Ghost of a Flea (2 page)

ALOUETTE NAMED THE CHILD for her mother. She was born on Epiphany, January 6, and I first saw her two hours later at Touro Infirmary, her father standing alongside grinning. Larson was a good, uncomplicated, immensely kind man.

“’ew,” he said when I stepped into the room, his
L
an unvoiced breath. I’d never been able to decide if he had an impediment or if that
L
with the tongue’s trip from the top of the mouth down was just too much effort for him. I was ’ew, his wife was ’ette. Not that he said much any other time, either. Scientists claim that in our lifetime we spend a total of twelve years talking. If there’s any kind of sliding scale, Larson would live to an advanced age.

We shook hands. His was rough and scarred, bleached in patches to a whitish, puttylike gray, elsewhere stained darker, by the cleansers and chemicals he used in his work. Larson restored old buildings. One of the few times I’d heard full sentences from him was a year or so past when we’d sat out on the porch after dinner sharing a beer and he began talking about a house he was working on. You wouldn’t believe what-all these old places have wrong with them, he said. Everything on God’s earth looks to be out to destroy them. Termites like you’ve never seen. Mold and rot everywhere. Ground settles, trying to crack them open, and when that doesn’t work it moves off somewhere else and settles again. People rip out their insides. Wonder any of them manage to go on standing. But they do.

I stood there by Alouette and the baby, grinning myself, remembering once years ago walking up Magazine watching people as they made their way out of the business district by car, bus, foot and streetcar. I’d been thinking then about the homes, families, meals and easy chairs they were headed back to, thinking how that world flowing past was one I’d never know. Alouette’s mother told me that the two of us were just alike, that we’d never find anyone permanent, anyone who’d go the long haul, who cared that much.

All that was a long time ago.

Early morning light spilled through the window onto us. Alouette was asleep. It was as though time were suspended, as though the very morning held its breath. Day became a squirrel gliding between trees in a long, silent jump.

“They’re both okay, the nurses said.”

Larson nodded.

“Tell her I was here? I’ll call or come back by later.”

Another nod.

“Let me know if you need anything.”

“Y’bet.”

But when I stepped out, Larson followed. We stood by a hall window. Below in the street a Toyota had tried to make it past a turning eighteen-wheeler carrying plumbing fixtures and had wound up lodged underneath. We watched firemen’s efforts to extricate the Toyota’s driver. A team from the hospital hovered about a gurney at crowd’s edge, hugging themselves against the cold, waiting. Lights from police and emergency vehicles lashed the street.

“She tell you about the notes?” Larson asked.

I shook my head.

“Think she meant to.
Hope
she did. Else I’m ’bout to step in it here. Pull you along.”

When his eyes cut towards mine, I said: “At work, you mean.” Alouette was a community activist. Rattling cages, shaking jars that had sat too long unmolested on shelves and getting in people’s faces was what she did, what she was good at. People got upset. They were supposed to. Sometimes abrasiveness hauled in results on its back. Sometimes it didn’t. Sometimes results not intended hopped aboard and made the trip.

Larson allowed as how it had been, yes, at work.

“Threats.”

He nodded.

“Anything specific?”

“Not really. Impression I got, she was supposed to know already.”

“Did she?”

Larson shrugged. “Have to ask ’ette.”

“You have any idea what the threats were about? Who they might have been from?”

“No.”

We stood together looking down at the revolving lights, circle of medical deacons about the car.

“Case she was working on, maybe.” Alouette being still, between bouts of raising ideological hell, a caseworker.

“Could be.” He shrugged. “You know how ’ette is. Save the world. Dozen or more balls in the air. No way she’s gonna keep them all up there. Sooner or later they start comin’ down on folks’s heads.”

“But she took the threats seriously?”

“She told me about them. So I have to figure she must of.”

Down in the street they dragged the driver from the Toyota. We watched as head and trunk came free, a young woman wearing a blue blazer, light blue shirt, red tie. Her legs hung oddly, like a doll’s. As did her head.

“I’ll need to see her files. What she was working on, correspondence, any notebooks or the like.”

“Most a that’s up to the Center. Have to ask them there. Not my world.” Larson spread fingers wide on the sill. I thought of the wingspan of large birds: eagles, hawks. Just before those splayed, discolored fingers fell lightly onto my arm.

I was sitting in Joe’s, heading for a record. I’d come in early yesterday afternoon for a coffee and never left. A regular named Jimmy and I had been talking and got to wondering how long anyone ever sat in a bar without drinking. Now, though I didn’t know whether momentum or inertia would be the appropriate term, I was too far invested in the thing to get up and go. Here I was. Too much coffee had my nerve ends flapping like tatters of flags left behind once all the Pattons, Westmorelands and Schwarzkopfs have had their way, dark things were beginning to move in the corners whenever I looked away, and I’d had enough weird conversations to last well into the next century. But here I was.

Not the original Joe’s, of course. That sad, used-up old place had passed during the Seventies. Briefly there’d been an uptown, unreasonable facsimile, someone’s halfhearted attempt at resuscitation, body pronounced DOA. But locals had kept the memory alive, till finally a new crop of moneyed folk thought to kick the tired horse to its feet one more time. Joe’s had come back as, essentially, a theme park, nostalgia island.

“Have to say I’m surprised you suggested meeting here.” Don stared at the cheeseburger they’d set down before him. Then his eyes crossed to the beer glass. A stanchion he could trust. “Authenticity be damned, huh? Glitz! Glamour! New Orleans’ answer to the new Times Square.”

“Tradition.”

“Tradition. Right. Ain’t what it used to be,” he said.

“What is?”

“Not burgers, obviously.” He lifted the bun to look underneath. “You have any idea what these things might be that’re growing on here?” With one finger he winnowed out a mushroom. It looked like those I’d once found sprouting from my welcome mat following a hard hour’s rain and a day or so of sun.

“Cremini mushrooms.”

He’d made a nice pile of them by then.

“First cousin to athlete’s foot and people pay good money—”

“Damn good money.”

“—to eat them.”

I shrugged. “White folk, Massuh Don. What can I say?”

His head wagged sideways two or three times, incredulous. Then he started stoking in demushroomed burger. Swallows of beer followed each bite.

“So,” I said. “How you filling your days now?”

“It’s only been three.”

“You don’t work it from the first, they get longer.”

“Thought I might take to reading some of those books you’re always going on about.”

“Good thought.”

“Or then again, maybe I’ll just get in the habit of hanging around making a full-time pain in the ass of myself, like you.”

“Someone came to me and asked, like for a recommendation, I’d have to tell them you’re not half bad at it. Being a pain in the ass, I mean. Definitely some nachural talent there. Even if being a cop’s what you’re good at.”

“Fact is, that’s
all
I was ever good at. Never much going for me with the family thing, for instance.”

“Not what I meant.”

“I know.”

Thirty, forty years Don held the reins on New Orleans’ criminal element, and he’d done as good a job at it as anyone would ever do. Five years ago his son killed himself. There’d been a bad patch then. For a while Don had moved in with me, going through motions, he said, hoping if he just kept on, somehow, someday, it’d all start making sense again. Then three years ago, walking into a print shop to have copies made of insurance forms, he’d met Jeanette.

He finished the burger and last swallow of beer. “We’ve done our turn on the floor, Lew, you and me.”

“More ways than one.”

“For sure.” Don laughed. “You especially.”

“But you probably meant dancing—as a metaphor.”

“Of course I did. Absolutely. A metaphor.” He pushed away his plate and signaled for another beer.

“And now all your dances are gonna be with Jeanette.”

He looked away and back. “Don’t I hope.”

By ten that night, a few hours after Don walked aslant and slightly weaving out the door, I decided to head home myself. That wasn’t good enough for a record, the hell with it. Made it erect out the front door, surprising enough in light of all those hours of sitting and all the years stacked up behind me, and watched the storm go from dog paddle to channel swimmer as I walked home. Gentlemanly palms along St. Charles bowed deeply. In yards off Prytania, banana trees were bent almost horizontal, their fan-blade leaves spread in layers close to the ground, like canopies over tiny rain forests. Driven by wind, first at my ankles, then at midcalf, debris ran about me in a stream: Popeye’s containers, plastic cups resembling the half-crushed, emptied-out shells of insects, burrito wrappers, cigarette packets, bits of bird’s nest, chunks of foam insulation like weightless cheese, part of a yard flamingo, tennis balls, sheet after sheet of notebook paper and one of gold-foil gift wrap, half a loaf of French bread hollowed into a canoe.

A group of children rode by on a motley of bikes. They stood on pedals and leaned hard against the wind at each stroke, dipping deeply to one side then the other. Feral with both youth and the release of the storm, with a kind of permission it gave them, they shouted back and forth at the top of their voices. A police helicopter thwacked by overhead, spotlight a bright, impersonal finger prodding at houses, streets, trees and cars.

Pushed back into the narrow crawl space between two apartment buildings, a young man wrapped in plastic bags secured with spirals of heavy twine sat holding a small dog. Dog’s eyes and man’s eyes alike anxiously swept the sky.

I got as far as the bench inside the front door, having forgotten to lock the latter again, which was just as well since I’d also forgotten to bring keys, before collapsing. No one home by the look and sound of things. Light from streetlamps came through low-set windows tall as a man. As though in contrast to the fury building outside, light fell gently onto the floor, emphasizing the slope and roll of it, drawing attention to every warped board, every swollen joining. I sat thinking how wood long ago brought down, carved to dull lumber and laid in place, still remembered roundness as a tree and tried to find its way back.

Then I sat not thinking at all.

Hours later, still on the bench, I woke to a world transformed. Leaves and limbs had been stripped from trees, causing them to look skeletal, asymmetrical, incomplete, like some new species struggling through to existence. Strata of topsoil, too, had been peeled away, laying open alluvial years. Elsewhere drifts of sand, rubbish and silt, aleatory dunes, sat a foot or more in height. With bare hands you could dig down to 1990 or 1964, plot out the lives of those who lived then, dredge up flatware, trinkets, seamed nylons. Gutters and streetside had become harbors clogged with ships: colored glass bottles, hundreds of them, washed up from who knows what primal deposits, Log Cabin, Vicks VapoRub, Bromo-Seltzer, Hadacol, Dr. Tichenor’s, startling both in their colors and long-forgotten familiarity. Sea-washed, bright and smooth, they clanked and rang and cast off flares of blue, amber, green. I sat thrown into the past myself by the sight of all those bottles, by the flood of memory and sensation they brought on, wholly unaware for the moment of the message lying coiled like a serpent in my answering machine.

I’D BEEN HERE a year, year and a half, when I first came across him. The city was full of eccentrics and never shut them away like they did back home—actually took pride in them, in fact. Preacher, the Duck Lady, Doo-Wop.

Nineteen or so, strolling innocently along, I glanced into an alleyway as I passed and saw a man kneeling there. Elbows climbed into light and sank. “That’s it, you’re doing fine,” the man said. “Push, push. You’re almost there, Patrice …”

Intrigued, I walked closer. No one else in the alley with him, though arms and hands worked steadily as he dipped and straightened, smiled, frowned with concentration. Under his breath, a subterranean river, ran a steady murmur of numbers, Latin, self-interrogation, misgivings, encouragement.

“Are you okay, sir?”

His face came around quickly, like a cat’s.

“What, four years of college, four more of medical school, not to mention internship and residency, you think I can’t handle this?

“Push.
Push
, Patrice.

“Well, boy, don’t just stand there,” he told me. Sweat poured off him; he trembled. “Get over here and take this baby while I see to the mother.” The two of us alone in the alley. 

Doc’s been around for years, a bartender told me later that day. He’d pop up, trek all over the city delivering make-believe babies in alleyways and vacant lots—duplicating the very scene I’d just witnessed—then drop out of sight. No one knew where he lived, or anything about him.

“Weird,” I said.

“I guess. You want another?” When he brought it, he said, “Guess you’re new in town, huh?”

“NO ONE KNOWS anything about him,” Deborah said. I’d mentioned that it was one of those names we all recognized, even if we didn’t know much else; maybe the titles of a play or two, or some half-baked notion of
Lysistrata
’s plot. “He lived to be about sixty. As early as his twenties, he’d grown bald. He served as a councillor of some sort, had a couple of sons, won six first prizes for his plays and four seconds. That’s about it.”

“Not many playwrights have that long a career.”

Deborah laughed. “Most of us don’t have a career at all.”

I’d made a fresh pot of coffee, and put a cup on the table in front of her.

“Thanks, Lew. Smells wonderful.”

“Medicinal.”

“Always.”

A script of the play, blown up on a copier for easier reading and to make room for Deborah’s notes, sat there too. Alternate translations ran in green cursive above some lines. Stage directions and blocking were printed in red at the left margin, miscellaneous notes and self-queries penciled in a scrawl at the right. Highlighted in yellow on one page I saw:

In the margin Deborah had written
son dresses father in fashionable new tunic—Persian,
and I remembered Emerson,
Beware of enterprises that require new clothes.

“The beginning should work great. One of the slaves watching over the old man tells us what the play will be like, but he’s lying the whole time. I just have to find a way to bring this out.”

“Well,” I said, “definitely time for a revival, at any rate.”

R
evival
was what she’d taken to calling her staging of the ancient play, grinning like some Hollywood shark given three minutes to pitch his spiel.

“Resuscitation is more like it,” I’d responded the first time she came up with that. Then: “The thing could do with a zippier title, too, while you’re at it.
Return of the Wasps
, maybe.”

“Son of Wasps.”

“Or jack it up a whole other notch, go for the grabber:
Sting!
”

“That’s it! With the exclamation point a stinger!”

“And a drop of blood at the tip.”

We laughed and poured more of the wine she brought home to celebrate. Lifting my glass in a toast, I said, “Happy you’re getting the chance to do this.” The grant came jointly through Tulane’s drama department and a loose association of several local arts foundations. She’d learned of it from one of her regular customers at the flower shop, a cardiologist on the board of a couple of those foundations, and had applied more or less on whim.

“Me too. I thought … well, I guess I thought the theatre thing was all over, that I’d had whatever chance I was likely to get.”

“No second acts in American lives?”

“Something like that.”

I sat down beside her now as I had then.

“Thanks, Lew.” She stared for a moment at the script. Commentary and notes had begun not to change the play in any elemental manner but subtly to reshape it, urging plot, surround, self and minions toward—what? She didn’t know. That’s what she was searching for. “Hellacious amount of work hiding in the woodpile.”

“And one hell of a woodpile. But it just so happens we’re running a special on homilies this week, Ms. O’Neil. Two for one.” Made as though to rummage in a bag, see what we had left. “Got Anything worth doing, If it was easy, Hang tough. Few more in there, looks like.” I leaned close. “Just between the two of us, marking them down’s the only way we’ve found to move this stuff off the shelves.”

“Like what Bierce said about good advice.”

“Right. Only thing you can do with it’s give it to someone else—fast.”

She was, as usual, wearing a long, full skirt, and when she leaned back, drawing legs under, the skirt took away not only her legs but the chair’s as well, along with a good few inches of floor.

A group of young people went by laughing and from the sound of it doing their version of dirty dozens on the street outside.

“That’s something else I never thought I’d have, Lew. Couldn’t imagine ever being close enough to someone long enough to have private jokes, places, thoughts that didn’t need to be completed, stories all our own. I love having that, Lew.”

“I do too.”

We sat there quietly a moment.

“I could fix more coffee,” I said.

“Two pots are enough—even for New Orleanians.”

She leaned forward to turn on the radio, found some small-combo jazz, Dolphyesque baritone sax weaving a floor for guitar and piano to walk on. Then a soprano sax sounding scarily like Sidney Bechet started up. Another New Orleans boy like Louis Armstrong and with him one of the truly great jazz soloists. They’d always said Bechet was so good you could put him in front of an army band and he’d even swing
that
. Bechet, who’d play great music anytime, anywhere, but would never consent to play nigger, and went off to Paris to live instead.

I turned back from the window to find Deborah’s eyes bright. She’d been watching me.

“You miss it.”

“What?”

“All of it. The books. What you used to do out on the streets, helping people. Teaching. LaVerne and Clare.”

“A curious list.” I smiled. “And a long time ago.”

“No. It wasn’t, Lew. Not long at all. That’s my point.”

“It’s just …”

“Just?”

“I have a family now. You, David, Alouette and her crew. Maybe not exactly the kind of family Republicans are always going on about, but a family nonetheless. Things change.”

“Things do, yes. I’m not sure people do.”

I picked up our cups and took them to the sink. Stood there a moment looking out the window. Bat, Clare’s cat, now mine, jumped onto the windowsill outside and began rubbing shoulder and head against it.

“I don’t think I can explain it, or even that I understand it myself. But it’s a little like when you’re crossing the lake.” The bridge over Lake Ponchartrain was twenty-five miles long. “You get halfway out there and you can’t see either bank. You just keep on going. It doesn’t much matter why you’re on the bridge in the first place.”

I raised the window to let Bat in and fed him, probably for the third or fourth time today, but who was counting. Then I rinsed our cups. Deborah sat watching. Bat lifted his head from the bowl to assure himself that no one was likely to fly in under radar and get his food, then went back to eating. Deborah yawned.

“Where
I’m
going is to bed. You?”

“Maybe I’ll try getting some work done.”

“Don’t stay up too late, love,” she said, reclaiming her legs and letting them take her upstairs to bed.

When Deborah was gone, I took a bottle of Jamaican ginger beer from the refrigerator and went out to the slave quarters. I wasn’t writing books anymore, not for years, but habits hang around like ghosts or idiot children that won’t be got rid of, and sometimes late at night, still, I’d find myself sitting expectantly before the computer. Instead of writing books, I reviewed them. Every few weeks Daniels (last name only, on the official name tag) rang the bell and pulled from her bag a bulky padded envelope bearing the logo of the
Times-Picayune, Washington Post, Boston Review.

This one, a biography of Kenneth Fearing, had arrived a month or so back, so I must be close to deadline on it. Fearing, who had achieved celebrity as a leftist poet and mystery novelist in the Thirties and Forties, was now almost wholly forgotten, yet another victim of what he himself had called the magic eraser of silence. Fiercely antiestablishment, a man to whom literary acclaim could mean only the containment of any truly challenging writing, Fearing would have found publication of
Floor of the Blue Night
by an academic press (according to his mood of the moment) amusing, ironic or abhorrent. I opened again onto the book’s heavily indented pages, thickets of inset quotations and citations like broad stone stairs, like archways, and pulled out my notes, jotted on a typing sheet folded in half.

Then I put the book down, turned off the light and sat  peering out. Bat had joined me, an indistinct, inert lump like a small gray haystack on the desk by the window. A
family
, I told Deborah, with no idea that, even as I said it, already my family had begun shrinking.

In preparation for writing the review I’d looked up a half-remembered poem assembled by Fearing’s contemporary, Alfred Kreymborg, from headlines of the day.

It was in the Thirties, Fearing’s time, that America turned itself into an urban society. It was also, with the proliferation of mass media, when the great divide began developing between high and low art, and Fearing carried that divide within him, on the one hand consciously adopting a kind of writing that limited him, on the other finding within those limits a release of creative powers that otherwise might never have been available to him. Populists like James Agee, and in his own way Fearing, rejected belief that the old high art held some possibility of salvation. Now art, all art, had been democratized, leveled, marked down for quick sale. Now it could only be packaged and repackaged and packaged again to fill the unending need for consumer goods and the media’s relentless demand for product: distilled into streams of sweet-tasting poison.

Little doubt that Agee, Fearing and the rest overstated the case. But in their mixture of populist pride and sadness at the decline of a higher culture lay something vivid and luminous, the apprehension of one of those rare moments when society visibly, utterly changes, and the sense of loss that sweeps over us then. That stream of poison, too, is a thing we all recognize.

Blacks more than most.

The poison goes down from generation to generation like the dissimulation and mimicry our forebears learned in order to survive, never saying what they really thought, putting their distress signals in code, till now, at this late hour in America’s history and our own, we no longer know, maybe can’t know, who we are or what we think.

Year by year by year the poison drips in. We’re told it will heal us.