Ghost of a Flea lg-4

by James Sallis

  “He means it, Lew.”

  “So do I.”

  “I just keep reading those books over and over, Mr. Griffin, gotta been through some of them five, six times by now. Skull Meat, The Old Man, Mole. You’re writing about what I lived all my life, streets I grew up in, people I know. All of it right there. Something else going on there, too. Something I don’t understand. I don’t give up, I keep reading. But I just can’t quite get hold of it.” He grinned. “Sometimes I almos’ do.”

  “Yeah. Sometimes I almost do, too.”

  Dead still this morning. So still and bright with sun that you don’t notice how cold it is until you move. Then the cold’s after you with blades and saws. Deborah and I have talked all night. Now I ask her what day it is.

  “Sunday.”

  Now that she’d told me, I heard bells from the Baptist church down the street. It had taken me days to figure out what was odd about the sound: the bells were electronic, starting up right on pitch and ending with no aftertones, volume at a level the whole time.

  “And the date?”

  It had become important to me, virtually an obsession, to know these things. Just as hour upon hour I found myself watching the clock. Hands that knocked knocked knocked without entering.

  “Diversion, Lew,” Deborah had told me, “misdirection. So you don’t have to face the darker time ticking away inside you.” Cold wasn’t the only thing cutting to the bone these days.

  Blearily I looked down at people huddled in the bus stop across the street four floors below. They wore whatever coats they had, and most held cups of coffee. Steam leaked like breath from their cups and from grease-stained bags of food. Cold waited till people stood or changed position on the bench, then pounced. Eye turned upwards and mouths writhed in pain.

  “Brought some things to help get you through all this,” Deborah had said, dipping into her backpack. I thought of Madame Butterfly (“I’ve brought a few things”) as she held up a finger: “Some favorites.” Montaigne’s essays, L’Ecume des jours. A second finger: “Also these.” Tapes of cultural programs and game shows like My Word a friend dubbed off the BBC. Third finger, with dramatic pause: “And me, of course….”

  So we’d spent the night talking. About how rehearsals were going, latest reports from doctors, official confirmation that this was the coldest winter in a quarter century, when I was likely to get sprung.

  “On that subject, I have a message for you from Don. He says if you try to walk out of here the way you usually do, he’ll personally come after you, rope and hog-tie you, and bring you back.”

  I whistled a bar or so from Copland’s Rodeo.

  “He’s serious, Lew. This is serious. You scared us.” She was stacking books and tapes neatly on the bedside table. “Rick Garces wants me to tell you to hurry up and get well because he’s got a new recipe he can’t talk anyone else into trying. Sea insects. ‘You know how picky them white boys is ’bout their food,’ he says, ‘’specially the straight ones.’ Dean Treadwell called from the school to see how you were and asked that I give you his best. The Washington Post said-I knew you had a piece due and gave them a call, hope you don’t mind-not to worry about the Fearing review, they’d wait. And your agent says call her when you get a chance. There’s a new publishing house in Scotland, run by a bunch of kids, Vicky says, but they seem to know what they’re doing, that wants to talk to you about reissuing your books.”

  “Nothing from David?”

  She shook her head. “I’m sorry, Lew.”

  A bus pulled up below and all climbed aboard. I had to wonder if any of them even cared where the bus was headed. It was warm at least, and you could stay aboard indeterminately. The bus pulled away, leaving bus stop and street alike empty, windswept, barren. As though the whole world itself had emptied. No one left alive.

  “You going to be okay?”

  I nodded. A nurse’s head tilted in around the door. Red hair, full lips. “Mr. Griffin?” Then she came on in. Eyes green and alive, forever in motion, unbecomingly wide hips somehow still sexy, tattoo of barbed wire on one upper arm. “Physical therapy called, asked me to let you know they’re on their way.” Her name tag hung from a lanyard of multicolored beads, swaying as she walked: Erin. “Need anything before? Pain meds, new designer gown, box lunch?”

  “Still no word, I take it, on my pardon from the governor?”

  Sad face. “Sorry.”

  “Just as well. I absolve you all, you know.”

  “Of course you do.”

  When she was gone, Deborah came and lay beside me on the bed. My right hand cradled her stomach, my left embraced her. “We’ve had good times, Lew. Lots of them.” Her hair was streaked with gray, strands of it. When had those shown up? Memory was so unreliable, such a liar. So self-serving. Only thing it did well was break your heart.

  Down in the street a lowrider passed with speakers blaring so loudly that it set off alarms in parked cars as it passed. We lay there listening to them go off, one after another, as it cruised along.

  Chapter Twenty

  “It always escalates, Lew. You know that.”

  “She didn’t want to bother me with it. Wanted to wait till I was out of the hospital at least, she said. I’m not sure she would have brought it up at all, if Larson hadn’t pushed.”

  “So he’s concerned.”

  “Larson’s the one who told me about it in the first place. Couldn’t have been easy for him, either. He and Alouette have a strong relationship, if not one we’d think of as ordinary. They have their own, quite independent lives. Distinct personalities. But they’re solidly together and respect one another’s opinions, beliefs, decisions. Seems to be plenty of space left in the relationship for that.”

  “You’re saying he saw coming to you with this as a violation.”

  I nodded.

  Don stood, flexing back and shoulder muscles. He rolled his head forward and back, shoulder to shoulder. “Used to be I could sit for more than five minutes without everything stiffening up, you know?”

  I knew.

  “I don’t keep moving, body’s not the only thing’s gonna stiffen up,” Don went on. “So in past weeks there’ve been more of these messages.”

  “More of them, and closer together.”

  He glanced again at the one in his hand.

  “Look, it’s not like there’s anything else I have to do, Lew. I can sit at home and spend my mornings worrying what’s for lunch, or I can get up off my butt and onto this. Still have favors I can call in. Forensics, for a start. I’ll have them take a look at this.” He held up the note. “And the file from her computer at work. You got any problem with my talking to Alouette, asking her about it?”

  “Not if she doesn’t.”

  We were silent then. I’ve been blessed with good friends.

  “Where are you?” Don said finally.

  “I was remembering the first time I saw you, slumped against a wall downtown with blood pooling under you and garlic on your breath.” The day he’d saved my life. “Then, later, how you showed up at my place with this yellow piece-of-shit BanLon shirt on. I mean, just how fucking white can you get?”

  Don shrugged.

  We’d been friends so long, been through so much together, that looking at him was a lot like looking in the mirror. And just as somewhere in your mind you stay twenty years old forever and are always slightly surprised when this old guy’s head pops up in there, I was never quite prepared to see my friend looking so tired and worn down.

  “You miss him, Don?”

  Something we’d rarely spoken of since it happened. We found him, half afloat, half submerged, in the bathtub, plastic bag secured about his head.

  “Every day of my life. I just keep thinking, if only I’d had the chance to get to know him better. If I’d made the chance, found it somehow.”

  “You did what you could.”

  “I don’t know…. I know what he was, Lew. Like I told you then, it just doesn’t seem to mak
e much difference.”

  “He was right about one thing: Everything’s water if you look long enough.”

  Don nodded. “From his note.”

  “Maybe it doesn’t matter how much time you have. Maybe you’re still left with all these piles of unfinished business.”

  Don sank back into his chair. “When did everything turn to past tense for us, Lew? You notice that happening?”

  I shook my head.

  He picked up the paper again. “You know what this is from?”

  If I have now made up my mind to write it is only in order to reveal myself to my shadow, that shadow which at this moment is stretched across the wall in the attitude of one devouring with insatiable appetite each word I write. It is for his sake that I wish to make the attempt. Who knows? We may perhaps come to know each other better.

  “A Persian novel, The Blind Owl.”

  “Which of course you’d read.”

  “Not a clue. But it took Rick about two minutes flat to track it down on the Internet.”

  “And what is this? Drawn on?”

  “Looks like someone did it on a computer, ran the typeface up to the point of blurring when he printed it out on an old dot matrix printer-not a well-maintained one, at that-then photocopied the printout. That’s Rick’s guess, anyhow.”

  “Why go to all that trouble?”

  I shrugged. “Why send it in the first place? Maybe he thought he was covering his tracks somehow, maybe he sent copies to world leaders, stuck them under windshield wipers at the nearest mall. Who the hell knows? We think he may have been trying to make it look like an engraving.”

  “Okay. There’s anything here useful, the lab’ll find it.” He held the paper up close. “That flytrack at the bottom some kind of signature?”

  “I’m pretty sure it says William Blake.”

  “Tiger, tiger guy?”

  I nodded. “Poetry was kind of a sideline for him, though. By trade he was an engraver. In his spare time he talked to angels.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Home I went, then, in due time, limping and scuttling. There on my island, I sat watching lives go on. Rain had come on like the fury it was, slamming away at houses and cars, lifting lawn appliances to abandon them half a block down and two across, slapping pedestrians to the ground. And everywhere the cold, attacking as much from within as without.

  Between two roaring worlds where they swirl, I.

  Yes, Mr. Joyce.

  Meanwhile, the good ship Rick Garces came calling at my island. Never a lack of friends or good food when Rick’s involved. This time, it was simple fare: polenta with wild mushroom sauce. Then he compensated with a salad of endive, baby green spinach, a handful of what looked like purple weeds, and slivers and bits of jicama, sweet cactus, sour German pickle. The mix of people, predictably, was as offbeat as the salad.

  A couple of gay activists from NO AIDS arrived first, a longtime pair oddly enough, given that one (in vintage Capri pants and chambray shirt) was male, the other (wearing Fifties sharkskin suit and saddleback shoes) female. All night long they stood side by side, a preponderance of sentences beginning “Eddie [or, conversely, Edie] and I …”

  Next came a lawyer “down from Tulane, way down,” working as he did exclusively pro bono cases. He sported the uniform of old New Orleans money, gray-and-white seersucker suit, starched shirt, bow tie. Luckily, he said, he’d been relieved of the burden of making a living and so was able to practice a purer form of law. And what better use (smiling) to which to put his family’s ill-got money?

  In fairly rapid succession, then:

  A reporter in blue blazer and torn jeans from the Times-Picayune. (Hosie Straughter? Hell yes, I knew him!)

  An emergency-room doctor whose color and fixed expression put one in mind of a Halloween pumpkin. In her wake trailed a retired FBI husband who, with half a bottle of wine and a brandy or two inside him, began telling tales of agents getting drunk on stakeouts and losing the car, reporting it stolen or sending in other agents the next day to investigate. Once an agent had managed to get transferred out of a particularly onerous assignment only when he accidentally blasted a hole in the car’s roof with the standard-issue shotgun, precipitating a rash of such accidents, first throughout the state, then on into Mississippi, Alabama and beyond.

  A painter of “how things might have happened in history” and (perhaps the most laid-back guy I’d ever seen) one who sold collectibles, Hopalong Cassidy lunchboxes, Gilbert erector sets and the like, in the weekend flea market downtown.

  George, from whom knives protruded quill-like at boot top and waist (though our journalist suggested the knife handles might well be scarecrows, like those false beepers sold nowadays) and who ran a tattoo, excuse me, body art, shop out on the edge of Kenner. He’d been in the Quarter for a quarter of a century, a fixture there, till gentrifiers dragged him to the ground. No sense of tradition at all, those people, absolutely none at all-when tradition, that sense of history, is what made this city great. At one point, George said, better than 95 percent of prisoners had tattoos; from their body art you could tell within a year or so when the con had gone up on his first stretch, and where. Older, proletarian tattoos had always been formulaic, iconographic-blue dot, enwreathed heart, initials-while contemporary middle-class ones edged towards the pictorial and profuse. Might even say decadent. As a culture we’ve spent so long promoting hostility to whatever exists as the only honorable stand, too often hostility’s all that’s left, a bottle with nothing much inside. Still (George, hefting his mug of herb tea, asked us all) does anything better represent man’s stubborn insistence to be himself and truly alive, to find beauty in the world and, if he can’t find it, create it?

  A rookie homicide detective, Angela, shaped like a barrel with eyebrows painstakingly plucked then drawn back in a high arch.

  A thirtyish guy, Louis, Louie, maybe Luis, who’d just opened a bookstore specializing in used textbooks. School bookstores had long held an unchallenged monopoly, repurchasing texts again and again at bargain-basement prices and reselling them at penthouse premiums. It wouldn’t last, he knew that, but for a while he’d be able dramatically to undercut the schools and still pull a fair profit. And even once this passed, he’d be left with the satisfaction of knowing he’d done good work-ah, America!

  Dennis, bald except for a gray, limp ponytail sprouting off the back of his head, who taught drawing and design at three community colleges and served as part-time docent for the Delgado.

  Danny and Steve. They ran an uptown B amp;B catering to gays and offered up, everyone said, breakfasts so good that guests got up an hour early just to enjoy them.

  Phillip, who’d gone through the master’s program in social work with Rick. He worked at the state hospital over in Mandeville, had for years.

  Charles, a waiter at Petunia’s who, whenever he was able to clear time, played clarinet with a local klezmer group, string bass with a pickup blues band meeting each weekend on Jackson Square. That group’s washboard player frequently spilled out of her top. The group was very popular.

  Towards ten that night, things began trailing off. God, we were old. Ten o’clock and the party’s over. Pots of polenta gave out as had mushroom and roux earlier; plates of cheese, andouille sausage, toothpickspeared peppers and olives faded away; folks reaching into honeycombs of beer and wine bottles came up empty, which given our diminished tolerances was probably just as well. With Rick I saw the last few stragglers to the door, then put on Charlie Patton cranked high as we began stacking dishes, glasses, coffee cups, ashtrays.

  “Thanks for letting me use your place, Lew.”

  “My pleasure. Great meal, fine company.”

  In the next room, slurring his words majestically (as I generally did these days, following the stroke), Patton saddled up his pony.

  “You want, you’re not into this right now, too tired to deal with it, we could leave it. I’d be glad to swing by early, before work, take care of it then.�
��

  “Just as soon get it done. I’m fine. Help me wind down some.”

  We worked away, Patton’s guitar plucking at the edge of our world, calling up strong feelings I had no name for, feelings that, once summoned, I knew, would be slow to go away. Cleanup mostly done, we knocked off to share half a bottle of Australian Shiraz-cabernet I’d tucked away for safekeeping in the vegetable drawer, sitting together for the most part wordlessly, before Rick headed home. I was stacking a final few plates on towels, long ago bereft of drainer space, when the phone rang.

  I made my way to it, shouted Hang on! Just a minute! and, carrying the phone with me, Deborah’s cordless, went to turn down the music.

  “Sorry.”

  A pause. “Mr. Griffin.”

  Maybe I should have left the music alone. Go back now and crank it up.

  “I apologize for calling so late. I wanted to say how sorry I am to hear of your recent difficulties.… Our bodies will go on betraying us, won’t they? Still, a stroke, if not too severe, can be an interesting thing. The jar gets shaken in intriguing ways…. You’ve made, I understand, a full recovery.”

  I wrung out the dishrag and draped it on the windowsill to dry. More accurately, probably, to mildew.

  “I was pleased to hear that. If there’s anything I can do … As you know, I’ve had considerable experience with this sort of thing these last several years. I would hope that you might call on me. Not that I think for a moment you will.”

  Time ticked in the wires.

  “I am hardly a monster, Mr. Griffin. Few of us are. It’s not as though I’m sitting here with drums going, waiting for those mighty gates to open.”

  “I am a man, Jupiter.”

  “Ah yes. Sartre, to balance my own King Kong. Interesting, isn’t it? How, increasingly, we seem to live our lives as allusion, reference-not directly, but refracted from something else.”

  The CD player had shut itself off, dropping the house into a supernal quiet.

  “Thousands of years ago, Mr. Griffin. Thousands of years ago, something, a creature who had not existed before, lugged itself up out of the slime and sat drying on a rock, looking around. It had no idea what it was, what it would become. Even where it was. But at that point, even with no words for it, the creature knew two things.