North American Lake Monsters (20 page)

Beltrane nodded, half smiling. This speech again. “Yeah, I know.”

“No you
don’t
know. ’Cause if you
did,
you would go down to the VA hospital and get yourself some damn pills for whatever’s wrong with you and get off the goddamn street. You will fucking
die
out here, ’Trane, you keep fucking around like this.”

Beltrane nodded again, and turned to leave. “You better get on home, Craig. Might get shot out here.”

“
Now
who’s making fun,” Craig said. He tried to push himself off his window, but the glass had grown into his head. His shoulders were stuck, too. “It’s too late,” he said. “I can’t go home. I’m stuck here forever now. God damn it!”

“I’m goin up to the white neighborhood,” Beltrane said. He avoided looking at Craig, turned his back to him and started to walk uptown.

“Yeah, you go on and get drunk! See what that’ll fix!”

“I’m goin to find that little Ivy, man. She always hang out up there. This time I’m gonna get that girl.”

“I can’t understand you anymore. My ears are gone.” And it was true: Craig had been almost wholly absorbed by his window now, or maybe he had merged with it. In any case, his body was mostly gone. Only the contours of his face and his small rounded shoulders stood out from the glass; his lower legs and feet still stuck out near the ground. But he was mostly just an image in the glass now.

Beltrane hurried down the street, feeling the beginnings of a cool wind start to kick up. He glanced behind him once, looking for Craig’s shape, but he didn’t see anything.

Just the empty storefront staring back at him.

Beltrane stands in front of the mirror and watches his face for movement. He exerts
great concentration to hold himself still: the slopes and angles of his face, the wiry gray coils of beard growing up over his cheeks, the wide round nostrils—even his eyelids—are as unmoving as hard earth. The skin beneath his eyes is heavy and layered, and the fissures in his face are deep—but nothing seems out of place. Nothing is doing anything it isn’t supposed to be doing.

He’s standing over one of the sinks in the shelter’s bathroom. It has five partitioned stalls, most of which have lost their doors, and a bank of dingy gray urinals on the opposite wall. After a moment the door opens and one of the volunteers pokes his head in. When he sees Beltrane in there alone, he comes in all the way and lets the door swing closed behind him. He’s a heavy man with high yellow skin, a few dark skin tags standing out on his neck like tiny beetles. Beltrane has seen him around a little bit, over the couple of days he’s been here, kneeling down sometimes to pray with folks that were willing.

“You all right?” the volunteer asks.

Beltrane just looks at him. He can’t think of anything to say, so after a moment he just turns his gaze back to the mirror.

“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 mor
e 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.