Chapter 11

AFTER SEVEN DAYS I was rotated back to New Iberia. I had almost forgotten Natalia Ramos, the companion of Father Jude LeBlanc. In fact, I had deliberately pushed her name out of my mind. I wanted no more of New Orleans and other people’s grief. I just wanted to be back on Bayou Teche with my family and Tripod, our raccoon, and our unneutered warrior cat, Snuggs. I wanted to wake in the morning to the smell of coffee and moldy pecan husks in the yard and camellia bushes dripping with dew and the fecund odor of fish spawning in the bayou. I wanted to wake to the great gold-green, sun-spangled promise of the South Louisiana in which I had grown up. I didn’t want to be part of the history taking place in our state.

“Phone’s ringing, Dave,” Alafair said from the kitchen.

“Would you answer it, please?”

Through the doorway I could see her frying eggs and ham slices in a heavy iron skillet, lifting it by its handle without a hot pad, her back to me. It was hard to believe she was the same little El Salvadoran Indian girl I had pulled from a submerged plane out on the salt many years ago. She clanged the skillet on the stove and picked up the phone, resting her rump against the drain board, giving me a look.

“Is Dave Robicheaux here? Wait a minute. I’ll check,” she said. She lowered the receiver, the mouthpiece uncovered. “Dave, are you here? If you are, a lady would like to speak to you.”

That’s what you get when your kid goes to Reed College and joins kickboxing clubs.

I took the receiver from her hand. “Hello?” I said.

“This is Natalia Ramos, Mr. Robicheaux. I’m here at the shelter, the one you told me to go to. Have you found out where Jude went? I can’t get no information from anybody at the shelter. I thought maybe you had lists of people who was picked up by the Coast Guard.”

“No, ma’am, I’m afraid I don’t.”

“Jude’s in pain all the time from his cancer. He went down to the Lower Nine to give his people communion. He’d always been scared to give people communion at Mass. ”

“I’m sorry, Ms. Ramos, but you’re not making sense.”

“His hands tremble all the time. He thinks he’ll drop the chalice. He’d always let another priest give out Communion at Mass. But this time he was gonna say Mass and give people Communion.”

In the background I could hear voices echoing in a large area, perhaps inside a gymnasium or a National Guard armory. Alafair was setting my breakfast on the kitchen table, placing the plate and knife and fork and coffee cup and saucer carefully on the surface so as not to make any noise. Her hair was long and black on her shoulders, her figure lovely inside her jeans and pink blouse.

I didn’t know what to say to Natalia Ramos. “Where are you?” I asked.

“At the high school in Franklin.”

“I’ll be there in forty-five minutes.”

“Where’s Chula at?” she asked.

“Your brother?”

“Yeah, where’d you put him at?”

“In the Iberia Parish Prison, along with his fall partner.”

I thought her next statement would be an abrasive one. But I was wrong.

“Maybe he can get some help there. Jail is the only place Chula ever did all right. I’ll be waiting for you, Mr. Robicheaux.”

I placed the telephone receiver back in the cradle, already regretting that I had taken the call.

“Who was that?” Alafair said.

“A Central American prostitute and junkie who was shacked up with a Catholic priest.”

I sat down and began eating. I could feel Alafair behind me, like a shadow breaking against the light. She rested her hand on my shoulder. “Dave, you have the best heart of any man I’ve ever known,” she said.

I could feel the blood tingle in the back of my neck.

THE HIGH SCHOOL gymnasium in Franklin, down the bayou in St. Mary Parish, was lined with row upon row of army-surplus cots. Children were running everywhere, inside and outside, sailing Frisbees that a local merchant had brought from his store. I found Natalia washing clothes by hand in the lee of the building, her arms deep inside an aluminum tub, the tails of her denim shirt tied under her breasts. I asked her to tell me again of her last moments with Jude LeBlanc.

“He brought the boat to the church roof. He was up there chopping a hole with an ax to get everybody out. Then I heard a fight up there. I didn’t see him again.”

It was warm in the shade, but her face looked cool and dry, her ribs etched against her dusky skin. She wore sandals and baggy men’s khakis and looked like a Third World countrywoman who was washing the clothes of children who were not her own. She did not look like a prostitute or a junkie.

“Did you bring any dope into the shelter?” I said.

“You drove here to ask me that?”

“You were holding when you got busted. I got you off the wrist chain and sent you here. That makes you my responsibility. So that’s why I’m asking you if you brought any dope into the shelter.”

“I been trying to get clean. There’s some people in the gym putting together a Narcotics Anonymous group. I’m gonna start going to meetings again.”

She had managed to answer my question without answering my question. “Ms. Ramos, if I find out you are using or distributing narcotics in this shelter, I’m going to get you kicked out or put in jail.”

She squeezed out a pair of children’s blue jeans and laid them on the side of the tub. “I got to go back to New Orleans.”

“I think that’s a mistake.”

“I keep seeing Jude drowning there in the dark, without no one to help him.”

“Jude is a stand-up guy. My advice is that you don’t treat him as less.”

“He used to say a special reconciliation Mass on Saturday afternoon for all the whores and junkies and street people. He gave everybody absolution, all at one time, no matter what they done. Somebody attacked him to get his boat. I think they killed him. I got to find out. I just can’t live without knowing what happened to him.”

“Ms. Ramos, tens of thousands of people are missing right now. FEMA is trying to-”

“How come nobody came?”

“Pardon?”

“People were drowning all over the neighborhood and nobody came. A big, fat black woman in a purple dress was standing on top of a car, waving at the sky. Her dress was floating out in the water. She was on the car a half hour, waving, while the water kept rising. I saw her fall off the car. It was over her head.”

I didn’t want to hear more stories about Katrina. The images I had seen during the seven-day period immediately after the storm would never leave me. Nor could I afford the anger they engendered in me. Nor did I wish to deal with the latent racism in our culture that was already beginning to rear its head. According to the Washington Post, a state legislator in Baton Rouge had just told a group of lobbyists in Baton Rouge, “We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn’t do it, but God did.”

How do you explain a statement like that to people who are victims of the worst natural disaster in American history? The answer is you don’t. And you don’t try to fix a broken world and you don’t try to put Band-Aids on broken people, I told myself.

“I believe Jude would want you to remain at the shelter. You can do a lot of good here. I promise I’ll do my best to find out what happened to him,” I said.

“I think he talked about you,” she said.

“Excuse me?”

“Jude said he used to deliver the newspaper to a policeman who owned a bait shop. He said the policeman was a drunk but he was a good man who tried to help people who didn’t have no power. Isn’t that you he was talking about?”

She knew how to set the hook.

AFTER LUNCH I drove to the Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Department and went upstairs to my office. The contrast between the normalcy of my job in Iberia Parish and the seven days I had just spent in New Orleans was like the difference between the bloom and confidence of youth and the mental condition of a man who has been stricken arbitrarily by a fatal illness. The building’s interior was spotless and full of sunshine. Cool air flowed steadily from the wall vents. One of the secretaries had placed flowers on the windowsills. A group of deputies in crisp uniforms and polished gunbelts were drinking coffee and eating doughnuts on the reception counter in front. From my second-story office window I could look out on a canopy of palm and live oak trees that cover a working-class neighborhood, and behind the cathedral I could see a cemetery of whitewashed brick crypts where Confederate dead remind us that Shiloh is not a historical abstraction.