Amerigo and Charles Go To New Orleans, Part 3

Some houses Amerigo and Charles passed had no front doors, just an opening to reveal shards of debris. Thin plasterwhite trailers were propped on cinderblocks in driveways and front yards. Mattresses and lampshades and trees lay over the sidewalks, and strange plants had overgrown the yards. It was all still. No one else seemed to be around. Amerigo and Charles walked steadily, silently through.

Each house had a big spraypainted X marking the number of dead once inside. Charles pointed to one house that said "2 dogs" and Amerigo took a flashless picture and then puked in the road. Other houses had a delineation on each outer wall, usually near the highest windows, of softened, dulled paint below and brightening color above. A rusted car rode up on a slumping wire fence, its front tires in the air, and Charles took back his camera and took more pictures, some of Amerigo wiping his mouth on his white shirtsleeve and his hands on his dirty jeans and some of him just walking. Ahead was a green traffic light and a hanging streetsign that said "Desire."

Charles still felt drunk, but mostly groggy and tired. He took deep, measured breaths of the cool April air which helped him feel awake, and not puke himself. Along side them, a pickup truck hummed down the street with six men sitting in the back. After that, a military Hummer rolled slowly by.

Amerigo stopped and said, "Are we lost? Do you know where we're going? Are we even in the United States?" His eyes were bloodshot and glassy, probably from vomited so much.

Charles said, "Yes, the fucking Mapquest said we turn left on First Street after 2.7 miles. It should be up ahead."

"I hope you're right. I have no idea where we are."

"Me neither. But let's just continue walking." There was a weight they both felt, a palpable seriousness of mood. It kept them quiet and contemplatative as they continued on.

Burnt out couches and empty clotheslines. Rhombus-shaped house frames with roofs spilling shingles. The lowing of cars from the distant highway. Charles's mind retreated back to Vaughn's where he danced and sweat to the blurting horns. A girl put his hands over him and he twirled her to the swaying rhythm and smiled and sung along with growly-voiced Kermit Ruffins to songs he thought he'd heard once in a dream.

The road became a high overpass that opened to a panorama of the city. Pieces of the overpass railing were missing, so they kept along carefully, concentrating on the sidewalk. But they were unable to stop themselves from looking to their right, where the early morning haze hung low over the skyscrapers and Superdome and the small foreground buildings, reminding them of a picture they saw, possibly taken from the same vantage point, where all this space, now seeming so vast, was drowned in water.