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 sailboats 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 gradually turning 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 rain clouds and the cool winds which precede a storm made the walk from the Treme to the Lower Garden District 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 and into the jeweled glow of New Orleans’s 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 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.
He’d turned his back to her then. There’d been a television behind the bar, and he’d fixed his eyes to it.
She’d grabbed his shoulders and turned him on his stool so that he had to look at her.
He’d 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.
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
