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

  Nine months after I received Wormald’s letter, I heard from Billings again, unprompted. He said he had been thinking of me and had decided to give me something unique to the collection of Red Baron material you have: a square piece of red fabric from Richthofen’s plane.

  September 4, 1973

  Malcolm, this is very definitely authentic, and you can have no doubt about saying so. I personally cut it from the plane after it had been brought into our squadron. And it is part of the piece I still have. Take good care of it. It is very rare. Yours, H. D. Billings.

  I recall holding the small piece of dark red fabric in my hands. I was too young to fully appreciate what Billings had given to me. How he must have run to the plane and cut the fabric himself. Then, some fifty years later, offering a piece of it to a boy he didn’t know, halfway around the world. Simply because I had asked him to share his story. It wasn’t just a piece of the plane that was his gift. He had validated my efforts, acknowledged my work.

  I did not understand this then. I just knew I had acquired something that none of my friends could match. I might not be an A student, I might have been cut from my junior high school soccer team, but I had a piece of Richthofen’s plane.

  October 10, 1973

  Dear Malcolm,

  You’ve certainly developed a fine file on the Richthofen matter and I commend you for your patience and endurance. I am especially pleased you have obtained a piece of fabric from the Baron’s plane. Congratulations! The people who write to you are certainly at ease in telling you the details of the encounter so apparently you have impressed them with your sincerity and interest. This is highly important in writing to anyone for information and recollections. Warm regards, Dale Titler

  * * *

  September 22, 2005

  Dear Mr. Titler,

  Last night on my way back to Gramercy, I heard what sounded like trucks behind me on St. Charles Avenue but I couldn’t see them. I pulled over. The trucks stopped and National Guard soldiers approached and asked if I was OK. Instead of using headlights, the driver explained, he drove using night-vision goggles.

  “Why?” I said.

  “Looters won’t know when we come up on them. We own the night.”

  He let me look through his goggles. The world swam before me in a pale green light.

  Tonight is another deep black evening without power. Not even a glow on the horizon. The RV feels cramped with we three reporters hunched over our laptops. I’d spent the day at Judson Baptist Church in Walker, Louisiana, about eighty miles outside New Orleans. The church has been sheltering families made homeless by the storm. Classrooms along a narrow hall were converted into dormitory-style rooms with cots and heaps of donated clothes, baby supplies and toys. For some of the children, the shelter has taken on the characteristics of a playground. They run shouting down the halls, skidding around corners and opening doors to bathrooms and offices.

  I met Keith Hall and his wife, Rosezina. As we talked, Rosezina held on to their two sons, five-year-old son Ashton and eighteen-day-old Keith Hall Jr. Rosezina had been pregnant with Keith Jr. when Katrina hit. She and Hall decided to split up when the water started rising in their house. Rosezina and Ashton went to a friend’s house on higher ground while Hall stayed behind and packed clothes. When her friend’s house started flooding, Rosezina waded and swam through the floodwaters seeking help. The exertion induced labor. A Coast Guard boat found her struggling in the water and evacuated her to Women’s Hospital in Baton Rouge where Keith Jr. was born on August 31. Meanwhile, the baby’s father was taken by rescuers to the Houston Astrodome where he called Rosezina’s aunt. She gave him the hospital phone number. Keith made his way back to Louisiana by bus after the hospital referred Rosezina to the church.

  “Our children are safe. Keith Jr. won’t even remember this,” Keith said and laughed, looking at the sleeping baby. He reached over with his tattooed arms and stroked the infant’s forehead. “You can’t stop the will of God. This was not in our hands. I’m a little sad, but we’re all living.”

  After I finished writing the Hall story, I connected to Norman’s satellite phone and filed it with my editor. The evening was still early and I felt restless and decided to drive into the French Quarter. There were just a few cars out. I noticed all the stars in the clear sky and listened to the sound of dogs barking as I drove onto I-10.

  In the Quarter, Humvees barreled down Bourbon Street, upending bags of garbage heaped and stinking beneath vacant apartments and closed stores. A 9:30 p.m. curfew remained in effect, but judging by the crowded sidewalks few people were paying attention to it. The National Guard seemed not to care, either. They stopped me, I showed my ID and they let me move on.

  All the businesses in the Quarter were closed except for a bar and a strip joint, Déjà Vu Showgirls, which may explain why the Guard ignored the curfew as much as civilians. The bar hummed with the noise of generators. I sat beside a woman wearing a blue Salvation Army uniform. A string of yellow Christmas lights hung above us from the ceiling and I was reminded of the Shar-e-Naw neighborhood in northwest Kabul. Vendors used the same kind of lights to illuminate their stalls, and I could see again the legless beggars reaching out to me and how the lights played across their faces and the shadows cast against the sidewalk and the smell of stagnant sewage in open gutters overwhelming even the shadows.

  I tried calling you again but the line remained dead. I dialed the operator to see if she could get through. She told me she had listings for Dale Titler and Dale Titler Jr. She tried the first number. Nothing. I asked her to try the second one. After a moment, I heard a ring, then voice mail kicked in.

  “This is Dale Titler Jr. We can’t come to the phone right now.”

  I left a message.

  Everyone in the bar, it seemed, had a cigarette. Smoke walled off the ceiling like a cloudy day. Two men shoved into me as they got up to pose for pictures beside a fallen neon sign of two huge breasts with red lights for nipples. People shouted, trying to speak above the blaring, battery-powered CD player, and then the Salvation Army woman, who had been laughing just moments before, started weeping. She covered her face and then raised her face to the ceiling.

  “So many homeless people, I’ve never seen anything like this,” she cried.

  A group of her colleagues looked at her. A man beside me said, “What’s her problem? We haven’t seen anything like this, either!”

  He slapped my back and guffawed.

  “Let’s go across the street, brother,” he said and tugged my arm.

  More out of curiosity than anything else, I followed him and some of his companions into Déjà Vu. Members of the Guard sat at small round tables, their green uniforms spotted with white dots from a mirrored disco ball twirling from the ceiling. Several generators hummed. I watched a gal with tattoos snaking down both her arms stomp onstage in black platform shoes. The Guard guys whooped. One man offered her five dollars. She balled the money into her hand, sat on the edge of the stage and wrapped her legs around his neck.

  “I can’t believe what I’m doing here. I’m a Cub Scout master at home,” the man yelled to no one.

  Then a Red Cross volunteer jumped onstage, tore off her T-shirt and wiggled out of her pants. Everyone’s mouth dropped. The stripper stared at her, shrugged and then yielded the stage. Kneeling before a table of National Guard, the volunteer leaned down and buried her face in a soldier’s lap. His eyes could not have gotten any wider, the guys with him hooting with laughter. She raised her head and leered at them. Then she paused as if something horrid had occurred to her, and her expression veered between desperation and terror. She stood up, covered her crotch and shouted in an alarmed voice,“Get away from me, get away from me, everyone get away from me!”

  “I gotta get a picture of this,” the scoutmaster said.

  “No!” the stripper shouted. “No pictures! No pictures! You don’t do that to her!”

  She demanded to see the camera to be sure he had deleted the
photo. Then she stepped around the sobbing volunteer and stalked offstage. Another stripper worked tables, flirting with the Guard, oblivious of all the commotion. She played with the hair of one acne-scarred young soldier and I watched him melt before her as she reached for his wallet. The volunteer emerged from the crowd and sat at a table near me.

  “You don’t think bad of me, do you?” she asked a man beside her.

  “No,” he said.

  He put an arm around her, then noticed I was watching.

  “Were you in Vietnam, Jerry?”

  “Jerry?”

  “Jerry Garcia, dude. You look just like him.”

  “It’s the beard and ponytail.”

  “Duh.”

  “No, I was too young for Vietnam.”

  “Wish I could say the same.”

  “You were in Vietnam?”

  “Dude, if you were too young for Vietnam, I wasn’t even born yet. Iraq, man. I was in Iraq.”

  “Understood,” I said.

  I went outside, pushing past a group of teenage boys peering inside Déjà Vu. Across the street, two cops were squaring off with each other. One of them landed some impressive punches. I asked the boys what was going on. They glanced at the cops, shrugged, and turned their attention back to the strippers. My cell phone rang and I answered.

  “Hello?”

  “Hello. This is Dale Titler Jr.”

  * * *

  Throughout junior high and high school, I stayed in touch with H. E. Hart and Rupert Radecki. Radecki retired about a year after I first heard from him. He and his wife took cruises in the South Pacific, visiting New Caledonia, the New Hebrides, Fiji, Tonga, and New Zealand, among other places I’d not heard of. If ever you visit the North Island of New Zealand, he wrote in 1972, take a trip down to Rotorua to see the geysers and boiling mud and steam coming up from the ground in numerous places. I thought Australia had a lot of sheep. New Zealand has sixty million head of sheep and some of the finest cattle I have ever seen. At present we are having a vicious thunderstorm with very bright flashes of lightning.

  I enjoyed his letters but I did not respond as quickly as I once had. The Vietnam War was winding down and with it the allure of becoming a fighter pilot. Memories of my fantasy squadron, the Bald Eagles, made me burn with embarrassment.

  No longer enthralled by Richthofen, I sought new research projects, new heroes. Inspired by the movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, I began studying outlaws of the American West. I wrote to Robert Redford, who’d starred as the Sundance Kid, for information about Cassidy and his Wild Bunch gang. Redford sent me an autographed photo. In a separate letter, his secretary put me in touch with Cassidy’s sister, Lula Betenson, then in her nineties. Betenson told me she believed her brother did not die in Bolivia as depicted in the film but returned to the United States and spent the remaining years of his life in Washington.

  March 15, 1974

  Dear Malcolm,

  You’ve done very, very well on the Butch Cassidy research. I’m proud of you for your obvious professional work on digging out the material firsthand such as the Betenson interview. You must think seriously about writing accounts or even books about your subjects. All best wishes, Dale M. Titler.

  Titler apologized for not responding to my letter as soon as he would have liked. He had suffered a bout with pneumonia that had left him bedridden for weeks. Almost a year later, ill health and age caught up with H. E. Hart.

  January 6, 1975

  Dear Mr. Garcia,

  First let me wish you every happiness this new year. Your card to my husband H. E. Hart arrived in time for Christmas but I thought I would let the joyous season pass before I told you my sad news. My husband died on the 29th of August. He was a remarkable man. Keen intellect and active. He enjoyed corresponding with you and admired your interest. Really, he wasted a great talent. He had a marvelous grip of English and had a flair for writing. He never mentioned it but he was decorated for bravery in the field on the 8th August, 1918. Many Americans were in the same breakthrough of the German lines and suffered heavy casualties. That offensive really ended the 1914–1918 war.

  Best wishes for your new study of the American outlaw—there seems to be plenty of them about in these days all over the world. Yours sincerely, (Mrs.) C. Veronica Hart

  When I wasn’t reading about Butch Cassidy, I’d catch the “L” train into Chicago with my friend Tom, rattling along the worn, rusted tracks until we got off on the skid row of South Michigan Avenue. We hung out in dimly lit bars thick with cigarette smoke that didn’t bother to card us—a couple of kids, rebels with a curfew. We saw old women wearing wigs stiff as straw, and men whose sad eyes, missing teeth, and faded tattoos said more about their lives than words could have. They teased the rims of their glasses with tobacco-stained fingers and spoke in hoarse tones as they hustled us for change. One man showed me the mottled real estate business cards he still kept in his wallet.

  I remember a red-haired woman named Carol. Her dirt-streaked face looked to me as wrinkled as a rumpled shirt. Her clothes reeked of cigarettes. She told me she made forty dollars a day, an enormous sum to me. How? I wanted to know.

  “Honey,” she said, “I beg.”

  When I got home, I didn’t dare tell my parents where Tom and I had been. Instead, I kept a diary. I began with one sentence, I was in a bar tonight, and took it from there. Honey, I beg. I wrote it down, afraid somehow that if I didn’t I’d forget the choice expressions and individual stories. I had no idea what I’d do with my diary any more than I knew what I’d do with the Richthofen and Butch Cassidy material. I just knew it was worth keeping.

  In 1975, Saigon fell to the communists in a renewed offensive. I overheard my parents in the kitchen criticize President Ford for not aiding an ally. “If Nixon were still president …” they said, still stunned by Watergate.

  Politics and foreign policy mattered little to me. As helicopters swept terrified Americans from the rooftop of the US Embassy in Saigon, I was preparing to graduate from high school and enroll at Ripon College in Wisconsin in the fall. I’d also begun dating my first girlfriend. Julie was shy but smart, plain but adventurous. I thought I loved her and worried I would lose her to someone else. She gave me a clothbound copy of The Day the Red Baron Died for my birthday. It had long been out of print. Because it was a surprise, she would not tell me where she had found it.

  July 23, 1975

  Dear Malcolm,

  I am pleased that your girl and you have a common interest in the Red Baron. I sometimes get letters from the female sex on the subject of the German ace; apparently they find him “irresistible.” But hang in there. Maybe some of his charm will rub off. I keep hoping it will in my case, anyway.

  As always, Titler wished me well. Normally, he signed his full name. This time, however, he wrote Dale. I continued to call him Mr. Titler out of respect.

  * * *

  September 24, 2005

  Dear Mr. Titler,

  It was a pleasure speaking to your wife, Helen, last night after getting your cell number from your son, Dale Jr. Sorry you were out when I called. As I told Helen, I will drive to Gulfport when I finish my work in New Orleans. I hope that will be soon. I hear the roads to Mississippi will open any day now.

  Small signs of life have begun popping up in New Orleans. Some families, for instance, have been allowed into Chalmette, in St. Bernard Parish where I was today on Victor Street and Bonita Drive. Filmy water lines wrapped around houses just below second-floor windows. The humid air had an odor of rot that I could almost taste at the back of my throat. Light mixed with shadows in the branches of trees. Cell phones rang. Families in rubber boots and hip waders trudged in and out of their homes carrying buckets of mud they dumped on their lawns adding to the stink, and the sun burned in a clear sky and the whole neighborhood steamed in the heat.

  One woman, Dora Williams on Bonita Drive, her face streaked with dirt, showed me a teacup she had salvaged from her home. She rinsed it
off with a bottle of water. Dancing Asian characters emerged from the dirty runoff. Through the open door of her house, I saw a closet door open, a tongue of mud oozing out.

  “How is it this wasn’t broken?” she wondered about the cup.

  A National Guard jeep pulled up in front of her house. The driver asked us if we needed help.

  “No, thank you,” Williams said.

  “There’s a lot of looting going on. Gangs too,” the soldier said.

  “Nothing here,” Williams said.

  “How about FEMA? The Red Cross? Have you heard from them?”

  “No,” she said.

  Pop, pop, I heard from about a block away. Pop, pop. The National Guard soldier cocked his head toward the sound and without another word got in his jeep and raced away.

  Williams looked at me. “Gunshots?” she said.

  A helicopter flew overhead, then veered away.

  The National Guard soldier returned minutes later. It was nothing, he told us. Aerosol cans exploding in a garage from the heat. He wished us a good day and left again. I thanked Williams for her time and got back into my SUV.

  Before I returned to Gramercy, I drove to West Jefferson Medical Center in Marrero. The hospital had no air-conditioning for four days after Katrina. Temperatures reached 100 degrees and higher inside. Generators powered fans, but that did little to relieve the heat. Doctors and nurses cut the legs and sleeves off their scrubs to stay cool. Elderly patients suffered. Nurses could not bathe them or provide them with as much water as they wanted. At the same time, people were coming in for help. One woman brought in an hours-old infant she had delivered herself in the attic of her flooded house. Another woman was thirty-seven weeks pregnant and unable to reach her regular physician.

  “We were rolling here without air-conditioning and running water, but we never lost our ability to operate,” surgeon Craig Thompson told me.

  Within twenty-four hours after Katrina had passed, doctors saw one man who had been stabbed in an evacuation shelter, a police officer shot in the head, two alleged looters shot in the chest, a family of four shot and a man injured after he crashed into a Humvee. One pregnant patient said she was past her due date. After the baby was delivered, a boy, doctors realized he was about four weeks premature.