James Sallis - Ghost of a Flea

“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.