James Sallis - Ghost of a Flea

He sat down beside me. “Well, that’s done.”

“Hard work.”

“Not too many’d know that,” he said after a moment.

The barmaid appeared tableside. Since I’d last seen her she’d had a couple more piercings, I was sure of it. “What would you like?” I asked Doo-Wop.

“What’re you having?”

“Generic beer.”

“Two of your best generics, Mandy,” he said.

She smiled, adjusted a few rings and studs, and went off to bring the beers as I asked Doo-Wop if he’d heard about some guy or guys who were killing pigeons. I’d hung out by the park a couple of times, talked to people around the neighborhood, but hadn’t come up with anything.

“Nope, but I’ll keep an ear open. Look what I still got,” Doo-Wop said, pulling one of my old business cards out of his wallet. I must have given it to him thirty years ago at least, about the time he got that wallet from the look of it, and he’d been carrying it ever since, the way some folks squirrel away newspaper clippings, till it was all but unreadable. No continuity in our lives, huh?

I took the card from him, amazed, for a closer look. Le -though that e could as easily be an o . And Griffin could have been almost anything: Grief, Gripping, Garage, Cartage, Goring. Below, Investigations remained mostly readable, though the v had migrated-hoping to start up a word of its own, perhaps.

I had a sudden vision, one it was probably best not to dwell on, of Doo-Wop sitting behind the barricades of a beer and peanuts telling stories from his years as a local detective.

Mandy brought our beers. Definitely generic. Doo-Wop drank half his down in a single generic swallow.

“You used to teach, right, Captain?”

I nodded. Another previous life. How many had I had? Feeling a certain sympathy for that used-up business card.

“You know anything about this film department up to Loyola?”

“Other than the fact that there is one, not much.” A year or two back, I’d attended a festival of student work and had dim memories of short films about a classics professor who lived in a trashcan out behind Antoine’s, a giant panda lobbying for the NRA, an insect zoo, complete with tiny cages, kept in someone’s dorm room.

We sipped our beers.

“Boy comes up to me over to Freret, the Come On In. You know it?”

No.

“Three people be in there and one of them goes to stand up, someone’s gotta back out the door.”

There used to be many such places scattered about the city. Bars in ground-level converted garages below apartments, one-room restaurants run out of family homes-like the Williams family snoball business that’s made a fortune dealing shaved ice and flavors out the back of a garage without so much as a sign for three or four decades.

“But I go by most every day, ’cause you never know. Meet up with good folk there sometimes. So I’m sitting having me a beer talking to a dogcatcher works out by Gentilly and this boy comes in. He’s wearing sunglasses and looking around in there trying to see and it’s like he’s forgot about them, thinking why the fuck’s it so dark in here, and of course it is dark in here, but not that dark, you damn fool, I’m thinking. As who wouldn’t. And he does look peculiar. White boy, mind you, but he’s got these braid things sticking out ever’ which way that look like they don’t get washed ’cept when it rains and he’s standing out in it, he’s got on these shorts that the crotch of them’s down around his ankles and you could pack three or four good legs in there. And this goddam backpack, bright orange with, I don’t know, some kind of animal or something on there with a lot of teeth, grinning.”

Mandy came back jingling, swinging and adjusting. Four more of the same, Doo-Wop said, we goan be here a spell.

“So,” Doo-Wop went on once our beers arrived, “boy swings off that backpack and says, Doo-Wop, I presume? That grin and all those teeth are down by my ankles now. Can we talk, man?

“What’re you gonna do?”

With no discernible cue, the tourists had formed a precise line just inside the door. Now the door sprang open, and they filed out bearing shoulder bags, fanny packs stuffed like Thanksgiving turkeys, souvenir glasses, six-packs of pralines, cheaply printed menus abounding in typos, greasy alligator tails wrapped in napkins.

“He’s heard about me, this boy says. Says me and my stories are a local legend and that that’s what New Orleans is, its history, all the stories. He’s making a movie about the city and wants me to be a part of it. Been looking for me for a while now, he says. Wants me to be a kind of interlocutor, that’s the word he used, have me talk some ’bout the rest, then they’d come on.”

Doo-Wop drained off his first beer and picked up the second. “What you think?”

“Beats me.”

“Me too. And it just beats all, don’t it, the whole thing. But the more I think on it, the more I’m inclined to.”

I raised my glass, my first, and still mostly full, to toast him. Three more squatted there by it. “Then maybe you should.”

“Yeah, maybe. Probly. Why th’hell not. But hey, for now I gotta go, right?” He chugged his third beer and, hand pausing over the table as over a chessboard, pushed the last into line with my own. “Have to take care of business like always, don’t I?”

I walked with him to the door. Outside, he pulled a bike from beneath the eaves. It was of the new generation, gears and toggles everywhere, high-tech tires. He unlocked it, threw a leg across, crotch-walked it into sunlight.

“Something new?”

“You bet. Resplendent, ain’t it?”

It was.

“Resplendent.” He nodded, then shook, his head. “Just cain’t get around like I used to. Boy wants to make that film, he up and gave it to me. Said why not, he don’t never use it no more. Someone ought to get the benefit of it, boy said. Don’t mind telling you it’s been a blessing. Now I can really cover ground.” This from a man who regularly, every day for well over forty years, had covered most of the city on foot.

“That’s good. You take care, now.”

“’Spect I will. Mostly have. You too, Captain. Don’t let them beers back in there go wastin’ neither.” Halfway to launch, listing starboard on the seat, left leg cocked, Doo-Wop paused. “Word of advice?”

“Always.”

“Boy asking after you as well. Had some stories he’s heard, old ones for the most part, near as I can say. He don’t tell them too good either, mind you. I thought you’d be wanting to know.”

“Appreciate it, my friend.”

“Welcome.” And Doo-Wop went sailing off to whatever port came next.

That night I sat out in the slave quarters reading David’s message again. I’d left on lights in the house and kept looking across, half-expecting heads and bodies to appear, as in previous, happier days, in that blazingly white kitchen.

I have no idea when you might find this-tonight, tomorrow, next week. I don’t even know, really, how to begin it.

I read David’s message over and over, slowly, leaving space around each word for it to expand, working sememes and syllables like bread dough. At one point I looked up to find Deborah’s face there in the window over the sink, across the courtyard. She was drinking a glass of water from the tap, and after she put it down she waved, face tilting like a bird’s to ask should she come out. I shook my head. She blew a kiss and laid head obliquely on joined hands: moving towards sleep.

We always have to understand, don’t we?

Life’s not a particularly good editor, but it can prove a quarrelsome one. David had careted in his message among notes I’d been sketching for a novel. There it was, rude actuality, thrusting up like a ragged tree stump from my own pale version of the same. I thought of David’s postcards and how the texts of our lives seem always overwritten, events scribbled in between lines, corrections tacked on at the end or written in at a slant.