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It was a big smelly sewer. It used to be a street. Now boats crossed it like they were cars on the road. Godawful terrible shame, those little boys bobbing fat in the water. An alligator was at home, but no man or woman. Soloman was small enough to have climbed the antenna on the roof. It was just enough to get him air time from the filth that had become the flooded lanes of New Orleans.
Soloman hated this place already, too many friends had died and too many women left him because of his height. It was a cesspool long before the levies broke. It was the worst neighborhood of the big easy. The Lower Ninth Ward, a terrible shit-storm of poverty, a rancid lake of violence and drug abuse. It was a breeding ground for the blues, a Darwinian test to see which survivor would grow prosperous. Culture always feeds on the razor’s edge.
God shunned the place because no one could get to his churches. Their doors were all under waves from the ocean. Their steeples still stood tall and their reverends and pastors tried their damnedest to preserve the spirit, risking life daily to deliver supplies to the desperate rooftop tenets. Jesus suffered beneath black waters, invisible to the faithful with their own crosses to burden.
Soloman had only one friend, one real friend, Felix, Felix “the cat.” A former gang member just like him, Felix hit a lucky string. He could get into the Marine Corps. He passed the physical. No more peddling dime bags and drinking late nights only to be brushed off by cunning ghetto whores, aiming for pocket books and alimony. Soloman had been hooked by a kid, although he was far from a father.
When Felix returned he had a new good friend, but it didn’t change their relationship much, a man named Ramos. Ramos was 6’ 7” and built like a Mack truck. Ramos always had a knife collection from the Philippines that he showed off, a couple curvy knives and strange hilted machetes. Ramos always bragged he cut a man in Afghanistan, slit him from his collar bone to his ear.
Damien was his neighbor and shared some ink with him, on his bicep, a black cross made of syringes. They had worked together, but never really liked each other. Damien was just too talented with tattoos and sketches, not too mention his accuracy during a ride always trumped his fellow travelers. The drive-bys in Ninth Ward were made famous by post-levee destruction documentaries. Soloman preferred the shadows than the open streets and front windows of drug houses. Damien’s 9mm was too effective for them to be eager compatriots.
There was of course Michael, he ran the “fiends,” of Ninth Ward. Sold them poison and didn’t mind killing. He survived long enough to sew the initials of the dead among his Sistine Chapel of Ink across his back. Michael was living history, every memory a pillar of his infamy and of his ego. He had no tolerance for life, the memory of success was more important. Damien had criticized him, which got him beaten and almost won him a morphine drip.
Coby had been back from a tour of duty, he was Soloman’s cousin, but they knew each other worse than acquaintances. It didn’t stop Felix from bringing him around; after all he was a fellow jarhead and he could justify the family reunion. It was all going great, Soloman stopped even worrying about the drug game, stopped worrying about his girlfriend, stopped worrying about Jacob, his kid. But the relief was washed away with his son, with his girlfriend, with his grandma, with his mother, with his dog. There wasn’t much of shit left for Soloman, other than the friends and neighbors he shouted too. It had been nearly half a week, the most he’d seen was a promise of safety at the dome, and some white actor in a bullet proof vest throwing him a bottle of water. Fuck this city. The marines even almost got washed away, guess they should have joined the Navy, maybe they’d have better swimming lessons.
Felix had been working with the others, they had been able to survive in it, and the roof was their desert. They were used to going without potable water. Michael’s house had got the worst of it, he had to swim to Damien’s roof. The two had made up old sores quick, none of the “game” mattered when no gang tags could be seen on submerged walls. Only survival mattered. We bullshitted, mostly at night, a lot of shouts from roof too roof, songs, war stories, and old girlfriends we’d shared. Personal information was no longer held back, we shouted every dirty secret across the filthy waters where our family’s drowned bodies bobbed like lifesavers.
Our life story was all we had to starve off the madness of our environment. Somehow the flood made sense, the lack of help made sense, the stinking corpses and the alligators all made sense. We’d already been written off from the black book of civilization. America no longer called us or sent text messages. We had considered them enemies long earlier. At least us non-patriots, those in the marines only confirmed our suspicions though. None of them earned a medal in the corps, or had a building named after them. They starved, and thirsted, and nearly died in slums no worse than our own, eighteen hours from Wall Street.
Somehow they knew that too much water was the same as too little, at least that’s what Ramos had said. Felix knew the corpses had poisoned it, he said he saw it when the rivers of Baghdad had filled full of republican guard berets. Soloman just knew he was thirsty and that dead dog didn’t make it easy to drink from the submerged streets.
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