James Sallis: Ghost of a Flea

“Yes, ma’am. This is Captain Don Walsh, NOPD. There’s an officer on duty in there, I take it?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Could you ask him to step out here, please?”

“I would, sir, but he can’t-”

“Just to the door.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Thanks.”

Shortly an officer stepped into sight around the wall and stood close behind the doors, squinting out. Not old, in his forties maybe, but had an old man’s gait and posture. His head jutted forward rather than upward from his neck, making him look turtlelike. He moved head and neck together from left to right and back, then smiled with a lipless mouth.

“What can I do for you, Captain?”

“Boy apprehended during a robbery over on Louisiana, a Circle K-he doing okay?”

“I think. Looks like someone took a tenderizer to him. Bad concussion, they say. But I’ve seen ’em hurt far worse get up and do more damage.”

“I want to see him.”

For just a moment the officer looked doubtful, as though he were going to recite regulations Don probably knew better than anybody else in the department, but then he said, “You got it,” and sprang the door. He hesitated again before asking,

“Be okay if I came along?”

“You bet.”

“Down this way.”

“What do we know about him?” Don asked.

“About this much.” The officer held up thumb and index finger joined in a circle. “Looks to be about eighteen, says he’s sixteen. No ID on him, no police, juvenile or court records. No mailing address or record of residence. Not a shred of paperwork anywhere, that we’ve been able to find.”

“Boy doesn’t exist.”

“Probably more of them like that out there than you’d think.”

“Could be.”

“Joe Papi works that ward pretty hard,” the officer continued after a moment. “Came up there himself. He says he remembers seeing the kid around, starting maybe four, five months back.”

“Boy was on the streets.”

The officer nodded. With his weird neck, it put me in mind of those dogs with bobbing heads you see in cars, on back window ledges.

We were at the door by then. Inside, looking a bit like Claude Rains, the kid had the bed cranked up high and was sitting there watching Ricki Lake. One after another, fat black women hanging four-fifths out of various outfits strutted from the wings, paraded through the audience and settled into overstuffed chairs onstage before launching into harangues about how sexy they were and how they could have any man they wanted anytime. Big and Bootieful showed at one corner of the screen, the first B stylized to suggest breasts, the second tipped on its side and bulging ludicrously in a caricature of buttocks. Wholly untouched by irony or by any sensibility at all, this spectacle was a kind of assault, as insulting to the audience as it was degrading to the women. Still, it bore manifest of a certain crude innocence; and to every appearance the kid found it hilarious.

He looked over finally at the three of us crowding into the room, eyes in their field of bandage moving from Don and his barge to me, the toter.

“Ain’t that always the way it is, though.”

Then his eyes went back to Don. Briefly his tongue, shockingly pink, naked-looking, larval, protruded past bandages.

“You don’t look so good neither, man.”

Don glanced over his shoulder at me. I shrugged. “Second opinion.”

“Shit, man.” The kid shook his head. “Shit.” His eyes went back to the TV. “Look-a that. Man could hide under there, no one goan ever find him. Whoa! Hold that thing still, mama!”

He watched several moments before saying, “I’d lack that beer now, officer.”

Don smiled up at him. “Could use one myself. More than one.”

“I hear that.” His eyes swung towards me. “You think they pay them bitches or what, they go up there, shake it loose like that? Why they do that?”

“Got me. Maybe they just want the attention.”

“ Gotta be it.”

“My name’s Don Walsh. How you doing?”

“Man, whatchu care? You the one did this. Now you goan come in here, ’pologize?”

Don didn’t say anything more, just kept eye contact, his expression neutral. After a moment the kid said, “I’m okay, man. You know.” Then he looked away.

“Yeah. Well, case you didn’t notice, I ain’t gonna be up dancing much sooner than you are.”

“Won’t look near as good when you do , neither.”

“That’s for damn sure…. You ever get tired of watching that TV?”

“Sometimes. Mornings ’specially. Ain’t never much on then. News ’n’ shit, all them ol’ dudes in their richass suits.”

“Could I get you some books or something?”

“What the fuck’m I gonna do with books?”

“Okay…. How about this, then? We’re both gonna be here awhile. You don’t mind, I could come over now and then, maybe a couple times a day, we could hang out.”

“Why would you wanta do that?”

“Hey, there’s not any more to do in my room than there is in yours. Nothing else, it’d help pass the time. We could talk.” Don glanced up at the TV. “Or just watch all these fine women.”

“You wanta come, how’m I gonna stop you? Yeah. Yeah, I guess that be all right.”

“Good.”

Don motioned, and I started backing out the door. Just as I was about to swing the chair around, the kid said, “My name’s Derick. Derick Soames. Most ever’one calls me Jeeter, though.”

“Good to meet you, Jeeter,” Don said. “This is Lew. You’re on the streets, he’s a good man to know.”

“He is, huh, him and his richass suit. Why? He goan save me from getting myself punked by the like of you?” What might have been a laugh almost made it out of him. We started out the door again.

“Don Walsh.”

“Yeah?”

“I did used to play some checkers, back when I was a kid.” Don nodded.

“One more thing …”

“Okay.”

“You know where my tooth is?”

Things are the mind’s mute looking glass, Walter de la Mare, another on the long list of forgotten writers, said. And Whitman, that things, objects, are a coherent world to themselves, the “dumb, beautiful ministers of reality.”

Certainly they become that when you’re drunk. You watch for hours as shadows from a palm or banana tree toss heads, sway and sweep wings across the wall beside your bed, doing all the creative things you should be doing. Towels tossed on the floor by the tub suddenly seem to harbor both great beauty and codes never before suspected, kennings just beyond reach, the towels’ folds and convolutions catching up, as a phonograph record does sound, those of your own mind.

Drinking also maroons you without provisions on the island of self. Like most other promises it makes, alcohol’s vow of kinship, that it will bridge your life to others, smooth the way, proves false. Fooled again: you’re alone. The path remains treacherous-stones in your passway, as Robert Johnson would say. And not another footprint on the whole island.

Emerson: Wherever we go, whatever we do, self is the sole object we study and learn. A solipsism that America took to its clanky, pragmatic heart not as philosophy but as operator’s manual. Humanism was from the first, of course, a matchless arrogance. And American individualism was humanism writ large, not just arrogant but colossally arrogant: Emerson’s “infinitude of the private man” turned out for the masses like bins of polyester shirts marked down for quick sale, durable, practical, all but indestructible, unlovely.

Still and well enough, there on your island of Scotch or gin, palm trees swaying, mind become this curious suspension bridge built from scraps of driftwood and salvage, everything remains fraught with meaning. Whitman also wrote