Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead by Sara Gran Page A

pity and turned back to his group. Then he thought better of it and turned back around, smiled again, and came over and handed me a folded-up dollar bill before retreating back to his tribe.
    â€œBless you,” he said.
    â€œYou too,” I said, taking the dollar. The man smiled and left. Jackson looked at my new dollar bill. I put it in my pocket. Jackson frowned.
    â€œOkay. It was Thursday,” I said. Jackson nodded.
    â€œHow did you know Vic, anyway?” I asked him.
    Jackson shrugged. “I know everyone around here. And everyone know me too. That’s just the way it is. I go all over getting my cans. You see everyone that way.”
    I asked him if he remembered anything else and he said no. I asked if I could come back and see him again if I had more questions and he said yes. I gave him twenty dollars and left.
    I believed Jackson. Vic Willing had been alive on September first. He hadn’t died in the flood.
    One cause of death ruled out. Only an infinite number of possibilities to go.

18
    L ALI VALENTINE WAS the only decent alibi Andray had given me. Ms. Valentine’s last known address was on Baronne Street in Central City, a few blocks away from the Garden District. This was where Andray was from, right on the other side of St. Charles Avenue from the District, like two sides of the same coin. Even the floodwaters seemed to have known the difference, slowing to a trickle by the time they reached St. Charles and coming to a gentle stop at Prytania Street.
    When I got to Lali’s address it was gone. A big pile of lavender painted wood shards lay where the house had stood. In between the shards I could see little bits and pieces of a home: a pink sock, a can of tomato soup, a Lil Wayne CD, a White Hawks record.
    Two men were hauling everything out of a house down the block, and I went over and asked them if they knew Lali.
    The men were filthy, covered in plaster dust and mold. One of the men took off his dust mask and frowned.
    â€œLali,” he said. “Lali. I think she’s staying with her cousins on Magnolia Street. I don’t know the number. It’s a blue house, right across from the projects. You can’t miss it ’cause it’s, like, folding.”
    â€œFolding?” I said.
    â€œYou’ll see what I mean,” he said. He went back to work.
    I thanked him and went back to my truck, but then I stopped. On the corner was the truck with a cherry picker. In the cherry picker was a man doing something to a transformer—one of the little power boxes on top of a pole, twenty-five or so feet up. In some cities they were underground; in New Orleans they were above ground, wires strung around the city like a cat’s cradle.
    The man wasn’t from Entergy, the idiotically named power company. Their people had blue uniforms. This man was in white. Another man was in the truck, operating the crane.
    â€œHey,” I said to the man operating the cherry picker. “Hi.”
    He either didn’t hear me or pretended not to hear me.
    â€œHey. Hello.”
    No answer. I saw he had earmuffs on, the kind men use when they tear up the sidewalks.
    I went back to the man who’d given me directions to Lali. This time his smile was less genuine.
    â€œExcuse me,” I said. “Sorry to bother you again. But I was wondering. Do you know what those men are doing over there?”
    The man shook his head. “It’s funny, I been wondering the same thing. They’re not Entergy. And the phone company got nothing to do with the power, and that’s what’s up there—transformers. So no, I got no idea. What do you think?”
    We looked at the men in white and then back at each other.
    â€œI don’t know,” I said.
    â€œI don’t think it’s anything good,” the man said.
    â€œNo,” I said. “Me either.”
    I thanked him again and went back to the corner. I watched the man in the cherry picker