Riding through Katrina with the Red Baron's Ghost Page 15

  Spanish was spoken in our house when members of my mother’s family visited. At those times, I watched the joy in her face as she spoke, watched the way her hands weaved pictures to accompany her words. Butch, Michael, and I laughed with everyone else, and when the laughter subsided my mother launched into another tale in a rapid-fire tangle of incomprehensible words and rolling rs, and the forced tittering of my brothers and me soon became the embarrassed smiles of our ignorance.

  On Summit Street, if anyone gave me any thought at all, I presume I was seen as the newcomer I was, one of a group of white trespassers, each of whom had his own plans for the neighborhood but who individually and collectively had no connection to the Mexican community well established there.

  With the condos came the enforcement of long-ignored code violations. The Star reported that one man whom I’d known as a customer of Los Alamos Market y Cocina, Adolfo Celedon, had sold his house after an enforcement officer cited him for several violations: an overgrown backyard and a leaking roof that heavily damaged the inside of his house. Living on a fixed income and financially strapped, Adolfo told the Star he had decided to give up his house and rent a room at the Roslin, a nearby hotel that served indigent people. He was sixty-five and had lived in the neighborhood for fifty years. He had abandoned his two-story brick home for a room with a dresser, an end table, a compact refrigerator, and a toaster oven. A mini TV occupied the one chair beside the big metal bed that dominated the room. Adolfo shared a bathroom down the hall. No shower. A tub only, and a toilet and a sink, and a mirror held together by duct tape. At night a forty-watt bulb illuminated his room. Occasionally I’d see him park his pickup in front of what had been his home, chatting up old friends. Then he vanished.

  The people with means liked the neighborhood’s economic diversity, Kathy Marchant told the Star in the same article. She had moved there in 1982 and opened a restaurant, the Bluebird Bistro, in 1994, described in one advertisement as “eclectic takes on farm-to-table American fare in a renovated, brick-lined Victorian space.”

  “It’s a diverse group of people trying to build something,” Marchant said. “It’s the healthiest urban environment I’ve ever lived in. This should be a model for urban redevelopment.” She dismissed the word “gentrification” to describe what was happening on the West Side. “That implies, ‘We don’t care about your life,’” Marchant told the Star. “Rich guys moving in on the poor guys. And I don’t perceive that happening here.”

  In my years on Summit, I’d walk to Los Alamos Market most mornings for a cup of coffee. Augustin opened at six except on Sunday and worked until ten at night. His wife and mother helped. A Mexican friend who held three part-time jobs maintained the kitchen. Sometimes Augustin took on side jobs when business was slow. Los Alamos smelled of steaming pinto beans and melting cheese and the warm aroma of corn tortillas. Bread and canned goods filled warped metal shelves beside other equally overloaded and crooked shelves heavy with cleaning supplies. Two refrigerators packed with soft drinks, fruit juice and milk hummed as loud as radiators. Mariachi music played out of a boom box behind the counter.

  One June morning in 2003, as I stood in a line near the counter with Mexican day laborers holding foam cups of black coffee, I noticed a collection jar by the cash register. The men in line put in what change they had.

  “What’s this?” I asked.

  Augustin told me he was raising money for a man found dead in a room below a house on Summit near Southwest Boulevard. The deceased was about five feet six and weighed 130 pounds, according to a one-paragraph news brief in the Star Augustin showed me. When the police found him, the body had decomposed so much they had trouble identifying him. He had been dead at least seven days, maybe as many as twelve. Police ruled out homicide. The man who owned the house thought the dead man’s name was Enrique Gomez, but he wasn’t sure. Augustin thought the name sounded familiar. He had a vague idea of a man he thought might have been Enrique. He hoped people would donate to have him properly buried or sent to family in Mexico.

  “Do you recognize the name?” Augustin asked me.

  “Enrique?” I shook my head. “No.”

  Augustin was sure I’d seen him. If Enrique was the man he was remembering, he came into Los Alamos all the time. He was short and skinny, with black hair starting to turn gray. He liked to joke. He was always polite. He let people go ahead of him. Every time Augustin saw him on the street he said hello.

  I thought again, but no one came to mind. The next day, thinking that the mystery of Enrique’s death might make a good feature story for the Star, I walked down Summit to the house where Augustin said police had found the body. They had been notified by several day laborers who also stayed there that someone had died. I knocked on the door and a short, elderly man looked at me, his face so heavily lined that he could have been chiseled from wood. He took off his glasses and cleaned them on his red denim shirt. I introduced myself and told him I wanted to know about Enrique. I added that I was a regular at Los Alamos.

  The old man shook my hand and said his name was Fausto Meixueiro. He had a reputation in the neighborhood for helping migrant workers. He had come to Kansas City from Mexico more than sixty years before and was now eighty-eight. He told me he let homeless Mexicans stay in empty rooms below his house without charge. He looked in on them now and then, but not often. There was nothing in the room worth stealing. He was away when the police had discovered the body.

  Fausto also thought the dead man was Enrique Gomez, but he could not swear to it. He thought he had probably known his name at one point, but he never used it and therefore forgot it. He had always called him Caruso, because he liked to sing. Caruso lived with Fausto off and on for about five years. He saved money he earned working on construction sites and in restaurants by depositing it in a savings account Fausto had set up for him. Fausto thought he was working at El Taquito, a tortilla factory in Kansas City, Kansas, when he died. One year, Caruso saved $6,000. He traveled on a train to Mexico through El Paso with all of his money and returned broke three months later.

  Fausto patted a worn blue chair, the stuffing blooming out of it like cotton. Enrique used to sit on it some evenings and sing. I looked at the chair and then around the room. Yellowed black-and-white photographs of Fausto’s family cluttered two round tables. He revealed that he had divorced some years before, and his eight grandchildren were grown. Stacks of newspapers and magazines filled every space not occupied by furniture. Mildew spangled the walls and dust hung suspended in the still air. A man scuba-dived through clear ocean water on a flat-screen TV.

  “I suppose when I die this house will be torn down,” Fausto said. “Do you think the memories here will die or remain like ghosts?”

  Fausto sank into a chair. He looked small and shrunken. He told me he didn’t see Enrique for long periods of time. One day, Enrique left for Chicago for two months. The last time Fausto had seen him, Enrique was walking on Southwest Boulevard. He used to bring Fausto tortillas.

  We walked outside and down some broken concrete steps to the dank room where the dead man had been found. I pulled aside an orange curtain and breathed the stale air. A sleeping bag lay crumpled on a damp rug near a refrigerator. Two desks and a small oven stood nearby. Cereal boxes littered the floor.

  “I never lived like this,” Fausto said.

  He gave me a telephone bill and underlined two numbers in Monterrey, Mexico, that the dead man called regularly. I dialed both numbers and listened to the phone ring across the miles. No answer.

  “He was a nice man. He would sing, but I didn’t know him well,” Fausto said. “I miss him. Will you stay and talk?”

  “No,” I told him. “I need to leave.”

  He showed me to the door and watched me walk to the sidewalk. Reaching into my pocket for my cell phone, I called El Taquito. The receptionist connected me to the owner, Mike Casey. He had heard about the dead man from police investigators and determined that he had worked at El Taquito off and
on since 1989.

  “Yes, his name was Enrique Gomez. He was one of those guys who lived on the street and traveled to Mexico and then came back here again. I’ve known him for years and years, but nobody knows a whole lot about him,” Casey said.

  He thought Enrique had been in his sixties and not his fifties, as the police had said. He had worked as a janitor at El Taquito and cut the grass. He hadn’t been there in more than a year. Everybody liked him. Casey didn’t know if anyone knew how to reach his family. Enrique had told Casey his wife had died and he had two adult children. Casey could not say much more about him. He didn’t know him well.

  I made my way to Southwest Boulevard and asked several Mexicans on the corner if they knew anyone named Enrique. They shook their heads. I returned to Los Alamos and told Augustin what little I’d learned.

  “These guys come from Mexico to work,” he said. “We don’t know where they’re from, where they go, where they live. We don’t know nothing about them. They die. It’s sad.”

  I left Augustin and called the coroner. After identifying myself as a Star reporter, I asked about Enrique. He died, the coroner told me, of a heart attack. Not untypical, he said, for someone so poor.

  I got off the phone and wondered whether I had seen Enrique in Los Alamos. I might have said “Hola,” and he might have responded as the other Mexicans do when I greet them, shy and appreciative of this gesture from someone not part of their community and who doesn’t speak Spanish.

  One morning I asked Augustin what he thought of all the changes on Summit. He had lost some old customers, he said, but he had picked up a few new ones like myself. As long as business was good, he would be okay, he said. He worried about property values increasing to the point that he could no longer afford his house. He would adapt, work harder. He had a wife and two children to support. He had to worry about himself first.

  “I try not to think too much about it,” he said, but I could see in his eyes that he thought a great deal about it.

  Augustin’s immigrant story was no different from those of many of his customers. He was born in Monterrey, Mexico. While he was still a boy, one of his aunts moved to Kansas City. She returned to Monterrey every few months to visit family, and every time she stopped to see his parents, Augustin made her coffee. He was her favorite nephew and she wanted to take him to the States. His father said, “If Augustin goes, we all go.” Augustin’s aunt hectored the family so much that one day his father said, “Okay, enough. We’ll go on a vacation.”

  His family intended to stay three months. Augustin had just turned seven. When it was time to return to Monterrey, they decided to remain a little longer. And a little longer. And a little longer. Now, decades later, Augustin can look south down Summit and see the small wooden house with a square backyard where he’d grown up. He and his wife and his two US-born children live in it now. Like his father before him, he plays the Mexican national anthem and raises the Mexican flag over his house. He reminds his children where he and their mother came from. Mexico. Never forget, he tells them. Never forget. You are Americans, but do not be embarrassed to be Mexicans too.

  Then Enrique died. Then the condominium debate started. Then Adolfo downsized to one rented room. In the fall of 2004, as the community meetings were going on, Augustin raised a Mexican flag on the rooftop of Los Alamos to commemorate Mexico’s independence from Spain on September 16, 1810, and to remind newcomers of the Mexicans who still lived on Summit and in the West Side. Many had left; others had died. In too many cases they were people no one remembered. Yet Augustin remembered them. They had worked hard and contributed to defining Summit Street as an immigrant community.

  Days after Augustin raised the flag, a man came into Los Alamos and accused Augustin of disloyalty to America. Then a vendor telephoned to warn Augustin that he had heard a caller on local talk radio threatening to remove the flag by force if necessary. “It’s bad enough we have illegals,” the caller had said. “It’s worse when they show their flag like they’re proud of it.”

  “What is the problem?” Augustin asked me. He lived in Kansas City legally. He loved the United States, but he also loved Mexico. He had asked the city if he could put the flag on the roof. The man he spoke to told him he did not need a permit. So why the threats? He had considered taking down the flag, but he decided no, he would let it stand. He would not be intimidated. He asked customers and friends who lived nearby to alert him if they saw anyone take it. He was not trying to do anything against the United States. It was just a flag.

  To my knowledge no one attempted to take down the flag, although the threats against Augustin continued for several more weeks and burglars broke into his store twice in the same period. Through it all the flag remained aloft, including the morning a year later when I left for Overland Park, a suburb of Kansas City, to live with my girlfriend.

  From time to time as I adjusted to my new life I considered driving to Summit Street to visit the old neighborhood. I wondered if Augustin still owned Los Alamos or if he too had fallen victim to gentrification. Did any Mexican families remain? I’ll never know because I never went back. I did not want to see how the changes I had witnessed might have consumed the community. I did not want to see how people like me—spearheading a contemporary version of manifest destiny without caring for what had come before—had caused those changes.

  On a windless night, the day before I packed up for Overland Park, I stopped by Los Alamos to say good-bye to Augustin. Mexican day laborers lingered outside talking, killing time, before they made their way home, men I recognized from the neighborhood and I had greeted dozens of times but whose names I did not know. They would get up early the next day and a few minutes before six meander nameless as shadows past what had been Adolfo’s house, renovated now by its new owner, past Fausto’s home where Enrique had sat in a blue chair singing and sharing tortillas, toward Los Alamos and coffee, the flag limp in the windless morning like something exhausted, drooping against the wooden pole in subdued deflation, not a breath of air to disturb it or the laborers once articulated lingering on the sidewalk, unnoticed now and unwanted.

  Flo’s House

  (2006)

  The other week as I followed a dirt path in an industrial area of Kansas City, Missouri, known as the West Bottoms, I found a kitten. Or, I should say, it found me. The trail twisted around trees and over rusted train tracks and past a camp of homeless army veterans. I was a reporter writing a story about federal budget cuts in programs for homeless vets for the Kansas City Star. I wanted to ask them what they thought of the reductions.

  Just as I was looking for a place to sit, I felt something claw into the back of my right thigh. I jerked around and looked over my shoulder while swatting at my leg. Whatever it was dug in deeper, and I turned faster and faster, cursing, and finally grabbed it but lost my balance and fell. One of the vets stepped over me, bent over and picked up whatever it was that had been squirming in my hand. He looked down at me, the trees behind him towering above us and blocking the sun.

  “Cat,” he said.

  He dropped it, I caught it, and sat up holding a gray kitten.

  The vet helped me to my feet. After the interview I searched my pockets for my cell phone and called my partner, Flo.

  “I found a kitten,” I told her.

  “A kitten?” Flo said. “Where?”

  I heard her ten-year-old daughter, Molly, shout, “A kitten! Bring it home. Let him bring it home, Mom!”

  “Well, it’s too late for me to say no now,” Flo said, sounding more flustered than upset.

  “I want it!” Molly shouted.

  “You hear that?” Flo said.

  “Flo,” I said, pausing to emphasize my point, “the kitten is mine.”

  My father had felt the same way about a Newfoundland we had when I was growing up. The dog, he said, belonged to him. For years we had owned Great Danes. They always died at an early age, however, from painful stomach disorders common to their breed, and my
mother and father grew tired of the heartbreak. When our veterinarian euthanized our third Great Dane just five years after we brought it home, my parents said that’s it: no more Danes. A few years passed when we didn’t have a dog at all. Then my mother persuaded my father to buy a black standard poodle, a decidedly feminine dog, in his estimation. The poodle accompanied my mother when she shopped, sat with her when she read the newspaper and slept at the foot of her side of the bed. It was her dog, as much as my two older brothers and I were her children. She made our breakfasts, lunches and dinners; bought our clothes; took us to doctor appointments; tucked us in at night. My father would come home from work, read the newspaper and listen to the news. He became increasingly distant as our hormones erupted and we grew into contrary teenagers.

  My father never warmed to the poodle. Two years after he gave it to my mother, he bought a second dog: a black Newfoundland, a much heftier breed than a poodle.

  “This is my dog,” he announced proudly, holding the fat four-month-old, distressed-looking puppy in his arms. However, Gus, the name he gave it, was no more his dog than the poodle was. My father was not home during the day like my mother. He did not housebreak Gus, feed him, walk him, and take him to the veterinarian. Gus followed my mother around the house when my father was home the way the poodle did, because in the end Gus was her dog too.

  Twelve years later, I drove with my father to Becker Animal Hospital to have Gus euthanized. His hair was falling out in clumps and he could no longer walk. My father wept as Dr. Becker inserted a needle into Gus’s foreleg and pushed the plunger of the syringe. Standing over Gus, my father felt keenly the loss of an animal he knew had never loved him as it had my mother.

  I was twenty-two when Gus died and had just graduated from Coe College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. I was bouncing from state to state, working temp jobs without a clue to a career. My father said I’d turned into a bum. He thought I should work at a bank or in retail and establish myself. Despite his criticism, he never stopped asking me about my travels. He traced my routes on a map. I have never visited that part of the country, he would say, poking at one place and then another. I always wanted to. What was it like? Did you like it? I’ll have to go there someday.