KAJUN'S.(The Talk of the Town)(Hurricane Katrina, 2005 damage)

Last week's coverage of Hurricane Katrina

Continuing coverage of Hurricane Katrina

Jon Lee Anderson on rescue and recovery in New Orleans

Joann Guidos, of New Orleans's Faubourg Marigny neighborhood, is a big woman with a piercing stare, the bark of a football coach, and a way of hugging people as though she intended to keep them physically anchored to the earth. She held her family of neighborhood drinkers together all through Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, keeping her murky, stifling bar, Kajun's Pub, open so that the lonely and the broke would not endure the ordeal alone. All last week, a can of Pabst still cost a dollar at Kajun's, even after the power and water went off and keeping the beer cold meant scrounging for gasoline to feed a noisy generator out back. "These people got no place else to go," she said, in the meaty New Orleans accent that is more "Sopranos" than "Gone with the Wind." "I'm not leavin' 'em."

At noon a week ago Sunday, eight New Orleans police officers bearing riot guns walked into the bar, ordered the music turned off and the customers out, and told Joann that she had to close. "They said, 'If you don't leave, you'll be shot,' " she said. "Never in this country. "

The regulars at Kajun's are among those willing to believe the worst about the New Orleans Police Department. "Tuesday night, I'm in the Quarter with fifty bucks to buy gas--I'm not looting," said Kenny Dobbs, naked to the waist, slick with sweat, and squinting through the smoke of his cigarette. "They pull me over at gunpoint, siphon half my gas, take the fifty bucks and a fifth of Crown. N.O.P.D." His girlfriend, who wore a Confederate-flag head scarf and Mardi Gras beads, held out a hand to be kissed. "Renee de Ponthieux," she said. "When Daddy dies, I'll be the Comtesse de Ponthieux." She threw back her head and laughed. A brown dog lying on the pool table sat up and howled. Joann, meanwhile, planted herself on a barstool by the front door with a plastic tumbler of Southern Comfort in one hand and a semi-automatic shotgun in the other. On the floor whirred a gigantic unshielded fan that seemed designed to cool an airplane hangar. The best seat in the house was close enough to the fan to keep cool but not so close that one risked falling in and being chopped to bits.

"I never seen her cry--she's really upset," said Chris Jungles, Joann's boyfriend, a tall man who wears a long braid. Jungles grew up in rural Minnesota; in 1987 his three-year-old daughter was killed by a truck and his marriage fell apart. He cooked methamphetamine for a while and indulged in "mucho" pointless violence as a biker, then served two and a half years in San Quentin. "I've been clean ever since," he said, and cast a ...