Ghost of a Flea Read online

  Six or a little after, Deborah emerged in housecoat and slippers and found me sitting on the porch. The Penguin Classics edition of Cervantes’ masterpiece was open to page 240. A bottle of Scotch lay sideways on the warped floor.

  “Lew?” she said.

  And the dam of my eyes broke, and tears flooded the land.

  Chapter Ten

  AS OFTEN TRANSPIRES with organizations of a thoroughgoing liberal bent, it was difficult to find anyone at the community center who’d admit to being in charge. Simple caution, or some weird excess of democratic spirit? Winnowing my way from desk to desk, eventually I fetched up before that of a lady named Valerie LeBlanc, face so white it made the pale pink sweater she wore look like a burst of violent color, and stood there thinking both about her name and the fact that she’d claim responsibility. Cast of faces around us running, as they did, from coffee to jet.

  “Yes, ma’am, if that’s okay with you,” I said in answer to her nonquestion. And Alouette asked you to come by and pick up some work she could do at home. “Didn’t want to go rooting around her desk without saying something first.” If mankind cannot bear too much reality, neither does it need too much truth told it. Use in moderation. Apply to a small, inconspicuous area first to test its effect. “That is, assuming I could even find it in here.”

  “So you’re Lewis?” she said. “I don’t believe we’ve seen you here before.”

  “Well, from the look of things, you could have a couple of extended families living in here full-time and never know it.”

  Long ago the place had begun life as a wine and liquor warehouse. Then for years it lay dormant until, during a brief period of progressive government (this oversight soon enough corrected), cascades of funds for “community improvement” became available. Delta Bottled Goods was reborn as Riverside Community Center and ever since, for some fourteen or fifteen years, it had been hanging out over the precipice with ropes afray, held aloft on half a broken wing, stupendous individual effort, all manner and forms of prayer. Now its cavernous spaces and bare, stained cement floor were strewn with desks and tables, some of them cobbled together from odd combinations of doors, squat filing cabinets or sawhorses, cinder blocks, planks, plastic milk crates, and studded with makeshift partitions formed of taller file cabinets, plywood and pegboard slabs lashed or nailed to the backs of desks, hastily constructed, slew-footed bulletin boards. The whole place still had much of the factory air about it and always would. Here, daily, dreams were refurbished, pills and loose threads cut from America’s shabby egalitarian overcoat before it was passed along to new wearers.

  Valerie LeBlanc removed her glasses: prolapsed teardrops, shell-gray, ruby rivets at apices. They swung on a gray cord about her neck, bare eyes springing forth with an unsuspected warmth, out of focus, vulnerable, immensely attractive.

  “Alouette’s fine, though,” she said. Another nonquestion. Had she checked, or did she simply assume, with the mulish optimism of uncompromising wellwishers, that all in her vicinity must go smoothly?

  “She is.”

  “And the child. A girl.”

  “LaVerne—after her mother.”

  She nodded. “LaVerne and I worked together at a women’s shelter downtown years ago, when I was just getting started at this. When we all were. And when there was a downtown. I thought a lot of her.”

  “Most people did.”

  “You among them, I hope.”

  She turned her head abruptly to meet my eyes. Glasses swung at the end of their cord as breasts swayed and came to rest inside a bone-colored silk jumper. One hand, veins close to the surface, crept into view atop the desk. Signals everywhere.

  “Here, I’ll show you.”

  I followed her through mazes that would put Charlie and Algernon at their collective best to shame, trying hard not to focus on skirt, buttocks and taut calves before me. We came to rest, like the head of Orpheus, in the snag of an L-shaped desk lodged north-by-northwest, smack against a coral reef of bookshelves. Desktop all but bare, memos tacked up in perfect rows, half an inch between them on the horizontal, two on the vertical. But when I pulled open the top drawer, there it was, barely contained: the world’s chaos.

  “Her mother’s daughter,” I said.

  I’d rummaged through half a dozen unmarked folders and envelopes stuffed with bits of inscribed paper when Ms. LeBlanc leaned against my shoulder to pose another nonquestion: “You’re looking for something specific.”

  I was, and, all things considered, didn’t mind her knowing, though I wasn’t sure how far onto that particular bridge I wanted to walk just yet. She forestalled my having to decide.

  “The job entails a bit more than answering phones and being able to plow one’s way through the morass of grant applications, Lewis. My degree is in law. When I found I was unable to practice, that I couldn’t in good conscience accommodate myself to the system—a child of the Sixties after all, though mostly I was absent from and oblivious of the era’s great events, being too busy with my studies to take much notice—I began casting about for alternatives. This is what I came up with.”

  “You’re lucky.”

  She nodded. “Most of us never find a place we fit. And I’m good at this. Good enough to suspect that Alouette has been receiving threats, for instance.”

  “Oh.”

  “And to assume that’s what you’re looking for.”

  “How did you know?”

  “I didn’t. Only suspected it.”

  “But you never talked to her about it.”

  “She never talked about it with me. It was her place to bring it up, not mine. Threats are a commonplace in our world, with what we do. We receive them all the time, in every kind of package—overt, implied, physical, psychological. Face to face in the heat of confrontations. Over phones at three in the morning. Downstream from bureaucrats in suits and cell phones and upstream from clients lugging their few precious worldy goods about in plastic bags or shopping carts.”

  “You thought the threats were routine, then. Not serious.”

  Now I was doing it. Nonquestions.

  “In their way they all are. I do think Alouette failed to take them seriously.” Valerie LeBlanc leaned back onto the window ledge, which canted her hips forward, pushing belly and thighs tight against the front of her skirt. She did this with the air of someone wholly unaware of her body, the effects it engendered. “Part of it’s that she doesn’t take herself seriously, you know.”

  “She works hard.”

  “Harder than almost anyone else around here. But that also serves to direct her away from herself. Sound like anyone you know?”

  “Sounds like everyone I know. Pardon me, miss, but your Sixties are showing.”

  “They usually do, however careful I am to tuck them in. Nineteen-ninety-six, the year he died, my father was still ranting about murderous, inhuman Japs. Talk about holding grudges. And people say Americans have no sense of history! So maybe I’m doomed to the same? Stuck in place like all those people with lacquered hair and leisure suits on the religious channel, flat and lifeless as pressed flowers. History’s torpedoes streaming towards me in silence.” She pushed off the window ledge. “Come on, let’s peek.”

  I followed back through the maze to her desk. “Mind you,” she said, “peeking’s nowhere near as exciting as it used to be.”

  “Things get that way at our age.”

  She sat before her computer. “They don’t have to.” Fingers rippled on the keyboard as though with a will of their own, the very figure of the socialist agenda, each finger acting independently though in concert, courting the common good.

  “At some level, always, we’re just looking for the secret stuff. Not much difference there between Molly Bloom and Sally Raphael.”

  Fingers went on as she spoke. I thought of H. G. Wells’s Martians stilting towards London, soldiers in blue peering down from the hills over Vicksburg, young men in Sopwith Camels who cast an eye on life, on death, flew on.
/>   “This whole thing,” she said, nodding towards the computer, “is a morass, an ethical slough. I can punch in and find out instantly who’s left messages on my machine, cruise business prospects and keep up with friends, have the world’s news at my fingertips. But I can also, with the flick of that same finger, call up a list of sex offenders and their current addresses. These are people, mind you, who’ve served their time, paid their debt. People who, according to every tenet of a Constitution we go on and on claiming to be so proud of, are fundamentally protected.”

  Menus and directories bloomed on the screen, gave way to others, in a constant wash.

  “Most days I bemoan that loudly. Decry, despise and disavow it.” She stopped, fingers still, and read what she had, then clacked a few more keys. Columns of icons and keywords filled the screen. “Here’s a file Alouette had tucked away in a private folder. Swept under the rug, as it were. Correspondence, mostly. And mostly electronic, from the look of it.”

  “Can I get a—”

  But she’d already pushed the eject button, and was handing me a disk.

  “Thanks.”

  “You’re welcome. I hope it helps.” She smiled. “Hate to invade someone’s privacy for nothing. Maybe you’ll let me know?”

  Valerie LeBlanc replaced her glasses. Mission accomplished, good deeds done. No one would take her for the hero she was, now. Back to the workaday world.

  Three hours and spare change later, I was sitting at a rear table in Tender Buttons, a converted drugstore where the food is great if profoundly idiosyncratic even by New Orleans standards. Service, on the other hand, might best be described as postmodern: sketchy, nonsequential and difficult to follow, forever self-conscious and oddly parodic as though in some indecipherable way alluding to other things entirely, say yakraising or kazoo artistry.

  Many of the entries from Alouette’s computer, lacking referents or perspective, proved utterly indecipherable. Others had to do with various projects at work and appeared to be of no more than utilitarian interest. There was a file of personal letters and e-mail messages, another of (I think) references to newspaper and magazine articles. But the one that caught my attention had been identified simply as GOK—Alouette’s code, I recognized, for an intellectual shrug, God Only Knows—and I sat thinking about it as the waiter brought my catfish au beurre noir and grit cakes studded with bits of bright habanero pepper, side of white asparagus, and vanished to reappear at irregular intervals, bursting suddenly upon the scene to linger there like a declaimed quote, or shuttling up all but unnoticed, superfluous as a footnote.

  The GOK file was a hodgepodge of lists, passages from novels and self-help books, advertising slogans, obituaries, cross sections of classified ads, altogether the most eclectic jumble of disparate things heaped up in a single place that I’d ever come across, a tour through America’s waste lots and past its false, ruined faces, a landfill of used-up words, expended cartridges of old thoughts clattering to the floor. One list comprised science-fiction titles.

  “The Education of Drusilla Strange”

  A Fabulous, Formless Darkness

  To Walk the Night The

  Man Who Fell to Earth

  A Mirror for Observers

  Another juxtaposed mysteries by Margery Allingham, Jonathan Latimer and Patricia Highsmith (provocative n added, one presumes in all innocence, to Ms. Highsmith’s given name), movies from the era of such actors as Broderick Crawford, Richard Carlson and Robert Mitchum, and TV shows like I Led Three Lives and (with painstaking documentation of each individual episode) The Prisoner. One contained a longwinded though rather breathless review of Donald Westlake’s Richard Stark novels from an alternative magazine in the Midwest, another several excerpts from Millay’s Collected Poems and Adrienne Rich’s The Fact of a Doorframe. A publisher’s flyer for a new translation of I’m Not Stiller had been scanned in.

  Messages everywhere.

  Somehow I hadn’t been altogether surprised to find my own first novel, The Old Man, listed there. Over coffee I sat thinking of that novel’s dedication, to David: Non enim possunt militares pueri dauco exducier. The sons of military men can’t be raised on carrots. Now here I was looking for others, shadows, with my own son gone missing—out in the world somewhere, as Buster Robinson and four or five generations of bluesmen put it. LaVerne would have had something to say about that. So for that matter would almost everyone else. Probably, if he knew, even my waiter, who ibid’d by long enough to refill my coffee and drop a check, albeit the wrong one, on my table.

  “What’s the F for?” I asked when, outwaited so to speak, at length he returned. I’ll read anything. F. Prokov.

  “F? Oh. The name tag, you mean. Not mine. I’m filling in for my roommate, has a part in a new play. My name’s Alaine. Like Elaine but with an A.”

  As we got the check straightened out and, finally, paid, I showed great control in refraining from complimenting him on just how well he fit in with the general waitstaff. Definitely in the groove. They’d probably wind up asking him to stay on.

  Outside the bar next door, near a crape myrtle whose limbs had crossed like fingers then intergrown to the point of having no separate existence, a young man and woman stood talking.

  “But honey, you know what I mean,” the man said as I came out of Tender Buttons. He looked into her face as though he had himself forgotten what he meant but thought he might find reminders of it there. Farther along, half a block or so, I paused to marvel at a dogwood’s spectacular involucres, as though huge thumbs had pressed each flower into place, then before a yard whose chain-link fence was interlaced with pinwheels of every size and color, dozens of them, all whirring gaily away.

  Following upon several hours of sunlight, New Orleans had again gone gray, as if the city had been turned inside out or some anti-city been unearthed, bleak where the original was bright. Purple-gray bellies of clouds hung overhead. Wind whipped about in the trees and beat its fist against the sides of buildings. Lines from a poem I’d read years ago came to me:

  Tell me again why, at the edge

  of the world, the wind screams.

  Across the street, someone had stacked magazines at curbside for pickup after sorting them into bundles and wrapping each bundle with twine. Now a man perhaps my age in layers of ragged clothing sat tearing apart each bundle and picking through, placing his selections carefully in a new pile beside him. Wind threw back exposed covers like bedclothes, ripped through pages. It would be a long winter. There was little enough a man could do about that, but he might at least stock up on reading matter.

  About the same time I came across that poem in a magazine, I also read a book of short stories by one of the young Southern writers then briefly fashionable. Something troubled me about the stories, some residue I couldn’t quite define or throw off. After a few days I picked the book up again, and soon had it: each story ended with a man walking back to his hotel alone or standing at a window looking out. This was in the early Nineties, and I was living, more adrift than usual, in a constant shuffle back and forth between furnished rooms and LaVerne’s. David had vanished, I thought for good, leaving behind a few moments’ silence on my answering machine. Putting in his own time (I imagined) walking back to dreary rooms and standing by windows. Watching the world pass by just out of reach, acceptance, participation, understanding.

  We always have to understand, don’t we, the two of us? That’s another thing I must get away from.

  Closer to home I passed a neighborhood grill and looked in to see a waiter who at first appeared to have been in a terrible accident, his arm a clutch of raw meat. But it was merely bacon he held, draped over the arm (much as in movies fancy waiters hold towels over their arms) preparatory to cooking.

  Five or six blocks further along, a homeless man had deposited his jumble of bags beneath a tree in an empty lot and lay knees up among them as though reclining in a field of high grass or flowers. Person and possessions, man and baggage, were indistinguishable,
equally still, equally serene, in perfect lack of expectation.

  Chapter Eleven

  THING IS, I walked out of the building and the cops were standing there waiting for me

  There was this sort of gate at the entryway, and I froze just outside it. The gate was cast iron and once had something written on it in art deco script, but now only two letters were left, an L and an I, spaced far apart.

  “Don’t s’pose you live here,” one of them, the older one, said.

  “Don’t rightly see how anyone could. Back home our barns’re better’n this shithole.”

  I held both hands up in plain view.

  “You been drinkin’, boy?”

  I shook my head. Best, always, to say as little as possible. That was true back home, even more true here in the city. I’d been in New Orleans a year or so at the time, and was learning fast.

  “Here to buy dope, then.”

  “No sir.”

  “Damn. You’re one polite nigger, ain’t you?”

  They walked me over to the squad between them. I made to lean against it and spread my feet.

  “No need for that,” the older one said. He smiled. The smile reminded me of alligator gars into whose mouths we’d jam sticks, then watch them sink and fight their way back to the surface and sink again till they died. “You been up to the third floor by any chance?”

  I shook my head.

  “You sure ’bout that.”

  I nodded.

  “’Cause there’s a man up there makes his living selling dope to kids. We don’t like that much.”

  “No sir.”

  “Maybe you don’t either.”

  “No sir.”

  “Maybe if we went up there right now we’d find he’s given up his former occupation.”

  “I wouldn’t know anything about that, officer.”

  “No … no, of course you wouldn’t.” A car sped by on the street. He followed it with his eyes, then looked back. “I haven’t seen you before, have I?”