Ghost of a Flea

by James Sallis

  “Not your typical concerned citizen.”

  “Not the kind you usually hear about, anyway.”

  We stood silently with that river of a couch beside us, bodies washed up on its shore. Behind him a diminutive arch showed a swatch of pinkish hallway.

  “Anyone else back there?”

  “Pretty sure not.”

  “What is?”

  He shrugged.

  “Let’s go see.”

  The hallway was about the size of a large man’s coffin. Bathroom directly ahead, bedrooms at either end. Barely enough wall space for the doors. We went left.

  “Holy shit!” my companion said.

  The entire back wall was paved with bird’s wings, single wings nailed there and spread, all at the same attitude and angle, one after another, a hundred or more. Like fish scales, covering the wall completely, floor to ceiling. Against the wall opposite, fifty or sixty cheap wooden cages were stacked. These contained the skeletons of birds.

  I stood in the middle of the room trying to imagine such cruelty: where it would come from, why and how it would take this form. Had a vision of them starting out catching the pigeons, in the park or elsewhere, putting them in cages just to watch them starve to death. Then moving on to poisoning and scalping—collecting the wings we saw here. Finally letting the birds lie where they fell.

  “You ever in the service?” my companion said.

  “Yeah. Not long, though.”

  “See action?”

  “Not the usual sort.”

  “You were lucky.”

  I nodded.

  “Me, I thought anything had to be better than watching my old lady toss that same coin in the air every night, wait to see whether she’d kill herself with the drugs first or get killed by some scumball she brought home. I was sixteen. By the time I was seventeen and threw away my helmet, I’d drunk sixty or eighty cases of beer and thought the world was mine, you know? Drop me anywhere, desert, jungle, I’d take the damn place, it belonged to me. That was an attitude rankers could get behind. So off I went to ranger school. Picked up some skills there that don’t do a lot for my résumé.”

  We were back in the front room by this time.

  “Only place I ever saw anything like that,” he said, indicating the trophy room. “We’re cool, you and me?”

  I nodded.

  “Anything else you need here?”

  Levon had pushed himself over to the wall and partway up it and leaned there clutching his privates. Pryor, turned facedown, was trying to get to his feet, pointed toes of his Western boots scratching at the floor.

  “Think I’ll stick around a while, then, have a talk with these boys. Like in the old days. Put some of those skills the government taught me back to work? Recycle them, like.”

  I kept expecting to come across a story about guys nailed to the wall, arms at least, but I never did.

  That afternoon I stopped off at a friend’s place up on Carrollton. June Bug, everybody called him, another vet. He lived in a lean-to on the flat roof of an apartment house up that way, on a floor of tar that gradually liquefied as the day progressed, and he raised pigeons.

  “Name’s Mr. Blue,” June Bug told me as we peered into the cage. I’m not sure I ever realized just how many shades of blue there are. The pigeon’s head was such a dark blue that it caught light and shone. Cerulean tipped its wings. Individual feathers were here dark, there light, powder blue, azure, aquamarine, indigo, no two of them alike. “And don’t you go tryin’ to change it, neither. Real thoroughbred, ain’t he?” The pigeon peered back out at me, cocking its head the way they do. Who the hell was I and what was I doing hanging around outside its cage? I’d brought a bottle of cheap brandy along. Mr. Blue and I left that and a fifty-dollar bill behind.

  Dog Boy’s eyes when I introduced them were all I’d ever need as thanks. I’d stopped off at a pet shop on the way to pick up food, treats, cage-size avian equivalents of parallel bars and vaulting horses. You give someone a pigeon, you want it to be a fit pigeon. Mr. Blue looked every bit as pleased as the boy.

  “Thank you, Lewis,” Lester said. I’d been doing my best to shuttle off unseen down the stairs, but Lester came hobbling after me. “Hope it makes a difference,” I told him.

  I’d barely got home—to an empty house again, but no matter—when a call from Lester asserted that indeed it had made a difference. The boy’s up, moving around, he said, for the first time in weeks. “He and Mr. Blue are sitting by the window in his room, looking out. It’s a sight.”

  The next call was from Don.

  I’d managed to get out most of the first syllable, “Hel—” before he started in.

  “How much you know about this Guidry character?”

  “Don. Good to hear from you. I’ve been fine. And you? Jeeter fitting right in, Jeanette okay with it, they’re getting along?”

  Silence at the other end.

  Finally: “You through?”

  “I guess.”

  “So what do you know about Guidry?”

  “Not a lot. Some kind of doctor, though I’m not sure he ever had much of a practice. He did have connections, though. Old money, I assumed. That whole underground Creole-society thing.”

  “What I’m wondering about here is previous marriages—before LaVerne.”

  “None that I know of. But you pretty much know what I know. He treasured Alouette.”

  “So did LaVerne. Enough that, just to stay with her, she allowed her own life to be completely taken over by him.”

  “True enough.”

  “Guidry was well along in years when he and LaVerne hooked up. You think the wick stayed dry all those years?”

  “Probably not, but—”

  “No fucking way.”

  For a moment I thought I heard steps on the porch. “Okay. So why do I get the feeling this conversation has suddenly gone multiple choice?” Key in the lock? Deborah? David? No. Just this old house breathing.

  “Not that I have much of anything,” Don said. “Lots of blanks that need filling in. Like all our lives. Years of monthly payments stretching back to the Seventies, for instance—to Gladstone Hall, whatever that is. And something that looks suspiciously like a trust fund, though so far I haven’t been able to get in close enough for a good look. Administered by Guidry’s lawyers, at any rate. Firewalls thick all around. I’ll keep chipping away. Rick’s on it, too.”

  He paused.

  “You okay, Lew?”

  “Tired. A little the worse for wear.” I filled him in on the party scene back at apartment 4-A.

  “Getting kinda long in the tooth for that kind of action, my friend.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “You need me to come over there?”

  “What for? Party’s over.”

  “You don’t sound real good.”

  “Nothing a few hours’ sleep won’t help. Say twelve or fourteen? I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

  “You sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  We went back and forth a couple times more before hanging up. I snagged a Shiraz-cabernet blend from the kitchen pantry and sat by the front window, level of wine in the bottle and daylight outside falling at pretty much the same pace. I thought about Dog Boy and Mr. Blue sitting by their window watching this same night fall. Wondered if David might be looking out a window somewhere, where that might be if so, and what he might be thinking. Then, for whatever reason, I found myself struggling to recall ambition, wondering just why, year after year, I’d gone on pushing my way through all those cases, gone on fighting so hard for a handful of lost and damaged people, why I’d sunk myself and so much of my life into a handful of peripheral, forgotten books.

  Light and wine both gone, I left those emptinesses behind and took my own upstairs to bed.

  I was in a library and the library was on fire. I grabbed books at random off the shelves, stuffing them underarm. Had to save what I could, as many as I could. Down a corridor towards me strolled
James Joyce, tip of a handsome malacca cane tapping the floor in front of him, shoes buffed to a high polish but severely down at the heels, eyes huge behind glasses. “Is there, sir, a problem?” The elevator door opened. Borges stood inside. His useless, boiled-egg eyes swept over me. He wore a well-appointed three-piece pinstripe suit, one black shoe, one brown. “Milton,” he said, “has anyone seen John Milton? He was just here. We were talking.” I scuttled towards the stairway, books spilling from my arms….

  Whereupon the library’s fire alarm there in that fanciful land became my telephone here in this unregenerate one.

  And whereupon, when my arm appeared to ignore the message sent it—simple enough directions, after all: reach out, pick up the phone—I panicked. I knew this lag, this recalcitrance. I’d had another stroke, and a worse one this time, no doubt about it. What should be currents pulsing down the wires of nerves had become a spray of welder’s sparks. Everything got worse. Always. The world’s single immutable law.

  But in fact the arm had only fallen asleep. Seconds later (though at the time it seemed far longer) the arm responded. I watched as, pins and needles firing along its length, it followed through. Found the phone, fetched it to me. Still felt as though my shoulder had two or three pounds of dead meat strapped to it. Then tongue and palate repeated the misfire.

  “Lew?” Deborah said in response to my gaugh?

  I tried again, coming up with, approximately, Yeg-guh.

  “Lew, are you all right?” Alarm in her voice now.

  Swallowing, clearing my throat. Trying out a few vowels and diphthongs offstage, then swinging the mouthpiece back towards me. Humming, I remembered reading somewhere, humming was supposed to relax your vocal cords.

  “Lew, what are you doing? What the hell is that?”

  “Humming.”

  “Humming. As in bird.”

  “Right: humming pigeon. Humming relaxes the vocal cords. Like doing warm-ups, stretches.”

  “But you’re all right.”

  “I’m fine. Sorry. It’s been a tough day. I was flat out, dreamless.” No way I’d tell her just how tough it had been, or why. “What time is it?”

  Silence on the line. Finally: “We’ve been together what, four or five years now, Lew?”

  “Something like that.”

  “You have any idea how often, in all those years, you asked me the time?”

  “No.”

  “Never. Not once. Clocks, dates, time of day, none of that ever had much to do with the way you live your life.”

  Which, upon reflection, was probably true, and I had to wonder, as she did, why now such things should matter. Hand meanwhile had distinguished itself from phone and begun its climb back up the phylogenetic slope. Switching the phone to the other, I shook the left heartily, worked it as though pumping the bulb of a sphygmomanometer that (I had little doubt) would reveal a dramatically elevated blood pressure. Like many things in life, alcohol for instance, relationships, or writing books, the meds had worked for a while, then stopped working.

  “Still at rehearsal?”

  “Not really—though there’s a chance we might go back. That’s why I’m calling.” She waited and, when I said no more, went on. “You sure you’re okay, I don’t need to come home?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “Okay.”

  Crackles and pops in the wire.

  “Things haven’t been going too well for us lately. That’s not exactly news, I guess. A lot of it’s my fault. I wanted so badly to find some way off the track. And now I’ve been so immersed in getting the play done. When I have coffee, whether or not I eat or sleep, deliveries at the store, sales there, regular hours—none of that seems to matter much anymore. I used to feel like this a lot, Lew. All the time. I wasn’t sure I ever would again.”

  More crackles and pops. Light from outside fell through the window, pushing a slab of brightness into place on floor and wall, darkening the rest of the room.

  “Never easy, is it?” I said.

  “No reason it should be.”

  We stood poised on parallel wires, balance poles like cats’ whiskers out at our sides.

  “You have somewhere to stay?”

  “Temporarily…. I’m sorry, Lew.”

  “Me too.”

  “I love you, you know.”

  “Yes.”

  I hung up the phone. From nowhere Bat appeared, leaping onto the nightstand. He sat there, eyes fixed upon me, purring, then collapsed, paws hooked over the edge. Telling me another life was there alongside my own, that I wasn’t alone after all.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  “THANK YOU FOR COMING. Can Mrs. Molino get you anything? Coffee? Something to eat, perhaps. A sandwich? We’ve just received a fine Virginia ham—shipped in from North Carolina, not Virginia, as it happens. Or since we’re well along in the afternoon, perhaps a single malt. Some years ago you had, as I remember, a taste for Scotch.”

  “Taste had little to do with it.”

  “So I understood at the time.”

  My eyes were on Catherine Molino, standing near the door through which I’d entered. What looked to be an original Ingres floated above her left shoulder, a framed Picasso drawing, four abrupt lines coming together in the most improbable manner, at her right. Black, Oriental-looking hair gathered in a clip at the base of a swanlike neck. Designer jeans and a man’s white dress shirt with sleeves rolled, tails out, handmade brocade vest over.

  “I’m good, thank you.”

  Mrs. Molino smiled, nodded once and withdrew. Smile, nod and withdrawal all equally engaging.

  “Alouette, I take it, proved otherwise occupied and unable to accompany you?”

  “I saw no reason to ask—as I’m sure you understand.”

  “Of course.”

  Looking far too small for it, Guidry sat in an antique highback wheelchair, as though the chair with time might be diminishing him, gaining by increments some stature drained from him. The room was warm enough to have orchids sprouting from cracks in the walls; nonetheless a blanket covered lap and legs.

  “An old man’s blood goes thin,” he said as I took off my coat, “turns from wine to water,” and hung the coat across the back of my chair.

  Here, we were well apart from the world I watched go on about its business outside the window. Everything in the room, carpet, curtains, walls, blanket, was blue-green, and all of it seemed slightly out of focus, fluid, shimmering. Here we moved at a much slower pace than those out there in that other world.

  I’m underwater. This room’s an aquarium.

  “Once again, Mr. Griffin, I thank you for coming. You had little enough reason or inclination to do so.”

  “True.”

  “So why have you come?”

  “To be quite honest, Dr. Guidry—”

  “Horace. Please.”

  “—I’m not sure. I’ve nothing to offer. Nor is there anything I want from you.”

  “Of course.”

  We sat quietly a moment. Half a block away, girls in plaid skirts and white shirts with pocket crests pumped swings higher and higher while young men in charcoal slacks and white shirts with clip-on ties shot baskets. All of this soundless outside the aquarium walls.

  Turn off sound and even the most familiar scenes, the commonest human gestures, turn strange on you. Not to mention what strange lives these were to me in the first place, how impenetrable. Nothing whatsoever to do with my own. I might as well be watching lobster or rays in their tanks. Ant farms. Beehives.

  “Just felt I should be here, I guess.”

  “Intuition. Much of your life has been shaped by it.”

  “What shape there’s been, yes.”

  “And not always to your benefit.”

  That, too, I had to concede.

  “Still you persist.”

  I shrugged. “As good a guide as any other, finally.”

  “Anything can save you if you grab it hard enough, and hold on.” He smiled. “You’re surprised th
at I’ve read your books.”

  “I’m surprised anybody’s read them. Surprised they were ever written, for that matter.”

  “But surely you must realize their attraction. How they take up the common textures of our lives—”

  “And just what do you think might be common in the textures of our lives, Doctor Guidry?”

  He paused. “You’re right, of course. A presumption on my part. Forgive me. Nonetheless, taking the books’ own high ground—scrambling for their shelter, if you like—I have to tell you I found them fascinating. Those first sentences drew me in. I was there. Oil pumps shushing Lew as he stands waiting to kill a man, water oak splitting open like a book in the storm. Lew himself shot, coming half-to there in the emergency room.”

  “Parent searching for a lost child.”

  “Yes.”

  Hands emerged from beneath the blanket and found their way to wheels, swiveling the chair to see what it was I watched over his shoulder. Wrists looked frozen, immobile, knots of bone protruding like cypress roots, fingers swollen and red as sausages. “Young people…. We should never let ourselves get too far away from them.” Then, swiveling the chair back around: “It’s not just another Catholic school, you know—despite the uniforms. Private, yes. But there’s no church affiliation. None. Other parts of the nation, they call it a magnet school. Culling the most talented, most promising students from all the city’s schools, small and large and in between, bringing them together here. I’m privileged to contribute.”

  Bending, he plucked a catheter bag from the side of the wheelchair, snapped his finger against the valve at the top, waited a moment, then snapped again. Bright gold fluid flowed into the bag in a gush. He let go of the bag and it swung there at the end of its rubbery placenta, back and forth.

  “I know about David, of course.”

  I nodded.

  “Recently I called to ask if you’d consider finding someone for me.”

  “And I declined.”

  “You did, yes. And it’s a capacity in which I require you no longer.”

  One hand snaked out again from beneath the blanket. A crooked finger hovered. Was I to follow knuckle, first joint, or tip? Each pointed in a different direction.