Ghost of a Flea lg-4

by James Sallis

  “Just over a week.”

  “No word from him?”

  “None.”

  “No idea where he might have gone?”

  “Not really.”

  “And no recent change in habits? Suddenly talkative, stops talking altogether maybe, starts staying to himself?”

  “I know the drill, Santos.”

  “Sure you do. No one new in his life, then? Woman, male friend, lost parent?”

  I shook my head. “I assumed he’d gone back to the streets. Descendre dans la rue, as the French put it. Doesn’t transfer well to English, but it’s what the French have always done-1789, 1830, 1871 or last week, it’s all pretty much the same-when the world starts weighing on them.”

  “He’s got a history of this kind of thing, then. Dropping out. Disappearing.”

  I nodded.

  A morgue assistant in dreadlocks that looked as though they’d been pressed between hot rocks made his way through the minefield of gurneys, found one and, bent like a surfer over his board, rolled it towards us. When he pulled back the rough sheet, Santos and Dr. Bijur looked up at him. A young woman’s body lay there, face gray, lips and breasts pale and translucent as wax. He checked the toe tag.

  “Sorry, man,” he said. “Wrong citizen.”

  Moments later, he trucked another gurney and rider down the waves. From size and general build, the body under the sheet easily could be David’s, I thought. But when Smashed Dreadlocks pulled back the cover, the world you and I live in day to day went flying away. What lay underneath looked like a skinned deer, a Gray’s Anatomy dissection showing muscle, sinews and tendons, flesh that peculiar maroon color. Most of one eye was left. And the eye wasn’t David’s.

  I told them so. “What happened?”

  “First we thought some kind of compulsive, serial killer thing,” Santos said.

  “Too many bad … movies.” This from Dr. Bijur.

  “Yeah, but how’re you not gonna think that. Just look at this poor son of a bitch. Some kid practicing peeling grapes, you think?”

  Back home, in the hill country not far from where I was raised, poor folk lived off squirrels they nailed to trees then skinned in a single long tear. The meat went into skillets for frying and into pots for stew. The skins stayed behind on trees. Dozens of them, hundreds finally, ringing the homestead.

  “Not much … I could put my finger on … a hunch…. Kind of thing happens … you do this all these years.” When she stopped to rest from that last headlong plunge, I realized that Santos and I were breathing hard ourselves. If this had been a musical, all the bodies on gurneys under sheets would start chugging right along with us.

  “We have someone on call … for situations like … this. Professor at LSU … came right down. New York … one or two other major cities’ve … got them on staff … full-time.”

  Santos and I exchanged glances.

  “You told me on the phone it was bugs,” he said.

  Taking a hit off one of her inhalers, Dr. Bijur decided it was empty. She tossed it backhand towards one of several tall galvanized cans sitting about (best not to think what might be in there), then started rummaging in the soft plastic cooler slung over her shoulder for a replacement. The discarded one fell short by a yard and hit the floor spinning. Santos walked over, picked it up, sank it.

  “You’re supposed to float … the damn things. They tip over, whatever … they’re still good. Like we aren’t going to know … when they don’t … work anymore?”

  Her eyes went wide with the fresh (concentrated?) hit. “Greevy’s a forensic … entomologist. Roaches were hard at work … he says. Man’d only been there … two, three days, not … weeks, like we’d thought.”

  “And my son’s wallet? How’d that get there?”

  Dr. Bijur shrugged her shoulders. At first I didn’t take it for what it was; it looked like all her other struggles for breath.

  “He doesn’t drive and … there’s no … bus … for a while. Bill’d probably … be out at the site … if you wanted to go by.”

  One of those typical New Orleans cul-de-sacs, city’s ancient soul pushing up through layers of attempts at refurbishment, this long-unused lot in the crook of old buildings extended half a block before it ended at a wall of cinder block serving no discernible purpose. Yet even here, on this bare, abandoned island, in the shade of automobile tires, shopping carts, shattered wine and antiseptic bottles, sacks of garbage bleached gray and dry as driftwood, life went on.

  Dr. Greevy sat on the overturned ceramic tumbler of a Sixties washing machine. The console stood alongside, Large load, Normal, Warm/cold dialed in-for how many years now? Green shoots ran out from beneath the tumbler. Knees apart with elbows propped on them, Greevy held the last two inches of a po-boy in both hands. Sauce and part of a meatball ejected when he took a bite. He chewed once or twice and swallowed.

  “You’d be Griffin.”

  I nodded.

  “It wasn’t your son, was it?”

  “No.”

  “Didn’t think so.” He finished off the po-boy, wiped hands on the backs of trouser legs. “Body was up there, third floor, but you know that. Not much to see. Anything likely to be of use to you, it probably rolled out of here with the body.”

  “I don’t even know what I’m looking for.”

  “We never do. Count ourselves lucky if we’re able to figure out so much as what direction to look in.” He smiled. “Man had your son’s wallet. Stands to reason you’d want to know what killed him, where he’d been-anything you can find out. It’s a deep canyon, with only this foot-wide path up here on the rim. But it’s what you have.”

  “And you’re going to tell me that? What killed him, where he’d been?”

  “Some of it, anyway. Like everything else, that depends mostly on luck. Give me a few days.”

  Greevy reached behind him. He’d tucked a bottle of Pearl back there, and in the interim a grasshopper had claimed it as perch. Slowly Greevy brought the bottle up close, until the two of them were eye to eye.

  “It’s really their world, you know.”

  Kiting out over fragments of brick, dropping at glide’s end onto a grassy patch, the grasshopper took flight. Greevy sat looking after it.

  “City has several dozen varieties of roach,” he said at length. “All of them as distinct as individual human faces, many of them deriving from one specific area of the city. Not to mention the others. Fleas, mites, lice. Moths and ants. Or our best if most rapacious friends, flies. Not only different from one another, but vastly different in behavior, diet, where they lay their eggs, how the young develop, gestation period.”

  Greevy took a deep swig of beer and held the bottle out to me. What the hell. Here we were, casual scientists, two men of the world talking things over, trying to understand. I drank and passed the bottle back.

  “Day or two, the samples I took will start hatching. From the eyes, mouth, wounds. I’ll be able to tell you more then. Almost to the moment how long he’d been dead. What he’d been eating. What parts of the city he frequented.”

  The bottle shuttled back another time or two.

  “Strange work you do,” I said.

  Though there’d been no bell, kids began spilling out onto streets from a school nearby, those with top grades, I assumed, let go early as reward. They took to bicycles and buses and looked impossibly young, part of the world’s order and continuity. They fit.

  One of them, though, twelve maybe, a girl with skin white as paper and coppery hair, stepped in front of us and stood there fiercely.

  “What are you men doing?” she said.

  Greevy ignored her.

  “You’ve been sitting there watching, for a long time now. I saw you from inside, through the window. That’s how it can start. I should call the police.”

  “We’re just friends, miss,” Greevy said, “catching up on things. Neither of us even knew there was a school nearby. Believe me, no harm’s intended.”

  “Sur
e you are. You people never intend harm, do you? And this is where you usually meet, right? In the middle of a vacant lot.”

  “Miss. I’m sorry. I don’t know what else I can tell you.”

  A bus pulled in at the stop across from the school. Our inquisitor’s eyes went from us to the bus and back.

  “Well-” She turned and ran for the bus, sprang aboard. We saw her face in the back window, still watching us, till the bus passed out of sight. Neither Greevy nor I spoke for a time.

  “Had a son once myself,” he said finally. “Long gone now.”

  “Divorce?”

  “Death.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Yeah. Me too.” He upended the empty bottle. A drop or two came out. “Boy was never right. Just couldn’t get it together, and even when someone else’d pull it together for him, he couldn’t keep it in the road. Something just got left out in the mix, you know. No one’s fault. But no one should have to live like that, either. All I could think when I heard was, Good, he’s not hurting anymore.

  “It’s all a gift, Griffin. All of it. You think maybe your son, wherever he is, knows that?”

  “I think he does, yes.”

  “Good.” After a moment he said, “So how do I get in touch, assuming I have something for you?”

  I scribbled name, address and phone number on a sheet from my notebook, tore it out and handed it to him. It went haphazardly into a coat pocket, no surprise. Though from general appearance the coat had been in use for some time, the pocket was still sewn shut. He had to rip out stitches to get the paper in.

  “Circle K up by the corner,” he said. “Still have more than an hour before my ride shows up. You want, we could grab a quart of beer, a couple of dogs.”

  Fine idea, I said, just what I wanted, and we swung that way. But when we got there a tour bus sat across the street. Through storefront windows we could see streams of elderly folk clutching bags of chips and pretzels, bottles of orange juice, candy bars, souvenir pralines. Greevy and I ended up on the curb by a nearby Exxon station. NOPD cars came drifting past as kids schlepped home lumpy knapsacks, lunchboxes, Gameboys, Walkmen, form-fitted saxophone and French horn cases.

  “They think it’s Disneyland,” Greevy said.

  “Kids?”

  “The tourists. Look at them. Like this is what they’ve been waiting for all along, what their lives’ve come down to, this pitiful bus ride with a package of Fritos and an adventure happening outside the window at the end. The kids know better. At least I hope to hell they do.”

  Listing right then left, a man with bandy legs approached us.

  “Sonny Payne,” he said. “How do you do. I’m homeless and I’m hungry. If you don’t have it, I understand, because I don’t have it either. But if you do, anything you might see fit to pass on, a sandwich, a few coins, a piece of fruit, will be appreciated. Thank you.”

  He stood there swaying, ticking it out. No response came, he’d move along, deliver the same speech verbatim just down the line. Greevy, however, pulled out his wallet and handed the man a ten.

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “My son was on the streets for years.” Greevy passed the quart of Corona to me. One of the NOPD cars slowed to check us out, then went on.

  “I think it’s against the law, our sitting out here drinking,” I told him.

  “Yeah. Probably is.” He took the bottle back and drained it. “You up for one more?”

  Chapter Fourteen

  As I make my way home, traversing abandoned lots, shoulder-narrow alleys, car-beset stretches of St. Charles, Jackson and Prytania, darkness lays its hand on the city, gently at first, then ever more firmly. Portions of sunlight cling to the edges of buildings. Headlights and streetlights straggle on. In houses I pass, behind windows tall as a man, wood floors are held in place by antique dining tables, barrister’s bookcases and overpadded chairs. In there, too, light falls: white light like cool pure water from chandeliers, light yellow and warm from table and floor lamps.

  I turned onto Prytania, skirting a house that looked like any other save for a discreet metal sign hung from its eave: Anderssen Real Estate. I’ve probably walked past a hundred times without taking notice. A fortyish man wearing slacks and an open-neck white dress shirt still crisp from the morning’s iron emerged, locked up, mounted a silver BMW and rode away. Almost immediately another man stepped around the low wall of cinder block separating this house’s driveway from that of the next. He made for a niche tucked between house and wall beneath an overbite of roof and there unrolled his blanket, positioning himself on it and setting out with every aspect of ritual a well-used plastic bottle of water, cans of food, backpack, folded newspapers. Then began pulling off braces and supports. The crutch he’d had under his left arm. Neck brace padded with foam. Wrap-around knee support. Plastic form into which right foot and ankle had been strapped. Wrist splint with wide Velcro ties attached. Elastic elbow wrap. Some weird sympathetic magic-he wore these, none of it could happen to him? Or had he from whatever obscure motive-sympathy, instinct for salvage, pride of ownership-simply fished them from refuse bins at nearby Touro Infirmary, slowly accumulating, growing one might almost say, this exoskeleton within which he went about the world?

  My own house of wooden floors, high ceilings and windows tall as a man, when I arrived, stood empty. I could have held it to my ear and heard the sea. Deborah away at rehearsal, David simply away (what else could I say just now?), out in the world somewhere. Cars past those windows followed headlights leading them like faithful horses towards the Barcaloungers, big TVs, barbeque grills and backyard swingsets that defined their riders’ lives. Few surprises when these crews disembark.

  I brewed coffee, heated milk in a long-handled pan that looked to have been strip-mined at some point for its copper, poured them together into a mug the size of a soup bowl. Rocker and floor, old friends, spoke to one another as I settled. From half-toppled stacks on the table alongside and tucked beneath, guided by who knows what instinct, specific hunger, chance, I fingered out Gustav Meyrink’s The Golem, a book I’d had for years but never got around to.

  The moonlight is falling on to the foot of my bed. It lies there like a tremendous stone, flat and gleaming.

  As the shape of the full moon begins to dwindle, and its right side starts to wane-as age will treat a human face, leaving its trace of wrinkles first upon one hollowing cheek-my soul becomes a prey to vague unrest. It torments me.

  At such times of night I cannot sleep; I cannot wake; in its half dreaming state my mind forms a curious compound of things it has seen, things it has read, things it has heard-streams, each with its own degree of clarity and color, that intermingle, and penetrate my thought.

  There was moonlight now, like a blanket, a shawl, thrown across my lap, making me the very image of an old man at rest, idly musing. I recalled Lee Gardner writing to me of a friend’s death, a writer he’d edited for years, and of the article by some self-styled expert briefly praising Lee’s friend, then going on at length to complain how he’d been lured away from “legitimate” novels by the temptation of huge sums of money to be made in writing genre fiction. Huge sums of money? Lee had asked, incredulous, in his letter. Legitimate novels? And still more incredulously: Sour obituaries-is this what we all come down to?

  Most of our lives come down to far less, of course.

  Long ago I’d given up trying to keep count how many times my own had gone south, gone sour, gone dead still. I’d think I knew where I was headed, every station, every stop, two dollars for the box lunch that came aboard at Natchez or Jackson tucked in my shirt pocket, only to find myself waylaid to some unsuspected sidetrack, engine long gone, mournful call fading.

  That was the shape my son’s life took, too, whatever the explanation. Some errant braid in the genes, mother’s madness encoded, encysted and passed down the line; chaos dropping (we’d expected another caller) on a swing from above. As though all his life David had been scaling this huge
mountain of sand. Some days, some years, he’d manage to kick in footholds and stay in place, maybe even hoist himself up a yard or two. But the sand always gave way.

  The phone, I realized, had been ringing for some time. As I stood, the manteau of moonlight fell away from my lap. I crossed to the hall table and picked up the receiver. Quiet enough itself, my “Yes?” tipped headfirst into silence.

  Someone there at the other end, though.

  After a moment I hung up. Almost at once the phone began ringing again. I ignored it. The ringing stopped, then restarted. Beating its jangly chest till I capitulated.

  “Lew? Were you sleeping?” Deborah.

  “Not really. You just call?”

  “Started to. Then someone needed something-right away, of course.”

  “Don’t they always? Makes you feel important, though.

  Needed. How many of us are given that?”

  “You’re saying this is a gift?”

  “Hey, you have to unwrap it, it’s a gift, right?”

  “Hmmmm.”

  “Wow. A polyester necktie with violins on it! An ant-farm picture frame! An electric hot dog grill!”

  “Hmmmm again. How’d your day go?”

  “Not bad. Stuck its head out of the water some earlier than I’d have liked. And now the tail keeps wagging.”

  “T-a-i-l? Or t-a-l-e?”

  “Either, I guess. Both.”

  “Think any more about your book-if it is a book?”

  “Haven’t had much chance to.” I told her about my visit to Don, what he was planning. Then about my expedition to the morgue with Santos.

  “I’m sorry, Lew. Listen …”

  Across the street, someone dressed all in gray, as though wearing tatters of the night itself, hove into view. He carried an old-fashioned red kerosene lantern, swinging it back and forth and shouting what well might have been (at this distance I saw only the motion of his lips) All aboard! Though he could as easily have been calling Bring out your dead, searching for an honest man, or just seeking warmth.