by Nathan Crowder
I met him there at Lydia’s Café in this out-of-the-way stretch of nowhere in Mississippi. We were south of Monticello along Fe Sellers Highway, or the 27 as my AAA map called it. Wasn’t much there but the restaurant, a gas station, and a handful of shacks, but when my old sedan started losing power steering fluid, I realized my options were limited. Finding yourself stuck in a no-escape rural “situation,” as my pop used to call it, can be real hit or miss in the Old South. There were pockets of resentment and out-and-out racism there which had festered, un-lanced for over a hundred years. A person never could tell when he was going to barrel into one. As an educated black man from Chicago, this could be dangerous, unfamiliar territory. Sure, I had been to New Orleans, but that was a whole other world. The Big Easy was over a hundred miles and a few generations away by highway.
The presence of a few out-of-state plates in the parking lot of Lydia’s gave me a glimmer of hope which was fanned into full-on relief when I saw two jovial old black men sitting at the counter near the register. I made my way to the counter where I began looking over a menu of artery-clogging comfort foods and a few token healthy options. I selected a grilled chicken sandwich, fries, and Dr. Pepper, then sat back to wait for my car to be fixed.
A ghost of a man, eyes lined by the hollows of sleeplessness, caught my attention from a few seats down the counter. He was in his forties, if I were to guess, thin, with a shade of mocha to his tone that bespoke his heritage as a mutt. “You headin’ to Nawlins?” he said to me over the lip of his coffee cup. His dialect identified him immediately as a native to the Big Easy, but I hadn’t recalled seeing any Louisiana plates in the lot.
I shook my head, “Nah, man, I’m just going as far as Tylertown. You need a ride?”
“Hell, I got a car. I didn’t ask if you could give me a ride, I just asked where you was goin’.” He turned back to his plate, his fork pushing greens around with disinterest. “You got family or somethin’ in Tylertown?”
“A client. I have a guy who wants to build an office and fulfillment center there and I have to go take a look at the site.”
My new friend squinted over at me with curiosity. “You an architect?”
I nodded and took a sip of my Pepper. “Yeah.” I saw him smile and half-pointed to him with the soda in my hand. “What about you? Are you a nurse?”
The smile vanished, and the stranger looked furtive, his eyes flickering out the front window of the café to the parking lot. “What makes you think I’m a nurse,” he laughed nervously.
“I’m sorry…” I started. “I saw you wore your watch with the face on the inside of your wrist. It’s a nurse thing. My ma used to wear hers that way, even after she retired.”
He looked self consciously down at his wrist, seeing the simple black-banded watch. He grew silent, withdrawn, and I figured our conversation was over. And then he picked up his plate and coffee and moved over to the stool next to mine. “I used t’ be a nurse. Then I left Nawlins and I ain’t done it since. I’m a dog groomer now, but old habits, you know.”
“Yeah, old habits.” I muttered. For reasons I couldn’t explain, I found his sudden closeness disturbing. And the talk of New Orleans was starting to wear on me as well. It had been years since my last visit, but it still hadn’t been enough time. Not nearly enough.
The stranger’s voice grew quiet, now that he didn’t have to speak over the three empty stools that had once separated us. “I jus’…I don’t have the stomach fo’ it no mo’. No mo’.”
Considering that I couldn’t even handle visiting hospitals, I couldn’t imagine working in one, and I told him so. His eyes grew wide in agreement.
“Oh yea, boy, ain’t no way I could work in a hospital, with the ‘mergency room and all dat.” He shook his head to drive home his distaste for the prospect. “Nah, I used t’ work in a hospice in the 9th. Jus’ a bunch of people wastin’ away. It was sad an all, but not violent. I can’t deal wit’ violence.”
“Fair enough.” I made my tone light, trying to brighten the mood of the conversation. “So you’re heading back to New Orleans now?”
It felt like the warmth of the café sank into my lunchtime companion. He became like a black hole of mood and internal angst, eyes laser-focused on his greens and beans. Finally he looked up at me after a long, brooding silence. “I been goin’ back to Nawlins fo’ two years, man. And I ain’t got back yet.”
I drained my Dr. Pepper and signaled the waitress for a refill, avoiding eye contact with the stranger seated at my right elbow. Likewise, he turned back to his meal, the eerie proclamation now out in the open between us like a re-opened grave. I knew what he meant. There must have been hundreds like us, maybe thousands — people for whom Katrina had been not just a natural disaster, but a life-changing experience we would never completely leave behind. The walking wounded, we orbited the drain of that experience, stubbornly refusing to go down into the darkness, knowing that sooner or later we all would.
“I had a friend…” I started, and then I caught and corrected myself. No reason to candy-coat history for this stranger, not when it was clear that he had his own story. “I had a coworker…I was sleeping with her, but I don’t know if I ever really liked her…it was just…it was convenient, you know?”
He didn’t look up from his meal, but nodded to let me know he was listening.
I took a deep breath then continued. “We were in New Orleans for work and things got heated. We had a fight, and I ended up bailing on the meetings we had set up for later in the week. She stayed. It was such a big account that one of us had to stay. And if she didn’t have to share credit with me on the project, it could be a big step for her career. Then Katrina hit, and I was safe up in St. Louis and she wasn’t.”
“She ever make it out?” he asked, his tone presupposing the answer.
My chest felt tight, and I realized too late that I had been trying to fight back tears and lost. “Nah, man. She never made it out. Never found the body, either. Just gone. Gone. And at first?” My hand clenched into a fist at my side. “At first, I was glad. I was so mad at her for so much stuff, so much stupid stuff, that I convinced myself that she deserved it.”
“That ain’t cool, man.” He said, but there was no condemnation in his tone. “What was her name?”
“Karen. Karen Wexler. And no, that wasn’t cool at all. And I don’t feel that way now. Just at first, for a few horrible days.”
He finished off the last of his beans, sopping up the gravy with the scraps of cornbread on his plate. He looked calmer now, and his voice took on the tone of confession. “I worked in a hospice in the 9th. I tol’ you that, right?”
“So you said.”
He nodded. “When the levee broke, I got stuck as the only staff with three people in my care. My boss, he was ‘posed to go get a van to help me get people out, ‘cept he never came back. He got to high ground, an he stayed there — left me all alone with three people, hell, not one of them in any shape to move by their own selves. The levee broke, and I piled up sandbags as high as I could, and the waters just kept comin’ and comin’. I moved ‘em one by one up to the second floor. And the water still kept comin’.”
I felt a chill at the inevitability of his story. I had read the news stories. Hell, we had all read the news stories. People put in extreme positions which required extreme actions. And I read these stories wondering, if it had been me, could I have done any better? I didn’t have the answer. Or, more accurately, I had the answer, but didn’t like it and wanted a recount. I opened my mouth to say something, but words failed me. I understood the lost look in his eyes better than before.
“Gots to be it was up to the bed, up to the mattress. And it was foul water, too, you know? Stuff in it — all kinds of stuff. And they was cold and wet and cryin’ out all the time, afraid of what was gonna happen. And they knew what was comin’. Hell, man, we all knew what was comin’.”
“You had to do what was right.” My voice choked on the way out of my throat.
“Oh, I knew what was right. They begged me to do it, too, don’t think they didn’t. ‘Cept…” he stood and dropped a twenty on the counter to pay what couldn’t have been more than a ten dollar tab.
“Except?”
“’Cept I can’t do violence. I tol’ you that.” He smiled sadly at me. “So I left ‘em there. I left ‘em to drown and I ain’t never gone back. Until now.”
I looked at him in a bright light of the hot Mississippi afternoon, and saw that he was a different kind of damned than I had originally suspected. He was haunted, I realized, not by what he had done, but instead by what he had failed to do. And that’s the kind of thing that it takes a lifetime to shake, however long that lifetime might turn out to be. “Why go back now?”
“’Cause I’m tired, man. I’m so tired. And maybe then they’ll let me rest.”
Without another word, he turned towards the door. Moments later, I saw him fold himself behind the wheel of an avocado green station wagon with Indiana plates. As he pulled out of the lot, the reflection on the windows of his car flashed in the sun, and for a second, just a second, I thought I saw three other people in the car with him. Hollow-eyed and hollow cheeked, thin hair floated about their heads like wet halos. When I blinked in disbelief, they were gone, and the green wagon turned right, heading down Highway 27 to the south under the mid-day sun.
I finished the rest of my meal in chill, claustrophobic silence. When I went back over to the garage behind the gas station, I was surprised to find my car already fixed. It was a quick patch, but it was the best they could do without sending out for a new hose. Chet, if the patch on his overalls spoke true, assured me that it would get me to Tylertown easily, but that I might want to get the hose replaced there. I settled up the repairs with the company plastic then hit the road to finish up my day’s travel.
That night in the small motel, I watched every local news report I could find, particularly if they had news out of New Orleans. It didn’t take me long to find the report about a car plowing off the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway just north of the city earlier in the day. The driver had drowned to death before they could fish the station wagon out of the lake, but it had been far too late anyway. He had been drowning for years.
The next morning, I walked to my meetings, did my initial analysis, and showed some design sketches to the client. It was late in the day by the time I finally piled back into my car, now outfitted with a new tube for the steering fluid, courtesy of the local garage. I put the key in the ignition and started it up, trying to forget the smell of filthy water coming from the back seat. I caught Karen’s eye in the rear-view mirror, staring accusingly from beneath her water-logged blond hair.
So close, this time. Next time, I’d get closer, I knew. And then, eventually I’d be able to end this orbit and give into the inevitable pull back to where it all went wrong.
“Not yet,” I said to the empty back seat. “Soon. But not yet.”
I dropped the transmission into drive and turned north, taking me mile by mile further from the city which refused to let me leave it behind.
About the Author
Nathan Crowder grew up in the unforgiving amber of the Seventies in small-town south-western Colorado, the eldest son of librarian and a daycare provider. He was drawn to books at an early age, and spent many hours looking at the pictures in oversized library books about horror cinema, thus beginning his macabre fascination with things that go bump in the night. His first competed novel was written while working at a self-storage facility in 2005, and he hasn’t looked back since, turning out a few dozen short stories, eight novels, and two screenplays in that time.
©2009 Nathan Crowder
