As soon as they were in the car, Achilles jammed the program into the glove box and Ines kicked her shoes off and rubbed her arches. “Here.” He extended his hands, offering his lap, and they drove like that, he rubbing her foot with his free hand, her sighing. They went home to change and then on to the phone bank, which had been relocated to a donated office in the Quarter.
He wanted to be with Ines all day, every day, like it used to be, but she forbade it. She didn’t want him volunteering because it was too spooky. “You spook me. I look over and see you all scarred up, like you were when I first met you, and it’s like we’re in a play with one act that keeps repeating itself. Besides, Charlie 1 needs you.”
Ines didn’t know that he hadn’t patrolled with them for three weeks. During the day, he wandered around, or sometimes went back to the condo and slept. That day, he went to Wages’s house as promised.
Wages’s neighborhood had always been the opposite of Uptown, but never was that more evident than after the flood. Achilles hadn’t even seen a rat, and no military checkpoints regulated traffic. There were a few Humvees parked on the median at major intersections, but they were empty, only reminders or warnings, which one he was never sure. He’d gone the first day that the city cleared enough debris. The little red duplex was tagged with the spray paint circle and cross and the number three, indicating that three bodies were found. He’d assumed it was for the neighbor. It had to be. He’d pushed at the swollen door and it fell over, twisting on one hinge. The smell was awful, the kind of stench that carved dread in your heart and set the pulse racing before you entered a building. From the porch he could see the furniture piled against the back wall of the living room, as if swept there by a giant broom. Each visit thereafter, he had remained on that porch like a man mesmerized by an abyss, remembering the last time he saw Wages, and all the questions he wished he had asked him. On each trip, he planned to go to the attic and salvage anything that Wages’s mother might want because he knew it would eventually come to that, but he kept picturing Margaret and her book.
Margaret volunteered for the Eulogy Archive, a project dedicated to memorializing Katrina victims. Achilles had assumed Wages was okay and hadn’t worried about not hearing from him. Many people were out of communication. But after he didn’t hear from Wages for a couple weeks, he went to the archive. He found the ledger for the Wageses: Kyle, Bethany, and Kyle Jr. Trapped in the attic, Bethany tried to fit Kyle Jr. through the vent pipe. He got stuck and drowned shortly after she did. When Wages reached the house and found the bodies, he lay down beside his wife and shot himself. Achilles, knowing that, swore he’d never enter that house again, blue envelope or not.
This time he sat outside for almost two hours before going in. Stepping through the door he remembered his first night — the view from the rooftop across the street, the way he had been overwhelmed by the photos on the wall. Now, the walls were as bare as the ceiling, and both were scarred by a brown watermark. The plaster had fallen off in chunks larger than dinner plates. The stuffing was bursting out of the high-heeled shoe chair, and the sparkling strawberry settee was overturned. I know, dude. Somewhere a seventies van is missing a bench seat. Don’t come a-knockin’.
When he finally worked up the nerve — he had promised, Mrs. Wages was depending on him — he dragged the dresser to the wall under the scuttle hole and climbed up to the attic. George, Wages’s neighbor, had set up camp in the attic. He had a propane stove, flashlight, candles, sheets, a water bucket set up in the corner, and a row of empty two-liter bottles. He sat cross-legged with all his possessions arranged in a semicircle around him like acolytes. “What are you doing up here?”
“The ceiling’s out in my half,” said George.
“I mean why?”
“I couldn’t stay in Houston. This here’s my home. I mean the city. I mean Nola.”
“I know what you mean,” said Achilles. Indeed, New Orleans natives loved their city like nothing he had ever before seen.
“You going to put me out?”
No, Achilles shook his head. He’d never spoken at length to George, but knew he was in his fifties, had three adult daughters that each had at least one kid, and they all lived with him. Achilles took a seat on the overturned bucket, brushing aside the ants on his pants. A trail of them ran across the trusses at chest height.
“Where are your daughters?”
George looked down. “I don’t know. You gonna put me out?”
“Stop asking that. No!”
Piled in the corner: winter clothes, photo albums, Bethany’s jewelry box, and Wages’s guns, all of which Bethany must have had the foresight to carry up to the attic.
“I didn’t touch Mr. Kyle’s stuff.”
“I’m sure he appreciates that.”
George was as good as his word. Wages’s trunk was unopened, though it easily could have been. A few tools were scattered about: a small hammer, a few pipes, a pair of pliers, but no axe. He could see where Bethany had dug at the walls, pulled down the insulation, and clawed at the boards to get out. The vent was knocked out, the hole open to the sky, barely eight inches in diameter. No one could have fit through there. What did it take for Bethany to do that, to believe that the only chance to save little Wages was to send him up the air vent? She couldn’t have known it would turn, he would get stuck, he would hear her drown, and he would soon after drown himself.
He beat the lock off Wages’s footlocker. The cedar lining had separated from the tops and sides, and wood chips were mixed in with Wages’s BDUs.
Achilles pocketed the Bronze Star for Wages’s mom. The photos looked like watercolors. There was Wages’s laminated birth certificate. With a wife, child, and real job, Wages had always seemed so much older than twenty-six. The label had soaked off a bottle of Maker’s Mark. Achilles’s blue envelope was a cake of damp paper. He picked it up and it lay limp in his hand, unsalvageable. He didn’t see anything Wages would want him to save, so he shut the locker back up. He sat on the floor, dropping his legs down the scuttle hole.
“Leaving already?”
He tossed the Maker’s to George. George tossed it back. “Don’t drink.”
“Me neither, these days.” Achilles tucked it in his belt anyway.
“I’ll watch this stuff,” said George.
He considered inviting George to stay in one of the empty condos, but that was probably a bad idea. Achilles nodded his thanks. As he lowered himself to the first floor, he saw a fingernail stuck in the wood between a rafter and the sheathing, and choked. The ant trail ended at the fleshy tip.
On the ground floor, he nudged one of the little cushions — though it was already dirty, he couldn’t bring himself to kick it — revealing one of Bethany’s épées. He decided to take that too. When he reached for it, he saw the starfish, with three legs missing. Soon his arms were fulclass="underline" the starfish, the épée, a pair of her Crocs, a somewhat salvageable photo of them at Disney, a cushion from the white couch, Wages’s hunting hat, and the Maker’s Mark. Though it smelled terribly, he put the hat on. If he had had a crazy straw, he would have downed the entire bottle of whiskey.
Achilles and Ines were at Harrah’s Casino trying their luck at the quarter slots when Achilles felt someone watching him and looked up to see Wages tromping over. Without thinking, he scratched his right ear and looked skyward, meaning stay away. In Goddamnistan, it meant keep a safe distance and keep your eyes open, but it started in a bar outside of Fort Benning, where it meant stay the fuck away, I’m on the prowl. Wages didn’t change his stride. He kept on walking without saying a word, passing close enough that Achilles felt the air move. That was the last he saw of his friend.