Pulphead: Essays by John Jeremiah Sullivan

like to use a site for shelter unless it has shower facilities, but many of the original buildings they’d chosen were destroyed in the storm, so they’d been forced to take over Harrison Central.
    Miss Jackie and R.J. led me past a plastic curtain into the shower area. What they’d done was pretty ingenious. With the keys the lunch lady gave them, they’d opened a metal plate in the bricks that shielded an outdoor spigot. Someone rigged a gas burner to heat a water tank inside. They’d scavenged the neighborhood around the school for metal pipe and rigged up a flow. For the showerhead, they’d taken an empty can, one of these curious white cans of tap water that Anheuser-Busch evidently produces during natural disasters, and poked a bunch of holes in the bottom. Then they’d taped it onto the pipe.
    “Turn it on, Miss Jackie!” said Bill Melton. Jackie was entrusted with the keys. She opened the metal plate and turned the red knob. Warm water came spraying out of the can, a fountain of water. It made a pattern like a garden spider’s web in R.J.’s flashlight.
    “We made this happen,” Bill Melton said.
    “Isn’t it beautiful?” Miss Jackie said.
    I groped for a response.
    “It is beautiful,” R.J. said.
    *   *   *
     
    When after a few days I left the shelter and drove back to Jackson in my rental, I had a Mad Max –style experience that I’ve thought about many times since. I started running low on gas, and the gas situation was bad. People had lined up for miles at the few pumps with any fuel left. My gauge showed well below a quarter tank, so I pulled off. The road to the station ran long and straight. I could see how far we had to go and wondered if I had even enough gas to last the line. It was unsettling to see something like that in America. In all the nuclear war movies that damaged us as kids, wasn’t there always a scene where they waited in line for the dwindling gas? Here we were. But so far everybody seemed calm, treating it like any other traffic jam. It was hot and sunny on the asphalt as we slithered over it, bumpers inches from one another, each of us an interlinked segment of some slow, determined insect.
    At one point, we intersected with another, smaller road that exited onto ours, the road to the gas. Few people were foolish enough to try entering the line by this road—it was cutting, essentially—but every time someone did, there’d be tension, shouts out the window, the exiting person making upturned “What can I do?” hands. Nothing awful, though. No fighting. The radio played “Sweet Emotion.”
    There was a traffic light at the intersection of these two roads, and in passing through it, as it reverted from green to red, I did something sort of awkward. An older woman who’d been immediately behind me—for an hour—was attempting to come through the light with me as well. She thought she’d be the last one in our group to make it. But she’d miscalculated, there wasn’t room. I’d gone as far forward as I could without hitting the truck in front of me, and the back half of her car was still stranded in the box. Had someone coming the opposite way, on the other side of the highway, tried to turn through our line fast, onto that road, she’d have been smashed. In my rearview mirror, she looked scared, so I did the only thing I could and gradually, with each jolt of the traffic, nosed my car over to the side of the highway, until I could edge the front right bumper up onto the grass there, giving the woman six or so feet to scooch up and out of harm’s way. It was no act of heroism on my part, but nor was it an act of sneakiness and cheating, which is what the wiry, drunken, super-pissed-off Mississippian who appeared at my side window accused me of, in the most furious tones. “I saw what you did, asshole,” he said. He’d actually climbed out of his own car and walked a good ways up the road, just to unload on me.
    “What do you mean?” I said. “I