Got a particular taste, huh?"

"Oh, we got martial law," an old drunk sings.  His skin is so sun-beaten as to make him racially indeterminate.  "And we got a curfew."

A pistol-waving kid, who tied his boat up next to mine like we were wild west cowboys, interrupts.  "Ain't none'a that mean dick to me."

Officials told everyone to stay put, but those who want to be out are out, swinging like they had before Katrina, hitting and playing and pounding just as hard and recklessly as ever. 

The old drunk raises a beer.  "This'a New Orleans.  Ain't gonna shut down 'cause no rain storm."

Hoping they can't see the fear swelling my body like the water had swelled damn near every stick of wood in the city, I tap the picture again.  When he shrugs, I slide the pic back into my pocket.

"Seen a lotta kids since the rain," he says.  "Seems like most of them with him."

Standing in the bedroom doorway, I see the flooded stair well.  The water rises slowly, and God knows how long it'll go.  It had risen forever when I was a kid, like a liquid monster drinking everything down.  The street, our yard, our steps.  Through our front door and up and up until the roof exploded and disappeared down the river.

I shake away the memory but hold on to Michelle's face from deep inside that memory.

"He was here a couple hours ago," the barman says.  "Working the bar."

"Everybody's looking for Benjamins, I guess."

Travel is officially non-existent but everyone travels.  Trying to get to the Superdome, where I'd been, or trying to get out of town, where I had come from.  Everyone travels but not everyone flees.  Some relish the lack of law and order, the lack of rules.  Yeah, maybe they are hungry and thirsty and maybe they have festering wounds and infected cuts, but New Orleans -- for at least a little while -- belongs to them. 

Anything you want.  Anything you need.

"You know where he went?" I ask.

The barman shakes his head.  "Didn't get any action here."  He nods at the handful of customers.  "Not their thing."

"Where is it their thing?"

The barman swallows, glances at the customers but no one pays us attention.  Their ears are glued to an AM station 300 miles away, leaking out of a bad radio, with news breaks telling the world what we're going through.

Except the radio has it all wrong.  The news people have no idea how horrible it actually is.  To them, it's people stranded on roofs or in nursing homes or hospitals, drinking rainwater until they get out.  They have no idea there are people who don't want out.  There is a reason the cops are getting shot at, and it doesn't have anything to do with food or water or looting a 'Shrek' DVD from Wal-Mart.

The barman wipes sweat from his face, rubs his hands on his trousers.  Muttering, he lifts my arm -- it's not bleeding much anymore -- and wipes my blood off the bar.  "Look, he's a scary guy, okay?  I don't want to get in the middle of -- "

"Just looking to do a little business is all."

His face changes, sudden understanding and disgust.  Maybe he wants to lay a right jab to my face, a knife to my gut, so I flash the .45.  His eyes catch it then snap away.  "That kind of thing used to be Café Endless, back behind the peep rooms."

"Café Endless is underwater."

Barman sucks his teeth.  "Gotta make new arrangements, then, I guess."

We've all made new arrangements.  The drinkers and smokehounds have, the skin poppers and tweakers have and don't let the politicians fool you, this town never shuts down.  Business closed and the affluent fled in their SUVs with $100 bills stuffed in the gas tanks, but New Orleans never stops.  People drink, people gamble, people keep getting over on other people.

Like Mr. Tim -- the father -- had gotten over on me, showing me papers and blood tests, genetic reports.

"So where are the new arrangements?"

He names a place and I cough up a twenty for his watery whiskey.  Then I slip out.  Off the balcony and into the boat I snatched from an old woman who was still arguing pretty fiercely with death when I saw her. 

Wanting to go home, wanting to spit the shit-tasting guilt out of my mouth, I head -- again -- deeper into the flood.

* * *

My right ear is gone because I had failed.  Because I'd been told to take care of Michelle and I had fucked it up.  Cosmic punishment had been to have a soldier's knife slip and take my ear clean off.  Maybe that's why I vomit at the thought of failing now.  Maybe it's why my head pounds like a bursting levee inside my skull.

I float past countless roofs, endless telephone poles looking like anorexically thin midgets standing on the water, dogs barking from open windows, cats lounging about in trees.  It's exactly the same as the first flood, nothing has changed.

The kids' picture was supposed to get pinned to the wall back in my safe, secure home in Iowa.  It was going to be a testament to my ability to save someone else's Michelle.  It's a simple picture, dashed off with my digital camera, printed from portable equipment I'd powered with a small generator I had set up in a corner of the Superdome.  A pic that showed kids dirty from fighting the storm, wet from crying.  Kids with blood still smeared under their noses and lips.  Kids terrified they would die alone.

It was what I had thought, what I had believed.  Until the knife cut my ear.

That pain had been a comfort.  It had meant someone was there, someone was going to keep me from being alone.

Just like I had wanted to keep these kids from being alone.

A screech shatters the darkness.  "Waaaaaaaaatchh oooouuuuuuut!"

I drop the oars, snatch my gun as my boat crashes into another.  I lurch sideways, grab the side to keep from tumbling overboard.

"Son of a bitch, ain't you ever driven no boat?" the woman asks.

I train my flashlight on her.  She's about a million years old, black as the water around us.  Wearing a formal ball gown.

"My burial dress," she says.

"The fuck is that?"  I let the light play over the coffin in which she rides.  "How the hell you float that thing?"

"You asking me questions while you got me blinded and got a gun on me?  Ain't your Mama ever show you no manners?"  Her bony hands go to her hips.

"Uh…yes, ma'am…she did.  But -- "

"My Harvey said we had to waterproof these things."  She points at her casket.  "'Cause the Easy is below the water line.  I guess that's pretty obvious now, ain't it?"

I nod.

"Said we didn't want water coming in to these damned things once we was down for the great eternal."  She lays a hand over her heart.  "God bless, Harv, I miss you."

"Died in the storm?"

"Fuck no.  Died eighteen years ago.  Got the French pox screwing some hoochie girl down in Pigeontown."

At that moment, a bang bang bang erupts. 

"Shootings been going on since the rain came," she says.  "You'd think martial law would keep them from shooting their stolen guns."

"I don't think it's technically martial law," I say.  But there was a curfew and rumors of shoot on sight and arrest without charge and confiscation of people's legal guns and tons of other shit that we thought was only going on in Iraq, but no one really knew anything.

"Sure it is, in practice if not in fact."  She eyes me like a next door neighbor.  "We ain't supposed to be out here.  What'choo doing?"

"I could ask you the same."

"Superdome," she says.

"Kids," I say.

Her eyes bore in on me.  "Lose some?"

"Yeah." 

She doesn't believe me and it's as obvious as the bodies floating past.  Her eyes tighten.  "You a do-gooder?"

"I came to help," I say.

"You're a doctor, then?"

"No."

"An engineer, working on the levees?"

"No."

"Maybe a cop, keeping those shooters from killing anyone?"

"No."

"You came to help the kids."

Since it's not a question, I don't answer.

"Makin' sure them kids all get back to their parents?"  She shrugs.  "A noble enough sentiment, I guess."  Her gaze falls back on me.  "If that's what you're doing."

"It is."

An attempt to erase time.  An attempt to lose the moment when my parents disappeared in a swath of water as wide as our entire town.  Trying to run time back to before my family of four became a family of just me.

"Can't let the kids lose their parents," she says. 

"Can't let them lose each other," I say.

The roof had slipped away while all four of us were in the attic.  The rest of the house had followed in half a heart beat.  Mama and Daddy were sucked down into the river.  Michelle and I got hung up in some oak trees and the last time I heard Daddy was when he screamed at me to take care of my little sister.

Three nights she and I spent with the smell of death in our nostrils, every stitch of clothing we wore soaked, trying to cook flood-dead fish over an open gas line fire, eating wet bread and trying to find a can opener to get into the treasure of Spaghetti-O's.

The fourth night, when we were exhausted from crying, when we knew Mom and Dad were gone and there was no one left alive but us, more rains came.  We held on to each other until our hands were bloody from our jacket zippers and belt buckles.

And then the water stole her from me.  Carried her out toward the junkyard, toward the hidden metal and submerged cars.  I heard a scream, then my name, then nothing.

Then the water dragged me into the river.

On night six, a soldier found me caught in fencing, in wire and rope, in brush and bodies, nearly 100 miles from where I'd started.  I looked up, saw the soldier's face, pissed myself empty with desperate relief at his huge smile, then felt the sharp sting of his knife when it slipped and cut me rather than the brush.

"I don't know I hope you find those kids," she says with a nod toward my arm.  "How'd you get cut up?"

"An accident," I say.  Cutting is cutting, accidental ear or purposeful arm.  The blade is the blade and a sting becomes a comfort very easily.

"Well, you stink like maybe you a little dangerous."

"We all stink."

I snap off anymore conversation by shoving her coffin away from my boat.  I try to head her toward dry ground while I move further into the flood zone.

As I row, the water rises higher and higher on every building, and I wait for the roofs to slide away.

***

She thinks I want the kids.  The barman thinks that, too.  And the guy watching boats for $5 a pop at the first place I went and the man trying to make time with the chicks at the second place.  They all think I want to steal the kids. 

Or buy them.

In every place I've been tonight, five or ten or maybe a hundred, there is at least one person who knows Mr. Tim.  These joints have only been open a few hours, maybe a day, and yet everyone knows them and him.  No one gives me names or directions, but for twenty bucks, I get a head nod or an eye flick, a subtle finger point. 

Down deep, further down than the black water of the Mississippi River, part of me does want to buy those kids.  Those four and three others and two more after that and then another and another.  I want to buy all the children.  I want to keep them from being lonely and terrified the way I had been.  I want to make sure none of them loses their family and dreams every night of losing their Michelle.  And if I can help them, then maybe I can dream better.

Heading to the next place, I pull out my Tom Mix pocketknife.  The old cowboy movie star's face is nearly rubbed away, has a crack running through it, but I can still see his smile.  He floated up in Mom and Dad's wake, a hard steel replacement for them.

Pop and the blade is open and then I feel it.  The sting of a shallow cut, lengthwise up my arm.  Just enough to get my head somewhere else.  Just enough to take my mind off my failure, my dead Michelle.

Add another scar to the map of scars.

The air is so humid, so fetid and rank and thick that I can't feel the blood on my arm.  But really the blood doesn't matter, only the sting.

If I have to I will pay cash for those four kids.  Buy them, get them out of this nightmarish place, get them to their parents or the Red Cross or the Salvation Army.  I will get them away from their 'father' and I will keep them together.

Then I will get my ass back to my safe janitorial job at Forest Oaks County Club.  And I know I'll cut myself damn near into the hospital when I get back.  And I know every series of cuts will spell Michelle.

The boat bumps against a house.  No music, no generator-driven lights.  Only a few candles on the second floor balcony. 

"The fuck're you?" a man asks.  He stands and stares hard at me, a shotgun casually in his hands.

"Got a taste," I say.  "Heard this was the place."

He lets me climb out of the boat.  His eyes never leave me but when I stand quick, the .45 in my hands, his eyes widen.

Maybe the shots I've heard over the last hours have desensitized me.  My gun isn't as loud as I had expected.  It's a delicate pop.

The man goes down, rolls off the balcony into the water.

Then the world is alive.  Bursting with scared voices and splashes as people dive from the house into the water.  A handful of men, faces terrified and some with pants still around their ankles, lunge out the door, shove past me.  One hits the water, the other manages to fall into my boat.  He rows furiously, never once looks back.  People -- some women in the mix, too -- come out of the windows like water over the levee or maybe hamburger out of a meat grinder. 

"Jesus Christ," someone shouts, his voice hysterical, cutting through the air like a chainsaw.  "The fuck is going on.  I wasn’t doing anything.  I didn't touch her -- "

I draw a bead on him and he splashes and then another thug rushes out, his gun already spitting fire.  I hear the bullets hit the water and I shoot back.  Two or three or maybe four shots and the man's eyes roll up in his head.

Splash and he floats away and my heart pounds and I just want to be home and where is Michelle and goddamn but please can we stop just long enough to let me cut?

When the world finally quiets, I hear his voice.

"Well," Mr. Tim says, standing in the doorway, his hands empty.  "Look who's here."  He chuckles.  "Come looking for some candy?  Seems like you had four pieces right there at the dome."

I pull a flyer from my pocket.  His face.  His mugshot.  New Orleans Parish registered sex offender.  Multiple convictions.  Multiple prison stays.

"You're not their father," I say.

"And you ain't even close to the sharpest lightbulb in the sink."

"You lied to me," I say. 

"And you just killed three people.  Wait, you just gave away four kids and then killed three people."

Again, that fat tumor of guilt in the back of my throat.  I had thought he was their father.  I had been seduced by his story, by the handful of smeared pages that looked so official.  They had laid out a legal lifetime for those kids.

"I'm guessing my lie ain't so bad compared to that."

I wave the sex offender poster.

"Fuck you," he says.  "That ain't nothing and what'choo going to do anyway?  You the one set up shop as some kinda self-appointed guardian.  You the one taking charge and giving kids away to people like me."  Even in the dim candlelight, I can see his wink.  "Never see those kids again, you kill me."

All I had wanted was to help, to make certain those kids had it better than me, that their flood didn't ruin their life.  Turns out, they didn't need the flood, they had me.

I'm sick again.  Long, ropey bands of hot vomitus that clings to my shoes and pants, spill from the balcony to the water.

"Give me the kids," I say.  I jam the gun in his face.

He chuckles but there is a tinge of fear to it.  He doesn't know me, doesn't know what kind of anguish has filled me since he strolled up to my corner of the Superdome about five hours ago.  But he knows I've killed three people already.

"Guess somebody brought you my flyer, huh?" he asks, backing into the house.

I follow.  "Fifteen minutes too late."

He'd been out the door with the kids, each of them with wide, terrified faces, scared silent, when a woman came to me.  She didn't say a word, just pinched her lips, stared hard at me for a while, then dropped the flyer on my sleeping bag. 

It was right there, in black ink and stained white paper: Jonathon Arseneneaux, no middle name but goes by Mr. Tim.  Convicted two years ago; molestation of a juvenile; statute citation LA R.S. 14:81:2.  Somehow that citation made it more real.  Not just the crime, not just the conviction, but the actual citation, something I could point to in a law book.

"Don't matter, boy," he says, trying to move away from my gun. 

I rack it.  There's already a round chambered but the sight of a bullet popping out and the sound of metal on metal catches his attention.  He backs up until he bumps against the wall. 

"Look, if not you, then someone else."  He smacks his lips.  "Them kids are all over, boy."

I know they are.  Just like when the Mississippi bounded over its banks and laid waste to everything I'd had.  Only a handful of kids in Iowa but hundreds of kids down here.  Parents lost or dead, relatives lost or dead.  Distant relatives lost or dead or unaware of them.  And absolutely no paperwork showing who those kids belong to.

Keeping the gun on him, I move around the room.  It looks like the house's master bedroom.  An extra two beds have been moved in and space cleared on the floor.  Out the door is a long hallway with at least four other rooms leading from it.

God knows where the children are.  Or if they're even still here.  Maybe he's already sold them. 

"See, most people are stupid," he says.  "Running around, looting a fucking electronics store.  Go on and get'cha TV or DVD or whatever.  Go on get'cha gun and shoot it out with the cops.  You always gonna lose that battle.  But go ahead, keep them cops busy, keep them from looking at me while I put a few bills in my wallet."

I fire and the man's left knee disappears.

This time the shot fills the room with an endless explosion, with a slash of sun light, and the smell of cordite.  Screaming, he falls to the floor, holding the mess that was his knee.

"Are you fucking crazy?"

When I lean in his face, the gun between us like a toy between lovers, I smell his piss.

"Where.  Are.  The.  Kids?"

His face tight, he says, "The ones you handed to a convict?"

"Yes."

Grimacing, he nods toward the hallway.  "You want those fucking kids?  They're yours, I'm all done with them."

It doesn't matter the heat, the humidity, the warmth of his breath on my face.  His words freeze me completely.  Maybe we're at the North Pole, maybe we're in a blizzard. 

Either way, I don't want to go into the hallway.  I don't want to look in the rooms.

I want to go backward, miles and miles, years and years, to that afternoon at the kitchen table before the rains.  Daddy and I built a model.  A Fire Chief's car.  Painted it bright red and I will always remember spilling the red paint on the table. 

In the hallway, Mr. Tim tied up by an electrical cord I'd ripped from a lamp, I stop at the stairs leading to the first floor.  The well is filled with water, as they all are anymore, and I know the sensation of movement before I see it.

The water is still coming up, swallowing each step deliberately. 

Her head bumps against the bottom step.  She rises with the water level, eyes open, naked, budding breasts bruised.  A boy comes after her, his feet tangled in hers, one eye closed, bruises all over his chest.

They're not my kids.

"All of them with him," the barman had said.

Mr. Tim has more kids than what I gave him. 

Maybe I don't see my kids because their shirts are snagged on the couch or the TV.  Maybe they are behind the stove in the kitchen or have gotten caught on the downstairs toilet.

Maybe they're dead or worse…parceled out to other men with LA R.S. 14:81:2 tattooed on their souls.  Maybe Mr. Tim divided those kids up the way the water had done with me and Michelle.

"Fuck you and your do-gooder bullshit.  You cain't change the world."

"Just my little piece of it," I say.

His brutal grunt dies raggedly when I shoot him in the face and toss him in the water.  Then I sit on the balcony and cry.  They did die alone.  Regardless of my promise, they died completely alone, even while surrounded by people.

The moon begins to set, begins to dip down into the water of New Orleans.  Who knows how long it'll be before someone finds me.  If the Blackhawk comes by, maybe they'll drop a line and take me.  Until then, I'll sit and wait and apologize to Michelle.

Snick and the Tom Mix pocket knife is open but once again I can't feel the blood. 

Hell, I can't even feel the sting.

I'll have to cut deeper.

Copyright(c) 2005 by Trey R. Barker

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