Ghost of a Flea

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?”

“No sir.”

“New in town?”

“Right new, yes sir.”

“Got family here?”

“No sir.”

“Heading back home soon, then?”

“I ’spect so, yes sir.”

“So I won’t be seeing you again.”

I shook my head.

“Good.”

“You’re free to go,” the younger one said. “He’s free to go, right?”

“Free as he’s gonna git, anyway.” They had a good laugh over that.

“Thank you, officers. You take care now, you hear?” And I walked away.

Away from apartment 321, where Harry Soames lay fouling pale blue tile with his blood.

“What the fuck, let ’em kill each other off,” the younger cop said behind me.

Two months after I’d come down from Arkansas, I met Angie at a Burger King on Carrollton. You could get a dinner there, burger, fries, drink, for about two dollars. She didn’t have it. And though I didn’t have much more myself, I sprang for her meal. I wasn’t so hardened back then, I hadn’t seen a lot.

We lived together for six, seven weeks. Didn’t take me long to find out Angie was an addict. But long as she got her stuff, she was good. And slowly over those days and weeks, without giving it a name or thinking much about it, I was falling in love with her.

Then one night-I’d started doing collections, which tends to be nighttime work-I came home and found Angie stretched out on the couch. She looked perfectly at rest. Some detective show was on TV, light from the screen washing over her. She’d popped corn and the full bowl sat beside her on the coffee table, along with a full glass of lemonade. She was dead.

Chapter Twelve

Years ago, in one or another of my hospital stays, LaVerne brought me a crackly old recording of Negro poetry. She’d come across it, on a New York City label more often given to Southern field recordings or folk music by aged Trotskyites and scruffily dressed suburban youngsters, with the occasional klezmer, fado or polka disk thrown in for good measure, at a client’s home. Following my initial, instinctive repulsion, I’d fallen in thrall to those voices, to Langston Hughes’s “Night comes slowly, black like me” and the poem just before, which described a Southern lynching. That one in particular I listened to again and again, riding the tone arm as it rose and spun and fell, words and images spilling from the grooves; till finally the weight of it all, shoveled from the record’s trenches, settled onto me. In subsequent years, without ever intending to, I’d begun collecting such poems. They’d push in past my feet as I opened the door and not be put back out. Then one day, browsing a ramshackle antique store in the Faubourg Marigny, I swung open the top of an old school desk to find, atop a packet of letters tied with string, a postcard dated Jun 3 1931. The message, in glorious Palmer loops and dips, read Geo. and family doing good. Yesterday we took ourselves out to these mounds that were bilt hundreds of yrs ago by no one knows who. Just these humps, like they’d done buried an elephant. Home soon. Yr wife, Dorothy. Much of the ink had faded, until only the outline of letters, like dry husks, remained. I turned the postcard over. On its front, a young black man hung from one middling limb of a pecan tree. All the limbs went up at sharp angles, as though in a rush towards sky. The man hung there, an afterthought, trying to tug this single branch back down. The rope about his neck was obscenely thick, thick as a man’s arm. His feet were bare and so bloated with pooled blood that they looked like melons. Beneath him, in the tree’s shade, a group of whites sat looking into the camera with cups raised.

As I walked back up into the Quarter towards Canal, past flotillas of tourists, shop owners hosing down sidewalks, mule-drawn carriages and delivery vans that looked as though they’d sustained artillery attacks, things began coming together in heart and head at odd angles. Half a block from Jackson Square I wheeled about and went back, bought the postcard for five dollars. Two weeks later I proposed Strange Fruit, Strange Flowers to my publisher. Had I written it, the book would have been an extended essay on the art and literature of lynching; it would have been also, leaving aside the unpublished autobiography, my only nonfiction book. It sold on prospectus the first time out to a major publisher for what my agent called “a respectable advance”-approximately what I’d made for all my novels to date combined. Then a long odyssey as editors came and went, book’s file staggering from desk to desk, carried home to Brooklyn on the F train, left behind at the Cheyenne Diner but recovered, correspondence outgrowing prospectus and contract like weeds taking over a vacant lot.

“I had no idea,” I’d say to Clare, weeks into the thing, “how difficult this would be, or how different. Writing a novel’s never easy. No way around putting in the time and sweat. And you never really know what you’re doing. There’s a stack of lumber and nails you’ve got to turn into walls somehow. Find a place for doorways, windows and sills and figure out some way to put them in. But for all that, it’s more like building a tree house, tacking on a porch. This is like remodeling your bathroom: walls a smelly map of mildew and stain, floors torn out, reeking, jagged pipes everywhere. And nothing fits anything else.”

Those first weeks and for some time after, as the book in its pod (I thought) grew a body, face, hands, I’d been a faithful carpenter. Turned up at local archives and libraries day after day with such regularity that the guards and I came to know one another. Sometimes I’d join them, bearing cups of carryout coffee, on the back steps before opening. Drink and chat a few minutes, then go inside and lay out legal pads, pens, PostIt notes, index cards, retrieve books held for me overnight under the counter, settle in at a table.

Once during an afternoon break I stood outside with a guard named Jean. Well past fifty, body unbowed and unslowed by time, features smooth as stone, he dismounted the bus each morning with shirt laundered and starched, trousers pressed to a crease that could slice butter. Half a block over, in the square before City Hall, long folding tables had been set up to feed the homeless and indigent. I looked from orderly queues awaiting allotments of stew, bread and applesauce, to the motel across the street where thirty-plus years ago a man named Terence Gully had clambered to the roof with a.44-caliber Magnum rifle, a duffel bag full of ammunition, and four generations of racial pain.

A man about the same age as my companion, wearing ancient khakis, Madras sportcoat and two or three shirts, all of them in tatters, walked across Poydras from downtown. With him was a girl of perhaps twelve, his daughter, perhaps, the two of them to every appearance living together on the streets. Each bore a backpack, blankets tied into bedrolls and swung under one arm. The girl’s clothes were as hodgepodge as his: oversize men’s jeans, sweatshirt from which cute pawin-paw kittens had long ago faded, grimy John Deere gimme cap. But as they came closer, I saw her face. Base and powder, liner and eye shadow, a touch of rouge, pale lipstick.

“Pretty girl. Got one ’bout that age myself,” Jean said beside me. He put out his cigarette on the sole of a steel-toed shoe, held it cradled in one hand for disposal. “Had, anyway. Wife up and left me two, three weeks ago.”

“I’m sorry.”

Jean shrugged. “Prob’ly for the best.”

After he’d gone back in, I stood watching father and daughter inch along the line, plates slowly filling. I