Ghost of a Flea

by James Sallis

Yes, Mr. Joyce.

  Meanwhile, the good ship Rick Garces came calling at my island. Never a lack of friends or good food when Rick’s involved. This time, it was simple fare: polenta with wild mushroom sauce. Then he compensated with a salad of endive, baby green spinach, a handful of what looked like purple weeds, and slivers and bits of jicama, sweet cactus, sour German pickle. The mix of people, predictably, was as offbeat as the salad.

  A couple of gay activists from NO AIDS arrived first, a longtime pair oddly enough, given that one (in vintage Capri pants and chambray shirt) was male, the other (wearing Fifties sharkskin suit and saddleback shoes) female. All night long they stood side by side, a preponderance of sentences beginning “Eddie [or, conversely, Edie] and I …”

  Next came a lawyer “down from Tulane, way down,” working as he did exclusively pro bono cases. He sported the uniform of old New Orleans money, gray-and-white seersucker suit, starched shirt, bow tie. Luckily, he said, he’d been relieved of the burden of making a living and so was able to practice a purer form of law. And what better use (smiling) to which to put his family’s ill-got money?

  In fairly rapid succession, then:

  A reporter in blue blazer and torn jeans from the Times-Picayune. (Hosie Straughter? Hell yes, I knew him!)

  An emergency-room doctor whose color and fixed expression put one in mind of a Halloween pumpkin. In her wake trailed a retired FBI husband who, with half a bottle of wine and a brandy or two inside him, began telling tales of agents getting drunk on stakeouts and losing the car, reporting it stolen or sending in other agents the next day to investigate. Once an agent had managed to get transferred out of a particularly onerous assignment only when he accidentally blasted a hole in the car’s roof with the standard-issue shotgun, precipitating a rash of such accidents, first throughout the state, then on into Mississippi, Alabama and beyond.

  A painter of “how things might have happened in history” and (perhaps the most laid-back guy I’d ever seen) one who sold collectibles, Hopalong Cassidy lunchboxes, Gilbert erector sets and the like, in the weekend flea market downtown.

  George, from whom knives protruded quill-like at boot top and waist (though our journalist suggested the knife handles might well be scarecrows, like those false beepers sold nowadays) and who ran a tattoo, excuse me, body art, shop out on the edge of Kenner. He’d been in the Quarter for a quarter of a century, a fixture there, till gentrifiers dragged him to the ground. No sense of tradition at all, those people, absolutely none at all—when tradition, that sense of history, is what made this city great. At one point, George said, better than 95 percent of prisoners had tattoos; from their body art you could tell within a year or so when the con had gone up on his first stretch, and where. Older, proletarian tattoos had always been formulaic, iconographic—blue dot, enwreathed heart, initials—while contemporary middle-class ones edged towards the pictorial and profuse. Might even say decadent. As a culture we’ve spent so long promoting hostility to whatever exists as the only honorable stand, too often hostility’s all that’s left, a bottle with nothing much inside. Still (George, hefting his mug of herb tea, asked us all) does anything better represent man’s stubborn insistence to be himself and truly alive, to find beauty in the world and, if he can’t find it, create it?

  A rookie homicide detective, Angela, shaped like a barrel with eyebrows painstakingly plucked then drawn back in a high arch.

  A thirtyish guy, Louis, Louie, maybe Luis, who’d just opened a bookstore specializing in used textbooks. School bookstores had long held an unchallenged monopoly, repurchasing texts again and again at bargain-basement prices and reselling them at penthouse premiums. It wouldn’t last, he knew that, but for a while he’d be able dramatically to undercut the schools and still pull a fair profit. And even once this passed, he’d be left with the satisfaction of knowing he’d done good work—ah, America!

  Dennis, bald except for a gray, limp ponytail sprouting off the back of his head, who taught drawing and design at three community colleges and served as part-time docent for the Delgado.

  Danny and Steve. They ran an uptown B&B catering to gays and offered up, everyone said, breakfasts so good that guests got up an hour early just to enjoy them.

  Phillip, who’d gone through the master’s program in social work with Rick. He worked at the state hospital over in Mandeville, had for years.

  Charles, a waiter at Petunia’s who, whenever he was able to clear time, played clarinet with a local klezmer group, string bass with a pickup blues band meeting each weekend on Jackson Square. That group’s washboard player frequently spilled out of her top. The group was very popular.

  Towards ten that night, things began trailing off. God, we were old. Ten o’clock and the party’s over. Pots of polenta gave out as had mushroom and roux earlier; plates of cheese, andouille sausage, toothpickspeared peppers and olives faded away; folks reaching into honeycombs of beer and wine bottles came up empty, which given our diminished tolerances was probably just as well. With Rick I saw the last few stragglers to the door, then put on Charlie Patton cranked high as we began stacking dishes, glasses, coffee cups, ashtrays.

  “Thanks for letting me use your place, Lew.”

  “My pleasure. Great meal, fine company.”

  In the next room, slurring his words majestically (as I generally did these days, following the stroke), Patton saddled up his pony.

  “You want, you’re not into this right now, too tired to deal with it, we could leave it. I’d be glad to swing by early, before work, take care of it then.”

  “Just as soon get it done. I’m fine. Help me wind down some.”

  We worked away, Patton’s guitar plucking at the edge of our world, calling up strong feelings I had no name for, feelings that, once summoned, I knew, would be slow to go away. Cleanup mostly done, we knocked off to share half a bottle of Australian Shiraz-cabernet I’d tucked away for safekeeping in the vegetable drawer, sitting together for the most part wordlessly, before Rick headed home. I was stacking a final few plates on towels, long ago bereft of drainer space, when the phone rang.

  I made my way to it, shouted Hang on! Just a minute! and, carrying the phone with me, Deborah’s cordless, went to turn down the music.

  “Sorry.”

  A pause. “Mr. Griffin.”

  Maybe I should have left the music alone. Go back now and crank it up.

  “I apologize for calling so late. I wanted to say how sorry I am to hear of your recent difficulties.… Our bodies will go on betraying us, won’t they? Still, a stroke, if not too severe, can be an interesting thing. The jar gets shaken in intriguing ways…. You’ve made, I understand, a full recovery.”

  I wrung out the dishrag and draped it on the windowsill to dry. More accurately, probably, to mildew.

  “I was pleased to hear that. If there’s anything I can do … As you know, I’ve had considerable experience with this sort of thing these last several years. I would hope that you might call on me. Not that I think for a moment you will.”

  Time ticked in the wires.

  “I am hardly a monster, Mr. Griffin. Few of us are. It’s not as though I’m sitting here with drums going, waiting for those mighty gates to open.”

  “I am a man, Jupiter.”

  “Ah yes. Sartre, to balance my own King Kong. Interesting, isn’t it? How, increasingly, we seem to live our lives as allusion, reference—not directly, but refracted from something else.”

  The CD player had shut itself off, dropping the house into a supernal quiet.

  “Thousands of years ago, Mr. Griffin. Thousands of years ago, something, a creature who had not existed before, lugged itself up out of the slime and sat drying on a rock, looking around. It had no idea what it was, what it would become. Even where it was. But at that point, even with no words for it, the creature knew two things.

  “It had knowledge of itself. It was self-aware.

  “And it knew, as it struggled even to breathe in this new world, that it hurt.
”

  Without response to that, I remained silent.

  “Of course, personally, I have also the pragmatic, absolutely nonphilosophical consolation of knowing that, for me, the pain will soon be over. An unfair advantage, some might suggest.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said after a moment.

  “Why should you be? From your vantage, no doubt, I’ve earned my pain.”

  “We all do, in our own way. Just that sometimes it seems so out of proportion.”

  “Yes. Yes, sometimes it does.” A cough started up in his chest, like a fist closing down; I heard him turn it away, end it, by sheer force of will. “I do apologize for calling so late.”

  “Not a problem.”

  “Good…. I should hate to impose.” A man walked slowly past on the street outside, a step or so off the curb, looking in. He was shabbily dressed, eyes bright with something: drink, fever, too many lost battles, too much time alone. “I wonder if you may have given any further thought to what we last spoke of.”

  “Alouette, you mean.”

  “I suppose I do.” When I said no more, he added:

  “She’s well?”

  “She is. As is the child.”

  “Good. Very good. And may I ask concerning the … notes … she has been receiving?”

  “Dr. Guidry, I understand and appreciate your concern, but that’s something you really need to take up with Alouette directly, not with me.”

  “You’re right, of course. And I’d be happy to do so, if only she’d take my calls. At any rate, Mr. Griffin, forgive me. And thank you for your time, of which already I’ve taken up far too much.”

  “Not at all. Good night, sir.”

  I heard the receiver get set down and was about to hang up myself when a voice came on the line.

  “Mr. Griffin, Catherine Molino here. You remember me?”

  “Of course I do.”

  “Thank you for talking to him. He doesn’t have much to look forward to these days. Perhaps …”

  “Yes?”

  “I was thinking that maybe someday it would be possible for you to come and see Dr. Guidry, speak to him about his daughter. That would mean a great deal to him.”

  “Why would I want to do that, Mrs. Molino?”

  She didn’t speak for several moments. “Because he is old and sick and alone, Mr. Griffin. Or simply because we’re all human.”

  Without waiting for a reply, she said, “Thank you, Mr. Griffin. Good night,” and hung up.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  I OPENED MY EYES. Another eye hovered inches away, regarding mine. A rat. Its whiskers twitched. Obviously, whatever I was, I was too big to eat here. But he could go get help, haul me back home for later.

  I sat up. Hard to believe what effort that took. For a moment the rat stood watching. But I was moving around now, no longer an easy target, alleyway carryout. The rat moved off towards the wall, sniffing at better prospects there.

  I was, indeed, in an alley. I think we are in rat’s alley where the dead men lost their bones. But I wasn’t dead. I wouldn’t feel this bad if I were dead.

  Yards off, doorway-size, an oblong of street and buildings showed. Light spilled from the doorway. Out there, cars passed, people hurried by on foot, life went on. Brick walls around me, a three-foot pile of black garbage bags, Dumpster marked Autumn House.

  I felt at my pockets. Wallet gone. Money. One arm of my sportcoat torn almost away, tie crushed, blood and dirt ground into my shirt, one shoe off and possibly gone missing.

  Back home, on my own, I’d found the release and deliverance of literature. Here in the city I’d been introduced to another: alcohol. And I’d taken to it, as my father would have said, like a duck to water. River was whiskey and I was a duck, bluesman Buster Robinson sang, I’d dive to the bottom and never come up.

  Bracing myself on the brick wall, I stood. Life’s oblong there at the mouth of the alley wobbled and stood still. I staggered towards it. Last thing I could remember was this long conversation with a cabdriver in some anonymous bar off Canal, vague impressions of new rounds being ordered and other folk arriving and departing, among them two young women in town from Alabama who agreed to accompany us to the Seven Seas for a splash of true New Orleans. Then it all went blank.

  Blanks and blurs were things I got used to.

  I also got used to squad cars and cops asking questions.

  “Bad night, boy?” one of them said. He stood, legs wide apart, just outside the alley. And barely out of high school from the look of him.

  “You’d appear to be some beat up.” That was the other one, hanging close by the car. Over the years, quantities of food dished up in New Orleans portions had made him a walking equator. Limp hair that looked like a fig leaf draped across his scalp. “You okay?”

  I ducked my head, ambiguously. Could be agreeing, indicating I didn’t know. Say as little as possible always: I’d learned that.

  “Where you from?”

  I tried, but for the life of me I couldn’t come up with an address. Too many cheap apartments and rooms, the latest of them taken just a few days back. Some place off Jefferson, I thought.

  “From the city, then.”

  “Like we didn’t know?”

  “Gonna take a little ride here.”

  Led to the car, I saw cement canals, establishments on the far shore. Metairie, then. Metairie cops were famous for picking up homeless and ferrying them back just across the line to New Orleans, dropping them there. Police equivalent of sweeping dirt under the rug. Threat dealt with. City’s problem now.

  Truth to tell, I fared little better back on familiar turf. Next time I woke, it was to similar environment and circumstances. The Metairie cops had dropped me off on Jefferson Highway and I’d started making my way towards home. Somewhere just the other side of Claiborne two guys came up and asked if I could help them with bus fare. They were pissed when I said I couldn’t and really pissed when they found out I’d told them the truth and had nothing, no money, absolutely nothing of worth or use, on me.

  “Sir, are you okay?”

  From all evidence, no.

  New Orleans’s finest this time. Again I’m slumped up against a building somewhere and it’s morning. Again I make it slowly to my feet.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  “MAYBE you should call him.”

  “Maybe you should stop giving people advice.”

  Seven in the morning. Had I intentionally waited till I knew Larson would be gone, Alouette crowded for time?

  “I’m sorry, Lew. That was uncalled for.”

  I shrugged.

  “But you’re right, these letters may be getting to me more than I admit, even to myself. Not that I understand why. There’s really not much there there. Nothing substantial, no real menace, all implication—if even that.” She paused. “Anyway, we’ve been out here on this train platform together before, Lewis. You can’t fix the lives of everyone you care for. You should be paying attention to your own.”

  “I know.”

  “Of course you know.” Her tone brought the word exasperation to mind. “David’s been gone how long now? What have you done about that?”

  “He doesn’t want to be found.”

  “Maybe not. But that begs the question, doesn’t it? You love David. You don’t want him out on the streets again.”

  “What I want isn’t the important thing.”

  “You know what it’s like, Lewis. You know.”

  I nodded.

  “So instead, you set yourself on a crusade to run down this guy who’s never done anything, who may just possibly be a stalker, but who might just as well be a good enough guy, maybe he’s only a little slow, a little backwards. Or you go galumphing out on your horse to try and Sam Spade some pigeon killers. Desperate men for sure.”

  “I don’t know … sometimes it’s only when you don’t look on directly that you’re able to see a thing.”

  “True enough. And birds who don’t find food fo
r days at a time begin pecking up gravel and sand, preening themselves uncontrollably. It’s called displacement behavior.”

  “Maybe you’ve been a social worker too long, dear.”

  “And you—”

  “—too long a fuck-up?”

  “Well. As a longtime social worker, of course, I’d prefer troubled. Or conflicted.” She laughed. “Hold on a minute, the baby’s crying.” Not that shrill, fruit-bat cry you hear so often, but something at a lower pitch, human, authentic, that quickly subsided. Then Alouette was back. “For all of it, Lewis, you’re still far and away the truest person I’ve known, and the kindest.”

  “I’d be flattered if it weren’t for the fact that the work you do tends to limit exposure to possible competitors.”

  “There is that.” She laughed again, a full-bodied, rich, rolling laugh. Her mother’s laugh. “And while I’d love to go on discussing philosophy with you, absolutely one of my favorite pastimes at seven in the morning, God knows, looking out on a brick wall with the smell of soiled diapers lugging up behind me, I really do have to get to work.”

  “We all have our burdens.”

  “Ah, yes. The many responsibilities our freedom entails. As that brick wall—I’m sure Heidegger and Sartre must point out somewhere—demonstrates.”

  I hung up the phone and carried mine (burdens, responsibilities) out to the kitchen like any good Southerner and, sitting at the table there, doused them with quantities of coffee. Times past, dans le temps as Vicky would put it, this is where we’d all gather, LaVerne and myself, Cherie, Clare, Don in the months he stayed with us, Alouette, David, half a dozen others over the years. Now I sat alone with haphazard hands of plates, cups and saucers dealt out across the Formica surface, brambles of cutlery, a jar of crystallized honey, plastic tumbler with half an inch of milk left at the bottom. Fanned beside them a week or two of mail. Pick a card. Electric, water and gas bills, lots of circulars, Visa, offers from video clubs, cable, Internet and other service providers, dues for the Authors Guild, plot rent for my parents’ graves. Another stack of Deborah’s working notes, which, though done with, would live here, I knew, until I found them new quarters. She’d left a note tacked to the fridge.