Hurricane Song Read online

  Then he got off his hurt leg and settled on the floor.

  I watched his black face in the glow of the orange flame as he raised the trumpet to his lips with his free hand. He hit the first note and something inside me jumped. It didn’t matter about the horn being bent or how it sounded. I felt the waves of music flowing through my veins.

  Pop was playing that trumpet like he had nothing left in this world to lose.

  I couldn’t hold myself back, and didn’t want to anymore. So I picked up a broken tabletop, pounding out a rhythm to match Pop’s.

  There was no stage left to play on, tables for me to bus, or kitchen where Cyrus washed dishes all those years. But none of that mattered, either.

  Together, we raised the roof on that joint, and I didn’t stop drumming till my hands turned raw.

  I played my heart out for the spirits I sensed all around me—the ones that were tied to New Orleans, and could never leave or die.

  Epilogue

  We slept on the floor at Pharaohs that night. The next morning, soldiers on patrol brought us back to the concourse outside the Superdome. Before the day was up, Pop and me were put onto an evacuation bus for Houston, Texas. When we got there, the bus pulled up in front of the Astrodome, and Pop looked at me like it was happening all over again.

  “I give it five minutes to be something different, Miles,” Pop whispered. “If it’s anything like the Superdome was, we’re outta here today.”

  It wasn’t.

  There was plenty of food and water to drink. The bathrooms were clean. Families with babies and little kids had a special section. And everyone had their own cot to sleep on, too, with the space for it marked off on the floor. That all helped the soldiers and welfare workers in charge to run the show right, and there wasn’t a single gang preying on people.

  We found Uncle Roy and Fess inside of our first hour at the Astrodome. Pop and me just followed the sound of their jamming straight to them.

  I finally got on the phone with Mom, and she wanted me in Chicago with her right away.

  “As fast as I can get you here,” she said, flat out. “If I need to wade through what’s left of that damn flood myself, so be it. I saw that horror on TV. I can’t sleep with you in another shelter. And where you gonna go to school? I’ve been worryin’ myself sick since Sunday. I can’t take no more, Miles. I want you with me.”

  “I love you,” I told her. “And I miss you. But I can’t walk out on Pop. Not now. We got somethin’ goin’ on together.”

  Pop wanted me in Chicago, too.

  “It’s probably best for you,” he said, with his head hanging down.

  But I wasn’t going to leave him, no matter what.

  A week later, we were still living in the Astrodome, and I was all set to start high school in Houston. Then Pop, Roy, and Fess got an offer to move to Seattle, Washington, and play the jazz clubs up there while New Orleans got rebuilt. The Seattle Jazz Society sent somebody to the Astrodome to find musicians who were left homeless by Katrina.

  The four of us moved into a house together there, and I started out in a new city and school without knowing anybody my own age. And it was hard.

  Pop got himself a new horn and two trumpet cases.

  Every time Pop played a gig, he’d have his bent horn sitting in an open case at his feet on the stage.

  “Lots of folks find it hard to part with the past,” Pop would tell the audience. “But this old horn reminds me that what you can’t tear yourself from is real family.”

  I was too late for football tryouts at school in Seattle. But I got a spot as one of the team’s equipment managers, and at least that kept me around the practice field with a football in my hands.

  Everything wasn’t perfect between Pop and me. We argued hard over my curfew on the weekends after I’d made a few friends, and about me getting a B-minus in music class. Pop still got caught up in his playing too much, especially living with Uncle Roy and Fess. But things were much better between us. And whenever I’d pull out the African drum Uncle Roy rescued for me, Pop would grin wide.

  He told my uncle and Fess about me hauling the piano back inside that club. That’s when they stopped calling me “Chic” and my new tag became “River.”

  “You get called ‘River’ when you’re part of the scene,” Pop told me. “Lots of cats share that name, and what they got in common is they keep the flow going. They’re part of the tradition that keeps the music rolling, and our heritage alive.”

  And I started to feel like part of that tradition every time I pounded the drum.

  Then after we lived in Seattle for nearly seven months, the schools in New Orleans reopened, and Pop hustled us back home fast.

  Uncle Roy had met a woman in Washington and wouldn’t leave her behind.

  “You won’t be playin’ at any wedding soon. I may be in chains, but I ain’t a condemned man yet,” Roy said, when he broke the news he wasn’t going with us.

  Pharaohs was in the middle of getting put back together. But there wasn’t going to be an apartment on top of it anymore. That extra space was going to be part of the club now. So Pop and me moved into a government trailer, and Fess had himself one, too. There were rows of them all the same, put up for people who wanted to come back to work in New Orleans and didn’t have any place to live.

  Being there was extra tough, because everybody around us was starting over from almost nothing. All they had was spirit and faith, and sometimes that didn’t seem like enough.

  In the first two weeks we were back, Fess got four offers from big investment companies to buy his property, even though Katrina had ripped the house on it to shreds.

  “Of course, they want to buy,” raged Fess the day we went over there to see what we could save from his place. “They wanna buy us all out. Pick up every plot of land they can from black folks while we’re still tryin’ to figure out which way’s up. They’ll try to get it for a song—whole blocks of blown-down houses. Then build it up for strip malls, luxury condos, or new hotels. Pretty soon there won’t be any black faces livin’ here. We won’t be able to afford it. And that’s what they want. Believe me.”

  “I take it you’re not selling?” Pop asked him coy.

  "Not sellin’?” Fess filled his lungs again. "Once I clear the front yard, I’m gonna pitch a tent there and live in it, just to make sure we don’t disappear from these neighborhoods. And when I die, bury me with my clarinet right in the corner by the street, ’neath a big headstone for everybody to see. Then when those rich folks buy up the rest of them properties, they can walk with their noses up in the air, pretending not to smell my poor black ass.”

  I finished the last part of my sophomore year in New Orleans. Cain and Dunham were missing from school, and I never had to lay eyes on either one of them again. Football had been suspended the whole year because of Katrina. But that summer it started up again, and I made the varsity team as a tailback.

  Then in late September, the Superdome reopened. The Saints took on the Atlanta Falcons in a Monday night football game, with practically the whole country watching. My coach had connections and got our team free tickets. Pop and Fess got a job playing in the stands that night for the crowd.

  I didn’t know how to feel as I passed through the turnstile. The newspapers said it took $185 million to piece the Superdome back together, like Humpty Dumpty. But no amount of gold paint could ever cover up what we went through in those seats.

  “We probably played ‘When the Saints Go Marchin’ In’ ten times durin’ that game,” Pop told me later. “And every time, I was thinking ’bout that march we had for Cyrus.”

  The Saints put a beating on the Falcons, winning 23-3.

  I closed my eyes in the middle of that cheering crowd and could see Uncle Roy, Preacher Culver, and Cyrus and his family. I could still smell the stink and feel the heat rising, and the air getting heavy. I didn’t want to ever forget what that felt like. What happened to us there was too important to let go of, or to
give a free pass to anyone who helped cause it.

  It was part of history now—part of our heritage.

  I still don’t know exactly where Pop and me will wind up, or if I’ll ever be in that championship game. But I know we’re part of something together—something that feels bigger than either one of us standing by ourselves.

  And Pop and the rest of them can call me “River” all they want.