Ghost of a Flea (14 page)

I OPENED MY EYES. Another eye hovered inches away, regarding mine. A rat. Its whiskers twitched. Obviously, whatever I was, I was too big to eat here. But he could go get help, haul me back home for later.

I sat up. Hard to believe what effort that took. For a moment the rat stood watching. But I was moving around now, no longer an easy target, alleyway carryout. The rat moved off towards the wall, sniffing at better prospects there.

I was, indeed, in an alley.
I think we are in rat’s alley where the dead men lost their bones.
But I wasn’t dead. I wouldn’t feel this bad if I were dead.

Yards off, doorway-size, an oblong of street and buildings showed. Light spilled from the doorway. Out there, cars passed, people hurried by on foot, life went on. Brick walls around me, a three-foot pile of black garbage bags, Dumpster marked Autumn House.

I felt at my pockets. Wallet gone. Money. One arm of my sportcoat torn almost away, tie crushed, blood and dirt ground into my shirt, one shoe off and possibly gone missing.

Back home, on my own, I’d found the release and deliverance of literature. Here in the city I’d been introduced to another: alcohol. And I’d taken to it, as my father would have said, like a duck to water.
River was whiskey and I was a duck,
bluesman Buster Robinson sang,
I’d dive to the bottom and never come up.

Bracing myself on the brick wall, I stood. Life’s oblong there at the mouth of the alley wobbled and stood still. I staggered towards it. Last thing I could remember was this long conversation with a cabdriver in some anonymous bar off Canal, vague impressions of new rounds being ordered and other folk arriving and departing, among them two young women in town from Alabama who agreed to accompany us to the Seven Seas for a splash of true New Orleans. Then it all went blank.

Blanks and blurs were things I got used to.

I also got used to squad cars and cops asking questions.

“Bad night, boy?” one of them said. He stood, legs wide apart, just outside the alley. And barely out of high school from the look of him.

“You’d appear to be some beat up.” That was the other one, hanging close by the car. Over the years, quantities of food dished up in New Orleans portions had made him a walking equator. Limp hair that looked like a fig leaf draped across his scalp. “You okay?”

I ducked my head, ambiguously. Could be agreeing, indicating I didn’t know. Say as little as possible always: I’d learned that.

“Where you from?”

I tried, but for the life of me I couldn’t come up with an address. Too many cheap apartments and rooms, the latest of them taken just a few days back. Some place off Jefferson, I thought.

“From the city, then.”

“Like we didn’t know?”

“Gonna take a little ride here.”

Led to the car, I saw cement canals, establishments on the far shore. Metairie, then. Metairie cops were famous for picking up homeless and ferrying them back just across the line to New Orleans, dropping them there. Police equivalent of sweeping dirt under the rug. Threat dealt with. City’s problem now.

Truth to tell, I fared little better back on familiar turf. Next time I woke, it was to similar environment and circumstances. The Metairie cops had dropped me off on Jefferson Highway and I’d started making my way towards home. Somewhere just the other side of Claiborne two guys came up and asked if I could help them with bus fare. They were pissed when I said I couldn’t and
really
pissed when they found out I’d told them the truth and had nothing, no money, absolutely nothing of worth or use, on me.

“Sir, are you okay?”

From all evidence, no.

New Orleans’s finest this time. Again I’m slumped up against a building somewhere and it’s morning. Again I make it slowly to my feet.

“MAYBE you should call him.”

“Maybe
you
should stop giving people advice.”

Seven in the morning. Had I intentionally waited till I knew Larson would be gone, Alouette crowded for time?

“I’m sorry, Lew. That was uncalled for.”

I shrugged.

“But you’re right, these letters may be getting to me more than I admit, even to myself. Not that I understand why. There’s really not much
there
there. Nothing substantial, no real menace, all implication—if even that.” She paused. “Anyway, we’ve been out here on this train platform together before, Lewis. You can’t fix the lives of everyone you care for. You should be paying attention to your own.”

“I know.”

“Of course you know.” Her tone brought the word
exasperation
to mind. “David’s been gone how long now? What have you done about that?”

“He doesn’t want to be found.”

“Maybe not. But that begs the question, doesn’t it? You love David. You don’t want him out on the streets again.”

“What I want isn’t the important thing.”

“You know what it’s like, Lewis. You
know
.”

I nodded.

“So instead, you set yourself on a crusade to run down this guy who’s never done anything, who may just
possibly
be a stalker, but who might just as well be a good enough guy, maybe he’s only a little slow, a little backwards. Or you go galumphing out on your horse to try and Sam Spade some pigeon killers. Desperate men for sure.”

“I don’t know … sometimes it’s only when you don’t look on directly that you’re able to see a thing.”

“True enough. And birds who don’t find food for days at a time begin pecking up gravel and sand, preening themselves uncontrollably. It’s called displacement behavior.”

“Maybe you’ve been a social worker too long, dear.”

“And you—”

“—too long a fuck-up?”

“Well. As a longtime social worker, of course, I’d prefer
troubled
. Or
conflicted
.” She laughed. “Hold on a minute, the baby’s crying.” Not that shrill, fruit-bat cry you hear so often, but something at a lower pitch, human, authentic, that quickly subsided. Then Alouette was back. “For all of it, Lewis, you’re still far and away the truest person I’ve known, and the kindest.”

“I’d be flattered if it weren’t for the fact that the work you do tends to limit exposure to possible competitors.”

“There is that.” She laughed again, a full-bodied, rich, rolling laugh. Her mother’s laugh. “And while I’d love to go on discussing philosophy with you, absolutely one of my favorite pastimes at seven in the morning, God knows, looking out on a brick wall with the smell of soiled diapers lugging up behind me, I really do have to get to work.”

“We all have our burdens.”

“Ah, yes. The many responsibilities our freedom entails. As that brick wall—I’m sure Heidegger and Sartre must point out somewhere—demonstrates.”

I hung up the phone and carried mine (burdens, responsibilities) out to the kitchen like any good Southerner and, sitting at the table there, doused them with quantities of coffee. Times past,
dans le temps
as Vicky would put it, this is where we’d all gather, LaVerne and myself, Cherie, Clare, Don in the months he stayed with us, Alouette, David, half a dozen others over the years. Now I sat alone with haphazard hands of plates, cups and saucers dealt out across the Formica surface, brambles of cutlery, a jar of crystallized honey, plastic tumbler with half an inch of milk left at the bottom. Fanned beside them a week or two of mail. Pick a card. Electric, water and gas bills, lots of circulars, Visa, offers from video clubs, cable, Internet and other service providers, dues for the Authors Guild, plot rent for my parents’ graves. Another stack of Deborah’s working notes, which, though done with, would live here, I knew, until I found them new quarters. She’d left a note tacked to the fridge.

Hey.

Bat in his characteristic way suddenly appeared, leaping to the table, and sat watching me, tail sweeping slow, serpentine S’s. Nothing’s more important than the connections we make to others. It’s all we have, finally. We move towards one another and away, close again, all these half-planned, intricate steps and patterns. Stand there far too often holding our bagloads of good intentions, shifting them from hip to hip, looking foolish.

Bat leaned onto his front legs and stretched, rump pushed up, to show what he thought of my reveries. By way of thanks, I fed him.

I may not have hobbled down to the park, but it felt like it. According to doctors and therapists, there were no sequelae from the stroke, only a little residual weakness, which was to be expected. Neither Deborah nor Don admitted to being able to see any compromise or debility, any change in the way I got around. But I’d go to push up out of a chair and find myself grabbing at things—not so much that I couldn’t perform the physical act as that the world no longer represented itself to me as stable, dependable. I wondered if this was what Clare had felt, this pause, like a shield or a window, between intent and action, desire and spasm. Lester sat looking out over the park, a sheen of sweat, like varnish that hadn’t taken, on the mahogany of his forehead.

“Lewis,” he said as I sank onto the bench beside him. “How you doing?”

“Good enough, all things considered.”

“You’ve been poorly then? Know I’ve missed seeing you.”

I filled him in on my hospital stay.

He nodded. “Thing is, over the years you commence to spending so much time there, those hospital stays get to be like bus rides for you. Ain’t the way you’d
choose
to travel, but you know that’s the only way you’re ’bout to get from one place to another now.”

We were all but alone in the park. A scatter of unfamiliar faces. I asked Lester about this.

“People done got scared, I think, some of them anyway. Pondering if what killed them birds might not just come after them ’n’ their children next.”

“The deaths haven’t stopped, then?”

Lester nodded, not in agreement this time, indicating.

“Look at that sorry flock. What, ten or twelve birds? And most of
them
gimped up one way or another. You remember how it used to be, Lewis. They’d come in in swarms. Something startled them and they took off, all those wings, it was like this sudden great wind. They’d all but shut off the sun for a moment or two.” He sipped his drink, one or another of those horribly sweet concoctions, Zima or such, pitched to us blacks, and laughed. “’Course, this far along, remembering how things used to be starts looming large for us, doesn’t it? We don’t be careful, that can get to be
all
we think about.”

He took another sip. The container hovered in the hinterland between dumbbell-and vase-shaped, label bright red and blue. Some sort of dog on it? A naked woman? Could even be a truck. “You ever tried this shit?”

I shook my head.

“Don’t.”

The hand holding the abomination lifted, two ruler-long fingers unfurling.

“Walk over to the other side of those bushes, Lewis, and you’ll come across a fair stretch of grave sites. Lots of birds been laid to rest back there. We put them in the ground ourselves, the boy and me. Just a few at first, then sometimes, later on, as many as three or four a day. With whatever ceremony we could manage.”

He put the container, mostly empty, on the bench beside him. A group of Hispanic teens sat together atop a slide, stretch of dark midriff showing between the girl’s sweater and skirt, guys exhibiting their own brand of midriff: two inches or so of boxer shorts peeked out over low-slung denims. Thirty degrees out and they’ve got skin showing. Tough kids.

“Boy won’t come with me anymore,” Lester said. “Almost got him here a couple of times. Tell him we were going for a walk, maybe we’d stop off for doughnuts after. But then he’d see where we were going and commence to crying and shaking. You remember how much he loved being here, Lewis. It’s a sad thing, truly sad. Boy don’t have much. His room, the park. Now half that’s got taken from him.”

Lester sat shaking his head. “Maybe there really
isn’t
any more to it. Maybe it
don’t
make sense and ain’t meant to. Vanity and vexation of the spirit, just like it says in Ecclesiastes.”

He laid a hand on my knee and I found myself wondering if in all these years we’d ever before touched. Surely we’d at least shaken hands. Right: that single, pained handshake.

“Good seeing you again, Lewis. Good that you’re up and about again, too.”

“That’s a lot of goods for someone quoting Ecclesiastes, downer of all downers, just moments ago.”

“What can I say?” The hand came up off my leg; those impossibly long fingers unfolded in the space before us and moved there expressively, putting me in mind of branches in gentle wind, of Dante: Half into life’s journey I came to myself within a dark wood where the straight way was lost. “It’s a character flaw. Try as I will, no matter how I practice and worry over it, I simply can
not
stay glum for very long.” He pushed himself up off the bench. “I’d best be getting back to the boy now.”

I said good-bye, that I’d see him soon.

“Maybe, if you found time, you might even come see the boy again? I think, when you did, that was good for him. I noticed a difference just after.”

“I’ll plan on it, then.”

He looked off momentarily, adrift on his own thoughts. “Good.”

The teens, when I approached them, had some trouble deciding between wary, smart-ass or antagonistic as best response. One of the boys popped the joint they’d been sharing into his mouth and swallowed.

“¿Que hay?” I asked. “¿De dónde son?”

Whatchu care? one of the kids wanted to know.

I told them.

“That boy? We seen him, sure. He ain’t right.”

They went in and out of Spanish as they spoke.

“Always with that same old man you been sittin’ wif.”

To them I was just one of a string of old guys without a clue. At worst a cop, child welfare agent or some other meddler from the outside world, otherwise someone inconsequential, and in either case so far outside the orbit of their lives as scarcely to exist. The Spanish helped. I didn’t come within a mile of speaking it well but, thanks to Rick Garces, on a good day with the wind blowing my way, I could fake it.

Guardedly they allowed as how, yeah, man, they were here most days, so? Had they taken any notice of the pigeons? Rats, they said, rats with wings, that’s what we call them. There used to be a lot of them.

Sure did.

But now there’s only a handful left.

He’s right, they told one another.

“Someone’s been poisoning them.”

The teens had stopped looking back and forth among themselves. Now they all looked at me. What they want to do that for? one asked. Yeah, don’t kill nothin’ you don’t plan to eat.

“Cases like this,” I said, “usually it’s someone from the neighborhood. Someone with a grudge, some private agenda. Maybe they’ve been hanging around, on the edge of things, face at the back of the crowd you never quite notice.”

Hey man, we don’t notice, how we goan tell you ’bout it?

Good point.

’Sides, it ain’t like we spend the day here.

Yeah, we be out here during lunch and once school lets out.

But that’s it for us, mister, we got other things to do. What’s that word you used? Agendas.

Fuck agendas, man.

Yeah, we got lives.

Gracias, I told them. Gracias por su ayuda.

De nada.

Hey, one of them called out, this time in English, as I turned. You need to talk to Mister Bones. He
always
here.

And it turned out that he was, though in all these years I’d never seen him. If I had, I’d have remembered, what with chicken bones through septum and earlobes African fashion and an Amerind-style breastplate of the same. If this had been a cartoon, some toothy black man would be doing a Lionel Hampton on those. Mister Bones never came in the park—something bad had happened here long past, he told me later—but neither was he ever far away. Mostly he resided under the porch of the abandoned house opposite. Had a mattress, most of a sleeping bag, boxes of canned and dry goods down there. Or else, when things got wet, he’d make his way up into the tree house some kids had built half a century back and half a block down in a massive water oak. Today, as usual, he was under the house. I shouted ahead then started under myself, thinking how my grandfather, working as builder, spent much of his life crawling under houses like this, crippled leg and all, fitting pipe, splicing wire, shoring foundations.

Somewhere in the back of my mind I had to be wondering, too, just what the hell I was doing. Alouette was right. My son had disappeared, my god-daughter was receiving anonymous threats, I’d just got scraped up off the floor with the medical equivalent of a spatula—and here I was, fiftyodd years old, snaking under a house to try and find out who’s been killing pigeons. Strange life all around.

“You the tax man,” he said, “or one of Mr. Hoover’s minions, you just might as well go on back out of here, and fast.”

I told him who I was.

“Lew Griffin.” He grunted. “Think I may’ve done heard some ’bout you.”

“Oh?”