“Sylv,” I said when we glanced at each other, silently deciding we needed to hurry down the sidewalk.
He didn’t look at me when he spoke. “Bastie said she saw a whole mess of Mr. Simoneaux’s white men all gathered together this morning when Ethel came to get her. Policemen too, and not Parish either. They were New Orleans cops.”
“Did she see Dempsey?” I watched my brother as he moved through the crowd and didn’t like how light his skin looked just then, as though something set in his throat and he didn’t want to let it out. That look on his face made something thick and knotted clot the air in my throat.
“No,” he finally said, taking my hand to tug me along quicker. “She said she hadn’t seen him for a week.”
Dempsey was the sweetest boy I’d ever known and he was the only one I’d ever let get close enough for a kiss. I thought maybe, despite the hurry in our steps and the wild noise around us, despite the trouble we were likely all in because of his daddy, that maybe, if our world had changed, that Dempsey would be the boy I’d get a chance to be with. Maybe forever.
We made it two blocks from Mama’s shop where the sidewalk was thinner and the crowd moved slower. I followed Sylv without really thinking of where we were going or why the streets were filling up with water. It sloshed around our ankles as we scurried.
“Sylv—” I started, pulling on his arm to make him stop but my brother’s arm tightened and his whole body went straight as the blade of a knife.
“Son of a bitch.” Sylv didn’t curse often. Bastie had always made sure we kept our tongues civil, but just then, watching wide-eyed as a few blocks away Mr. Simoneaux and a half a dozen policemen stormed into Mama’s shop, I thought maybe Bastie wouldn’t mind so much.
Things went muddy then. Dark and thick as though the water around us came straight from the Manchac and not the Mississippi. Sylv took off, running toward Mama’s small shop and he got tussled and pushed back as Mr. Simoneaux stood next to a large truck with a shotgun on his shoulder and Joe Andres at his side. As I got nearer and spotted Uncle Aron and Mama screaming at three policemen, wrestling with them as they fought the rising water on their calves and the men screaming about prohibition and illegal contraband, I could just make out the shape of a boy sitting in the cab of Mr. Simoneaux’s truck.
“There’s that little bitch.” I could only guess that I was the little bitch Joe Andres pointed to, because as I made my way toward Mama who was still fighting with the policemen and the rising water, Mr. Simoneaux and Andres cornered me. “What you got to say for yourself, gal? You gonna tell those policemen how you attacked me? How you tried stealing my wallet when I’d had too much drink?”
He wasn’t worth the argument, a fact I thought was plain when I darted around him to follow my Mama and Uncle Aron, just as they broke away from the policemen.
“Run, baby. Run fast.”
I didn’t know where Uncle Aron was or how I’d gotten ahead of him. I didn’t know if Sylv followed or where it was Mama was leading us. I only knew that the rain came so hard and fast now I could only make her out by the black hem of her slip as she dashed ahead of me and those long, red nails as Mama reached out her hand.
We came to some building I didn’t recognize and slipped right in. There were tarps that covered the broken windows and wooden crates stacked up ten feet along the inside. It smelled like mildew and dirt and of the sweat and rain that came off me and my mama’s skin and hair.
“Keep still,” she said to me, pulling me next to her as we hid underneath a wooden stairwell with more tattered tarps and half-broken crates. She moved her head, nodding at the burned smudge in a circle around the foot of the staircase and I wondered, trying to distract myself from the race of my heart and the shake that took over my hands and fingers, if this was where drifters came to rest when nights in the city were cold and rainy.
Outside, the rain drowned out most of the noise, but Mr. Simoneaux’s voice carried and I heard my brother crying out, begging for something I could not hear.
“If we’re still and quiet,” Mama promised, her voice in a whisper, “maybe they’ll go away and give on up.” She said it like she meant it. At least for a few seconds. Her rare smile was big and broad, like she thought it might give me a little comfort. Maybe make me feel less hopeless than I did just then.
But my mother knew same as me that they would not give up. Not when they felt they were justified, and men like Mr. Simoneaux and Joe Andres always thought they were justified, especially when they were doing the devil’s work. And it must have been the devil’s work, else how would it have been possible to start a fire when Noah’s storm was raging outside?
The smoke started to billow before we realized what was happening. Sylv’s voice was panicked and loud and I swore I heard someone else, a different voice not my brother’s pleading for things I couldn’t hear.
“They’ll come out,” Mr. Simoneaux said in a voice meant to carry and there was a whole lot of laughter in that promise. “Don’t you fret, they’ll come on out.”
The smoke got thicker, billowed wilder and Mama grabbed me, led me to the opposite side of the room where it was a bit clearer, her eyes wide as she hurried around to the windows, yelping when she tugged down a tarp and saw Joe Andres on the other side with a gun pointed right at her.
“Come on out, gal. Come on now.” There was tobacco between his teeth and the same greedy spark in his eye that had been there the night he ripped my shirt open. “Don’t you make me say it again.”
When I started to cough, because the smoke had gone black and one side of the building had gone up in a hot, bright flame, Mama pulled me along with her towards a set of rickety stairs that led to a platform in the direction of a catwalk on the second story. A large opening way high up the wall of the building, probably meant for offloading, was broken and open to the elements, with a large chain bolted to the crossbeam above it. Climbing those sagging stairs two at a time, Mama held tight to my hand, thinking, I guess, that if we got to the roof we could jump to the next building. But from the platform, the catwalk up ahead dropped off in the center with only that long chain stretching high enough to reach the broken window.
“You little enough, Sookie, I want you to climb up there.” Mama’s voice was wild, broken as she screamed over the sound of the flames, fighting off the coughs that wracked her lungs. She pulled off the kerchief that had bound up her hair and wrapped it around my nose and mouth, trying to smile at me through the smoke, trying to give me some courage. “You can make it, baby. I know you can.”
“Mama, no. I can’t.” I glanced at the broken window, some two stories above the ground. “It’s too high. It’s just too high.”
She shook me then like a rag doll, her fingers clawing into my arms. “You listen here to me, girl. You get up there and climb that chain.” I hated the way her voice cracked. My mama was strong, tough as nails. In my whole life I’dnever seen her cry or fret over nothing. Now she went at me like she was desperate, like she was near to begging me and my mama never begged for a thing in her life. “You might fall, you might make it to the building across the way, but you will not burn up in here.”