James Sallis - Ghost of a Flea

I’d gone out to the kitchen to pour the rest of the coffee down the sink, a healthy dram or two of Scotch into my cup, when the phone rang again. Carried cup towards the hall and dipped into it as I lifted the phone. Cast down your bucket where you are, as Booker T. Washington advised us.

“Good morning, Lew. Hope I didn’t wake you.”

“Not at all. Up and working.”

A pause, then: “Working?”

I filled her in on the past few days, Alouette, Terence Braly, these latest brambles and snags. “How are you?”

“Fine, just fine…. We opened last night. It went well. Extraordinarily well, I think…. I hoped you might be there.”

“I’m sorry.”

“That’s okay. I didn’t think you would, I just hoped.” She was quiet a moment. “Am I never going to see you again, Lew? I’d hate that. I’m not sure I could stand it.”

“You’ll see me.”

“Good.”

Doors, I thought. Their hearts do business like their doors. Apollinaire. LaVerne telling me how as a child she’d look out the back of train windows at all the people and places she passed, these lives she’d never see again, every passage a chain of good-byes. Alouette at the door when I’d ferried her home from the hospital: Our lives are an apocalypse served in a very small cup.

“I’m glad to hear things went well.”

“The place was packed, Lew. Packed. I couldn’t believe it. Blue-haired little old ladies, students lugging backpacks, even a couple of families with kids in strollers. White-faced young women in all black, bangs, clunky shoes. Others in evening dresses complete with mouth-watering show of thigh and breast. Most of one whole row was all Willie’s friends. Remember Willie? I told you about him.”

“Rap version of Greek choruses.”

“That’s the one. Calls himself Bad Dog Number Fifteen-which is how he insisted we list him on the program. And these guys, his posse he calls them, were having more fun than anyone else. Slumped down in seats with their big-legged droopy pants and oversize shirts, talking low among themselves. Willie’s a talent, Lew. A natural who came out of nowhere. He gave me a copy of this play he wrote, British Knights . It’s so good that after I read it I wanted to just go off somewhere and cry. I knew I could never write anything like that.”

Moments pulled themselves like discarded newspapers across the floor towards sunlight.

“I’ve been meaning to tell you this, Lew. When I was researching early theatre, I found an article on what seems to be the first real civilization. Mesopotamia, on the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates, 2500 B.C. The Sumerians kept extensive records, etched them in a script they’d devised onto damp clay tablets which were then baked. Eventually, like all others, their civilization declined. The great libraries and record houses where they stored these tablets, these documents of what they’d been personally and collectively, of how they’d lived their lives and the more they’d envisioned-all this fell into ruin or burned to the ground. Walls crumbled back to stone, but the tablets remained. Fires that consumed libraries and whole cities simply turned the clay tablets brick-red, baked them to a new durability.”

“The city falls, the pillars stay.” Apollinaire again. Or stretching further back: All Pergamum is covered with thorn bushes, even its ruins have perished.

“I knew you’d like it.”

“That I’d steal it, you mean. And I will, first chance I get.”

She laughed. “I’ve got to go, Lew. The production’s been extended, it’s on through the end of the month, Tuesdays through Saturdays. Maybe longer, who knows? And maybe you’ll come some night.” Getting no response, she said, “I miss you.”

Then I stood with the phone’s black anvil in my hand, dial tone in my ear.

That morning, as we stood outside Hoppin Jon’s, me looking around to see if by any chance I could spot the youngish man who’d just been looking in, Don and I had parted.

“I know, I know. You’ll walk. Damn, I forgot to lock the thing again.” He pulled the door open and stood there in the notch. “Few more years, we’re both in those motorized wheelchairs, you’ll probably still cut out on your own. Hitch a ride behind a garbage truck, way kids do on bikes.”

“Surely it won’t come to that.”

It didn’t.

Shaking his head and grinning, Don worked the gearshift, with a moment’s maneuvering slipped into gear, and pulled away from the curb. He looked into the rearview mirror: a mask from which his eyes peered out. I waved.

Six or eight blocks down and more or less homeward, a battered Buick Regal pulled up, rocking, alongside me and a man leapt out from the driver’s seat. Sweat poured off him. He shook.

“Can you help me, man? My wife’s having a baby.”

I bent down to look through a back window permanently at half mast with a square of cardboard bracing it in place, floor an undergrowth of fast-food wrappers and sacks, throwaway cups with lids and straws still in them, beer cans. Terrified round eyes peered back out at me.

“I came home from work and found her like this,” he said. “I don’t think we’re gonna make it to the hospital. Something’s wrong.”

“Help me,” she said. “Please. It hurts. Hurts bad.”

She was white. Might be well along in the race’s evolution, but it was still the South. I knew what could happen if I got in the back of that car.

Moments later, I had a different kind of trouble from the kind I’d anticipated.

Back in Paris, Vicky worked as an OB nurse. She’d told me about those years, how dullingly routine the work was mostly, how reaffirming it could be occasionally, how horrible it might suddenly turn without warning. I knew enough to recognize a bad delivery. Contractions were strong but the baby didn’t seem to be moving along the birth canal. I thought I saw something up there, a head, a shoulder, but couldn’t be sure. My mind ground and spun like Don’s transmission, searching Vicky’s stories for the appropriate word.

Breech.

“It’s going to be all right,” I told her. “Don’t be afraid.” I was sufficiently afraid for us all.

Pain goosestepped over her face as the puppeteer worked fingers and strings. She clamped down on directives of pain just long enough to meet my eyes. She nodded. Then another wave hit and she passed out.

I stood bent over, half in and half out of the car, thinking of Deborah’s earrings: mouthdown sharks swallowing swimmers. I was in way over my head. As was this child.

Knuckles rapped on the window. I backed out expecting the husband and father. Police. Cavalry. Please.

“You got a license for that, boy?”

Doc stood there looking in, cup of coffee in his hand. Streaks of brown down the side where it’d spilled from his tremors. Layers of clothing, greasy thin hair, traces of this morning’s fast food, possibly yesterday’s, in his beard.

I shook my head.

“Neither do I,” he said. “Used to, though. Looks like you all could use some help.”

I told him what I thought. He nodded, considering.

“You’re probly right. K amp;B right across the street there. Get me a bottle of rubbing alcohol, whatever’s the cheapest.”

“But-”

“Now,” he said.

When I returned, he took the bottle from me, poured its contents carefully over his hands, and wiped them on his shirttail. “Do what we can,” he said as he ducked into the backseat.

“Okay, she’s fully dilated … I see … Not the head, though … You’re right, it’s a breech … And the cord’s … Damn … Ain’t seen this for a long time … If I can’t … Can’t seem to … Wait, I think … Okay, I’ve got it … You’re gonna be fine, honey … Yeah, I do … Almost there, ma’am … Sorry if I was a little rough … It’s a boy.”