Ghost of a Flea lg-4

by James Sallis

  Surprising how we subtropical folk got used to the cold. Coming to take it so much for granted that we’d stopped remarking it. An adaptable lot. I stood now, blanketless, chill, watching the plume of my breath stream out, balance for a moment before me, fade.

  “Rehearsal’s going … well … oddly, I guess might be the best description. But good. We’re onto something here, and reluctant to shut it down. I may not be home for a while.”

  “You get a chance to eat?” She’d gone directly from work to rehearsal, I knew, and rarely ate lunch. “I could bring you something.”

  “We ordered out. Soup, sandwiches, coffee, beer. Should be here any minute. We’ve all been hitting it pretty hard, and we were starving. Thought we’d take a break first, then tuck heads down and give a try to plowing on through, see where we get. Just a second, hang on.” Someone had spoken to her, and she turned away briefly to answer. “Lew …”

  “Still there?” I said after a moment.

  “Yeah. Yeah, still here. Guess I will be for some time too, from the look of it. Here, I mean. You be okay?”

  “Sure I will.”

  Enormous shadow accompanying him, the man came back along the sidewalk with his lantern.

  “I was sitting outside the theater tonight waiting for everyone to show. Tired beyond belief, exhausted really, but at the same time excited, eager. There were these rings and loops around everything, like auras, street and sidewalks and the edges of buildings vibrating, trembling. I didn’t know if that was because of the light or just because I was so tired. Dark was coming on fast, and I remembered your telling me how, when you were a child back in Arkansas, you’d sit in your backyard trying to watch it get dark. After a while you’d look around and realize it had gone several degrees darker but that you hadn’t been able to see the change as it happened. We never do, do we?

  “Sorry, Lew,” she said. “I’m just fantastically, incredibly, unbelievably tired. When I’m this tired, my mind’s all over. Nothing connects and everything seems to. Listen, don’t wait up, okay? I’ll see you in the morning.”

  “Have a good rehearsal.”

  I put the phone down with the sure sense that I was letting go of something far more than a conversation; with the sense, too, that there was little enough I could do to change this.

  Or maybe it’s just my storywriter’s sense, all these years later, telling me that.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Boy’s been sick, Lester said. Took to his bed and won’t be budged, over a week now. Never done that before. I’d gone across for coffee and doughnuts from the Circle K. Lester held his plastic cup on one bony knee, vinelike fingers wrapped around. We’d both wisely foregone the doughnuts after tasting them. Pigeons strutted happily among their dismembered remains.

  Maybe I could go see him.

  Don’t know as how it would do any good. But if you could spare the time, the boy does seem to have taken to you, in his own way. Meaning only (I thought) that occasionally, in his own way, he acknowledged my existence.

  We walked four, maybe five blocks. A square, Federal-looking house set almost flush with the sidewalk, columns thick as pecan trees on the shallow gallery out front, two stories, peach with darker trim, faux gable stuck atop like a stubby birthday candle. We went up wooden external stairs painted industrial gray through a wrought-iron gate, multiple locks and frosted-glass front door into the entryway. Folks are away, Lester said. Table inset with lime-green tile there, vase of yellow, hopeful flowers on it. Mail stacked alongside. Floor itself tile, darker green, light blue. Up more stairs then to the boy’s room. Mattress in a corner, chair by the window. Cardboard box on its side, packed neatly with food: boxes of crackers, squares of cheese, cans of Vienna sausage, potted meat, bags of carrots, celery. Boy doesn’t take much to beds, Lester explains, just plain will not sleep in one. Won’t sit at table either, or eat like reg’lar folk-shaking his head.

  But I understood. This food was the boy’s own, forage, stockpile. He had no further need to go out into the world for it, no need to ask anything more of that world, anything at all, at least for a while. Here in his cave, on this pure, bare island, he’d become self-contained, self-sufficient, insular, hermetic, whole.

  All man’s problems, Pascal said, derive from the simple fact that he is unable to remain quietly alone in his room.

  The boy, just as Lester reported, lay on the mattress. On his right side, knees drawn up, so that he faced me when I sank to the floor just inside the door. My own knees stuck up like a cricket’s. I’d put my back to the wall and slid down it. God. I used to be able to do this, and it doesn’t seem so long ago, with ease. Now garden tools dig at my joints and I fight for breath. Cramps announce themselves: arriving on track four.

  The boy and I sat looking at one another. His eyes wide, unblinking. Does something, recognition, sympathy, identification, pass between us? Is there a message, is there feeling, even comprehension, in those eyes? How can I know? They’re like stone artifacts left behind, the menhirs of Carnac, unreadable.

  Then the boy worked his mouth a moment and made sounds.

  What was that?

  You got me, Lewis, Lester said from the doorway. Miracle, some might be inclined to say. Boy’s never spoken before. No one thought he could…. Big uns?

  Pigeons.

  You’re right. It could be.

  What about them? I asked the boy. What about the pigeons? What are you trying to tell me?

  His mouth worked silently for a time before producing again (at what unimaginable cost?) that same indecipherable sound.

  Here I squatted at cave’s mouth, a midwife attending language’s birth, witnessing urgencies that over hundreds of years, a thousand, would shape themselves into human speech. Lester shifted feet beside me in the doorway. Downstairs the phone rang. On the third ring, the answering machine picked up. Again, momentarily, I became a child: comforting voices from other rooms, grown-ups out there doing drinks and dinner parties, extending the ever-elastic day while I lie tucked away safe and warm in night-time’s folds.

  We waited, but the boy failed to speak again. When at last I stood, hauling myself up with one hand on whatever I could reach, wincing at pain and stiffness, his eyes didn’t follow.

  I could have said many things as Lester and I trudged together down the stairs. That the boy had identified somehow with the park’s pigeons, taking their illness, their immobility-all he could understand of death? — for his own. That with the extreme posture of his stillness he’d found a way to speak, a way to express his grief. Instead I said that I was sorry and hoped the boy might soon get better. Lester thanked me for coming.

  It was my day for casualty reports. Earlier I’d gone to see Alouette. She’d been up and about and doing well for some time, but two days ago that bearable pain along the incision became something more; she woke with a fever and with (her words) maggoty white pus oozing from the site. A two-hour wait and five-minute visit at her OB/GYN confirmed the obvious diagnosis of infection. So now she was supposed to be back on bed rest, pushing fluids, cleaning the incision regularly with peroxide, gobbling dollar-a-capsule Keflex. I found her sitting at the kitchen table, laptop propped awobble on stacked books and phone cradled to one ear, little LaVerne asleep alongside in what looked like a dishpan lined with towels bearing pictures of teakettles, iron skillets, yellow squash, carrots.

  As usual, the backdoor stood open, screen unlatched.

  “Don’t blame me,” Alouette said, looking up from computer and phone, when I stepped through. “She likes it there, it’s the only place she’ll go to sleep. I laugh at your sixty-dollar cradle! your tapes of mother’s heartbeat!”

  “You really shouldn’t be sitting here with the door unlocked.”

  “So everyone says.” Back to the phone. “Look, I don’t mean to interrupt, but you’re telling me Judge Haslep isn’t in town? Even though he had a full docket today and has another scheduled tomorrow? Why am I supposed to believe this?”

&nb
sp; She motioned me to sit.

  “You’ll get back to me? Gee, I sure hope so.” Sweetest voice possible. “Within the hour? Before I start dialing up some other numbers here on my Rolodex, asking if they know what’s going on?”

  Thumbing the phone dead, she set it down.

  “Every bit of your mother’s charm.”

  “God, I hope so. Worked for her. Get you something?”

  “I’m good. You?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “I do have to say it doesn’t look much like a bed in here. Which is where, according to my information, you’re supposed to be?”

  She shrugged. “Larson.” Word and shrug alike conveying this comic sense of the burden she had to carry, alas. “So why is it he talks to you when he never talks to anyone else?”

  “Must be the honest face. Maybe like any good tribesman he values my experience as an elder. Or at the other end of civilization, merely defers to my status as cult novelist.”

  “My God, you don’t think he can read, do you?”

  “Stranger things have happened.”

  “Besides, I thought you gave all that up.”

  “More like I was given up. Not that you’d be changing the subject….”

  A beat, as Deborah and her actors would say. “I feel fine, Lew. Little Verne’s fine.”

  “That’s good. We’d all like to keep it that way.”

  She pushed the phone to one side, a dinner plate she was done with. “I’m not going to get out of talking about this, am I?”

  I shook my head.

  She typed in several lines, hit the mouse, glanced at the screen and hit it again. Then in a gesture of capitulation raised her hands, fingers spread. Pushed back from the table.

  “The messages began about the time I learned I was pregnant. Just a sentence or two at first, scrawled on postcards. I didn’t think too much about them.”

  “Unsigned.”

  “Always. I’d wonder, but how far can you go with nothing to go on?”

  “You didn’t save them? Didn’t take any notice of postmarks?”

  “Why would I?”

  “And these were what-standard post-office issue? Picture postcards?”

  “Well … at first a lot of them were like those godawful slick cards from souvenir shops. Antelopes with jackrabbit ears, talking cactus wearing sunglasses, ‘Back to the grind soon’ with the drawing of an office coffeepot, that sort of thing. The messages were just as generic. Wish you were here. Hope you’re well. Missing you.”

  “Then at some point they changed?”

  “So slowly as to go unremarked.”

  From time to time her mother’s speech leapt to the surface in Alouette’s, word choice, cadence, attitude. Fishhooks in the heart.

  “After a while I began to have the feeling that the cards were getting selected rather than picked at random. A stunning photo of Alaska with ‘It never gets fully dark here’ written on the back, for instance. There’s some deeper message there, I’m sure. Was sure. Though I had and have absolutely not the barest ghost of an idea what it might be.”

  “Nothing directly threatening.”

  “Nothing overt. Nor ever, really. More the feel of it all. This presence forever refusing to announce itself but always palpably there.”

  Catching a thought on the wing, she pushed back up to the computer to type it in. I remembered LaVerne telling me, You’re never completely here, with me, when you’re working, are you, Lew?

  “Sounds like classic paranoia, doesn’t it?” Alouette said.

  “Exactly the response a stalker wants to elicit…. I’ve seen your GOK file, you know.”

  “I was wondering when you’d bring that up. If you’d bring it up.”

  “Everything about it-your taking pains to tuck it away, that it exists at all-suggests you must have taken the whole affair more seriously than you claim.”

  From within the dishpan on the floor alongside came the scuttling sound of small legs and arms. “Hungry again,” Alouette said. Fishing little Verne out, she bared a breast and put the baby to it.

  “I do have to wonder, though, Lew. How is it you manage to avoid seeing this as a violation of privacy? All those rights and principles you uphold so heartily-what, they just go by the way when it becomes personal? And you have no qualms about the dishonesties involved?”

  “Of course I do.”

  She shifted the child against her chest. “Of course you do. I’m sorry, Lew. I know it’s not that simple.”

  “What is?”

  “And I do appreciate your taking time to look into this. Though it’s probably nothing.”

  “Probably. But it’s okay with you if I keep poking around, right?”

  “Sure it is. But talk to me about it, all right?” The baby kept sliding down; with one arm under, Alouette kept shrugging her back up. “I need to give Deborah a call about getting you guys over here for dinner sometime soon, too. Been way too long. How’s Don, by the way?”

  “Doing good. Over the worst of it. Should be home in a day or two.” I told her about Derick, about Don’s latest notion. Then took leave of Alouette to wend my own way homeward-through the thickening hubbub, as Wordsworth has it. By the park to draw from its well, from Lester and his young charge, whatever solace I could, then over sidewalks heaving up like sculpted waves above the roots of ancient trees, Spanish moss overhead, buildings sharecropped into ruin all about. Everything and everyone I knew a casualty. Some of war, but most of us casualties instead of subtler things: ambition, expectation. Of sex, history, our families; of what is within us or therein lacking. Economic casualties, too. Washed away in the floods pushing downhill from America’s scripture of progress and spilling out over the banks of the gospel according to market economy, privilege and special interest, inundating us. Casualties of the system.

  Almost home, I passed my favorite statue in all of New Orleans, a Confederate officer astride his horse. Time had not been good to him. His name on the statue’s base was unreadable beneath a century’s mildew, and though protected by the historical society, here he was stuck on a tiny plot of land between a sandwich shop and low-end apartment house. Both front legs of his horse were in the air, signifying that he’d died in battle. One aloft would have meant he died of wounds sustained in battle; all four aground, that he’d died of natural causes. All our statues, all our horses, should have both front legs in the air. Casualties everywhere.

  It was, as I said, my day for casualty reports. I got home, found a starving cat and a message to call 528-1433, took care of the first though perhaps not (and never) to his satisfaction, dialed the second and after two rings had an uptown, quiet-spoken Yes? at the other end. Lew Griffin, I told her. Please hold. Moments later, a heavy breather.

  “Thank you for returning my call, Mr. Griffin. I was not at all certain you would do so.”

  I waited.

  “Perhaps apologies are in order? I had not intended to catch you unaware. I thought you would know to whom you were speaking. That Mrs. Molino had seen to that.”

  “I know.”

  “Ah. Good, then. It’s been many years since we last spoke. A call much like this one, as I remember. I hope you’ve been well?”

  Silence slalomed down the wires.

  “I realize that you don’t like me, Mr. Griffin. This is as it should be: I’ve given you no reason to. Nor do I require or particularly desire your approbation.” His sentences fell into place, space and silence between, like bricks being set into a wall. “I do, however, ask that you hear me out now-if that much is possible?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Thank you. I am calling … Excuse me.” He turned away from the phone. Four coughs rang out like distant rifle shots. Then he was back. “There is an individual I have need to locate. Purely a personal matter. In the past, I’m told, such searches were a specialty of yours. I wonder if perhaps you might consider, if there were some way I might persuade you to undertake, locating this individual for me.” />
  “Your sources were correct when they said ‘in the past,’ Dr. Guidry. I don’t do that work anymore.”

  “I see…. They told me that as well, of course. Nonetheless I felt it imperative to ask. In which case, perhaps you could recommend me someone else? Another … practitioner?”

  I gave him Boudleaux’s name, address, e-mail, phone and fax numbers.

  “A moment. Let me … Yes, I have it. Thank you.” Silence in the wires again, that vacuum, that pull.

  “I have become, I understand, a grandfather,” he said at length. “Alouette and the child, they are both well?”

  “They are.”

  “Very good. Then-” Again he turned away, into that chesty coughing. “Mr. Griffin, could you hold a moment, please?” the quiet, uptown voice asked. Moments later Guidry was back, apologizing. “Might you possibly prevail upon the girl to call me, Mr. Griffin? It would mean a great deal to me. I-”

  This time he didn’t come back, and after a moment the quiet voice said, “I’m afraid Dr. Guidry has become indisposed. He does appreciate your help, Mr. Griffin.” Voice still there at the other end, waiting.

  “I’m not at all sure the doctor would want me to tell you this, Mr. Griffin. Actually, I’m fairly certain that he wouldn’t. But nowadays, with no one else available to take these decisions, I’ve only my own counsel to fall back upon.”

  She paused.

  “The thing is, Dr. Guidry is dying. An advanced cancer of the prostate, that he seems to have known about for some time yet, whatever his reasons, chose to leave both unremarked and untreated. I have no way of judging whether this might affect your response to his request. I did feel you should know.”

  “Thank you-Mrs. Molino, is it?”

  “It is. Catherine. And Mr. Griffin?”

  “Yes.”

  “It is I who answers the phone, on this line, always … should you happen to call again.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  Morning’s minion. Dappled dawn-drawn falcon towing in its wake besides the new day, like a ragman’s cart, this wagonload of old. Breath a white plume above, Deborah’s pale body alongside. Both of them oddly insubstantial? Bellies of frost at the base of the window. Birds outside richly achitter as though seeking news of the tropics so soon and suddenly departed. Surely one of them’s heard something.