Jack looked at the man and spat some brown juice at the base of the cell.
Another guard called out to him about the next row of cells. “That one has AIDS,” the thick-bodied woman said. “Be careful.”
Most of the prisoners were looters, some stole cars, some broke into mansions, and about ten had tried to kill folks. Mainly taking shots at cops who were trying to rescue people from their swamped neighborhoods.
“Hey, Audie Murphy!” yelled a man with a long gray beard stained yellow. “Go suck a turd.”
Jack walked into the wide expanse of the train station, the newspaper racks selling a copy of USA Today from August 26, a picture of Martha Stewart on the cover with a big shit-eating grin on her face.
Welcome to Angola South read a cardboard sign by the door.
Jack got a break just before sundown.
He used his cell phone to call his father back on Grand Isle, a man who’d been left alone to pick through the wreckage of a shrimp company he’d owned since ’64, surviving even Hurricane Betsy. His dad told him that every boat they owned, the refrigerated warehouse, and their stilt house had all washed out into the Gulf.
“Say hello to Mama for me,” Jack said before ending the call and heading out in his truck along the river.
Jack rode through the city and drank a cold Budweiser, a cooler in the back of his Chevy loaded down with ice brought in by the Indiana National Guard. The radio carried nothing but news, so he shut it off and just drove slow out Canal Street past the carnival of TV trucks and reporters camped out on the neutral ground. At one point, he slowed, noticing a leg sticking out from under a tarp.
But raising his sunglasses, he saw it was only a mannequin. He glimpsed a couple of cameramen in the shadows laughing and pointing.
He drove on.
Rampart at Canal was the foot of the swamp, water all the way to Lake Pontchartrain. He turned around and crossed back through the Quarter, found higher ground and crossed Rampart further downriver, ending up at the corner of St. Louis and Tremé, right by the old housing projects, St. Louis Cemetery, and the looted-out Winn-Dixie. All along Tremé, tree branches and drowned cars filled the road. Birds and loose trash skittered in the warm breeze.
Jack polished off the Bud and pulled a plug of tobacco from his pouch. Sitting on his hood, he brushed off the brown pieces of Redman from his mustache and spit into the swampy water covering his truck tires.
The warm air was calm. The city completely still, with huge clouds above the Central Business District. A skinny, mangy dog wandered past him.
An old black man on a bicycle peddled through the foot-deep water and waved.
The only sound came from helicopters loaded down with machine guns passing over the Mississippi and the Lower Ninth Ward looking for bodies and looters. An old-fashioned Army Jeep passed, driving in reverse with a young kid in the passenger seat wearing an NOPD shirt and Chinese hat. He eyed down his rifle, scoped a bird on the cracked cemetery wall, and then, satisfied he had the shot, dropped the gun at his side.
Jack spit and smiled.
He wasn’t even back at the train station for his next shift when he saw the smoke curling and twisting like a mythical snake. Jack followed the smoke and called in on his handheld radio, arriving before the firetrucks at a block of row houses at Oretha Castle Haley Boulevard and Jackson Avenue. Two of them burned, crackling and popping as only ancient wood can. Hard and buckling, turning to coal-black smoke.
Six firetrucks. And then seven.
The sun set through leafless oaks, the light orange and slatted and broken through black smoke. A helicopter passed overhead and dropped a huge bucket of water on the dying buildings. The falling water stirred up dead leaves and stale wind and fell with a whoosh.
Dried pieces of debris and smoke blocked out the sun.
“So you were scared?” Jack asked the pretty girl from Indiana.
“Hell yes, I was scared,” she said.
It was the next day at sunset and they talked at an old convent in the Bywater near a statue of the Virgin Mary.
“They dropped us off in the middle of the night,” she said, smoking. Her hand shook a bit. “The water was up past the transport’s tires and you couldn’t see two feet in front of your face. No moon. Nothing.”
The girl was pretty. Blond and muscular with brown eyes. She wore camouflage but sat like a girl, on her butt with her knees pulled up to her chin. Jack met her when she’d delivered the ice.
He turned away when she exhaled.
“You want one?”
“I don’t smoke.”
She nodded. “So they dropped us off on the high ground,” she said. “When was that, a few weeks ago?”
“Last week.”
“Last week,” she repeated, thinking. “And they dropped us off, like I said. On the high ground. Well, we didn’t have orders or anything. We just sat there.”
“All night.”
“All night,” she said. “We could hear gunshots and people yelling. Families passing us on boats and little pool floats... So anyway, I finally fall asleep and I hear something at the edge of sleep. You know how that can go? Kind of a dream but you’re awake. And it’s a trudging sound through the water and this heavy breathing. I couldn’t see anything. It was so dark I wasn’t sure if it was just in my head.”
“What was it?”
“You’ll laugh at what I thought it was.”
“What did you think it was?”
“Demons.”
“What was it?”
“Horses.”
“You religious?” Jack asked.
The pretty Indiana girl stubbed out her cigarette on one of the statue’s base stones and tucked back on her uniform hat. “Not at all.”
At midnight there was a riot. A man who’d shot at the police from the top of the hot sauce factory in Mid-City had decided to lock himself in the portable toilet.
A few minutes before, he’d stuck his penis through one of the holes and told a female guard to “suck it” as he masturbated with his eyes rolling up in his head. Instead, she’d whacked it hard with a billy club and then two of the other inmates in an adjoining cell had started climbing the chain link and screaming at the guards.
The guards were able to mace the two on the walls but the man who’d started it all had run and shut himself in the toilet.
Jack said: “Give me the hose.”
Guards pulled the hose from the edge of the train platform and ran the nozzle to Jack.
“Turn it up.” And he unlocked the gate and walked inside and thumbed open the toilet’s door.
The flush of water blew the man against the back wall of the toilet and washed him outside in a long brown stream until he rolled and crawled to the far corner of the cell.
“Goddamn!” the man yelled, curling into a ball. Both hands on his privates, his brown pants at his knees.
“Turn it down,” Jack said.
You wrote a report, fingerprinted them, and then tagged them. Pink for federal cases, green for misdemeanors, and red, yellow, and blue for different kinds of felonies. They were locked up, given something to eat, and then shipped on buses by gun bulls out of the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola the next morning.
“Move ’em in, herd ’em out,” Jack always said.
A few days before, a two-time loser had driven a stolen car to the drop-off zone at the old Amtrak station, walked up to the front desk, and asked the warden for a one-way train ticket.
The warden, ten years on the job running Angola, asked for his driver’s license and registration, and it wasn’t but a second later that he nodded to Jack and another guard. “Yes sir. Yes sir. One-way ticket to Angola coming up.”