Ghost of a Flea

by James Sallis

  Up with the birds.

  Sorry I was so late last night. Didn’t want to wake you.

  Rehearsals are going well. Scarily well, actually. That feeling of what’s happened here, it’s got away from us all.

  But in the best possible way. (Still scary.)

  Any chance you can mind the store today, maybe the next couple of days, afternoons?

  We open this weekend. Can you believe it? I’ll grab breakfast out, probably just swing by McDonald’s for a sausage biscuit. Not exactly Griffin fare, but hey.

  Love you.

  Hey.

  Bat in his characteristic way suddenly appeared, leaping to the table, and sat watching me, tail sweeping slow, serpentine S’s. Nothing’s more important than the connections we make to others. It’s all we have, finally. We move towards one another and away, close again, all these half-planned, intricate steps and patterns. Stand there far too often holding our bagloads of good intentions, shifting them from hip to hip, looking foolish.

  Bat leaned onto his front legs and stretched, rump pushed up, to show what he thought of my reveries. By way of thanks, I fed him.

  * * *

  I may not have hobbled down to the park, but it felt like it. According to doctors and therapists, there were no sequelae from the stroke, only a little residual weakness, which was to be expected. Neither Deborah nor Don admitted to being able to see any compromise or debility, any change in the way I got around. But I’d go to push up out of a chair and find myself grabbing at things—not so much that I couldn’t perform the physical act as that the world no longer represented itself to me as stable, dependable. I wondered if this was what Clare had felt, this pause, like a shield or a window, between intent and action, desire and spasm. Lester sat looking out over the park, a sheen of sweat, like varnish that hadn’t taken, on the mahogany of his forehead.

  “Lewis,” he said as I sank onto the bench beside him. “How you doing?”

  “Good enough, all things considered.”

  “You’ve been poorly then? Know I’ve missed seeing you.”

  I filled him in on my hospital stay.

  He nodded. “Thing is, over the years you commence to spending so much time there, those hospital stays get to be like bus rides for you. Ain’t the way you’d choose to travel, but you know that’s the only way you’re ’bout to get from one place to another now.”

  We were all but alone in the park. A scatter of unfamiliar faces. I asked Lester about this.

  “People done got scared, I think, some of them anyway. Pondering if what killed them birds might not just come after them ’n’ their children next.”

  “The deaths haven’t stopped, then?”

  Lester nodded, not in agreement this time, indicating.

  “Look at that sorry flock. What, ten or twelve birds? And most of them gimped up one way or another. You remember how it used to be, Lewis. They’d come in in swarms. Something startled them and they took off, all those wings, it was like this sudden great wind. They’d all but shut off the sun for a moment or two.” He sipped his drink, one or another of those horribly sweet concoctions, Zima or such, pitched to us blacks, and laughed. “’Course, this far along, remembering how things used to be starts looming large for us, doesn’t it? We don’t be careful, that can get to be all we think about.”

  He took another sip. The container hovered in the hinterland between dumbbell-and vase-shaped, label bright red and blue. Some sort of dog on it? A naked woman? Could even be a truck. “You ever tried this shit?”

  I shook my head.

  “Don’t.”

  The hand holding the abomination lifted, two ruler-long fingers unfurling.

  “Walk over to the other side of those bushes, Lewis, and you’ll come across a fair stretch of grave sites. Lots of birds been laid to rest back there. We put them in the ground ourselves, the boy and me. Just a few at first, then sometimes, later on, as many as three or four a day. With whatever ceremony we could manage.”

  He put the container, mostly empty, on the bench beside him. A group of Hispanic teens sat together atop a slide, stretch of dark midriff showing between the girl’s sweater and skirt, guys exhibiting their own brand of midriff: two inches or so of boxer shorts peeked out over low-slung denims. Thirty degrees out and they’ve got skin showing. Tough kids.

  “Boy won’t come with me anymore,” Lester said. “Almost got him here a couple of times. Tell him we were going for a walk, maybe we’d stop off for doughnuts after. But then he’d see where we were going and commence to crying and shaking. You remember how much he loved being here, Lewis. It’s a sad thing, truly sad. Boy don’t have much. His room, the park. Now half that’s got taken from him.”

  Lester sat shaking his head. “Maybe there really isn’t any more to it. Maybe it don’t make sense and ain’t meant to. Vanity and vexation of the spirit, just like it says in Ecclesiastes.”

  He laid a hand on my knee and I found myself wondering if in all these years we’d ever before touched. Surely we’d at least shaken hands. Right: that single, pained handshake.

  “Good seeing you again, Lewis. Good that you’re up and about again, too.”

  “That’s a lot of goods for someone quoting Ecclesiastes, downer of all downers, just moments ago.”

  “What can I say?” The hand came up off my leg; those impossibly long fingers unfolded in the space before us and moved there expressively, putting me in mind of branches in gentle wind, of Dante: Half into life’s journey I came to myself within a dark wood where the straight way was lost. “It’s a character flaw. Try as I will, no matter how I practice and worry over it, I simply cannot stay glum for very long.” He pushed himself up off the bench. “I’d best be getting back to the boy now.”

  I said good-bye, that I’d see him soon.

  “Maybe, if you found time, you might even come see the boy again? I think, when you did, that was good for him. I noticed a difference just after.”

  “I’ll plan on it, then.”

  He looked off momentarily, adrift on his own thoughts. “Good.”

  The teens, when I approached them, had some trouble deciding between wary, smart-ass or antagonistic as best response. One of the boys popped the joint they’d been sharing into his mouth and swallowed.

  “¿Que hay?” I asked. “¿De dónde son?”

  Whatchu care? one of the kids wanted to know.

  I told them.

  “That boy? We seen him, sure. He ain’t right.”

  They went in and out of Spanish as they spoke.

  “Always with that same old man you been sittin’ wif.”

  To them I was just one of a string of old guys without a clue. At worst a cop, child welfare agent or some other meddler from the outside world, otherwise someone inconsequential, and in either case so far outside the orbit of their lives as scarcely to exist. The Spanish helped. I didn’t come within a mile of speaking it well but, thanks to Rick Garces, on a good day with the wind blowing my way, I could fake it.

  Guardedly they allowed as how, yeah, man, they were here most days, so? Had they taken any notice of the pigeons? Rats, they said, rats with wings, that’s what we call them. There used to be a lot of them.

  Sure did.

  But now there’s only a handful left.

  He’s right, they told one another.

  “Someone’s been poisoning them.”

  The teens had stopped looking back and forth among themselves. Now they all looked at me. What they want to do that for? one asked. Yeah, don’t kill nothin’ you don’t plan to eat.

  “Cases like this,” I said, “usually it’s someone from the neighborhood. Someone with a grudge, some private agenda. Maybe they’ve been hanging around, on the edge of things, face at the back of the crowd you never quite notice.”

  Hey man, we don’t notice, how we goan tell you ’bout it?

  Good point.

  ’Sides, it ain’t like we spend the day here.

  Yeah, we be out here durin
g lunch and once school lets out.

  But that’s it for us, mister, we got other things to do. What’s that word you used? Agendas.

  Fuck agendas, man.

  Yeah, we got lives.

  Gracias, I told them. Gracias por su ayuda.

  De nada.

  Hey, one of them called out, this time in English, as I turned. You need to talk to Mister Bones. He always here.

  And it turned out that he was, though in all these years I’d never seen him. If I had, I’d have remembered, what with chicken bones through septum and earlobes African fashion and an Amerind-style breastplate of the same. If this had been a cartoon, some toothy black man would be doing a Lionel Hampton on those. Mister Bones never came in the park—something bad had happened here long past, he told me later—but neither was he ever far away. Mostly he resided under the porch of the abandoned house opposite. Had a mattress, most of a sleeping bag, boxes of canned and dry goods down there. Or else, when things got wet, he’d make his way up into the tree house some kids had built half a century back and half a block down in a massive water oak. Today, as usual, he was under the house. I shouted ahead then started under myself, thinking how my grandfather, working as builder, spent much of his life crawling under houses like this, crippled leg and all, fitting pipe, splicing wire, shoring foundations.

  Somewhere in the back of my mind I had to be wondering, too, just what the hell I was doing. Alouette was right. My son had disappeared, my god-daughter was receiving anonymous threats, I’d just got scraped up off the floor with the medical equivalent of a spatula—and here I was, fiftyodd years old, snaking under a house to try and find out who’s been killing pigeons. Strange life all around.

  “You the tax man,” he said, “or one of Mr. Hoover’s minions, you just might as well go on back out of here, and fast.”

  I told him who I was.

  “Lew Griffin.” He grunted. “Think I may’ve done heard some ’bout you.”

  “Oh?”

  “Damn, man, this here ain’t nothing but a overgrown small town. Ever’body know your business. You bring trouble.”

  “Got a load with me now, in fact. Thought you might help put me together with the people who need it.”

  “So they live happily ever after.”

  “Something like that.”

  “Ain’t got much truck with other folks’ needs. Not a one of them’s ever he’ped me much.”

  “I know that.”

  “Think you know a lot, don’t you?” Someone was walking on the porch floor above us. Their floor, our roof. Rotted from rain, desiccated from heat, boards creaked, went swayback and threatened to give way. “But look at you. Come crawling up under here like some goddamn kid looking for answers, still think the world got answers for you. Ain’t no fortune cookies, you know. Break’m open, read what to do in there.”

  We listened as footsteps paced back and forth above.

  “Cold as a sonuvabitch down here,” I said.

  “You get used to it after a time. Year or two. I been down here—hell, I don’t know how long I been down here. Man gets used to ’most anything…. You feelin’ trollish?”

  “I don’t know what I’m feeling. Not my feet. And the fingers are going fast.”

  “Shiiii. You a part-timer.” That was funny enough to say again. “Part-timer.”

  “More ways than one,” I admitted. “But you’re not. And I figure you have to have seen my boy over there in the park.”

  “One they call Dog Boy.”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ve seen him all right. Seen you with him, too.”

  “Then you know how much he loves life.”

  “I know how much he loves animals.”

  “There’s a difference?”

  Mister Bones shrugged. His breastplate rattled like Venetian blinds in wind.

  “Someone’s been killing pigeons. Poisoning them.”

  “Sure have. For a time now … You okay under here? You don’t look too comfortable. Noticed a blanket set out to dry on a porch across the way yesterday, probably still be there.

  We could go get that for you.”

  Moments limped by.

  “I want to find them. The ones who are doing it.”

  “They’re survivors, you know. Pigeons. You have to respect that.”

  Even though he was looking out towards the park and couldn’t see me, I nodded.

  “Like us,” he said. “You hungry, Griffin? Miz Miller up the way left a can of Vienna sausages out on the stoop for me last night. Be happy to share them with you, you want.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  THE STAIRWAY STANK of urine, beer, stale cigarette smoke and mold. Once, long in the past, there’d been carpeting. Fragments of green remained in patches, mostly beneath nailheads, like tufts of hair sprouting from old men’s ears. As I entered, someone let loose a bowl of water from the third landing, screaming I told you not to come back here, goddamn it! No one else on the stairway as the cascade came down and I ducked aside. A door slammed.

  Each floor held six apartments, A through F, though in no apparent order. A might just as easily be the apartment nearest the stairs, or tucked away between E and B. A pencil eraser would have taken down most of the doors. Walls bore deep gouges, long troughs, as though trucks had been driven repeatedly into them over the years. Here and there plaster had come away in great statuelike chunks; elsewhere it clung on bravely. At one turning I put my hand against the wall and precipitated an avalanche of plaster nuggets, pebbles, powder. This went on for some time. Stairwell corners held stacks of gravid boxes, belongings for which residents had no room inside, presumably. Surprising that these hadn’t long ago been borne off. Posters of Sixties movies and rock shows hung alongside paintings of clowns and seascapes on landings. The whole stairway creaked and swayed like a suspension bridge.

  I climbed to the fourth floor. Four’s about as far as it goes for most of New Orleans, outside downtown anyway. The city’s well below sea level, filled-in swampland for the most part, one of those triumphs of man’s imagination and will that the world periodically refutes with such rejoinders as floods and hurricanes. Then I came to 4-A.

  This door wasn’t going to be taken down with an eraser. It fit the frame flush. No give to it, no space about the edges, no apparent weak spot. Door and frame both steel.

  I knocked. It was like rapping knuckles on a boulder. Whole armies could be on the move in there, tanks, armored vehicles, transports, and I wouldn’t hear them.

  Incredibly enough, the door opened.

  A thirtyish man in cornrows wearing Tommy Hilfiger’s clothes, barrel-like shorts, oversize rugby-style shirt (I hoped Tommy had more), stood there. Skin color medium brown, eyes blue-gray. Brows and upper lip lifted at the same time, three birds taking flight.

  “Those our bitches?” someone behind him said.

  “Sure nuff don’t look to be,” the doorman said. Then to me: “Whatchu want?”

  Taking that as an invitation, I pushed my way in. Doorman fell back, then recovered and came towards me, leg lifting for a karate kick. When the ankle came up, I grabbed it and twisted as I shoved it towards the ceiling, hammered a fist into his crotch. He went down as the others shot up off the couch.

  I’d taken notice of the rock sitting by the door as I entered. Judging from roundness and polish, it had spent several human lifetimes in water somewhere perfecting itself. About the size of an orange and used as a doorstop, no doubt. The one who’d come up off the couch and started towards me went down hard when it hit him square in the forehead. I’d thrown underhanded, like a kid on a softball team. That left two of us on opposite banks with the river of a sky-blue couch between. This one was older, done up in high grunge: plaid shirt with sleeves flapping, long-sleeved T-shirt under, cord jeans bagged into camel’s knees and shiny with wear. Both hands came up, palm out. He stepped out from behind the couch shaking his head.

  “Whatever this is, man—”

  “You liv
e here?”

  He shook his head again.

  “Then what are you doing here?”

  “Guess I’d best be asking myself that same question ’long about now.” He looked down at the floor, from one to the other of the bodies there, then back at me. “Thing is, I went to high school with Pryor here, guy making that snoring sound? Not that we ever hung out back then, nothin’ like that. But this morning when I ran up against ’im at Hoppin Jon’s, suddenly he’s acting like we’re old-time bros.”

  Picking up on my unvoiced question, he said: “It’s a bar and grill just off Claiborne downtown. Serves a kickin’ breakfast, so lots of night workers turn out, hospital workers, firemen, paramedics going off duty, camp followers. I pull graveyard shift at the coroner’s myself, have for years. So I’m sitting at the bar, just gonna have a quick one and head out, when Pryor comes up and says, Hey man, I know you. This here’s Levon, he tells me, my boy. We had a few drinks, scored breakfast, wound up back here. Next thing I know, you’re busting in.”

  He still had his hands up. Now slowly he put them down.

  “This over, man—or you just puttin’ in a new clip? Anything I can do to help convince you to let me walk out of here?”

  “That could happen.” Briefly I told him what brought me there, about the boy, the dead pigeons.

  “This bone man’s the one gave them up?”

  “He sees everything that goes on in the park. One day these two, never been regulars before, take to hanging ’round, and they get to be like toothaches, just won’t go away. Turn up in the park with paper bags too small for lunches, anything like that, and leave empty-handed. Them boys weren’t proper, he said. Knew it from the first.”

  “Proper?”

  “What he said.”

  “Well, they’re definitely bent. He got that right.”

  “Finally one day he hauled himself out from under the house and followed them back here. Never did nothin’ like that before, he told me. Ain’t likely to again.”