James Sallis: Ghost of a Flea

He looked up as I approached and, though no one else sat on the bench with him, moved the boy’s backpack closer to himself to make room. A bottle of chocolate drink peeked from out his twisted fingers.

“Lewis. A pleasure as always. Must of been, what, Thursday a week ago, I saw you last?”

“Thereabout.” Right now I had about as much time sense as Doo-Wop.

“Thursday,” Lester said, nodding to confirm it.

We didn’t shake. I’d done so once, noting in his face (though he was too polite ever to have told me this) the pain it brought him. What I saw in his face now was something different, something I never stopped marveling at. Lester had a genius for attentiveness, for making whatever you said to him, whatever you might say to him, seem vitally important. Everything about him signaled that he’d never before heard the like of it, and that he valued your choosing him to share it with as much as he valued the information itself.

“You’ve been busy, then.”

I told him about Don, that I’d just come from seeing Jeanette. She had insisted on making coffee for us, listening for the gurgle as we sat waiting in the front room and, once that had come and subsided, finding only hot water in the carafe, having forgotten to put in coffee. The can of French Market still sat there on the counter by the sink.

“Tough on her,” Lester said.

I nodded.

“She just have to be tougher. Your friend’s okay, though?”

“Going to be, anyway. How’re things with you?”

“Things moving right along, Lewis. Like they do most days, ’f we just think to take notice of them. Billy Boy over there seems to have him a new woman. Thinks he might, anyways.” I followed Lester’s nod to a large tan-and-white pigeon strutting before another, smaller bird, periodically bowing and bobbing. “Gertie came up missing some weeks back. Been together a long time. They mate for life, you know. But if one of them dies, sometimes the other one will take a new mate. And it looks like Billy Boy’s of a mind to do just that.”

When Billy Boy turned to make another pass, I saw that the bird’s foot was clubbed, digits curled back under and withered into a ball, burrlike. Some portion of what I’d assumed to be courtship posturing in fact derived from a rolling limp as he stepped onto the damaged foot.

“City’s hard on them,” Lester said.

“Hard on us all.”

“ That’s God’s truth.”

Cooing at him and ducking her head twice, Billy’s new lady strolled to the pond for an aperitif, a delicate beakful of scummy water. Billy joined her. There were so many insects skittering across the pond’s surface that they looked like cabs at rush hour in midtown Manhattan.

Lester’s gold signet ring jangled against the bottle as he raised his hand to gesture, long index finger unfurling from the rest. It spent some time unfurling. Its nail was the size of a demitasse spoon, almost perfectly flat. “Not many birds do that, drink directly by immersing their bills and sucking. Pigeons are one of the few.” Every week, Lester had told me, he carted home an armful of books from the public library. Whenever he became interested in a subject, pigeons for instance, or ancient Greece, he read everything the library had. “During Egyptian times-”

Lester stopped because the boy had come up to us. He stood there making whimpering sounds, eyes puffy and red though no tears fell. He held out his hands together, palms up. In them a pigeon’s head lolled as it tried to focus, to understand where it found itself, to get a fix on this latest in a procession of dangers, the exact nature of the catastrophe. Even as we watched, the head fell. Its eyes filmed over as light left them.

“It’s gone, child,” Lester said. “Dead, like the others.”

Lester and the boy went off behind a stand of oleander where, with a stick and a fragment of sharp-edged wood, they dug a shallow grave for the bird. I offered to help, but Lester declined, saying it would be better if they did it themselves. So I sat watching, warmed as always by the relationship these two had, each in his own way forever the outsider, one of them having seen, suffered and survived most of what the world had for him, one given eternal youth and thus forever given to seeing the world anew. That was good, to a point. But the pain came as strongly each time as did the wonder; it never diminished.

“Others?” I asked when Lester rejoined me. The boy, whom he had left sitting by the grave, now walked to the edge of the park and stood pressed against the mesh fence there, motionless, like a statue caught in netting.

“Close to a dozen this past week, I expect. Someone poisoning them, is what they say. Almost have to be.”

“And no one’s looking into it?”

“Lewis. They don’t care ’bout all our young colored men dying out there for no good reason, who in this town you think’s gonna bother themselves over a few pigeons more or less?”

“You do.”

Lester smiled. “Yes sir, I expect I do,” he said after a moment.

“So does my boy over there. And that, I expect, is the long list.”

“Maybe not.”

Lester stood to carry the squat bottle over to the garbage, dropped it in. Another man materialized at his side and pulled it out. This one carried two black plastic bags bulked and lumpy with objects and wore a gray pinstripe suit over a soiled white shirt with tail out, dress shoes with tassels. Tassel fringes poked out every which way. The outside edges of the heels were worn down to slivers. When Lester came back to the bench, the newcomer followed, sitting between us, by the boy’s pack.

“You come here all the time, don’t you?” he said. “I know, I see you. Started me thinking what I had that you’d like.” He spent the next half-hour pulling various items from his bags and offering them to Lester, a plastic clock with one hand, a pair of white earth shoes gone fish-belly gray, a sandwich bag of paper clips, rubber bands and gum erasers, whether with a thought to profit or as gifts never becoming clear; I’m not sure he knew. Lester would tell him he wasn’t interested and the man would talk for a few more minutes about people in the neighborhood, where he’d obviously spent his entire life, about this one who had been arrested or was in the hospital or that one who had suddenly attacked family members with a crowbar or electric carving knife, before starting up again with “I’ve got just the thing for you” and dipping back into his bags.

“Can’t use it, sorry,” Lester said for the twentieth or thirtieth time.

“I understand, I understand.” He sat quietly for a moment looking off towards the line of palm trees across the street, then towards the fence where the boy still stood immobile. Messages might come through at any time, from any source, any direction. “That’s your boy, right?”

Lester nodded.

“Fine young man. I know, I watch him here, I can see that. They are a pleasure, aren’t they?” He was shoulder-deep in his bags again. “Look, you don’t mind,” he said, “I’ve got just the thing for the boy here. He’ll love it,” coming up with a green rubber scuba mask. The seals were rusted, the straps rotten. “Perfect fit.”

Back in basic, over near Mobile, they put me in a barracks full of white men not altogether reconciled to their new living arrangements. Working beside us was one thing. These weren’t, after all, your educated, privileged young white gentlemen-most of those one way or another got out of serving-so it’s not like they weren’t used to working on farms or in factories or loading trucks alongside Negroes. They’d even got used to using the same bathrooms. But this, sleeping beside us, eating every meal with us, this was something else again.