Riding through Katrina with the Red Baron's Ghost

by J. Malcolm Garcia

Back off or suffer the consequences. At least, that’s my father’s interpretation of what he said. My father knows only that the owner sent a letter to the Woodley Road Neighborhood Association after his power lines were cut the other week, and he was none too pleasant in what he wrote. He’s a rich, high-powered Chicago attorney, which leads my father to all sorts of nervous speculation about what he might do.

  “I’m told he’s under the impression it was people from around here who cut his power lines,” my father says. “He accused association members themselves of doing it. He thinks they were also the ones who tore up his sod and marked his driveway with graffiti two weeks ago.”

  I drove here from Kansas City to spend the weekend with my parents at my brother Michael’s request. He called me this afternoon to say he’d be here later tonight but not in time for dinner. I told my parents, and my mother said he could have dessert with us. What they don’t know is that Michael wants to talk to them about moving, about leaving the house where they’ve lived since 1957 for an assisted-living home.

  I go into the kitchen and ask my mother for some plates. My father gets napkins from a cupboard, and together we set the table. My mother stays in the kitchen heating a large frozen pizza.

  “The association tried to stop him in court from building the Castle and later objected when he added the wall around it,” my father continues. “All the members deny any involvement in the vandalism. I don’t know what to believe. If it doesn’t stop, he’ll do something. I don’t blame him; I’d do something too. I don’t belong to the association but I bet he’ll take it out on the whole neighborhood, whether you’re a member or not. He thinks we’re all against him. I was opposed to him building the Castle but I’m not against him.”

  My father looks at me. I hand him the plates. He sets them on the table.

  “He has a right to live here, is what I mean,” my father says. “I just wish he hadn’t built that thing.”

  Replete with minarets, balconies, archways, and walkways, the four-story square stone mansion my parents have nicknamed the Castle sprawls on three acres of land. Its owner bought the property from the Yarnald family. I only vaguely remember the Yarnalds, yet I can still see their white two-story house and the three yapping miniature schnauzers they walked every day no matter the weather. Hedges of evergreen shrubs and towering elms concealed their house from the road, and I would often hear their dogs barking furiously, following me from behind the hedges as I walked past their property to school.

  The street my parents live on was named Woodley Road by its developer. When I was a child, elms concealed houses from one another and absorbed the noise from Hill Street and Illinois Road and Skokie Highway 41 and other busy roadways outside the neighborhood. Their heavy branches provided shade in the summer and helped block frigid winds blowing off Lake Michigan in the winter.

  The owner of the Castle bought the Yarnald property two years ago and tore down the house to erect his estate. It did not go well at first. The new foundation cracked. Once that issue was resolved, construction resumed and the monolithic size of his ambition soon became apparent. Neighbors recognized that once completed, the Castle would obscure the view from their own expansive homes.

  Petitions were distributed and signed, and the neighborhood association took the Castle’s owner to court in the hope of scaling down the size of his mansion, but the case was thrown out, my father says. He doesn’t know the details but suspects that money, personal connections, and property rights trumped zoning laws and the neighborhood’s objections.

  Last year the Castle’s owner built a ten-foot brick wall around his property and in the process cut down fifteen elms. The neighbors took him to court again. Something about infringement, property lines, and building too close to the road. That case was also thrown out.

  “People asked us to get involved, so I said, ‘Sure, I’ll sign your petition, but that’s as far as I’ll go,’” my father says. “I didn’t want any trouble. This guy knows what he’s doing. He’s a lawyer, after all. He’s got it all laid out. He knows people who greased the wheels for him, I’m sure. I wish I hadn’t signed that petition. I’d rather he not get hold of my name.”

  “So now he thinks the neighbors are out to get him by vandalizing his property because they failed in court?” I say.

  “He’s not popular, for sure,” my father says.

  “I don’t think much of anyone who kills fifteen trees,” my mother observes.

  She tells me the pizza is ready, and I take it out of the oven and slide it onto a cutting board. I look for a knife to slice it.

  “It’s not just the trees,” my father says, pulling out a chair for my mother at the table. “I hate seeing old homes torn down.”

  “It’s like losing a member of the family,” my mother says.

  My father is ninety-two, my mother ninety. They read the Chicago Tribune, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times, and prefer listening to the radio to watching TV. On occasion they still go out to a restaurant, but not often. I want to believe they’re just fine, but I can’t help noticing that they no longer maintain the house and to some degree themselves.

  My mother has curvature of the spine and is blind in one eye. Arthritis has curled her fingers into hooks. She does little more than sit in one place for most of the day and stare into space when she’s not reading. My father has a bad heart. He continues to drive and does the grocery shopping, but the dents on the front and rear of his car testify that he shouldn’t get behind the wheel.

  The house itself has become something of a wreck. I don’t know when my parents last cleaned the living room carpet. They fail to notice that its stink sucks the oxygen from the room. The chipped and cracked wooden floor needs to be waxed if not replaced, and moths have harvested the draperies. Layers of dust mantle the furniture. In the kitchen, encrusted pots and pans fill a cabinet beneath the oven. The grimy gas stove has ensnared ants in pockets of goop, and only one burner works. My mother washes some of their clothes by hand in the kitchen sink because it’s become increasingly difficult for her to walk downstairs into the basement to use the washing machine. Socks, T-shirts, and underwear drip dry in their bathroom. I’ve suggested that they hire a maid. They tell me they don’t need anyone helping them.

  At one time they did consider moving into an apartment, but never followed through. I don’t think they looked very hard. Sentiment keeps them on Woodley Road. They can account for each year they’ve lived in the house by the big and little moments they experienced in it: the births of my older brothers and me, the death of JFK, the Chicago ice storm of 1968 during which my brother and I skated on the lawn, the raccoon trapped in the basement in 1973 and the mess it made, Nixon’s resignation, the time Michael broke his arm, and so on. These are the mile markers of my parents’ life together, the passage of years in which they saw themselves age and the house along with them. Their stooped backs, its warped walls. Their gray hair, its chipped paint. Their lined faces, its worn look. The house holds their history. Remaining in it must be akin to holding on to one of the few friends they have left.

  My mother feels sure the house will be torn down like the Yarnalds’ someday. In her mind a far more imposing, perhaps even more sinister monstrosity than the Castle will rise from the rubble of our demolished home. Something so huge that its engulfing presence will obliterate any memory of my father and her and the family they raised.

  Michael cares little about the fate of the house. He has a wife and daughter, owns his home in Barrington, Illinois, and has no emotional attachment to Woodley Road. I, on the other hand, have rented apartments my entire adult life and have always understood that nothing in them belonged to me except my furniture, clothes, kitchen utensils, and the few pictures I’ve hung on the walls.

  As a reporter, I’m often on the road for weeks, sometimes longer. It doesn’t make sense for me to own a house I’d rarely occupy. Apartment living and month-to-month rentals allow me the flexibility to pack up and lea
ve when I’m given an extended assignment. I enjoy traveling and immersing myself in cultures different from my own, the mental chess game of reporting from a foreign place. Still, I can appreciate what I’m missing: stability and a home and a family of my own. That’s why I enjoy the times when I visit my parents and sleep in my old bed, surrounded by the detritus of boxed childhood toys and curling Jethro Tull and Santana posters and the memories and sense of place they hold.

  Past is past, Michael likes to say. He’s a banker, a numbers guy, while I’m the wandering scribe. He could no more live the way I do than I could sit down with a calculator and think what a fine way this is to spend a day. We’re not close, but I don’t mean to suggest that we dislike each other. We’re like two regulars of a bar or coffee shop. We exchange pleasantries and then go our separate ways. We get together only when a task or problem arises that requires collaboration.

  Such as now.

  Michael doesn’t think it makes sense for our parents to pay property taxes on a house much too big for just the two of them. He wants them to live in Meadowlark, an assisted-living complex near him. The dining hall, he told me, serves three meals a day, and our parents would be required to eat there several times a week to ensure that they don’t “isolate.” Their “socialization skills” would increase through field trips and other group activities. They would stay active by developing “community engagement plans.” For the next four months, Meadowlark is having a move-in special. Michael wants our parents to take advantage of it and is coming over tonight to speak with them about selling the house.

  He called me in Kansas City last week. “Would you come up and be there when I talk to them?” he asked me. “If they see we both think it’s a good thing for them to do, I think they’ll consider it.”

  They might consider it but they won’t like the idea, we both know. No matter how Michael frames it, he’ll be asking them to leave the home they have lived in for decades for a new place in a different town. I could see it from their vantage point.

  When I was ten minutes from my parents’ house, I stopped at Meir’s Tavern to fortify myself with a quick beer. The tavern was a favorite stomping ground for my friend Tom and me when we were in college. It dates back to the 1920s and has changed little since then. Deep holes gouged the gravel parking lot. Small square tables with plastic red-checkered tablecloths crowded the wooden floor beneath blinking beer signs. Long ago, cigarette and cigar smoke, now prohibited by law, glazed a mural on the wall a light brown. Ceiling fans creaked and dispersed the aroma of grilled cheeseburgers.

  I took a seat at the bar. The bartender gave me a beer and resumed talking to a guy next to me about playing in a rock band. He had some CDs and set them on the bar for anyone interested. I picked one up.

  “CDs are almost too much of a good thing,” the bartender said. “Now everybody is recording. Doesn’t matter how bad they are. Used to be you had to really earn your chops before you cut a record. Now quality acts are competing against thousands of amateurs. Breaking out is even harder today than before.”

  His CD had a red cover with head shots of the band members etched in black. I assumed that the bartender lived not too far from Meir’s. I imagined him at night sitting on his couch and looking out the window at passing traffic. He strums tunes he hears in his head, searching for a song. He’s visible to those drivers who look his way, and then, blip, he’s gone.

  I put the CD back on the bar and thought of my brother Butch and his teenage fantasies of playing in a rock band. My parents gave him a guitar. He took lessons but I don’t remember him playing much. His passion, if he really had one, receded once his fantasies clashed with his disinterest in practicing. In time his guitar gathered cobwebs. It has stood at a slant in a corner of his bedroom for years now, below a window where I can still see the log pile behind our house that he and Michael and I played in as kids. We’d creep up to it after school. Raccoons burrowed inside it during the day. We would shine flashlights into the cracks between the logs and watch multiple pockets of narrow eyes blink at us from the shadows. Most of the logs have now crumbled into splinters, and when it rains the remaining logs stand isolated like islands in a deepening pool of water.

  The families living on Woodley Road then were mostly Irish. Over the years, my parents have noticed more Eastern Europeans and Asian couples moving in. According to my father, an Indian family lives not far from our house. Maybe Egyptian. He doesn’t know which.

  My parents and I finish the pizza. I take their plates and load the dishwasher. Pulsing red lights draw me to a window above the sink, and I see two police cars in the driveway of the Castle. My father and mother notice the lights too, and together we peer out the window toward the road, stare through the darkening evening and the outstretched branches of leafless trees.

  “What now?” my father wonders.

  “More vandalism?” my mother says. “A break-in, do you think?”

  I doubt that anyone has broken into the Castle. Most of the houses on Woodley Road have complex security systems and motion sensors that blast the street with revolving floodlights when so much as a squirrel scampers across a lawn at night. My parents don’t have those kinds of devices, but they’ve taken their own precautions against intruders.

  When I was growing up, we never opened the door to someone we didn’t know. The doorbell would ring and we all stopped whatever we were doing and froze in place. We shut off the TV and anything else that might reveal that we were home. My mother would whisper, “Don’t make noise.” My father would peek out a window. The doorbell would ring once, twice, three times. We listened to ourselves breathe, listened for the sound of footsteps retreating down the walk, for the sound of an engine starting and of a car leaving. We didn’t budge. We absorbed the weighty silence left behind until my parents gave the all-clear. Then my father opened the front door, and like hunters we looked for a sign.

  “Where’re the police going?” my mother says. “Into the Castle?”

  “Three police, that’s a lot,” my father notes.

  A dog starts barking, but it sounds far off.

  “What’re the police doing now?” my mother asks.

  “I don’t know. They seem to be standing around,” my father says.

  One of the squad cars backs out of the driveway and leaves.

  “Well, it looks like the police are going,” my father reports.

  “Yeah, they’re getting in their cars,” I say.

  “What do you think happened?” my mother wonders.

  “An alarm may have gone off by accident,” I suggest.

  “I bet he takes the association to court for whatever happened tonight,” my father says. “I wish I hadn’t signed that damned petition. This has gotten too personal. It’s not him, it’s his house I opposed.”

  An odd kind of emptiness hovers over the street after the police drive off. Then a pair of headlights tunnel up the road and a car turns into our driveway.

  “Who can this be?” my father says.

  “Don’t answer the door,” my mother commands.

  I stare out the window until I recognize the car. “It’s Michael,” I say.

  My parents look at me, surprised.

  “Why’s he here?” my mother says. “Is anything wrong?”

  “No, no,” I reassure them. “He called earlier, remember? Said he’d come by after dinner.”

  “Oh, yes,” my father says in a drifting voice that tells me he does not remember. He hurries to the front door to let Michael in. I walk into the living room with my mother and we sit on the couch without speaking. I hear my father sort through the confusion of keys on his key chain.

  Staring out the window at the backyard, I reach for my mother’s hand. Woods seal us off from neighbors and the road, and the changes still to come from outside the perimeter of trees.

  Stay a Little Longer

  (2010)

  I’ve been in Islamabad for nearly four weeks for the Virginia Quarterly Review. My editor
asked me to cover the rise in violence from jihadi groups opposed to Pakistan’s alliance with the United States. Every morning, before making my rounds to the various ministries for news updates and press conferences, before negotiating the countless bureaucratic hurdles required to see Minister So-and-So, I stop at a bakery near my guesthouse with my Pakistani colleagues Yassin and Tahir for bread and tea.

  I met Yassin by chance in 2004, when I was in Pakistan for Knight Ridder Newspapers covering the search for Osama bin Laden. Yassin, a taxi driver, picked me up one morning. He asked in his limited English if I needed a driver for the day. I told him I did. I said I also needed a translator, and he suggested his brother-in-law, Tahir. The three of us teamed up for four weeks. When I left Pakistan, I kept in touch with Tahir by email. When VQR hired me for this trip, I coordinated with Tahir for us to work together again.

  Yassin takes pride in driving for foreigners and insists on calling me sir, opening my door, and carrying my camera pack. Every time we park, he inspects his graying hair and pats down any stray strand. In contrast to the care he takes with his hair, he wears a worn salaawr kameez that is stained black in spots and appears to never have been washed.

  Tahir, on the other hand, typically dresses in pressed blue jeans and muscle shirts. A man in his thirties, he lives with his parents, listens to American soft rock music, and ogles young women on the street like a horny teenager. Although he knows our morning routine, he always asks me, “Where’re we going, boss?” Before I finish explaining, he cuts me off.

  “Okay, okay, okay,” he says. “I remember now.”

  We call each other Mr. Okay, Okay, our running joke.

  The baker’s name is Hanif. He sits cross-legged on the flour-dusted floor. His bakery overlooks a narrow street in the Aabpara neighborhood, where in the morning I see taxi drivers asleep, their sandaled feet sticking out open car windows. They rouse themselves from time to time and drive into downtown seeking fares. If they find none, they drift back to Hanif’s shop for tea, bread, and another nap.