Riding through Katrina with the Red Baron's Ghost

by J. Malcolm Garcia

  Copyright © 2018 by J. Malcolm Garcia

  Portions of this book have appeared in slightly different form in the following publications: Alaska Quarterly Review, Apple Valley Review, Ascent Magazine, Big Muddy, Bio Story, Cold Mountain, The Common, Guernica: A Magazine of Arts & Politics, The Kansas City Star, Latterly, Memoir (and), Salon.com, The Sun, Under the Sun.

  Some names have been changed to protect privacy.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Skyhorse Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

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  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  Cover design by Erin Seaward-Hiatt

  Cover photo credit: iStock

  Print ISBN: 978-1-62872-869-9

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-62872-870-5

  Printed in the United States of America

  “I looked around at the rooms that I did not see as rooms but more as a landscape for my emotions, a biography of memory.”

  —Anne Spollen, The Shape of Water

  “No, rather, he felt suspended between two worlds, never to truly belong to either.”

  —Dominique Wilson, The Yellow Papers

  Dedicated to the memory of Dale M. Titler

  1926–2014

  Contents

  Riding through Katrina with the Red Baron’s Ghost (1970–2015)

  Draft Notice (1968)

  Gypsy (1986)

  Stabbing Johnny (1987)

  Granny (1988–1994)

  Eastbound (1997)

  My Middle Age (2003)

  Flag Raising (2004)

  Flo’s House (2006)

  A Simple Explanation (2005–2008)

  The Castle (2007)

  Stay a Little Longer (2010)

  Before I Knew My Father (2010)

  Walking (2016)

  Acknowledgments

  Riding through Katrina with the Red Baron’s Ghost

  (1970–2015)

  New Orleans

  September 19, 2005

  “Who you looking for again?” firefighter Roy Howard asks me.

  “A friend.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Titler. Dale M. Titler.”

  I’m a reporter riding in the back of a pickup with Howard, hanging on to the tailgate as we bounce and crunch over fallen tree limbs and piles of debris. We’re looking for survivors of Hurricane Katrina. Since just after Labor Day, Howard and about fifty other Georgia Search and Rescue firefighters have trudged house to house in St. Bernard Parish, just east of New Orleans and one of the neighborhoods hardest hit by Katrina. They have knocked on doors and, more often than not, broken them down as they searched for survivors. We have found six people. Many stayed because they had no other place or families to go to. Others wouldn’t leave because it was their home, had been for years, and that was reason enough.

  None of them knew what they would face by remaining. Katrina’s winds slammed the parish, but a storm surge of more than thirty feet inflicted the deadliest damage. It swept over levees, tossing boats on top of houses as if they were toys, and devastated much of the low-lying parish of about seventy thousand people.

  Among the missing is my friend Titler. Our long correspondence inspired me to ask questions, the first step down a road that would lead to a journalism career and into this pickup.

  “The level of how everything was destroyed gets to you,” says Howard, a tall, broad-shouldered thirty-seven-year-old from Garden City, Georgia. “As a firefighter I’ve seen a lot of damage, but not to this degree. You known this Titler a long time?”

  “Thirty-plus years.”

  “When’d you last see him?”

  “I’ve never met him.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean we’ve never met.”

  Howard shoots me an arched eyebrow, but before he can get off another question, we stop at a bright yellow house on Angela Avenue. I follow six firefighters out of the truck. Dead quiet. Our footsteps are the only sounds. The avenue and the yards around us are caked with drying mud. A metal plate on the door indicates the owner has a medical condition, but nobody’s home.

  “I hear something,” Howard says. “Dog, maybe.”

  Another firefighter presses his ear against the door.

  “Sounds little.”

  I look through a window at a large shadow expanding and shrinking, moving through the gray light. I step back.

  “It’s definitely not little,” I say.

  Howard raises a maul, hesitates. He runs the tips of his fingers against the looping, curved designs of the wooden door. Old, 1930s or thereabouts, he says. But he knows that if something is alive inside, he has no choice but to break it down. As Howard examines the door, another firefighter, Ned Dixon of Byron, Georgia, jimmies the back door with a crowbar. A bandana sporting the American flag is dark from his sweating forehead.

  “Let’s bust this door,” Howard says.

  He lifts the maul again and swings.

  The door cracks off its hinges, sags inward, and gives way. The claustrophobic stench of rot and mildew washes over us like foul breath, followed by some kind of pit bull or Rottweiler.

  “Back up! Back up! Back up!”

  We jump away as the dog shoots through the door and looks at us, whimpering. It feints toward one firefighter and then another and another. He’s hungry and thirsty. I have a bottle of water. I squat down, cup my hand, and pour water into it, but the dog ignores me. A firefighter helps me back up. I wipe my face with my wet hand. I’m forty-eight, a good twenty years older than these firefighters, and about the same age Titler was when I first wrote to him in 1970. I was thirteen and had just finished reading his book, The Day the Red Baron Died. Before then, I’d thought the Red Baron was nothing more than Snoopy’s imaginary enemy in the Peanuts comic strip. I didn’t know he was the most famous World War I German fighter pilot. I didn’t know his death was a mystery.

  The book filled me with questions. Encouraged by a determined and curious mother, I wrote to Titler. To my great surprise, Titler answered. I wrote him another letter, and another. His letters prompted more from me, and a correspondence was born that lasted decades.

  I was one of hundreds of journalists sent to the Gulf Coast when Hurricane Katrina struck on August 29, 2005. That night, in the living room of my girlfriend’s Overland Park, Kansas, home, I watched television images of submerged houses in New Orleans that recalled scenes of World War I portrayed in Titler’s book. In the first chapter, he described Cappy, a desolate French town near the bank of the Somme River: A wall. It belonged to a house that now spilled on the cobblestone street. Everywhere were ruined and demolished structures, remnants of houses, and jagged tree trunks.

  I searched the Internet, found Titler’s phone number and called his house, but the line was dead. I found an online Katrina message board and listed his name, but no one, not the police, firefighters or t
he Red Cross, responded with any information.

  More than two weeks later, a message appeared on the board: “9/14/05. Re: Looking for Dale Titler in Gulfport. Did you get in contact with him? Haven’t seen him in a while. I think he is still with the MS Gaming Commission.”

  I called the commission but no one answered. The next day, my editor at the Kansas City Star called me into her office. Pack up for Louisiana, she said. I didn’t tell her I was going to use the opportunity to find Titler.

  Now, four days later, I’m in St. Bernard Parish looking for dead and missing people.

  Howard and his colleagues have found ten bodies since they arrived in New Orleans. The dead were discovered in bedrooms and kitchens. Sometimes they were in attics surrounded by bottles of water, a final refuge before trying to break through the roof. It was hard to tell precisely where they had died because the water may have carried them through the house like flotsam before it receded.

  “The dead ones I saw, I couldn’t tell their age except they were adults,” firefighter Eric Ashburn of Chattanooga, Tennessee, tells me. “I imagine they had something, an illness maybe, that prevented them from getting out.”

  Glenn Dorner, task force leader for Georgia Search and Rescue, nods in agreement. “When you see an entire world shaken up, your personal security is threatened,” he says. “We’ve been trained on critical stress management, but there’s no coping measures to get through this.”

  Among other things, he adds, no one advised him on how to handle distressed pets.

  “Be careful of the dog!” Howard shouts.

  The dog barks at us, won’t stop moving. It seeks an exit from our loose-knit circle. The firefighters step back and the dog dashes through a gap between two of us. It finally stops on the sidewalk, tongue lolling, watching us.

  “He’s scared.”

  “The other day one came out like a bullet.”

  “This one wasn’t exactly slow.”

  “It’s starving to death.”

  “Got food?”

  “Crackers. All’s I got is crackers.”

  I follow two firefighters into the house. The soggy brown carpet sucks at our boots; water bubbles underfoot and absorbs the imprints of our every move. We pass through a pink-wallpapered hall where framed family photos hang aslant over an empty fireplace and enter another room lined with more pictures of smiling men, women, and children. Floodwater has stained their silent faces, paling them to ghosts. No wonder: A dark line on the wall marks the storm’s high-water level just below the ceiling.

  Glasses are standing on a bar that is still stocked with booze. I pick up an overturned chair, the one blemish in the otherwise oddly undisturbed room. The scene here is nothing like a house we had entered earlier in the morning that had been turned upside down from flooding. Sofas were piled against back doors, the ceilings dripped mud, and mold covered the walls like thick green fur. One of the firefighters vomited from the rank, throat-closing funk.

  We climb stairs into the attic. I brace myself for what we might see. Is there a way to prepare for discovering the dead?

  “That’s a first,” Dixon says.

  “What?” Ashburn asks.

  “There’s a closet in the attic. Never saw that before.”

  “Nobody inside?”

  “Nobody inside.”

  Back out on the street the dog has vanished. Howard spray-paints a zero on the wall next to the broken front door.

  “Place across the street had antiques and stuff,” Howard says.

  “I saw a TV wider than my arms.”

  “House over there still had some good paint. Must’ve bought the mold-free kind,” Dorner says.

  Inside empty parked cars, rotted bags of spoiled groceries spill onto the seats. There is no sound on the street except for the creak of a rocking chair listing slowly in the wind next to a truck that floodwaters deposited on a front porch. Kitchen curtains hang like poor posture from broken rods. A wet wind carries the stillness far beyond us.

  Is Titler still alive? Did he make it through the storm? Maybe he’s in one of the hospitals that flooded. Maybe he’s one of the dead patients they found days after the hurricane hit. I’ve got all these questions and I’m stuck in New Orleans because the roads leading to his Mississippi home remain flooded and impassable.

  “Hey.”

  A man in a blue T-shirt and blue jeans looks at us from the porch of the frayed white house next door. A yellow fence wrapped around the front yard shines in the sun. Music from a radio interrupts the silence and carries loudly into the street from an open window. The man raises a hand and we wave back. A suitcase stands beside him. One of the firefighters talks to him for a minute and then walks back to the rest of us gathered around the pickup. He says the man has just returned to his house for the first time since Katrina struck. His neighbors left before he did. He hasn’t seen them. He is still standing in the street as we drive off.

  “Nice,” Howard says to me. “A survivor.”

  * * *

  I had my first taste of war at home, in the many adventure books that lined my bedroom shelves. War was also in the television coverage of Vietnam that my father watched every weeknight if he wasn’t helping me and my two older brothers, Butch and Michael, with our math homework—something we dreaded because he had no patience when we didn’t understand an equation—while my mother cooked dinner listening to Arthur Godfrey on the radio. Ours was a typical 1960s suburban clan in the Barry Goldwater mold. We lived in the posh suburb of Winnetka, Illinois, sixteen miles north of downtown Chicago in Cook County.

  Butch was seven years and Michael two and a half years older than me. Butch’s real name was Charles Jr. but my father had nicknamed him Butch from day one. Butch envisioned himself working beside our father someday. Pop, as we called him, was vice president of Perfecto Garcia Cigars, a company founded by his father and uncles. His brother Manuel, in Tampa, was president. Pop drove into Chicago to his South Wells Street office Monday through Friday while my brothers and I attended school. Our mother stayed home, cleaning and cooking and making it her job, when we were around, to fill in the gaps left by public education by stressing elocution, reading, and writing.

  She was born in Puerto Rico. In 1929, when she was twelve, her mother died of influenza. A Barbados-born nanny, Amy Clairmonte, helped raise her and her two older siblings. Amy had learned English working for British families in Bridgetown, and passed on her precise diction to my mother. Her influence never waned. My mother corrected my brothers and me whenever we slipped into vernacular.

  “Gonna? What’s gonna?” she’d say. “It’s going to. Now, sit up straight, elbows off the table.”

  “Haveta? What’s haveta? It’s have to. Don’t slouch.”

  “Gotta? What’s gotta? It’s got to. Tuck in your shirt.”

  She also required us to read a book a week and then write a report. If I didn’t understand a word, she handed me a dictionary. If I had other questions, she pointed me toward our collection of red World Book volumes or drove me to the Winnetka Public Library. She expected me to find answers to my questions.

  Every day after school, she had a sentence for us. I recall one: The fireman parked his truck in front of a burning house. We then had to compose a story around that sentence. She was checking for spelling, grammar and handwriting, yes, but she wanted more.

  “Where are the people?” she would ask. “Who are they? What do they look like? What’s the story?”

  By the time I was thirteen, I was ready to buy my own books. I had read nearly everything handed down to me by Butch and Michael, advancing from Doctor Dolittle to Tarzan of the Apes to the Hardy Boys to biographies of Henry Stanley, Richard Burton, and other explorers. I walked into Winnetka, my pockets filled with an accumulation of my ten-cents-a-week allowance money, and stopped at The Booksmith.

  The Booksmith has long since closed, and now the old white brick building on Chestnut Street houses Denim & Soul, a women’s clothing store. E. B. T
aylor & Company, a hardware store across the street, has been converted into Neapolitan Collection, another high-end women’s apparel outlet. When I visit these days, however, I am still taken back to the way it was when I was a child and an A&P grocery store stood a few blocks away. Bells rang as I pushed open the doors of The Booksmith. Slats of gray light shone through the shades of its windows and spools of dust turned above my head. It smelled of books, a kind of closed-in attic odor that made me feel I had entered another time. A pleasant, gray-haired woman with black-rimmed glasses asked if she could help me.

  “No, thank you. I’m just looking,” I said, mimicking how my mother always answered that question when she shopped.

  I browsed a shelf of biographies and noticed The Day the Red Baron Died. A photograph of a young man peered out at me from an oval frame on the glossy black cover. His deep eyes held me. The raised collar of his coat wrapped around his neck contributed to his stern look, as did his military cap slanted to one side. His name was Baron Manfred von Richthofen, a renowned German fighter pilot of World War I. He shot down eighty Allied planes—more planes than any other fighter pilot at the time. He was killed in action at the age of twenty-five while chasing a British plane far behind Allied lines, something he had warned his fellow pilots against. No one knew who shot him down. Was it a Canadian fighter pilot? Or could it have been Australian and British antiaircraft gunners? The book promised an answer.

  I saw no photo of the author, Dale M. Titler, but a blurb on the back cover said that Titler had learned to fly in Pennsylvania on an airfield named after an associate of Amelia Earhart. He had piloted open-cockpit airplanes and liked to skydive on Sunday afternoons. He had served in the Army Air Forces during World War II. He lived in Gulfport, Mississippi.

  To be perfectly candid, what happened on that crisp spring morning in 1918 was a rather simple act of war, I read at the end of the preface. An experienced—and tired—fighter pilot violated his own tactical concept, and paid the price.

  That sounded terribly romantic to me. I bought the book for $1.25 and walked home. My mother thought The Day the Red Baron Died would be too detailed and dry to hold my interest and scolded me for wasting my money, but I began reading it that afternoon, sprawled on my bed, a pillow propping up my head. I read for hours, until my mother called me for dinner. By the time I put the book down, I’d come to realize that Richthofen was once a boy like me who also had a desire for adventure.