The Trinity Game (9 page)

I
n his dream, Trinity lay on his back, lengthwise in the middle of the railway tracks just riverside of Tchoupitoulas, while a freight train thundered over him, inches from his face. The sound was earsplitting and the turbulence threatened to jostle his body against the wheels. His heart pounded against his ribs, and he forced himself to breathe. Then there was another sound, like an elephant groaning, and he turned his head to the right, looking through the blur of rushing wheels toward the mighty Mississippi. A wave rolled down the length of the river, cresting the banks. Then another, and another, and with each wave the river swelled over the embankment, and now water flowed steadily into the basin of the rail yards, toward the track where Trinity lay. It seemed the train would never end. He guessed that maybe twenty cars had passed over him, but he couldn’t raise his head to look down and see how many more cars were still to come. The water was flowing fast now, splashing against his side. If the train didn’t end soon, Trinity would surely drown.

And in a flash, he knew. The train would not end in time, and he would drown. And he knew why. Trinity knew this was God’s punishment for his unbelief.

He woke from his nightmare in the silence that followed the storm and realized it was the silence that woke him. The storm had
passed. He shook off the dream’s residue, grabbed the flashlight, and staggered to the bathroom, his head pounding. There was a box of BC headache powders in the cabinet, and Trinity fumbled a couple out of the box and poured the bitter powder onto his tongue. He spun the faucet and stuck his mouth under the tap. Nothing.

Then he remembered.
Right, of course. There wouldn’t be.
He reached for the jug he’d placed next to the sink and guzzled warm spring water.

The house was like a sauna. Out in the hallway, he aimed the flashlight down the stairs, expecting to see a little water. He saw a lot. The entrance hall was waist-deep and rising. He watched as a chair floated by the staircase.
Shit.
He moved back to the bedroom, opened the hurricane shutters, and stuck his head outside.

The sky was a solid sheet of blue, the sun white-hot on his face. The air was thick and heavy and smelled of salt and mud. Aside from the soft murmur of moving water, there was no sound. No barking dogs, no chirping birds, no human voices, and no machinery of human civilization. Nothing. Most of the trees on the street were down, and those that stood were stripped of their leaves, naked limbs hanging down like broken arms. There were no power lines, and the poles stood at odd angles, like drunken sentries guarding the abandoned neighborhood. The entire street was a lake, and the muddy water flowed so quickly he thought he could see the level rising as he watched.

So much water.

Trinity craned his head to the left. The water was about chest-high against the doors of his garage. Behind the doors, his tricked-out Cadillacs would be underwater, ruined.

He turned away from the window, switched on the shortwave radio. The radio told him that the worst had indeed happened.
The Seventeenth Street Canal levee had given way, and Lake Pontchartrain was now fulfilling its destiny, annexing Lakeview and flooding on into Mid-City, Carrollton, Gentilly, City Park…

Fifty-two other levees were breached, over 80 percent of the city now flooded or flooding.

So much water. And it kept on coming.

A few hours later, Trinity’s entrance hall was completely submerged, the water halfway up the staircase. Outside was still silence, occasionally punctuated by the whirring blades of a Coast Guard helicopter and the patter of distant gunfire. A dead German shepherd floated down the street. A few minutes later, a ten-foot gator swam by.

“OK, joke’s over,” Trinity said aloud. “This shit ain’t funny no more.” He’d planned on camping out for a few days, was well provisioned, but now he just wanted the hell out. He could come back later.

Trinity set up on the balcony off the front guest room, and the next time he heard a helicopter nearby, he started shooting flares into the air.

No luck.

The pistol fire continued in the distance, more frequently now, and the radio said New Orleans had slipped into a state of anarchy. The radio said tens of thousands were stranded on rooftops, and no one was picking them up. Where the hell was the government?

It was a long night.

The next day passed like the first. Trinity ate canned food and drank warm bottled water and fired a flare whenever a helicopter came close. Then, as the sun settled on the horizon, another helicopter came near, and this time they spotted the flare, lowered a line, and raised him into the sky.

Below him, the city—
his
city—was drowning and burning at the same time. Trinity counted the buildings ablaze above the muddy water, until he couldn’t stand it anymore and had to close his eyes.

A young man in a Coast Guard uniform got Trinity strapped into the copter, and the side door slid shut, cutting off the din of the blades. He gave a thumbs-up to the pilot, and the bird veered west. The young man took a long look out the side window and yelled to the pilot, “Incredible, isn’t it?”

The pilot yelled back, “Incredible don’t come close. It’s fuckin’
biblical
, man.”

The helicopter flew low over Trinity’s ruined city, but he kept his eyes shut until they put down at Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport, in the suburb of Jefferson Parish, where a triage center had been established. Trinity was quickly examined by a medic and put on a refugee bus to Baton Rouge, where he sat next to a very old black woman who’d lost her wig and apologized profusely for her bald head.

“Not a thing,” Trinity said as the bus rocked into gear. “Hell, if ’Fess were still alive, he’d be signing songs about you.” He laughed with good nature and held his hand out to her. “Tim Trinity.”

The old woman gasped. “Oh, lordy, you’re Reverend Tim!”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She took his hand. “Thought you looked familiar, but I gots me some bad cataracts, can’t see for shit no more.” She smiled at him, lips pulled back from dark gums. She’d lost her dentures in the storm too. “I’m Miss Carpenter. You call me Emogene.”

“Good to know you, Miss Emogene.”

Miss Emogene looked out the window at the dark road ahead. “You got kin in Baton Rouge? I’m blessed with a daughter, lives up this way.”

“No, ma’am. But I’m not staying long, couple days maybe. Soon as they let me, I’ll be back to doing the Lord’s work. Got me a soup kitchen in the Lower Nine.”

The old woman’s face grew haunted, and her smoky eyes filled Trinity with great terror. “I just came from there. I mean to tell you, you ain’t going back there.”

“Sure I am.”

“Boy, you don’t understand. There
ain’t
no Lower Nine no more. It’s…
gone.”

Miss Emogene retreated into her sadness and they rode on in silence. Trinity looked around and now saw that he was the only white person on the bus. A middle-aged man across the aisle turned on an old transistor radio, and the bus went quiet as all strained to hear the latest.

It was bad news on top of bad news. The old woman was right—the Ninth Ward had been wiped off the map, and the list of devastated neighborhoods included most of the lower-income parts of town.

It was at that moment Trinity realized he was finished as a prosperity preacher in New Orleans. His income base had been cut off at the knees. The market had collapsed. They say there’s no man so poor he can’t find a few dollars to spend on whiskey and salvation, but this was something else entirely. This was about survival.

The Lower Nine was gone, but now the whole city needed a soup kitchen. Sure, Trinity could go back in a few days and look like a hero on CNN, but what would it gain him? There’d be no income from the locals, probably for years. And the infrastructure was decimated. How long before he could get his show back on the air to draw money from the rest of the country?

A long time, if he stayed.

By the time they reached Baton Rouge, Trinity had made the decision to start over in Atlanta. He had plenty of money in the bank, could be up and running in a month or two. And he’d always flattered himself he could compete with the big boys in the big city. This was his chance to prove it.

In Atlanta, Trinity bought a large warehouse in the impoverished Vine City neighborhood. Within a month it was decorated with a stage pulpit and audience seating, outfitted with cameras and lighting and a video control room. He was back in business. In the second month, he built his flock, and by the end of the third month, he was back on the air. His new church was an instant hit, and the money poured in like never before.

But he hadn’t counted on the voices.

When they started, he put it down to stress, and an Atlanta doctor prescribed Valium. When that didn’t work, the doctor tried him on Ativan, then Xanax, then Serax. When none of the anti-anxiety drugs worked, he moved on to anti-depressants: Prozac, Zoloft, Effexor. They didn’t work either.

After over a year of pharmaceutical futility, Trinity resigned himself to living with the voices. But then the voices strengthened, and soon they brought the tongues. Tongues that came upon him like epileptic fits, completely beyond his control. The fits often came during his sermons, and they were good theater, but they also came upon him when he wasn’t doing his act. In the shower or driving his car, seemingly at random. They often woke him in the night, and he became exhausted. He knew he couldn’t keep going this way much longer. Something had to give.

Then one night, Trinity sat in front of the television, flipping channels, afraid to fall asleep. He stopped on a documentary about addiction, and he heard a cocaine addict say that coke silenced the voices in his head.

Trinity had never wanted anything to do with illegal drugs, had never even smoked grass, but he’d never in his life felt this desperate. He made his first drug buy the very next morning. And that night, when his head started pounding and the voices came upon him, he snorted his first line.

The voices disappeared.

D
aniel stood in the shadows of Tim Trinity’s backyard, snapping photos through the window of his uncle’s den. Snapping photos of his uncle taking cocaine. He lowered the camera slowly, thinking:
What the hell did you expect?

But whatever he’d expected, he sure as hell hadn’t expected this.

Daniel had seen enough, and it was getting late. Time to terminate surveillance. He scaled the fence, dropping down into the wooded ravine that backed onto Trinity’s property. He moved quietly through the brush, listening to the singing of frogs and crickets, the chatter of distant coyotes. Moved to the ravine’s public access way, at the end of the street.

He walked among silent mansions to where he’d parked his rental car, wondering what could’ve gone so wrong in Tim Trinity’s life that he was now snorting coke. He’d always been a drinker, sure, but for Southerners—and especially New Orleanians—alcohol is like mama’s milk.

In all their years together, Daniel had never seen his uncle do anything as flagrantly self-destructive as what he’d just witnessed.

What could’ve gone so wrong?