Read Online Zeitoun by Dave Eggers - Free Book Online

to reach the roof.
    Zeitoun pulled up and parked the van on the street in front of the house. Kathy watched him approach. She never doubted his ability to care for himself in any situation, but now her heart was jumping. She was leaving him to fend for himself, leaving him to chop holes in the attic with an axe? It was insane.
    He and Kathy stood in the driveway, as they had many other times when she and the family were leaving and he was staying.
    “Better hurry,” Zeitoun said. “Lot of people leaving at once.”
    Kathy looked at him. Her eyes, much to her own frustration, teared up. Zeitoun held her hands.
    “C’mon, c’mon,” he said. “Nothing’s going to happen. People are making a big deal for no reason.”
    “Bye, Daddy!” Aisha sang from the back seat.
    The kids waved. They always waved, all of his children, as he stood on the driveway. None of this was new. A dozen times they had lived this moment, as Kathy and his children drove off in search of sanctuary or rest, leaving Zeitoun to watch over his house and the houses of his neighbors and clients all over the city. He had keys to dozens of other houses; everyone trusted him with their homes and everything in them.
    “See you Monday,” he said.
    Kathy drove away, knowing they were all mad. Living in a city like this was madness, fleeing it was madness, leaving her husband alone in a home in the path of a hurricane was madness.
    She waved, her children waved, and Zeitoun stood in the driveway waving until his family was gone.
    *    *    *
    Zeitoun set out to finish securing the rest of his job sites. The air was breezy, the low sky smudged brown and grey. The city was chaotic, thousands of cars on the road. Traffic was worse than he expected. Brake lights and honking, cars running red lights. He took streets that no one fleeing would use.
    Downtown, hundreds of people were walking to the Superdome carrying coolers, blankets, suitcases. Zeitoun was surprised. Previous experiments using the stadium as shelter had failed. As a builder, he worried about the integrity of the stadium’s roof. Could it really withstand high winds, torrential rain? You couldn’t pay him enough to hide there from the storm.
    And anyway, in the past it had been little more than a few hours of squealing winds, some downed trees, a foot or two of water, some minor damage to fix once the winds had passed.
    He already felt good. New Orleans would soon be largely vacated, and being in the empty city always felt good, at least for a day or two. He continued to make his rounds, secured the last few sites, and arrived home just before six.
    Kathy called at six-thirty.
    She was stuck in traffic a few miles outside the city. Worse, between her own confusion and the unprecedented volume of cars, she had gone the wrong way. Instead of taking the I-10 west directly to Baton Rouge, she was on I-10 heading east, with no way to correct her error. She would have to cross Lake Pontchartrain and swing all the way back through Slidell and across the state. It was going to add hours. She was harried and exhausted and the trip had barely begun.
    Zeitoun was sitting at home, his feet up on the table, watching TV. He made a point of telling her so.
    “Told you so,” he said.
    Kathy and the kids were expected at her brother’s house for dinner, but at seven o’clock she’d traveled less than twenty miles. Just short of Slidell, she pulled into a Burger King drive-through. She and the kids ordered cheeseburgers and fries and got back onto the road. A little while later, a foul odor overtook the Odyssey.
    “What is that?” Kathy asked her kids. They giggled. The smell was fecal, putrid. “What
is
that?” she asked again. This time the girls couldn’t breathe they were laughing so hard. Zachary shook his head.
    “It’s Mekay,” one of the girls managed, before collapsing again into hysterics.
    The girls had been sneaking the dog pieces of their cheeseburgers, and the cheese was clogging