Day Out of Days (12 page)

“Sank?”

“Completely. And so here we are again—We’ve got to hold Fats down to the gunwales, he’s so excited we’re afraid he’s gonna capsize the whole bunch of us. He’s become one desperate man—crashing around with his eyes just hunting that water for any sign. Then, bam!—here it pops up again, white and shiny with its teeth grinning out at us. We’ve still got one line on that other leg but it’s not tracking with us like it was before. It’s causing the whole boat to heave off to one side and the front end is lurching way up like it might just roll over and capsize on top of us. So now, my friend the bodyguard is saying we’re going to have to cut the piano loose before we end up drowning the boat altogether and he breaks out one of those SWAT team kind of knives with saw teeth like a shark and Fats is yelling, ‘No! No! That’s my piano, man! You can’t cut my piano loose! I’ll never find it again!’ And he jumps clean overboard!”

“No!”

“God’s truth. Just throws his huge self off the back end of that fancy boat where the motor’s churning away and he’s thrashing around in his tuxedo trying to dog-paddle over to his sinking piano while my friend shuts the motor off so it won’t chop Fats into chunks of meat. And now the boat kind of settles down some and the piano just lurks there in the water with one corner of it sticking up and Fats has found the rope line and is inching his way down it toward the baby grand and talking something—saying something out loud as he’s paddling along. I think, at first, he’s talking to us but he’s not, he’s talking to that piano and he’s telling it ‘Everything is gonna be all right,’ in the softest, sweetest voice; ‘Everything is gonna be all right, now.’ Just talking to it like that. Repeating it like you’d talk to a child stuck high up in a tree and you’re trying to climb to it and keep it calm: ‘Everything is gonna be all right,’ over and over again. And Fat’s big head and shoulders are slowly making their way toward the keyboard as he keeps quietly
talking to it and the two of us are just holding our breath, waiting to see what happens. What’re we gonna do now? We got the engine stopped. We got Fats Domino in the water and we’re tied on to a damn baby grand piano, bobbing up and down in that soup while all the guts of New Orleans goes roaring past us toward the Gulf of Mexico.”

“So, is the water still rising at that point?”

“Water’s leveled off some but it’s getting dark and nothing’s working. No lights. Electricity’s all busted up and fires breaking out everywhere. Power lines snapping and spitting. People screaming. Far away you can hear voices calling out but there ain’t nothing you can do. People just come floating by hanging onto their front doors, hunks of blue insulation, Styrofoam, any old piece a junk that floats. You just sit there and watch them come and go. Helpless. You and them, both. Some of ‘em you recognize from the neighborhood. You call out to ‘em. They call back and drift away. And Fats—Fats, he yells out for us to throw him another line of rope and we’re yelling back: ‘Fats, you gotta get back in the boat now! We gotta get you outa here! It’s getting dark and we gotta find our way out of this mess.’ And he says, ‘I’m not leaving without my piano, man! I’m not leaving without it!’ So we toss him out another line and he catches hold of it and starts wrapping it around his chest and over his cummerbund then tying the end onto another leg of that piano. And we’re telling him: ‘Fats, don’t tie that thing around yourself! If that piano goes down you’re gonna for sure drown!’ And just right then that’s exactly what happens.”

“It went under?”

“That piano pulls him right down. They both go under and disappear. And my friend the bodyguard he jumps in after them with his shark-tooth knife and I’m thinking now I’m in really deep shit—alone on the boat and I don’t know the first damn thing about how to get it started. I’m hardly familiar with Ward Nine in
the dry daylight and now here it is all covered in water and it’s getting to be dark thirty. Then, my last thought—and this is the one that freezes my blood up solid. You wanna know what that last thought was?”

“What?”

“Alligators.”

“Alligators?”

“Alligators, just lurking. You know they gotta be. There’s dead meat everywhere. It’s like a cafeteria for alligators. But before I could get too carried away with that, up bobs Fats and the baby grand again, like a dolphin breaking the surface. And Fats is sitting up on the corner of it now, roped to it—just sitting on the bass end of the eighty-eights and he’s smiling and spitting water and he laughs with this big old grin: ‘Everything is gonna be all right now! Everything is gonna be all right!’ And there was just no reason in the world for us to disbelieve him. That piano was riding up on top of the water just as flat as a table and Fats was sitting up there like he was ready for a cocktail and my buddy hauls himself back on board with his knife between his teeth, turns that motor over, and off we go like the tail end of some old beat to shit Mardi Gras.”

“And you got him out of there? To safe ground. You saved Fats Domino?”

“And his piano—both.”

“That’s incredible! You actually saved Fats Domino!”

“That’s exactly right—Well—me and my friend did.”

“The bodyguard.”

“Right.”

“That’s amazing.”

“I can’t believe it myself, sometimes.”

“You must feel really good about that.”

“I do. I actually do.”

We’re high above Detroit by now, looking down at the sparkling lights just coming on. Then, the dark gray wolf head of Lake Superior begins to emerge out of the northwest. My partner
in flight takes a little snack break; tears an edge off a cranberry muffin, pops it in his mouth, then twiddles his fingers to shed the crumbs. He licks the corners of his mouth, preens his moustache and beard, then wipes the moisture from his neck with the linen napkin. His eyes have a gentle, slightly feminine cast with long lashes tucked deep in his chubby cheeks. He tells me this is “Day 52” for him, since the flood. Fifty-two days wandering the country in a Dodge van with nothing but what he had hastily thrown into it as he fled the city of his birth. Since the hurricane he hasn’t stopped moving; revisiting ex-wives, girlfriends, relatives, friends of family. From Biloxi to Memphis to Philadelphia to New Jersey, New York; slowly working his way north. Now he’s flying out to St. Paul to track down an aunt he last saw when he was ten. He hopes he can still recognize her. She’s told him she has an extra bed. Then he might head west, he thinks. He’s never been there. Portland or Seattle. “Maybe it’s time to get adventurous.” I go back to the
World Traveler
just out of having nothing left to say. “I wouldn’t recommend Acapulco, though, if I were you,” he reiterates, as though
I
were the one in search of new digs. “Dangerous as hell down there.”

“No,” I say. “I was just thumbing through the pictures.”

“Dangerous just about anywhere when you think about it.”

“I try not to.”

“What’s that?”

“Think about it.”

“Well, yeah—right. That’s probably a good policy. Otherwise you’d just never venture out at all, would you?”

“Probably not.” I return the magazine to the pouch on the back of the seat in front of me and reset my chair as we begin our descent into the Twin Cities. My friend nibbles away at his muffin, staring contemplatively straight ahead. He seems gripped by a deep silence now as though his immediate unknown future were a tangible thing; a strange partner he was just now getting used to. Out the window the streaming highway lights frame the braided
black headwaters of the Mississippi, laying out placid and lazy in their seedbed before starting the long, inexorable journey south to the Gulf of Mexico. “Can I just ask you one thing?” I say to the man from New Orleans. Again, he twiddles his fingers, knocking crumbs into his lap then flicking them to the floor.

“Sure. Why not?” he says.

“Did all that stuff actually happen? I mean with Fats—saving Fats Domino. Or did you just—kind of dream it all up?” He pauses a moment, staring down at his beefy knees, then looks up at the plastic ceiling as though trying to pierce right through it to the rushing night sky.

“What’s the difference?” he says to me.

In Memory of Chappy Hardy
10/05 NYC

Ceiling’s way too low. Made out of I don’t know what. Fireproof sheetrock or something lumpy. Little squares of it squeezed together in sections. Some of the squares don’t quite fit. There’s black gaps where the wind comes through. I can see it. The wind. I watch it. I’m not sure if it’s coming from the outside or inside. Like wind from the building itself. Building-generated wind, I guess. And dust. Tiny floating particles of crud. And bugs. Beautiful long-winged lacy-looking things with bent, delicate legs. They press against the glass sliding door and look like they’re licking it. I don’t know what could be on the glass that they like to lick it like that. Salt maybe. We’re a long way from the sea. Maybe film from the sticky humidity. Maybe something sweet but I can’t think what that would be either. There’s nothing sweet in here. There’s displaced New Orleans people in here, that’s for sure. Whole families living all around me. Right next door. Maybe ten people in there. All ages, I guess. You can hear them. Way too many for one squashed-up room. You can hear them trying to get along. Trying to find room to sleep side by side, head to toe, or even a place to sit down with a plate of food. They’re cooking all the time in there. You can smell it; crawfish, jambalaya, all that Cajun stuff. They’re
always cooking seems like. Singing too. But there’s fights going on. Somebody pushing somebody else around. Family. Brothers fighting. Sisters-in-law. Mothers yelling. Kids wailing away. Then everyone will suddenly just stop and laugh. Just like that. Amazing how that happens. They’ll all just stop and laugh. I never hear the joke, the punch line; just the laughter. Maybe somebody is getting made fun of. I don’t know. That could be too. Somebody getting humiliated. That happens. Sometimes you see them coming and going with their laundry or bringing beer into the room—Diet Sprite, stuff like that. You can spot them right away from the people in Shreveport. They stand right out. White bandanas, these exotic print dresses with tropical flowers and parrots flying across their breasts. They sound different too. They’ve got that different ring that must come from back deep in those bayous somewhere. I don’t know. I try not to look them straight in the eyes. I don’t know why. I’m not afraid or anything, I just don’t want them to think I might be curious about their catastrophe. You know—I don’t want to embarrass them. Not that they would be. I wonder about catastrophe sometimes. How close it is. How near. Right here, under the skin. How some people it never seems to touch and other ones that’s all they know. Like some of these people here, you see that their whole life has just been a string of catastrophes; one strung on top of another, like bad beads. This hurricane deal is just another one. Maybe the worst but just another one. Who knows, maybe those weren’t the first bodies they ever saw floating facedown through the drowning streets. Maybe that wasn’t the first time they had to carry their mother on their back or not eat for three days or have to fight off a dog to get something out of a garbage can. Makes you wonder. I lie here sometimes thinking about it. Just lie here watching the overhead fan and listening to all these people. Listening to Highway 220 moaning right outside the sliding glass door. You can see the trucks pouring back and forth from Dallas. You can hear the B-52 bombers big as small cities running low patterns all day long. Running circles from the local air
base; practicing for Iraq, I guess. Practicing for some new catastrophe. Something coming up. Maybe they know something we don’t. I’m sure they do. We’re the last to find out. Don’t you think? Always. Big long ropes of black fuel trailing out across the sky, out past Louisiana Downs, across the greasy Red River where the big glitzy casinos flash their neons bragging about jackpots and payouts and fun trips to the Bahamas and nobody out here’s got a pot to piss in. Nobody on this side of the river anyway.

John Luther Jones was born in a far-flung corner of southeastern Missouri. At the raw age of thirteen he and his family moved to Cayce, Kentucky, a town I can’t even locate on my Rand McNally road map. Evidently, it was directly across the rolling junction of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers from Cairo, Illinois, the most important port town for the transportation of Union troops during the Civil War; one of only four gateways between the northern railways and the Deep Southern slave states. Its strategic location, according to one account, made Cairo “like a loaded pistol aimed down the Mississippi at the throat of the lower Confederacy.” More than twenty years after the end of the war, the young Jones sat entranced on the banks of the wide river watching the comings and goings of the Illinois Central locomotives as they loaded and unloaded the flat white ferryboats heading down to New Orleans. Their long feathery plumes of steam seemed to hang forever above the dark water, beckoning him toward an irresistible destiny. Soon, he became a fireman on the Illinois Central, stoking the raging stoves of the engines as they carried huge crowds up to Chicago for the World’s Columbian Exposition at Jackson Park. Before long the kid had picked up the moniker “Casey” from his hometown in Kentucky and his frame had grown as tough as the cordwood he
fed the voracious boilers. In February of 1890, while not quite twenty-six years of age, Casey Jones was promoted to engineer and became famed for being able to play a fancy tune on the locomotive’s six-tone calliope whistle. His favorite was the Stephen Foster classic, “My Old Kentucky Home.” Early in January of 1900, Casey was again promoted to the Memphis-Canton run, aboard the fastest passenger train ever built:
The Cannonball Express
. Shortly before midnight on April 29, 1900, Jones and his trusty fireman, Sim Webb, were asked to take the southbound
Cannonball
out of Memphis, even though they had just finished a regular northbound run into the city, and were dog tired. When Casey pulled out of the Memphis station for the 188-mile run back south to Canton, Mississippi, the six-car passenger train was already ninety-five minutes late. Jones was not a man to be tardy and he urged Sim Webb to feed the dragon in earnest. As they rocketed through the night, down through the deep hardwood forests of Mississippi, the
Cannonball
soon devoured the lost time. Just outside Vaughan, a tiny outpost fourteen miles north of Canton, a strange combination of fates was awaiting them: the wide-open throttle of Casey’s engine, a broken air hose on a freight train stalled on the track up ahead, and the total absence of block signals on the southern line. As Casey went to the brake, he yelled at Sim Webb to jump clear. The screaming flanged steel wheels showered sparks through the dark woods. Casey stuck to his post. Sim Webb jumped to safety. No other crew member or passenger sustained more than a minor injury. But Casey was gone.