On a balmy afternoon several weeks ago, Alfred “Big Al” Taplet, a portly man in paint-spattered work clothes, stood in an open garage, applying the final touches to a manhole-size sheet of plywood. Ignoring the Houston mosquitoes — no match for a son of Louisiana — he dipped a stubby brush into a small canister of red house paint, wiped the excess paint on the lid, and meticulously began tracing the letter ‘N.’

The plywood was jigsaw-cut to resemble an oversize glob of grits and bore the inscription “No Money No Grits.” It was one of Big Al’s most-popular folk-art designs, one he’d painted hundreds of times before and sold to tourists from around the world. But before he finished tracing the second ‘No’ he realized something was wrong. What was that circle?

“Damn,” he said, lifting his brush and turning to his identical twin, Alvin (”Little Al“). “Think I made a mistake.”

Little Al scrutinized the painting. “That’s s’posed to be eggs,” he said. The circle was a yolk. The plywood should have said “No Money No Eggs” — another popular Big Al design.

The two Als, both 71, had been at work since 8 a.m., finishing art for the Project Row Houses’ ninth annual Arts and Music Festival, where Big Al would be a featured exhibitor. It would be his first show since Hurricane Katrina forced the Taplets to evacuate to Houston.

For most of September and October, they’d been living as guests of Melissa and Charles Hall in a tony two-story home a few blocks from Rice Village.

How the Taplet brothers ended up in the Halls’ garage is a story about how Katrina changed the lives of two New Orleanians. It’s a story about the generosity of strangers and the triumph of creativity over destruction. Mainly, though, it’s a story about starting over.

Looking at the botched painting, the brothers started laughing — a high, hoarse, phlegm-limned “heh-heh-heh” that broke the afternoon torpor.

“Oh, well,” said Big Al, smiling, “guess I’ll do the other side.”

Like the best folk artists, Big Al has a crackerjack creation myth. He says the idea hit him one day in 1980, when he was shining shoes under a tree in Jackson Square: “Put it on slate.” He quickly scavenged 10 gray slate roofing tiles from nearby buildings, painted them with slogans advertising his shoeshine business and hung them in the tree, where French Quarter tourists could see them.

After a while, a man walked by.

“How much for one of the slates?” the man asked.

“Ten dollars,” Big Al said.

Another man walked by. “How much?” he asked.

“Fifteen dollars,” Big Al said.

By his fifth customer Big Al had raised his price to $50 — more than 10 times what he charged for a shine.

The man looked at the slate for a minute. “All right,” he said.

“That’s when I knew I got a winner,” Big Al says, laughing.

Big Al’s slates soon attracted notice from New Orleans’ art establishment. One woman asked him to come to Arkansas to exhibit his art. A dealer from Palego, a private gallery in New Orleans, told him he was a folk artist and that he would make more money selling through the gallery.

Big Al signed a contract with Palego, giving it exclusive rights to sell his paintings. That was fine, he says, until he learned that Palego was keeping 50 percent of its sales price — a typical percentage for art galleries, but one that struck Big Al as suspicious. When Palego sold his original shoeshine stand for $5,000, Big Al was furious to receive only $2,500.

He cut ties with the gallery, applied for a license to sell merchandise on Jackson Square and went into business for himself. He was soon making so much money selling art that he was able to purchase a workshop/shoeshine store near his home in the Sixth Ward. Either he or Little Al would man the store while the other brother staked out Jackson Square.

Big Al never stopped shining shoes. The job gives Big Al’s art its self-promotional raison d’etre (“If You Got the Blues and Don’t Know What to Do, Go Find Big Al and Let Him Shine Those Shoes”). And shining shoes gives Al the “authenticity” and back story prized by folk-art dealers and collectors.

Since breaking with Palego, he’s been courted by a long series of galleries, which he’s generally dumped as soon as they try to extract their first sales commissions. Perhaps because of his distaste for galleries, he wasn’t routinely asked to participate in exhibits, and wasn’t considered one of New Orleans’ top folk artists.

But, says Houston folk-art collector Jay Wehnert, aficionados considered Big Al’s house well worth a pilgrimage. Wehnert visited Big Al about eight years ago.

“Al’s art had started as something utilitarian,” remembers Wehnert. “But at that point, it had developed into something he marketed. His signs had taken on a life of their own, and his place was full of variations on the themes.

“They weren’t actual shoeshine signs anymore. They were once-removed artifacts. But they were still wonderful in their own right. They retained an interesting graphic element. And they were really funny.”

Big Al shared stories about his life with Wehnert, who was charmed and bought a couple of signs. “His home-slash-workshop-slash-studio was one of the must-see stops in New Orleans because he had so many of those real, genuine qualities of a folk artist,” says Wehnert. “He was a treasure. And very much of that place.”

The Taplet brothers were at Big Al’s house in the Sixth Ward when the water started to rise. It was Tuesday, Aug. 30, the day after Katrina had made landfall, and they believed they had weathered the worst of the storm. But suddenly, muddy water began pouring into the house from every direction. In less than an hour it was chest-high.

“Nobody knew why the water was coming,” Big Al says. “No answers, no nothing.”

Later that day an Army truck picked up the Taplets and their neighbors and took them to the Superdome. There they learned a Lake Pontchartrain levee had collapsed and that their homes were probably destroyed.

For the next three days the Taplets endured the Superdome’s heat, stench and chaos, and waited for the buses they were promised would evacuate them to Texas.

“It was a mess,” Little Al says. “Worse’n a pigpen.”

Neither of the brothers had ever been to Texas, but they decided that if they made it here, they’d stay for good. Katrina was merely the latest of their complaints against New Orleans: crime, crooked politicians, rude neighborhood kids.

After three days, officials herded the entire population of the Dome outside to board the evacuation buses. Because they’re both old and diabetic, they were told they’d be among the first to leave.

But by 3 p.m., not a single bus had arrived. The crowd was growing impatient, pushing and shoving against each other “like a bowl of maggots,” remembers Little Al. To head off a riot, National Guardsmen fired shots in the air and ordered the crowd to lie prostrate on the ground.

Hours later, when the buses finally rolled up, another riot almost broke out as people fought for seats. The Taplets were separated. Little Al lost his insulin. And the brothers ended up on separate buses.

Little Al’s bus arrived in Houston late that night but was turned away because of overcrowding at Astrodome and forced to return to Louisiana. On that leg of the trip, Little Al’s blood-glucose level rose too high, and he passed out. The next thing he remembers is waking up at the Baylor University Medical Center at Dallas.

Meanwhile, Big Al had checked into the Astrodome and received a medical exam and was wandering the food court early the next morning when a volunteer approached him. Larry Gray, a commercial real estate broker, had driven to the Astrodome after work the day before to see if he could help. He’d spent the night running errands for other volunteers and was looking for something more meaningful to do.

“Alfred was holding up his pants and had an old T-shirt on,” Gray remembers. “I figured he was a good candidate for somebody I could take care of long-term.”

All Big Al needed was a belt and a beer, he told Gray, who wrote down Alfred’s sizes and bought him a new set of clothing from Target. (The brewski would have to wait.)

Gray asked Big Al if he’d like to spend the night at a hotel. Sure, Big Al said, so Gray put him up in Room 709 at the nearby Holiday Inn.

Learning that the hotel had rooms to spare, Gray saw an opportunity to reduce crowding at the Astrodome. He told the hotel manager he’d pay for rooms for the neediest evacuees, figuring that FEMA would eventually reimburse him. (He’s still waiting for a check.) He ended up supporting about 50 people in 15 rooms.

Sitting in his hotel room alone, Big Al worried about Little Al, and the news that another evacuee had discovered Little Al’s wallet was no comfort. But after almost a week, Gray relayed good news from Dallas: Little Al was alive.

Gray and an evacuee headed to Dallas to retrieve him. Just before they left, a couple of Gray’s friends, Melissa and Charles Hall, stopped by the hotel to drop off some clothes and were introduced to Big Al.

At a family meeting the next day, the Halls decided to invite the two Als to stay at their house. When Little Al arrived in Houston Sept. 8, the family had a bed made up for him.

For the 5 1/2 weeks that they lived with the Halls, the Taplet brothers slept in the vacant bedrooms of the Halls’ two college-age children, ate dinner at the Halls’ table and watched Tivo’d episodes of favorite shows — The Three Stooges, The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Matlock — on the Halls’ big-screen television. When the Als weren’t painting, they played a card game called Tonk for hours at a time in the Halls’ garage.

When he first met the family, Big Al had mentioned something about painting. No one took him seriously.

“We said. ‘Yeah, yeah, you’re a shoeshine man,’” Melissa says. “We didn’t even pay attention.”

A few days after the Taplets moved in, Melissa, on a whim, Googled “Big Al Taplet.” The search returned more than 300 hits, with dozens of Web pages devoted to Big Al’s life and art. She learned that Big Al was featured in two reference books, Contemporary American Folk Art: A Collector’s Guide and Outsider, Self Taught, and Folk Art, and that his art was being sold around the world through the Web site of Primitive Kool Art, a San Diego gallery.

Melissa e-mailed Big Al’s new contact information to the proprietors of these Web sites and soon began hearing from his fans across the country. Some sent congratulations on Big Al’s safe escape from Katrina. Others sent money. So far, Big Al has received more than $1,000 from his fans, mostly tourists who met him on vacation in the Big Easy.

Melissa became Big Al’s de facto manager, building him a garage studio and promoting his art to the Houston community. Graziano Roofing donated 50 slate tiles to Big Al so he could continue painting on his signature medium. Managers at Sprint, Whitney Bank and CVS Pharmacy bent the rules to get the Taplets new cell phones, bank accounts and prescriptions. And with the help of one of Melissa’s neighbors, Big Al got his first official Houston exhibition.

Post-Katrina, Al softened his opposition to dealers because he needed the money. But Melissa never asked for a cut of Big Al’s profits. He had finally found the perfect manager.

The Taplets now work as shoeshine men at City Barbers & Spa, a men’s salon on Edloe, a few blocks north of Lakewood Church. The salon caters to the well-groomed professional men of Greenway Plaza, offering manicures, pedicures, deep-tissue massages and full-body hair waxes. A sandwich board by the street advertises the salon’s newest service: “Shoe Shine — Wait or Drop Off.”

Last week Big Al could be found sitting in one of the salon’s Bauhaus-style leather-and-steel armchairs, watching CNBC on a flat-screen television. The red vinyl throne of his shoeshine stand was empty.

Big Al has had trouble finding shoes to shine in Houston. In the previous week at City Barbers & Spa he had made only $27 — not nearly enough to pay the rent for the nearby apartment he and Little Al now share. He seemed discouraged.

“Selling these pictures, that’ll help,” Big Al said hopefully, picking at a splinter he’d gotten while cutting tin in his workshop.

Last week Melissa sold eight of Big Al’s works on slate and 10 works on wood to Screen Porch Arts in Rice Village. The same day, the House of Blues, which had previously bought 70 of his works to decorate its restaurants, bought 34 more. They plan to put the art up for sale at their locations across the country.

Big Al is counting on his art’s popularity to bring in shoeshine business, just as it had in Jackson Square. But City Barbers & Spa, with its de Stijl interiors and staff of professional aestheticians, is a long way from the French Quarter.

Big Al remained stoic.

“Takes time for everything,” he said. “Gotta wait on the customers.”