Ghost of a Flea lg-4

by James Sallis

  The first was from Jeanette asking Deborah and me to dinner with her, Don and Derick that night. Kind of a celebration, she said. Though of what, they hadn’t decided yet. Maybe we could all do that together, decide.

  “Thanks, Jeanette, but incredibly enough you’ve caught me on one of those rare evenings-these occur maybe two or three times a year-when I actually have plans.”

  “Well, we’re sorry, of course. But we can do this later.”

  “That would be great. As long as it’s not too much trouble.”

  “We have dinner most nights, Lewis.”

  “True enough. But you don’t celebrate every night.”

  She paused before saying, “In our own way, I think we do.”

  “There’s something else, Jeanette.”

  I told her about Deborah’s departure.

  “I’m so sorry, Lew. Are you okay?”

  “I will be, sure.”

  “If there’s anything we can do …”

  “Thanks.”

  “We’ll talk soon.”

  “You bet.”

  I’d barely made it back to kitchen, chair and legal pad before the phone rang again. I sat looking through the open doorway at the phone on its table, newel post, wooden floor, the pattern of it. A composition, like Van Gogh’s painting of his room at Arles, something brought to stillness and no longer quite of this world.

  “I’ll be there in ten minutes,” Don said when I picked up.

  “No need, my friend.”

  “Fifteen at the outside.”

  “Do us all a great favor, Don. Stay home with your family.

  It’s cold out. And I’m fine.”

  “Sure you are.”

  “Really. I am.”

  “You sure?”

  “It’s not exactly like I was blindsided, is it? This’s been working its way to the surface for a long time.”

  “And nothing you could do about it, I suppose.”

  Little moved on street and sidewalk, lawns, porches. Every minute or two, as though chugging across a TV screen, exhaust a white plume, a car traversed the window. Two kids on collapsible scooters with bright green wheels rowed by. Had the neighborhood ever been this quiet, this still, by day? The cold was a part of it. But I had again the eerie, familiar feeling that there’d been some catastrophe, some dislocation, which only I and a handful of others had survived.

  “How many times have we been through this, Lew, your side or mine?”

  “Too many.”

  “Both of us lost count some years back, I guess.”

  “Probably just as well.”

  “Yeah.” Behind him I heard the sounds of life going on: voices, rattle of cutlery and dishes, drawers, cabinets, a radio or TV. “Angels die. Because the air’s too thick for them down here. Skull Meat.”

  “Or The Old Man. One of them, anyway.”

  “You always disparage your books, Lew, pretend they aren’t important to you. I never have understood that.”

  “They’re important-if that’s the right word-while I’m writing them. Afterwards …” Afterwards, what? “They’re pretty much a blur to me. One runs into another.” Like our lives here on the island. Scatter of bright segments, the rest of it mush.

  Another of those comfortable silences that existed between Don and myself from the first, and that increasingly with the years seemed to occupy our time together, fell.

  “Okay, so I’ll stay home,” Don said finally. “But only if you promise to call if you need me, man. A drink, a meal, just to talk.”

  “Absolutely.”

  The third call came within the hour. I was building a sandwich from the stump of a pork roast, cold bread, horseradish, mustard and mayonnaise, slivers of pickle. Children sauntered, biked and skateboarded by outside on their way home from school, children dressed in plaid skirts or charcoal-gray slacks, children in baggy cargo pants and bell-bottoms salvaged from thrift shops, children with processed hair, buzz cuts, bouffants, dreadlocks, multiple piercings. In the front room, off hall and telephone berth, NPR’s Talk of the Nation beamed in from the greater world. As did this call.

  “David?”

  “I don’t have much time. I just wanted to let you know that I’m all right, didn’t want you worrying.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Out in the world somewhere. That’s what Buster Robinson and your other characters would say, right?” Someone spoke behind him. He covered the mouthpiece to respond, after a moment took his hand away. “Look, I’ll be in touch soon, okay?”

  “David-”

  The connection went.

  Most of an hour later, sandwich a scatter of crumbs on a chipped plate, half a bottle of California chardonnay sent after it, the fourth call came.

  “’ew.”

  “No way this is good.”

  “Beg pardon?”

  “Larson: you’re using the phone. Scary, real scary. What’s wrong?”

  “It’s ’ette. Paramedics are taking her to Baptist and I need to stay with ’Verne. Thought maybe you’d swing by there.”

  “The hospital, you mean.”

  “She’s okay, but one of us needs to be there.”

  “What happened?”

  “Oh, right. Okay. I’m on a job over in Metairie. Been there two, three months.” Long enough to become forever, the only present, for Larson, something he had in common with Doo-Wop. “Gem of a house, kind you’re not ever gonna see again.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’ve got my face two inches from the hardwood banister, going at it with the finest chise’ I have, trying to reshape this thing, when Robert comes crabbing up the scaffo’d. Boy’s got a ce’phone, on’y one who does-so we a’ways give out his number. For me, he says, and hands over the phone.”

  Officer McAllister calling. And this is … It’s about your wife, I’m afraid…. First of all, let me assure you she’s all right….

  A neighbor, old Miss Siler, placed the call. She’d been sitting out on her porch sipping at a toddy as she did most afternoons now she’d been retired from teaching after thirty-nine years (“More than one toddy, I suspect,” McAllister said, “less than a dozen”) and noticed a young man with a package under his arm stepping up onto Alouette’s porch. He didn’t ring the bell, which Miss Siler thought odd, but then he didn’t do much of anything else either, so she lost interest. Next thing she knew, that young man was running off down the street like he had the very devil after him. Miss Siler looked back, up the street, across the yard, over the railing onto the porch, and there was Alouette, stretched out on the boards. She dialed 999, 919, finally got it right with 911. Officer McAllister responded.

  Alouette was coming to as he arrived. She told him she’d heard someone on the gallery, boards creaking out there. She waited, and when no one came to the door, she opened it to look out. Thought she saw movement-someone hurrying around the bend? That was all she remembered. Presumably she’d stepped out onto the gallery. And someone was there. No sign of what the man had been carrying underarm. They did have one good impression of a footprint, McAllister said, looks like a heavy work shoe with waffle soles, where he vaulted over the banister, same banister she’d likely hit her head against.

  “They’re taking her out now, ’ew.”

  “Then I’m out of here too. On my way. I’ll give you a call.”

  No one answered next door at Norm Marcus’s house. I’d figured on snagging a ride in his cab, something I’d done before in similar situations, but that having failed, set out on foot, cutting through alleyways and across open lots, staggering in a broken run down Prytania, past St. Charles, along Napoleon Avenue to Baptist.

  There in the ER I found Alouette standing beside a gurney simultaneously raging, enumerating inefficiencies of the system and demanding to be released. Five medical personnel stood facing her, hopelessly outnumbered. They hadn’t a chance.

  Everything’s all right at home, I told her. Larson’s with the kid. You okay?

  “Fine-
except that I’ve been abducted and now the aliens in their monotonous, unimaginative manner are preparing to perform medical experiments on me.”

  “The paramedics had to bring you in,” one of the nurses said. “They’re legally obliged to do so. We explained that to you.”

  “And I explained to you that I had no problem with that. They brought me. I came. Now my ride’s here.”

  Doors swung open to admit a stretcher and two paramedics. One of them was reporting to the resident who’d met them out on the dock. The resident glanced over at me. One of her eyes drooped, the other looked wild.

  “… BP low but stable. Tourniquet’s been in place just over twenty minutes. Out when we got there, but he’s been conscious since. Alert and oriented. Stopped to help someone with car trouble, apparently. Had his hand under the hood when the driver decided to peel off. Took this one’s arm, up to the elbow, with him. Probably still there under the hood.”

  “My ride’s here,” Alouette repeated, “and you have work to do.”

  Outside, we walked over to Claiborne. A cab pulled in to the curb to pick us up almost instantly. The driver, an elderly black man swaddled in layers against the cold, undershirt, plaid flannel shirt, checked sweater, sweatshirt zipped to his chin, nodded when I gave him our destination. He nodded again at the end, when I paid him. Never spoke.

  “Thanks for saving me, Lew.”

  “Sure. Glad you don’t mind.”

  “Am I really that difficult?”

  “Yes.”

  She laughed. “Guess I could always claim I have no choice, it’s in my genes.”

  Vehicles swarmed thickly about a windowless, bunkerlike store selling beer, wine and liquor at discount prices. Smoke wafted up from Henry’s Soul Food and Pie Restaurant across the street. Four police cars sat outside.

  “This wasn’t the first time, Lew. The last couple of letters, I thought I heard someone on the porch. I’d go out and find envelopes in the mailbox.”

  “You should have told me.”

  “I know.”

  Attaining Jefferson Avenue, the driver turned riverside. His tape of Sam Cooke done, he pushed in a new one, Barry White.

  “At first I just didn’t think it amounted to much. Later on, I guess my pride kicked in. I could take care of it myself….”

  “Fearless, like your mother.”

  “O yeah, that’s me all right.” When she looked up, I had a flash of her as a teenager. “I’m afraid all the time, Lew. Every day of my life, every hour and minute of it. Whatever I do, work, family, on some level it’s just another way of keeping fear at bay. As a child, I used to wonder why I was so different, why others weren’t afraid.”

  “Then you realized they were.”

  “Are they? I’m still not sure. Some are. You can see it in their eyes, the way they can’t bear to be alone or in silence, in all the habits and hungers they’d swear to you are their passions. I remember how years ago, back when I was living with you that first time, you told me you didn’t trust anyone who had no sense of humor. I think I feel the same way about people whose fear doesn’t show.”

  “Maybe that’s why you do the work you do.”

  She nodded. “It’s why my mother did.”

  We sat quietly and I thought how proud I was of this young woman, of the life she’d made for herself. Maybe it was in the genes: she’d recapitulated her mother’s transformation. Sitting beside her there with Barry’s music flowing like honey, I was vividly aware of her youth, her vitality, of the warmth rising from her body. Of how much I loved her.

  “You know what Hortense Callisher said?” she told me at the door. “An apocalypse served in a very small cup. That’s what our lives are, Lew.”

  Then she went in to her family and I, after putting in the necessary appearance, offering up regrets, struck out homeward on foot. With each footfall my breath materialized before me, remained there a moment, and was gone. Only this light silk sportcoat for warmth. I had no notion what time it was. Growing late-I was safe with that. It’s always growing late. Time enough, still, to meet my kinswoman Mrs. Molino?

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  In my memory she’s always there at the edge of things, sipping half cups of coffee, shuffling about in slippers: a small, ill-defined woman, face closed like a fist about-what? Pain? Her disaffection and disappointment with life, I suppose. Only in photographs, old photographs, did I ever see her smile. I don’t know what made her go on. She had no passions that I know of. There was nothing she loved, nothing was ever as it should be, nothing was good enough. As years went on she faded ever further from life, her days held together by meager threads of routine. I recognize so much of her in myself, so much of myself in her.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  “Self-defense.”

  “What?”

  “How I learned to cook. When I was a kid, we ate all this wonderful stuff, what people started calling soul food in the Sixties, corn bread, greens, pig tails, black-eyed peas, grits, salt meat. My parents were depression people, country folk. But then as urbanization kicked in full force, as the country grew more prosperous and all those wonderful progressive products hit the stores, little by little that wonderful food stopped showing up on the table. Canned peas and ground meat now. Biscuits out of cardboard tubes. You wouldn’t think they could, but things got even worse when my mother went to work-she’d waited till I was in junior high. She was getting sicker by then, too, steadily falling away from the world. Food had never mattered to her. Now she’d bring home this stuff from the grocery store where she worked, TV dinners, mixes, prepackaged foods of all sorts, and that’s what would show up on the table. When she did cook, she fried-a true Southerner. Or laid things out in a pressure cooker and turned them into something unrecognizable to sight or taste.”

  Mrs. Molino’s hand, putting down her cup, continued across the table to my own. Nothing sexual in this for all her attractiveness, despite the physicality vibrating the very air around her. Simple human warmth, rather. She was one of those to whom connections came easy.

  “I spent a lot of time later on, after I left home, reading cookbooks, just trying to puzzle my way through the basics. Wore a groove in kitchen tiles going back and forth from cookbooks to counter or stove.”

  Since we’d missed the reservation at Commander’s, at my suggestion we’d gone instead to Jessie’s, a neighborhood bar and grill of the sort that abounds here and almost nowhere else. There was a huge, wraparound old bar and only five or six small tables in the back for food service, but far more people came here to eat than to drink. The door rarely closed all the way: one customer caught it coming in as another, toting sacks, went out. Weekends, people lined up two or three deep at the bar having a Jax, bourbon or rum and coke as they waited. Jessie was a twig-thin albino with knobby joints, six-foot-four and 120 pounds tops, hair clipped short and so colorless it disappeared under lights, maroon eyes. His catfish po-boys, dressed with shredded lettuce, homemade pickle and his own remoulade, were the stuff of legend. I’d seen children in high chairs being fed pinches of these sandwiches by their parents. They’d probably grow up, move to Texas or Iowa, and need to be weaned. Decompressed, like deep-sea divers.

  The coffee was almost as good. This, in a city that takes its coffee seriously. Local legend had it that Jessie added a spoonful of graveyard dirt to each pot. Things like that made you consider how essentially pagan New Orleans could be. Citizens here still keep track of solstices, favor Halloween and All Saints’ Day over Christmas.

  “You and Deborah’ve been together awhile.”

  I nodded.

  “Is this it, do you think?”

  “I suspect so. She’s never been one to make arbitrary or tentative moves.”

  “Then I’m sorry, Lewis.”

  I was about to say more when Don stepped through the doorway, glanced around, and walked towards us, followed in short order by Rick Garces.

  “I’m going to assume you’re looking for me, and di
dn’t just stop by for a catfish fix.”

  “Nah. Roast beef’s better, anyway.”

  “So how’d you find me?”

  “You mentioned you were meeting with Dr. Guidry-”

  I was fairly certain I hadn’t, but let it pass.

  “-so I swung by. Mrs. Molino here-”

  “Catherine: Don Walsh, Rick Garces. Both old friends.”

  “-left her destination with the housekeeper, in case she was needed.”

  “Good to see you, Rick.” We shook hands. “Been some time. Why do I remember you as smaller?”

  “Probably because I was. And it’s all your fault. You took me to that Cuban restaurant the first time, now I can’t stay out of there. Jose has a Cuban coffee working, sandwich soaking up grease on the grill, before I’m through the door. Then afterwards the damn fool brings me flan on the house. And I’m damn fool enough to eat it.”

  As we spoke, Catherine had discreetly gone off and borrowed chairs for them both from other tables. Embarrassed, as much from not noticing as from her ministry, they sat.

  “And what does Eugene think of that?” I asked. Eugene had enlarged, cropped and framed my favorite photo of LaVerne, a snapshot Rick took just before she died, when she’d stuck her head in his door at the Foucher’s Women Shelter where they both worked to ask Rick about a client.

  “More of you to love, is what he says.”

  “Good man.”

  “You bet he is.”

  I went back to the window behind the bar to tell Jessie we needed four coffees when he had the chance. Steam from the grill wreathed his face. “Ever think about getting some help in here?”

  “You volunteering?”

  “I could get the coffees.”

  “You do that. And while you’re at it, see who else needs a refill. Pot must be scraping bottom ’long about now too, so maybe you could pour in some water, drop in a filter. Then fill the sucker up-to the top-with French Market.”

  “Sure, just tell me where you keep the dirt.”

  “Come again?”

  “Forget it.”

  I did what he asked, pulled a battered ancient Coke tray out from under the counter and used it to carry four cups of fresh coffee back to our table. Santa with a squat bottle tilted into his beard, sixty dollars or more at any flea market. Catherine, Don and Rick were in spirited conversation.