Ghost of a Flea

by James Sallis

  Little doubt that Agee, Fearing and the rest overstated the case. But in their mixture of populist pride and sadness at the decline of a higher culture lay something vivid and luminous, the apprehension of one of those rare moments when society visibly, utterly changes, and the sense of loss that sweeps over us then. That stream of poison, too, is a thing we all recognize.

  Blacks more than most.

  The poison goes down from generation to generation like the dissimulation and mimicry our forebears learned in order to survive, never saying what they really thought, putting their distress signals in code, till now, at this late hour in America’s history and our own, we no longer know, maybe can’t know, who we are or what we think.

  Year by year by year the poison drips in. We’re told it will heal us.

  Chapter Five

  I’D GOT UP that morning (off the bench, so to speak), taken a long look at the reef of bottles, and climbed upstairs to bed. During the day I awoke several times and lay there listening to the old house’s creaks and groans, remembering Whitman’s I think I will do nothing for a long time but listen/And accrue what I hear unto myself, before falling back asleep. I got up for good when I heard Deborah down in the kitchen. It was dark.

  “And here we thought you’d become just another brave explorer claimed by the desert,” she said when I stumbled in.

  “Bad news, I’m afraid. We had to kill the camels for food. And the bwana, of course.”

  “Bwana first, I hope.”

  “Damned right. Not much meat on Ol’ Massuh, though. Tell me there’s coffee.”

  “I was thinking about making some. You can chew the beans, if you’re really desperate.”

  “Desperate, yes—but chewing beans would only remind me of the camels. I loved those camels.”

  “You do need coffee.”

  That was the first pot, as we sat idly talking, both of us too tired to give much thought to food or other routines of the day. We pulled various corners, edges and butt ends of cheese out of the fridge and ate them with the remains of a loaf of French bread. Deborah had stopped off at her set designer’s apartment after leaving the flower shop, and it was now past nine. I’d slept, in bed as opposed to on bench, fourteen hours.

  “I just didn’t have the heart to wake you this morning when I came down. You were, by the way, doing a fine imitation of Bat, half on the bench and half off, no bones anywhere.”

  I squeezed both eyes shut and opened them again: Bat, wincing.

  “You didn’t get caught in the storm, then?” she asked.

  “Only the beginnings of it. Which is just as well, from what I saw this morning. I’m surprised the streets were clear.”

  “They weren’t. Passable, though. Everything bleached-out and blasted-looking, but with this brilliant sun and bright blue sky overhead. There had to have been all kinds of trash in the streets, tree limbs, trash cans, African drums, a bloated politician’s body or two, but I guess the rain washed most of it away.”

  So, veering from prattle about Aristophanes and the play to news of her day at the shop, the latest on Pakistan’s earthquake and the saga of my purposeless sit-in at Joe’s, we went on talking till almost midnight, when Deborah cashed in the chip or two she had left and left the casino.

  Coming back in from the slave quarters, I’d brought Fearing’s spirit with me. Kenneth and I sat together in the dark not talking for a couple more hours. Bat followed me in, too, made another plea for food and, failing, curled up beside me on the chair’s overstuffed, well-worn, moderately clawed arm.

  I was sitting in pretty much the same place and attitude when Deborah came down the next morning. I’d had three or four hours’ sleep upstairs myself, and now I was contemplating piles of laundry that needed doing. An Iwo Jima of whites, Allegheny of darks, a veritable Everest of colors. Where was Teddy Roosevelt when you needed him to go storming up these hills and take them? Even if the famous footage, and in large part the event itself, was faked.

  “It’s a start,” Deborah said, “kind of. Which one’s Krakatoa?”

  “You’re always complaining that I don’t sort things properly.”

  “I just had in mind not putting everything in the washer at once, Lew. It somehow escaped me that the creation of new continents would be involved.” She looked ceilingward, as though for steerage. “Oh well. Just passing through.”

  “City be full of tourists. Always underfoot. Speaking of which: any sign of David?”

  “I didn’t hear him this morning. Want me to go look?”

  “He’d be up and about if he were here. I suspect he’ll wander home when he’s—as my father always said—of a mind to.”

  She went on to the kitchen, where I heard her rummaging: cabinet doors chattered, a drawer slid shut with the sound of an arrow thunking into its target. Dull smack of the refrigerator door opening. Minutes later she walked into the front hallway. A voice, none of which I could make out, unrolled on the answering machine. Then she was there in the doorway.

  “Lew, you better come listen to this.”

  She wore a light green housecoat that matched the glass in her hand turning the orange juice within a sickly color.

  “It’s the third one,” she said, pushing the button on the machine. “It must be from last night. Neither of us thought to check.”

  Mr. Griffin, this is Marie at Book News. I don’t seem to have an e-mail address on file for you. We were wondering if you might have time to review a new translation of Cendrars for us. Give us a call? Thanks.

  The second caller had so much trouble trying to say what he wanted that, after repeated stammering, he finally hung up.

  Then the third. Jeanette’s voice.

  Lew, are you there? … I guess not … Can you call me when you get in? It’s Don, Lew. He’s been shot.

  When the elevator doors opened on the second floor, three heads turned towards me. Two of the heads nodded. The owner of the largest of them came to meet me.

  “Griffin,” he said.

  “Santos.”

  No hand was offered. Cops don’t much like shaking hands. And when all was said and done, Santos himself, though his skin was as dark as my own, didn’t much favor black men. No way in hell we were ever going to like one another, his attitude told me; but since I was a friend of Don’s, he always treated me with deference. Don’s retirement had left him chief of detectives.

  “What happened?”

  “Jeanette called you, right?”

  I nodded.

  “She told you Don’s been shot.”

  “And that’s the whole of what I know.”

  One of the other cops approached, and Santos stepped away for a moment to confer.

  “We had kind of a send-off for Walsh last night,” he said upon return. “Nothing formal, just a lot of us who wanted to get together and say hey, we’re here, we appreciate what you’ve been doing all this time. Man did a fuckin’ hero’s job for a lotta years. You think anyone noticed? Anyone but us? So we got together at O’Brien’s, a bar down on—”

  “I know it.”

  “Yeah. Yeah, sure you do.” His eyes met mine. O’Brien’s was the closest thing New Orleans had to a cop’s bar. Citizens knowing cop stuff is another thing cops don’t much like. “Anyhow, Tony Colado snagged a cake half the size of a football field from his uncle’s bakery, a deli a lot of the guys eat at up on Magazine kicked in a tray of sandwiches, like that. Whole thing ran maybe five in the afternoon to eight, eight-thirty.”

  Automatic doors from the ICU sprang open and a young man in blue scrubs ambled through. The scrubs, probably the largest available, struggled to cover the man’s chest and bulky shoulders. Weightless blond hair clung to his scalp like damp flower petals; a tiny silver and blue-enamel cross hung from one ear. Beckoning for me to come along, Santos went to meet him.

  “Dr. Lieber,” he said. “This is Lew Griffin, he and the Captain go way back.”

  Don’s rank and title had changed several times over the yea
rs. When he first took the job, not too long after we met, he’d been chief of detectives and a captain. Then sometime in the Seventies the department kicked him up to major. Twenty years later he’d become, at least briefly, maybe permanently—by this time I’d lost track, and he probably had too—an assistant superintendent. But cops don’t take to change any better than they do to handshakes and citizens knowing things about them, and for most of the men he worked with, those to whom he wasn’t just Walsh, he’d remained the Captain.

  Dr. Lieber held out hands that looked like a steelworker’s and we shook.

  “There’s no real change, sir. Vital signs are stable, the bleeding’s under control. He had developed, as I told you before, a secondary pneumothorax—free air in the chest, and hardly surprising in cases like this—but that’s been taken care of. He’s breathing on his own, without difficulty, though we’re keeping him on the ventilator as a precaution.”

  “Is he conscious?”

  “Not yet. Everything considered, we’d just as soon he’d stay under a while longer. The rabbit puts his head up, I’ll—”

  “Rabbit?”

  “Sorry, it’s been a long day. Just something we say all the time around here, among ourselves: that our job in ER is to pull rabbits out of hats and sometimes they don’t even give us the hat. What I meant, first time there is a change, I’ll let you know. Or if I’m not available, the resident on call will.”

  “Thank you.”

  “No need to. It’s my job. I take the job seriously. So, apparently, did your friend in there.”

  Dr. Lieber turned and, pushing the doors open, went back into the ICU. The other cops immediately came over. Santos told them what had been said, then the two of us stepped away. We stood near the wall, in a narrow channel bounded by the ICU doors and an unmanned information desk, looking out. Beyond our dull oblong of an island, visitors and hospital personnel swarmed everywhere, pushing carts, carrying flowers and paper bags of belongings, rubbing at eyes or the backs of necks, embracing. The cover of brochures stacked on a table nearby read Are you ready for Him?

  “Walsh stopped on the way home, at a Circle K just around the corner from his apartment. He went in, the guys were already there. He pulled some milk out of the cooler, started toward the register, then went back and got a six-pack. The store owner says he could see him staring into the glass door like he was trying to decide what kind of beer. Afterwards he figured that was why Walsh went after the beer in the first place—just so he could take a look around, without having it be obvious.

  “There’s two of them, one guy standing over by the magazines while the other one pretends he’s playing this video game. Only there’s no noise from the game machine, see, and it’s like all of a sudden the one standing there by the machine, he’s the one with the gun, thinks of this and starts getting nervous. Walsh and this guy start walking toward the register at the same time. The guy’s reaching in under his jacket for the piece when Walsh says, Hey buddy, have a beer, and chunks the six-pack right at him. Guy jerks back, his feet slip and he goes down, but the piece goes off anyway. Then the six-pack hits him square in the face. That, the fall when he slams his head, and the store owner’s jumping the counter and doing some slamming of his own with a baseball bat puts this mook down for the count. The other one’s history by now. Long gone.

  “But then the store owner, a Mr. Chadras, looks over and sees Walsh lying there with his service revolver drawn and blood streaming out all around him. He’s having trouble breathing, too. But Mr. Chadras, it turns out, was a doctor back in his own country. He grabs a piece of gauze and some Vaseline off the shelf and slaps it over the hole in Walsh’s chest. Saved his life, the paramedics say.

  “Boy that did this looks all of nineteen. We tried running him, but the computer just started spitting out empties. Those weren’t all that got spit out last night, either.”

  Santos took a small box from his pocket, the kind jewelry comes in.

  “I ain’t saying this was right, Griffin—or how it came about. Crew that booked him sent it up late last night. Boy had this tooth he was proud of. You know how they used to have those gold caps? Well, somehow or another this kid had one of those.”

  Santos lifted the box top. The gold tooth lay on a nest of cotton batting. Blood still adhered to the upper edge. A few strands of the cotton were stained pink.

  Santos shrugged and put the box back in his pocket. “What can I say?”

  For some reason, wildly, I thought of Don telling me he’d become a detective mainly because he could write a complete sentence, which put him miles ahead of the competition. I also remembered another time, years later, when I’d come upon him in a spectacularly sleazy bar deep in what was then no-man’s land below the Quarter. “Out of your element, aren’t you?” I’d said. He sat for a moment peering into his glass. “Not really. I’m like you, Lew. I take my element with me.”

  Or another time, many years later, when my life had bottomed out. Some of his men had scraped me off the walls of a bar out on Jefferson Highway and taken me to Mercy. When I woke blank as a slate, no idea what had happened and more than a few days gone, Don was sitting beside me. Neither of us spoke for a while. Then he said, “What are you gonna do, Lew: there’s nowhere to go but on.”

  “Appreciate your filling me in, Santos.”

  He nodded.

  “You think I can see him?”

  “Just family for now. Doctor says they’ll let us in tomorrow, assuming everything goes right. I figure we go in, there’s no problem with you coming along.”

  “Thanks.”

  “No problem.”

  “What about Jeanette? She with him?”

  “Sent her home to get some rest. Took some talking and fast footwork on my part.”

  “I expect it did. Guess I should go by, then, see what I can do.”

  “Yeah, she’d like that.”

  I stepped off our island and started for the door.

  “Hey, Griffin, you need a ride?” Santos called. I turned back to decline, but saying, “Sure you do,” Santos called out again: “Whitaker, you wanna give Griffin here a ride over to Captain Walsh’s?”

  The cop I didn’t know detached himself. We went down and out and across the alley to where his gray Crown Victoria was parked by a Dumpster. (“You wouldn’t believe what shows up in there,” he said.) Moments later we pulled into traffic. Whitaker’s radio had come on, turned low, when he hit the key, one of those stations that alternates its own trademark brand of news with talk shows about welfare abuse, the conspiracy of world government and the dangers of water fluoridation. Whitaker took two sticks of gum from a package the size of a paperback War and Peace jammed into where the ashtray had once been. He was, I figured, around thirty.

  Much of the drive uptown became a kind of down-and-out Grey Line tour.

  “That’s the Billies,” Whitaker said as we passed the slablike, mostly roofless shell of a building. Two men inside sat on boxes at a battered old spool cable, having breakfast from the look of it. I half expected them to lift their cups to us in greeting. “Billy Williams and Billy Nabors. Been there over a year now. Came down from Minnesota, Nebraska, one of them places. Say they just couldn’t take the cold no more.”

  Some blocks further on we passed a sixtyish woman wearing a red wool sweater, pink ballet tutu with baggy, lime-green tights, and purple-and-orange sneakers.

  “Squeezebox Sally. Makes the rounds on Maple Street every night, all those restaurants and bars up there, with her accordion. Comes up to a table and asks people, usually couples, what they want to hear, but it all sounds the same, mainly just her pushing and pulling at the box, hitting keys at random. Word is, she used to be some kind of piano virtuoso. Word is also that now she’s deaf as a board. Her big finish is always the same: she turns around, bends over and tosses up her skirt.”

  “I guess there are some things in New Orleans’s rich cultural life that I’d just as soon miss out on,” I said.

&nb
sp; “Could definitely put you off your lasagna.”

  We were almost to Don’s by this time. Whitaker took a right by the Circle K where Don had been shot.

  “Bonner”—the other cop, that I knew, from back at the hospital—“says you write books.”

  “I used to. Used to do a lot of things.”

  “Didn’t we all,” Whitaker said, pulling up at the curb.

  Chapter Six

  REGULARS KNEW HIM AS DOG BOY. He could be found each morning and late afternoon, accompanied by the elderly black man who looked after him, in the small park a block and a half away, riverside, from our house. Whenever someone brought a dog into the park, the boy would drop to all fours and stare into the animal’s eyes. Most of them stared back, boy and dog transfixed before one another, fused in the press of their concentration to something like a single entity; I had seen lap dogs, poodles and Dobermans the size of small cars standing there by him, turning their heads that curious way dogs have, keening in puzzled kinship. Dogs were chiefly what people brought to the park, hence the name, but the boy’s sympathies extended well beyond. Once I observed him by the ironwork fence, back bent to an S curve, chattering away with the squirrel atop it. Another time, what must have been an escaped domestic parrot came to rest, bobbing, in an azalea, while boy and bird, faces but inches apart, rolled, swiveled and ducked heads in tandem.

  Lester Johnson had worked for the boy’s family, as a shoe repairman in a store they owned, for over forty-two years, long after people gave up on having shoes repaired; long, too, after Lester’s arthritic hands had grown unable to hold the necessary tacks, narrow-headed hammers, awls and needles, and his eyes unsuited to such detail work. His wife, Emmie, had cared for the boy at first, just as she’d brought up the family’s older children, all of them even then off to college or making their way in the world, but when the boy was three and the family first coming to the realization that something was not quite right, Emmie had died. Her blood pressure shot up not to be brought down, circulation faltered and began to fail, every treatment seemed to further complicate things, and one quiet Saturday afternoon as Lester stood by the bed he watched her, with a single long breath, let go. Four days later he shut up the shoe store for the last time and took over Emmie’s duties.