1 Dead in Attic by Chris Rose

Author:Chris Rose
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

A Huck Finn Kind of Life

4/9/06

After witnessing the chaos, confusion, and clutter of last summer’s massive evacuation and displacement from New Orleans—people wandering from town to town with everything they owned in a shopping bag while carting pets and octogenarians halfway across the country—my wife and I decided that our life wasn’t complicated enough.

But we don’t have any octogenarians in New Orleans to haul around with us. So we got a dog.

She’s a freaky-looking yellow mutt who was abandoned near Lafayette during Hurricane Rita and was on the kill line in a temporary euthanasia clinic in Acadiana when a friend of ours stepped in and rescued her.

She has one blue eye and one brown and her name was Luna but my kids wanted to call her Biscuit so her full name is Luna Biscuit, which I like, because that’s French for “Moon Pie.”

Sort of.

But this story is not about my dog, not really, but about the landscape and horizon she has allowed me to revisit here in this city I love and that she has introduced to my children.

We’re river rats now. We hang out down by the water with our dog. On the banks of the Big River, the Mighty Mississipp, that brown serpentine of lore, legend, mystery, romance, mythology, literature, song, and history.

And, yes—of cliché, hackneyed antebellum commercialism and volumes of bad poetry.

But still. What a grip it has on the American imagination, character, and identity.

And it’s strange how, even though the city’s economic livelihood depends on it, both for industry and tourism, it is so often unseen, unnoticed, in our day-to-day living.

It seems very few of us around here actually interact with the river on a regular basis—on any cognizant sensual or emotional level—other than to drive over it, drop kids off to play soccer near it in Audubon Park, or absorb its majesty from inside the hermetic glassed-in cocoon of a tall office building.

But it is us. It is everything, really.

Over twenty-two years and at seven different New Orleans addresses, I have never lived more than eight blocks from the river. But still, there have been periods of time—years at a time—when I have lived in nearly total disconnect from it.

I’ve had my occasional dalliances. I remember, in my younger and more vulnerable years, heading to the levee with friends after the Uptown bars closed at daybreak, and we would open our trunks, fetch our golf clubs, wait until tankers came by, and then try to drive balls and hit them.

This was stupid, and not just because the tankers are a half mile away (their immensity on that watery chimera makes them seem so close) but also because it is a perfect waste of $2.50 with every swing of the club.

Once, while I was drinking with a prospective girlfriend on the river many years ago, she took off all her clothes and went swimming and that freaked me out beyond words and reason and she wound up contracting some kind of wicked skin rash.

Let’s just say we eventually drifted apart.

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