Wading Home_ A Novel Of New Orleans Part 6

A small sharp burn swelled in his jaw, then went away. He touched his hand to the spot and held it there. He waited, then tried again.

A scale stumbled out-his tone cracking horribly, notes splitting like dry wood. But in a moment, through a dull film of pain, clean notes streamed into the thick night air.

The doctor said the soreness would go away and the nerve endings would take a while to heal. Didn't make sense to press his luck. But after a minute, he put the horn back up to his lips and played again.

The moon, arced higher now, its silver reflection casting longer tendrils of light on the surface of the river, bathed everything in deep purple and strands of muted light. A tune surfaced from somewhere beneath his jumble of thoughts, low and lazy like a whisper of sea-fog, a blues drenched in flood water and rising like mist from a childhood summer night. He felt lightheaded. He was a little kid again, playing street tag, double-dog-dare, stickball. And like most of the kids he knew, he felt safe, like nothing bad would ever happen in his life.

No thoughts of his city sinking in on itself, or simply washing away.

Standing by the river in the dark, he realized he'd thought little about the city itself, about what all this meant. This was his home, home, the place where he'd been born and grew up, where his roots stretched so deep into the sandy soil that their beginnings seemed to have no end. Now, it was unfit for human life. He closed his eyes and his tears burned and in the shadow of the song a rhythm section grooved in the breezeless night-wire brushes soup-stirring watercolor patches of blue-while the sodden soil of home grew soft beneath his feet. the place where he'd been born and grew up, where his roots stretched so deep into the sandy soil that their beginnings seemed to have no end. Now, it was unfit for human life. He closed his eyes and his tears burned and in the shadow of the song a rhythm section grooved in the breezeless night-wire brushes soup-stirring watercolor patches of blue-while the sodden soil of home grew soft beneath his feet.

Tomorrow he would go to Silver Creek to find his father and bring him...home, whatever that meant now. If he was there.

If he was there.

As he lifted the horn high and played out over the big, silent river, he wondered if anybody out there in the endless dark was listening, if maybe he could play so loud that Simon, wherever he was, could hear him. From nowhere, the legendary musician Buddy Bolden sprang to mind, the golden bra.s.s G.o.d blowing the city's first song, a sound so big it soared across time to split the air where he stood now.

When he was small and his friends' fathers spooked them with stories of ghosts and dragons, Simon had made up tales to get Julian to practice. He told stories about the mythic cornet player who blew way back when the city was young, when jazz crawled up from cradle-high to paddle upriver to the world. He was a genius, the best anybody ever heard. A horn player who blew so loud that clouds trembled and birds' wings stuttered in flight. Handsome, too-a ladies' man. Or so the story goes. He was a genius, the best anybody ever heard. A horn player who blew so loud that clouds trembled and birds' wings stuttered in flight. Handsome, too-a ladies' man. Or so the story goes. In Simon's stories, Buddy Bolden's power was mighty, fierce, and the sound of his horn could level mountains and raise the dead. Julian's young eyes lit up, his mind filled to overflowing, and he could not wait to play. In Simon's stories, Buddy Bolden's power was mighty, fierce, and the sound of his horn could level mountains and raise the dead. Julian's young eyes lit up, his mind filled to overflowing, and he could not wait to play.

He wondered if Bolden were here tonight, what notes would blast from his horn. For a moment, he wished his father's fables were true. But even if they were, it would take something more powerful than Bolden's horn to bring this dead city back to life.

After a while, his jaw was still sore, but his breathing felt easy and his head lighter from the lift of his music, so he got back in the car and drove toward his Baton Rouge motel. He didn't turn on the radio-the road hum and darkness beyond the headlights' reach felt right for thinking. He thought of so many things. Simon. Ladeena. A pot of red beans and rice saturating the kitchen air on a Monday afternoon with a smell to make a grown man weep. His daddy, stirring the pot and going on and on about Silver Creek. His mother, reading by the window on a summer Sunday after church. The city he called home, sick at heart and sinking.

All of that, and Velmyra Hartley's smile.

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If he hadn't remembered that she rose early, sometimes before dawn, to capture the colors of morning light on her canvas, he would not have gone. But she was one of the few people he knew for whom seven a.m. was not an unreasonable hour to call.

He had called Sylvia at midnight after lying in his Best Western bed, sleepless, for an hour. He could have sworn he heard a small chuckle of glee in Sylvia's voice when he told her what he wanted. Sylvia hadn't hesitated. It was as if she'd been waiting for him to ask.

"She's not too far from you. She's staying at the Day's Inn right there in Baton Rouge, the one closest to the river," Sylvia had said. "Room 212."

Of course. Half the town of New Orleans had picked up and moved to Baton Rouge, at least temporarily. And even though Velmyra's house in Uptown was not damaged by the storm or the flood, she was still without power and her plumbing didn't work.

He had gotten up at five so he could bathe and shave unhurriedly, then called the auto club to get directions to Silver Creek, a place not even MapQuest seemed to know about. He hadn't brought his good clothes with him, mostly just T-shirts and jeans. He found a pair of clean black denims he hadn't yet worn, then reached in the bottom of the suitcase to find one of his newer T-shirts, one emblazoned with the logo of a new New York club where he'd played a year ago, and pressed out the packing folds with the iron he found on the closet shelf.

When he had showered and arranged himself in a reasonable way-face meticulously shaven, hair washed and neatly combed, shirt tucked in-he got into his car and drove from the Best Western toward the Days Inn, which was, to his surprise, at the next light.

The streets were still quiet, shiny after an early mist that beaded his windshield, the silver sky fissured like marble, the red and green of the traffic lights and cars protruding in bold relief from the flat gray of the wet, early morning streets. He pulled into the lot as light misting thickened to light rain.

This was not something he particularly wanted to do. Through his night of fitful sleep, he'd remembered his tears, actually crying crying over this woman. Whatever he felt about her now, however undefined, was clearly uncomfortable. It wasn't that he wanted to be with her-it was over this woman. Whatever he felt about her now, however undefined, was clearly uncomfortable. It wasn't that he wanted to be with her-it was so so over after all this time. He just wanted to clear out whatever lingering webs of hurtful memory still cluttered his mind, and then move on. over after all this time. He just wanted to clear out whatever lingering webs of hurtful memory still cluttered his mind, and then move on.

And since he'd been raised not to be an a.s.s, running out of Sylvia's house like some loser would nag at him until he did something about it.

He knocked softly three times on her door.

When she answered, he couldn't help but float his gaze down, then upwards again. Her hair, still fluffed out in crinkly curls, was lighter than he remembered from last night. She was dressed in white shorts and a short-sleeved green tank. Her eyes looked rested, bright. Clearly, she'd been up a while.

He had planned to smile, as if everything was cool, say a few appropriate words, then be on his way. But when he saw her, he felt his tongue thicken and the smile didn't come the way he'd planned.

"Sorry, I know it's early and everything," he started. "I just want to say I'm sorry about last night, running off like that. The stress and all, you know, with Daddy missing and everything, I guess..."

"Julian." She opened the door wider, letting the morning light spill onto her face. "Why don't you come inside? You're standing in the rain."

8.

He hadn't realized it was raining, even though his face was covered with water. He hadn't particularly wanted to come inside, to be there any longer than necessary, but he didn't know how not to, so he stepped inside the tiny motel room while she closed the door behind him.

"Like I said," he began again. His hands were hot and moist. He stuck them both in the back pockets of his jeans. "I'm sorry about running off last night."

Almost every inch of the room was filled, but there seemed to be a sense of order about it. A pot of coffee, buried behind bottles of toiletries, made gurgling sounds on the bath area counter top. White towels sat neatly folded on racks near the mirror. Two fullsize beds filled most of the s.p.a.ce-one with stacks of laundry folded on top of the paisley spread, the other with disheveled sheets and pillows thrown about. On a luggage rack near the TV, a full suitcase sat open, and on the table near the window sat boxes of cereal and crackers, bags of nuts, a few apples, and a half-dozen bananas.

It looked remarkably like his motel room, as if someone had taken up permanent residence, except for the large wooden artist's easel near the television with a blank canvas sitting on it.

"You want some coffee?" She looked back toward the gurgling pot. "It's the worst coffee I've ever made."

He smiled a little. "Naw. Thanks."

For another minute they both just stood in the middle of the room, trapped by a silence so awkward Julian coughed just to interrupt it.

"Look, Julian," she said. "I'm really so sorry about Simon. I was so upset when I heard. I just hope he didn't-"

He narrowed his eyes as he cut her off, and started to turn toward the door.

"He's all right. I'll find him."

"I didn't mean...of course, you'll find him. Simon's strong. If anybody can survive all this, he can."

She smiled, leveled an a.s.suring gaze at him. "And knowing you, you won't stop until you find him."

Some people just knew they had a great smile, and Velmyra must have learned this early on. Milk-white sea-washed pearls set perfectly within the strong bones of her face, her smile was something she could measure against the moment, time to best effect: to tease, cajole, gain advantage, defuse an argument. Right now, she had caught his testiness in her perfect teeth and rendered it numb.

"Anyway, he's lucky to have you for a son."

A decent thing to say. Her smile tried to ignite the one buried deep in him that somehow could not surface to his face.

"Well. OK. Thanks," he said.

Light blinked through the parted drapes on the long window facing the parking lot, as if the sun, held captive by a thick cloud, had been set free. Realizing his shoulders had been tight, arched slightly up the whole time he'd been in the room, he let them down, and reached up to ma.s.sage the side of his neck.

She played with her fingers, interlacing them, in and out. The fact that she seemed no more comfortable than he did pleased him a little.

"Well." She let out a breath heavy with resignation. "What happened with us doesn't matter much now, does it? I mean, everything's so...horrible. You know how I felt about Simon. He was always so kind to me. I hate that he's missing. So, truce?"

He remembered the bond between Simon and Velmyra. During their engagement, when Julian brought her to his father's for Sunday afternoon dinner, Simon seemed to step a little lighter in Velmyra's presence; chairs were held back, doors held open, jokes told in a doting fatherly tease framed by an almost boyish smile. A special spark lit Simon's eyes, his voice pitched to a lighter lilt, and Velmyra obliged with smooth but genuine affection.

That last evening when she'd left him, the words they shot back and forth lit up the s.p.a.ce between them like bright shards of gla.s.s. One particular shard had nicked his heart-she'd accused him of being selfish, uncaring. Nothing she said had hurt him worse than that. Afterward, the boil of their anger cooled to glacial silence. Remembering, he was angry all over again.

But the anger crowding his mind did little to erase the fact that right now, he really wanted nothing more than to trace the smooth lines of her mouth with the tip of his finger.

Truce. Julian looked away in a manner that told her he was weighing the word. Julian looked away in a manner that told her he was weighing the word.

He gave a quick half-nod, and glanced over at the white canvas sitting on the easel. "What you working on?"

She shrugged her shoulders. "Nothing. As you can see. Haven't been able to paint since everything happened."

He nodded. "Your mama and them OK?"

She sat down on the edge of the bed and rubbed a hand against the back of her neck, telling him, in the language of people who once knew each other well, that she was fraught with worry.

She sighed again. "They're OK. Family's scattered everywhere, though. Cousins in Atlanta. My sister and them in Houston. Momma and Daddy came here to Baton Rouge, just like half of New Orleans. They...lost everything. But they've got insurance. They wanna go back as soon as they can."

Julian knew where her parents lived, and he'd heard about all the water Pontchartrain Park took on when the levee broke. At least Simon's house only had a few feet, for what it was worth. Her folks' house, he figured-the house she grew up in-was probably destroyed.

"I'm sorry."

She nodded. "Well, my my house in Uptown did OK, you know, it's not too far from Sylvia. We were so lucky." house in Uptown did OK, you know, it's not too far from Sylvia. We were so lucky."

"That's good." It hadn't occurred to him that she might be suffering, too. The storm and flood were so easy to take personally, everyone buried so deep in their own troubles, but truth was that no one seemed to escape its effect.

No matter how flawless they looked.

She took a sharp breath. "Look, I just want you to know that if I can do anything to help you find your father..."

He felt the smallest smile emerge, softening his face. "Thanks, but I think I know where he is. I'm on my way there now, in fact. So I better be going."

"Well, OK. Like I said, if you need help.... I loved your father. Simon was like another daddy to me."

His smile grew, and he nodded. "Well, Daddy was always crazy about you. In fact, he got really p.i.s.sed at me when everything happened, like, you know..." He stopped, hoping she hadn't caught the small note of irritation.

"Like it was all your fault? I hope you told him it wasn't."

In fact, he hadn't told Simon much of anything. "It's over," his ragged voice confessed when Simon had asked, "How's our girl doin'?" and the throbbing vein in Julian's temple had warned him not to press. But the breakup seemed as hard for Simon as for Julian. Maybe even harder, as Julian had watched loneliness pale his father's deep caramel eyes in the weeks after. He had brought this lovely young woman into his father's life, not realizing that, after a time, whenever Simon had looked at Velmyra, he'd seen family. He'd already lost a wife; now he had lost a daughter, too.

He told Velmyra where he was going, and she smiled, remembering stories of how he been dragged there as a kid, and how much Simon just loved to talk about it. He'd even bent her ear a couple of times, when Julian wasn't around, about Silver Creek.

"Well, I guess I better go," he said, looking out the window. "Looks like it might be a nice day after all."

When he finally left her room and got into his car, the rain had let up and the sky was brightening into pale blue. The air felt steamy, the day heating up. He rolled down his window and as he pulled out of the lot, he caught a glimpse of her in his sideview mirror. She was running toward his car, waving a hand.

He stopped. She leaned over, looked into his window, her shoulders hunched and arms folded across her chest.

"Hey, this is just an idea. If you don't like it, feel free to say no. I won't mind."

He hadn't expected it, and didn't know how to respond. So he just said, "Sure, get in." She said she'd always been curious about the place, and she wasn't doing anything except sitting around worrying about her folks and her friends. That, and waiting. Waiting for a plumber to call, waiting for her electricity to come back on, waiting for her folks' insurance guy to give a d.a.m.n. Waiting for the whole nightmare to be over, and everything to be the way it used to be. She said she just wanted to get away, and a drive to Silver Creek sounded like a trip to Shangri-la, someplace away from Baton Rouge and anything that reminded her of New Orleans.

So they pulled out of the lot, onto the slick streets and under a warming sun, and then onto the highway, toward his father's home.

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It was when Julian was about eleven that the stories began about the Silver Creek land. Simon had a captive audience in Julian on gumbo night. Julian would pull up a chair to the big round table in the tight kitchen and start his homework while the mixed scents of sausage, shrimp, chicken, and okra swirled in the steam, almost potent enough to taste.

"Pay attention to what I'm saying," Simon would say, stopping in the middle of stirring rice to point an admonishing spoon at Julian. "Someday that land's gonna be all yours."

Simon told Julian how his grandfather Moses, a freed slave turned sharecropper, had inherited the land from his master and mulched it with sweat and blood. It had been left first to Jacob, Simon's father, and Jacob's first cousin, Maree, and then, upon their deaths, to the next generation of Fortiers-Maree's daughter Genevieve and Simon.

Simon bragged as if his name were on the deed of the Taj Mahal. Two hundred and forty acres of sugar-rich bottom land, black and fertile as a young womb. Pines, magnolias, live oaks by the hundreds, and honeysuckle and jasmine that turned the air to perfume. And the creek snaking through it like a thick vein of silver.

Wistfulness played in Simon's eyes when he talked about how nightfall wrapped Silver Creek in darkness so velvety you "could feel it on your skin," and set off a symphony of cicadas and nightbirds that "could drown out a bra.s.s band." About how Auntie Maree, his father's first cousin, had yoked him to her ap.r.o.n strings until he could craft a perfect roux. And how Jacob had taught Simon the ways of fishermen and hunters, so he'd never know an empty supper table.

"Uh, huh." Julian would flip to the next page in his geometry book. When Simon went on like this, it meant one thing-supper would be late, and he'd have to cut short his practice time. But he always indulged his father the endless paeans to the skywardreaching oaks and clear-water streams and earth so sweet it could grow d.a.m.n near anything. The more Simon talked, the more excited he got, the more loose and free his spice-sprinkling fingers, the more delicious the gumbo. But Julian was more interested in mastering a page in the Arban trumpet method book than in any talk about land he couldn't care less to ever own.

The first time Julian remembered seeing Silver Creek, he must have been four. The last time he saw it was just after Ladeena died. The creek that Simon always described as a ribbon of sparkling silver winding through rich earth and shaded by luxuriant trees and thickets, was, to Julian, just a hot, bug ridden swamp. Simon tried to teach him hunting, but the buckshot noise hurt his sensitive ears. He was equally unimpressed with the joys of fishing, lacking the stomach for worms and fish guts. The only good part was when Simon and Genevieve decided to throw down in the kitchen. Then, everything was good.

Crawfish etouffee from fresh-caught mudbugs, red beans and rice with homemade andouille, tomato-ey shrimp Creole, and peppery gumbo with all manner of whatever swam or crawled thrown in, and fresh herbs and spices from Genevieve's garden that made every inhaled breath a joy. Simon invited everybody he knew from the nearby town for supper. As impatient as Julian was with logging in country time, he had to admit, the food made it worth the trip.

But after his twelfth summer, Julian did not return to Silver Creek until he was eighteen, for his mother's burial. And then, never again. He and Simon rarely talked about it any more. Julian had other plans that did not include spending his life holed away in some backwater when there was so much world to get out and see.

At thirty-one, after his engagement to Velmyra ended and he was itching for change, Julian had packed up his trumpet and headed for New York, and any other part of the world where he could lose himself in his own, self-made blues. Simon's steps slowed, his eyes paled, his shoulders fell. He had been to a war in Korea, cooked in foreign kitchens in exotic villages, seen so much of the world-and still longed for home, talking about his land the way some men talked about their first love. That his only son didn't share his southern-boy homing instinct was more than heartbreaking, it was an a.s.sault to his history.

But Julian couldn't understand his father's obsession with a stretch of flat, lifeless land called Silver Creek.

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"Do you mind if we turn down the air a little?"

"Oh. Sorry."

He reached over to dial down the air conditioner, which had been blasting since they left Baton Rouge. To Julian's mind, the noise helped to quell the awkwardness dividing them.

For a half hour they had been driving westward over the long bridge stretching across the Atchafalaya River, where the giant cypresses and pines, their thick trunks moored deep in the mirroring swamp, filtered flashes of sun as the car made its way over the jigsawing wetlands. As they crossed the broad basin, there was no sound except the air conditioner and the wail of the tenor saxophone from a radio station just outside of Baton Rouge. Grover Washington-Julian recognized the silky tone, the post-seventies groove. He tried to listen to the music, nodding his head to the rhythm, his arm resting lightly on the top of the steering wheel. Feigning nonchalance, when actually there was a constant nervejitter in the pit of his stomach.

When he'd first turned on the radio earlier, bad news had blared mercilessly. All about the hurricane, the levees, the current state of the whole town and its nearby parishes. The government failures. The second hurricane that had followed, adding insult to injury, another blow to an area already bludgeoned by the first. The missing people and the ones who were not-the ones who floated face up in the flood waters, bloated, found at last.

But there were a few good stories-the reconnection of loved ones once lost and returned to each other, the rescues of old women or young children on rooftops, who told their tales of hopelessness, heat, exhaustion, and fever dreams of heaven, until the whir of chopper blades sounded like the battering wings of angels. The volunteers who'd rescued starving dogs destined for disease and death. The tearful cries of defiant citizens from their outposts of exile-Houston, Dallas, Denver-determined to return and rebuild.

But after a while they had both had enough. "Do you mind?" she said. And Julian was relieved, too, when she reached a hand across to the radio, inviting Grover to float them away to a mindless refuge of fusion funk.

Soon, Velmyra broke the silence, but not the way he would have preferred. She wanted to talk about his career.

"So, anyway, like I was saying the other night. I saw you on The Tonight Show The Tonight Show," she began, proud at having taken a good whack at the icy barrier between them. "It was a repeat, I know. But I had missed it the first time, a couple of years ago, so I was glad I got to see it."