"Ya alright buddy," a voice said.
Two faces were looking down at me.
"Yeah," I said.

 

I smiled but my mouth didn't work very well and I tasted the blood on my teeth.
One of the guys reached his hand down to me. I did not want to get up but I reached my hand out and they pulled me up. I got a strong headrush and everything went black. There were two girls with the guys. They wore pastel party dresses and looked worried.

 

"Thanks," I said.
"You better get cleaned up," the guy said.
I nodded.
"Is he alright?" one of the girls said.
"I'm alright. I just need a second. Thanks."

 

They left me standing there. One of the girls took a look back over her shoulder. I must have looked pretty bad. When I got my legs back under me, I walked down to Tchapitoulas and turned on it back towards my hotel Downtown. My ribs hurt but my head was so clear. For the first time since I could remember I wanted to be alone. My upper lip was split pretty deep and I sucked at it, tasting the blood on my tongue and enjoying the empty sidewalk. I wondered what Bobby would say when he heard the story.

 

I guess I was still drunk because I do not remember the walk, only that it went fast. When I got back Downtown I did not want to go to my hotel. I didn't want to go to bed at all. I walked straight through Downtown to Market St in the Quarter. I walked past Coops where I'd first met Bobby and Clyde and it made me dizzy to think it had only been three days before. I saw Marie, the big loud bartender, through the open door toasting a customer and knocking back one of her vodka and redbulls. I thought about going in but it did not make sense. I decided to keep walking so I walked past the party crowds to Frenchman St. in the Marigny where the live music would go all night during the Fest and where the people gathered on the black wrought iron balconies to watch the party below. I walked past all the clubs I had been to and a few more and I did want to go inside any of them. I wanted to be alone and so I kept walking through the quiet streets until there was no one around me but the old men picking up cans and the winos sitting on their steps. I started to walk faster. My body heated up and a sweat came on my forehead and lip and it felt good, like I was cleaning myself out. I had gotten all the way through the Marigny before I realized that I was walking towards the Lower 9th Ward.

 

"We callin em back!" the Chief laughed in my ear and his eyes flashed.
He was calling us all back to the Lower 9th, to where the flood had breached the levee and filled the low plain with water and moved all the people away to places very different from New Orleans. The neighborhoods I was walking through got poorer and blacker as I walked and I realized that all the while I was moving along a very slight down grade. I was walking to the lowlands, the flood plain of the Crescent City where the Whites and the Creoles would not live for fear of the snakes.
By the time I reached St. Claude, I had walked all of the drunk out of me and I was tired. My legs were tired and my ribs had begun to throb and I could feel my heart beat in my lip. The blood was pulsing through me and it found out every little hurt and turned up the volume so that I noticed one minute a bruise on my hipbone and the next a lump on the back of my head where I had fallen on the sidewalk.
The street was a wide boulevard and in the middle there were cars, wrecked by the flood, stacked in rows and piles. Some were brand new and others the kind of old beaters you can only see in the South or way out in the country. All of them were coated in a light brown film. A plant grew out from under the hood of a Cadillac. Nothing more destructive to a machine than soil and water. There were groups of men every two blocks or so. Young and old together all with serious looks on their faces, all holding big beers. The first few of these groups I passed, I expected to hear something from them and I got nervous and cocky at the same time, as white men do when they pass a group of black men. But no one said anything to me. I was invisible to them. Pretty soon I wasn't uncomfortable and I could study their faces as I passed. Every now and then an old timer would nod in my direction and I would nod back. They seemed to know where I was going even if I didn't really. I'd studied the map every day since I'd been in New Orleans and I knew that to get to the Lower 9th you just needed to follow St. Claude, but I had no idea how long it would take or what the places would look like.