The Trinity Game

leave.
    Trinity fell into another category. Too greedy. He’d stayed for Andrew in ’92, and it earned him a lot of credibility with the
po’folk
. He figured if he rode out Katrina, he could be on-scene for the reopening of his soup kitchen in the Lower Ninth Ward, and he could snag some good press. Hell, if he played this right, he might even get interviewed by Anderson Cooper or that Soledad babe, get on CNN.
    Something to shove up the ass of the IRS, next time those fuckers questioned his
legitimacy
.
    But it didn’t play out like that.
    New Orleanians are no strangers to weather, and while Katrina remained a category three storm, there was much talk about who would be hosting the hurricane party on each block. But as the storm passed through the Gulf, she gained strength, and talk turned to evacuation.
    Trinity never seriously considered leaving. He owned a six-thousand-square-foot stone mansion in Lakeview, and he could ride out anything nature cared to send his way. He did urge his congregation to evacuate, and they did. But before they got out, he conscripted a half dozen of their strapping teenage boys. The boys hauled 120 jugs of Kentwood Springs water from the neighborhood Rite Aid to Trinity’s mansion. They boarded up the massive ground floor windows and helped him secure the storm shutters on the second and third floors. They sandbagged the front of Trinity’s three-car garage. When the boys’ parents picked them up, Trinity gave each a thousand dollars in cash, for “traveling money.”
    On August 28, 2005, Katrina was upgraded to category five. At ten a.m., just twenty hours before the storm would make landfall, Mayor Ray Nagin held a press conference and made the evacuation mandatory. The National Guard was being called in, and the Louisiana Superdome was being set up as ashelter-of-last-resort for those who couldn’t get out in time. About ten thousand would take refuge there, and many of them would later wish they hadn’t.
    It would be a bad storm, but the roads out of town were already jammed, and Trinity’s mansion was thoroughly battened down. In addition to the stormproofing, Trinity had Robért Fresh Market deliver enough non-perishable food to feed a family of a hundred for a week. He had a portable shortwave radio and a waterproof flashlight and a ton of batteries, a Colt .45 semi-automatic pistol and seventy-two hollow point bullets, if it came to that. He was ready.
    During the long night that followed, Trinity buzzed with anticipation, unable to sleep. News reports suggested that maybe one hundred thousand people would be unable to get out in time. There would be plenty of hungry mouths to feed when he re-opened his soup kitchen in the Lower Nine.
    The wealthy of New Orleans had long since evacuated and Tim Trinity was the only soul left in Lakeview. But the “Hurricane Party” is a venerable tradition, so as the black sky lightened to gray, he mixed a very large Sazerac—to the original recipe, with real absinthe, and cognac instead of rye—and proceeded to get thoroughly drunk in preparation for the show.
    Katrina made landfall at 6:10 a.m. on August 29, 2005, with sustained winds of 140 miles per hour. For a while, the radio said she was veering east and everything would be OK. But then the radio announcements changed, and Katrina slammed into the Crescent City with a storm surge of twenty-two feet.
    People say a hurricane sounds like a freight train. It doesn’t, not exactly, but the analogy is close as dammit. Tim Trinity ambled through his mansion, from empty room to empty room, listeningto the approach of nature’s freight train, sipping Sazerac and congratulating himself on his place in the world.
    His dad had been an ineffectual door-to-door salesman—vacuum cleaners, encyclopedias, aluminum siding, whatever he could get a job peddling—and his mother had been a poor housewife, because Dad wouldn’t cotton to a wife who worked outside the home, even though he never earned a decent living. Tim and his little sister Iris never knew real hunger, but they knew red beans and rice, not just on Mondays but sometimes three, four days a week. They knew the shame of having to lie to bill collectors on the phone, saying, “My daddy ain’t home just now,” while Dad stood quietly to one side, grinning like it was a game. And they lived their childhood in threadbare clothing that had been worn hundreds of times by older kids and donated to the VOA thrift shop. They grew