A Thousand Miles from Nowhere (26 page)

So he started to run.

I'M GOIN'
away, to a world unknown.
Henry shook the words from his head. No. No. Not a world unknown. He was home. True, the ground beneath his feet was a mosaic of dried mud—amber, fragile as glass, cracking and then turning to dust with his every step. True, a thick gray film coated every oak leaf and branch, every fence post and street sign, every car roof and window and front porch and shrub. The air was thick with an oily septic stink. And every house, every building, was inscribed with the awful spray-painted hieroglyphs he'd seen on TV: who had entered and when and how many dead. Even so. He was home.

He could feel the entire city circling him, the clatter now tuned to a familiar pitch, not of the ruin around him but of memory—lines from Whitman he'd memorized at fifteen and the languid grace of Pistol Pete, his mother laughing with her friend Marianna Greco, the scent of magnolia and stench of skunk, algae-covered seawall steps, blazing New Year's Eve bonfires on the levee, the old stereo's glow, his father's eyes squinting behind his glasses, brow furrowed, the scrawled note left behind:
I'm worried now, but I won't be worried long.

And the city wasn't empty. He'd been wrong. It was far from empty. There were people working—hauling scraps of metal and wood from warehouses and storefronts, repairing telephone and electric lines, steering backhoes through rubble—though Henry seemed to be a ghost among them, invisible and silent, even as the cacophony hammered away inside his head. He walked up Canal Street toward Carrollton. No one looked up from his work; no one even noticed him passing. Maybe eventually he'd come across the police or National Guard; he'd seen them on TV marching in a line through the French Quarter to prevent looting. He imagined them stopping him, pinning him facedown in the dirt, and hauling him off—but where would they take him? On the news, in that first week after the storm, he'd seen the shots of Parish Prison and its flooded cells. He'd seen the inmates herded onto the Broad Street overpass in their bright orange shirts and pants, heads slumped in the heat and humidity—not even handcuffed, merely waiting for rescue, waiting for the water to recede so they could be transported out of town to another prison. Or perhaps, Henry thought, they'd simply been set loose, left to wander on their own without food or water or shelter until they finally expired.

Henry was already thirsty; his clothes were already soaked with sweat. He'd hidden for a while in the St. Patrick Cemetery, resting his back against the cool marble of one of the larger family mausoleums. He'd looked over the damage in the cemetery, marble doors to crypts wedged open, stone vases upended, crumbling brick and concrete scattered across the narrow paths between the tombs. Two black wrought-iron gates,
Charity Hospital
inscribed in the iron trellis above them, had been pulled off their hinges and lay, still latched together, on the ground. Henry figured they marked the section where the indigent and anonymous who'd died at Charity were buried. The headstones inside the gates looked like giant books with tattered covers bleached white in the heat and rain and sun.

Henry soon realized that no one would be coming after him, that no officers had been dispatched to track him down. He wondered what the officer who'd approached the car had told Marge and Katrell, if he'd simply instructed them to turn around, to head back home, to forget about their drunken idiot of a friend who had wandered off alone.

What would Marge have told him? That Henry was not a drunken idiot but merely desperate, maybe a little unhinged, that he'd come all this way determined to find someone, an old man he'd seen on the television, an old man he knew who seemed to have wound up in an abandoned store? Okay, so yes, the idea was more than a little crazy, Marge would say—Henry could hear her saying it, could see the sweet knowing smile she'd present to the officer.

Yeah, well, give me a break,
Henry imagined the man telling her.
Who's not alone here? Who's not crazy? Let's just hope for his sake he makes it.

Yes, he was alone. He thought about the commerce he'd once had here—with Amy, with Amy's friends, with the folks at Endly's. He thought about the crowded halls at Ben Franklin, the crush of students between classes, his colleagues. He thought about the school building itself. What remained and what was gone? He remembered a Chekhov story he'd once taught, just a few pages long, about a carriage driver whose son had just died. On the evening the man returned to work, neither of his fares—an officer in a greatcoat and then three young men at the conclusion of a night of drinking—would listen when he spoke, when he told them that he had lost his son. No one would attend his grief. And so the story ended with the man alone in the stables speaking to his horse, a ragged old mare, recounting his son's funeral, his trip to the hospital to retrieve his son's clothes, the myriad small details that he was desperate for someone to hear.

Who would listen to all the grief—the loss and sorrow and despair—that needed to be spoken here? He felt the weight of that grief, so much heavier than his own, begin to settle inside him. He had not suffered the way so many thousands of others had suffered. He had not been left behind, had not had to climb to some rooftop, filthy and thirsty and starved, and wait day after day after day to be saved. He had not watched his home get washed away, had not wound up wading through—or, worse, floating facedown in—the oily stink. He did not lose a wife, a child—at least, he did not lose them in the storm. And all he
had
lost in his life—well, he had been given years, and he still had years now before him to recover, to pay his debts, to ask for forgiveness, to secure some reward.

He had years before him.
He tried to imagine it, these years. He couldn't.

Had Marge and Katrell done what they had no doubt been ordered to do—turned around and begun the long trip back to Virginia? What else was there for them to do? There was nowhere they might wait for him, no way to know when he might return. He hoped that they were not frantic with worry, that Katrell had not been overwhelmed by what Henry had done, had not feared what Henry in those first few moments had feared—that the officer would remove his gun from its holster, raise it and aim and fire. He hoped Marge had said to the boy,
Oh, he'll be just fine. That Henry Garrett's a smart one. We'll see him back in Virginia before long.

So this was it, then; he would make his way to Magazine Street, to Endly's, and then—what? What if he found Tomas Otxoa? What would he do then? He had no idea. He had no car, no way to save him, no way to save himself.
Walk with me,
he could say, wrapping his arms around the old man, steering him outside.
Walk with me until we are
too weary to walk any farther. We'll lie here beside the road, close our eyes until morning, set off again.

Make a way out of no way.

How absurd. They wouldn't even make it out of the city. How was it that he never thought anything through?

But there would be people in Virginia waiting for them, ready to help: Latangi, Marge, Rusty Campbell, Amy. All the others who'd given money. Imagine their surprise if Henry and Tomas simply appeared, as he had appeared a month ago, tired and dirty but prepared to be saved.

Henry turned at Carrollton Avenue and headed uptown. Here, in Mid-City, was the neighborhood where his father had been raised. Henry hadn't known his grandparents—they'd died young, his grandfather before Henry was born, his grandmother when he was three or four—but his father had once shown Henry and Mary the house where he'd grown up, a block off of Bienville Boulevard, a narrow white clapboard shotgun with green shutters, a statue of the Virgin Mary out front and plantain trees around back. About the only thing Henry had known about his grandparents was that his grandfather had worked as an engineer at the Dixie Brewery on Tulane Avenue, that his grandmother had been a secretary there when they met. He'd had no idea what his father's childhood had been like.
Maybe a brewery wasn't the best place for him to work,
his father had once told Henry, shaking his head, but Henry was too young to grasp what his father meant.

“That's it,” his father had said when he'd pulled up in front of the house. “That one.” He pointed.

Henry and Mary waited for whatever story might follow, but their father just sat there in silence, staring at the house. One of the shutters in front was crooked, a few of the slats broken, the green paint chipped; it leaned away from the house.

“Does it look any different?” Mary finally asked, but their father didn't answer; he didn't seem to hear her question.

Henry watched him take off his glasses and wipe them on his shirt. Then he put the glasses back on, started the car, and drove off. He seemed to have forgotten about Henry and Mary in the backseat.

They'd looked at each other, bewildered, frightened. Somehow, they understood—from their father's posture? from the way he drove? maybe just from the silence itself?—not to ask any more questions. Even so, they were children. They could not have known what was going on with their father, what he had been thinking. What memories had seared their way into his head? What clatter and chaos, what confusion and sorrow, had he endured?

Where had he gone?
Henry couldn't believe that he still didn't have an answer to this question. Even if he couldn't answer the thousands upon thousands of other questions he had, shouldn't he have been provided—
offered, granted, delivered
—this one answer, just this one?

He walked and walked, down Carrollton all the way to St. Charles, an hour of walking, maybe two, every familiar block and building made strange by the dirt and dust and stench, by the fallen trees and dangling power lines, by the shells of battered cars, by the thud and shuffle of his own feet, by the empty sky. He began to notice others walking as he walked, block to block, each of them wading through, as Henry waded, the debris scattered across the sidewalk—discarded surgical gloves, smashed water bottles, paper towels, cardboard boxes, broken pipes, upended furniture, rubber boots—as if they were all imprisoned in the same ceaseless dream, the very one he'd started having when the clatter and clamor and chaos began, a wandering phantom or mendicant or nomad or hermit, the whole world in ruins around him.

Could it be that he'd known, long before the storm, that this moment lay ahead, that so many would find themselves forsaken, left to wander these streets alone? No, he had thought the destruction would be merely his own, not the entire city's.

No, not the
entire
city's; the palaces on St. Charles Avenue—glorious homes with cut-glass windows and stone walls and trellised gardens—appeared to have been spared. The rusty waterlines marking the level to which the water had risen, etched across so many of the ruined houses he'd walked past, were nowhere in evidence here. A few windows were cracked, some trees torn from the ground. Otherwise, these grand houses had been spared. Even so, there might be dead inside them, Henry thought. Maybe there were hermits as well, survivors who had shut themselves away, subsisting on whatever had been stored in the mansions' bountiful cupboards, drinking wine for lack of water, beer for lack of bread.

And look, now, just as he'd imagined it: a figure, a young man, unshaven, hair unkempt, clothes gray with filth, emerged from a side door of one of these houses, a rust-colored stone mansion. Henry watched the man step out onto the side lawn, loosen his pants, and unleash a stream of piss into a long boxwood hedge. Did he belong there, Henry wondered, or had he broken in, found no one there, and decided to stay? When he noticed Henry looking, the young man solemnly waved, then headed back inside.

Henry continued walking. He noticed now that although here too gray dust covered the trees, the streetcar tracks along St. Charles Avenue were inexplicably shiny, almost golden in color, as if the force of the storm had miraculously scrubbed them clean. He thought of the story Tomas Otxoa had told him about the death of Bernardo Belaga, the drunk whom everyone in the town of Tolosa had believed was an idiot. One hot summer day, Tomas told Henry as he closed his eyes and sipped his gin, Bernardo had walked to the outskirts of Tolosa where there was a pig farm, and in the heat of the noon sun Bernardo climbed the metal rungs to the top of a grain silo. From there, he had fallen into the grain below and, buried beneath it, suffocated. The town's inhabitants lamented Bernardo's idiocy, certain that he had mistaken the silo for a cistern in which he would bathe and refresh himself, but Tomas said he and his brother, Joaquim, suspected a different explanation. They believed, actually, that only they possessed the truth of Bernardo's death—that he had been seduced by the golden ocean of grain beneath him, a beauty so bright and shimmering that he felt compelled to immerse himself in it, an immersion so complete that it would, of course, result in his death.

And Tomas had then opened his eyes, drained the last sip from his tumbler, and smiled sadly at Henry. “This would become one of Joaquim's best-loved stories. ‘Our Icarus,' he named it. All Basque children read it in their schools.”

“That's an awfully sad story for children,” Henry had said, and Tomas had looked at him, clearly contemplating Henry's words.

“Well,” Tomas had finally responded, “are children to be denied their sadness?”

Yes,
Henry thought now,
I would spare every child, every single one, even a moment's sadness. I would spare them every loss, every disappointment, every misfortune, every grief.

They will all—loss and misfortune and grief—arrive anyway,
he thought.
They will all arrive unbidden, of their own accord. Why summon them?

That was what his father had meant, what he had wanted to tell Henry:
Don't go looking for it.