James Sallis: Ghost of a Flea

“She tell you about the notes?” Larson asked.

I shook my head.

“Think she meant to. Hope she did. Else I’m ’bout to step in it here. Pull you along.”

When his eyes cut towards mine, I said: “At work, you mean.” Alouette was a community activist. Rattling cages, shaking jars that had sat too long unmolested on shelves and getting in people’s faces was what she did, what she was good at. People got upset. They were supposed to. Sometimes abrasiveness hauled in results on its back. Sometimes it didn’t. Sometimes results not intended hopped aboard and made the trip.

Larson allowed as how it had been, yes, at work.

“Threats.”

He nodded.

“Anything specific?”

“Not really. Impression I got, she was supposed to know already.”

“Did she?”

Larson shrugged. “Have to ask ’ette.”

“You have any idea what the threats were about? Who they might have been from?”

“No.”

We stood together looking down at the revolving lights, circle of medical deacons about the car.

“Case she was working on, maybe.” Alouette being still, between bouts of raising ideological hell, a caseworker.

“Could be.” He shrugged. “You know how ’ette is. Save the world. Dozen or more balls in the air. No way she’s gonna keep them all up there. Sooner or later they start comin’ down on folks’s heads.”

“But she took the threats seriously?”

“She told me about them. So I have to figure she must of.”

Down in the street they dragged the driver from the Toyota. We watched as head and trunk came free, a young woman wearing a blue blazer, light blue shirt, red tie. Her legs hung oddly, like a doll’s. As did her head.

“I’ll need to see her files. What she was working on, correspondence, any notebooks or the like.”

“Most a that’s up to the Center. Have to ask them there. Not my world.” Larson spread fingers wide on the sill. I thought of the wingspan of large birds: eagles, hawks. Just before those splayed, discolored fingers fell lightly onto my arm.

I was sitting in Joe’s, heading for a record. I’d come in early yesterday afternoon for a coffee and never left. A regular named Jimmy and I had been talking and got to wondering how long anyone ever sat in a bar without drinking. Now, though I didn’t know whether momentum or inertia would be the appropriate term, I was too far invested in the thing to get up and go. Here I was. Too much coffee had my nerve ends flapping like tatters of flags left behind once all the Pattons, Westmorelands and Schwarzkopfs have had their way, dark things were beginning to move in the corners whenever I looked away, and I’d had enough weird conversations to last well into the next century. But here I was.

Not the original Joe’s, of course. That sad, used-up old place had passed during the Seventies. Briefly there’d been an uptown, unreasonable facsimile, someone’s halfhearted attempt at resuscitation, body pronounced DOA. But locals had kept the memory alive, till finally a new crop of moneyed folk thought to kick the tired horse to its feet one more time. Joe’s had come back as, essentially, a theme park, nostalgia island.

“Have to say I’m surprised you suggested meeting here.” Don stared at the cheeseburger they’d set down before him. Then his eyes crossed to the beer glass. A stanchion he could trust. “Authenticity be damned, huh? Glitz! Glamour! New Orleans’ answer to the new Times Square.”

“Tradition.”

“Tradition. Right. Ain’t what it used to be,” he said.

“What is?”

“Not burgers, obviously.” He lifted the bun to look underneath. “You have any idea what these things might be that’re growing on here?” With one finger he winnowed out a mushroom. It looked like those I’d once found sprouting from my welcome mat following a hard hour’s rain and a day or so of sun.

“Cremini mushrooms.”

He’d made a nice pile of them by then.

“First cousin to athlete’s foot and people pay good money-”

“Damn good money.”

“-to eat them.”

I shrugged. “White folk, Massuh Don. What can I say?”

His head wagged sideways two or three times, incredulous. Then he started stoking in demushroomed burger. Swallows of beer followed each bite.

“So,” I said. “How you filling your days now?”

“It’s only been three.”

“You don’t work it from the first, they get longer.”

“Thought I might take to reading some of those books you’re always going on about.”

“Good thought.”

“Or then again, maybe I’ll just get in the habit of hanging around making a full-time pain in the ass of myself, like you.”

“Someone came to me and asked, like for a recommendation, I’d have to tell them you’re not half bad at it. Being a pain in the ass, I mean. Definitely some nachural talent there. Even if being a cop’s what you’re good at.”

“Fact is, that’s all I was ever good at. Never much going for me with the family thing, for instance.”

“Not what I meant.”

“I know.”

Thirty, forty years Don held the reins on New Orleans’ criminal element, and he’d done as good a job at it as anyone would ever do. Five years ago his son killed himself. There’d been a bad patch then. For a while Don had moved in with me, going through motions, he said, hoping if he just kept on, somehow, someday, it’d all start making sense again. Then three years ago, walking into a print shop to have copies made of insurance forms, he’d met Jeanette.

He finished the burger and last swallow of beer. “We’ve done our turn on the floor, Lew, you and me.”

“More ways than one.”

“For sure.” Don laughed. “You especially.”

“But you probably meant dancing-as a metaphor.”

“Of course I did. Absolutely. A metaphor.” He pushed away his plate and signaled for another beer.

“And now all your dances are gonna be with Jeanette.”

He looked away and back. “Don’t I hope.”

By ten that night, a few hours after Don walked aslant and slightly weaving out the door, I decided to head home myself. That wasn’t good enough for a record, the hell with it. Made it erect out the front door, surprising enough in light of all those hours of sitting and all the years stacked up behind me, and watched the storm go from dog paddle to channel swimmer as I walked home. Gentlemanly palms along St. Charles bowed deeply. In yards off Prytania, banana trees were bent almost horizontal, their fan-blade leaves spread in layers close to the ground, like canopies over tiny rain forests. Driven by wind, first at my ankles, then at midcalf, debris ran about me in a stream: Popeye’s containers, plastic cups resembling the half-crushed, emptied-out shells of insects, burrito wrappers, cigarette packets, bits of bird’s nest, chunks of foam insulation like weightless cheese, part of a yard flamingo, tennis balls, sheet after sheet of notebook paper and one of gold-foil gift wrap, half a loaf of French bread hollowed into a canoe.

A group of children rode by on a motley of bikes. They stood on pedals and leaned hard against the wind at each stroke, dipping deeply to one side then the other. Feral with both youth and the release of the storm, with a kind of permission it gave them, they shouted back and forth at the top of their voices. A police helicopter thwacked by overhead, spotlight a bright, impersonal finger prodding at houses, streets, trees and cars.

Pushed back into the narrow crawl space between two apartment buildings, a young man wrapped in plastic bags secured with spirals of heavy twine sat holding a small dog. Dog’s eyes and man’s eyes alike anxiously swept the sky.

I got as far as the bench inside the front door, having forgotten to lock the latter again, which was just as well since I’d also forgotten to bring keys, before collapsing. No one home by the look and sound of things. Light from streetlamps came through low-set windows tall as a man. As though in contrast to the fury building outside, light fell gently onto the floor, emphasizing the slope and roll of it, drawing attention to every warped board, every swollen joining. I sat thinking how wood long ago brought down, carved to dull lumber and laid in place, still remembered roundness as a tree and tried to find its way back.