WHEN HE WOKE HE WAS FACEDOWN IN THE DIRT. HE COULDN'T SEE OUT of his left eye, and he couldn't breathe through his nose. For a moment he couldn't remember where he was, and then memory flooded back in a scalding rush.
Over the thrum of blood in his ears he thought he heard sobbing. He squinted around, and through blurred vision managed to distinguish a shape on the ground in front of the hut. He rose up on his elbows and dragged himself to it.
"Adara," he said, around a tongue that felt swollen in his mouth. He reached out a trembling hand to touch her shoulder.
She flinched away. She was naked but for her qameez, and it was torn to shreds. She had pulled one of the few remaining folds over her head, covering her face, hiding from her shame. She was curled into a fetal position but he could see that her legs were covered in blood, the rest of her body in bruises and rapidly crusting cuts. They had not just raped her, they had beaten her with their fists and kicked her with their boots.
He cringed from the sight of his sister's nakedness, and of her wounds and all that those wounds meant, and steeled himself to speak. "Adara," he said again, and began to sob. He let his head fall forward, once, twice, a third time, again and again, beating his head against the dirt. A scream built in his throat and backed up until it could no longer be contained and he let it loose, a long, high howl of anguish that went on and on.
It was carried on the night wind to the circle of mud houses that formed the village not a thousand yards distant, but no one came to help them.
AKIL KNOCKED SOFTLY. THE DOOR CRACKED. AN EYE PEERED OUT. "GO away," a gruff voice said.
"Uncle," Akil said. "Please."
"Go away!" the voice said, more loudly this time. The door slammed in Akil's face.
Akil staggered back to Adara, clad now in his shirt and sitting on a rock by the side of the lane staring vacantly into space. At least she had stopped weeping. "I'm sorry, Adara," he said-how many times now? "He won't let us in."
Her breast rose and fell in a soundless sigh. "None of them will," she said, her voice the merest thread of sound. "AMI, you must end this."
"No!" he shouted. She flinched. "No," he said, more temperately. "No, Adara. We will find someone who will help us, give us food and shelter for a night, and then we will leave this place."
"And go where?" she said. "Our parents turned us away. Three of our uncles, two of our cousins. There is nowhere left for us to go, AMI."
"I'll find a place," he said. "Trust me, Adara. I will find us a place to go, where you can be safe."
And he would have, he knew he would have, but when the third cousin refused to let him into her house and he returned to Adara, he found her hanging from the branch of a neem tree, strangled on a knot made from the sleeve of his own shirt.
1
NEW ORLEANS, SEPTEMBER 2005
"I feel like I'm in a third-world country," Parker said, breaking a silence that had endured the entire distance from the Iwo Jima, moored at the Riverwalk in downtown New Orleans.
" Haiti," Helms said. She looked around with the same expression of bewilderment she'd worn all day. "Where is everyone? There should be ambulances and helicopters and-and police cars." She looked back at the two officers, almost pleading. "It can't be only us. It can't be."
Everything in St. Bernard Parish was backwards, if not upside down. The cars were in the water. The boats were on the land. Enormous barges, stripped of their containers, were beached hundreds of feet from the nearest canal. Trailers had been forcibly separated from their tractors and were scattered haphazardly across drenched and flattened fields like so many giant Tonka toys. Electrical transmission towers lay on their sides, half-submerged in bayous much deeper and wider than they had been not twenty-four hours before. The houses, those that remained standing, were minus doors, windows, roofs.
The landscape was not improved by the almost total absence of life. Once they saw a woman peer out at them from behind a tree. It didn't make any of them feel better when she screamed, a high, thin, terrified sound, and went crashing headlong through the underbrush, getting as far away from them as fast as she could. Once they saw a dog, a pit bull, emaciated and hostile, who growled menacingly at them before it, too, ran off. Cal would have shot it if he'd thought to bring a gun.
He realized with a faint sense of shock that they might actually need one.
The dog had been savaging the body of a woman. In spite of the swelling and the decay after a week's worth of lying in the sun, it was obvious that she had not died in Katrina, but afterward, and that she might have found her death a merciful ending to what had come before. And like all the other bodies they had found that day, she was black.
Cal had never before been quite so conscious of the whiteness of his skin.
Parker got a poncho out of the back of their jeep-they had run out of body bags-and covered her, holding his breath so he wouldn't retch. He backed off and stood looking down at the olive green bundle for a moment. "Animals," he said.
"Americans," Helms said, in such disbelief it was almost a question.
Parker raised his head and looked at Cal. "I was stationed in D.C. in 2001.I thought I'd never see anything like that again." He shook his head. "I hoped I wouldn't. But this-this is-" Words failed him. Parker was in his forties, in the Coast Guard long enough to work his way up to chief warrant officer, a veteran of patrols in the Caribbean and the Eastern Pacific and the Bering, like Cal, a cutterman.
On 9/11 Cal had been in New York City, testifying at a UN hearing on international maritime regulations. He had been in a cab on the way to the United Nations building when the first plane had gone in. It had been a beautiful morning, he remembered, clear, cool, the streets of New York filled with parents taking their children to school, people headed to work. He'd reported to the scene as soon as news of what happened had penetrated his meeting, and worked three days and nights helping to dig people, mostly dead, out of the debris. He, too, had never wanted to see anything like that ever again.
"Where is everyone?" Helms said. A yeoman with much less time served, still in high school when the planes went into the towers and the Pentagon and that field in Pennsylvania, she had watched the response on television with the rest of her peers. There had been a massive response of fire and rescue personnel and equipment to that disaster. She looked around now, expecting a line of response vehicles, ambulances, fire trucks, heavy equipment to begin the process of recovery to roll up and disgorge the people who were supposed to be doing this kind of work, people who were trained in it. "I was just here to see New Orleans," she said numbly. "I wanted to hear some good music, eat some beignets, walk around the French Quarter." She looked at Cal again, imploringly. "Captain, where is everybody?"