Riding through Katrina with the Red Baron's Ghost

by J. Malcolm Garcia

  What would I be doing in Kabul now? Having lunch. A little place my colleague Aziz and I always go. I see us sitting on carpets strewn across the floor. We order rice, beans, and cuts of lamb. A waiter tosses water on exposed areas around the rugs to keep dust from rising while we eat. The water spatters my shoes, and I hold out my hands and he pours water over our fingers to clean them. I shake my hands and resume eating. After lunch Aziz and I walk through a hovel of vendor stalls on Butchery Street, where the skinned carcasses of goats and sheep drip blood and crowds of men wrapped in blankets clog the sidewalks. Cars swerve past us, and we make our way amid the raucous beeping and the hundreds of disembodied voices rising around us, and the bustle of shepherds herding goats and mules pulling carts, and the men and women stepping through the debris of bombed buildings, and the kids playing soccer where buildings once stood.

  The dogs tug me forward. I enjoy their quiet company. I’m glad to be home, but I haven’t called friends. I want to be alone. To ease back into life here before I leave for Honduras. I spend my days in coffee shops, reading newspapers and magazines surrounded by people I don’t know, my face buried in articles. I’m in the company of strangers, alone but not alone, and I find comfort in the bubble I’ve created. But life intrudes. Tom is dead.

  If Tom were alive, he’d listen and not ask questions, just let me blab on about how I have a tough time adapting back to Kansas City. Reentry, reporters call it, I’d say, and he’d make a face at that bit of jargon. Oh, is that what they call it, Mr. Whoop-Dee-Do foreign correspondent man, he’d say, is it really, and we’d both laugh.

  I wonder if he would remember the evening with Laura’s brother. We stayed up late that night and drank too much beer and the next day Tom called me from work and said he hoped I had the same pounding headache he had. Tom began working at Crate & Barrel right after college. Like me, he unloaded trucks and organized a warehouse. His hands and forearms got strong from days spent ripping open fifty-pound box after fifty-pound box of pots and pans.

  Unlike me, Tom enjoyed his job and had no desire to be anything other than a Crate & Barrel warehouse supervisor. Laura wanted to establish her own design business. She thought Tom lacked ambition, and that, he told me years later, contributed to problems in their marriage. They divorced in 1994.

  Laura had not known Tom in high school when he excelled at soccer and was ranked eighth in Illinois. His coach encouraged him to try out for the Olympic team, certain he would make it, but Tom dismissed the idea. Perhaps he thought subjecting his natural talent to the rigors of that sort of competition would render everything he had accomplished insignificant if he failed. Perhaps he was simply happy with what he had done and saw no need to do more.

  Tom had a casual manner when he played soccer, sauntering up to the ball as if it were a stray Coke can on the sidewalk that he hadn’t quite decided whether to ignore or not. Then he’d kick it. Fueled with an unseen energy, the ball would rocket between the bare legs of opposing players with the kind of streamlined intensity of something immersed in the celebration of its sudden freedom; it would soar waist-high past even more players, and Tom would stare after it as if it were a bird he had just released, a benign, almost humble look on his face expressing appreciation for his small part in its liberation, for the gift he had given an inanimate object, and he’d watch the ball streak past the goalkeeper before being stopped finally by the net, and dropping heavily to the ground. Tom would look almost disappointed as he considered the abrupt stillness that enwrapped the ball like a dead thing, and he’d slump a little, head bowed. He’d shrug off the backslapping of his teammates and at halftime sit by himself on the bench. After the game he’d seek me out. We’d get in his car and usually stop somewhere for pizza. I would tell him he’d done a great job, and he would say, “Yeah, it was a good game,” and nothing more.

  One night as we ate pizza, he told me his older sister Kathy had died. “I can’t tell you what happened,” Tom said. “I can’t tell you how she died. Don’t ask.”

  I didn’t. Kathy was seven years older than me. I’d barely known her.

  At his house, photographs of Kathy had been removed from the walls. Maybe Tom saw me looking at the blank spaces, I don’t know, but for no reason he told me his parents had begun sleeping in separate bedrooms. I was eighteen. I didn’t know what to say. I think now that Tom wanted desperately to talk about it.

  Years later he told me Kathy had committed suicide. Carbon monoxide. She had sat in her car in the garage. She had a history of depression. After the funeral, Tom’s father told him to stop crying.

  “It’s over. We have to continue with our lives,” he’d said.

  Tom wasn’t home when Kathy’s photos were removed. He didn’t know when or why his parents decided to live detached from each other but remain in the same house. They never mentioned Kathy again.

  My dogs keep pulling me. I see their breath and lean back to slow them. I should take them to a training class. There are a hundred and one other things I should do but won’t.

  I smell the early morning air and the persistent odors of car exhaust, trash, and skunks, and I think of the smell of horses and mules that lingers on Jalalabad Road after dozens of them have hauled wagonloads of wood into Kabul. There is the nauseating stink of horse shit and mule shit mixing with diesel fumes. Mortared buildings stand on either side of the jammed roads, and the homeless inside them stare out holes and watch me take photographs.

  Later, I return to the Park Palace Guest House where I’m staying and order kabob. Water leaps out of a fountain in the courtyard, splashing onto the dead grass.

  An army contractor joins me. If you’re in the shitter, do you think you would finish pissing when a bomb drops? he asks. It’s one of those mind-fuck, does-a-falling-tree-make-noise-if-no-one’s-around-to-hear-it kind of questions when you’ve got nothing to do and no place to go, and you’ve seen all the DVDs you brought with you from the States. Weird thing is, the contractor leaves to take a leak. And I hear a blast from somewhere nearby. Bomb? I doubt it. No commotion on the street to suggest panic but I see the contractor run out of his room. Did he piss himself? Probably not, but the thought makes me laugh.

  Walking back to my apartment, I stop outside Los Alamos Market y Cocina, a convenience store across the street. My dogs pant at my side. A breeze rustles the leaves in trees along the sidewalk. Parked cars loom in the dark.

  Los Alamos is closed at this early hour, but inside I see the thirty-four-year-old owner, Augustin Juarez, stocking shelves. Brightly lit, Los Alamos reflects Augustin’s sunny nature; he is a short, stocky, dark-haired man with an easy grin and a contagious laugh.

  One afternoon when I was in the store, he asked to borrow my glasses to better read a purchase order. Tu está viejo, I teased him. You’re old. Ever since then, we’ve always greeted each other, Hola, viejo!

  Augustin keeps the shelves full and mops the white-tiled floor. Posters of green mountainous valleys shrouded by fat white clouds hang crookedly on the cream-colored walls. People like to drop by and talk even when they have no need to shop. Since I’ve been back, I’ve walked into Los Alamos for no particular reason, checking shelves filled with cans of chili, pinto beans, fruit cocktail. I find it oddly comforting to mindlessly pick up cans and put them down and listen to the talk around me without being drawn into it.

  KITCHEN OPENING SOON, a sign inside reads. Before I left for Afghanistan, Augustin told me he planned to expand his business by serving Mexican meals that would taste like home cooking. What he earned from the kitchen he would put into a retirement fund. He didn’t want to be managing a convenience store when he was a real hombre viejo.

  I saw Tom for the last time in 1988, when we were both thirty-one. He and Laura had recently moved to Dallas to help open a Crate & Barrel, and I was visiting. We sat in their living room drinking beers and debating the start of middle age while Laura worked in the kitchen, examining designs for the store. I told Tom that if by middle age we meant
a halfway mark, then the midpoint of, say, infancy and one hundred would be fifty.

  Tom countered that the average life expectancy for men was about seventy-four. Middle age, therefore, would be thirty-seven. Neither of us accepted the idea that middle age was six years away. To be middle-aged at thirty-seven and then three years later turn forty was too much to consider. We stuck with fifty as the midpoint, an age that seemed far into the future.

  A dog barks and my dogs’ ears prick up. The sound of someone jogging bounces off houses. Streetlights cast a yellow glow, washing out swaths of fading night. I look up at dimming stars and miss the pitch-black skies of Afghanistan.

  When I’m in Kabul, I take care in the evening, worried about breaking an ankle in a hole in the sidewalk. Generators hum in some vendors’ stalls, and I use the light they provide to make my way. Men and women emerge from the cloudy darkness and walk toward the light to buy rice and bread, and then they walk back into the dark, toward mountains I know are miles away but appear to loom out of the city itself.

  “Coco!” boys shout at me, using the Dari word for “uncle,” and then they too vanish.

  If Tom were here, I’d tell him that everything feels off-kilter when you first arrive in Kabul, and you wonder if you have conjured a kind of skewed dream that you will awaken from soon enough, and then a few weeks later you’re used to it and the life around you becomes normal, a new normal, and everything you’ve known before is really the dream you’ve awakened from.

  I watch Augustin punch buttons on a calculator. Forms from the city health department and a blueprint for the kitchen are spread out on a desk beside him. I can just make out the fine lines of the blueprint. I like the idea of the drawings being transferred from the page and morphing into vents and pipes and plumbing that will all be part of something new.

  I don’t think of myself as old necessarily, but I’m not young. There is no going back. Tom is frozen in time, just as he was in a favorite high school photograph that hung in his room. The camera had caught him in midair as he jumped up to watch the trajectory of a soccer ball during a game. It looked like he head-butted the ball, but it had in fact been kicked by a teammate. Tom told me he’d jumped because he wanted to see where the ball would land, but I think something else motivated him. What I saw in the photo was a moment of sheer exuberance. Tom couldn’t restrain himself and hurled himself into the air, his shoulder-length hair rising off his head, his blue-and-white sports jersey sparkling in the light. It was typical of him that the one photo he had of himself playing the sport he excelled at had nothing to do with him kicking the ball or scoring a point.

  Talking about his high school soccer days long after we had graduated did not make him nostalgic or sad. He never regretted passing on the Olympics. He had had his high school moment. He revealed an exceptional talent, then walked away from it, satisfied to open boxes and stock shelves and supervise a warehouse. He would have been interested in my travels, but he would not have understood my restlessness, the worry I have that satisfaction might lead to passivity and that years from now I would look back and regret the risks not taken.

  “You don’t relax,” he’d say. “You’re always afraid of what you might miss. You’re never satisfied.”

  I kick a ball of ice and watch it tumble off the sidewalk and break apart. I couldn’t play soccer worth a damn. I wonder if Tom had trouble sleeping; if the thing that drove him to take his life kept him up at night until he made a decision. Did he find peace at that point?

  I see my life racing forward at an irrevocable clip to this present moment. Time passes. We’re either dragged along or keep pace with it. I suspect that at some point Tom felt dragged. He was tired and decided he’d had enough and got off.

  A car passes and then another one follows it, and another one after that. The buildup of another workday. Soon the honking congestion of a new morning rush hour will be upon me, but I’ll still hear the din of people in Kabul’s bazaars and the roving packs of feral dogs howling unseen, see the war widows kneeling on the streets screaming “Money, mister!” and the spreading red blaze of sunrise as mullahs recite the Quran on loudspeakers and call people to prayer.

  My dogs pull on their leashes and I look at them and the noises in my head diminish, replaced by the wet hissing sound of the few cars rushing by. The cold air makes my eyes water. There seems to be no end in sight of frigid temperatures, but it’s late February and I know spring is not far off. More snow may fall, but winter is almost over.

  Tom was born in April. I’ll think of him on his birthday. I turn forty-eight in August. However, I tell people I’m that age now. It’s a trick I play on myself. When my birthday arrives, I will have already accepted being one year older, worked it in, adjusted to the idea. My birthday will be just another day. I’ll have had a jump on time. Tom, I’m sure, would laugh at this self-deception.

  A tap on the window startles me, and I see Augustin staring at me. He mouths, Viejo! Que pasó?

  “Hola, viejo,” I say.

  He looks confused. Can’t sleep? he mouths.

  I nod and he shakes his head and returns to his shelves. I cross the street to my apartment, where I hope to fall asleep. I’ll dream of Kabul and wake up alone and estranged until I remember where I am. I’ll think, Tom is dead, and confront with the steady immutable beat of my heart the loss of a friend, and my own middle age.

  Flag Raising

  (2004)

  From 2000 to 2004, I lived on Summit Street, at 16th Street in the West Side neighborhood of Kansas City, Missouri. One-story wood and brick houses built in the 1940s, curled peels of paint dropping off them like so much falling hair, stood aslant on ruined foundations. Porches that may once have provided romantic interludes for young couples buckled and sagged and held no furniture or any other suggestion of life but only jutted out beneath cracked windows, misshapen and wearied from decades of rain and snow, heat and cold, dimly illuminated by the faint glow of lamps inside.

  On the south end of the street, Summit intersected with Southwest Boulevard; on the north side, it came to a dead end above Interstate 70. Feral dogs slept in packs on hills not far from the traffic. In the early morning just before dawn, they would trot down the middle of Summit, the homes on either side of them still dark. Those mornings when I woke up before my alarm clock rang, I would watch the dogs run, seeking cover from the approaching day as streetlights blinked off and a few car engines coughed into life and the sky began to brighten.

  The dogs’ nights of free roaming, however, would not last. By the time I moved to Summit, developers were already buying up many of the old houses and people like me, with no connection to the neighborhood, began moving in. Changing demographics was nothing new to Summit Street. In the 1880s it had been known as Irish Hill. In subsequent decades, the houses belonged to Swedes, Germans, and Danes, among others. Most of the immigrants worked for the railroads. Mexicans started settling there in large numbers in the 1920s, and it remained largely Mexican when I lived there.

  The new promise of rehabbing houses with historic “peaked” gable roofs dating back to the 1870s and increasing property values appealed to developers. Mexican families, however, descendants of relatives who had settled there decades earlier, felt the housing speculation had gotten out of hand. They considered the West Side their ethnic stronghold, the rickety houses were homes to their families, and they couldn’t afford the prices—as much as $100,000 in some cases—these rehabbed houses commanded. “I think there’s a little clique up there that wants to turn it into Yuppieville, and it’s very dangerous,” remarked one Hispanic activist, a hairstylist named Alfredo Parra, in an interview with the Kansas City Star. “What I see of the West Side is a Chicano community, and I really want us to keep our identity.”

  Newcomers considered such worries nonsensical. “You have a part of the Mexican population who don’t like being integrated,” said Kathy Kirby, who was interviewed for the same Star story. She had spearheaded neighborhood beautificat
ion projects by promoting community gardens. “They won’t recognize this has been Northern European in the past, and they don’t value an integrated setting.”

  It did not take me long to see why Mexican families were anxious. Shortly after I arrived, developers built two condominiums on empty lots where houses had been destroyed by fires. The developers promised the mostly Mexican families who attended community meetings that the condos would match in design the style of existing houses and would be only slightly taller. The opposite was true. The condos rose four stories and resembled no other buildings on Summit, each square section a hulking gray cube of modern architecture, each floor placed slightly askew to achieve an effect, I presume, that I did not understand but that a Star colleague called “condo cubism.”

  The deceit of the developers angered me, but I did not feel as violated as the Mexicans who had lived on Summit for generations. I was not raised as a Latino, Chicano, Hispanic. I had no visceral feeling of what those designations meant, no sense of connection to my immigrant forebears or the Spanish-speaking community.

  This had to do in part with my father. He was born in St. Louis, Missouri, of Cuban parents. His family later moved to Tampa. Although his first language, he said, was Spanish, I rarely heard him speak it as I was growing up. Every now and then he’d say a word or phrase, but the stumbling sentences emerged with the kind of uncertainty that happens when we evoke a distant memory. If indeed Spanish had been his first language, he lost it growing up. Perhaps in deference to my father, my Puerto Rican mother, who spoke Spanish flawlessly, declined to speak it in the house. My father was not a patient man, and I can’t imagine him tolerating my mother talking to his sons in a language he no longer understood.