For Katrina

At the corner of Marigny and Dreux, overcast skies churned and trapped the milky heat of late August close to Otis Freely’s skin. Sultry breaths of wind lapped at the sweat on his neck as he labored over his table saw in the N’awlins Co-op parking lot, slow and deliberate.

Otis shook his head with a wry smile. Mother Nature was in a mood.

There’ll be plenty of time for you and me later, he promised.

As Board President of Gentilly’s new co-op, Otis felt duty-bound to remain with their modest storefront through the storm. Give some peace of mind to the other eighteen member-owners who, if they hadn’t evacuated voluntarily the day before, were now baking in their cars as they inched out of the city, God bless ‘em.

Andrew, his friend’s boy, caught the larger half of the plywood before it clattered to the cracked asphalt. He held the board to the window while Otis hammered from atop a ladder.

“Your daddy’s gonna be mad you ain’t left yet.”

Andrew scoffed. “I couldn’t get out now if I tried.”

“Then where you plannin’ to head?”

“East Holiday Inn,” Andrew grunted, repositioning his hold on the shifting plywood. “Me and the guys were supposed to play Six Flags this weekend before they closed everything down, but we picked up a gig in the French Quarter tonight.”

Otis leveled his brow. Descended the ladder.

“Who you gon’ play for? Curfew’s at six.”

Andrew shrugged, smile wistful.

“We’ll play for Katrina.”

———

Otis got provisions from his house on the other side of Filmore Avenue before returning to the co-op. He put matches, money, and flashlights in Ziploc bags, blowing air into them before sealing them so they might float if swallowed up in floodwater.

“Did you see the weather report they issued this morning?” his wife asked when she called him that night. “They are calling for the destruction of the whole city. I don’t like you bein’ there all a sudden.”

Otis leaned against the rear doorframe, pungent salt air heavy on his chest after the evening rain. A bead of sweat slid down the seam behind his ear.

“Couldn’t get out now if I tried, Missy. Besides, I don’t see how it’d be any worse than Betsy.”

“Boy, you were a skinny tomcat whippin’ marbles at my porch stairs when Betsy breached those levees and flooded Gentilly up to its eyeballs. Or d’you forget?”

Otis idly poked his finger into the phone’s tan coil. He could feel the offended storm reaching out from the Gulf of Mexico to wrap its rainbands around his throat and strangle him for his insolence.

“Them’s the old levees. Times are different. I’ll be fine.”

“How you gettin’ out, then?” Missy asked.

“I’ll get, don’t you worry.”

“I worry.”

“You worry about your bus,” Otis said, shuffling back inside. “Say hi to Houston for me.”

“Houston got nothin’ to say to you after last time.”

Otis laughed.

Missy’s sigh crackled in his ear.

“Be safe.”

———

The anticipation manifested as a pressure in Otis’s lower back—an uncomfortable, lewd giddiness that kept him shifting on his cot all night long. It wasn’t the wind or rain or storm surge he remembered so much as that pressure; Get up, Otie, or I’m gonna move you.

The winds pried the plywood from the windows by dawn.

And about the time Otis started thinking about venturing out to check on his home, the London Avenue levee broke.

A furious torrent of floodwater swept Otis out of a window.

He caught the gutter.

Otis hauled himself up on the roof and, narrowly avoiding a snarl of telephone wire, rolled onto his back, panting.

Told you I was gonna move you.

Otis lay there until the rushing waters became still, until the sun dried his overalls. The gentle scrape of debris against the yellow cinderblock walls lulled him in and out of sleep, but the sharp odor of natural gas choked him back into the waking world. His stiffness made him cry out when he finally moved.

The landscape defied comprehension.

After taking a moment to regret not joining Andrew’s band in their cushy hotel room the night before, Otis wriggled on his belly to the roof’s edge to feel under the lip for anything that might be useful.

He spotted white fabric just below the surface and, thinking it would make a good rescue flag, pulled it up.

The bloated arms and face of a dead man came with it.

———

“How you gettin’ out, then?”

By motorboat, it turned out.

A group of good samaritans found Otis late Tuesday evening. Dehydration and heat illness left him weak in body and spirit, but he got out. Forever and always, he would be haunted by the motorboat’s robust susurration burying the distant calls of his neighbors left to fend for themselves another night in that sweltering swamp.

Otis spent two days recovering in a tent outside a triage trailer.

Eventually, he got to call his wife.

“Paul ain’t heard from Andrew,” she said.

Otis took a look around. Took in the horrors he could never describe.

“A lot people ain’t heard from a lot of people, Missy. I’m sure he’s fine.” A laugh. “Fourth floor of a Holiday Inn? I know he’s fine.”

But that certainty, that divining rod, slowly began to bend in another direction.

The more Otis looked, the less he found.

Then, on September 14th, Andrew’s car was pulled from a second-story window of the Crescent Crown Brewery, a quarter mile from the failed Industrial Canal levees. One of his bandmates was still in the passenger seat. Almost impossible to identify, but the identification was eventually made, simultaneously snuffing and spurring hope.

“Come home, Otis,” Missy said.

“Not til I find him.”

Eleven days later, Andrew’s trombone case materialized on Almonaster Avenue.

It was all they ever found of him.

“He’s playin’ for Katrina,” Otis would say.

She liked it so much, she done did took him with her.