Ghost of a Flea lg-4

by James Sallis

  Automatic doors from the ICU sprang open and a young man in blue scrubs ambled through. The scrubs, probably the largest available, struggled to cover the man’s chest and bulky shoulders. Weightless blond hair clung to his scalp like damp flower petals; a tiny silver and blue-enamel cross hung from one ear. Beckoning for me to come along, Santos went to meet him.

  “Dr. Lieber,” he said. “This is Lew Griffin, he and the Captain go way back.”

  Don’s rank and title had changed several times over the years. When he first took the job, not too long after we met, he’d been chief of detectives and a captain. Then sometime in the Seventies the department kicked him up to major. Twenty years later he’d become, at least briefly, maybe permanently-by this time I’d lost track, and he probably had too-an assistant superintendent. But cops don’t take to change any better than they do to handshakes and citizens knowing things about them, and for most of the men he worked with, those to whom he wasn’t just Walsh, he’d remained the Captain.

  Dr. Lieber held out hands that looked like a steelworker’s and we shook.

  “There’s no real change, sir. Vital signs are stable, the bleeding’s under control. He had developed, as I told you before, a secondary pneumothorax-free air in the chest, and hardly surprising in cases like this-but that’s been taken care of. He’s breathing on his own, without difficulty, though we’re keeping him on the ventilator as a precaution.”

  “Is he conscious?”

  “Not yet. Everything considered, we’d just as soon he’d stay under a while longer. The rabbit puts his head up, I’ll-”

  “Rabbit?”

  “Sorry, it’s been a long day. Just something we say all the time around here, among ourselves: that our job in ER is to pull rabbits out of hats and sometimes they don’t even give us the hat. What I meant, first time there is a change, I’ll let you know. Or if I’m not available, the resident on call will.”

  “Thank you.”

  “No need to. It’s my job. I take the job seriously. So, apparently, did your friend in there.”

  Dr. Lieber turned and, pushing the doors open, went back into the ICU. The other cops immediately came over. Santos told them what had been said, then the two of us stepped away. We stood near the wall, in a narrow channel bounded by the ICU doors and an unmanned information desk, looking out. Beyond our dull oblong of an island, visitors and hospital personnel swarmed everywhere, pushing carts, carrying flowers and paper bags of belongings, rubbing at eyes or the backs of necks, embracing. The cover of brochures stacked on a table nearby read Are you ready for Him?

  “Walsh stopped on the way home, at a Circle K just around the corner from his apartment. He went in, the guys were already there. He pulled some milk out of the cooler, started toward the register, then went back and got a six-pack. The store owner says he could see him staring into the glass door like he was trying to decide what kind of beer. Afterwards he figured that was why Walsh went after the beer in the first place-just so he could take a look around, without having it be obvious.

  “There’s two of them, one guy standing over by the magazines while the other one pretends he’s playing this video game. Only there’s no noise from the game machine, see, and it’s like all of a sudden the one standing there by the machine, he’s the one with the gun, thinks of this and starts getting nervous. Walsh and this guy start walking toward the register at the same time. The guy’s reaching in under his jacket for the piece when Walsh says, Hey buddy, have a beer, and chunks the six-pack right at him. Guy jerks back, his feet slip and he goes down, but the piece goes off anyway. Then the six-pack hits him square in the face. That, the fall when he slams his head, and the store owner’s jumping the counter and doing some slamming of his own with a baseball bat puts this mook down for the count. The other one’s history by now. Long gone.

  “But then the store owner, a Mr. Chadras, looks over and sees Walsh lying there with his service revolver drawn and blood streaming out all around him. He’s having trouble breathing, too. But Mr. Chadras, it turns out, was a doctor back in his own country. He grabs a piece of gauze and some Vaseline off the shelf and slaps it over the hole in Walsh’s chest. Saved his life, the paramedics say.

  “Boy that did this looks all of nineteen. We tried running him, but the computer just started spitting out empties. Those weren’t all that got spit out last night, either.”

  Santos took a small box from his pocket, the kind jewelry comes in.

  “I ain’t saying this was right, Griffin-or how it came about. Crew that booked him sent it up late last night. Boy had this tooth he was proud of. You know how they used to have those gold caps? Well, somehow or another this kid had one of those.”

  Santos lifted the box top. The gold tooth lay on a nest of cotton batting. Blood still adhered to the upper edge. A few strands of the cotton were stained pink.

  Santos shrugged and put the box back in his pocket. “What can I say?”

  For some reason, wildly, I thought of Don telling me he’d become a detective mainly because he could write a complete sentence, which put him miles ahead of the competition. I also remembered another time, years later, when I’d come upon him in a spectacularly sleazy bar deep in what was then no-man’s land below the Quarter. “Out of your element, aren’t you?” I’d said. He sat for a moment peering into his glass. “Not really. I’m like you, Lew. I take my element with me.”

  Or another time, many years later, when my life had bottomed out. Some of his men had scraped me off the walls of a bar out on Jefferson Highway and taken me to Mercy. When I woke blank as a slate, no idea what had happened and more than a few days gone, Don was sitting beside me. Neither of us spoke for a while. Then he said, “What are you gonna do, Lew: there’s nowhere to go but on.”

  “Appreciate your filling me in, Santos.”

  He nodded.

  “You think I can see him?”

  “Just family for now. Doctor says they’ll let us in tomorrow, assuming everything goes right. I figure we go in, there’s no problem with you coming along.”

  “Thanks.”

  “No problem.”

  “What about Jeanette? She with him?”

  “Sent her home to get some rest. Took some talking and fast footwork on my part.”

  “I expect it did. Guess I should go by, then, see what I can do.”

  “Yeah, she’d like that.”

  I stepped off our island and started for the door.

  “Hey, Griffin, you need a ride?” Santos called. I turned back to decline, but saying, “Sure you do,” Santos called out again: “Whitaker, you wanna give Griffin here a ride over to Captain Walsh’s?”

  The cop I didn’t know detached himself. We went down and out and across the alley to where his gray Crown Victoria was parked by a Dumpster. (“You wouldn’t believe what shows up in there,” he said.) Moments later we pulled into traffic. Whitaker’s radio had come on, turned low, when he hit the key, one of those stations that alternates its own trademark brand of news with talk shows about welfare abuse, the conspiracy of world government and the dangers of water fluoridation. Whitaker took two sticks of gum from a package the size of a paperback War and Peace jammed into where the ashtray had once been. He was, I figured, around thirty.

  Much of the drive uptown became a kind of down-and-out Grey Line tour.

  “That’s the Billies,” Whitaker said as we passed the slablike, mostly roofless shell of a building. Two men inside sat on boxes at a battered old spool cable, having breakfast from the look of it. I half expected them to lift their cups to us in greeting. “Billy Williams and Billy Nabors. Been there over a year now. Came down from Minnesota, Nebraska, one of them places. Say they just couldn’t take the cold no more.”

  Some blocks further on we passed a sixtyish woman wearing a red wool sweater, pink ballet tutu with baggy, lime-green tights, and purple-and-orange sneakers.

  “Squeezebox Sally. Makes the rounds on Maple Street every night, all those restaurants and
bars up there, with her accordion. Comes up to a table and asks people, usually couples, what they want to hear, but it all sounds the same, mainly just her pushing and pulling at the box, hitting keys at random. Word is, she used to be some kind of piano virtuoso. Word is also that now she’s deaf as a board. Her big finish is always the same: she turns around, bends over and tosses up her skirt.”

  “I guess there are some things in New Orleans’s rich cultural life that I’d just as soon miss out on,” I said.

  “Could definitely put you off your lasagna.”

  We were almost to Don’s by this time. Whitaker took a right by the Circle K where Don had been shot.

  “Bonner”-the other cop, that I knew, from back at the hospital-“says you write books.”

  “I used to. Used to do a lot of things.”

  “Didn’t we all,” Whitaker said, pulling up at the curb.

  Chapter Six

  Regulars knew him as dog boy. He could be found each morning and late afternoon, accompanied by the elderly black man who looked after him, in the small park a block and a half away, riverside, from our house. Whenever someone brought a dog into the park, the boy would drop to all fours and stare into the animal’s eyes. Most of them stared back, boy and dog transfixed before one another, fused in the press of their concentration to something like a single entity; I had seen lap dogs, poodles and Dobermans the size of small cars standing there by him, turning their heads that curious way dogs have, keening in puzzled kinship. Dogs were chiefly what people brought to the park, hence the name, but the boy’s sympathies extended well beyond. Once I observed him by the ironwork fence, back bent to an S curve, chattering away with the squirrel atop it. Another time, what must have been an escaped domestic parrot came to rest, bobbing, in an azalea, while boy and bird, faces but inches apart, rolled, swiveled and ducked heads in tandem.

  Lester Johnson had worked for the boy’s family, as a shoe repairman in a store they owned, for over forty-two years, long after people gave up on having shoes repaired; long, too, after Lester’s arthritic hands had grown unable to hold the necessary tacks, narrow-headed hammers, awls and needles, and his eyes unsuited to such detail work. His wife, Emmie, had cared for the boy at first, just as she’d brought up the family’s older children, all of them even then off to college or making their way in the world, but when the boy was three and the family first coming to the realization that something was not quite right, Emmie had died. Her blood pressure shot up not to be brought down, circulation faltered and began to fail, every treatment seemed to further complicate things, and one quiet Saturday afternoon as Lester stood by the bed he watched her, with a single long breath, let go. Four days later he shut up the shoe store for the last time and took over Emmie’s duties.

  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 g
rave, 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.