Old Orleans
By
Caelan M Huntress

I hate breaking promises to myself.  But I had to go back into Old Orleans.
	My wife left me, just as she promised she would if I ever swam back into the French Quarter.  We had a deal, and I did not expect her to let me get around it.  When she saw me taking my old scuba gear out of the garage, she quietly got her suitcase and started to pack.
	We left at the same time, not even saying goodbye.
	I headed down the dry, paved street of the New Orleans and went right for the swamp.  The pathways were few, but my favorite old route along the abandoned sewer pipe was still there.  Once the mud gave way to water, I took out my harpoon gun and jumped in.
	I was breaking six different laws by stepping into that water, but nobody was going to brave the gators and water moccasins to write me a ticket.  Most sensible people would stay away and let me risk my own safety.  It was with that theory that the Wet Frenchie Tour Guides started their business.
	It was me and Shawn McKee, three years ago, kicking out a market with the extreme sports enthusiasts who wanted to see an underwater city.  Snowboard junkies with no adrenaline kicks in the summertime would come down in the summer, and we would wander around through the submerged metropolis.  It was good money, better than the Hydrology job I had in New Orleans.  But better money meant a job with no safety.  An average of one person per trip never made it back to the surface.
	Which is why I came back; Shawn had been missing for three hours.
	Ryan Carmichael called me, just as I was finishing my lunch hour at home, and told me the news.  Ryan was a frequent visitor who later became a tour guide.  Most of the Wet Frenchie guides started out that way.  It was his second summer there, and he had no idea what to do.  Shawn took a group on a tour; nobody returned.  He didn’t know where to look, who to call; he just rang me up out of habit.
	I remember hanging up the phone and looking briefly at my wife.  She had a cool, detached expression on her face; not quite a dare, but the wounds from last night’s argument were still fresh.  She had erupted when she found out that I had stepped aside so a friend could get a promotion that I was more qualified for.  After accusing me of caring too much for my friends and not enough about my career, we went to bed angry.
	Today we hadn’t mentioned it; and now, a friend was calling, asking me to leave off work to help him out.  If I left, she left; if I stayed, she stayed.  But there was no guarantee of permanence in staying with someone who will go to bed angry, I realized.  If she wanted me to stay, I would have.  But it was her callousness, her impassive waiting to see what I would do, that made me suit up and leave.  If she thought I was capable of doing this, then I’d just prove her right.
	A gator stirred ahead, on the borders of Old Orleans.  I couldn’t see him, but I felt the telltale change in the current that only a large, long muscle could provoke.  The gator’s tail moved in an arc as it settled into position somewhere, and I looked around to spot likely hiding places.  There were crumbling buildings on either side of me, and I floated down to the cobblestone street to look around.  Where would I hide, if I were a gator?  I picked two likely spots. The first was around the corner of the building on my right.  The building past it had collapsed completely, so the alley between was crowded with debris.  At the bottom was a cave-like enclosure.
	The other likely ambush spot was on top of the collapsed building itself.  Since I felt the current in a whole, continuous push, it likely meant the gator was in the open.  I leapt from the ground and went to the top of the building to get a good look.
	Sure enough, perched on the pile of a collapsed building, the gator sat.  It had tried to nestle itself among the decaying planks and moldy bricks as camouflage.  The huge beast flicked its eyes up at me.  We watched each other for a moment before he shuffled to his feet and wandered away.
	Most gators knew better than to attack someone who stared them down.  Shawn and I had a tough time fighting them off when we first started coming down here, but over time the gators learned to leave us alone.  We bit back.  I put the harpoon gun strap once more around my neck and made off for the heart of the French Quarter.
	Shawn liked to start where the old Mardi Gras parades were.  Most kids today know Old Orleans because of the pictures of Mardi Gras; and since most Wet Frenchie clients were little more than kids it was the most requested tourist attraction.  I went down the streets, scanning both sides for signs of trouble.
	Searching through Decatur Street, I imagined Shawn floating just above the Café du Monde like he used to, as the audio tour playing in the tourist’s earpieces described where the parade route used to go.  Shawn would point out the locales that his prerecorded voice described to the others as he floated in front of them.  The most exciting tours were when he was pointing at something the tape was describing, and as the audio continued, he would have to pause to fight off a batch of snakes that wandered too close.
	I knew it wasn’t snakes that had taken out an entire tour group.  As I swam down the routes I remember Shawn preferring (he liked to go south on Canal Street, whereas I liked to go north; I thought it made more dramatic tension when you hit the Park Plaza Hotel) I discounted the possibility of gators as well.  What could take out an entire group of fifteen people?
	When I swam up to Jackson Square, I realized that the group wasn’t captured.  They were enraptured.
	There were lights streaming through the holes in the stain-glass windows of St. Louis Cathedral.  It was small beams, flicking back and forth.  I could tell by their movement that they were flashlight beams attached to helmets.  This was them, and they were alive.  I swam to the steeple to get a look through the window at what was going on below.
	Inside was Shawn, confidently swimming between the dozen tourists, pointing them to different places.  They all had ropes in their hands, and they were trying different types of pulleys and leverages to get the whale out.
	It was a big whale; probably not full grown, but large enough to be near impossible to get out of a church.  It had swum in through the back, which was collapsed, and couldn’t manage to free itself.  The tourists were doing a magnificent job for trying, but if they’d been down here for three hours, they weren’t making enough progress to succeed.
	I swam over to Shawn as he braced himself against a pillar and heaved on his rope.  The other end was held fast by five tourists, and the middle was wrapped around the midsection of the whale.  They were trying to turn it, it seemed; not wanting to distract them from their efforts, I swam over to the whale’s face and pushed.  Its skin was oily, and my hands had difficulty finding a purchase.  But my touch angered it, and it flailed.
	The rope flew out of the hands of all of the divers, and I saw blood float away from the palms of a few of them.  The massive beast bucked against the ceiling, and the reverberation I felt through the water told me that something had broken loose.  I dove out of a window near me, then turned and watched in horror as the walls crumbled, weary mortar finally disengaging the blocks of stone that it had held together for so long.
	I screamed through my inhaler, dodging dust and bricks thrown up into the water as the entire building collapsed.  The whale took the ceiling on one side of its head and used its incredible might to push its way out from under it.  Then it swam away.
	I spent fifteen minutes scrambling through the rubble, looking for survivors, but only found streams of blood floating out from cracks in the debris.  After digging through stones to find three dead bodies, I gave up on finding any live ones.
	Back at the boathouse, where the Wet Frenchie sign still annoyed me because I never got a chance to finish painting the border of it, Ryan was waiting anxiously out front.  He was the only other guide here today, and he was still just a kid.  Shawn had been adamant that there would always be one person at the office; if someone came in while there was a tour going on, they needed someone to sign up with.  Ryan had been unwilling to defy Shawn’s business maxims, even in the face of mortal peril.  That was the Wet Frenchie’s stock in trade, after all.
Ryan jumped up hopefully when he saw me surface.  “Did you find them?  Where are they?”
	“They’re gone,” I told him.  “They’re all gone.”
	Ryan paused a moment while he let this sink in.  “Man,” he said.  “Guess that means I’m promoted.”
	We stood in silence for a moment before I reminded him, “I’ve got seniority over you.  Any more tours scheduled for today?”