Riding through Katrina with the Red Baron's Ghost Read online

  The year Granny died, 1994, I left the center to run a Sonoma County program for undocumented day laborers. Months passed, then a year. Then three. I never saw Tommy again. Poppa Ron died of lung cancer. Doug and Paul left for the Midwest, where they had family. In 1997 I accepted a job in Philadelphia. The center remained in the Tenderloin but was relocated to a larger building. Strict new rules required people seeking help to develop a “stabilization plan.” They had to be actively trying to find a job and a place to live, or they’d be expelled from the program.

  On my last day of work in Sonoma County, I saw an elderly, stoop-shouldered woman sorting through discarded bottles and cans by the side of the road and tossing them into a plastic garbage bag she dragged behind her. For no good reason I stopped what I was doing, went outside, and joined her. I picked up a bottle and dropped it in her bag. She heard it clink against the other bottles.

  “Oh,” she said, her eyes wide, delighted.

  She continued searching the ground. I walked beside her. Her lips moved, forming silent words I was unable to decipher. She took furtive glances at me, as if I made her uncomfortable. I offered her another dirt-encrusted bottle. She reached for it, and we held it between us. Her mouth twitched and she muttered words I did not understand before she put it into her bag and hurried away.

  Eastbound

  (1997)

  BAR, the sign read. I went inside.

  NOW SERVING TAMMY AND MONICA, I read on a chalkboard by the restroom. I paused, sat down, ordered a beer, and put three dollars on the bar.

  “Ten bucks,” the bartender said.

  I looked at him, my eyes wide.

  “Whorehouse prices,” he said.

  He opened a refrigerator and took out a can of Budweiser, snapped off the tab, and set the can on a napkin. He gave me a tall glass dripping with water. I saw a note on the mirror behind the bar reminding patrons to use condoms. I put a twenty-dollar bill by my glass and wiped sweat off my forehead. A ceiling fan turned above me, but the air didn’t move.

  “I’ll call Tammy,” the bartender said. “You’ll like her. Monica’s busy.”

  “I don’t want a girl. Just the beer. I didn’t know. I mean, there’s no sign about, you know, what you do here.”

  “We’re called The Hotel California,” the bartender said, and pointed to some T-shirts on the wall bearing the name. “This is Nevada, man. It’s not illegal.”

  “I know, but it just said ‘bar’ outside.”

  “Got you in here, didn’t it?”

  He rang up my beer and gave me the change. A big man with a red beard walked in, followed by a woman carrying a bag of groceries. She set the bag on the bar and the bartender peered inside.

  “Thanks for taking Monica to the store,” he said to Red Beard.

  “She owes me,” Red Beard told him. “I’ve run her around more than enough for you today. I expect a free one.”

  “What are you talking about?” Monica said.

  “You heard me. I get a free one. Gas costs money.”

  Monica rolled her eyes. Her face was parchment tight, mouth thin. Her breasts pushed out against her small white T-shirt but there was nothing enticing about the display. She lit a cigarette, took a drag, and held it before releasing her breath in one long exhalation that tightened her face even more.

  I sipped my beer. I had driven eight hours eastbound on Interstate 80 from San Francisco before I stopped for the night here in Elko. I was on my way to Philadelphia. I figured it would take me four more eight-hour days to get there. I’d checked into a motel. From my room I saw the bar sign a few blocks away and decided to have a cold one.

  I had spent the previous night with Sandy, my ex. We’d never married but had been together for eight years, six of those under one roof. All sorts of reasons for our split. If I were to settle on the reason, the one neither of us wanted to articulate as we refused to compromise on our differences, it would be that we had stopped loving each other the way we needed to if we were to spend the rest of our lives together. The drifting apart had happened gradually. When we finally noticed, we were at a loss to stop it. However, we still loved each other in our way.

  A year after Sandy and I separated, I accepted a job at the Philadelphia Inquirer. At thirty-nine and after having lived in San Francisco for fourteen years, I was starting over.

  Sandy was stunned when I told her about the Inquirer job. Despite our split, we would get together from time to time, not to reconcile but to ease into living alone. My move to Philadelphia would end the transition period.

  “When do you leave?” she asked.

  “Next week.”

  “Next week!”

  Pause.

  “Will you come see me before you go?”

  “I want to,” I said.

  A woman in a thin satin robe with a purple flower motif walked out of a room behind the bar and sat beside me. I could see her black bra, flat stomach, and black panties through the robe. Her black hair fell to her shoulders and her blue eyes were wide and hesitant. She wore just enough makeup to highlight her cheeks. Small furrows descended from her mouth, giving the impression of a pout. She wasn’t hard like Monica, but I could see the hardness coming.

  “This is Tammy,” the bartender said.

  He turned to her. “He thought we were just a bar. He just wants his beer. I told him you’d be more interesting to talk to than me.”

  “Oh,” Tammy said. “You don’t want a girl?”

  “No.”

  “Ask him to buy you a glass of wine at least,” Monica chimed in. “Don’t give him your time for nothing.”

  “Right,” Tammy said. “Would you buy me a glass of wine?”

  “If you get her wine or a drink she gets half the bar tab,” the bartender said.

  “Okay.”

  “Five bucks.”

  I put five dollars on the bar and the bartender poured a glass of red wine. He put two-fifty in a tip jar for Tammy.

  “I had a real nice guy the other night,” Tammy told Monica. “He said he’d take me to a movie.”

  “A date?”

  “Yeah. He’s going to stop here sometime tonight and then we’ll go out.”

  Tammy turned to me and asked what I was doing in Elko. On my way to Philadelphia, I told her. She said she would be flying to New York City in a few months to meet with representatives of the United Nations. Her mother was Iranian, Tammy explained. She believed she was owed thousands of dollars from Iranian assets frozen by the US government since 1979, when Americans were taken hostage in Tehran.

  “That money belongs to all Iranians,” she said. “When I’m paid I’m going to travel the world and then run my own business.”

  I didn’t say anything. Tammy had not decided what sort of business she wanted to start. She said she had been a Realtor before the bottom fell out of Nevada real estate. Four weeks ago, she started working here. She would return to real estate when the market picked up.

  “He saved my life,” she said of the bartender. “He gave me a job.”

  This morning I had gotten up early. I dressed and carried my duffel bag to my car. When I came back inside, Sandy was sitting on the black couch she’d bought without asking me and that had caused one of our countless arguments.

  “Coffee?” she asked.

  “I’m good, thanks.”

  “I’ll visit you in Philadelphia,” she said.

  “Christmas.”

  “That would be good, yes.”

  “We always enjoyed Christmas together,” I said.

  We hugged. Both of us gave in to choked sobs. Then I walked outside to my car. I waved; Sandy raised an arm. I drove around the block and stopped in front of the house, hoping she would still be standing there, but the front door was closed.

  “Would you like me to show you around?’ Tammy asked.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “I’m ready for that free one,” Red Beard said.

  “Shut up,” Monica said. “Last time I as
k a favor from you.”

  I followed Tammy into a room with a cot and a couch. A hot tub stood in a corner. I smelled the wet heat rising from the tub.

  “This room is used for parties,” Tammy said.

  She didn’t elaborate. She sat on the cot and watched me. The robe sagged open around her breasts. I looked away.

  “What else?” I asked.

  She got up and led me out of the room and down a hall, opening a door that had her name on it. A bed with a white comforter was pressed against the wall near an open closet. Skirts and blue jeans hung on hangers. An ironing board leaned against a wall. A McDonald’s plastic cup half filled with soda stood on a dresser.

  “We’re charged thirty dollars a day to live here,” Tammy said.

  “Steep.”

  “That’s why I like doing parties. You can make a thousand dollars with one party. The house keeps half. That’s still five hundred for me.”

  She stopped talking and loosened her robe.

  “It’s been slow this week,” she said, facing me. “Depending on what you want, I could probably give it to you cheap. I’d have to ask, though.”

  I felt my face turn red. If Sandy saw me now: Sure, you didn’t know it was a brothel. I could just hear her. I smiled at the thought. Tammy smiled back. I shook my head.

  “No,” I said. “I really only wanted a beer. I just saw the sign outside and came in.”

  “Oh.” She tightened her robe. “Buy me another wine, then.”

  “Sorry?”

  “Would you buy me another wine? So I can make a little cigarette money off you at least?”

  “Of course,” I said.

  After I’d left Sandy, I drove into downtown San Francisco and drifted through North Beach. I passed a bagel shop she and I had often stopped at for breakfast. I continued on to City Lights Bookstore, where we sometimes went to browse on Saturdays. I took Clay Street to I-80. Within two hours I’d reached Sacramento and continued on to Lake Tahoe. Then came the California-Nevada border. I pulled in to a rest stop and stared at the interstate, its long gray lanes stretching east to the horizon. I can always turn back, I reminded myself. I can always turn back.

  Tammy and I sat back down at the bar. I ordered a glass of wine and a beer.

  “Nothing?” the bartender asked, looking at Tammy and then at me.

  “Nothing,” Tammy said and sipped her wine.

  “Well,” the bartender said to me, “you did say you only wanted a beer.”

  He dropped another two-fifty in the jar for Tammy. I concentrated on my beer. Red Beard took Monica by the arm.

  “C’mon,” he said.

  “Let go!” she snapped.

  “Stop it!” the bartender said and slapped the bar with his palm. “Christ, I gave you a drink. How much longer you going to go on about a free one for some goddamn groceries? You’ve been coming in here too long to act the fool.”

  Red Beard dropped Monica’s arm.

  “You owe me,” he said, jabbing a finger at the bartender. “Gas money.”

  As he stormed out the door a sharp splash of sunlight burst into the bar. For seconds I couldn’t see. I blinked, heard a truck start. The bartender blurred into view and I watched him freshen Monica’s drink. She carried it down the hall, her face etched in shadow against the wall. The truck pulled away.

  “I never thought I’d be doing this,” Tammy whispered to me.

  Her warm breath washed against my ear, and she placed a hand on my knee. I turned to her. She seemed very slight and small. I knew she didn’t believe a word she had said about the UN and frozen Iranian assets. I knew she had no experience in real estate. I knew her customer from the other night didn’t exist, or if he did, he would never take her to a movie. I knew her name wasn’t Tammy.

  I also knew that I had left San Francisco for good. I had days of hard driving ahead, and when I reached Philadelphia, Sandy would not visit me at Christmas.

  I finished my beer and told Tammy it had been a pleasure meeting her. She bounced back with a chirpy request for me to remember her because we might see each other again. After all, Philadelphia was not that far from New York City, was it?

  “No, it’s not,” I said.

  I got in my car and drove down the street to my motel room. I opened the door to the empty bed and dusty chest of drawers and the thin light filtering through the faded curtains. I stepped inside and closed the door. In the musty silence, I whispered, “Good-bye.”

  Good-bye.

  Good-bye.

  I felt the words come off my tongue and leave my mouth and dissolve into the quiet. I stretched out on the bed and stared at the ceiling. The morning would be the start of another long day. I closed my eyes and tried to sleep.

  My Middle Age

  (2003)

  Jet lag. I’ve been back from Afghanistan three days but still I can’t sleep. Gone five months, my third trip there. I’d have thought I’d be used to the travel by now. I look at the clock. Four a.m. I look out my bedroom window at the Kansas City skyline. It would be about noon in Kabul. I kick out of bed, call my dogs. The white one looks up bleary-eyed from the floor. The black one’s somewhere. I can’t see him, but I hear the ID tag rattle on his collar. I flip on a light.

  “Walk,” I say.

  Before we go outside I push aside maps of Honduras for a reporting trip I’m planning and open my laptop to check email. The computer makes a popping sound, and a little bubble rises in the lower right-hand corner. I have one message and click on it.

  Tom is dead.

  The sender, my childhood friend Gabrielle, had dated Tom in high school and remained fond of him despite the passage of years, changes in geography, marriage, and children. I suppose she just needed to blurt out her shock and grief in the way we do things now: tweets, email, Facebook, texting. No more the assurance of a sympathetic voice on the other end of a phone to convey the bad news.

  Tom is dead.

  I hadn’t heard from him in years. I would call him, but he never answered and did not have voice mail so I could leave a message. Eventually his phone was disconnected. I mentioned Tom to Gabrielle in an email from Kabul while I was stuck in the airport on my way home. I had seen some kids playing soccer and thought of him. I didn’t know it at the time, but after Gabrielle received my message, she searched the Internet and found a one-paragraph news brief that said Tom had been found dead in his Dallas apartment.

  The brief stated that Tom was forty-six years old. It did not suggest foul play. The last time I had spoken to him by phone, he had just been released from a psych ward for attempted suicide. Pills and vodka. Just got drunk and stupid, he said, embarrassed to have been locked up with people “who had real problems.”

  I sit down, weighted with sleeplessness, and try to wrap my head around Gabrielle’s message.

  Tom is dead.

  1982

  I am sitting in the living room of Tom’s future brother-in-law Brad in Winnetka, Illinois. He has just returned from Afghanistan, backpacking in a war zone. Dig it. Brad’s a rangy kind of guy: tall, lean, sandy hair. Confident. He describes the occupation of Kabul by Soviet troops. Soldiers on every corner. Afghans hustling past them, avoiding eye contact.

  I tell him I’d like to go there. I’m itching for something. College grad, working the stockroom of a Crate & Barrel in Skokie. Former English major filled with stories of the Left Bank and Hemingway and how all the writers of that time traveled the world and witnessed history: World War I, Spanish Civil War, World War II. I was also taken by Jack Kerouac and his manic road trips across America with Neal Cassady.

  Now here’s this guy, Brad, sitting in front of me on a white couch, living the adventuresome life I imagine for myself. Laura, Tom’s girlfriend and future wife, sits beside her brother, smiling. Proud. She designs window displays at Crate & Barrel. Tom works there too. He got me my job. I also write feature stories for Lerner Newspapers, a suburban chain.

  “I can give you contacts in Afghanistan if you�
�re serious,” Brad tells me.

  “Sure,” I say.

  I know I won’t go. Still, it’s fun to pretend and pretend I’m not pretending. I’m twenty-five and live with my parents. I need to get out. Get out like Brad. Like Tom. He and Laura share a Chicago apartment. I don’t want to think about what I’m going to do. It seems so complicated. Right now, I’ll settle for pretending I’m going to Afghanistan.

  In the morning I’ll be back in the Crate & Barrel stockroom. Barely into my twenties and I feel left behind in my own life.

  “He’ll go to Afghanistan,” Tom tells Brad. “He’ll do it.”

  Tom has complete faith in me. He’ll go, he says again in that voice of his that rises and cracks in a kind of joyful agitation whenever he gets excited. The same voice that shouted encouragement to his teammates on our high school soccer team. He was one of the best players in the state then, and his future in sports seemed assured.

  2001

  I am leaving for Afghanistan two months after September 11. I have twenty-four hours to get ready. I am a reporter at the Kansas City Star. Flyover country, but even the Star is sending people to Afghanistan. A beat reporter’s moment. My heart races. I call my parents.

  “They can’t just send you like that, you have to prepare,” my father blusters on the phone. I laugh, can’t believe I’m going.

  I don’t think of Tom and our evening in his brother-in-law’s apartment nearly twenty years ago. I’m too hyped up to think of anything. When I do think of Tom, six weeks later, I am in Kabul. I call him on a satellite phone but he doesn’t answer.

  2003

  Tom is dead.

  Gabrielle’s email tells me that Tom died on December 21, 2001, about six weeks after I arrived in Afghanistan.

  I shut off my computer and jog down a flight of stairs with my dogs to the door and open it to the sidewalk. A late January snow crunches underfoot, and the dogs leap into piles plowed against the curb and I tug them away from where other dogs have peed, covering my face from a blast of frigid wind blowing off Summit Street. I still see deserts and patrolling US soldiers and men in turbans. My twenty-seven-hour flight from Kabul took me away from Afghanistan faster than I can get it out of my head.