SEPTEMBER 4, 2005
Above the Seventeenth Street Canal; New Orleans
Looking down on the houses, most of them still submerged but for their roofs, Rumsfeld remembered those candy dots on strips of paper that Joyce used to buy for the children. How—once the helicopter touched down, a few minutes from now—was he going to tout the waters’ recession as a sign of the situation’s improvement?
He did not want to be here, but everyone in the administration’s topmost echelon had been instructed to show the flag, an exercise that, to Rumsfeld’s mind, only implicated them in a supposedly general failure that was in fact quite specific: the fuckup of the past seven days belonged to the Department of Homeland Security, a vast modular monstrosity whose creation, he had warned Andy Card four years ago, would never succeed. Before half the people below this helicopter got a blanket or a can of Spam, FEMA—now trapped inside DHS—would be spending a month getting internal approvals to hire private contractors.
“We’re passing over the levee,” said Steve Cambone.
Waitin’ for the Robert E. Lee, Rumsfeld thought, hoping the old song didn’t turn into an earworm that would bedevil him for the next week. He could already see the titles of the first Katrina books that would start appearing a year from now: Breach of Faith? That would work.
Despite Cambone’s pointing, he could barely make out Seventeenth Street, let alone the hole in the canal wall, but at least they were lower than 1,700 feet, the closest Bush’s Air Force One flyover—Rove’s genius idea—had gotten last Wednesday. The White House’s excuse had been that the president’s plane would “interfere with rescue and relief operations” on the ground. And what might they have been? From the look of it, nothing.
The chopper was now low enough that Rumsfeld could see some of the houses sporting spray-painted numbers—not the cheering Iraqi signifier that minesweepers had come through, but an indication of how many bodies had been found inside.
“How the hell did they not get word of these breaches up the chain of command until Tuesday morning?” he asked Cambone. His deputy of course had no answer, even after Rumsfeld added: “It’s not a rhetorical question, Steve.”
Late last week he had been forced to send in 4,500 troops from the Eighty-second Airborne. He hadn’t wanted them here at all, but at least they wouldn’t be policing, so you wouldn’t have some kid trained to shoot anybody making a furtive move in Kandahar blowing off the head of some guy looting a sixpack from a 7-Eleven. The Louisiana National Guard, still more or less controlled by the state’s incompetent governor, would remain responsible for restoring order. The guys from the Eighty-second would be doing “humanitarian work” instead, a term that always made its recipients somehow sound less than human, like statistical aggregates.
The helicopter flew over Jackson Barracks, here for 170 years, and now, after the breaks in the levee, more or less gone—drowned and splintered and deserted.
“Jesus,” whispered Cambone. “Where did everybody from there go?”
“To the Superdome,” Rumsfeld answered. “Once boats could get them to helicopters.” The waters had risen twenty feet, a picture his mind could more easily host than the images of life inside that stadium-turned-shelter. But those pictures had gained mental admittance over the last several days: the gropings in the dark; the scrounging for water and bags of chips to stay alive on; the shit-smeared concrete floors. And why was it that most of these images derived from reporters inside the place instead of from DHS people, who kept claiming they couldn’t get near?
“How the hell did that happen in the middle of everything else?” Rumsfeld asked, pointing below to a car that had been crushed by a train.
“The train was empty,” said the helicopter pilot, who’d flown over this curiosity several times. “It wasn’t moving until the wind pushed it.”
Cambone handed the defense secretary the printout of a newspaper article about Condi Rice’s rough week: she’d been seen shoe-shopping in New York, and gotten booed at Spamalot with Gene Washington, before she’d come to her senses and hightailed it back to Washington. Her defense? The State Department had been highly proactive before the hurricane—transferring the responsibilities of its New Orleans passport office to Miami.
“Really Janie-on-the-spot, isn’t she?” said Cambone.
Rumsfeld couldn’t manage a twinkle. Despite her stumbles, Condi had by the end of the week prevailed against him on the question of sending troops. People wouldn’t like seeing them “in the streets,” he’d argued; and she’d fought back, saying that they’d be “cheered.” Even if she sounded like Dick talking Iraq in 2003—They’ll be greeted as liberators—it was clear by Saturday that she’d been right. As for Dick, he knew enough to stay as far as he could from this new mess; Bush so far couldn’t even get him to go down to the politically friendly Mississippi coast. Condi had just been dispatched to Mobile, in her native Alabama; and here he was in New Orleans, uselessly charged with pepping up the troops.
All of these trips had had to wait until Bush could make his own visit here on Friday, when he’d hosted a clusterfuck of a meeting inside AF1 on the airport tarmac. Nagin and Blanco spent most of it shouting at each other, and Senator Mary Landrieu, hapless at the best of times, kept blubbering like some hysterical Kewpie doll. “Brownie,” the head of FEMA, was still off somewhere doing his “heckuva job,” while Chertoff, his boss atop the jerry-built Homeland Security pyramid, waited for a decent interval to pass before firing him.
The helicopter made one last loop over the levee breaks, while Cambone went through the rest of the news printouts. “Jesus,” he told Rumsfeld after seeing one about other countries’ offers of aid to New Orleans. “The government of Afghanistan wants to send a hundred thousand dollars.” The secretary of defense, who usually delighted in ironies, shook his head. He looked down toward the Coast Guard station where they would land. “Let’s get this thing on the ground,” he said. “So we can have our fatuous press conference.”
After touching down, while waiting for the blades of the propeller to slow, Rumsfeld asked Cambone, “Any word on Allison O’Connor?”
He’d called her six days ago, after finding out from another NSC staffer that she’d gone to New Orleans for the weekend. Her BlackBerry just rang. The hotel she was supposed to be at had no record of her.
“Nothing further,” said Cambone.
“Tell Phil Lago I want to talk to him,” said Rumsfeld, referring to the National Security Council’s executive secretary. “And keep this quiet. I don’t want ‘NSC Staffer Missing in New Orleans’ to become one more human-interest horror story.”
A minute later, near the press ropeline beyond the helipad, he took the first shouted question from a reporter: “Mr. Secretary, how would you describe the current state of the relief effort?”
“Suboptimal,” Rumsfeld answered.
Baton Rouge, Louisiana
“Thank you, Mrs. Caine,” said Ross. “You’ve really been kind.” The realtor had just brought him up a hurricane cocktail, complete with a little umbrella stuck in the orange slice.
“It’ll put you in the mood for dinner. I still can’t get over what you’ve been through. You remember Father Montrose? He’ll be joining us tonight. He’s been over in Thibodaux since Tuesday, doing what he can. He’s eager to get back to New Orleans, but they’re sayin’ any returning is weeks away. He might even go to Houston in the meantime to help out the…displaced.” Her delay in uttering the last word seemed to indicate a desire for something more genteel than “refugees.”
Ross, still trying to find a flight to Washington, told her: “I think I can get home by Tuesday, if I fly from here to Nashville first.”
“You’re welcome to stay as long as it takes.”
Mrs. Caine was more relaxed than she might have been, because she now had Ross’s eyewitness testimony to add to news accounts of how well the Quarter had fared in the storm. And she enjoyed bossing around her timid sister, another widow, here in Baton Rouge.
“Sorry about this itty-bitty electric fan,” she told Ross, retreating from the guest bedroom. “I know the air conditioning doesn’t really get up to the third floor.”
“I’m just fine,” he replied. “I can’t thank you enough.”
Once she was gone, he positioned his chair in front of the weak electric breeze. He set the cocktail on the armrest and after two sips was near to dozing again. He hadn’t realized how tired he was until he got here Friday night. Whenever he closed his eyes, the same sound came back into his ears: the scream of the wind early Monday morning, as he lay in his room in the Monteleone, still soaked from his foray into Mrs. Boggs’s courtyard, while Katrina neared landfall. The sound wasn’t the loud, flapping whooshes he remembered from Lubbock dust storms, but a keening, angry whistle that insulted everything in its path with a get-the-fuck-out-of-my-way madness. Within hours the noise had receded, but it still wasn’t out of his head.
When he looked out the window on Monday afternoon, he’d seen a few loose bricks and fallen signs on Royal Street and concluded that things would soon be all right. And then came the news of the levees: half the city had drowned. The elevated Vieux Carré may have survived, like a louche version of Reagan’s shining city on a hill, but soon enough, except for buildings like the Monteleone that had their own backup generators, all the Quarter’s lights were out too.
The hotel began to empty on Tuesday morning; its guests were asked to buddy up in any available cars. Emile told him there would be no problem with his staying, and Ross gratefully pitched in however he could. Food was plentiful: the freezers held provisions for the twelve hundred or so people the Monteleone was used to having inside. But the elevators were out and the generators had only enough juice to keep the hall lights on at night. Ross carried up meals to the frailer guests, along with buckets of water for flushing the toilets. Once some looting began outside, Emile and other edgy staff patrolled the hotel’s perimeter and parking lot. On Wednesday afternoon Ross saw a man on Royal Street break an antiques-shop window with one of the fallen signs.
The troops started arriving as fuel for the hotel’s generator ran out. An extra shipment that the management had ordered before the storm got commandeered for the Convention Center and Superdome. Hellish stories had been drifting back from both of them all week. With the Monteleone’s lights about to go out for good, Ross helped Emile and the others to lock up, after knocking on the door of every room to make sure no one was left behind.
Emile had relatives in Baton Rouge, so he took Ross with him in the last available hotel car, depositing him like a foundling on the front porch of Mrs. Caine’s sister, whose name Ross remembered from the message canceling the dinner party a week before. Settled in the house, he charged his phone and called Deborah to tell her he was okay. Her relief upset him; he didn’t feel worthy of it. And when she put the children on the line he experienced an absurd desire to tell them they would soon have a new baby sister.
He also called the Chairman, who urged him to get back to Washington as soon as he could: “There are lots of relief efforts to plan, and you’re the only one that knows New Orleans.” No, I don’t, Ross had thought, before pledging a fast return.
Only now, two days later, did he feel ready to power up Allie’s BlackBerry, however pointlessly: he’d still found no message from her on his recharged phone. Over the past week he’d gone out of the hotel only once, to look for her at the nearby Marriott Courtyard, which had been turned into a shelter. Even so, he felt certain she would have departed the city before the storm. Her refusal to contact him seemed not ominous but cruel.
Now, as soon as the progress bar indicated a strong enough charge on her phone, he was appalled by what he found: forty-two messages, most of them increasingly frantic repeats from Allie’s mother and office, some of them left as late as Friday. There was even one, in the middle of the rest, from Rumsfeld.
Ross felt his thoughts tumbling like clothes in a dryer. To try and stop them he put Allie’s phone underneath a pillow and turned on the television. He’d been looking at it for most of the two days he’d been here, continually disoriented by its filmed record of so many calamities he’d been nearby but unaware of. He was still realizing how much worse it had been than anything he imagined from inside the Monteleone. When he spoke to Mrs. Caine and her sister, and even to Deborah, he realized how they all knew more than he did.
The greatest surprise was that the natural catastrophe of the hurricane had been followed by what everyone now perceived as a colossal human fiasco, a debacle already starting to dwarf Iraq in the public mind. Right now he was seeing footage of George and Laura Bush at Red Cross headquarters in Washington. They were followed onscreen by John Edwards: “If this is ‘a heckuva job,’ I’d hate to see a bad one.” The ex-senator was squeezing shut his eyelids, in an effort to hold back tears—or maybe to produce them.
Ross turned off the TV and dialed Allie’s landline in Arlington.
Her phone rang and rang, summoning only, yet again, the sound of the keening wind.
2001 N. Clarendon Boulevard, Arlington, Virginia
Allie heard the phone and finger-stopped her ears against its ringing. With her hands so close to her face, she swore she still smelled filth and homelessness on them, no matter that she’d stood under the shower in Houston for half an hour on Friday, and then under her own, here last night, for at least that long.
Eight days ago, once she’d exited the Monteleone and gathered her wits, she’d found a room in a little hotel on St. Ann Street. The owner made it clear that it would be for one night only; he was determined to close up and get out of town on Sunday. That morning, beginning to understand the fix she was in, she decided to head toward the Jackson Barracks. With her multiple impressive IDs and Army connections, they would have to take her in until the airport reopened. She even had a telephone friend there with the memorable name of Merrily Smith, a woman who’d consulted with her about the deployment to Iraq of the Louisiana National Guard’s 256th Infantry Brigade.
And so she walked the first mile down St. Claude, pulling her rollaboard, until she found a renegade cab driver still cruising the streets who agreed to take her the rest of the way before the storm commenced. Sure enough, at the barracks there was a lovely clean cot for her, in a room with a lock, all of it quickly arranged by Merrily herself, who’d come in on a Sunday to help orchestrate the Guard’s expected movement into the streets of the city.
By seven o’clock the next morning phone service was gone, and Allie’s missing BlackBerry, which she assumed she’d dropped on the street on Saturday, seemed entirely irrelevant. She kept her wallet strapped to herself inside a fanny pack and guessed that the worst might be over by afternoon. And then, at 8:15 a.m., she heard a crash, and water began coming in under the door to her room. She opened it, and a lightning-fast slab of Lake Pontchartrain rushed in and pinned her to a bookshelf by the cot. She swam, indoors, for her life, making it to a staircase and then, on foot, to the highest point inside the barracks. She stood there with a captain and a nurse, who told her that the levees had been breached. Hours passed, all of their panic rising with the waters, until their ears popped at the same moment in response to the sudden, enormous rise in barometric pressure that told them the hurricane was moving away. Before long they ventured out onto the roof, realizing they were waiting not for a helicopter but a boat.
A pink house floated past like a merry pleasure craft. Was there a person, at the window, trapped inside it? Or had she only imagined that?
At five o’clock a motorboat came near. Its pilot signaled them to get back inside and climb out one of the windows closer to him. In minutes he had them at the banks of the Mississippi, where a Chinook chopper pulled them up above the city and delivered them, in less time than the average ride on a ski lift, to the Superdome. As soon as they were inside it, she and the captain and the nurse got separated and never saw one another again.
Now, closing her eyes, once more in her own apartment, she can remember the four half-lit nights in the death star of the stadium: the lines for water; the shaming improvisations performed whenever she needed the toilet. Twice she’d received the gift of a half sandwich from people who had brought their own food, as the mayor had suggested in his final evacuation order.
She remembers the sound of the creaking, leaking roof, more frightening than the screams of anger and the speeding rumors of people dying in their seats.
She never tried to use her pregnancy to any advantage, but wrote out a card with Holley’s name and her own and put it in the fanny pack, so that if they both died in there someone might find a record of the baby’s preexistence.
While under the dome, she had wanted a gun more than she ever wished for one in Baghdad.
Where, she had wondered day after day, was the Army? She’d felt as if Bush had taken her advice about a zero troop level and applied it to New Orleans instead of Iraq.
Then, early on Friday, the soldiers started to arrive. Too dazed to figure out whether she was offering assistance or asking for a favor, she identified herself to a sergeant. That afternoon they put her on a bus to Houston, where she narrowly avoided being herded into the Astrodome: she had to remind the relief people that she still had a home, and could get to it if they would only take her to the airport named for the president’s father. Once they did, at a hotel on its edge, she telephoned her mother, who greeted her voice with cries appropriate to a New Testament miracle. And then, at last, yesterday, they found her a flight to Reagan. Back here, inside the apartment, she ordered in food, threw up most of it, and called no one.
The baby could certainly have died, but every instinct and physical sensation convinced her that it was still fine. She had decided to keep the card she’d written inside the stadium as a souvenir of what they’d survived together. Tomorrow she would go to the doctor and let people at work know she was alive.
Had Ross been sensible enough to remain inside the Monteleone? Did she have a right to worry about him? Lying here in the dark without contacting him seemed more respectful than selfish.
On her bureau sat the picture of Fadhil’s daughter—IT’S A PERSON!—a baby made fatherless by men with guns rather than the blunders and ego of a woman who now felt sure she had no right to be a mother.