Ghost of a Flea

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.”