Riding through Katrina with the Red Baron's Ghost

by J. Malcolm Garcia

  When we returned home from Bermuda, Butch shelved his mask and flippers in his bedroom closet, canceled his subscriptions to scuba magazines, and became fixated on race cars. He covered the walls of his bedroom with posters of GT-R and F1 cars. Stacks of Road & Track magazines filled the corners of his room. He started driving with his arms locked at the elbows like the great Mario Andretti and took curves at high speed. He could imagine whatever he wanted when he was behind the wheel of our father’s Mustang, out of sight of his scorn and a little brother too young to drive.

  Chris skidded across a median strip on Antioch Road and into oncoming traffic when he lost control of his car. Miraculously, he struck only one other car. Just as amazing, its driver, while shaken, was uninjured. Chris’s car overturned onto a sidewalk where it came to a rest upside down, wheels spinning. His sister survived.

  Chris’s family lived not far from me. I didn’t know them. A neighbor pointed out their house, a one-story home of brown stone and red bricks with a small lawn and sloping driveway. I saw no one, only an array of cars in the driveway. Relatives. Mourners. Unaware of the accident, a passerby might have assumed the family had company for the holidays. The same passerby would likely have thought the same thing had they seen the people filing into our house when Butch died three days after Christmas in 2006.

  I wanted to feel bad about Chris, but I felt no more than a kind of intellectual regret, what I always feel when I learn about the death of someone I don’t know who has died needlessly. Like a tornado picking off one house while leaving others untouched, his dying seemed too random, too purposeless, thrust upon the neighborhood by circumstances over which we had no control, leaving those of us who hadn’t known Chris wondering what to think, what to say.

  On the other hand, I haven’t come to terms with Butch’s death, someone I obviously knew quite well. It hovers around me, lurking silently, springing out of nowhere when I least expect to be reminded of him. And now, recalling Chris, so much like my brother in at least one respect, I’m missing Butch once more.

  A week before he died, Butch called to tell me he had married Carol, his live-in girlfriend, in a brief ceremony before a Chicago judge. He did so, he said, “for the health care.” He was unemployed, and she was working and had benefits. I thought he was just posturing but he persisted, and I couldn’t help but notice the concern in his voice, even fear.

  “I don’t know what’s happening,” he said. “I’m eating right, eating my vegetables, I’m not drinking, but I keep putting on weight. I need to see a doctor.”

  Three years of sitting around unemployed, eating fast food, knocking off soda after soda and indulging in too much booze had taken its toll. He was obese. Now, I thought, he’s become so huge, so uncomfortable, that he wants to do something about it. Finally.

  “That’s good,” I said about the doctor. “See what he says.”

  Butch had a checkup the day after Christmas. He told my parents the doctor had prescribed a diuretic to reduce fluid buildup. Other than that, Butch said, he was in good health. Blood pressure normal. Lungs clear. Lab tests negative. My father said he didn’t believe him. Two days later, an ambulance rushed Butch to a hospital.

  The day after Butch died, I drove nine hours from Overland Park to my parents’ home in Winnetka. I arrived at night and let myself in through the garage and entered the kitchen. No lights. The hall consumed me. I put out my hands, groping for a light switch, and called out to my mother and father.

  “Who’s there?” they both said from the living room, sounding confused and fearful, as if I were another shock of bad news.

  “It’s all right,” I said. “It’s me, just me.”

  My mother shuffled into the kitchen, her damp, red-rimmed eyes small pools of grief. She hugged me and then withdrew without a word to the couch in the living room. She stared without seeing out the terrace window. My father asked about my drive.

  “It was fine.”

  “It’s good to see you. I’m sorry it had to be like this.”

  He turned off the hall light. Even in grief, he would not waste electricity. In the sudden blackness, I heard my father searching for answers.

  “It happened so fast,” he said. “It doesn’t make sense. I spoke to him the day before.”

  My eyes slowly adjusted to the dark. I walked into the living room and sat beside my parents without speaking, Butch making his presence felt by his absence.

  Friends of Chris held an evening prayer vigil near where his car had overturned. They stuck a small artificial Christmas tree in the ground and lit candles around it, and placed a small white cross surrounded by plastic-wrapped roses against a streetlight on the median strip. Chris, we’ll always remember that dreadful night, someone wrote. The cross shone at night beneath the light, the roses full and open. A few days later snow fell in heavy white clumps and the cross collapsed from the weight. When the weather warmed, the cross lay in mud streaked with slush. The roses had curled but had maintained their color.

  When I was sixteen, I myself came close to ending up like Chris when I nearly crashed into a tree head-on during Christmas break. It was my junior year in high school, and I was driving a car that belonged to the parents of my friend Tom. At sixteen we knew only the thrill of the present and the need to show off, convinced that the faster we drove the more power we had, the cooler we were. I turned onto Woodley Road and accelerated to sixty miles an hour. I turned left at a fork in the snow-covered road, slipping into a skid. I spun the wheel left and then right, getting increasingly frantic. Tom screamed Brake! Brake! I slammed on the brakes and veered off the road into some woods. Tree branches raked the side of the car and dead leaves and clumps of snow struck the windshield. I hurtled forward against the steering wheel and gasped. Tom banged his forehead against the dashboard. We didn’t say anything. Snow-covered bushes around us sucked in all sound except for our rapid breathing. We were inches from an oak tree.

  Tom told me to get out, and we switched places. He backed the car onto the street and we saw the deep gouges the tires had made where I’d spun off the road. We drove to my house. The gray grit on the car was slashed with crooked lines. We couldn’t tell how badly, if at all, the car had been scratched.

  I told my parents we wanted to surprise Tom’s mother by washing her car. I filled a bucket with steaming hot water and grabbed two fat sponges from our garage. My father followed me outside without putting on his coat. He said the water would freeze on the car. Tom and I wiped it down anyway, washing away the dirt. Our wet hands stung from the cold and turned pink. My father shook his head, watching the water bead into ice.

  “You’re not making any sense,” he said.

  As the grime sluiced off, we saw there were only a few minor scratches. Tom’s parents would never notice. We slapped each other on the back, invincible again.

  “Get inside!” my mother shouted at my father. “You’ll catch your death of cold.”

  He waved her away. Crossing his arms against the wind he frowned, trying to comprehend our logic.

  “You’ll catch pneumonia!” my mother shouted.

  It took years of ignoring her, but eventually my mother was proved right. In 2004, Butch and Michael called me in Overland Park to say that our eighty-nine-year-old father had been hospitalized with pneumonia. He had gone out into the cold without a coat once too often. I had known something was wrong; when I called home, my father coughed and cleared his throat every two or three words. My mother pleaded with him to see a doctor. He refused. Then one night, unable to talk, his chest aching with every breath, and clutching his left side, he relented and my mother drove him to Highland Park Hospital. He allowed himself to be admitted without complaint.

  He stayed in the hospital for about two weeks. I remained in Overland Park but spoke to him daily by phone. He sounded exhausted, his voice hoarse. He struggled for breath between words but he insisted he was fine.

  “Call your mother,” he said. “Check on her for me.”

&n
bsp; My mother spent her days with him in his hospital room and her evenings at home alone. Our house was a rambling two-story structure with five bedrooms. My mother had hoped to have six children, but she married late and had only three. Without my father there, it must have seemed like wandering through a museum, with darkness enveloping rooms we never used, the photos of my two brothers and me ghostly on the walls, the grandfather clock in the front hall ticking off the seconds. My mother would sit in the living room on the side of the sofa where my father usually sat. The light from the lamp on the end table reflected off a growing stack of magazines she intended to read but never did.

  I called her every night. When she didn’t pick up I’d leave a message and she would call back almost immediately and apologize. “I was asleep,” she’d say in a weary voice, sounding adrift in the vacant house. “I expected your father to get it. Then I remembered he wasn’t here.”

  My father recovered, thinner for the effort, and bad-tempered.

  “He’s nervous,” my mother would say. “He won’t sit still.”

  When I asked my father how he felt, I sensed him searching for words, trying to articulate what he thought of being hospitalized at eighty-nine and surviving when he had already exceeded the average life expectancy of most men by fifteen years.

  “I’m glad to be eating home cooking,” he said finally, and forced a laugh before he passed the receiver to my mother.

  I asked Butch what he thought. “Pop looks great,” he told me. “You’d never know how sick he was.”

  He never divulged that he had not visited our father in the hospital.

  Butch was fifty-four then. After high school he attended Hanover College in Indiana. After he graduated, Northrop Grumman, a defense contractor, hired him as an accountant. He lived at home until he was thirty-five. When he moved out, he bought a house and met Carol. In 2002 Northrop laid him off after more than thirty years. He found another job, at Northwestern University, where Carol worked, but a year later he was laid off again. He gave up. He stayed home. He drank. He ate. He lived off his savings and Carol’s income.

  Sometimes when we got together, Butch would slip back into race-car-driving mode. Elbows locked, foot heavy on the pedal. He was quiet during those moments, perhaps even desperate, the wind coming through the windows and blowing his hair, his sunglasses concealing whatever he might have been thinking.

  He gained weight until he appeared inflated. He sounded out of breath. My mother worried about him much as she’d hounded my father to wear a jacket in the cold. She urged me to talk to Butch but I didn’t know what to say, discomfited just by looking at him. Even his face had grown puffy.

  “He’s a grown man,” I said, sounding like my father. “He’ll do what he wants. Nothing I can do about it.”

  On Thursday morning, December 28, 2006, Butch woke up struggling to breathe. Carol helped him out of bed. Paramedics rushed him to a hospital. He stopped breathing in the ambulance, dead of congestive heart failure.

  The what-ifs come at night.

  What if Butch had taken better care of himself?

  What if he had seen the doctor earlier?

  What if the doctor had admitted him?

  What if I had talked to him about his weight?

  What if I had said I love you, Butch, don’t kill yourself?

  His obituary listed his age, occupation, and surviving family members, summarizing his life in a small, two-hundred-word square of copy surrounded by other names in equally small squares. No photograph. What he never achieved in life was not recorded in print. He, his story, was edited down to its essence. Two hundred words, no more. Gone. Just like that.

  Michael called me the day Butch died, and then I heard from Carol. Her voice was measured but worn. I was too shocked to ask questions. She told me that when she woke up that morning, Butch sat beside her in bed clutching his chest. He looked scared, confused. Carol called 911. Butch became frantic.

  “Did you call?” he asked her again and again, struggling to breathe. “What’s taking them so long?” Carol stared out the bedroom window, phone in hand, as if that would make the paramedics arrive faster.

  The approaching scream of an ambulance must have reassured them both. It was only seven o’clock. Clear blue skies, light coming through the curtains, snow on the front lawn, their neighbors leaving for work.

  The medics examined Butch and thought he might be having an asthma attack. They gave him oxygen, then helped him onto a gurney. He appeared to relax. The medics would figure it out. They would find an answer. A simple explanation. He might have to stay in the hospital overnight, nothing more.

  “Don’t let the cat out,” he told Carol.

  Inside the ambulance, Butch closed his eyes.

  “Don’t let the cat out,” he said again.

  Carol’s voice quivered, overcome by emotion before sinking again into an exhausted monotone.

  “When will you get here?”

  “As soon as I can,” I told her.

  I got off the phone. My heart pounded. My hands shook. I thought, I’ve got to call work. I must cancel my appointments. I must call an airline for a flight home. I repeated in a half whisper, “My brother died, my brother died, my brother died,” until I knew I could say it without breaking down. Then I called my editor at the Star.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “So am I.”

  Next, I canceled a dentist appointment, then called United Airlines. I explained what had happened and that I needed a flight to Chicago from Kansas City immediately. The man on the line demanded proof of Butch’s death.

  “What hospital was he seen at?”

  I didn’t know.

  “What funeral home was he at?”

  I didn’t know.

  “What time did he die?”

  “Today, this morning. I don’t know exactly.”

  The man told me I couldn’t get a bereavement flight without answering these questions. I insisted I just wanted a flight, not a special rate. He hung up. I slammed the receiver against the kitchen table until it slid out of my hand, and I covered my face and wept.

  Today is the second anniversary of Butch’s death. A clear morning, absent of clouds. No snow. Unseasonably warm, with temperatures somewhere in the mid-forties. The cool air reminds me more of fall than winter. Squirrels romp across bare lawns and Christmas lights frame doors and garages. I did not remember what day it was until this evening, when I called a friend to wish her happy birthday. As her phone rang it hit me: Butch died today. I hung up before she answered, stunned that I had forgotten.

  A blind woman I know told me that with each passing day it gets harder and harder for her to remember what it was like to see. I wonder if something similar is happening with my memories of Butch. My life has changed these past two years while his has ceased. Since he died, I’ve reported from Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Chad. I broke up with my girlfriend and moved back to Kansas City from Overland Park. The economy tanked. I worried about my job. I turned fifty, then fifty-one. It seems long ago that I was forty-nine and looking at my brother’s coffin. I still recall how we’d get together to wash his car or watch the Chicago Bears and share some beers. I hear his booming laugh. Memories increasingly distant, never to be repeated.

  Some things haven’t changed. I telephone my parents every Sunday, as I did when Butch was alive. We compare the weather in Chicago and Kansas City, complain about it being too hot or too cold. After a brief pause we struggle for other things to talk about, but they don’t have much to say. Their advanced age confines them more and more to the house and limits their participation in my world of movies and restaurants, politics and gossip, travel abroad and in the States.

  “So, what have you been doing?” they ask me.

  I tell them, launching into a kind of one-man act for which they are the audience, because I’m the one doing the doing, not them.

  Sometimes I find myself subtracting the year of my parents’ births from the current yea
r, grateful they have lived long lives but aware that they will not live forever. I know eventually I’ll get a call about one of them, as I did about Butch.

  I had just deposited a check and was still in the bank parking lot when Michael reached me on my cell phone.

  “I have terrible news,” he said.

  “Pop again?”

  “No.”

  “Mom?”

  “No, Butch. He died.”

  I didn’t say anything. My car seemed to contract around me until it felt horribly claustrophobic. I unrolled my window for air. People strolled through the parking lot but I didn’t hear them. Michael began crying. I sat and listened to him for a long time, speechless.

  On a whim this morning, I drove with my dogs to Overland Park and stopped at the memorial for Chris. The worn cross still stood slanted in the ground. I placed it against the lamppost and wiped it clean. Three years. I’m surprised how it has endured. I wonder if it will be here next year. I doubt it. If there’s such a thing as life after death, I believe, it’s in the memories we have and the ways people no longer here continue to influence us and live on in our own behavior. I won’t forget Butch. Chris either. Cross or no cross.

  My dogs tugged at their leashes. I waited for traffic to pass, then ran with them across the street to the sidewalk. We started walking, and the day resumed with us, the sun advancing across the sky, everything moving forward, only differently, no one the same.

  The Castle

  (2007)

  The owner of the Castle issued an ultimatum yesterday: