Anonymity (13 page)

EVERY DAY had been turmoil since the flood. His staff was stressed to the point that David was concerned for their health. He'd tried to send a couple of people home, but they refused.

The Red Cross arrived once a day to distribute water bottles and blankets, but there was a paucity of food. David was on his way to a city council meeting to request emergency funding for staples, but a young woman in crisis waylaid him in the hall.

The girl's hands trembled and she nearly dropped her trac phone.

“Mom, Mom, can you hear me? Mom? MOM?”

Tears rimmed her eyes.

“You probably just ran out of minutes,” David said. “I bet she didn't hang up on you.”

The girl checked the tiny screen and caught her breath when she saw he was right. She seemed relieved, but then her voice began to hick with emotion.

“I want to go home. I want to go home and…I…don't…have any…money.”

“Let me take you to Amelia,” David reassured her. “She helps girls who want to go home.”

On occasion, a kid decided home wasn't that bad after all. The return rate had definitely gone up since the flood. Others simply moved on to places with more resources. Phoenix and Santa Fe were the next stops to the west. It was New Orleans going east, but since Katrina, demand for services had outstripped the city's resources tenfold. David tried to persuade his kids that New Orleans had nothing to offer, but they still headed there drunk on just the idea of Mardi Gras.

After David introduced the freaked out young lady to Amelia, he tried to make his escape again. This time, another staff member waved a phone at him.

“No time,” David said.

“Searching parent.” That was all she had to say. David never passed up a chance to reconnect families.

“I've given up and started calling morgues,” the woman said. She didn't sound upset, her tone was almost deadpan, perhaps dulled with pain or antidepressants. “The Austin morgue said you know all the kids. Said you might be able to help me find her if she's still alive. Which I doubt, but anyway, can you help me?”

“I'll try. What's her name? What does she look like?”

She described Fiona, with different colored hair, a small heart tattoo on her hand—the only real description needed.

“She was in Austin two nights ago,” David told her. “I saw her myself.”

“Can you get her to call me?”

“I'll ask her if I see her. How old is she?”

“Nineteen.”

“She's an adult. I can't force her to do anything she doesn't want to do. You understand that, right?”

“Oh. No. You can't? Can I call the police to find her?”

“Not unless she's committed a crime. And being homeless isn't a crime.”

“So she
is
homeless.”

“Without a doubt.”

She was silent. Then, “Well, what should I do?”

She could come to Austin and she'd most likely find her daughter, but if Fiona didn't want to go home, there was nothing her mother could do to force her.

“I'll pass along the message. Do my best to get her to call you.” David scribbled down the woman's contact information. After they hung up, he stuck the slip of paper into his wallet so he would have it with him.

He sprinted to his motorcycle, sure he would be late to the council meeting. A touch and the engine of his 883 Iron Black Denim hummed to life. It was a wicked ride that scored serious cred with the kids.

He'd had an old car when he started working at Tumbleweed, but he soon learned that he would be forever giving rides if he didn't draw strong boundaries. One day, his girlfriend was driving and a kid recognized his car, banged on the window and scared her to tears. So David got a bike. The girlfriend eventually left, but the Harley stayed.

He zipped through traffic trying to make up for lost time. One of the things he liked most about riding was the concentration required. He had to focus, which meant he didn't have time to consider problems like girls crying to go home and parents searching for corpses instead of children.

David parked and walked past the giant gleaming guitar sculpture outside of Austin's futuristic city hall. He had brought a stack of files to review while he waited for his turn to speak. He didn't have to wait long. He walked into chambers just in time to hear a council member addressing the city's homeless situation.

“I propose we buy these folks bus tickets out of Austin back to where they came from.” The key term in his statement being “out of Austin.”

“Lots of cities are doing it,” the councilman said.

David searched the room until he locked eyes with the director of the Salvation Army. David could see his counterpart was seething.

“Like what cities?” another council member asked.

“New York's doing it. It's been proposed in a lot of larger cities.”

The council member's ignorance of the situation astounded David. He walked forward toward the microphone stand, positioned in the middle of the aisle in front of the dais. The council chairwoman nodded acknowledgement. She waited for an opportunity, then said, “I see Mr. Simpson is here from the Tumbleweed Young Adult Center. Mr. Simpson, according to my notes you are later on the agenda. Do you have something you'd like to contribute to this particular conversation?”

“Yes, Madam Chairwoman. I do. I think the idea of shipping the homeless out of Austin is an uninformed and insensitive proposal.”

The council member who put forth the proposal openly scoffed.

“Of course you do,” he snapped.

“Mr. Simpson has the floor. Go on, Mr. Simpson. Give us your opinion,” the chairwoman said.

David swallowed a lump of dread. Public speaking was the part of his job he hated the most. He took in a large breath and held it while he pulled his thoughts together.

“I can't speak on behalf of the other shelter organizations represented here, but I can tell you about the homeless youth in Austin. Half of my kids have no home to return to. Period. No parents, no grandparents, no relatives, nobody who can provide a home. Most of these young adults have aged out of the foster care system and they have nowhere to go.”

“What about public housing?” the chairwoman asked.

“The waiting list for public housing is about two years, so that creates a gap between the time the state releases them as adults and the time housing becomes available. And then there are the younger ones. I've got a least five hundred every night under eighteen. These kids don't even qualify for public housing.”

“Five hundred? Every night?” The chairwoman seemed surprised.

“Tens of thousands of homeless youth come through Austin every year. Most of these kids have no home and it's
not their fault.
Children are not in control of these situations. They are at the mercy of the communities where they land. A lot of them happen to land in Austin. They're our children now.”

The council members looked at each other. Public officials were pragmatists. They viewed the homeless problem as a costly burden, a truth that couldn't be denied. It was hard to drum up sympathy for the tattooed, scraggly-haired children their constituents shooed away from their business doorsteps. Taxpayers didn't vote for representatives who handed out money to shiftless people.

“We hear your reasoning, Mr. Simpson, but there is only so much the city can do. Only so much money can be allocated to this particular problem. Do you have any suggestions to help us deal with this in a more sensitive and effective way?”

He stammered. There was no denying Austin already committed very generous resources to the homeless.

David had spoken passionately and made his point, but the council's point was made as well.

They all knew the truth. He had come today with his hand out yet again. He was a beggar, just like those he served.

HE LOVED working late in the newsroom. There were fewer people around. No ringing phones or sexy co-eds to distract him.

Travis banged out the flood story, his writer's block gone. No boring screed on parking meters or city council meetings. He'd decided to open with a scene that would put readers right in the action.

“Giant swirling walls of water,” was how Ava Torres described what she saw coming at her as she drove over the Winsor Street Bridge in Pease Park. Torres, a domestic worker in the Penbrooke neighborhood, was on her way home when she crossed the usually reliable bridge and was suddenly in the clutches of savage rushing water.

“I shouldn't have stopped my car, but I panicked,” Torres said. “As soon as I stopped I knew I'd done the wrong thing.” Water invaded her car and Torres ended up on the roof where an off-duty police officer rescued her in the pouring rain with a rope and the help of two citizens.

Torres was almost a casualty, but luck was on her side. Others were not as fortunate. Torrential rains took two lives and swept away many millions of dollars of property in Austin during the aftermath of Hurricane Gordon. Cars were pushed around like floating beer cans. In places, the city remains a crumpled mass of mangled sewer lines pushed above ground, street signs, broken concrete and structural steel.

Surviving handbills and posters formed a high water mark on buildings. In the floodplain, thick fingers of brown water pushed out into neighborhoods, natural areas and parking lots. Cars were stalled and abandoned all over Austin. People were stranded on roofs in low-lying areas.

As Austinites are painfully aware, hurricanes from the Gulf of Mexico tend to unleash on Central Texas. This time, county water stations registered a rise of eight feet in twenty minutes. There is no way to prepare for that.

It was a good start. There were so many ways the story could go, but he liked leading with an individual crisis instead of generalities about property damage and local government reaction.

His e-mail chimed for attention. It was from Emily. She had sent images and the release he needed to publish her photographs.

Travis opened the attachments. The shots were interesting and well-done, if a little on the artsy side. He wondered if she had retouched a few. Travis had forgotten to tell her that legit news sources didn't manipulate images.

She'd caught a woman crying out as she watched her house wash away. Another of a boy holding a dog, both covered in mud, the whites of their eyes the only clean spot on the pair. There were people kayaking down city streets and piles of debris caught on the upstream side of a bridge. His mind was already spinning captions.

The last one he opened was the money shot. Emily seemed to have a steady hand under pressure. The image was the two stranded boys, blanched, drenched, huddled on a car's roof. Water lapped up and over the hood below them. Their eyes were averted out of the frame, watching their friend climb into the back of the SUV. The emptiness in their eyes said it all. They were part of the damage.

All the pieces of a front page article were there, but time was short. Still, he wasn't worried. He liked working against deadline. He responded well to pressure.

THE MORNING was robin egg-blue. The air had a brisk edge. Fall had arrived on the wake of the rains. The city was in ruins and Emily needed a latte.

Lorelei was awake and sitting on the back stoop, cleaning mud from her Doc Martens when Emily got up. The girl had been with her for a few days.

“You hungry?” Emily asked.

Lorelei shrugged.

“Let me throw on my sweatshirt and we can walk to get some coffee.”

Mud had dried to chalky crust in unexpected spots along the streets. A certain strange stench wafted by at times, making Emily aware of the earth.

Above the entrance to Bouldin Creek Coffee hung a sign:
Our mission is to inspire community action, intellectual foment and people-watching.
On the side of the register:
Slacker special: Regular coffee $1. You know who you are.

They ordered. Emily paid.

While they waited, Emily took a
Be Here Now
from a metal rack.

She held the magazine toward Lorelei. “Look!”

“That's so cool.”

Her stranded street punks stared out from the cover.

She grabbed a short stack of papers. They found a patio table outside and began to read. Emily immediately regretted that she hadn't suggested captions for her photos. Did photographers get to do that? She didn't know. She'd have to ask Barbara.

Emily let the first sip of latte burn its way down her throat, hardly noticing the heat or the approach of her friend Leslie, Austin's icon of weirdness. He was winding his way between tables, talking to people. One table stopped him for a group photo. A visor that read
A positive voice in Austin
held back his wild gray hair. Like always, he smoked as if his life depended on it.

A vagrant cross-dresser, Leslie was one of Austin's most loved citizens. He hung around Sixth and Congress during business hours, often with a lengthy message scrawled on plywood railing against what he viewed as the Austin police force's mistreatment of the homeless.

Like many people around town, Emily had bought Leslie a cup of coffee. Leslie leaned in to give her a hug.

“Hey, Em. What's going on? I haven't seen you in a while, sugar.”

“Leslie, hey. Look, I took this picture.”

“Girl, that is good. I've seen those two around.”

“This is my friend, Lorelei.”

“I'm Leslie. Nice to meet you, sweetheart.”

“Leslie!” somebody yelled from another table. His attention was pulled away, and he teetered over to the other table in his heels.

“He's a trip,” Lorelei said.

“Leslie runs for mayor all the time.” Emily pointed to a Leslie for Mayor bumper sticker on the wall among the jumble of other oddities.

Leslie high-fived and knuckle bumped a table of young guys.

One of them said, “Fight the power.”

“Everybody thinks he's a scream,” Emily said.

“Does he always have a beard and wear a bra?”

“Yeah, and a thong in the summer. He's like Austin's human weather gauge. People say you can tell the temperature by what Leslie wears.”

This day, Leslie sported hot pink bellbottoms ringed with white flowers at the hem and a matching pink halter top with peep toe platforms. He wore a cropped zebra print coat.

“For a homeless guy he sure can dress up.”

“Yes. He must be resourceful.”

Where
did
Leslie keep his stash of costumes and signs?

“He's been in rehab, got beat up a couple of weeks ago. Says he was trying to convince some kids not to do drugs.”

“Yeah,” Lorelei snorted. “Good luck with that.”

“You know what they say, ‘Crack is whack.’”

“Don't make me gag.”

They watched Leslie work the room.

“I have a brother,” Lorelei said softly. She sipped her coffee and waited for a reaction to her casual announcement.

Emily tried to seem disinterested. “What's his name?”

“Noah. He's sick.”

“In what way?”

“Schizophrenic. When he's on his meds he does fine, but he needs somebody to make sure he takes them like he's supposed to.” She took another sip of coffee and paused to gather her words. “He ran away from home. But I guess when you're twenty-two you can't technically run away from home. My parents are tired of trying to take care of him. He was a drain on them. An embarrassment, I guess.”

“So, where is he now?”

“Who knows? I keep looking for him, but so far, no luck.”

“That why you came to Austin?”

“Yeah. He stays in the adult shelters. That makes it harder for me to find him. But he moves a lot. He's probably not here.” “We could ask Leslie if he's seen him. He knows about everybody.”

“Maybe. I don't know.”

“Have your parents filed a missing persons report?”

“I doubt it.”

“You don't talk to them?”

“No. They don't care about me either. Plus, they'd hate these,” she said pointing to her face.

There were probably plenty of parents who would reject their children over something as superficial as tattoos. Emily wondered if her parents would be like that. A tramp stamp or something she could easily hide would be one thing, but Barbara wouldn't be able to handle a facial tattoo. Emily was still considering this as they walked back to her house.

“So, what made you think Noah came to Austin?”

“It's logical. He likes music. It's on the circuit.”

“The circuit?”

“Yeah. Travelers go from Seattle all the way down to Miami, depending on the weather and stuff. Then they turn around and come back the other way. He's not here or I would have found him by now. I'm thinking he's already moved on to New Orleans. Austin's been great and all, but it's not like I can live with you forever.”

Lorelei let things hang a moment, but Emily didn't take the bait.

“So anyway,” the girl said. “Mardi Gras is coming up. Wanna go?”

“What?”

“Let's go to Mardi Gras.”

“And do what?”

“And do whatever.”

“I don't think so.”

“Couldn't hack it on the streets?”

“I'd do just fine.”

“Oh yeah, here.” She handed Emily her empty coffee cup. “Go over there and ask that guy for a dollar.”

“No way.”

“Chicken.”

“No. I'm not going to beg.”

“See. You couldn't make it.”

“I could too. I'm a bartender. I can get a job in any city.”

“But don't you see that what you do isn't all that different from what I do? What do you think tips are? You're still living off a stranger's spare change. You spange. You just don't call it that.”

“It's different. I work for it.”

“You don't think I work to get money? Don't you think standing on a sidewalk all day trading your dignity for pocket change is work?” She picked up a bottle in the road and smashed it on a rock.

This startled Emily, but she decided to ignore it. “Why are we having this conversation?” she asked.

“Because you're being hypocritical.”

“And you're being a little snot.”

Emily liked her better when she didn't talk so much.

“Look,” she said. “I know I can't stay with you forever. I appreciate the help, but it's time to vacate.”

Emily nodded and said nothing. She felt guilty at how relieved she was, but not guilty enough to offer to let her stay longer.