Ghost of a Flea (4 page)

“That’s the Billies,” Whitaker said as we passed the slablike, mostly roofless shell of a building. Two men inside sat on boxes at a battered old spool cable, having breakfast from the look of it. I half expected them to lift their cups to us in greeting. “Billy Williams and Billy Nabors. Been there over a year now. Came down from Minnesota, Nebraska, one of them places. Say they just couldn’t take the cold no more.”

Some blocks further on we passed a sixtyish woman wearing a red wool sweater, pink ballet tutu with baggy,
lime-green
tights, and purple-and-orange sneakers.

“Squeezebox Sally. Makes the rounds on Maple Street every night, all those restaurants and bars up there, with her accordion. Comes up to a table and asks people, usually couples, what they want to hear, but it all sounds the same, mainly just her pushing and pulling at the box, hitting keys at random. Word is, she used to be some kind of piano virtuoso. Word is also that now she’s deaf as a board. Her big finish is always the same: she turns around, bends over and tosses up her skirt.”

“I guess there are some things in New Orleans’s rich cultural life that I’d just as soon miss out on,” I said.

“Could definitely put you off your lasagna.”

We were almost to Don’s by this time. Whitaker took a right by the Circle K where Don had been shot.

“Bonner”—the other cop, that I knew, from back at the hospital—“says you write books.”

“I used to. Used to do a lot of things.”

“Didn’t we all,” Whitaker said, pulling up at the curb.

REGULARS KNEW HIM AS DOG BOY. He could be found each morning and late afternoon, accompanied by the elderly black man who looked after him, in the small park a block and a half away, riverside, from our house. Whenever someone brought a dog into the park, the boy would drop to all fours and stare into the animal’s eyes. Most of them stared back, boy and dog transfixed before one another, fused in the press of their concentration to something like a single entity; I had seen lap dogs, poodles and Dobermans the size of small cars standing there by him, turning their heads that curious way dogs have, keening in puzzled kinship. Dogs were chiefly what people brought to the park, hence the name, but the boy’s sympathies extended well beyond. Once I observed him by the ironwork fence, back bent to an S curve, chattering away with the squirrel atop it. Another time, what must have been an escaped domestic parrot came to rest, bobbing, in an azalea, while boy and bird, faces but inches apart, rolled, swiveled and ducked heads in tandem.

Lester Johnson had worked for the boy’s family, as a shoe repairman in a store they owned, for over forty-two years, long after people gave up on having shoes repaired; long, too, after Lester’s arthritic hands had grown unable to hold the necessary tacks, narrow-headed hammers, awls and needles, and his eyes unsuited to such detail work. His wife, Emmie, had cared for the boy at first, just as she’d brought up the family’s older children, all of them even then off to college or making their way in the world, but when the boy was three and the family first coming to the realization that something was not quite right, Emmie had died. Her blood pressure shot up not to be brought down, circulation faltered and began to fail, every treatment seemed to further complicate things, and one quiet Saturday afternoon as Lester stood by the bed he watched her, with a single long breath, let go. Four days later he shut up the shoe store for the last time and took over Emmie’s duties.

Over the course of the first couple of years we saw one another in the park, Lester and I had begun speaking. Over the next two or three we’d gradually progressed to brief exchanges. Only this past year, and without its ever emerging as a conscious decision for either of us, I think, had we taken to sitting together and talking.

Lester was never less than properly, one might say elegantly, dressed, shoes buffed to a high shine, coat and tie even on the steamiest of New Orleans days. If sometimes the clothes were a bit worn, well, so were the two of us. And if coat and slacks didn’t quite go together, what matter: we were both used to mismatches in our lives. Today he wore a drip-dry white shirt with long, pointed collar, tan tie with Hawaiian beach scene, mustard-colored coat, maroon slacks hitched up to show brown nylon socks with figures of dogs as clockwork. The continent of Lester ended at two-tone shoes, off-white on tan.

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.

I’d lie in bed at night after lights-out watching the play of shadows from palm trees on the wall and listening to the wind. It seemed to me that summer that the wind was coming in off the beach always, rushing breathless towards us from somewhere else, washing up in great waves like the tides themselves.

A few days before my own wave peaked, I had watched them grab one of the other blacks, a slow, slightly backward, ever-friendly boy from Texas, out behind the latrine. He’d been lipping off to them, they said—and beat him badly. I had seen it happening, then gone on by, and hadn’t stepped up to them on it. I was still worrying over that, trying to find a place inside myself I could put it. But if I did step up to them, I kept telling myself, they’d only come for me next. At that point I hadn’t learned that it didn’t matter, they’d most likely come for me anyway.

They did, maybe two weeks later, about two in the morning. I heard the springs on one of their beds, then the other, and could follow their progress towards me by the creaking of floorboards. I lay unmoving, one arm hanging off the side of my bunk. Outside, a sudden gust of wind caught in the trees and bounced like a thrown ball from branch to branch.

Moments before they reached me, I jumped to my feet. The radio my mother had just sent me came along; I swung it on its cord in two quick circles above my head before crashing it against that of the nearest of my attackers. I heard the crunch of something internal, radio, head, giving way. The man went down and didn’t move.

Turning to the other, I pulled out the antenna I’d taken off the radio earlier and with a flick of my wrist extended it. I went at him with it as though it were whip and foil in one, slashing, slashing again. Deep cuts opened on the hands he held up to try and protect himself, on his face, on neck and arms. When he began backing away, I went with him, never letting up, slashing, tearing. He tripped, tripped again and this time couldn’t catch himself, falling backwards against the wall.

Thanks, Mom.

During all this, no one else in the barracks had moved or spoken. Now a voice from the far end said: “Those boys through?”

“They be done with, all right,” another said.

Then the first again: “You okay, Griffin?”

I said I was.

“That’s good.”

A pause. I could hear my heart thudding. “Right shame those boys had to tear into each other that way. Who’d have thought there was bad blood between them? Always looked to be close. Just goes to show.… Guess we’d best get the sergeant in here, tell him what happened. Reckon they’ll be in stir awhile.”