chapter 28

HENRY

“Are you ready?” said Jake.

“I’m ready,” Henry said.

But he wasn’t so sure.

Guards let them cross the Crescent City Connection Bridge into New Orleans. It was unlike anything Henry had ever seen. The sun was blazing down, but everything was gray. The street was gray. The houses on the street were gray. Their windows and doors were gray. The cars on the street pointed in all different directions. They were gray too.

HELP ME was painted on the side of one of the houses. An enormous tree branch was partway through the front window of the house next door. At the house across the street, a hole had been ripped out of the roof.

And rows of refrigerators were duct-taped and lined up on the sidewalk. Refrigerators! Henry realized that the sun was so bright because there were barely any trees on the street. There were more refrigerators than trees! He imagined the woods behind his house, imagined them filled with appliances. A stand of washing machines, a path through some dishwashers, a field of microwaves and toasters.

It was unlike anything he had ever smelled either. Jeezum Crow! Nopie had pushed him into the dumpster behind the school once. Not on purpose—Nopie wouldn’t have dared do that, but Henry had been balancing on its rim and Nopie ran into it with his bike and knocked him in. New Orleans smelled worse than that. Like rotting vegetables and sweat and sour milk. Like the entire city was a giant dumpster.

Henry breathed in deeply. The thick air coated his lungs, his head, and his thoughts like glue.

He remembered Wayne’s funeral. The way his body had come unglued. The way it had exploded into little bits all over the church.

They drove for a few blocks in silence. The only other vehicles on the streets—besides the pickup sticks array of cars facing every which way—were a Humvee, two construction vehicles, another eighteen-wheeler, and a truck pulling a boat.

“You okay?” said Jake.

Henry nodded. He couldn’t speak.

“Keep your eye out for a sign. We need to find Camp Street. This might even be it.”

Henry nodded again.

They crossed an intersection.

A Chevy Blazer sat parked in front of a house. Or what was left of the house. Magnets covered the car, from the hood to the back bumper, from the wheels to the roof.

“Can you stop?” Henry managed to say.

Jake stopped the truck and Henry got out. He walked over to the Chevy.

There were hundreds of magnets covering it.

I ♥ NEW ORLEANS.

An American flag.

A yellow smiley face.

Mickey Mouse.

Advertisements for doctor’s offices, law firms, electricians, and towing companies.

And photos.

So many photos. School pictures, pictures of grandparents and grandkids, and animals.

Dogs and cats and birds.

Henry touched a picture of a small girl with pigtails sitting next to a huge dog. The dog was practically sitting on her. He traced the outline of the dog’s body.

A tall man with a beard walked over to join Henry.

“What am I doing, right?” the man laughed. “I know. I’m asking myself the same question.”

Jake joined Henry and the man.

“I’m an artist. And I haven’t been able to paint,” he said. “I couldn’t just leave them on these refrigerators out here— It seemed like a crime to abandon them—” He opened up his hand. A magnet of Frosty the Snowman sat in his palm. “Maybe I’m just crazy—” he laughed. “You want to put this one on the car?”

Henry took the Frosty magnet. He studied the mosaic of tiny bits of people’s lives. Finally he placed the magnet on the front passenger door. Next to a magnet of a quote on one side—JUST WHEN THE CATERPILLAR THOUGHT THE WORLD WAS OVER, IT BECAME A BUTTERFLY—and a cartoon of a dog peeing on a man dressed in red pants on the other.

—

Sixteen hundred miles from home. Smack in the middle of a street filled with garbage, in front of houses chopped open and smeared with paint, in a place where everything was backward, where the inside, like those refrigerators, was outside and where the outside, like that tree through the front window, was inside. In the middle of the worst kind of destruction Henry had ever seen and ever smelled, he felt the strangest sense of comfort. Because for the first time since he had been on the mountain with Wayne, what was outside Henry matched what was inside.