North American Lake Monsters (21 page)

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?”

A cold pulse of fear flows through Beltrane’s body. But before he can think of a response, a sound reaches them through the closed door. People are entering the church from the street.

Davis smiles suddenly. It’s an artificial smile, manic, out of all proportion to any possible stimulus. “They’re here! Come on!”

He leads him into the large room with the lectern and the rows of chairs. Two people—a young, slender Latina woman and an older, obese white man—have just entered and are standing uncertainly by the door. Although they’re dressed in simple, cheap clothing, it’s immediately obvious that they’re not homeless. They both stare at Beltrane as he approaches behind the pastor.

“Come on, everybody,” Davis says, gesturing to the front row of chairs. “Let’s sit down.”

Davis arranges a chair to face them, and soon they are all sitting in a clumsy circle. “These are the people I wanted you to meet,” he says. “This is Maria and Evan. They’re haunted, too.”

Maria tries to form a smile beneath eyes that are sunken and dark, like moon craters or like cigarette burns. She seems long out of practice. Evan is staring intently at the floor. He’s breathing heavily through his nose with a reedy, pistoning regularity. His forehead is glistening with sweat.

“I’m trying to start a little group here, you know? People with your sort of problem.”

“This is how we gonna get rid of it?” Beltrane asks.

Davis and Maria exchange glances.

“They don’t want to get rid of them,” Davis says. “That’s why they’re here.” He turns to the others. “Mr. Beltrane came here from New Orleans. He’s looking for his daughter.”

Maria gives him a crushed look. “Oh, pobrecito,” she says. The news seems to affect her deeply: her face clouds over, and her eyes well up. Beltrane looks away, embarrassed for her, and ashamed at his own optimism.

“His ghost is a city.”

This seems to catch even Evan’s attention, who looks at him for the first time. “I’m the Ghost of Christmas Past,” Evan says, and barks a laugh. “My family died in a fire two days after Christmas. The fucking tree! It’s like a joke, right?”

Davis pats Evan on the knee. “We’ll get to it, my friend. We will. But first we have to help him understand.”

“Right, right. But it wants to come out. It wants to come out right now.”

“Mr. Beltrane thinks he lost his city in the flood,” Davis continues.

“I did lose it!” Beltrane shouts, feeling both scared and angry to be among these people. “After Katrina came, I lost everything! Craig moved away after his place flooded! Places I go to are all shut down. The people all gone. Ivy . . . Ivy, she . . . she was in this empty old house she used to crash in. . . .” His throat closes, and he stops there.

Davis waits a moment, then puts his hand on his shoulder. “But it’s not really gone, though, is it?” He touches Beltrane on the forehead, and then on his chest. “Is it?”

Beltrane shakes his head.

“And if it ever does go away, well, God help you then. Because you will be all by yourself. You will be all alone.” He pauses. “You don’t want that. Nobody wants that.”

Evan makes a noise and puts a hand over his mouth.

“I had enough of this crazy shit,” Beltrane says, and stands. Davis opens his mouth, but before he can speak the room is filled with the scent of cloves and cinnamon. The effect is so jarring that Beltrane nearly loses his balance.

Evan doubles over in his seat, hands over his face, his big body shuddering with sobs. The smell pours from him. Smoke leaks from between his fingers, spreading in cobwebby wreaths over his head. Beltrane wants to run, but he’s never seen this kind of thing in anyone but himself before, and he’s transfixed.

“Oh, here it comes,” Davis says, not to the others but to himself, his eyes glassy and fixed, staring at Evan. “That’s all right, just let it out. You have to let it come out. You have to hold on to what’s left. Never let it go.” He looks at Maria. “Can you feel him, Maria? Can you?”

Maria nods. Her eyes are filled with tears. Her hands are clutching her stomach, and Beltrane watches as it grows beneath them, accompanied by a powerful, sickly odor that he does not recognize right away. When he does he feels a buckling inside, the turning over of some essential organ or element, and he is overwhelmed by a powerful need to flee.

“Will you get rid of this?” Davis is saying, his face so close to Maria’s they might be lovers. “Will you get rid of your child, Maria? Who could ask that of you? Who would dare?”

Beltrane backs up a step and falls over a chair, sprawling to the floor in a clatter of noise and his own flailing arms. There’s a sudden, spiking pain as his elbow takes the brunt of his weight. The air grows steadily colder; the appalling mix of cinnamon and desiccated flesh roots into his nose. Davis kneels between the others, one hand touching each body, and once again his features seem to be tugging inward, even his round stomach is drawing in, as though something empty, some starving need, is glutting itself on this weird energy; as though there’s a black hole inside him, filling its belly with light.

“Please God, just let it come,” Davis says.

Beltrane tries to scramble to his feet and slips. A large, growing puddle of Mississippi River water surrounds him. It soaks his clothes. He tries again, making it to his feet this time, and staggers to the door. He pushes his way outside, into the warm, humid night, and without waiting to see if they’re following he lurches further down the street, away from the church, away from the shelter, until an alleyway opens like a throat and he turns gratefully into it. He manages to make it a few more feet before he collapses to his knees. He doesn’t know anymore if the pain he feels is coming from arthritis or from the ghost which has wrapped itself like a vine around his bones.

Across the alley, in the alcove of a delivery door, he sees a mound of clothing and a duffel bag: this is somebody’s roost. A shadow falls over him as a figure stops in the mouth of the alley. The city light makes a dark shape of it, a negative space. “What you doin here?” it says.

Beltrane closes his eyes: an act of surrender. “I just restin, man,” he says, almost pleads. “I ain’t stayin.”

“You don’t belong here.”

“Come on, man. Just let me rest a minute. I ain’t gonna stay. Can’t you see what’s happening to me?”

When he opens his eyes, he is alone. He exhales, and it almost sounds like a sob. “I wanna go home,” he whispers. “I wanna go home.” He runs his hands through his hair, dislodging drowned corpses, which tumble into his lap.

Beltrane left the Avenue Pub behind, well and truly drunk, walking slowly and carefully
as the ground lurched and spun beneath him. He summoned the presence of mind to listen for the streetcar, which came like a bullet at night; just last year it ran down a drunk coming from some bar further up the road. “That’s some messy shit,” he announced, and laughed to himself. The United Cab offices were just a few blocks away. If he hurried he could beat the rain.

Halfway there he found Ivy, rooting lazily through a trash can.

She was a cute little thing who’d shown up in town last year after fleeing some private doom in Georgia; she was forty years younger than Beltrane, but hoped lived large in him. They got along pretty well—she got along well with most men, really—and it was always nice to spend time with a pretty girl. He waved at her. “Ivy! Hey, girl!”

She looked up at him, her face empty. “’S’up, ’Trane. What you doin?” She straightened and tossed a crumpled wrapper back into the can.

“I’m goin to bed, girl. It’s late!”

She appraised him for a moment, then smiled. “You fucked up!”

He laughed, like a little boy caught in some foolishness.

She saw the bag he still clutched in his hand. “I ain’t had nothing to eat, ’Trane. I’m starving.”

He held the bag aloft, like the head of a slain enemy. “I got some food for ya right here.”

She held out a hand and offered him her best smile. It lit up all that alcohol in him. It set him on fire. “Well give it over then,” she said.

“You must think I’m crazy. Come on back with me, to my place.”

“Shit. That old cab?”

Beltrane turned and walked in that direction, listening to her footsteps as she trotted to catch up. The booze in him caused the earth to move in slow, steady waves, and the lights to bleed into the cloudy night. A cold wind had kicked up, and the buildings swooned on their foundations. Together they trekked the short distance to United Cab.