The Collected Short Fiction, page 14
“The way you charged in here, I thought you might be in trouble.” The volunteer stays in his place by the door.
Beltrane looks back at him. “You see anything wrong with my face?”
The man squints, but comes no closer. “No. Looks okay to me.” When Beltrane doesn’t add anything else, he says, “You know, we have strict policies on drug use in here.”
“I ain’t on drugs. I got this thing here... I don’t know, I don’t know.” He lifts his shirt and turns to the volunteer, who displays no reaction. “Can you see this?” he asks.
“That street there? Yes, I can see it.”
Beltrane says, “I think I’m haunted.”
The man says nothing for a moment. Then, “Is that New Orleans?”
Beltrane nods.
“I guess you’re here from Katrina?”
“Yeah, that’s right. It fucked my world up, man. Everybody gone.”
The man nods. “Most people from New Orleans are going up to Baton Rouge, or to Houston. What brings you all the way out here?”
“My girl. My girl lives here. I’m gonna move in with her.”
“Your girlfriend?”
“No, my girl! My daughter!”
“You’ve been here two days already, haven’t you? Where is she?”
“She don’t know I’m coming. I got to find her.” Beltrane stares at himself. His face is dry. His hair is dry. He lifts his shirt to stare at the hole there one more time, but it’s gone now; he runs his hand over the old brown flesh, the curly gray hairs.
The volunteer says nothing for a moment. Then, “How long has it been since you’ve seen her?”
Beltrane looks down into the sink. The porcelain around the drain is chipped and rusty. A distant gurgling sound rises from the pipes, as though something is alive down there, in the bowels of the city. He has to think for a minute. “Twenty-three years,” he says finally.
The volunteer’s face is still. “That’s a long time.”
“She got married.”
“Is that when she moved here?”
“I got to find her. I got to find my little girl.”
The volunteer seems to consider this; then he opens the door to the common area. “My name’s Ron Davis. I’m the pastor at the Trinity Baptist, just down the street a few blocks. If you’re all done in here, why don’t you come down there with me. I think I might be able to help you.”
Beltrane looks at him. “A pastor? Come on, man. I don’t want to hear about God tonight.”
“That’s fine. We don’t have to talk about God.”
“If I leave they won’t let me back in. They just give up my cot to someone else.”
Davis shakes his head. “You won’t have to come back tonight. You can sleep at the church. If we’re lucky, you won’t ever have to come back here. If we’re not, I’ll make sure you have a bed tomorrow night.” He smiles. “It’ll be okay. I do have some influence here, you know.”
They leave the shelter together, stepping into the close heat of the Florida night. The air out here smells strongly of the sea, so much that Beltrane experiences a brief thrill in his heart, a sense of being in a place both strange and new. To their left, several blocks down Central Avenue, he can see the tall masts of sail boats in the harbor gathered like a copse of birch trees, pale and ethereal in the darkness. To their right the city extends in a plain of concrete and light, softly glowing overpasses arcing over the street in grace notes of steel. People hunch along the sidewalks, they sleep in the small alcoves of shop doors. Some of them lift their heads as the two men emerge. One of them tugs at Beltrane’s pant leg as he walks by. “Hey. Are you leaving? Is they a bed in there?”
Davis says something to the man, but Beltrane ignores them both. He hopes the walk to the church is not long. The pleasant sense of disorientation he felt just a moment ago is giving way to anxiety. The buildings seem too impersonal; the faces are all strange. He looks up at the sky—and there, in the thunderheads, he finds something familiar.
Piling rainclouds and the cool winds which precede a storm made the walk uptown more pleasant. Rain was not a deterrent, especially in the summer months when the storms in New Orleans were sudden, violent, and quickly over. Low gray clouds obscured the night sky, their great bellies illuminated from time to time by huge, silent explosions of lightning. Beltrane’s bones hummed in this weather, as though with a live current. He made his way out of the darkened neighborhood of the Tremé and into the jeweled glow of New Orleans’ Central Business District, where lights glittered even when the buildings were empty. The streetcar chimed from some unseen distance, roaring along the unobstructed tracks like a charging animal. He walked along them, past the banks and the hotels until at last he hit the wide boulevard of St. Charles Avenue and entered the Lower Garden District. The neutral ground—the grassy swath dividing the avenue into uptown and downtown traffic—was wide enough here to accommodate two streetcar tracks running side by side. Palm trees had been planted here long ago by some starry-eyed city planner. A half mile ahead they gave way to the huge, indigenous oaks, which had seen the palm trees planted and would eventually watch them die. They stood like ancient gods, protecting New Orleans from the wild skies above her.
“Here we are,” Ron says, and Beltrane drifts to a stop beside him. There are no trees here. There are no streetcars.
The Trinity Baptist Church is just one door in a strip mall, sandwiched between a Christian bookstore and a temp agency. The glass of its single window is smudged and dirty; deep red curtains are closed on the inside, and the corpses of moths and flies are piled on the windowsill. Ron takes a moment to unlock the door. Then he reaches inside and flips on the light.
“My office is in the back,” he says. “Come on in.”
They walk through a large, open area, with rows of folding chairs arranged neatly before a lectern. The linoleum floor is dirty and scuffed with years’ worth of rubber soles. Ron opens a plywood door in the rear of the room and ushers Beltrane into his cramped office. He seats himself behind a desk which takes up most of the space in here and directs Beltrane to sit down in one of the two chairs on the other side. Then he switches on a computer.
While it boots up, he says, “We’ll look online and see if we can find her. What’s your name?”
“Henry Beltrane.”
“You said she was married. Will she still have your name?”
“Um... Delacroix. That’s her husband’s name.”
Davis’s fingers tap the keys, and he hunches closer to the screen. He pauses, and begins to type some more. “Twenty-three years is a long time,” he says. “How old would she be about now? Forty?”
“Forty-five,” Beltrane says. “Forty-five years old.” It’s the first time he’s said it aloud. It works like a spell, calling up the gulf of years between now and the time he last saw her, when he was drunk in a bar and she was trying one more time to save his life.
Dad? she’d said. We’re leaving. Four more days. We’re doing it.
He’d turned his back to her then. There’d been a television behind the bar, and he fixed his eyes to it. Have a good trip, he said.
It’s not a trip. Do you understand? We’re moving there. I’m moving away, Dad.
Yeah, I know.
She grabbed his shoulders and turned him on his stool so that he had to look at her. Daddy, please.
He watched her for a moment, shaping her face out of the unraveling world. He was so drunk. The sun was still up, filtering through the dusty windows of the bar. Her eyes were tearing up. What, he said. What. What you want from me?
Davis releases a long sigh, and leans back in his chair. “I got a Sam and Lila Delacroix. That sound right?”
Beltrane’s heart turns over. “That’s her. Lila. That’s her.”
Davis jots the address and phone number down on a sticky note, and passes it across to Beltrane. “Guess it’s your lucky night,” he says, though his voice is flat.
Beltrane stares at the number in his hand, a faint, disbelieving smile on his lips. “You call her for me?”
Davis leans back in his chair and smiles. “What, right now? It’s almost midnight, Mr. Beltrane. You can’t call her now. She’ll be in bed.”
Beltrane nods, absorbing this.
“Look, I keep a mattress in the closet for when I don’t make it home. I can pull it out for you. You can crash right here tonight.”
Beltrane nods again. The thought of a mattress overwhelms him, and he feels his eyes tearing up. His mind skips ahead to tomorrow, to wondering about how soft the beds might be in Lila’s home, if she’ll let him stay. He wonders what it will feel like to wake up in the morning and smell coffee and breakfast. To have someone say kind things to him, and be happy to see him. He knew all those things once. They were a long time ago.
“You have a problem,” Davis says.
The words push through the dream, and it’s gone. He waits for his throat to open up again, so he can speak. He says, “I think I’m haunted.”
Davis keeps his eyes locked on him. “I think so too,” he says.
Beltrane can’t think of what else to say. His hand rubs absentmindedly over his chest. He knows he can’t see his daughter while this is happening to him.
“I was haunted once, too,” Davis says quietly. He opens a drawer in his desk and withdraws a pack of cigarettes. He extends one to Beltrane and keeps one for himself. “Then the ghost went away.”
Beltrane stares at him with an awed hope as Davis slowly fishes through his pockets for a lighter. “How you get rid of it?”
Davis lights both cigarettes. Beltrane wants to grab the man, but instead he takes a draw, and the nicotine hits his bloodstream. A spike of euphoria rolls through him with a magnificent energy.
“I don’t want to tell you that,” Davis says. “I want to tell you why you should keep it. And why you shouldn’t go see your daughter tomorrow.”
Beltrane’s mouth opens. He’s half smiling. “You crazy,” he says softly.
“What do you think of, when you think of New Orleans?”
He feels a cramp in his stomach. His joints begin sending telegraphs of distress. He can’t let this happen. “Fuck you. I’m leaving.” Davis is still as Beltrane hoists himself out of his chair. “The shelter won’t let you back in. You said it yourself, you gave up the bed when you left. Where are you going to go?”
“I’ll go to Lila’s. It don’t matter if it’s late. She’ll take me in.”
“Will she? With streets winding through your body? With lamps in your eyes? With rain blowing out of your heart? No. She will slam that door in your face and lock it tight. She will think she is visited by something from hell. She will not take you in.”
Beltrane stands immobile, one hand still clutching the chair, his eyes fixed not on anything in this room but instead on that awful scene. He hasn’t seen Lila’s face in twenty years, but he can see it now, contorted in fear and disgust at the sight of him. He feels something shift in his body, something harden in his limbs. He squeezes his eyes shut and wills his body to keep its shape.
“Please,” says Davis. “Sit back down.”
Beltrane sits.
“You’re in between places right now. People think it’s the ghost that lives between places, but it’s not. It’s us. Tell me what you think of when you think of New Orleans.”
Moving up St. Charles Avenue, Beltrane arrived at the Avenue Pub, which shed light onto the sidewalk through its open French doors and cast music and voices into the night. He peered through the windows before entering, to see who was working. The good ones would let him come in, have a few drinks. The others would turn him away at the door, forcing him to decide between walking all the way back down to the French Quarter for his booze, or just calling it a night and going back to his wrecked car at the cab station.
He was in luck; it was John.
He stepped inside and was greeted by people calling his name. He held up a hand in greeting, getting into character. This was a white bar. There were certain expectations he’d have to fulfill if he was going to get his drinks. Some college kid—he had short hair and always smelled of perfume; he could never remember his name—grabbed his hand in a powerful squeeze. “’Trane! My dog! What up, dude?”
“Awright, awright,” Beltrane said, letting the kid crush his hand. It was going to hurt all night.
The kid yelled over the crowd. “Yo John, set me up one of them shots for ’Trane here!”
John smiled. “You’re evil, dude.”
“Oh, whatever, man! Pour me one too! I can’t let him go down that road all by hisself!”
Beltrane maneuvered to an open spot at the bar beside a pretty white girl he’d never seen before and an older guy wearing an electrician’s jumpsuit. The girl made a disgusted noise and inched away from him. The electrician nodded at him and said his name. The college kid joined him in a moment with two milky gray shots in his hand. He pushed the larger one at Beltrane.
“Dude! I’m worried, bro. I don’t know if you’re man enough for a shot like this.”
“Shiiiit. I a man!”
“This is a man’s drink, dog!”
“Dat’s what I am! I a man!”
“Then do the shot!”
He did the shot. It tasted vile, of course: like paint thinner and yogurt. They always gave him some horrible shit to drink. But it was real booze, and it slammed into his brain like a wrecking ball. He coughed and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
The college kid slapped his back. “Shit, ’Trane! You okay? I thought you said you was a man!”
He tried to talk, but he couldn’t get his throat to unclench. He ended up just waving his hand dismissively.
Beltrane screwed a bleary eye in the bartender’s direction, who moved in a series of ripples and left a ghostly trail in his wake. A beer seemed to sprout from the bartop like a weed. He held out the bag of shrimp he’d gotten earlier. “Heat this up for me, John.”
When John came back a few minutes later with the bag, Beltrane said, “You seen Ivy tonight?”
“She was here earlier. You still trying to hit that, you pervert?”
Beltrane just laughed. He clutched his beer and settled into his customary reverie as bar life broke and flowed around him, wrapping him in warmth, like a slow-moving river. He downed the shots as they appeared before him and concentrated on keeping them down. Somewhere in the drift of the night a girl materialized beside him, her back half turned to him as she spoke with somebody on her other side. She had a tattoo of a Japanese print on her shoulder, which dipped below the line of her sleeveless white shirt. She was delicate and beautiful. He brushed her arm with the back of his hand, trying to make it seem accidental, and she turned to face him.
“Hey, ’Trane,” she said. Her eyes shed a warm yellow light. He wanted to touch her, but there was a divide he couldn’t cross.
“We all God’s children,” he said.
“Yeah, I know.” She looked at the boy she was talking to and rolled her eyes. When she looked at him again she had raised windows for eyes, with curtains blowing out of them, framing a yellow-lit room. Below them, her face declined in wet shingles, flowing with little rivulets of rainwater. It took him a moment to realize the water was flowing from inside her. Behind her, her friend rose to his feet; wood and plaster cracked and split as he stood. His eyes were windows, too, but the lights there had been blown out. Water gushed from them. The bar had gone silent; in his peripheral vision he saw that he was ringed with wet, shining faces.
A figure moved to the window in the girl’s face. It was backlit; he couldn’t make out who it was. Water was rising around his feet, soaking through his shoes, making him cold.
Davis says, “There’s some people I want you to meet.” His voice is so soft Beltrane can barely hear it. Davis is sitting on the edge of his desk, looming over him. His eyes are moist.
Beltrane blinks. “I got to get out of here.”
“Just wait. Please?”
“You can’t keep me here. I ain’t a prisoner.”
“No, I know. Your... your ghost is very strong. I’ve never seen one that was a—a city, before.”
Beltrane is suddenly uncomfortable with Davis’s proximity to him. “What you doing this close? Back off a me, man.”
Davis takes a deep breath and slides off his desk, moving back to his side of it. He collapses into his chair. “There’s some people I want you to meet,” he says. “Will you stay just a little bit longer?”
The thought of going outside into this strange city does not appeal to Beltrane. He doesn’t know the neighborhood, doesn’t know which places are safe for homeless people to go and which places are off-limits—whether due to police, or thugs, or just because it’s someone else’s turf. He was always safe in New Orleans, which he knew as well as he knew his own face. But new places are dangerous.
“You got another cigarette?” he says. Davis seems to relax a little, and passes one to him. After it’s lit, he says, “How come I can’t get rid of it?”
“You can,” says Davis. “It’s just that you shouldn’t. Do you—do you really know what a ghost is, Mr. Beltrane?”
“This must be where you start preaching.”
“A ghost is something that fills a hole inside you, where you lost something. It’s a memory. Sometimes it can be painful, and sometimes it can be scary. Sometimes it’s hard to tell where the ghost ends and real life begins. I know you know what I mean.”
Beltrane just looks away, affecting boredom. But he can feel his heart turning in his chest, and sweat bristling along his scalp.
“But if you get rid of it, Mr. Beltrane, if you get rid of it, you have nothing left.” He pauses. “You just have a hole.”
Beltrane darts a glance at him. Davis is leaning over his desk, urgency scrawled across his face. He’s sweating, too, and his eyes look sunken, as though someone has jerked them back into his head from behind. His appearance unnerves Beltrane, and he turns away.
“Emptiness. Silence. Is that really better? You need to think carefully about what you decide you can live without, Mr. Beltrane.” He pauses for a moment. When Beltrane stays silent, he leans even closer and asks, “What do you really think is going to happen when you make that call tomorrow?”
