Ghost of a Flea (20 page)

AT FIRST I couldn’t think why I knew the place, then remembered: the ex-ranger back at the pigeon hunters’ apartment.

Hoppin Jon’s. From outside it looked like a cement bunker. Inside, it was one room the size of a dance hall or bowling alley. At the far end, a low brick wall set off kitchen area and cooks; a round bar stood dead center. Otherwise the floor space was broken only by homemade tables of whitewashed wood, some of them small, others picnic-size, pushed about the floor into casual combinations and collisions. Even now, at breakfast, the place smelled, as so many New Orleans restaurants do, of fried shrimp.

Three dozen or so patrons sat, stood or milled about. Looked a little like a prison yard during an eclipse. Most of them had plates of food, all of them had drinks. The drinks came in what appeared to be honest-to-God jelly glasses. Terence Braly was at a communal table halfway in. Santos had remained behind at the door as we entered; now he leaned easily against the wall, looking around with no expression on his face. Don had kept moving to take position in the rear, near bathrooms and whatever exit they or the kitchen might offer. When I sat down by him, our boy’s friends all found their feet and went away. Most of them no doubt saw me come in with Santos and Don and figured us all for cops. The others just had feelers out—kind of work they did, they developed feelers—and knew when to (as Chandler said) be missing.

“Ex
cuse
me,” he said. White, five-six or right around there, dark hair with tight curls. Pushing thirty but hanging back in the breezeway. He still had on his hospital uniform. He’d unzipped the green top. A ribbed undershirt showed beneath; his employee badge, alligator-clipped to the collar, flapped underarm. White pants bore a permanent crease you could use to slice bagels. Shoes white too, Reeboks, recently polished but with traces of grime and possibly dry blood around eyelets and seams. “Do you
mind
?”

Smiling, I said nothing, and moved still closer to him. Sensed, as though they were my own, heartbeat and respirations increasing.

“I know you?”

“Nope.” I reached over and picked up his glass. Took, as my old friend O’Carolan and several centuries of traditional singers might say, a healthy dram. Put the glass back exactly where it had been, in the ring it came out of. “Okay, one question down, nine to go.”

“Man,” he said, drawing the
n
out to its breaking point, “that’s my fucking drink. You wanta get out of my face here?”

“No. Eight.”

He took a long breath. Maybe a change of tactic was in order. “Look, man, whatever your thing is, can we get into it some other time? Been a long night, I’m just not up to this.”

“Those old folks do take their toll, don’t they?”

He braced himself from glancing at me and instead looked off, something he’d seen tough guys do in movies. Eyes stayed there in the middle distance when he spoke.

“Man, whoever you are, I don’t have anything you need, you know? And what I do have, you don’t want.”

But he was crimping. Part of the reason he did the work he did and hung on to it was that it allowed him a control wholly absent from the rest of his life. Whatever tension or danger he faced, whatever bad guys, the weight of authority bulked behind him, the deliverance of routine bore him up. Now he found himself face-to-face with one of those bad guys outside the palace grounds, no one else around, rules gone south.

I put my hand over his, joints bulky as pecans beneath my palm, and bore down. When he tried to pull away, for a moment I bore down still harder, then let him withdraw.

“Maybe I could buy you a drink,” I said. “Several drinks.”

Cage door left open, free at last, free at last, his eyes came back to me.

“Okay. Tha’d be all right.”

“Canadian Club and 7-Up, right?”

“Sweet…. Don’t worry, man. I saw your posse, I ain’t going nowhere. They step back long enough to let me have a piss, you think?”

“Absolutely. Nod to Cerberus as you go by, guy in the yellow shirt. Best keep your distance, though. He recently got shot. It’s made him edgy.”

“I hear you.” He started off towards the back as Don and I exchanged glances. I snagged a CC-and-7 and a brandy at the bar, waited for Terence back at the table.

“Alouette says hello,” I told him, pushing the drink his way.

He picked it up and took a long pull. “Damn that’s good. Guess I’m screwed, huh?”

“Sure looks that way.”

“So how’d you find me?”

“Does it matter?”

He shrugged.

We’d flagged his name, along with others, on the list of employees sent us by Dr. Ball. He’d been an orderly at the psychiatric facility in Fort Worth, assigned for the most part (a call to Dr. Ball’s Miss Eddington disclosed) to back wards, when Tony Sinclair was there, and left shortly thereafter. Over the next several years, as Rick was able to track, his name showed up on rosters at half a dozen or more facilities in Louisiana, Alabama and Texas. Now he worked at a geriatric hospital here in the city. Most human resources records are elliptical, Rick said, and in a kind of code, but it isn’t a hard code to read, and what it comes down to is that Terence had started getting too close to his patients, identifying with them, claiming communication and levels of interaction no one else ever witnessed.

“I didn’t mean to hurt anyone.”

“I’m willing to believe that.”

I’d never drunk Courvoisier from a jelly glass before. Aroma and taste of the brandy coloring my world, smoothing it, pulling things together as it always does, I told him who I was. Told him about LaVerne and our life together, how I’d gone looking for Alouette and found her up in Mississippi with her baby. How after the baby died, I brought her home. How she’d stayed around a while, left, and years later returned.

“She was on the streets, then.”

I nodded. “You didn’t know much about her.”

“No. I didn’t.” He looked off again, nothing histrionic about it this time, and for some moments grew silent. “I thought I was helping. I was trying to.”

I got us new drinks at the bar. Terence sampled his and said, “I was on the street myself till I was nineteen, twenty. Starting when I was, I don’t know, ten? eleven?”

“What happened to your parents?”  

He shrugged. “They died, maybe. Or I ran off. I don’t remember much of anything before being on the streets, really. Seems like I was always out there. I learned everything I know from people I met—how to get along, how to find food, where to sleep. I’d watch them, copy what they did. Got older, I started wondering if there was a me somewhere in there. Maybe I was just this pasteup, this artificial thing. A bad copy, you know?”

All signs being that our boy wasn’t going to bolt or attack, Don and Santos came in from the field.

“You gonna be okay here, Griffin?” Santos said.

I nodded.

“Then I better get back to the work the citizens pay me for.”

“I’m grabbing breakfast. You want anything, Lew?” Don asked. He started off.

“Captain …” Santos said.

“Yeah?”

“Dinner, man. That rain check you’ve been holding has to be faded out by now. My wife’s a patient woman, but you put it off much longer she’s likely to turn up at your door. One thing you don’t want’s a pissed-off Cuban coming round. I ever tell you about the time her father ran into Lee Harvey Oswald on the street handing out communist pamphlets?”

“I’ll check with Jeanette, give you a call.”  

Santos nodded to Don, then to me. He headed for the door, Red Sea of patrons parting before him.

“Every few months,” Terence went on, “I’d get scooped up off the streets and sent to some holding center, or farmed out to foster homes. I’d escape—one time, I crawled out through holes knocked in old walls to make room for
air-conditioning,
another time I hid in barrels of garbage—or more often I’d just walk away.

“Then late one afternoon I ran smack into a wall I couldn’t get through or around. Don’t think I didn’t try. But instead of packing me off upstate or exiling me to some godawful suburb, Judge Branning took me home with him. The house was filled with kids, three or four of them his own (I was never sure how many or which), the rest a mixture of neighborhood kids, other kids hooked up with one or the other for schoolwork or projects, and kids who’d come through his court and still dropped by from time to time.

“I wasn’t a kid, of course, and I made sure they all knew that. Way I walked, talked, way I kept myself apart from the rest. I’d been on my own a long time. Late that night, the judge found me out on the porch. Everyone else was either gone or in bed. I was sitting there with my feet hanging off. He’d had a few drinks by then—Judge loved his bourbon—and his speech was a little slurred.

“‘Don’t do what most of us do, son,’ he said. ‘Don’t get along towards the end of your life, look around you, and realize you’ve wasted it.’

“That’s all he said. We sat there, him on the big swing, me on the floor by the edge. A shooting star sliced through the sky. Cars and trucks passed by on the street, heavier traffic out on the interstate. ‘How you figure I can get ’round that?’ I asked him. ‘I been thinkin’ on it,’ he said. ‘I still am.’

“Next morning he took me down to the local hospital. Not to the employment office, but right on into the hospital administrator’s. ‘Got a good man here,’ he said after he’d introduced us, ‘who needs good work.’ Administrator looked me over. ‘Well, I don’t know about good,’ he said, ‘but we sure enough got
hard
work needs doing. Good might come later.’ Judge looked over at me: ‘What you think?’ ‘I reckon that should do for now,’ I told them.”

Don rejoined us bearing a plate of eggs, sausage, home fries and toast aswim in grease.

“Yum.”

“Get your own.”

“One way or another,” Terence said, “I been at it ever since. Felt like I was doing something that mattered, you know? Not just moving papers around, trying to sell people something they don’t need.” I nodded.

“Funny thing can happen to people who work health care for a long time. I don’t know, maybe they just see too much, reach some kind of limit. Or have to protect themselves. But they lose sight of what it’s all about, stop feeling anything for those they’re taking care of. Not hard to see how that might happen, but with me it was just the opposite. More time I spent doing the work, the more I felt for those I was caring for, the more I wanted to do for them. Taking care of their basic needs, medical needs, just being there, wasn’t enough anymore.”

“Danny Eskew, for instance.”  

“Right. You know what it’s like to be rejected by your family, cast off like old clothing, furniture that clashes with new curtains? He was the man in the iron mask, shut away for life from everything human. Sitting there unable to feed himself, messing himself as often as not, staring at walls and waiting—with nothing to wait for. Meanwhile there’s this family elsewhere, this half-sister his father absolutely adores. Danny knew all that. How do you think it made him feel?”

“The doctors taking care of him say there’s no way he could have known.”

“Psychiatrists …”  

“And even if he did know, there’s no way he could have communicated it.”

“Not to them. But I think I knew the first time I walked into his room. It’s like that sometimes. You walk close enough to them, their soul leaps into your own. It’s an electric arc. Blue, and all but blinding—you can almost smell it afterwards. Like a welder’s torch.”

“You guys want another drink?” Don asked.

“No. No, I don’t think so. But thanks, man.” I shook my head.

“Okay. So you identified with Danny Eskew. I can understand that. What I’m not clear on is how you get from there to stalking Alouette.”

“No, no. That’s not it, not at all, I don’t identify with Danny. This has nothing to do with me. Stalking her? God, no. I’m only trying to help. The girl doesn’t know about her brother, doesn’t even know he exists. She should. And he’s stranded, marooned, all alone. I’m just a channel, a conduit, from Danny to his sister. Through me he’s reaching out, speaking to her.”

“There on the porch, for instance?”

“I’m sorry about that. I didn’t think she was home. When I heard her coming out, I panicked—started to run, then in my confusion turned around and ran right into her. I’m glad she wasn’t hurt.”

“Where’d William Blake come from?” Don said suddenly. You’d have sworn he hadn’t been paying the least attention.

“Another patient of mine. Old soul, he called himself. Always going on about Madame Blavatsky, Nostradamus, Native Americans. Had a book about Blake on top of a stack of them in his room. I picked it up one morning and it fell open to this picture of a painting, some kind of monster walking across a wooden floor, with curtains right by him so that it looks like he’s on a stage. The book was there for me to find. Instantly I realized that I’d known that painting forever, though I’d never seen it before. Since then I’ve read everything by and about Blake there is…. Maybe I
will
have that drink.

“Blake talked to angels, you know,” he said when Don came back with our drinks.

“Yeah. Yeah, I heard that. You?”

Terence nodded. “They don’t answer very often, though.”

AS WE STOOD by the front door saying final things that morning, a youngish man in watch cap and sweater had come to the window outside. In the moment before the frost of his breath obscured it, his face showed, and when the frost cleared, he was gone. For that moment I could have sworn it was my son’s face pressed there against the glass, looking in.

Two hours later, at home trying to piece back together with coffee what brandy had torn down, I was still remembering that face outside when the phone rang.

“Lewis, haven’t seen you down to the park of late.”

“Lester. How are you?”

“Fit, thank you. Yourself?”

“I’m good…. The boy’s okay?”

“Never better. That boy and Mr. Blue are inseparable. Just sit there looking out the window for hours at a time, the both of them content as can be. Boy gets a bath, Mr. Blue has to be in there too. I fix the boy lunch, I got to fix somethin’ for Mr. Blue. Beats all I’ve seen. That was a good thing you did, Lewis.”

“I’m glad it worked out.”

“You ought to get on down to the park soon and have you a look. Bring along a good coat though, that wind’ll slice meat right off your bones. And you won’t believe it when you see it. Pigeons came sweeping back in all at the same time, like they knew. Like they were coming home. That park’s a little corner of my heart’s country—you know that. Seeing those birds again did my heart some righteous good.”

“Tell the boy I said hello?”

“I’ll surely do that. And will I be seeing you?”

“Soon. I promise.”

Hanging up, I thought for a moment how lonely Lester must be. How lonely we all are, all of us like Ulysses just trying to find our way home. And I thought about my son. Maybe there is something to this notion of karma. Maybe the good things we do—Guidry’s sponsorship of the school, Alouette’s community work, even Terence Braly’s efforts in their own way—maybe somehow these can make up for all the rest.

I’d gone out to the kitchen to pour the rest of the coffee down the sink, a healthy dram or two of Scotch into my cup, when the phone rang again. Carried cup towards the hall and dipped into it as I lifted the phone. Cast down your bucket where you are, as Booker T. Washington advised us.

“Good morning, Lew. Hope I didn’t wake you.”

“Not at all. Up and working.”

A pause, then: “Working?”

I filled her in on the past few days, Alouette, Terence Braly, these latest brambles and snags. “How are you?”

“Fine, just fine…. We opened last night. It went well. Extraordinarily well, I think…. I hoped you might be there.”

“I’m sorry.”

“That’s okay. I didn’t think you would, I just hoped.” She was quiet a moment. “Am I never going to see you again, Lew? I’d hate that. I’m not sure I could stand it.”

“You’ll see me.”

“Good.”

Doors, I thought. Their hearts do business like their doors. Apollinaire. LaVerne telling me how as a child she’d look out the back of train windows at all the people and places she passed, these lives she’d never see again, every passage a chain of good-byes. Alouette at the door when I’d ferried her home from the hospital: Our lives are an apocalypse served in a very small cup.

“I’m glad to hear things went well.”

“The place was packed, Lew. Packed. I couldn’t believe it. Blue-haired little old ladies, students lugging backpacks, even a couple of families with kids in strollers. White-faced young women in all black, bangs, clunky shoes. Others in evening dresses complete with mouth-watering show of thigh and breast. Most of one whole row was all Willie’s friends. Remember Willie? I told you about him.”

“Rap version of Greek choruses.”

“That’s the one. Calls himself Bad Dog Number Fifteen—which is how he insisted we list him on the program. And these guys, his posse he calls them, were having more fun than anyone else. Slumped down in seats with their big-legged droopy pants and oversize shirts, talking low among themselves. Willie’s a talent, Lew. A natural who came out of nowhere. He gave me a copy of this play he wrote,
British Knights
. It’s so good that after I read it I wanted to just go off somewhere and cry. I knew I could never write anything like that.”

Moments pulled themselves like discarded newspapers across the floor towards sunlight.

“I’ve been meaning to tell you this, Lew. When I was researching early theatre, I found an article on what seems to be the first real civilization. Mesopotamia, on the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates, 2500
B.C.
The Sumerians kept extensive records, etched them in a script they’d devised onto damp clay tablets which were then baked. Eventually, like all others, their civilization declined. The great libraries and record houses where they stored these tablets, these documents of what they’d been personally and collectively, of how they’d lived their lives and the
more
they’d envisioned—all this fell into ruin or burned to the ground. Walls crumbled back to stone, but the tablets remained. Fires that consumed libraries and whole cities simply turned the clay tablets brick-red, baked them to a new durability.”

“The city falls, the pillars stay.” Apollinaire again. Or stretching further back: All Pergamum is covered with thorn bushes, even its ruins have perished.

“I knew you’d like it.”

“That I’d steal it, you mean. And I will, first chance I get.”

She laughed. “I’ve got to go, Lew. The production’s been extended, it’s on through the end of the month, Tuesdays through Saturdays. Maybe longer, who knows? And maybe you’ll come some night.” Getting no response, she said, “I miss you.”

Then I stood with the phone’s black anvil in my hand, dial tone in my ear.

That morning, as we stood outside Hoppin Jon’s, me looking around to see if by any chance I could spot the youngish man who’d just been looking in, Don and I had parted.

“I know, I know. You’ll walk. Damn, I forgot to lock the thing again.” He pulled the door open and stood there in the notch. “Few more years, we’re both in those motorized wheelchairs, you’ll probably still cut out on your own. Hitch a ride behind a garbage truck, way kids do on bikes.”

“Surely it won’t come to that.”

It didn’t.

Shaking his head and grinning, Don worked the gearshift, with a moment’s maneuvering slipped into gear, and pulled away from the curb. He looked into the rearview mirror: a mask from which his eyes peered out. I waved.

Six or eight blocks down and more or less homeward, a battered Buick Regal pulled up, rocking, alongside me and a man leapt out from the driver’s seat. Sweat poured off him. He shook.

“Can you help me, man? My wife’s having a baby.”

I bent down to look through a back window permanently at half mast with a square of cardboard bracing it in place, floor an undergrowth of fast-food wrappers and sacks, throwaway cups with lids and straws still in them, beer cans. Terrified round eyes peered back out at me.

“I came home from work and found her like this,” he said. “I don’t think we’re gonna make it to the hospital. Something’s wrong.”

“Help me,” she said. “Please. It hurts. Hurts bad.”

She was white. Might be well along in the race’s evolution, but it was still the South. I knew what could happen if I got in the back of that car.

Moments later, I had a different kind of trouble from the kind I’d anticipated.

Back in Paris, Vicky worked as an OB nurse. She’d told me about those years, how dullingly routine the work was mostly, how reaffirming it could be occasionally, how horrible it might suddenly turn without warning. I knew enough to recognize a bad delivery. Contractions were strong but the baby didn’t seem to be moving along the birth canal. I thought I saw something up there, a head, a shoulder, but couldn’t be sure. My mind ground and spun like Don’s transmission, searching Vicky’s stories for the appropriate word.

Breech.

“It’s going to be all right,” I told her. “Don’t be afraid.” I was sufficiently afraid for us all.

Pain goosestepped over her face as the puppeteer worked fingers and strings. She clamped down on directives of pain just long enough to meet my eyes. She nodded. Then another wave hit and she passed out.

I stood bent over, half in and half out of the car, thinking of Deborah’s earrings: mouthdown sharks swallowing swimmers. I was in way over my head. As was this child.

Knuckles rapped on the window. I backed out expecting the husband and father. Police. Cavalry. Please.

“You got a license for that, boy?”

Doc stood there looking in, cup of coffee in his hand. Streaks of brown down the side where it’d spilled from his tremors. Layers of clothing, greasy thin hair, traces of this morning’s fast food, possibly yesterday’s, in his beard.

I shook my head.

“Neither do I,” he said. “Used to, though. Looks like you all could use some help.”

I told him what I thought. He nodded, considering.

“You’re probly right. K&B right across the street there. Get me a bottle of rubbing alcohol, whatever’s the cheapest.”

“But—”

“Now,” he said.

When I returned, he took the bottle from me, poured its contents carefully over his hands, and wiped them on his shirttail. “Do what we can,” he said as he ducked into the backseat.

“Okay, she’s fully dilated … I see … Not the head, though … You’re right, it’s a breech … And the cord’s … Damn … Ain’t seen this for a long time … If I can’t … Can’t seem to … Wait, I think … Okay, I’ve got it … You’re gonna be fine, honey … Yeah, I do … Almost there, ma’am … Sorry if I was a little rough … It’s a boy.”

Enveloped with mucus, smeared with blood, the newborn lay nestled in Doc’s arms. He held it out to me, and as he did, the tremors, which had stopped when he bent over the young woman, started up again. Hands trembling, he tore strips of cloth from the woman’s slip and tied off the cord, cut between ties with a pocket knife. Tears streamed down his face.

“You never quite get over it,” he said.

When I went in for the alcohol, I’d asked the store clerk to call an ambulance, which now arrived.

“Heart rate’s 160 or thereabouts,” Doc told the paramedics. “Color good, good capillary fill, good cry. Apgar, I’d put at about 9/9.”

“You a doctor, sir?” one of them, a stocky woman of thirty or so with flyaway blond hair, name tag Cherenski, asked.

“Me? No, I’m a drunk. Speaking of which, I sure could use one right now. A drink, that is.”

Shaking her head, Cherenski set to work, checking vitals, wrapping the baby in sterile batting, starting IVs.

“You did good here, sir,” she told Doc.

“Let’s get that drink,” I said.

We found a bar half a block down, where Doc sat beside me through four double whiskeys. His tears never let up the whole time, and I made no effort to talk. When we parted outside he nodded thanks, starting off in one direction then abruptly reversing. I don’t suppose it made much difference, finally.

Drop by drop at the heart, the pain of the pain remembered comes again,
Aeschylus wrote in
Agamemnon
.

It sure as hell does. And the gods did no better than we’ve done ourselves. They never knew how to care for us, either.