Ghost of a Flea

by James Sallis

  “Lew?”

  No telling how much food went out that backdoor and down that alley year after year to those who might otherwise have gone without, itinerant farmworkers, folks in town hoping for positions at the tire and chemical plants, whole families trucked up en masse from Mexico to pick cotton, bluesmen in town playing jukes and streetcorners, local blacks, poor whites. All the lost tribes.

  “Lew. Damn it, answer me!”

  No longer was I drifting. Now I’d begun struggling my way upwards. Age ten or twelve, about the same time I came upon Sonny Boy and Robert Junior at the Blue Moon, I saw Houdini at the Malco halfway up Cherry, from the balcony cordoned off, weekends only, 25 cents, for blacks. Wrapped in chains and shut away in a trunk, Tony Curtis got thrown into freezing water. He rose, manacles and trunks left behind, only to encounter a sky of ice.

  But now the ice gives way and I’m moving up again, ever closer. Deborah’s face swims into focus there above me. Lovely as always.

  Years ago, after I found Alouette and her child, both desperately ill, in a hospital up in Mississippi, she told me what it was like to be so sundered from life. “Suddenly I broke free. Really free. I was floating. Nothing could touch me, nothing could hold me down. I remember thinking: How wonderful this is, I don’t even have to breathe now.”

  But of course I did. Had to breathe and had to do it now, here, as I struggled upward, light digging into my eyes like fists. Where am I? What shore have I washed up on?

  Now, I found, had become then. Another hole in my life.

  “Hey, woman.”

  Halfway between sleep and waking, my mind takes up familiar things, turns them over, around. I stand in a tenement house watching figures move in the frame of windows opposite. It’s hot and their windows, like mine, are open. I see their lips moving, hear the sound of their voices but can’t make out what they’re saying. Trying, I lean closer, out my window, and in that moment feel my balance giving way.

  “Lew. You’re back.”

  “I guess.”

  “We’ve been worried.”

  When I didn’t respond (I was working on it, but words proved slow to shape themselves around my intentions), she went on. “Don, Rick Garces, Alouette. We’ve been taking turns. Larson even took a couple of shifts off to spell us, turned things over to his foreman. You’ve been out almost five days.”

  “Damn.”

  She told me the date.

  “I don’t remember a thing.”

  “You’ve had a stroke, Lew. A light one.”

  “Damn.”

  “Yeah. Damn.”

  “Light one,” a voice says above me. Not Deborah’s this time. Have another five days passed, or just moments? I’ve no way of knowing. No landmarks here, nothing to grab hold of. “You’re lucky, Mr. Griffin.” In here becoming out there in a flood, I open my eyes. Not Deborah’s face either, unless she’s grown a soul patch, pierced an ear. On the trade wind of his breath I smell coffee, raw sugar, milk that’s just turned or is about to. “The world’s been kind enough to send you a message. A warning. You’re going to be okay. A month, six weeks from now, it’ll be like nothing’s happened. But next time …” Sincere face and brown eyes hover there over me. He’s what, mid-twenties? Sees so much of life every day, been through so little of it himself.

  More white space then, as the world again shut itself down. The doctor’s face stayed up there a while, lips moving. Then it changed: grew larger, misshapen, grotesque; broke into parts and rolled away—as though in slow motion a stone had shattered a water-borne image.

  When next the world washed back, Don and Jeeter were there at water’s edge, talking. Don held a pint-size plastic cup of coffee in one hand. Every few moments he’d gesture with that hand to emphasize something he was saying, then catch himself just before coffee sloshed over the top.

  “Thing you have to look at,” Don was saying, “is how’s it gonna travel? Sure it looks good right now, but what about four years from now, or ten? Horseshoeing probably looked good, too, sixty or seventy years ago.”

  “I hear you.” Jeeter grinned. “Whatchu think ’bout shepherding?”

  “Don’t mind me,” I told them.

  “All right,” Jeeter said.

  “Derick’s trying to decide what he wants to be when he grows up.”

  “So how you doin’, Mr. Griffin?”

  “I’ve been better.”

  “Worse, too,” Don said.

  “Can’t argue with that.”

  “You be needing anything?”

  I told the boy no.

  “Be okay we talk a spell, then?”

  “Sure.”

  “Lew may not feel like—” Don started, but I waved him mute.

  Jeeter pulled a molded plastic chair lost somewhere on the road between purple and blue, one size fits none, up to the bed. When he sat, his knees came almost level with his ears.

  “Don’s took me down to the library, got me a library card. Lady with sequins on her glasses tells me I can take home six books. Gotta be a million or so in there at least, and I’m walking around wondering how’m I gonna pick six books out of all those. And what about? So I’m giving thought to all this stuff I’ve wondered about, Joan of Arc, karate, old cars, the Vietnam War my old man never got over, this Langston Hughes person I’ve heard of, and suddenly I remember how Don told me you wrote some books. I go back to the lady with the sequins on her glasses and ask can she help me. Sure enough, she brings me this little stack of books. They’re pretty beat up, so I guess I’m not the only one’s looked into them, you know? I took the top six home—two of them were the same, but I didn’t know that—and I read them all that weekend.”

  I glanced over at Don, still by the window. He nodded.

  “Monday morning, I was there waiting when the library opened. The lady with sequins on her glasses had the day off. Young woman in a crinkly brown dress and sandals helped me that time. Her skin was white as rice, I remember. Kind of lumpy like it, too. She brought me another stack of books, some of them different, some the same. I went ahead and read them all.”

  “You have a new fan, Lew,” Don said.

  “I didn’t know books could be like that, Mr. Griffin. None of the ones I’d ever saw before were.”

  “Thank you, Jeeter.”

  “Call me Derick.”

  “Derick, then. Thanks. I don’t think I’ve ever had a finer review.”

  “He means it, Lew.”

  “So do I.”

  “I just keep reading those books over and over, Mr. Griffin, gotta been through some of them five, six times by now. Skull Meat, The Old Man, Mole. You’re writing about what I lived all my life, streets I grew up in, people I know. All of it right there. Something else going on there, too. Something I don’t understand. I don’t give up, I keep reading. But I just can’t quite get hold of it.” He grinned. “Sometimes I almos’ do.”

  “Yeah. Sometimes I almost do, too.”

  Dead still this morning. So still and bright with sun that you don’t notice how cold it is until you move. Then the cold’s after you with blades and saws. Deborah and I have talked all night. Now I ask her what day it is.

  “Sunday.”

  Now that she’d told me, I heard bells from the Baptist church down the street. It had taken me days to figure out what was odd about the sound: the bells were electronic, starting up right on pitch and ending with no aftertones, volume at a level the whole time.

  “And the date?”

  It had become important to me, virtually an obsession, to know these things. Just as hour upon hour I found myself watching the clock. Hands that knocked knocked knocked without entering.

  “Diversion, Lew,” Deborah had told me, “misdirection. So you don’t have to face the darker time ticking away inside you.” Cold wasn’t the only thing cutting to the bone these days.

  Blearily I looked down at people huddled in the bus stop across the street four floors below. They wore whatever coats they had, and mo
st held cups of coffee. Steam leaked like breath from their cups and from grease-stained bags of food. Cold waited till people stood or changed position on the bench, then pounced. Eye turned upwards and mouths writhed in pain.

  “Brought some things to help get you through all this,” Deborah had said, dipping into her backpack. I thought of Madame Butterfly (“I’ve brought a few things”) as she held up a finger: “Some favorites.” Montaigne’s essays, L’Ecume des jours. A second finger: “Also these.” Tapes of cultural programs and game shows like My Word a friend dubbed off the BBC. Third finger, with dramatic pause: “And me, of course….”

  So we’d spent the night talking. About how rehearsals were going, latest reports from doctors, official confirmation that this was the coldest winter in a quarter century, when I was likely to get sprung.

  “On that subject, I have a message for you from Don. He says if you try to walk out of here the way you usually do, he’ll personally come after you, rope and hog-tie you, and bring you back.”

  I whistled a bar or so from Copland’s Rodeo.

  “He’s serious, Lew. This is serious. You scared us.” She was stacking books and tapes neatly on the bedside table. “Rick Garces wants me to tell you to hurry up and get well because he’s got a new recipe he can’t talk anyone else into trying. Sea insects. ‘You know how picky them white boys is ’bout their food,’ he says, ‘’specially the straight ones.’ Dean Treadwell called from the school to see how you were and asked that I give you his best. The Washington Post said—I knew you had a piece due and gave them a call, hope you don’t mind—not to worry about the Fearing review, they’d wait. And your agent says call her when you get a chance. There’s a new publishing house in Scotland, run by a bunch of kids, Vicky says, but they seem to know what they’re doing, that wants to talk to you about reissuing your books.”

  “Nothing from David?”

  She shook her head. “I’m sorry, Lew.”

  A bus pulled up below and all climbed aboard. I had to wonder if any of them even cared where the bus was headed. It was warm at least, and you could stay aboard indeterminately. The bus pulled away, leaving bus stop and street alike empty, windswept, barren. As though the whole world itself had emptied. No one left alive.

  “You going to be okay?”

  I nodded. A nurse’s head tilted in around the door. Red hair, full lips. “Mr. Griffin?” Then she came on in. Eyes green and alive, forever in motion, unbecomingly wide hips somehow still sexy, tattoo of barbed wire on one upper arm. “Physical therapy called, asked me to let you know they’re on their way.” Her name tag hung from a lanyard of multicolored beads, swaying as she walked: Erin. “Need anything before? Pain meds, new designer gown, box lunch?”

  “Still no word, I take it, on my pardon from the governor?”

  Sad face. “Sorry.”

  “Just as well. I absolve you all, you know.”

  “Of course you do.”

  When she was gone, Deborah came and lay beside me on the bed. My right hand cradled her stomach, my left embraced her. “We’ve had good times, Lew. Lots of them.” Her hair was streaked with gray, strands of it. When had those shown up? Memory was so unreliable, such a liar. So self-serving. Only thing it did well was break your heart.

  Down in the street a lowrider passed with speakers blaring so loudly that it set off alarms in parked cars as it passed. We lay there listening to them go off, one after another, as it cruised along.

  Chapter Twenty

  “IT ALWAYS ESCALATES, LEW. You know that.”

  “She didn’t want to bother me with it. Wanted to wait till I was out of the hospital at least, she said. I’m not sure she would have brought it up at all, if Larson hadn’t pushed.”

  “So he’s concerned.”

  “Larson’s the one who told me about it in the first place. Couldn’t have been easy for him, either. He and Alouette have a strong relationship, if not one we’d think of as ordinary. They have their own, quite independent lives. Distinct personalities. But they’re solidly together and respect one another’s opinions, beliefs, decisions. Seems to be plenty of space left in the relationship for that.”

  “You’re saying he saw coming to you with this as a violation.”

  I nodded.

  Don stood, flexing back and shoulder muscles. He rolled his head forward and back, shoulder to shoulder. “Used to be I could sit for more than five minutes without everything stiffening up, you know?”

  I knew.

  “I don’t keep moving, body’s not the only thing’s gonna stiffen up,” Don went on. “So in past weeks there’ve been more of these messages.”

  “More of them, and closer together.”

  He glanced again at the one in his hand.

  “Look, it’s not like there’s anything else I have to do, Lew. I can sit at home and spend my mornings worrying what’s for lunch, or I can get up off my butt and onto this. Still have favors I can call in. Forensics, for a start. I’ll have them take a look at this.” He held up the note. “And the file from her computer at work. You got any problem with my talking to Alouette, asking her about it?”

  “Not if she doesn’t.”

  We were silent then. I’ve been blessed with good friends.

  “Where are you?” Don said finally.

  “I was remembering the first time I saw you, slumped against a wall downtown with blood pooling under you and garlic on your breath.” The day he’d saved my life. “Then, later, how you showed up at my place with this yellow piece-of-shit BanLon shirt on. I mean, just how fucking white can you get?”

  Don shrugged.

  We’d been friends so long, been through so much together, that looking at him was a lot like looking in the mirror. And just as somewhere in your mind you stay twenty years old forever and are always slightly surprised when this old guy’s head pops up in there, I was never quite prepared to see my friend looking so tired and worn down.

  “You miss him, Don?”

  Something we’d rarely spoken of since it happened. We found him, half afloat, half submerged, in the bathtub, plastic bag secured about his head.

  “Every day of my life. I just keep thinking, if only I’d had the chance to get to know him better. If I’d made the chance, found it somehow.”

  “You did what you could.”

  “I don’t know…. I know what he was, Lew. Like I told you then, it just doesn’t seem to make much difference.”

  “He was right about one thing: Everything’s water if you look long enough.”

  Don nodded. “From his note.”

  “Maybe it doesn’t matter how much time you have. Maybe you’re still left with all these piles of unfinished business.”

  Don sank back into his chair. “When did everything turn to past tense for us, Lew? You notice that happening?”

  I shook my head.

  He picked up the paper again. “You know what this is from?”

  If I have now made up my mind to write it is only in order to reveal myself to my shadow, that shadow which at this moment is stretched across the wall in the attitude of one devouring with insatiable appetite each word I write. It is for his sake that I wish to make the attempt. Who knows? We may perhaps come to know each other better.

  “A Persian novel, The Blind Owl.”

  “Which of course you’d read.”

  “Not a clue. But it took Rick about two minutes flat to track it down on the Internet.”

  “And what is this? Drawn on?”

  “Looks like someone did it on a computer, ran the typeface up to the point of blurring when he printed it out on an old dot matrix printer—not a well-maintained one, at that—then photocopied the printout. That’s Rick’s guess, anyhow.”

  “Why go to all that trouble?”

  I shrugged. “Why send it in the first place? Maybe he thought he was covering his tracks somehow, maybe he sent copies to world leaders, stuck them under windshield wipers at the nearest mall. Who the hell knows? We think he ma
y have been trying to make it look like an engraving.”

  “Okay. There’s anything here useful, the lab’ll find it.” He held the paper up close. “That flytrack at the bottom some kind of signature?”

  “I’m pretty sure it says William Blake.”

  “Tiger, tiger guy?”

  I nodded. “Poetry was kind of a sideline for him, though. By trade he was an engraver. In his spare time he talked to angels.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  HOME I WENT, then, in due time, limping and scuttling. There on my island, I sat watching lives go on. Rain had come on like the fury it was, slamming away at houses and cars, lifting lawn appliances to abandon them half a block down and two across, slapping pedestrians to the ground. And everywhere the cold, attacking as much from within as without.

  Between two roaring worlds where they swirl, I.