Evacuated
Kevin J. Bates Jr.
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COPYRIGHT:2006 BY KEVIN J. BATES JR.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. THIS BOOK, OR PARTS THEREOF, MAY NOT BE REPRODUCED IN ANY FORM WITHOUT WRITTEN PERMISSION OF THE AUTHOR EXCEPT FOR THE INCLUSION OF BRIEF QUOTATIONS IN A REVIEW.
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PUBLISHED BY
APOSTOLIC EXPERIENCE PUBLISHING
8412 BRIDLESPUR DR.
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To all those who suffered during the hurricane season of 2005.
So long as we have strength enough to breathe and blink, we have strength enough to survive and overcome.
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Introduction
Where once there stood buildings, now there lay chasms
See the shots live and on screen, we scream gasps and
Chemical sick water is pungent through gas masks as
I can hear the laughs, the laughs of phantasms
I can hear the ghastly laughs of phantasms
While living through hurricane Katrina, I discovered that you don't have to die to become a ghost. If you are wondering how that is possible, I'll tell you how it happens.
First, some morbid circumstance makes you an introvert. For me, that was a relatively easy transition to make after all the young years I had spent fixed in my bedroom living my life somewhere in between my television and my books. It is a state of very shallow depression where interacting with, or even having, friends is a veritable non-issue. A state of mind for the quiet and contemplative where there are seven things in all of your life more steady and familiar than anything else: Four walls, a ceiling, a floor and a single door that stands as your only, and seldom used, portal to the outside world. It is in this mind state that you begin to explore the limits of the question mark and use it more often than you use a period.
Next, you become isolated within yourself. I don't mean that you are set apart on a small plot of land out of touch with the rest of humanity. In fact you could be surrounded on all sides by people in this state and still feel utterly alone. It is in this state where you begin to feel your mind and body disconnect from one another and rather than working together like they always have, they just let each other go their own way and float. Here's where reality begins to bend and where chance blurts of imaginings can manifest themselves before your eyes so clear and solid that you can fool yourself into thinking that they are lucid reality.
Then comes the final stage where you are within spitting distance of dementia. You know that you're at this point when somewhere in your aimless, listless wanderings, you stop and think to yourself, "Am I really here?" You begin to look at your hands and your feet and what parts of you can be seen from your vantage but despite it all, you've spent so much time with your body disconnected from you that you hardly recognize your own voice. "How did I get to this place? What am I doing here? Where is here? Who am I?" Sadly, you'll know that this is where you are when you ask yourself these questions and the answers are not there.
This is the situation I faced in McComb, Mississippi after Hurricane Katrina. For 15 days I was stuck in a three bedroom house, an island in a forest of nowhere, with 20 other family members without food, running water, drinking water, gas, or phone service.
I tell you, it's no easy thing to endure such mental anguish. And the torment is in no way lessened when you find yourself trudging through it with a small mob of others on all sides of you; a cloud-like plague of flying insects; and random trials to degrade your very sense of humanity as you're beaten into the dirt by a cruel, unrelenting, heat-smothering sun. I tell you, there were more times than none that I wondered if I was going to die.... Did you get that? How many times in life does someone have to come face-to-fang with a situation so severe that they actually think to themselves, "Is this it? Is this where and how I am going to die?"
But as God is my father, my keeper and my witness, we came through it. Not just me, but all of us there. And you could ask any of us from now until forever how we did it and the response you would get, I assure you, would be something akin to what King David himself observed in the 23rd Psalm: "Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me."
Chapter 1
Have you ever found yourself briefly looking at an old country road? Once that road turns off and away, it often disappears behind trees, ponds or swampy patches of land. Have you ever wondered where that road goes? Well, odds are if you took one of those roads out in McComb, Mississippi and got very, very lost, you'd run passed my Uncle Boot's house.
It's a good old house, mind you. It holds a lot of heart and a lot of history for my family. It stands as a construction from old, hand-made design. A homemade home that has stood likely since before my mother trod the earth. Yes, though not a very glorious or magnificently appointed abode, you could very easily feel a sense of care and pride that resonates from every nail and plank. This place, clearly, was made to keep a family safe from storms. And thus it stands as an aged and sturdy body of rusted nails and cold lumber.
Given the situation I knew that before long we would come here. Of every hurricane season that I had ever endured, I cannot recall even one instance that we didn't run by this house for at least a few hours. But now we were beyond the level of visitation and well within the bounds of a pack of squatters. Now understand that there was no legal issue with us being able to stay there as far as the residents' permission was concerned. Uncle Boot and Auntie Nell opened their doors to us very freely, as is the nature of real family, but the Fire Marshal would likely have been called in under any normal circumstances. You see, there are only four bedrooms, one of which is reserved solely for Uncle Boot and Auntie Nell, one bathroom that serves no purpose because there was no running water; and 21 of us.
"Man." I said to myself as I exited the car. "We made it, thank God. That was some kind of trip."
"Yeah, but how long do you think we'll have to be here?" Paul asked me in his typical thick timbre.
"Well I'm leaving with some others later on." Brandon stated as he left my vehicle and headed toward the front door of the house. "Are you guys going to stay here?"
"That depends." I replied while taking a look at this place that I had not set eyes on in at least a year. "A few of us, maybe, but this house isn't going to take too much. I can tell you that." Perhaps I would not have made that statement had I known how wrong I was about to be.
"Uh, Kevin?" Paul asked me as I continued to obliviously look over the roof of my car and toward the house.
"Yeah?" I then turned around to see what had Paul in such a state of sudden unrest. "Oh no." I said in a huff. Just behind me, I saw that the caravan had been reassembled and, this time it was a few cars longer. Now all of them were coming into the small lot in front of Uncle Boot's house and it didn't look like any of them had much intention to leave.
"Are we having a family reunion or something?" Paul stated with sarcastic a look of confusion on him. "It looks like everybody's here!"
"Sure enough." I said as I saw the last hopes of any remnant trace of comfort dwindle and die right in front of me. "Everyone that came up with me is already here, and here comes your mamma." I said as I saw my Auntie Diane's van pull up. "Do you think Auntie Diane has Stephanie and the kids with her?"
"She probably has Arian and Ryan in the car with her. But I know Stephanie's riding with Cornelius."
"Huh? Paul, who's Cornelius?"
"Stephanie's new boyfriend."
I let my head drop at hearing this and shook it off just so that I could ask about this new face in the picture. "Okay. And what's his deal? Anything I should know about?"
"Not much. Just don't say too much about his limp."
"Limp?"
"Yeah. He got shot doing some stuff a few years back and-"
"Never mind! I don't need any more than that." I interjected as I walked away from Paul, mumbling to myself while Brandon and his grandfather, Uncle Rob, drove away. "I don't know what's wrong with Paul's big sister, but I think she just may be crazier than I thought... and that's saying something."
Just then another sedan pulled up just to the other side of Terry's truck and produced a young girl of roughly 15 years and her mother. I switched direction to go and greet them, though I was still wondering how this house was going to stand any more people coming to its doorstep.
"Hey Auntie Susan. How you doing Alicia?"
"We're fine, Kevin." Auntie Susan stated straightly as she moved passed me and into the house where Tasha's radio was being set up. I just watched her go in as the possible sleeping scenarios began to seem less and less ideal.
"So Kevin." Alicia asked me with a twinge of worry. "How bad do you think this is going to be?"
"There's no real telling right now." I answered bluntly. "The only thing we hear is what the radio says and it's not saying much right now but that the storm hit and we have no power. I'd love to tell you it's going to be alright soon, but I don't know."
"I figured that." Alicia said with a sigh. "I just hoped you had heard something I didn't."
"Hey guys." Came the voice of my little sister from across the way. "Alicia, are you staying here too?"
"I guess so. Unless we can find a hotel for the night."
"Good luck with that!" Paul stated harshly. "We just left from there and those people are acting stupid over there."
"I know that, Paul. We were over there this morning." Alicia said with a roll of the eye.
"Oh yeah, you were." Paul replied.
"So how's this going to work?" Tasha asked with a hint of worry in her voice. "I know Brandon and Uncle Rob are going to stay someplace else, but what about the rest of us? Are we all going to stay here?"
"Well we can't go back to the hotel. That's for sure." I said in all candor.
"Do you think that anyone else is staying with... whoever Uncle Rob is staying with?" Alicia asked curiously.
"I don't think so." Paul replied. "I think that if anyone was going with him then they'd have left with him, right?"
"It sure doesn't look like anyone else is trying to move out to me." I added.
"But..." Tasha said as she was brought to utter confusion at the logistics of all of this. "Wait a second. No, that can't be right. There are only four rooms in that house, right? And one of them is already spoken for. So how can we all do that? There are, what, ten of us out here?"
"Twenty one." I said in correction.
"What!?" Tasha and Alicia replied in eerie unison.
"Tasha, remember. Everyone that we came with from home is here; plus Alicia and Auntie Susan and Auntie Diane's whole crew. Now add that with Auntie Nell and Uncle Boot. Plus, you know our cousin Carl lives here with them. All together, that makes twenty one."
Chapter 2
I remember well the first night we were to stay at that place on the high grounds. Most of the day had been spent recalling the terrible driving conditions and complaining about how ill we had been treated at the Hotel Ghetto. So much time was spent on that, in fact, that no one even bothered to think on the sleeping arrangements until the little ones began to nod and yawn.
Now I already knew that I shouldn't even think about sleeping in a bed while I was here. The elder adults held the privilege of seniority. And even if things had been done on a first-come-first-served basis, I knew these people to be fast when they wanted to get to something and ruthlessly territorial when they got it. So rather than putting myself into a competition that I knew I couldn't win, I stood back and I observed.
The beds filled quickly, as did the floors around the beds in the available rooms. The remaining elders claimed the two living room sofas and several others took blankets and made their pads on the living room floor. And after all this was done and all the space was taken, there was still about nine of us who didn't have anyplace to sleep.
I wasn't too upset by this actually. I didn't want to sleep in that house that night or at all if I could have helped it. And it wasn't any kind of a pride issue; I'm no stranger to sleeping on someone's floor. The fact was that we were in the last days of summer, in the middle of Mississippi, with no electricity to feed the air conditioning units that hung out of the windows. The heat that beat down on us through the day was trapped in that house by night and it was sweltering. At a point, I was honestly fearful for anyone who did sleep in there. With so many people packed into such small, sweltering quarters, I was afraid that someone might suffocate in their sleep. So to that end, I opted to seek an alternative resting place.
I headed outside and saw my car just sitting there in the night and remembered that inside my car were seats. Seats with cushions and headrests. What a faultless answer to my sleeping dilemma. I took my keys in hand and swiftly made way to my little vehicle.
Then, as I inserted my key into the driver's side door, my eyes wandered heavenward. What I saw in the sky above me was sight enough to seize the very breath in me and make my eyes wide. Now, so far away from the strings of streetlights, the far reaching lights of the glowing business district and even the flashing red shown by the random radio towers, I saw the sky and I was taken aback.
I had never, never, in all my life seen such a thing as this. I saw the winding cluster of stars that made the passing whip of the milky way. I saw the many constellations that I could only read about in textbooks and believe were there. I saw the faint red glow radiate from Mars. I saw why the ancient Greeks and Romans turned to the night sky for such things as direction and inspiration in their timeless, heroic and poetic tales. I saw, I suppose, the same kind of sky that Adam laid under at the very beginning of the world. And when I was so deeply enthralled by the complete gloriousness of such a divine creation as the absolute starscape, I felt within myself that for the first time in my entire life, I saw the night sky.
What can one say when he looks at the beginning of infinity and is left wanting? At that moment the only pathetic word that I could get myself to whisper was, "Beautiful."
"Yeah. It is isn't it?"
"What?" I said as I tore my gaze away from the stars and to my side. And who else would be there but my little sister.
"Oh no." I grumbled to myself. "Girl, what do you want?"
"It's too crowded in that house." She answered straightly. "We need a place to sleep tonight too."
I gave her a slightly crosswise glace at hearing this. "Who's we?" I didn't even need her to point before I looked over to the other side of my car. There was not only Tasha, but three others that looked to my car to provide them a place to rest that night. Feeling just a twinge more sympathy than annoyance for this group of youngsters, I offered no real argument when they asked for a place to sleep. I'm not so cruel as to leave them to sleep on the ground outside, after all. But I do wish they would have chosen the house, porch or ground - anything other than my car after all of us climbed in.
You see, we're a Black family raised in the south. And what that means is that we're used to highly seasoned, broiled, fried and barbecued meats, poultry and seafood with sauce dripping off of it at the tips. I mean the kind of good stuff that makes baby fat grow up. And right now, we all wished we had gone on a diet before heading out. We're not massively obese, mind you, we just tend to carry a little bit more around with us than some would like.
Paul, I believe, was the most uncomfortable because he was the biggest of us. Poor Alicia was the smallest. Sad for her, because she was sandwiched in between Tasha and Paul. Raven sat in the front passenger's seat and I was in the driver's seat. This seating arrangement was finalized sometime around ten o'clock but as tired as we all were, sleep eluded us.
As minutes turned to hours, we held a long, pointless conversation about things that, as far as we knew, were washed away. The heat of the day had gotten into us and it forced me to roll the windows down. But frustration followed when I realized that a substantial pestilence of flying insects chose now to move en masse, and I had to roll the windows back up to only a slight crack so as to keep them out and keep at least a huff of fresh air coming in. Around one in the morning Alicia decided she couldn't take the conditions in my car and chose to try and sleep on top of the trunk outside. She fought it out for a solid hour but the swarm of insects tormented her to the point that she was forced to come back inside with the rest of us.
Conversation turned to laughs, then to sighs, then to television gossip, then to frustration at our own sleeplessness and finally to a series of silencing hisses that acted to keep us all quiet as we individually battled ourselves for the right to fall soundly asleep.
I remember Raven went first. I looked at my 15 year old stepsister and realized how little I knew about her. Other than this. I had only ever met her twice before. I studied her braids that were tinted a lighter brown than her natural color. She always seems to have a smile on her face, like she is telling herself an interior joke that did not lose its color no matter how many times she repeated it. My sister Tasha fell asleep next , followed by my cousins Paul and Alicia soon after. I was a harder case, but I tried to remain quiet with respect to the younger ones under my watch. Having such knowledge as I do, even some things beyond those younger ones, I was aware in the deepest parts of me that this situation was likely to get worse before it got better. Everything natural in me was screaming for me to scream, but I found peace in the looks on their sleeping faces and the magnificence of the untainted sky above me as I fell into an exhausted lull and then, myself, into sleep.
Chapter 3
Have you ever fallen asleep at the end of a long, impossibly trying day and said to yourself in the depths of sleep that all you had just endured was a dream? Then you wake up and half hope that you'll rise in a happier, less painful world that gives hope for the fulfillment of optimistic expectations only to find that what you so sorely prayed was nothing more than a horribly realistic dream was reality itself. That was my set of feelings my first day out there.
In all honesty as soon as my eyes crept open, something in the utter pits of me shouted for me to just fall back asleep. But I could not. Though I struggled to close my eyes back shut, I could not keep them that way for very long at all. So after I grudgingly allowed myself to rise back into consciousness, I immediately took notice of two things. One was that my clock read eleven thirty in the afternoon and secondly, that I was alone in my little car where once I was smothered by four other people. I exited the vehicle, not even caring to lock the door or roll the windows closed, and took a look about myself. I was still there.
Behind me was Uncle Boot's house, just in front of me was an asphalt road with a vast forest behind it and in either direction was more road and more trees and more trees and more trees. It was then that I began to gather a deeper sense of my locale. Where I stood was like a pad of red-orange dust surrounded on every side by tall arbor giants. If I was to lose my mind here and run in a manic panic, I could go in any direction and I would find myself in the woods too soon before I began to lose breath.
The closest neighboring structure to us was a church that sat just under two miles down the road. The closest semblance of a town we could find was some fifteen miles down that same path. Then, if we went two miles more, we would find a major shopping center where we could purchase food and water and gas. This place was like an island. But where an island is a landmass swarmed on all sides by water, this house was a half-sanctuary swarmed on all sides by trees and distance.
Now I say half-sanctuary, not to take anything away from the profoundly appreciated home that Uncle Boot and Auntie Nell opened up to us, but to convey the reality of our situation. For as much love and family as that house offered, the rest of the natural world was not so hospitable.
Anyone who is even familiar with the concept of debt and day-to-day struggles for the impoverished and lower-middle class has likely heard and laughed at some comedians' jokes about bills not being paid and utilities being cut off. Well this situation brings to mind the thought of having the power and water disconnected. But to a pitiless degree.
The power was gone; no one had any illusions about that. On the drive there, I had personally seen the electrical cables that fed that house snapped and laid low some seven miles away. And with all the chaos that was running unchecked though the entire gulf coast, it was anybody's guess when the electrical workers were going to get to fixing it.
There were several problems that this caused and the immediate one was food. Now faced with the grave reality that home was no longer a place we were going back to any time in the near future, we were forced to settle in for what could potentially be weeks. But how do you store and preserve food for that period of time? The simple answer for that is you can't.
The only real solution to this was to buy only what we needed to eat that day and no more. We would then go back out and buy more food for the next day and so on in this manner. But this introduced more problems. One was the fact that we were buying new rations everyday and even though that would solve our food storage problem, the fact still remained that there were twenty-one people in that house that had to eat. This equated to something like seventy dollars that would have to be spent a day just to keep everyone fed. And of course there was the gas issue.
The only sane way to get to the market from our island was by car, but sadly for us, two of the nearest gas stations to us had been battered, broken, impaled by tree limbs, or some combination of the three. The remaining stations were unable to get any new gas into their pumps so they were forced to ration off what they had. Fifteen dollars of gas per car was the average. It wasn't long before half the pumps within a thirty mile radius were sucked dry. With all these things in mind, it was decided that only one car would be sent out at a time and only to collect our necessities. But despite it, the water issues still loomed over us, ever menacing and ever torturous.
Somewhere along somewhere, the storm had come and done some severe damage to McComb's water systems. I couldn't say if a fallen tree had pulled up a pipe or if water and sewage lines were forced into one another, but for whatever reason, there was no water coming to us at all.
The plants Uncle Boot and Auntie Nell had growing outside were no good to us, because we couldn't wash the dirt and fertilizer off of them. We couldn't wash our clothes, which after one and a half days of heat and sweat were becoming filthy and fetid. Our physical bodies were no cleaner than our clothes, but there would be no bathing for no one knew how long. And besides these things, the toilet would flush, but no new water would come to it, so relieving ourselves in a manner even closely similar to that of human beings rather than zoo animals became less and less of an available option.
For this, our only viable solution was to dedicate some of our food money into purchasing two or three gallons of water every day to pour into the toilet after use. The rule was to flush only at the day's end so as to keep our toilet water usage to a minimum and to pour only a single cup into the bowl once you were finished. I will likely never forget the smell or the sight.
By mid afternoon, the bowl was nearly filled with unflushed urine and feces and brown-striped toilet tissue. The spray can did nothing to remove the sharp, hanging stink but only complimented it with the scent of flowers and rain. Clearly, use of the bathroom was an act that we all tried to avoid if merely from personal disgust, and those of us who were able found it much more acceptable to find a tree and handle our business there like feral dogs with no training or shame.
And with all these things at hand, there I stood on the island facing a clear and cloudless sky. The rain was now gone and the biting wind was nonexistent. The sky seemed to sparkle in its own crystal blue and appeared almost pristine, as it seemed to feign innocence. But now, cloudless wasn't a good thing as we were just about praying for rain and shade to take away some of this almost intolerable heat. But no, there would be no such overt pity shown to us small things caught unhappily in the wake of the hurricane. And realizing this, all I could do was look up towards the throne of God and silently pray for mercy as the beaming sun poured heat upon us like misery raining from above.
Chapter 4
After a time, it seemed like my body was merely a shell that moved about and my entire existence was reduced to a series of miserably surreal daydreams that lasted hours at a time-- daydreams that I could not pull myself out of. It is difficult to adequately describe the all-encompassing sorrow that was present there and as thick in our atmosphere as the merciless heat. I can so clearly recall watching myself being taken out of myself and not having the wherewithal to do anything about it. I began to internalize my very existence until I was a walking specter covered in flesh that wandered as aimlessly as a blind drunkard. I felt broken down to the very foundation of my humanity and felt the grief push against me on all sides like a massive hydraulic press. And the only solace I was able to gain at this point was that I had the coveted ability to draw into my own head like a turtle draws into his shell. But yet I was still suffering, yet I was still becoming a living ghost, and I was doing so without anyone in the outside world knowing of my family's plight.
The fact was that we had survived, but the harder fact was that no one knew that we did. In addition to the complexity and isolated nature of our location, we had no way of communicating to the outside world. Between the twenty-one of us there were a dozen plus cell phones, including my own, but not a single one of them were receiving or sending a proper signal. We had other family that had gone in other directions and friends that we did not know if they were alive or dead. But mostly, we were unable to let anyone who cared know that we were not dead.
It was like we were suddenly made castaways from the rest of humanity. We were like the ship in the middle of the ocean that is caught in a storm and is unable to signal anyone of their situation. Like the island in the midst of the sea that is battered by a tsunami until it is reduced to little more than a sandbar and no one knows of the havoc that descends upon it. In a way, we seemed to have stopped existing while yet we lived.
It is such a terrible thing to be transformed into something phantasmal while you continue to draw your mortal breath. What worse feeling is there to feel as though you don't exist in your mind while your body is still subject to hunger and thirst and pain? What is torture if not the feeling of your tongue swelling and your lips cracking and your skin drying like the removed flesh of a scaled fish while your mind tells you in its confusion that you are already a specter? In this manner, we were made ghosts and our minds and spirits wandered this place like haunts... but we were yet alive.
This so immediately reminded me of the old brainteaser that asks, "If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is around to see or hear it, does the tree make a sound?" Odd that that one was always a favorite of mine. And I was convinced from young that the tree did make a sound. It was my overanalyzed opinion, at age nine, that despite the fact that no one was there that the tree still produced audible sound waves in its immediate area and that this sound would exist regardless of whether there were witnesses or not... Yes, I was a nerdy kid.
But do you see the correlation between this question and our reality? We were the trees in this question and we fell hard to our backs and sides in such a way that we were unsure that we would ever stand erect again. We were lost in a grand shuffle of the human race and we were in a place away from anyone we were familiar with save those that were immediately to our lefts and rights.
So if someone was to rewrite the question to conform to us it would read something like this: "If a painfully large group of people massed together in the forest started to lose their minds to the point of sorrow, self pity and denial and no one was around to witness their suffering, do they exist?"
Yes, such was our plight and discontent. Such was my own personal torment and mental weariness. Until this, I never knew that such anguish--such misery--could exist. For a time, I was actually driven to question the nature of me. I asked myself half-consciously again and again if I was even real. For a day and a half, my mind was lonely and affixed on a single subject as my shell of a body wandered this place and that. I continued to ask myself, 'do we still exist? Are we alive?' And I continued to ask, even though the answer came back 'yes' every time. Every single time.
Chapter 5
"This is insane." I said to myself as I wandered wearily from this place to that in the heat of the mid afternoon that I had just woken up into. "After everything, I'd never think I ever want to see rain again.... But now, I'll give just about anything to see a rain cloud. Just one.... cloud....." at this I began to lose myself to a kind of mild fainting spell. My head began to spin and I felt as though I would soon fall to my face in the dust despite the fact that I had just awakened not half an hour ago. But then again, such was the merciless panging of the heat against my already battered being. "I .... I don't want to.... I have to stay.... stay awake.... stay alive."
"Then don't die. That'll take care of that problem." Came a voice of such conscious beauty that I was forced to look up.
"Who said that?" I asked while frantically searching here and there to find no one. "Hello? Who's there?"
"It's more like, 'who's here', Kevin. Don't you remember me?"
"What?"
At this I collapsed to my knees and looked straight ahead to see what had not been there before. There was what must have been the most gorgeous thing I had seen throughout this entire ordeal. There, kneeling down in front of me, looking me sympathetically in the eye and, I would have sworn, just as real as the hand in front of my own face, was Yvonne.
I remember well the first time I saw her. It was roughly a week before the most recent hurricane of hurricanes laid low the city of New Orleans and her outlying neighbors, about a year after I had swapped words with my friend Steven on the politics of out present and the aspects of our collective futures. I had resumed my schooling at my university in New Orleans and I was nervously beginning my second year the day I found myself entering into a chemistry class. I suppose it's a nerd's prerogative, but I made certain that my seat was in the forward-most row of the lecture hall.
While waiting the two or three minutes for time to come about and the class to begin, I mulled over thoughts concerning the bureaucratic insanity that held up my financial aid and kept me from getting any of my necessary books. I wondered how long I would be able to survive in this class without the proper text and exactly how long I would be able to bluff my way through it until I could get my aid unlocked. Then as the professor began pacing behind his long, desk-like lectern, Yvonne walked into the room.
I was immediately taken aback by the very look of her. My eyes bugged out in my skull and my jaw just about dropped off of my head. Her frame was svelte and marvelously proportioned. Her skin was smooth and soft looking and bore the rich color of honey and caramel. Her very walk exuded grace and behind her chic, slim-framed glasses were two of the most gorgeous, dark brown almond eyes I had ever seen. And then the unbelievable occurred. By some unfathomable act of kindness, or perhaps cruelty, she overlooked every other available chair and sat in the one that shared my right armrest.
I wanted to look at her, but my head would not turn to her at that moment. I wanted to speak to her, but my breath was caught and held fast in my throat. Every synapse in my nervous system was suddenly set afire with a heated charge of electric euphoria so immediate and tangible that I would almost swear she could feel me twitching. And as the professor rattled on with dry joke after dry joke, she would occasionally toss him a bone and laugh, giving me a preciously sought after hint of her melodious, angelic voice. Needless to say, I didn't get a lot of chemistry information out of that lecture. Then, before I could even finalize how I wanted to introduce myself to her, the professor dismissed us and she was gone. Thankfully, none the wiser of the affect she had on me by simply sitting next to me.
As I rose from my seat, I felt like a fool and a failure. In all my life, I had never been much good with women. I was just never the guy that developed a spark with them and almost nothing was ever granted me beyond the strictly platonic. At this point, I can still count on one hand the number of girlfriends I've ever had and I can't really even count four of them towards my total. I've always been the nerd to some capacity and I've always, always, been the nice guy. Thusly, when it came to being friends there was never a problem, but once I tried to advance further there always came the thousand and one reasons why we should just stay as we were. But this one was different.
I had never felt such an electricity from any girl as I did from her. Every cell in my body was shot awake when I was near her and I wanted more than I could say to just speak my hello to her. But I could not. Even then, when everything in my mind was moved to move, my body immediately shut down and she never even knew it. But I realized that I had that this was a Monday and I had this class again on Wednesday and Friday so I knew I would see her again and have a second chance to actually speak.
It's is still mind boggling to think about how important she was to me. At that point there was nothing in this mortal world that mattered more to me than her and I just couldn't figure why. I gave a shrugged never mind to the fact that I was broke and going more broke with each class. I didn't give a button and thread for the fact that I was utterly ill-equipped for literally every class I was enrolled in. The fact that I didn't have any of my proper text books or any money or aid to get them was no longer a major concern. All that mattered that day was me finding some way to get to this girl and, at the very very least, find out her name. But it had been a week since I saw her and she was nowhere to be found, and so I opted to vent my frustration one Friday at the university recreational center.
During the two and a half hour time gap I had set into my class schedule I played basketball along with some of the best intramural players at the college, and assisted my team to a hard earned victory. I had to give a lot of what was in me to just keep up with those guys but in the end the intense game, and the delicious smoothie that I chased it with, acted to loosen my tightly compacted nerves as I made my huffing exit.
Not minding what time it was and having nothing of any severe importance to do at the moment, I decided to begin the trek from the campus rec center all the way to the science building on the complete opposite side of the vast, sprawling college campus. Now typically am never on time for much of anything. I once got to school a full hour and a half ahead of time and was late for class. But this afternoon, I was at the entrance to the hallway of my chemistry recitation course a full twenty minutes before the class started, and there she sat, just reading a book, all but oblivious to my presence.
I had to turn my head heavenward for just a moment to mouth a deeply humble 'thank you for making this possible for me.' After that, I moved in slowly, sat my book bag down next to me and sat myself in the chair just next to her. I desperately wanted to make sure that I came across smoothly and thusly spent about five minutes just sitting there trying to force my mouth to make words. Then, when it finally would cooperate, I could think of nothing to ask her but, "So, you like reading?"
'Brilliant ice breaker,' I thought to myself sarcastically. 'That's the way to get a ridiculously beautiful girl to talk to you.'
"Yes, actually." She replied sweetly. "I try to read every now and then. You know, whenever I get a spare minute"
I was stunned for a moment. I couldn't believe that this young woman had actually responded. I had to follow up on this, lest the opportunity pass me by. "So, uhm... what kind of books do you like reading?"
"Mostly Christian books. Fictions and stuff, you know."
"Oh, you're a Christian?"
"Uh-huh. I was born and raised in the church actually."
'Score!' I shouted inside myself. 'A super-fine Christian girl who likes reading and is in the college of sciences. This is beyond belief. So should I bring up my book? I mean, I did write a book and am about halfway through my second one. That should impress her, but maybe it's a bit too early in the conversation. Better try something else.'
"So where'd you get that book from? I don't think I saw it in the student bookstore."
At this, she actually placed a bookmark in her page and turned her full attention to me. Had I not been fighting with all my mind and sinew to keep my cool, I would have broken down right there.
"No, my grandmother gave me this. I don't think I'd ever buy a book from that store unless I absolutely had to. They're so expensive."
"No joke. I mean, I've heard of price gauging, but those people are pirates." This elicited a slight smile and giggle from her and the sound of her gentle laughter struck me with such an uplifting sense of warmth that I thought for a minute that I might float out of my seat.
"So," she began, surprisingly opting to lengthen our slightly awkward conversation. "do you read a lot too?"
This was my cue. "Not as much as I should, I think. I do write though."
"Really?" she said in a slightly interested tone and look that asked me to go into further detail.
"Yeah. I finished my first book not too long ago and I'm about halfway finished my second one now."
"Wow." She said with a surprised look in her eyes. "That's amazing. What are they about?"
"Well the first one is a religious-suspense/thriller about death, life and redemption, and the second one is a sequel to that."
"That's so cool. I'd have to read it sometimes. Are you going to get it published or anything?"
"I plan on it. The first one is in D.C. right now getting a copyright, but once that comes through, I'm going to get into talks with a publisher."
"I'll have to look out for it."
"..." it was right then that my mind recalled something very basic to polite conversation. I had honestly been so elated that I was actually having this conversation, that I had forgotten that which was supposed to come before most else. "Oh, I am so sorry." I apologized while drawing my hand to my temple. "I don't know what happened to my manners. Uh, my name is Kevin Bates."
I then offered my hand to her and she took it gracefully. Her skin was textured more smoothly and flawlessly than I could have imagined. There was a kind of soft warmth that came off of her and into me. It took some great doing, but I was able to maintain my presence of mind enough to hear her reply. "My name is Yvonne. It's nice to meet you, Kevin."
It was then, there, cordially holding this young woman's hand, if in nothing more than a greeting handshake, when my mind began to play cruel games with me. I would swear for that instant that this felt like The One. That perfectly arranged stranger that would be my lady. The very thought of it was soothing to my heart, mind and soul.
"So, Kevin." She began again, breaking me out of my trance and giving me reason to release her hand. "Are you like an English major?"
"Oh no." I responded, trying frantically to recompose myself. "At the end of it all I'd like to be an orthodontist. It's been a goal of mine for a while now."
"Okay, that's kind of weird."
"Well I love writing, you see. But I'd like to have and wife and kids someday, and writing doesn't have a very steady paycheck from what I've heard. If I'm going to be a husband and father, I have to have a guaranteed income that can provide for the ones I love."
A slight smile and a glow fell over Yvonne at hearing this and she snickered her response. "Well it's weird, but I'm going for the dental field too. And if you can believe it, I dabble in writing myself."
"Really?"
"Well, I've never gone so far as to write a whole novel, but it's something to pass the time."
This was as the blessing of my life. I had almost instantly developed chemistry with this girl I met in chemistry. Considering all the terrible luck I've had with women in my life, here sat a woman with similar ambitions, similar goals, similar hobbies and a similar religious background as me. Add the fact that she was one of the most beautiful and sweet girls I had ever met and I couldn't see how I could possibly lose. The whole thing came together to spell 'JACKPOT!' in big, bold letters. I would have been content to have gone back and forth in such a manner with this girl from the rest of the day and longer if she'd have let me, but it was at this point that the Teacher's Assistant opened the door for us to enter and sit.
We entered the room to see a series of semi-circular tables arranged into a large ellipse with new laptop computers stationed at each seat. We were allowed to pick out seats and as I sat I watched in great happiness as Yvonne slid gracefully into the seat next to mine. With the last few moments that the TA gave for the straggling students to come in and take their seats, we continued to speak about everything and nothing like young hearts love to do. Recitation started shortly after this, and as our intellectually prodigious Asian TA went on and on about how to do this, that, thus and so, Yvonne and I sat next to each other, sneaking smiles and glances at one another. Even still we managed to get our work done, though she was finished a quick bit before me.
The work wasn't due for another week and I could easily have completed it some other time. And all of me wanted to follow that course of action because as soon as Yvonne finished, she packed her bag and stood to leave after saying to me in the sweetest of timbres, "I'll see you Monday."
This comment drew a smile from me and a deeply inset feeling of warmth. But for all the chemistry we had, I was still that nice-guy-nerd who never got the girl. I was so jubilant over the fact that she had shown so real an interest in me that I didn't even think to get her phone number or e-mail until she was long since gone.
"How are you?" she asked with a slight smirk. "You look a mess."
"This can't be..." I said to myself as a tear began to run a track down the caked on layer of red-orange dirt that was settling onto my face. "How did you...what are you doing here, Yvonne?"
"I guess you needed me." She replied so sweetly that I could hardly stand it.
At that moment, while my strength was still battling to come about for reasons of my mind's grand bewilderment, it was almost all I could do to stretch my hand out towards her face. I was compelled to touch her skin again. To feel a warmth that was comforting rather than scalding. It was all I wanted in the world to simply feel the softness of her, but when I tried to....
"...n-No. No, please. No!" I shouted to myself as I touched her chin and felt nothing.
"I'm so sorry. I know how this must hurt you."
"You can't possibly.... You're not real. You're just a... I don't know, a mirage, a hallucination. Oh my God, I'm going insane!" I then jumped up to my feet and started to run away from her, but her words caught me in mid-step.
"You'd be going insane if I wasn't here wouldn't you?" I heard her say almost sorrowfully. "Kevin, please. I would have hoped that you seeing me again would be good."
"But I'm not seeing you." I replied in frustration. "I'm seeing a memory of a girl I wanted to fall in love with playing in front of my eyes because I'm losing touch with reality. That's what I'm seeing. You're an idea of mine. Just a product of an overactive imagination that has nothing to do but mess with me in the middle of all of this... this.... You're just a figment of my imagination!!!"
"Yes" she replied wryly. "But you're still talking to me, aren't you?" as embarrassing as it is, I have to admit that I didn't have an answer for that. "Don't you see? I'm here because you need me. I don't want you to fall off the world like this. You can't really go to anyone else about what you're going through right now because you're all going through it at the same time. Kevin, you need to talk to someone, so talk to me. Please."
In the face of all of this I had to go back to my car and lay my face into the window mumbling and wondering why the words of this living imagination seemed to ring so true to me. "Oh God." I said to myself. "Please save my mind."
"Trust me, he will." She replied. "I'll be here when you need me. Anytime you need me... goodbye..."
And at this, I returned with a confused, happy and simultaneously grievous goodbye to her as I heard the sound of a soft kiss echo in the air of the hot midday.
Chapter 6
Before I was an evacuee, I was an employee. For just over two and a half years, I held a position as a service clerk at Walgreens drugstore. And that day before we actually left, the day we were deciding whether or not to even leave at all, I was at the front register, like I so often was.
The front register was a position that was usually the trainee's first task to master. The initiation point, so to say. In Walgreens' culture, the front register carries a kind of dignity and pride in its manner, as the person at that register was the first employee the customer saw when they entered and the last one they saw as they exited. For me however, the position had begun to lose its luster despite the fact that I had gotten exceeding good at it. In fact, I can say with no ego that I was one of the best cashiers that store had on staff.
But still, the work load was usually light and I did have a nice view of the outside. Now, the store was strategically located on the corner of West Esplanade Avenue and Chateau Boulevard in Metairie. There was a gas station positioned just across Chateau and from my vantage, I could see West Esplanade filter into Chateau from an area that could hold six to ten cars from the station an into the subdivision that Chateau fed into. What was strange that day was that there was a line of cars that spanned that entire six to ten car stretch, coming from both sides of traffic, and continued passed my sight into the subdivision. Needless to say that the station's twelve car port was full with all manner of vehicles filling up and trying to exit in a twisting, congested mess of disorganization.
This rushing mass of vehicles struck me as an oddity, for at this point I actually had no knowledge that a hurricane was even coming in our direction, or than one even existed. It was a wondrously beautiful day out, after all. There were delicate strings and puffs of wandering clouds, the sun hung high in the sky, the air warm and crisp and inviting. Who would think that a torrential terror of a storm was coming? And in fact, there was one man, other than me, who didn't.
About midway through my shift, there entered a rather interesting elderly gentleman with a receding hairline and various traces of grey who had come in to buy beer. He was somewhat dismayed when I informed him that we didn't sell any alcoholic beverages at our store. I actually had hoped that that was the end of it, but as so often seems the case of the afternoon alcohol consumer, this man was a man of opinions.
As he moved toward the exit, he seemed ready and content to criticize the gas station patrons across the street as idiots. He in fact spent a good five minutes conversing with me in between customers about how this hurricane Katrina wasn't even coming in our state. This man claimed to be from one of the local news stations and the nametag on his breast pocket confirmed that, but taking into account his manner and mode of his speech, it did little to legitimize his claims in my opinion. Rather, it only moved me more to make certain that I filled up that night before I even started back for home.
Hurricane season was no new thing to me. Actually, it often seemed little more than an excuse to get out of the state and visit some family that I might not otherwise see. But all Louisiana residents knew well that if you were even thinking of evacuating, one of the first things you wanted to do was top off your gas tank for the trip to wherever you were headed, and in all the hurricane seasons that I had been through, I had yet to see people react in such an urgent manner as this. These people knew something monstrous was coming and they didn't want to be caught in its wake.
Yet there this man was, spewing songs of their stupidity in my ear while speaking of how well ingratiated he was with the meteorological staff at his news station. He just continued on to me and to several of my customers his entire time there about how the storm would veer either to the east or the west and should hold no terror for the people in our area of Jefferson and Orleans Parish for more than a moderate rain.
Thusly frightened for what I had seen and heard, I took time out of my allotted forty-five minute lunch break to call my paternal grandfather whom I affectionately call 'Pops.' I spoke to him on my cell phone and found out that he and my Grandmother had resolved to evacuate to LaPlace, which is stationed a nice way north of Kenner and Metairie, where they would stay with my auntie Kim and her family. After corroborating with Pops about the interesting newsman, he was doubly moved to insist on my evacuation from the area. He always was a prudent and cautious man, bless him.
Other than these new developments, my shift continued and ended just as it always had. I wondered why I hadn't heard of this Katrina before today and the most prominent thing in my mind that day were people. The people that I worked with, the job that I was doing and the friends I had made and said goodbye to over the past two and a half years. I left that day and said goodbye to managers and coworkers.
Perhaps, had I known that I would be so soon taken from that place that oft times seemed like a rut, I would have slowed my step to take in the entirety of my workplace one final time. During my coming trials I discovered that the memories of this place would act as a comfort, like a balm for my mind. After all, I did have some great times there, and it just isn't possible to spend two and a half years of your life somewhere and not have memories of it. But without walking the aisles, without rendering any grand or beauteous farewells, I waved and said my rapid goodbyes to the people that happened to be around at the time.