Free Salvation Row by Mark Dawson Page B

customers?”
    “Happy homeowners ,” she corrected. “The second family we moved in here. We’ve got a homeownership counsellor on the books, she managed to get them $75,000 in down payment and closing assistance. They paid just north of $90,000 for a home that would have cost twice that before the storm, one that’ll last them for as long as they need it for their kids to grow up. They lost their home in the flood. Lost everything. They’d been in a shelter for four years. Seeing the kids smile like they did when they moved in… man, I could retire right now and be happy.”
    “They were the second family? Who was the first?”
    “Come on,” she said. “We’ll go see them.”
    They went outside, back into the smack of the heat.
    “You want the standard tour or the extended one?”
    “Whichever you think I need.”
    “All right.” She touched his shoulder, and they set off down Salvation Row away from the new houses. They walked for five minutes until they turned a corner and started down a street that had not been cleared. It had the same row of tumbledown shacks as Milton had seen during his taxi ride, the same overgrown vegetation.
    “You come in from the city?”
    “Yes.”
    “So you saw what the parish is like? Like this?”
    “Like a nuclear bomb went off.”
    She nodded somberly. “Pretty brutal. The houses were all wrecked. Most of them were demolished. The ones that were still structurally sound were flooded out. Eighty-five percent of the families who lived here, they’re all gone now. Most of them will never come back. The neighbourhood died overnight.”
    They walked down the street. Milton saw species of vegetation that had no business being in an area like this: crepe myrtle, black willow and golden rain trees garlanded with vines. There were weeds as high as basketball hoops. There was lantana, oleander, and oxalis.
    Izzy saw that he was looking. “It grew fast. The soil’s rich from the alluvium in the Mississippi, and the climate’s perfect. They’ve had botanists down here to look at some of it, try to explain why it started to grow.”
    “They didn’t try to clear it?”
    “Sure, they tried. The city appointed a contractor to clear it; he turned out to be a felon. They appointed another; he took the money but did a poor job. They’ve got a crew of twelve ex-cons, going around now to try to keep on top of it. But as soon as it’s cleared, it starts to grow again. You leave a lot untended for three months and it’ll be thick with knee-high weeds. After five months, you’ll see saplings. The only way to reclaim the area is to put people back in here again. You been in the city yet? The centre?”
    “Not yet.”
    “You’re not here for Mardi Gras?”
    “Not especially.”
    “Wait ’til you get up there. You wouldn’t know Katrina even happened. The oldest, wealthiest districts—the whitest ones—they’re all on higher ground. The poorer neighbourhoods, where the native New Orleanians live, all those are below sea level. You know the difference between the French Quarter and this area around here?”
    He said that he didn’t.
    “Nine feet,” she said.
    They reached the end of the row and turned again. Milton saw that they were following a long, rectangular route. There were more wrecked and deserted houses on this stretch of the road, but, as they reached the junction and turned to the right, they were back on Salvation Row.
    “And then we get to this,” she said proudly. “Better than it ever was before. All ecologically sound, the houses generate most of their own power from the solar panels, the carbon offsetting means that there’s no footprint at all.”
    “It’s amazing, Isadora.”
    “Izzy,” she corrected. “You sound like my father.”
    They reached the first house at this end of the block. The siding was painted red, the colour a flamboyant counterpoint to the bright blue sky.
    “You asked about the first family we moved in?”
    He