Ghost of a Flea lg-4

by James Sallis

  “You can set up systems to provide basic needs. Service, employment, housing. No problem there. But what do you do about incentive? Much as we’d like it to, Maslow’s hierarchy doesn’t just kick in like an afterburner.”

  “Same dilemma as at the heart of socialist and communist forms of government.”

  “Right.”

  “Whereas capitalism tends inevitably to monopolies and centralization of wealth,” Don said.

  I stared at him.

  He shrugged. “Lots of spare time these days. I’ve been reading some.”

  “Because motivation has to come from within,” Catherine said.

  “Does it? There’s no greater motivator, for some, than wealth accumulation. Status. Both of those are external counters. Meanwhile, what seems an evergrowing percentage of our population has no motivation.”

  I sat listening, watching the steady exchange of customers through the door. When finally the tiniest hairline of a break opened in the conversation, I said, “God I hope the bell rings soon.”

  “Anyone know who this man’s with?” Rick asked.

  “So what are you guys doing here?”

  Don’s eyes met mine. Again I thought: lands and grooves of my own life, my own years, on someone else’s face. “Rick and I were having lunch last week-”

  “At Casa Verde.”

  “Right.”

  “Sandwich, coffee.”

  “Three coffees, maybe four.”

  “Four coffees?”

  “Hey. Small cups.”

  “And flan,” Rick said.

  “Of course.”

  “He wanted to know how you and Alouette were doing, how the baby was. Somewhere along the way-”

  “Third napkin, as I recall.”

  “Good grease.”

  “Absolutely.”

  “-I mentioned the letters she’s been getting.”

  “He also mentioned the unexpected contact you’d had with Alouette’s father. I went home and the more I thought about that, the odder it seemed to me. What did he want?”

  “To find someone, he said.”

  “But then he didn’t want that anymore. And why you? With his means, he could hire a battery of folks to do a search.”

  “Even people who actually find who they’re looking for,” Don put in.

  “Very funny. I assumed it was his roundabout way of trying to make contact with Alouette.”

  “Maybe …”

  Jessie materialized beside the table, carrying a platter. Enough food on there to feed everyone in the Desire projects.

  “We’ve gone to finger-food heaven,” Catherine said.

  “Anyone works here gets fed free. Gator tails,” pointing. “Catfish. Meatballs in my own marinara. Pickles-I make them, too. Slices of chicken breast marinated in barbeque sauce and grilled.”

  “Good, Jessie,” I said. “This makes an awful lot of sense. I put in six minutes, tops, helping out, and that mainly because we need coffee, so you spend twice that putting this platter together.”

  He shrugged and went back to his kitchen, only place he ever felt right.

  “Have to admit it’s one hell of a coincidence,” Garces went on. “Dickensian. But life’s never story-shaped. I kept thinking: Whatever’s being said here, it’s not what’s being said.”

  There were, along with gator tails, catfish, meatballs, chicken and sliced vegetables, small pots of ranch dressing, mustard with hot peppers chopped into it, a dish of fresh cilantro and mint. We all tucked in. Don went off towards the kitchen to confer with Jessie, then to the bar, and brought back beers.

  “Now you work here,” I said, “and he’s gonna bring more.”

  “No end to it.”

  “We’ll never get out of here.”

  “I go home and start poking about, using this loose network that’s developed over the years.”

  “One you used to find Alouette.”

  “The same. Social workers like myself, psychiatric nurses, aides, people from support groups, family members, expatients. Not too many of those at first. Lots more these past few years. Whole thing’s fishing, drop in tackle and flies, hope for strikes. Nothing jumps right out, maybe for a while, maybe never. But that’s what I do.

  “Then one night I can’t get to sleep, finally give up on fighting the bedclothes-it’s so bad that ditties from Carmen and old Randy Newman songs are running loose in my head, rattling around in there like marbles. And the bedclothes are definitely winning, they’ve pinned me eight times out of ten. So after an hour of watching bad movies on TV, women warriors whose acting consists of contorting their mouths, male leads so stupid you wonder how they ever managed to find the dryer and hair spray, I settled down in front of the computer and tossed out a few new lines. Most of them just went spinning on out and didn’t catch anywhere, as usual. But one or two snagged, got responses that brought up new queries, suggested some direction or flight path I hadn’t thought of before. I started feeling my way carefully, like crossing a muddy field on stepping-stones. Around four that morning I found myself talking to a bus driver who’d spent nineteen months in a clinic up near Fort Worth. Bus driver now, but back before the breakdown he’d been a pilot. Not only was his insurance good but his family had money, so he wound up there, one of those got-it-covered private asylums, instead of across the river at Mandeville.

  “His name’s Tony Sinclair. Once he started getting better, he asked if there was anything he could do to help out. Always been a hard worker and couldn’t stand the inactivity anymore, feeling so useless, he told me. So he started out doing this and that, not much of anything at all at first, really. Reading to other patients, walking with them out on the grounds, helping them get dressed or write letters home, that kind of thing. But gradually he took on more and more. Before long he’d worked his way into the back wards and was helping take care of the really sick ones. Got to know some of them pretty well, that last year.”

  A face appeared in the window beside us, in the scant space left at one edge of the ancient lettering, J E S S E ’S, above placards pitching gospel shows and revivals. The man’s breath fogged the glass, which partially cleared then fogged again with another breath and another, so that, frost building by increments, bit by bit his face disappeared. He wore three or four shirts, a hunter’s cap with earflaps, shiny wool trousers held up by suspenders, one side of which had been replaced by hemp twine.

  “Sinclair’s the kind of guy you instinctively trust and want to talk to. He wasn’t, no way I’d be up hitting keys back and forth to him at four or five in the morning.”

  “People like that make good investigators,” Don said.

  “They make great social workers and therapists, too. Only problem is, they tend to burn out…. Anyhow, some of these guys on back wards started talking to him, guys who hadn’t said anything to anyone, some of them, for years. Not that there’s any kind of dialogue or conversation going on, understand. But things would just jump out there from time to time.

  “Early one morning Sinclair’s attending this young man, he’s in his thirties, name given as Danny Eskew. White skin, straight dark hair, negroid features. According to records he’s not only mentally ill-schizophrenia-but also severely retarded. Anoxic insult, they figured. Sinclair’s not so sure. He’s noticed Eskew’s eyes following him around the room, wondering who he is maybe, what he’s doing here. Blinds are open, Sinclair’s shaving him, and just as he lifts the razor, a shaft of sunlight catches on it, gets thrown, blindingly, up onto the wall.

  “‘Sharp,’ Eskew blurts out as his eyes find it.

  “‘Razor’s too sharp?’ Maybe he was hurting him.

  “‘Light.’

  “He waited, but that was it. Week or so later, he was reading to this guy, The Count of Monte Cristo, only thing he could find in the hospital library that looked interesting, when Eskew spoke up again.

  “‘No … story,’ he said.

  “‘What do you mean?’ Then: ‘Danny?’

 
; “A long time went by, Sinclair said, before Eskew said anymore. Then he said: ‘Me.’

  “Hackles rose when I heard that. Hair standing up on my neck, what the Russians call chicken skin. Sinclair’d had much the same response, which is why he passed it along to me. That was it, though: the last thing he ever heard from Danny Eskew. ‘Maybe I’m reading too much into it. Maybe I’ve been doing that all along,’ he said.

  “I didn’t think so. But it was definitely time for me to surface, flip things over to official sites. So I logged on and started raking records for psychiatric facilities and private clinics in or around Fort Worth. Dredged up lots of nothing at first-not that I expected much else. I called in to work to let them know I’d be late, might not even make it at all, and kept going.”

  “But you knew where he, this Sinclair, was.”

  “Which helped not much at all. Records from facilities like that are locked down tight. They call themselves private and they damn well mean to stay that way. That’s a large part of their appeal, and what clients pay for.

  “So what I’m doing is backtracking. Looking for ghosts, echoes, footprints on the beach. Records from local hospitals, say, from years back. Parkland, John Peter Smith. Those are public records and accessible-at least partially. Same with social services like Child Welfare, MHMR. Or schools, whose counselors and nurses often note what others fail to.

  “Sometimes you only have to snag one loose end, a single thread. I found my strand a little after ten this morning and started worrying at it, hopscotching off a couple of Dallas-area hospital admissions. The second admission carried a court date-court’s held right there in MDC, just up Harry Hines from Parkland-but it got canceled for no apparent reason, and at the last moment. We’re talking pro forma here, cookiecutter. Cancellations like that just do not happen.

  “But at that point, whatever weirdness is going on, I’ve got a fix on him. He’s in the system. Lawyers and conservators can tuck him away, but they can’t hide him. Another hour or so on the phone, I’ve got a rough history.”

  “Lawyers and conservators,” I said.

  “Mm-hm.”

  Our Gentleman of the Half Suspenders was back at the window. Holding up a burger proudly, he proceeded to eat it for us. Grease worked its way along his whiskery chin; catsup, mustard and saliva splattered onto the glass. Finished, he wiped hands on wool pants and blew us a kiss.

  “Plan on seeing Dr. Guidry anytime soon?”

  “Why?”

  Don and Rick exchanged glances.

  “When you do, you might ask about Danny Eskew.”

  “Yeah,” Don said. “Ask him how his son’s doing.”

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  “Let me assure you, Mr. Griffin, there’s absolutely no way, no way at all … this young man … could be involved.”

  This young man.

  “Dr. Guidry first learned of his existence,” Catherine said after a moment, “when Danny was fifteen, and then only because the boy had come onto such trouble. The mother was at wit’s end, with nowhere else to turn.”

  “And she is …?”

  “A former secretary.”

  Guidry’s face was turned towards the window. He could have been remembering this woman he’d briefly loved so long ago. Or watching dark angels of regret gather out on the schoolyard.

  “He’s never felt any connection or kinship to the boy. Why should he? But he has, from the moment he learned of the boy’s existence, taken full responsibility for his care.”

  “Removing all authority from the mother-”

  “At her express request, yes.”

  “And committing his son for life.”

  “What else was he to do, Lewis? The boy is incapacitated, profoundly ill. This isn’t some prime-time TV show where he’s going to snap out of it in the last five minutes and head over to the mall on a shopping spree.”

  “Yet he seems to have been normal up till what-fourteen, fifteen?”

  “That’s often when mental illness begins to manifest itself, especially schizophrenia.”

  “No indication of deficiency, retardation.”

  “At that point, no.” Giving me her full attention, she also managed somehow to keep an eye on Guidry, whose head again had lowered onto his chest, coaxing forth soft snores.

  “Danny’s first serious hospitalization was in a satellite clinic in Oak Cliff, one of a dozen or more communities thronging around Dallas to make up the Metroplex. Six weeks, by court order. Fifth week, he took the meds he’d been hoarding all that time, fifty, sixty pills, maybe more. They didn’t find him till morning, just after seven, when an orderly went through bouncing beds and calling out. His head lay in a pool of vomit. Respirations were shallow, down to six or so, barely visible. The orderly screamed for help and started mouth-to-mouth. Danny came back, but he’d been down a while. His brain had gone too long without adequate oxygen. It was shortly after that that the boy’s mother got in touch with Dr. Guidry.”

  “Did Guidry visit? Actually see Danny face-to-face?”

  “Once. He never spoke of it afterwards.”

  “So the boy’s care fell to others.”

  “To the same group of lawyers and advisors who oversee all his financial affairs, yes.”

  “Then he would have received regular reports.”

  “He did.”

  “Did he read them?”

  “I can’t say. They were passed along to him.”

  “Up the food chain. By?”

  “Myself, for some years now. Others before I came.”

  “Secretaries, you mean. Personal assistants.”

  “Yes.”

  We’d been speaking as though he were no longer in the room, which, in a sense, he wasn’t. But now Guidry’s head rose. He turned his gaze to us, eyes clear.

  “I can say, Mr. Griffin.” He grimaced as pain thrust and withdrew. “I read every word, many times over. If words could be used up, those would have been empty shells, nothing more. Hundreds upon hundreds of them. Empty shells.”

  I watched as something else, something in its own way as substantial as the pain, arrived.

  “One summer, long ago, my parents rented a cabin up in Arkansas, a place called Maddox Bay. Near your homeland, I believe. Beautiful country.”

  “Others think so. I could never see it.”

  “Often one doesn’t…. Generally we vacationed on Grand Isle, where my grandparents owned a cabin, or over in Biloxi. One of my earliest memories is of Biloxi, green trees and grass, then a low wall and nothing else but sand to water’s edge-sand they had to ship in truckload by truckload from somewhere else, though of course I didn’t know that at the time. They had two or three of these squat, blocky, ugly things called Ducks, aquatic landing vehicles left over from the war, and they’d take tourists for rides in them.

  “Nothing like that on Maddox Bay, though. Nothing for tourists. Just a lot of thrown-together shacks, porches and patios tacked onto cheap aluminum trailers set up on blocks. Boats with outboard motors the size of oil drums coursed in and out from rough docks or slid directly down muddy banks into scummy water. I loved the way they’d slow, cut back to almost nothing, whenever they passed other boats with people fishing, then rev back up. Fishermen cleaned their catch on the bank, tossing scales, fins, heads and intestines back in the water.

  “One late afternoon I came walking out of the woods, bank neither dull, dirt nor mud here but heaped with seashells, hundreds of them, thousands, that glinted powerfully in late sunlight, crunching as I walked into them. They appeared whole at first, but when I bent to pick one up and looked closely, not much was left: only the overall form, a patchwork of narrow bridges between round holes.

  “Buttons, my father explained when I told him of my discovery. They’d punched out holes in all those shells to make buttons, then dumped them there, in mounds.”

  His eyes strayed again to the window, back to us.

  “There was a point to all this. Really there was.”

&nb
sp; “You need to rest now,” Catherine said.

  “You’re right, my dear. One of many things I need. Most of which I’ll never have.”

  She took him off to bed and, twenty minutes later, returned, sinking down beside me on the steel-gray leather couch.

  “I had to let him tell you, Lewis. It wasn’t my place to do so.”

  “I understand.”

  For a time then, we sat without speaking.

  “I’m so tired. I can’t even begin to imagine how he must feel.”

  “Someday you have to tell me how you came to be here, doing this,” I said.

  “Does it really seem that strange to you?”

  “Ever the more, as I get to know you.”

  “Then someday I will.” Her head rested against my shoulder. “I’ve always been a sucker for men who say ever the more.”

  Moments later, she was asleep.

  “I’m faxing through a list of employees from that period. To Assistant Superintendent Santos at NOPD, right?”

  “Right.” My own fax hadn’t worked in years. Don suggested Santos, who agreed over the phone with a verbal shrug.

  “This is all … unorthodox, Mr. Griffin.”

  “I appreciate that, Dr. Ball. And I thank you for your help.”

  “I do have assurances from my colleague Richard Garces and from Captain Don Walsh-”

  Captain Emeritus, I’d have to start calling him.

  “-both of whom vouch for you personally, and for the legitimacy of your request. They explained what was going on here. God knows women in our society are prey to enough, without this sort of thing. I can only hope the information will help you.”

  “Yes, sir. I’m sure it will.”

  “The list should at any rate be with Officer Santos now. I’ve alerted my secretary, Miss Eddington-”

  For a moment I thought he said Errington.

  “-that you may call back. She should be able to help you with any further information or assistance you need.”