Ghost of a Flea

by James Sallis

  Over the course of the first couple of years we saw one another in the park, Lester and I had begun speaking. Over the next two or three we’d gradually progressed to brief exchanges. Only this past year, and without its ever emerging as a conscious decision for either of us, I think, had we taken to sitting together and talking.

  Lester was never less than properly, one might say elegantly, dressed, shoes buffed to a high shine, coat and tie even on the steamiest of New Orleans days. If sometimes the clothes were a bit worn, well, so were the two of us. And if coat and slacks didn’t quite go together, what matter: we were both used to mismatches in our lives. Today he wore a drip-dry white shirt with long, pointed collar, tan tie with Hawaiian beach scene, mustard-colored coat, maroon slacks hitched up to show brown nylon socks with figures of dogs as clockwork. The continent of Lester ended at two-tone shoes, off-white on tan.

  He looked up as I approached and, though no one else sat on the bench with him, moved the boy’s backpack closer to himself to make room. A bottle of chocolate drink peeked from out his twisted fingers.

  “Lewis. A pleasure as always. Must of been, what, Thursday a week ago, I saw you last?”

  “Thereabout.” Right now I had about as much time sense as Doo-Wop.

  “Thursday,” Lester said, nodding to confirm it.

  We didn’t shake. I’d done so once, noting in his face (though he was too polite ever to have told me this) the pain it brought him. What I saw in his face now was something different, something I never stopped marveling at. Lester had a genius for attentiveness, for making whatever you said to him, whatever you might say to him, seem vitally important. Everything about him signaled that he’d never before heard the like of it, and that he valued your choosing him to share it with as much as he valued the information itself.

  “You’ve been busy, then.”

  I told him about Don, that I’d just come from seeing Jeanette. She had insisted on making coffee for us, listening for the gurgle as we sat waiting in the front room and, once that had come and subsided, finding only hot water in the carafe, having forgotten to put in coffee. The can of French Market still sat there on the counter by the sink.

  “Tough on her,” Lester said.

  I nodded.

  “She just have to be tougher. Your friend’s okay, though?”

  “Going to be, anyway. How’re things with you?”

  “Things moving right along, Lewis. Like they do most days, ’f we just think to take notice of them. Billy Boy over there seems to have him a new woman. Thinks he might, anyways.” I followed Lester’s nod to a large tan-and-white pigeon strutting before another, smaller bird, periodically bowing and bobbing. “Gertie came up missing some weeks back. Been together a long time. They mate for life, you know. But if one of them dies, sometimes the other one will take a new mate. And it looks like Billy Boy’s of a mind to do just that.”

  When Billy Boy turned to make another pass, I saw that the bird’s foot was clubbed, digits curled back under and withered into a ball, burrlike. Some portion of what I’d assumed to be courtship posturing in fact derived from a rolling limp as he stepped onto the damaged foot.

  “City’s hard on them,” Lester said.

  “Hard on us all.”

  “That’s God’s truth.”

  Cooing at him and ducking her head twice, Billy’s new lady strolled to the pond for an aperitif, a delicate beakful of scummy water. Billy joined her. There were so many insects skittering across the pond’s surface that they looked like cabs at rush hour in midtown Manhattan.

  Lester’s gold signet ring jangled against the bottle as he raised his hand to gesture, long index finger unfurling from the rest. It spent some time unfurling. Its nail was the size of a demitasse spoon, almost perfectly flat. “Not many birds do that, drink directly by immersing their bills and sucking. Pigeons are one of the few.” Every week, Lester had told me, he carted home an armful of books from the public library. Whenever he became interested in a subject, pigeons for instance, or ancient Greece, he read everything the library had. “During Egyptian times—”

  Lester stopped because the boy had come up to us. He stood there making whimpering sounds, eyes puffy and red though no tears fell. He held out his hands together, palms up. In them a pigeon’s head lolled as it tried to focus, to understand where it found itself, to get a fix on this latest in a procession of dangers, the exact nature of the catastrophe. Even as we watched, the head fell. Its eyes filmed over as light left them.

  “It’s gone, child,” Lester said. “Dead, like the others.”

  Lester and the boy went off behind a stand of oleander where, with a stick and a fragment of sharp-edged wood, they dug a shallow grave for the bird. I offered to help, but Lester declined, saying it would be better if they did it themselves. So I sat watching, warmed as always by the relationship these two had, each in his own way forever the outsider, one of them having seen, suffered and survived most of what the world had for him, one given eternal youth and thus forever given to seeing the world anew. That was good, to a point. But the pain came as strongly each time as did the wonder; it never diminished.

  “Others?” I asked when Lester rejoined me. The boy, whom he had left sitting by the grave, now walked to the edge of the park and stood pressed against the mesh fence there, motionless, like a statue caught in netting.

  “Close to a dozen this past week, I expect. Someone poisoning them, is what they say. Almost have to be.”

  “And no one’s looking into it?”

  “Lewis. They don’t care ’bout all our young colored men dying out there for no good reason, who in this town you think’s gonna bother themselves over a few pigeons more or less?”

  “You do.”

  Lester smiled. “Yes sir, I expect I do,” he said after a moment.

  “So does my boy over there. And that, I expect, is the long list.”

  “Maybe not.”

  Lester stood to carry the squat bottle over to the garbage, dropped it in. Another man materialized at his side and pulled it out. This one carried two black plastic bags bulked and lumpy with objects and wore a gray pinstripe suit over a soiled white shirt with tail out, dress shoes with tassels. Tassel fringes poked out every which way. The outside edges of the heels were worn down to slivers. When Lester came back to the bench, the newcomer followed, sitting between us, by the boy’s pack.

  “You come here all the time, don’t you?” he said. “I know, I see you. Started me thinking what I had that you’d like.” He spent the next half-hour pulling various items from his bags and offering them to Lester, a plastic clock with one hand, a pair of white earth shoes gone fish-belly gray, a sandwich bag of paper clips, rubber bands and gum erasers, whether with a thought to profit or as gifts never becoming clear; I’m not sure he knew. Lester would tell him he wasn’t interested and the man would talk for a few more minutes about people in the neighborhood, where he’d obviously spent his entire life, about this one who had been arrested or was in the hospital or that one who had suddenly attacked family members with a crowbar or electric carving knife, before starting up again with “I’ve got just the thing for you” and dipping back into his bags.

  “Can’t use it, sorry,” Lester said for the twentieth or thirtieth time.

  “I understand, I understand.” He sat quietly for a moment looking off towards the line of palm trees across the street, then towards the fence where the boy still stood immobile. Messages might come through at any time, from any source, any direction. “That’s your boy, right?”

  Lester nodded.

  “Fine young man. I know, I watch him here, I can see that. They are a pleasure, aren’t they?” He was shoulder-deep in his bags again. “Look, you don’t mind,” he said, “I’ve got just the thing for the boy here. He’ll love it,” coming up with a green rubber scuba mask. The seals were rusted, the straps rotten. “Perfect fit.”

  Chapter Seven

  BACK IN BASIC, over near Mobile, they put me in a
barracks full of white men not altogether reconciled to their new living arrangements. Working beside us was one thing. These weren’t, after all, your educated, privileged young white gentlemen—most of those one way or another got out of serving—so it’s not like they weren’t used to working on farms or in factories or loading trucks alongside Negroes. They’d even got used to using the same bathrooms. But this, sleeping beside us, eating every meal with us, this was something else again.

  I’d lie in bed at night after lights-out watching the play of shadows from palm trees on the wall and listening to the wind. It seemed to me that summer that the wind was coming in off the beach always, rushing breathless towards us from somewhere else, washing up in great waves like the tides themselves.

  A few days before my own wave peaked, I had watched them grab one of the other blacks, a slow, slightly backward, ever-friendly boy from Texas, out behind the latrine. He’d been lipping off to them, they said—and beat him badly. I had seen it happening, then gone on by, and hadn’t stepped up to them on it. I was still worrying over that, trying to find a place inside myself I could put it. But if I did step up to them, I kept telling myself, they’d only come for me next. At that point I hadn’t learned that it didn’t matter, they’d most likely come for me anyway.

  They did, maybe two weeks later, about two in the morning. I heard the springs on one of their beds, then the other, and could follow their progress towards me by the creaking of floorboards. I lay unmoving, one arm hanging off the side of my bunk. Outside, a sudden gust of wind caught in the trees and bounced like a thrown ball from branch to branch.

  Moments before they reached me, I jumped to my feet. The radio my mother had just sent me came along; I swung it on its cord in two quick circles above my head before crashing it against that of the nearest of my attackers. I heard the crunch of something internal, radio, head, giving way. The man went down and didn’t move.

  Turning to the other, I pulled out the antenna I’d taken off the radio earlier and with a flick of my wrist extended it. I went at him with it as though it were whip and foil in one, slashing, slashing again. Deep cuts opened on the hands he held up to try and protect himself, on his face, on neck and arms. When he began backing away, I went with him, never letting up, slashing, tearing. He tripped, tripped again and this time couldn’t catch himself, falling backwards against the wall.

  Thanks, Mom.

  During all this, no one else in the barracks had moved or spoken. Now a voice from the far end said: “Those boys through?”

  “They be done with, all right,” another said.

  Then the first again: “You okay, Griffin?”

  I said I was.

  “That’s good.”

  A pause. I could hear my heart thudding. “Right shame those boys had to tear into each other that way. Who’d have thought there was bad blood between them? Always looked to be close. Just goes to show.… Guess we’d best get the sergeant in here, tell him what happened. Reckon they’ll be in stir awhile.”

  Chapter Eight

  A FEW DAYS LATER, I was able to tell Don: “You look like shit.”

  I don’t know why I had been thinking about that incident back in basic on my way to see Don. Just musing on mayhem in general, maybe. Or sending telegrams to myself in code. Sometimes memories are like dreams, artifacts of unknowable civilizations falling into ruin even as you approach them.

  Santos had come in with me, then after a few minutes’ badinage left us alone. Don was in one of fifteen glassed-in rooms set like petals of a flower around a central nurses’ station. Phones rang unrelentingly at the station, buzzers and mysterious, unsettling pneumatic sounds came from other rooms, snatches of conversation ricocheted off walls and ceiling.

  “Well, that’s some comfort, at least. Good to know I look better than I feel.”

  “You’ll want this coffee.” I set the cup down by him. “And today’s newspaper.”

  “You could have saved yourself the trouble—”

  “—and brought last week’s, I know.” It was an old joke with us: they’re all the same. “Doctors tell me you’re going to live.”

  “Ah, still more reassurance. Interesting … They look to be happy with this news?”

  “Hard to say. Consensus seems to be you’re one thoroughgoing, uncooperative son of a bitch.”

  “All because I told that male nurse I couldn’t use a bedpan, never had been able to use a bedpan, and if he brought the damn thing in here one more time I’d put it away for good where no one would ever find it. You could tell he was giving it some thought.”

  “On the other hand, they probably figure that means they’ll eventually get rid of you.”

  Don sipped tepid coffee. “My God, that’s wonderful. You forget all the small things, don’t you? Take them for granted. Taste of coffee, or the feel of clean sheets against your skin. When maybe in the end they’re what’s important, what stays with you once most of the rest is gone.”

  I sat by his bed. “You’re going to be okay.”

  “We always are, you and me.”

  “Way a philosopher friend of mine once put it, we carry our okay with us.”

  He laughed. A tube went from the upper part of his left chest to a plastic box sitting on the floor beside his bed. When he laughed, valves of some sort fluttered in the box, making a sound like grasshopper wings. Don looked down at the box. Then he laughed again, at a different tempo and rhythm. “Hey, maybe I could learn a few tunes while I’m lying here.” He shifted on the bed. Plastic mattress covers crinkled. “Feel like something from a horror movie, all these tubes growing out of me.”

  “Ze pain, it ees not-ing. Endure it, Herr Valshman, endure it in ze knowledge that zoon jew vill be … more than human.”

  Don finished his coffee and set the cup down with a soft click.

  “I’m tired, Lew. Used up.”

  “Been a rough few days. Then there’s that retirement thing, wear down the best of men.”

  “You see a wheelchair coming in?”

  “Yeah, there’s one right outside your room.”

  “You wanta get it? I don’t think I can walk and carry all this shit. Hell, I’m not sure I can walk at all.”

  “We’re going somewhere?”

  “Just down the hall.”

  Seeing me fetch the chair, a nurse came flying out of the central station and through the room’s open doorway with a shrill litany of can’t-allow-its and absolutely-nots. Rose Price-Jamison, her name tag read. I stood quietly by and let her and Don talk it through, their discourse a stew of pigheadedness, tacit invective and (for me) the all-too-familiar condescension of medical personnel. Authorities were called to bear, a charge nurse, a baffled and battle-fatigued surgical resident, a hospital administrator; finally Dr. Lieber, who after listening to the resident’s summary said more or less, Man thinks he can do it, let him. Miss Price-Jamison helped us gather up tubes, monitor lines and IVs and hang them strategically about the chair.

  “And you wonder why phrases like ‘thoroughgoing, uncooperative son of a bitch’ follow you around.”

  “Image is everything.”

  “Yeah. Well right now you look like something from a cheapie version of Mad Max. Big finale’s gonna be you and the bad guy chasing one another in wheelchairs across the wasteland.” I rolled us out into the circle. It suddenly occurred to me how much the layout of the ICU resembled a roulette wheel. “Where we going?”

  “Prison ward. Up one floor, go to the end of the corridor, Santos says.”

  We shared the elevator with another reverse-rickshaw pair, pusher and pushee alike twentyish black men. Urine in the bag attached to the latter’s wheelchair was the dull red of rust. His head kept falling onto his chest, then he’d catch himself and come around again. His unfocused eyes were that startling gold color you see often around New Orleans.

  I pushed Don off the elevator and down the hall. He thumbed the buzzer by locked double doors beyond which only a wall could be seen. Wi
thin moments a voice issued from the tiny speaker: “Can I help you?”

  “Yes, ma’am. This is Captain Don Walsh, NOPD. There’s an officer on duty in there, I take it?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Could you ask him to step out here, please?”

  “I would, sir, but he can’t—”

  “Just to the door.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Thanks.”

  Shortly an officer stepped into sight around the wall and stood close behind the doors, squinting out. Not old, in his forties maybe, but had an old man’s gait and posture. His head jutted forward rather than upward from his neck, making him look turtlelike. He moved head and neck together from left to right and back, then smiled with a lipless mouth.

  “What can I do for you, Captain?”

  “Boy apprehended during a robbery over on Louisiana, a Circle K—he doing okay?”

  “I think. Looks like someone took a tenderizer to him. Bad concussion, they say. But I’ve seen ’em hurt far worse get up and do more damage.”

  “I want to see him.”

  For just a moment the officer looked doubtful, as though he were going to recite regulations Don probably knew better than anybody else in the department, but then he said, “You got it,” and sprang the door. He hesitated again before asking,

  “Be okay if I came along?”

  “You bet.”

  “Down this way.”

  “What do we know about him?” Don asked.

  “About this much.” The officer held up thumb and index finger joined in a circle. “Looks to be about eighteen, says he’s sixteen. No ID on him, no police, juvenile or court records. No mailing address or record of residence. Not a shred of paperwork anywhere, that we’ve been able to find.”