Buddy (12 page)

23

But being a man ain't easy and I can't do it. I go off to school every day and I do my homework like I'm supposed to. I make sure I don't fuss with Tanya and I'm quiet when Baby Terrell's sleeping. But that's all I can do. No matter what, it seems like I can't get happy. My mind can't help flying back to New Orleans, zooming over that black water and trying to see through the roof of our house. It's been almost two months and there ain't no way that bag of food could last that long.

I can't think about that but it's the only thing on my mind.

Then one day toward the end of October Daddy comes home from work and says he's got some news. We're sitting at the table eating, and he says the mayor made an announcement. The mayor says people can come in and look at their houses now. The water's gone way down, but there ain't no electricity and the water in the pipes is poison. There ain't no gas for heating because the flood filled up the gas pipes. There ain't no stores to buy food. There ain't no schools. There ain't no firemen and the National Guard's doing most of the policing.

“But,” Daddy says, “the mayor says if we want, we can come in the city. We can go to the house and look. We can look, he says, but we've got to leave. Everybody's got to be out of the city by six o'clock.”

“And so?” Mama says.

“And so,” Daddy says, “I'm wondering if anybody in this family wants to go look?”

“There's nothing left,” Mama says. “There's no point in driving all that way just to look at dead trees and a house rotting into the ground.”

Daddy pushes his food around on his plate. Mama makes an airplane fly a couple of green beans into Baby Terrell's mouth.

“I want to go look,” Daddy says. “A man at work said he'd give me a ride on Saturday morning. He said anybody wants to go is welcome.”

Another airplane load of beans is hanging right outside Baby Terrell's mouth but it ain't going in. Mama stops it in midair. “That's foolishness, T Junior,” she says. “We're making a new start here. You're going to let all that rot and ruin drag you down.”

“I grew up in that house,” Daddy says. “I want to see it. At least one more time.”

Mama puts down the plane-load of beans and snatches off Baby Terrell's bib. “Well, I'm not going back,” she says. “I'm not ever going back. I don't have the stomach for it.” She hoists Baby Terrell out of his seat, and he goes rocking off to his pile of toys.

“What about you?” Daddy's looking at Granpa T. “Don't you want to see your house now?”

Granpa T shakes his head. “I'm too tired,” he says.

“It'll be good for you,” Daddy says.

Granpa T shakes his head. “I ain't going.”

Daddy leans over toward Granpa T. “Come on, Daddy. You need to get out of this apartment. Get up on your feet.”

“I ain't going,” Granpa says again. “Comes a time, T Junior, when you got to let go.”

Daddy leans back. He and Granpa T are looking hard at each other. “I hear what you're saying,” Daddy says. “But this ain't that time.”

Then everybody's sitting quiet at the table. After a while, I raise my hand like I'm in school. Daddy looks at me.

“I want to see,” I say. “I'll go.”

Daddy frowns. He knows what I want to see. Then he nods. “Okay. If you were old enough last time, I guess you still are.”

This time we start out when it's already light. This time I ain't surprised at the broke trees and the air don't smell like a Christmas tree lot anymore. This time Daddy's carrying a cooler with a big lunch packed inside and I'm carrying a box of trash bags.

In the city there still ain't no working traffic lights but it don't matter because there ain't hardly any cars. When we get to where there used to be a light, the handful of cars all stop and take turns going.

Daddy and the man are shaking their heads the whole way. “Look at that,” they're saying. “Look at that.”

We pass by a house where one side just fell into the street and all the furniture is still sitting there like in a dollhouse. At one store, there's a front loader parked halfway through the front glass window. It's easy to see there ain't nothing left in the store.

A pack of dogs comes trotting around the corner. I sit up straight and look hard. One of them is black but he's got all four legs.

It's hard to figure out where we are because all the signs are down. Finally we pass the corner where the Tomato Man sits. There ain't nothing there. Just sidewalk and weeds. Weeds as tall as me with white flowers on the top.

All the yards are brown. All the grass and bushes are dead. Brown and gray tree branches are piled up as high as my head on the corner lots where they put them after they pulled them out of the streets.

Somebody's fishing boat is sitting on the neutral ground. I see cars knocked every which way—some up in people's yards, some with wheels sitting on the front stoop, some upside down. One looks like it's driving up a tree. It's just standing there on its back end with its front wheels resting high up on the trunk of a big old oak tree. Every single car used to be covered in water. Their windows are smeared over with white and brown mud like they've been painted with it.

Mud is on all the steps and porches. There's a black line going around every house. Actually, there are a bunch of lines, one above the other. That's where the top of the water was, Daddy says. I'm looking at it way above my head. Way above the top of the truck we're sitting in.

All the houses have spray paint marks on the front. They're all the same: A big
X
.

“What's that mark?” Daddy says.

“The rescuers made it,” the man says. “They painted one on every house they checked.”

We watch the marks go by. We figure out they wrote the date at the top. We figure out they wrote what they found at the bottom. Most houses have a zero at the bottom. We figure that means they didn't find anything. One house says, “Three cats.” Another house says, “One dead in attic.”

I'm thinking,
One what
? Then I remember Mrs. Washington. I stop looking at the
X
s.

The man pulls up at the corner of our street and drops us off. Now Daddy and me are walking exactly where I walked with Buddy.

It was shady then but now there's too much sun. Half the branches are gone and what are left have been stripped of their leaves.

It was noisy then but now it's quiet. There ain't no sound anywhere except our feet crunching on the little twigs all over the sidewalk. There ain't any cars. There ain't any air conditioners. There ain't any ambulances in the distance or trucks backing up. There ain't any squirrels. There ain't even any birds.

We pass by a pile of trash washed up against somebody's fence. Daddy and me both gag at the same time. The smell is like a wall you walk into. It's like rotten cheese and spoiled chicken and horse droppings and dead rats and other things you don't even want to think about, all sitting there together for weeks and weeks in the hot sun.

We cover our faces and run past but it feels like the smell sticks to us.

We're looking up at all our neighbors' houses. They're all the same. That water mark sits just under the roof line of the one-story houses. Some of the houses have holes chopped in the roof. That's where people climbed out of the attic, Daddy says. Sometimes maybe that's where the searchers climbed in.

On the two-story houses, the water mark is about as high as the floor on the second story.

Our house is a two-story, I'm thinking, and I feel my heart start to pound.

That bathroom is on the second floor, I'm thinking, and I feel my heart go even faster.

And then there it is.

All Mama's flowers and bushes are brown and dead. The driveway is covered up with mud. Half the pecan tree crashed through the attic roof. The other half has smashed the shed. My new bicycle is somewhere under there but there ain't no point in trying to fish it out. It's been crushed and soaked in water for weeks. It ain't going nowhere even if I found it.

The front porch is covered in mud and twisted a little sideways off the front wall.

The swing has come off one chain and is dangling halfway over the rail. The other porch chairs are gone. The pots of plants Mama had on the front steps are busted.

And there is that
X
. There is that
X
painted up above the front porch roof where the rescuers had tied up their boat.

I stand on the street and stare at the
X
.

On the top it says, “9/12.”

On the bottom it says, “One dog.”

24

We try to push open the front door. It won't budge. Daddy kicks it as hard as he can. It still won't budge.

“It's swoll up,” he says.

He steps over to the window opening onto the porch. He's got to be careful of the gap between the porch and house. He takes off his T-shirt and wraps it around his hand. He taps on the glass and breaks it just enough to undo the lock. But when he tries to lift the window, it won't budge either. Finally, he just breaks out all the glass. He's careful to get all the pointy pieces out. He drops them in the hole between the house and the porch. Then he crawls in.

“Sweet Jesus,” he says, and I come in after him.

This is the living room. Mama's sofa is upside down on top of the turned-over table. The curtains are pulled off the wall. One set is laying in a heap in the corner. Another set is draped over the TV, which is laying on its back beside the stand it used to be on. The stand is broke to pieces and flat out on the floor. The floor is covered in mud. The rug has floated up and made wrinkles of itself. Underneath the rug, the wood flooring strips are buckled and popping up, and some of them have floated off and got caught in a tangle with the sofa.

Clothes from Granpa T's bedroom are stuck on the floor. A hat is laying upside down by the window. A doll is sitting inside like she's riding in a boat.

The house stinks, and black stuff is growing everywhere. On the cushions and furniture, on the walls and on the ceiling.

When Daddy looks up, he almost laughs. The blades of the ceiling fan are hanging straight down like they melted. They got soaking wet and now they're just drooping down like a dying flower.

I don't even smile when I see it. I'm too busy trying to step over all the stuff. I'm too busy trying to make my way to the stairs.

The stairs ain't safe. When they got wet, they buckled and broke. The rail fell off. We're extra careful climbing up. We press up against the wall where the wallpaper is peeling off in strips. We're in the hall. We can see there was water on the floor. The carpet looks like black bread.

And there's the bathroom. The door is standing wide open. There are scratches all over it. The water in the tub is halfway down and black with scum. Food is scattered everywhere. It smells even worse than the rest of the house with Buddy's business piled up in one corner.

But it don't take even one second to see that Buddy himself ain't in that bathroom no more. Buddy himself is gone.

We're standing there just staring when Daddy sees a piece of paper by the sink. He picks it up.

“It's a note,” he says.

I look too. It's so old, the ink is faded away. All we can see of the phone number is 1-800 and then in the middle, a 3. I ball up the paper in my hand.

“He gone,” I say.

“But he's still alive somewhere,” Daddy says. “Probably. We just don't know where.” He puts his hand on my shoulder. “That's got to be enough.”

It ain't enough. It ain't even close, but I don't say nothing. I just pull out a trash bag and get to work.

We had planned to fill up the trash bags with trash. But there's so much of that, there ain't any point. So we look for stuff we can keep. We fill up the bags with clothes. We get our own pillows. We get some toys from Baby Terrell's crib. Daddy gets some dolls for Tanya even though I say she has plenty already. I grab up her ballerina skirt and those red shoes. They're still laying on the bed from that day when we were packing.

Daddy's shifting around in his closet when he says, “Oh my God,” and I go running in there to see what's wrong.

He's standing there holding a white box. “You know what this is?” he says.

I shake my head.

“It's my mama's wedding dress.”

I look at Daddy. His eyes are all full up with water. “Don't cry, Daddy,” I say, and then he sits down in the middle of the floor and starts heaving like a little girl. I go over and stand next to him. I put my hand on the top of his head. I'm standing there looking out the window and thinking how round his head is and wondering what am I going to do if he can't stop. What am I going to do if he can't never stop.

And then he stops. He rubs the water out of his eyes and shakes his head and says sorry. He stands up real fast and starts putting clothes in a bag like it ain't never happened. And I figure that's best. It don't change nothing so it ain't never happened.

We throw five bags of clothes and toys in the back of the man's truck when he comes by to pick us up. It's almost six o'clock. We have to hurry. We're barreling out of town and I remember I left that note in the bathroom. It's just as well. I can't read it anyway.

We pull up to the apartment in the dark. The man helps Daddy lift the bags out of the truck. We're saying good-bye and thank you, and Mama and Tanya come running out the front door. They're hugging us and kissing us like we're just back from the war or something. Mama's got fried chicken and lots of tea. I realize I'm about to starve.

We carry the bags in and we're all talking. I'm telling about Buddy and the fan, and Daddy's saying about the wedding dress but not the part where he cried. Tanya is pulling her clothes out of the bag and hugging all those dolls. Granpa T comes wandering in like he's been taking a nap even though it's night. He sits on the sofa and listens to all the jabber. After a while he tilts back his head and goes to his place.

Daddy's telling about how the water filled up the whole downstairs. He's telling Mama about how the kitchen cabinets fell off the walls and the sofa is sitting on top of the table and the refrigerator floated into Granpa T's bedroom.

“Sorry, Daddy,” he says to Granpa T. “We couldn't save anything out of your room. Everything downstairs is ruined.”

Granpa T don't even move when Daddy says that. He just stays in that place he likes to go.

Daddy looks at Mama. Mama looks at Daddy. Daddy steps over to Granpa T. He touches his shoulder. “Daddy?” he says. “Daddy?”

Granpa T don't move.

I'm watching him while Tanya shakes a toy at Baby Terrell. I'm watching him and then I know Granpa T ain't never going to move again. He's gone to his secret place, and he ain't never coming back.