Infinite Tenderness: In the wake of Katrina

(Paperback)

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Hurricane Katrina roared in on Aug. 29th, almost a month ago. Mountains of garbage and debris cover the landscape. Floating casinos are hauled out along the coast like beached whales. Plastic shopping bags flutter in the trees, flags of defeat. It's Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2005, and you are in Hancock County on the sweltering Gulf Coast of Mississippi.
Early in the morning, disaster workers Travis Harney and Lew Roche spot Dewey Bassett at the Gulfport-Biloxi Airport. They have been tasked to take her to a mobile mortuary at the far west end of the county. Dewey's learned a body there may be Landon's, her nineteen-year-old son. But the body turns out not to be his and they travel on to Picayune to rendezvous with Dewey's estranged partner and Landon's dad, Hershel Prall.
During the drive, Dewey divulges more about Landon-he graduated from high school last spring and around the same time became depressed and then delusional, hearing voices and seeing things. When Hershel took Landon on a diving trip at the end of August, Landon ran away in Hershel's VW bus. That was five days before Katrina and Hershel and Dewey have been looking for him ever since.
Then Landon's name pops up in the government's database as having applied for disaster assistance. But is this Landon the son of Dewey and Hershel Lew wants to tell them, but Harney says not until it's verified the person is indeed Landon.
Meanwhile, Travis and Lew have to deal with media covering a hazmat clean-up at a meat locker south of Pearlington. Abandoned after the hurricane, the facility is spewing toxic fumes into the countryside and their job is to keep the media coverage positive. Then Travis gets a call: two addresses for Landon have been checked but to no avail; a third address will have to wait. But Lew can't wait. He sneaks off and finds the house close to the Pearl River. A spacey kid comes to the door and at Lew's prodding says, yes, Landon lives here, but he's off somewhere.
Lew's driving back to the meat locker when Travis calls with bad news-Landon's dead, killed in a car accident. His body is at a funeral home in Bay St. Louis and Dewey needs help finding the place. Lew helps her get there and then she asks him to come in the viewing room with her. He hesitates but goes in. Afterward, they're sitting in the parlor when Travis and Hershel arrive. Arrangements are made and suddenly Lew and Travis find themselves helping the parents load a cardboard coffin with Landon's body into Dewey's rental SUV. They convoy to the town of DeLisle, where Landon's body is to be cremated.
Things take yet another turn when Hershel insists on going to a nearby wrecking yard to salvage what they can from the totaled VW bus. The four of them go through the crumpled bus in a pounding rainstorm. Then Lew lets slip he'd gone to a house where Landon might have been and Hershel flies into a rage.
Travis heads back to Biloxi, while Lew stays with the mourning parents, although he feels he can do nothing but be witness to their grief. The three of them sit out on the patio of Dewey's motel. When she retires, Hershel-cooled off now-and Lew continue talking into the night. Later Dewey returns and overhears Hershel telling a story about Landon that she's never heard before. It's too much. They have it out as Lew looks on. All their grief at losing Landon and the buried pain of a transgression that drove them apart years ago boils over. Finally, they just quit and leave Lew to pick up the beer cans.
It's after midnight, too late to return to Biloxi, so Lew puts up at a boarding house in Bay St. Louis. Come daylight, Hershel and Dewey meet Lew at the house where he looked for Landon yesterday. When Lew knocks, the same spacey kid opens the door and Lew is shoved aside by Hershel and Dewey as they lunge past and take the kid their arms.
Infinite Tenderness: while the world may spin out of control, the human capacity for tenderness is infinite

Author Bio

Mark Clemens was born in Missouri, raised in Iowa, migrated to Montana and from there to Washington state. Now he lives on the Olympic Peninsula, hard by the Salish Sea, with his wife Karen, also a writer. He has been a reporter, photographer and layout artist for newspapers; a publications designer and editor for colleges and state agencies; a faculty member in creative writing and English literature; and an emergency public information officer, a.k.a. PIO.
In that latter role he worked for Washington state's emergency management agency from 1990 to 2014. He served as a spokesperson during daily operations and over the years on disasters and emergencies that included earthquakes; floods; wildfires; the World Trade Organization (WTO) protests in Seattle; ice, wind and winter storms; Y2k; and Operation Evergreen to receive Katrina evacuees.
In September and October of 2005, he was loaned to the federal government to support recovery operations as a Field PIO on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi. There he worked with PIOs from every state of the Union, helping the people of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast recover from the vast sweep of Katrina's devastation. He saw PIOs who were well-intentioned but hampered by the lack of a common structure and operating procedures. He also saw survivors who were often all the more lost as they tried to navigate the labyrinthine ins and outs of government assistance. His first novel, Infinite Tenderness, is based on that experience.
Clemens has degrees in history from Iowa State University and an M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of Montana. His stories and poems have appeared in the Mountain Gazette, The North American Review, Gray's Sporting Journal and an array of other literary magazines.