Soul Survivor (23 page)

“No,” said Bruce slowly, “there is still the matter of the Corsair. And the fact that we cannot find an eyewitness.”

“There can be no ironclad proof,” she argued. “Not after all this time. You’re just being pigheaded.”

Bruce didn’t disagree. He knew that he was being pigheaded. But that was the trait of a good researcher—keep after something
until it is nailed down tight. Otherwise…

In the fall of 2002, the Gulf Coast was struck by a number of quick storms. And while Bruce was wrestling with the implications
of the logs and diaries and halting memories of
Natoma Bay
survivors—as well as Andrea’s indifference to the factual details that his stringent requirements for irrefutable proof demanded
—
another storm approached Lafayette, Louisiana: Hurricane Lili.

On September 30, 2002, the Emergency Operations Center at the Lafayette Office of Emergency Preparedness announced that a
hurricane storm would strike the Louisiana-Texas coastline no later than Thursday, October 3. The governor ordered mobile
homes and low-lying areas evacuated.

Bruce wasn’t worried. Lafayette was the highest ground in the parish. Besides, the hurricane was supposed to hit Florida first,
not Louisiana. It would dissipate by the time it ever got here.

All this was exciting for James, who had a teacher named Lily and wanted to know why they named a hurricane after her. “You
better not get that teacher mad,” said Andrea.

While she was whizzing back and forth, trying to nail down her little fort against the oncoming winds and possible flood,
Bruce was busy packing.

She asked where he was going.

He reminded her that he had an important business appointment in Houston on October 3. He would leave early on the second,
spend a night in Houston so that he would be fresh for the interview, then come right home afterward. No big deal.

Andrea was at her wits’ end.

“What?”

“Well, you wanted me to make appointments, so I made an appointment. You wanted me to get a job interview, so I landed a job
interview. That’s what you wanted, isn’t it?”

“Now?”

“I’m doing what you told me to do.”

That was the thing about Bruce. Once you pointed him in a certain direction and told him to charge, he was off to the sound
of the guns.

In the four months since his job at OSCA ended, he had arranged this one interview—she had to let him go. The house might
be in danger, but her fiscal universe depended on his landing a solid, nine-to-five everyday job, not starting a consulting
firm.

The house was strong, Bruce insisted. James seemed to be excited by the prospect of getting blown away. Well, Bruce said,
he wouldn’t be gone that long.

And so with the storm clouds still only a rumor, he drove to Houston. And at nine a.m. on Thursday, October 3, he met with
his prospective employer. The meeting went so well that they stayed together for lunch. Then he was ready to drive back to
Lafayette.

Meanwhile, Andrea was desperately trying to take precautions. She got in line at the municipal loading dock, where they were
distributing sandbags. But demand was so high, they were being rationed. After four hours of waiting, word came down the line
that each applicant would be limited to one sandbag. “What am I gonna do with one friggin’ bag of sand!” she yelled out her
car window. “Hold on to it so I won’t blow away?”

Holding on to her anger, she drove to Lowe’s and began the sandbag search all over. The only thing she could find was high-grade
sand—the expensive kind in which you could search for diamonds. And the plywood she had to buy was the same quality used to
build furniture. She also picked up about five rolls of masking tape. Andrea loaded James and the supplies into her Saturn
and raced back to the house on West St. Mary Boulevard. On the way, she stopped for Happy Meals at McDonald’s—she had no idea
when they would eat again.

When she got home, she started cross-hatching the windows with masking tape to prevent the glass from splintering in the high
winds. The television now was no help. Lili was getting worse and coming closer—she had turned into a category three hurricane.
The county opened the Cajun Dome and designated it an emergency shelter. Andrea tried to call Bruce, but he had turned his
cell phone off. She went into Lamaze breathing. Maybe she wasn’t going into labor, but the extra oxygen helped.

When Bruce called at two p.m. after his business lunch, saying that he was starting to drive back and should make it home
by, oh, say, five, Andrea was a wreck.

“You better hurry. There’s no food—the markets have been picked clean. Everyone is clearing out.”

There was panic in her voice, and Bruce, sensing that he had perhaps underestimated the crisis, quickly headed east on Interstate
10. It was an easy but spooky drive. All the traffic was going the other way. He passed through Beaumont—a ghost town. After
Beaumont, there was not one single car heading in his direction. And no cops. And so he mashed down on the accelerator, and
his 850 turbo-charged Volvo soared beyond all the speed limits.

Back at home, Andrea summoned her inner soldier, got James back in the Saturn, and headed out again. She filled the car with
gas, filled the propane tank, got three hundred dollars from an ATM, loaded up on candles and batteries, took a

shower and bathed James (you had to be clean for a hurricane—something she didn’t even know she knew), then cleaned the tub
and filled it with water.

Still no word from Bruce. Lili had now been bumped up to category four. Andrea started collecting family photos and home videos.

And then Bruce arrived. Together, he and Andrea nailed the plywood over the big window in the sunroom and over the windows
on the south side of the house—the side that would bear the brunt of the storm. Andrea laid down plastic sheeting and held
it in place with what she regarded as diamond-encrusted sandbags to stop any water from flooding in. James was squealing with
delight, thinking that he had found another game; this one was called Monster Lili.

Meanwhile, the bulletins were growing more and more alarming. Andrea thought they should leave and drive to Dallas, but Bruce
didn’t want to. He was determined to stand his ground and defend his home.

“If something breaks, I can fix it, minimize the damage,” he argued. “Besides, we can always leave; if it gets bad enough,
we’ll just pile into the car and go.”

As the night went on, the predictions got worse and Andrea got more nervous. It was after midnight when she declared, “James
and I are leaving—with or without you.” Bruce finally saw that it was time to bail. They told James that he was going to see
his cousins, Hunter and K. K., on a mini vacation, and, as usual, he took it in good spirits. James was excited, up for anything.

“Take a good look at the house,” Bruce said. “It might not be here when we get back.”

Andrea’s heart leaped into her throat. “Do you really think we could lose the house?” she asked pitifully. She couldn’t bear
the thought of losing this house—this was her final move, her last stand.

“No, I don’t think we’ll lose the house, but it will surely get damaged. Maybe we’ll lose the roof.”

In an odd way, that seemed to calm her.

Suddenly, he stopped the car before they had even backed out of the driveway. He had forgotten something. He ran into the
house and came back carrying all of his
Natoma Bay
research.

It was after one a.m. when they pulled out. They drove to Dallas, racing the clouds and wind.

All the motels and rest stops along Interstate 49 had become refugee centers. Great mobs of eighteen-wheelers were parked
off the highway, forming circles like pioneer settlers getting ready to defend a wagon train against the storm.

They pulled into Jen and Greg’s at dawn. The first thing they did was turn on the TV and watch Lafayette being torn up by
eighty-five-mile-an-hour winds. The power lines were down, and the rain whipped fiercely through the downtown center. Bruce
tried the home phone, but it was dead. He did manage to get a neighbor, who did a drive-by and reported that a lot of branches
were down but the house looked intact.

The Leiningers got home a week later, and it took them four days to clean up the mess. And then something happened. It was
another of those moments that left Bruce and Andrea agape.

It was during the cleanup. While Bruce and James were raking the leaves and gathering the fallen branches from the yard, Bruce
had a sudden impulse to hug his son. He picked him up and kissed him and said how happy he was to have him as a son.

James replied, in a tone that seemed eerie to Bruce, “That’s why I picked you; I knew you would be a good daddy.”

Bruce did not know what he had heard. “What did you say?”

“When I found you and Mommy, I knew you would be good to me.”

This was not the voice of a child, although it came out of the mouth of a four-year-old.

“Where did you find us?” asked Bruce.

“Hawaii,” James replied.

Bruce said that James was wrong. They had gone to Hawaii just that summer, when they were all together.

“It was not when we all went to Hawaii. It was just Mommy and you.”

Although profoundly shaken, Bruce managed to ask where he had found them. And James said, “I found you at the big pink hotel.”

Bruce remained dumbfounded as James added, “I found you on the beach. You were eating dinner at night.”

In 1997, Bruce and Andrea had gone to Hawaii to celebrate their fifth wedding anniversary. They had stayed at the Royal Hawaiian,
the landmark pink hotel on Waikiki Beach, and on their final night, they had a moonlight dinner on the beach. It was five
weeks before Andrea got pregnant. And James had described it perfectly.

This was not something that either parent had ever discussed
—
certainly not in detail. Not the pink hotel or the dinner on the beach or the fact that Andrea got pregnant five weeks later.

He had no idea what to make of it. He was confused and frightened. Bruce ran into the house and told Andrea, but she was already
convinced that James possessed knowledge that no one could readily account for. It was just one more thing.

Meanwhile, Bruce had hooked up with a local steel company for a consulting contract—a financial salvation, just in time. Their
reserves were rapidly depleting; the family morale was low, but things were looking up.

At about the same time, John DeWitt sent nine rolls of microfilm containing records from
Natoma Bay.
Bruce spent the next three weeks at the University of Louisiana library, copying five thousand pages of these.

He found something new every day. In one microfilm, there was a diagram that pinpointed the spot where James Huston’s plane
crashed. Another contained some details about the crash. It also listed the other pilots who took part in the attack: Stewart
Gingrich, Robert Greenwalt, Daryl Johnstone, Jack Larsen, William Mathson, Robert Mount, and Mac Roebuck.

And he also found a vital new clue. The eight Avenger Torpedo Bombers that took part in the attack—the ones referred to by
Jack Larsen—had come off another ship, USS
Sargent Bay
(CVE-83). The Avenger was equipped with an advanced communications system so the strike leader could control the attack from
the air. The eyewitness account in the VC-81 war diary—the details about the plane being hit in the front and bursting into
flames and crashing into the ocean on retiring—had to come directly from the VC-83 strike leader. It was the only thing that
made sense. Here was his eyewitness!

Now all he had to do was to find a reunion of VC-83—locate the crew members of the Avenger bombers that followed the fighter
planes in VC-81 on March 3, 1945. Surely there would then be more eyewitnesses, more evidence to be found.

Bruce was in pigheaded heaven.

J
AMES’S ATTACHMENT to his GI Joe action figures did not go unnoticed in the family. He played with the prosaically named Billie
and Leon every day; they took baths together, and James even slept with them.