Ghost of a Flea lg-4

by James Sallis

  I took the card from him, amazed, for a closer look. Le-though that e could as easily be an o. And Griffin could have been almost anything: Grief, Gripping, Garage, Cartage, Goring. Below, Investigations remained mostly readable, though the v had migrated-hoping to start up a word of its own, perhaps.

  I had a sudden vision, one it was probably best not to dwell on, of Doo-Wop sitting behind the barricades of a beer and peanuts telling stories from his years as a local detective.

  Mandy brought our beers. Definitely generic. Doo-Wop drank half his down in a single generic swallow.

  “You used to teach, right, Captain?”

  I nodded. Another previous life. How many had I had? Feeling a certain sympathy for that used-up business card.

  “You know anything about this film department up to Loyola?”

  “Other than the fact that there is one, not much.” A year or two back, I’d attended a festival of student work and had dim memories of short films about a classics professor who lived in a trashcan out behind Antoine’s, a giant panda lobbying for the NRA, an insect zoo, complete with tiny cages, kept in someone’s dorm room.

  We sipped our beers.

  “Boy comes up to me over to Freret, the Come On In. You know it?”

  No.

  “Three people be in there and one of them goes to stand up, someone’s gotta back out the door.”

  There used to be many such places scattered about the city. Bars in ground-level converted garages below apartments, one-room restaurants run out of family homes-like the Williams family snoball business that’s made a fortune dealing shaved ice and flavors out the back of a garage without so much as a sign for three or four decades.

  “But I go by most every day, ’cause you never know. Meet up with good folk there sometimes. So I’m sitting having me a beer talking to a dogcatcher works out by Gentilly and this boy comes in. He’s wearing sunglasses and looking around in there trying to see and it’s like he’s forgot about them, thinking why the fuck’s it so dark in here, and of course it is dark in here, but not that dark, you damn fool, I’m thinking. As who wouldn’t. And he does look peculiar. White boy, mind you, but he’s got these braid things sticking out ever’ which way that look like they don’t get washed ’cept when it rains and he’s standing out in it, he’s got on these shorts that the crotch of them’s down around his ankles and you could pack three or four good legs in there. And this goddam backpack, bright orange with, I don’t know, some kind of animal or something on there with a lot of teeth, grinning.”

  Mandy came back jingling, swinging and adjusting. Four more of the same, Doo-Wop said, we goan be here a spell.

  “So,” Doo-Wop went on once our beers arrived, “boy swings off that backpack and says, Doo-Wop, I presume? That grin and all those teeth are down by my ankles now. Can we talk, man?

  “What’re you gonna do?”

  With no discernible cue, the tourists had formed a precise line just inside the door. Now the door sprang open, and they filed out bearing shoulder bags, fanny packs stuffed like Thanksgiving turkeys, souvenir glasses, six-packs of pralines, cheaply printed menus abounding in typos, greasy alligator tails wrapped in napkins.

  “He’s heard about me, this boy says. Says me and my stories are a local legend and that that’s what New Orleans is, its history, all the stories. He’s making a movie about the city and wants me to be a part of it. Been looking for me for a while now, he says. Wants me to be a kind of interlocutor, that’s the word he used, have me talk some ’bout the rest, then they’d come on.”

  Doo-Wop drained off his first beer and picked up the second. “What you think?”

  “Beats me.”

  “Me too. And it just beats all, don’t it, the whole thing. But the more I think on it, the more I’m inclined to.”

  I raised my glass, my first, and still mostly full, to toast him. Three more squatted there by it. “Then maybe you should.”

  “Yeah, maybe. Probly. Why th’hell not. But hey, for now I gotta go, right?” He chugged his third beer and, hand pausing over the table as over a chessboard, pushed the last into line with my own. “Have to take care of business like always, don’t I?”

  I walked with him to the door. Outside, he pulled a bike from beneath the eaves. It was of the new generation, gears and toggles everywhere, high-tech tires. He unlocked it, threw a leg across, crotch-walked it into sunlight.

  “Something new?”

  “You bet. Resplendent, ain’t it?”

  It was.

  “Resplendent.” He nodded, then shook, his head. “Just cain’t get around like I used to. Boy wants to make that film, he up and gave it to me. Said why not, he don’t never use it no more. Someone ought to get the benefit of it, boy said. Don’t mind telling you it’s been a blessing. Now I can really cover ground.” This from a man who regularly, every day for well over forty years, had covered most of the city on foot.

  “That’s good. You take care, now.”

  “’Spect I will. Mostly have. You too, Captain. Don’t let them beers back in there go wastin’ neither.” Halfway to launch, listing starboard on the seat, left leg cocked, Doo-Wop paused. “Word of advice?”

  “Always.”

  “Boy asking after you as well. Had some stories he’s heard, old ones for the most part, near as I can say. He don’t tell them too good either, mind you. I thought you’d be wanting to know.”

  “Appreciate it, my friend.”

  “Welcome.” And Doo-Wop went sailing off to whatever port came next.

  That night I sat out in the slave quarters reading David’s message again. I’d left on lights in the house and kept looking across, half-expecting heads and bodies to appear, as in previous, happier days, in that blazingly white kitchen.

  I have no idea when you might find this-tonight, tomorrow, next week. I don’t even know, really, how to begin it.

  I read David’s message over and over, slowly, leaving space around each word for it to expand, working sememes and syllables like bread dough. At one point I looked up to find Deborah’s face there in the window over the sink, across the courtyard. She was drinking a glass of water from the tap, and after she put it down she waved, face tilting like a bird’s to ask should she come out. I shook my head. She blew a kiss and laid head obliquely on joined hands: moving towards sleep.

  We always have to understand, don’t we?

  Life’s not a particularly good editor, but it can prove a quarrelsome one. David had careted in his message among notes I’d been sketching for a novel. There it was, rude actuality, thrusting up like a ragged tree stump from my own pale version of the same. I thought of David’s postcards and how the texts of our lives seem always overwritten, events scribbled in between lines, corrections tacked on at the end or written in at a slant.

  Life for each man (this from Eugene O’Neill) is a solitary cell whose walls are mirrors. Looking out, we think we see someone signaling, a warning, a wave, a plea. But it’s only our trapped selves measuring with hands the limits of their world.

  From long habit, music forever asimmer on back burners as I worked, I’d turned on the radio when I settled in out here. Classic jazz had given way to a talk show on which prizefighter Eldon Truman was being interviewed, and I came skittering to a stop on its surface.

  Scooped from the street following a series of central Baltimore burglaries, Truman went on to spend some twentysix years in America’s worst prisons. Two, three minutes into the interview, Truman, a biography of whom had just been published, took exception to the host’s use of the word commune and went on taking exception. Taking exception was a way of life, a creed, for him. Just as in prison (he recounted) he’d refused to follow the white man’s rules. Refused upon induction to divest himself of civilian clothing, of rings and necklaces, refused to have his hair cut. “They had to put me where the others couldn’t see me, finally. Had to get me out of sight. Out of sight and mind, you see.” Solitary. Out of sight there, he’d spent a dozen years re
ading law books obsessively, then (out of mind, many said) turned just as obsessively to metaphysics. Castaneda. Ouspensky. Husserl.

  Phone calls came in from Al and Ian in Keokuk, Iowa, Sharon in Sharon Center, Georgia, Cheryl in Highland Park, Illinois, George from Irving, Texas, Roberto (call me Rick) out in Tucson, Arizona. They never tell us the truth, one caller said, never. Whatever they do tell you, just turn it over. Mr. Truman’s right. Another said: Up here in the heart of the heart of the land, we’ve built us a model community. Grow our own food, bake our own bread. Simon called in to say there was so much wrong in the world, so much pain, and ended with a favorite quote, from Brecht: What times are these when a poem about trees is almost a crime because it contains silence against so many outrages? Bret from Milwaukee: The disparities just keep unfolding. Ever since Reagan, Bush, that sorry lot, water rising, a flood. Executives now pull down three hundred and twenty-six times the average worker’s salary. How in God’s name did this come about? And why do we let it go on?

  I keyed in Select All and sat for a moment with my finger over Delete, then hit it. Notes for a novel that might have been, and David’s message, washed away. Enough stray words in the world already.

  “Somewhere, among the wastes of the world, is the key that will bring us back, restore us to our Earth and to our freedom,” Pynchon wrote in Gravity’s Rainbow. That’s where David was now, I hoped-out there in the wastes of the world where the keys are kept. And there in the dark (for now I’d shut off radio, computer and lights to welcome it) I bent my head into the vast silence that is our lives, and listened.

  Chapter Nineteen

  “Lew. Do you hear me? Lew?”

  I drifted up slowly, all the time in the world. World up there waiting for me. Patient as grandfather’s hand when we’d walk down by the river. I was four, maybe five, and he’d come up alongside the house, up the hill, hobbling, to fetch me. As a young man Grandfather had broken his leg. With no doctors around, his father built a box, a small tailored coffin, around it. He was a carpenter, this was what he knew. The leg healed, but forever afterward Grandfather listed to port and starboard with each step. As Grandfather came he’d be reciting some poem he’d learned back in school forty or more years ago. More like ninety, now, I guess. Longfellow, Whittier, William Cullen Bryant. The whole of “Thanatopsis” or “Snowbound,” Booth led boldly with his big bass drum. Not just reciting the poem, but declaiming it as had been the fashion in his youth, an auditory equivalent of Palmer penmanship. Lines, stanzas, rhymes spun and leapt like dancers, like high divers, from his tongue, providing my earliest intimation that words might do more than simply express needs or convey information: that they could transform the world, recast it. Down we’d go then by the river, this hobbling old man and upreaching, diminutive me, past tar paper shacks and along the levee as barges lugged their tedious way upriver towards Memphis or down to Vicksburg and New Orleans, barrel-like pipes running out above and across (carrying what? I never knew), cement slabs piling up crisscross by the hundreds as trucks ran over legs and wood risers collapsed, burying workers paid $3.50 a day, at the slab field just south, the sandbar at river’s center growing ever wider through the years. We’d bob and weave along the levee, through cement floodgates thick as tree trunks at the bottom end of Cherry Street behind the abandoned train station and just off Niggertown (where, at the Blue Moon Cafe, age ten or twelve, I saw my first live blues musicians-Sonny Boy Williamson and Robert Lockwood, I later discovered), and stop off for watery fountain Cokes in the alleyway behind Habib’s. Habib’s was run by one of two Jewish families in the town. Aside from the restaurant, they kept to themselves.

  “Lew?”

  No telling how much food went out that backdoor and down that alley year after year to those who might otherwise have gone without, itinerant farmworkers, folks in town hoping for positions at the tire and chemical plants, whole families trucked up en masse from Mexico to pick cotton, bluesmen in town playing jukes and streetcorners, local blacks, poor whites. All the lost tribes.

  “Lew. Damn it, answer me!”

  No longer was I drifting. Now I’d begun struggling my way upwards. Age ten or twelve, about the same time I came upon Sonny Boy and Robert Junior at the Blue Moon, I saw Houdini at the Malco halfway up Cherry, from the balcony cordoned off, weekends only, 25 cents, for blacks. Wrapped in chains and shut away in a trunk, Tony Curtis got thrown into freezing water. He rose, manacles and trunks left behind, only to encounter a sky of ice.

  But now the ice gives way and I’m moving up again, ever closer. Deborah’s face swims into focus there above me. Lovely as always.

  Years ago, after I found Alouette and her child, both desperately ill, in a hospital up in Mississippi, she told me what it was like to be so sundered from life. “Suddenly I broke free. Really free. I was floating. Nothing could touch me, nothing could hold me down. I remember thinking: How wonderful this is, I don’t even have to breathe now.”

  But of course I did. Had to breathe and had to do it now, here, as I struggled upward, light digging into my eyes like fists. Where am I? What shore have I washed up on?

  Now, I found, had become then. Another hole in my life.

  “Hey, woman.”

  Halfway between sleep and waking, my mind takes up familiar things, turns them over, around. I stand in a tenement house watching figures move in the frame of windows opposite. It’s hot and their windows, like mine, are open. I see their lips moving, hear the sound of their voices but can’t make out what they’re saying. Trying, I lean closer, out my window, and in that moment feel my balance giving way.

  “Lew. You’re back.”

  “I guess.”

  “We’ve been worried.”

  When I didn’t respond (I was working on it, but words proved slow to shape themselves around my intentions), she went on. “Don, Rick Garces, Alouette. We’ve been taking turns. Larson even took a couple of shifts off to spell us, turned things over to his foreman. You’ve been out almost five days.”

  “Damn.”

  She told me the date.

  “I don’t remember a thing.”

  “You’ve had a stroke, Lew. A light one.”

  “Damn.”

  “Yeah. Damn.”

  “Light one,” a voice says above me. Not Deborah’s this time. Have another five days passed, or just moments? I’ve no way of knowing. No landmarks here, nothing to grab hold of. “You’re lucky, Mr. Griffin.” In here becoming out there in a flood, I open my eyes. Not Deborah’s face either, unless she’s grown a soul patch, pierced an ear. On the trade wind of his breath I smell coffee, raw sugar, milk that’s just turned or is about to. “The world’s been kind enough to send you a message. A warning. You’re going to be okay. A month, six weeks from now, it’ll be like nothing’s happened. But next time …” Sincere face and brown eyes hover there over me. He’s what, mid-twenties? Sees so much of life every day, been through so little of it himself.

  More white space then, as the world again shut itself down. The doctor’s face stayed up there a while, lips moving. Then it changed: grew larger, misshapen, grotesque; broke into parts and rolled away-as though in slow motion a stone had shattered a water-borne image.

  When next the world washed back, Don and Jeeter were there at water’s edge, talking. Don held a pint-size plastic cup of coffee in one hand. Every few moments he’d gesture with that hand to emphasize something he was saying, then catch himself just before coffee sloshed over the top.

  “Thing you have to look at,” Don was saying, “is how’s it gonna travel? Sure it looks good right now, but what about four years from now, or ten? Horseshoeing probably looked good, too, sixty or seventy years ago.”

  “I hear you.” Jeeter grinned. “Whatchu think ’bout shepherding?”

  “Don’t mind me,” I told them.

  “All right,” Jeeter said.

  “Derick’s trying to decide what he wants to be when he grows up.”

  “So how you doin’, M
r. Griffin?”

  “I’ve been better.”

  “Worse, too,” Don said.

  “Can’t argue with that.”

  “You be needing anything?”

  I told the boy no.

  “Be okay we talk a spell, then?”

  “Sure.”

  “Lew may not feel like-” Don started, but I waved him mute.

  Jeeter pulled a molded plastic chair lost somewhere on the road between purple and blue, one size fits none, up to the bed. When he sat, his knees came almost level with his ears.

  “Don’s took me down to the library, got me a library card. Lady with sequins on her glasses tells me I can take home six books. Gotta be a million or so in there at least, and I’m walking around wondering how’m I gonna pick six books out of all those. And what about? So I’m giving thought to all this stuff I’ve wondered about, Joan of Arc, karate, old cars, the Vietnam War my old man never got over, this Langston Hughes person I’ve heard of, and suddenly I remember how Don told me you wrote some books. I go back to the lady with the sequins on her glasses and ask can she help me. Sure enough, she brings me this little stack of books. They’re pretty beat up, so I guess I’m not the only one’s looked into them, you know? I took the top six home-two of them were the same, but I didn’t know that-and I read them all that weekend.”

  I glanced over at Don, still by the window. He nodded.

  “Monday morning, I was there waiting when the library opened. The lady with sequins on her glasses had the day off. Young woman in a crinkly brown dress and sandals helped me that time. Her skin was white as rice, I remember. Kind of lumpy like it, too. She brought me another stack of books, some of them different, some the same. I went ahead and read them all.”

  “You have a new fan, Lew,” Don said.

  “I didn’t know books could be like that, Mr. Griffin. None of the ones I’d ever saw before were.”

  “Thank you, Jeeter.”

  “Call me Derick.”

  “Derick, then. Thanks. I don’t think I’ve ever had a finer review.”