Your Place Was Checked

When I lived in Livingston Parish on the Tickfaw River, every few weeks or so the sheriff, Willie Graves?, would drop in via boat and check to make sure the place was ok and didn't seem to have been vandalized. He did this because it was the off seasoon, and I was living year yound in a place of seasonal (summer) places. He would leave a card on the boat dock that read You place was checked on ______ with the date written in by hand.

Well, over the weekend my brother went into New Orleans to check his place. He had about seven feet of water in the house for three weeks. The smell was so bad he said he was retching. Mold up the walls, the fridge turned over, every single object he had ever owned destroyed after soaking in shitty water for three weeks. He showed me the pictures and I did not recognize anything--not the house, not his street, not the surrounding areas. Every landmark tree and sign was either goe or surrounded with so much debris that it couldn't be seen.

He didn't say much, but I know whe was very upset. He got sick that night, from touching the water we think. He took off a glove to rub some debris off of a Strom trooper figure, and we think maybe the water got under his fingernails or something. Jay came home with two plastic bags of objects he thinks he can hold onto. He hasn't showed us anything from the bags.

He's been washing CD's in a bucket all week. No word on if they're playable or not.

Jay had to sneak into the city under the protection of a friend of his who had clearance to save cats. (All the remaining cats are dead now, the friend says.) As hard as he worked to enter the city, Jay says he never wants to go back while his house is standing. Just tell them to bulldoze it to the ground.