Ghost of a Flea lg-4

by James Sallis

  Like a tired swimmer, I turned onto my side, skimming the surface of this day. Land behind, land ahead. Neither in sight.

  So many in my life fallen, gone so quickly. My parents, LaVerne, Alouette’s first child. The man I killed up by Baton Rouge as oil rigs wheezed beside us, flat birds’ heads rocking and pecking on their tethers. Can that really have been almost forty years ago? Before long, before anyone notices, Raymond Carver wrote, I’ll be gone from here, and was. Or Rilke in “Portrait of My Father As a Young Man.” He sees the dreams in his father’s eyes, the prehensile brow like his own, all the rest so contained and unknowable that, even as Rilke looks on, the image of his father begins fading into the background: O quickly disappearing photograph in my more slowly disappearing hand. My own photograph would look much the same. Soon enough we all fade from whatever records, whatever impressions, there are of us. Fade like Rilke’s father into time itself, the gray batting forever at our backs. Might David one day, looking at a photograph of me, sense something of those same longings? I remembered the photo of my young parents sitting together, smiling and happy, on the hood of their Ford. A woman I did not recognize-where in the embittered, joyless mother I grew up alongside was this pretty young woman hiding? — and a man I knew but slightly better, a man who had faded into the background long before his time, at the very start of mine.

  The birds’ tropics would be back, of course. They had only to wait here, gossiping among themselves. But my mother’s happiness, the happiness I saw in that photo, once fled never returned. Would David?

  LaVerne was gone. Baby Boy McTell. Hosie Straughter. Harry, the man I killed up by Baton Rouge. Don’s son. All of us, eventually. Before long, before anyone notices.

  You’re always quoting other people, Verne told me once. Anytime something important happens or some thought logjams in your head, there you are, hopping up like a schoolboy, pick me! pick me! with what Dante or Camus or Thingamabob said. You think anyone gives half a damn, Lew? And half the time, anyway, you’re only using it to avoid digging in, avoid having to find out what you think. Or what you feel.

  Deborah’s arm came across my shoulder, pulling me up from the depths, back safely to land. (Did I struggle? Drowning men often do.) Spread of sunlight on every surface. Wall and curtain, bureau, nightstand, quilt, rib cage. Whole world become surfaces now: how long will they hold? I feel Deborah’s breath on my neck as she pushes into me. Warm the whole of her length, she smells faintly of sweat. Blankets and history, even this morning light, weigh us down.

  “You’re awake,” she said.

  “Oh yeah. Courtesy of our friends the birds.”

  “Who won’t have us missing a single moment of this exciting new day.”

  “Not to mention Bat, who’s been in here at least twice already, demanding to know why his food’s not been replenished.”

  “Or the pneumatic truck collecting curbside garbage.” Grunting and sucking air through pursed lips, slamming hands against wall and headboard, she did a great take on bad brakes, tailgates, whirring pickup motors.

  “Ah, civilization.”

  “Not just Twelfth Night and Faulkner, is it, Lew?”

  “Or Ricki Lake.”

  “Point taken.”

  Then: “Got some good points there yourself.”

  “Hard little buggers, aren’t they? Anytime I have my period I get horny-you know that, right?” Her free hand moved down, rested on my stomach. “Sleep okay?”

  “Mostly. I had this dream that seemed to go on and on all night, though I’m sure it didn’t. Couldn’t have. We were getting ready for a trip, fitting things into the car. Two friends (in the dream I knew who they were, even if I’m clueless now) had these old coins with distinctive dates, dates that jumped out at you, nickels I think. They kept putting them down in front of us, wherever we were. We’d be drinking coffee, one of them would come along and slap down a nickel there between cups. Standing on queue at a movie premiere-you looked quite wonderful, by the way, wearing one of your crinkle skirts, low heels, a sleeveless sweater, long earrings-there they were again with the nickels.”

  I turned towards her. We made necessary adjustments, tugged at covers.

  “Damn cold, isn’t it?”

  “Houses just aren’t built for it.”

  “Neither are we.”

  We lay there quietly for a time.

  “Play going okay?”

  “Way better than I have any right to expect. Turned into something of a marvel last night, actually. Everyone felt it at the same time. Suddenly the play wasn’t us: we were the play.”

  “That’s good.”

  “It’s what you work for. You never know if it’s going to happen.” Moments later she added: “Most of the time it doesn’t.”

  Doors slammed shut and dogs barked outside. A car alarm racketed on. Cans and bottles rang together as a neighbor emptied trash. From open windows in a third-floor apartment across the street, Mahler fought his way up through strings and brass to a deafening crescendo.

  “Time for us to put the nickel down, Lew?”

  Whatever the nickel was.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Obviously this man has come to and found himself onstage. He looks about him, off to the wings, out at the audience. Then back to the wings, where a prompter reads him a line. He repeats it. The stage crew comes on and begins carrying off parts of the set, a chair, a screen, a table, as he speaks, looking back and forth from prompter to audience. Then a second person steps out and begins speaking. Their stories, we soon realize, interweave. And now there’s a third….

  Something familiar, too, in what they’re saying.

  I recognize lines from Suddenly Last Summer just as Deborah leans towards me to whisper: Ionesco. The crew reappears, lugging yet another character in its wake, and goes back offstage bearing further bits and pieces of the set, a bookcase, a teapot, leaving this new character behind. Like the first, he looks about, disoriented. Then lines of Sartre spring from his lips, not The Flies, I think, something a bit more obscure.

  Moliere, O’Neill, Ben Jonson and Vian soon follow.

  Gradually we come to realize that these are characters left over, as it were, from other plays, secondary characters, supporting roles-all those to whom, in whose stage lives, nothing much happened.

  Afterwards at a coffeehouse on Magazine, as I watched powdered sugar from beignets drift in a blizzard onto her dress and cafe au lait’s breath struggle up from the cup, Deborah was quiet.

  “I miss it, Lew.”

  “Theater, you mean.”

  “It’s as though something’s been torn from me. As though there’s this huge vacant lot in the middle of my life, buildings all around.”

  “So plant a garden. Take back the lot.”

  “It can’t be that easy, can it, Lew?”

  And of course it wasn’t. In the weeks following, Deborah began play after play, at length abandoning them all.

  “It’s gone,” she said, weeping against me in the deep of night. “How do people live without passion, without that one bright blue light? How do they go on without something central in their life?”

  We were agreed on the idiocy of good advice, that only a fool would give it, a greater fool accept it. That night, three in the morning with Deborah’s body shuddering against me and wind padding predatorily about outside, was no different.

  “That’s what people do,” I said. “They go on.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  I wasn’t looking for him, you understand.

  Long since an adult, he was equally capable of making his own choices and declining to make them; he’d never hedged at accepting the fallout from either. Nor could I plead to having had much impression or influence on his life, not having been around to offer understanding, a sympathetic ear, least of all an example. I knew something, myself, about not making choices.

  So as I rummaged the city, touching down with beer-drinker fishermen at their ordained posts on the levee off Tch
oupitoulas, benching myself to reminisce in a statue-guarded, pie-slice park on Magazine, prowling Decatur with its shoulder-narrow sidewalks and balconies like shrugs above, wading across river-wide Canal down Esplanade to the Faubourg Marigny and rising back up through the Quarter past Simple Suzies, Eds and Professor Bills, past lean-to missions with tureens of watery soup and hope, past the library and City Hall, Leidenheimer Bakery, wooden stoops and swayback cement stairways, shipwreck islands of storm-tossed furniture, cable spools and milk crates on the neutral ground, I wasn’t looking for my son.

  For something within myself, rather. At some level that’s what all our searches are about, of course.

  “Can’t help you much, Lew,” his mother said that morning when I called. “Far as I knew, everything was going well. Last heard from him-I’d have to check to be sure-four, five weeks back? One of those trademark postcards of his, where the message starts off in regular script and becomes ever more crabbed, final sentences squeezed in sideways at the margins or asterisked in between lines.”

  “No sense of what was going on in his life?”

  “You’re kidding, right? You know what those cards are like. Sometimes he’d touch down, sure. Bring up some play or movie or concert he’d seen, string together bits of overheard conversation, remark that both of you’d taken to hanging around the house too much. Mostly, though, he just wrote about what he saw at his job. People he got to know there, their stories, where they lived, how. Hang on, I’ve got to pull something out of the oven.” Two, three minutes later she was back. “Been a long time since we’ve talked, Lew.”

  “True enough.”

  “No reason for that, you know. You have my address, you could write from time to time, even do something outrageous like send the occasional Christmas or birthday card. Scrawl a satirical line or two in there if it made you feel better, whatever space’s left. A quote, maybe, something appropriately snarly. Swift, Laurence Sterne, Thomas Bernhard, like that. It’s always Serious Friday somewhere.”

  Serious Fridays had begun as a joke when David and his friends were students, all of them casually bohemian. No television, parties, dumb movies or other mindless escapism allowed on Fridays, the screed read. Exalted conversation only. High-end jug wine. Smelly, mysterious cheese. Books tucked underarm, coolly they’d stroll towards bars and ethnic restaurants, skirling intellectual happy hours like bullfighter’s capes about them out there in a hot world.

  “I hadn’t imagined there was any way you’d want to hear from me, Jane. Christmas, Serious Friday, or otherwise.”

  “Well-” She turned away. “Hey! You see me, right? One standing here by the kitchen counter? knives all around? Don’t want to spend the rest of your life reaching for things with two blunt forearms, hobbling about on ankles, right? Get away from my bread!” Back to me then. “All that was a long time ago, Lew. We were young together. Shared the very beginnings of our lives. We won’t ever have that with anyone else, will we? It binds us.”

  “Those beginnings lasted, what, about ten minutes?”

  “And the marriage not much longer-I know.” Silence fell like Joyce’s snow along hundreds of miles of wires, up past bayou and swampland, Whiskey Bay, Grosse Tete, through stands of ancient cypress, on into wildest America. “Nothing turns out the way we think it will, Lew. We don’t know much else, but we know that. And if life’s about anything, it’s about all those twists and twinings and sudden turns and trapdoors, about learning to get lost gracefully.”

  I said I’d be in touch and, fortified with a troop-sized cup of coffee and a bagel I could have used help from that same troop in chewing, entrained for my sentimental journey. Steamed out of port past K amp;Bs and Circle Ks, chewed-up, century-old homes, abandoned storefronts sheathed in plywood so pitted and weatherworn that it resembled bark. Tchoupitoulas, Prytania, St. Charles, Jackson, Decatur. Streetcars teeming with tourists, black maids headed home with cash pay rolled and tucked into garters and waistbands after the day’s work uptown, children gone hunchback from knapsacks of schoolbooks and video games. Mule-drawn carts stood at idle alongside Jackson Square; limos skimmed the city’s surface like sharks; battered delivery trucks, mopeds and bicycles hauling makeshift carts rose and sank in random patterns. Cats beside buildings crouched over invisible meals and shot glances past shoulders as I drew abreast. Children’s faces turned up from tricycles, peered out from latticed recesses beneath porches. By one apartment house, garbage bags sat piled in a black honeycomb, aloud with the hundreds of flies buzzing inside them.

  In a bar on St. Philip I came across Doo-Wop holding forth to a busload of bulky, fair, rather square-faced tourists, Finns possibly. Half a dozen drinks sat aligned on the table before him. A Sony recorder, like Doo-Wop hard at work, ground away there too. The tourists were ordering round after round, eating with greasy fingers from baskets of what purported to be alligator tails and smiling broadly at one another, the barmaid, Doo-Wop, the jukebox, signs on the walls advertising beer, the walls themselves.

  “Gitcha sump’n?” the barmaid asked. She was twenty maybe. Looked well on the way to piercing everything possible. We all need short-term, long-term goals.

  “Draft.”

  “On tap we got-” Gold stud in her tongue flashing into view like a Christmas tree ornament hidden away.

  “Whatever,” I said. “All pretty much the same, isn’t it?”

  “I guess.”

  “These people have any idea what’s going on?”

  She shrugged. “How you gonna know?”

  She brought me a glass of something that the other beers probably beat up every day on its way home from school. Felt kind of sorry for the poor thing, actually. I’d taken a seat at bar’s end in half darkness and now, price of the ticket paid, was able to focus on Doo-Wop’s performance.

  “This was back in the golden days, you understand, no reason back then to doubt any of it. Did what we did so other Americans could get on with their lives. Eternal vigilance and all that. Hell, we were saving the free world single-handedly. You-all understand free world, right? Single-handedly?

  “Good.

  “Twice a day, then, flying at treetop level to stay just below radar, I’d make my way towards Cambodia. I’d climb in the cockpit with floppy mailbags and come back with them packed full. Most days I flew a modifie-Captain!”

  Doo-Wop had caught sight of me. He stood, sole of one shoe flapping forward of the hemp twine he’d secured it with. A bright yellow sportcoat hung heavy as stage curtains from his shoulders. Below, as though under its protection, an aqua shirt, bottle-green tie, chocolate trousers. He’d come up out of his chair and away from the table set with drinks to shake hands. Don’t think I’d ever seen him do that before. I felt as though history itself had gone on pause.

  “Been a long time, Captain.”

  “It has.”

  “You still turning out them books?”

  I nodded. “Just like you’re still turning out looking good.”

  He glanced down at what he was wearing. God knows what he saw, what he thought.

  “New Bargain Town opened up just last week, up on Oak. Where that shoe store used to be? Rack after rack of fine product ripe for the picking. Great country, this.” He smiled out on the prospect of his tourists, waved an apologetic hand. “Be done here shortly, Captain,” he said. Point of honor: he had to repay with stories the drinks advanced him. “You be able to stick around?”

  I said I would and settled in. Doo-Wop returned to his table, where he became by turns a park ranger at Yellowstone, a businessman from “one of those midwestern states starting with I where all the suburbs have the same name,” a bus driver from Montgomery convinced he knew what had happened to those kids and had seen the man responsible, an accordionist named Jimmy who for over thirty years played happy hour (never missed a day) at King’s Inn in Memphis, famous for his stylings of “Heartbreak Hotel,” Jimmy Reed songs and various Abba hits, and a retiree to Phoenix who’d worked graveyard shift as se
curity guard for a Third Street transplant center until the night, bored out of his mind, he’d added Drive-Through Window complete with arrow to the sign out front.

  All of them, people Doo-Wop had crossed paths with here in New Orleans. He’d pick up their stories like shells off a beach. Sometimes in the drudge of afternoons I found myself watching all those TV shows suddenly become so popular these last few years, weekly movies “based on a real story,” Cops, Ricki and the rest, and I’d think: Doo-Wop had it down years ago, long before any of them. Rumplestiltskinning the straw and dross of the real to fool’s gold.

  He sat down beside me. “Well, that’s done.”

  “Hard work.”

  “Not too many’d know that,” he said after a moment.

  The barmaid appeared tableside. Since I’d last seen her she’d had a couple more piercings, I was sure of it. “What would you like?” I asked Doo-Wop.

  “What’re you having?”

  “Generic beer.”

  “Two of your best generics, Mandy,” he said.

  She smiled, adjusted a few rings and studs, and went off to bring the beers as I asked Doo-Wop if he’d heard about some guy or guys who were killing pigeons. I’d hung out by the park a couple of times, talked to people around the neighborhood, but hadn’t come up with anything.

  “Nope, but I’ll keep an ear open. Look what I still got,” Doo-Wop said, pulling one of my old business cards out of his wallet. I must have given it to him thirty years ago at least, about the time he got that wallet from the look of it, and he’d been carrying it ever since, the way some folks squirrel away newspaper clippings, till it was all but unreadable. No continuity in our lives, huh?