James Sallis - Ghost of a Flea

I climbed to the fourth floor. Four’s about as far as it goes for most of New Orleans, outside downtown anyway. The city’s well below sea level, filled-in swampland for the most part, one of those triumphs of man’s imagination and will that the world periodically refutes with such rejoinders as floods and hurricanes. Then I came to 4-A.

This door wasn’t going to be taken down with an eraser. It fit the frame flush. No give to it, no space about the edges, no apparent weak spot. Door and frame both steel.

I knocked. It was like rapping knuckles on a boulder. Whole armies could be on the move in there, tanks, armored vehicles, transports, and I wouldn’t hear them.

Incredibly enough, the door opened.

A thirtyish man in cornrows wearing Tommy Hilfiger’s clothes, barrel-like shorts, oversize rugby-style shirt (I hoped Tommy had more), stood there. Skin color medium brown, eyes blue-gray. Brows and upper lip lifted at the same time, three birds taking flight.

“Those our bitches?” someone behind him said.

“Sure nuff don’t look to be,” the doorman said. Then to me: “What chu want?”

Taking that as an invitation, I pushed my way in. Doorman fell back, then recovered and came towards me, leg lifting for a karate kick. When the ankle came up, I grabbed it and twisted as I shoved it towards the ceiling, hammered a fist into his crotch. He went down as the others shot up off the couch.

I’d taken notice of the rock sitting by the door as I entered. Judging from roundness and polish, it had spent several human lifetimes in water somewhere perfecting itself. About the size of an orange and used as a doorstop, no doubt. The one who’d come up off the couch and started towards me went down hard when it hit him square in the forehead. I’d thrown underhanded, like a kid on a softball team. That left two of us on opposite banks with the river of a sky-blue couch between. This one was older, done up in high grunge: plaid shirt with sleeves flapping, long-sleeved T-shirt under, cord jeans bagged into camel’s knees and shiny with wear. Both hands came up, palm out. He stepped out from behind the couch shaking his head.

“Whatever this is, man-”

“You live here?”

He shook his head again.

“Then what are you doing here?”

“Guess I’d best be asking myself that same question ’long about now.” He looked down at the floor, from one to the other of the bodies there, then back at me. “Thing is, I went to high school with Pryor here, guy making that snoring sound? Not that we ever hung out back then, nothin’ like that. But this morning when I ran up against ’im at Hoppin Jon’s, suddenly he’s acting like we’re old-time bros.”

Picking up on my unvoiced question, he said: “It’s a bar and grill just off Claiborne downtown. Serves a kickin’ breakfast, so lots of night workers turn out, hospital workers, firemen, paramedics going off duty, camp followers. I pull graveyard shift at the coroner’s myself, have for years. So I’m sitting at the bar, just gonna have a quick one and head out, when Pryor comes up and says, Hey man, I know you. This here’s Levon, he tells me, my boy. We had a few drinks, scored breakfast, wound up back here. Next thing I know, you’re busting in.”

He still had his hands up. Now slowly he put them down.

“This over, man-or you just puttin’ in a new clip? Anything I can do to help convince you to let me walk out of here?”

“That could happen.” Briefly I told him what brought me there, about the boy, the dead pigeons.

“This bone man’s the one gave them up?”

“He sees everything that goes on in the park. One day these two, never been regulars before, take to hanging ’round, and they get to be like toothaches, just won’t go away. Turn up in the park with paper bags too small for lunches, anything like that, and leave empty-handed. Them boys weren’t proper, he said. Knew it from the first.”

“Proper?”

“What he said.”

“Well, they’re definitely bent. He got that right.”

“Finally one day he hauled himself out from under the house and followed them back here. Never did nothin’ like that before, he told me. Ain’t likely to again.”

“Not your typical concerned citizen.”

“Not the kind you usually hear about, anyway.”

We stood silently with that river of a couch beside us, bodies washed up on its shore. Behind him a diminutive arch showed a swatch of pinkish hallway.

“Anyone else back there?”

“Pretty sure not.”

“What is?”

He shrugged.

“Let’s go see.”

The hallway was about the size of a large man’s coffin. Bathroom directly ahead, bedrooms at either end. Barely enough wall space for the doors. We went left.

“Holy shit!” my companion said.

The entire back wall was paved with bird’s wings, single wings nailed there and spread, all at the same attitude and angle, one after another, a hundred or more. Like fish scales, covering the wall completely, floor to ceiling. Against the wall opposite, fifty or sixty cheap wooden cages were stacked. These contained the skeletons of birds.

I stood in the middle of the room trying to imagine such cruelty: where it would come from, why and how it would take this form. Had a vision of them starting out catching the pigeons, in the park or elsewhere, putting them in cages just to watch them starve to death. Then moving on to poisoning and scalping-collecting the wings we saw here. Finally letting the birds lie where they fell.

“You ever in the service?” my companion said.

“Yeah. Not long, though.”

“See action?”

“Not the usual sort.”

“You were lucky.”

I nodded.

“Me, I thought anything had to be better than watching my old lady toss that same coin in the air every night, wait to see whether she’d kill herself with the drugs first or get killed by some scumball she brought home. I was sixteen. By the time I was seventeen and threw away my helmet, I’d drunk sixty or eighty cases of beer and thought the world was mine, you know? Drop me anywhere, desert, jungle, I’d take the damn place, it belonged to me. That was an attitude rankers could get behind. So off I went to ranger school. Picked up some skills there that don’t do a lot for my resume.”

We were back in the front room by this time.

“Only place I ever saw anything like that,” he said, indicating the trophy room. “We’re cool, you and me?”

I nodded.

“Anything else you need here?”

Levon had pushed himself over to the wall and partway up it and leaned there clutching his privates. Pryor, turned facedown, was trying to get to his feet, pointed toes of his Western boots scratching at the floor.

“Think I’ll stick around a while, then, have a talk with these boys. Like in the old days. Put some of those skills the government taught me back to work? Recycle them, like.”

I kept expecting to come across a story about guys nailed to the wall, arms at least, but I never did.

That afternoon I stopped off at a friend’s place up on Carrollton. June Bug, everybody called him, another vet. He lived in a lean-to on the flat roof of an apartment house up that way, on a floor of tar that gradually liquefied as the day progressed, and he raised pigeons.

“Name’s Mr. Blue,” June Bug told me as we peered into the cage. I’m not sure I ever realized just how many shades of blue there are. The pigeon’s head was such a dark blue that it caught light and shone. Cerulean tipped its wings. Individual feathers were here dark, there light, powder blue, azure, aquamarine, indigo, no two of them alike. “And don’t you go tryin’ to change it, neither. Real thoroughbred, ain’t he?” The pigeon peered back out at me, cocking its head the way they do. Who the hell was I and what was I doing hanging around outside its cage? I’d brought a bottle of cheap brandy along. Mr. Blue and I left that and a fifty-dollar bill behind.