James Sallis - Ghost of a Flea

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 donde 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?”

“Damn, man, this here ain’t nothing but a overgrown small town. Ever’body know your business. You bring trouble.”

“Got a load with me now, in fact. Thought you might help put me together with the people who need it.”

“So they live happily ever after.”

“Something like that.”

“Ain’t got much truck with other folks’ needs. Not a one of them’s ever he’ped me much.”

“I know that.”

“Think you know a lot, don’t you?” Someone was walking on the porch floor above us. Their floor, our roof. Rotted from rain, desiccated from heat, boards creaked, went swayback and threatened to give way. “But look at you. Come crawling up under here like some goddamn kid looking for answers, still think the world got answers for you. Ain’t no fortune cookies, you know. Break’m open, read what to do in there.”

We listened as footsteps paced back and forth above.

“Cold as a sonuvabitch down here,” I said.

“You get used to it after a time. Year or two. I been down here-hell, I don’t know how long I been down here. Man gets used to ’most anything…. You feelin’ trollish?”

“I don’t know what I’m feeling. Not my feet. And the fingers are going fast.”

“Shiiii. You a part-timer.” That was funny enough to say again. “Part-timer.”

“More ways than one,” I admitted. “But you’re not. And I figure you have to have seen my boy over there in the park.”

“One they call Dog Boy.”

“Yes.”

“I’ve seen him all right. Seen you with him, too.”

“Then you know how much he loves life.”

“I know how much he loves animals.”

“There’s a difference?”

Mister Bones shrugged. His breastplate rattled like Venetian blinds in wind.

“Someone’s been killing pigeons. Poisoning them.”

“Sure have. For a time now … You okay under here? You don’t look too comfortable. Noticed a blanket set out to dry on a porch across the way yesterday, probably still be there.

We could go get that for you.”

Moments limped by.

“I want to find them. The ones who are doing it.”

“They’re survivors, you know. Pigeons. You have to respect that.”

Even though he was looking out towards the park and couldn’t see me, I nodded.

“Like us,” he said. “You hungry, Griffin? Miz Miller up the way left a can of Vienna sausages out on the stoop for me last night. Be happy to share them with you, you want.”

The stairway stank of urine, beer, stale cigarette smoke and mold. Once, long in the past, there’d been carpeting. Fragments of green remained in patches, mostly beneath nailheads, like tufts of hair sprouting from old men’s ears. As I entered, someone let loose a bowl of water from the third landing, screaming I told you not to come back here, goddamn it ! No one else on the stairway as the cascade came down and I ducked aside. A door slammed.

Each floor held six apartments, A through F , though in no apparent order. A might just as easily be the apartment nearest the stairs, or tucked away between E and B . A pencil eraser would have taken down most of the doors. Walls bore deep gouges, long troughs, as though trucks had been driven repeatedly into them over the years. Here and there plaster had come away in great statuelike chunks; elsewhere it clung on bravely. At one turning I put my hand against the wall and precipitated an avalanche of plaster nuggets, pebbles, powder. This went on for some time. Stairwell corners held stacks of gravid boxes, belongings for which residents had no room inside, presumably. Surprising that these hadn’t long ago been borne off. Posters of Sixties movies and rock shows hung alongside paintings of clowns and seascapes on landings. The whole stairway creaked and swayed like a suspension bridge.