4 Shelter From The Storm by Tony Dunbar Page A

and took one careful step at a time, leading off with her left foot and waiting for her right to catch up.
    Tubby tuned out her complaints at floor 38, his own sore hamstring at 31, and decided to desert her at 25.
    They had been joined for part of the journey by two young travelers, law school types, Tubby judged, forced to stay late in the office after all the partners had long since departed. They all swapped stories about where they had come from and theories about what they might find at the bottom. But the strangers were moving at a faster pace, and soon their voices could no longer be heard below.
    Finally, at the thirteenth floor, Tubby and Mrs. Lostus encountered a security guard who confirmed that the building was not working due to extraordinary flooding in the streets. He guided them through normally locked doors to the parking garage and left them to continue their slow walk downward.
    Tubby sprawled on the hood of his car on the third floor. He unlocked the door with fumbling fingers, and gratefully collapsed in the driver’s seat. He leaned over to push open the passenger door for Mrs. Lostus when she closed the hundred step gap between them. In time, she flopped beside him with a loud “Whoowee! I’m pooped!”
    He cranked the engine and flipped on the air conditioner. He instantly felt better to be in charge of machines that worked again. Joyfully, he drove them to the ground floor, where they found out what all the trouble was about.
    “This is big,” Tubby said.
    Mrs. Lostus bent over the dashboard and peered through the windshield. Inches from the LeBaron’s front tires was a swirling soup of impure water floating plastic cups and Pepsi cans. It reminded her of something she had seen growing up in Goose Creek, Kentucky, and about which she had had nightmares most of her life.
    She started screaming.
    Unprepared, Tubby jumped so that his head hit the roof and he nearly screamed himself.
    “For goodness sake,” he pleaded. “It’s just a rainstorm. It happens all the time here.”
    “Like that?” she pointed hysterically at the main channel, which to Tubby appeared to be about two feet deep in the middle of the street.
    “Well, that sure is a lot of rain,” he conceded. “Lemme go take a closer look.”
    He got out of the car and stood in the garage driveway at water’s edge, trying not to get his shoes soaked.
    A woman, blouse pasted to her body, was pressing through the stream with determination in the vicinity of where the sidewalk should be, water just below her knees.
    “C’mon in,” she invited Tubby. “You won’t melt.”
    “What’s the temperature like?” he asked.
    “Not too bad. A little cool maybe.” She splashed on.
    “What should we do?” Mrs. Lostus called out the car window.
    The rain was still pouring down. In Tubby’s experience floods, once begun, did not end until at least a couple of hours after the rain stopped. It took that long for the mammoth pumps that guarded the city to suck the overflow out of the reclaimed swampland that constituted the Big Easy and push it uphill and over the levee to Lake Pontchartrain. Once it got there it would nurture blue crabs and nutria and all manner of other local delicacies before flowing back into the Gulf of Mexico.
    The choices as he saw them were to stay put in the garage for, quite possibly, the rest of the night, with Mrs. Lostus, minus any food or drink— or, wade four or five blocks to the French Quarter where there were restaurants, bars, Mrs. Lostus’s hotel, and more diverting companionship. This overflow must be localized in the downtown area because everyone knew the French Quarter never flooded.
    “Let’s take the plunge,” Tubby said.
    He had to talk her into it, but she wanted to go to the bathroom and surely did not want to remain in the garage and miss all her shows.
    While Tubby parked the car again a little higher up the ramp and locked his briefcase in the trunk, he tried to buoy his client’s