Ghost of a Flea

We listened as footsteps paced back and forth above.

“Cold as a sonuvabitch down here,” I said.

“You get used to it after a time. Year or two. I been down here-hell, I don’t know how long I been down here. Man gets used to ’most anything…. You feelin’ trollish?”

“I don’t know what I’m feeling. Not my feet. And the fingers are going fast.”

“Shiiii. You a part-timer.” That was funny enough to say again. “Part-timer.”

“More ways than one,” I admitted. “But you’re not. And I figure you have to have seen my boy over there in the park.”

“One they call Dog Boy.”

“Yes.”

“I’ve seen him all right. Seen you with him, too.”

“Then you know how much he loves life.”

“I know how much he loves animals.”

“There’s a difference?”

Mister Bones shrugged. His breastplate rattled like Venetian blinds in wind.

“Someone’s been killing pigeons. Poisoning them.”

“Sure have. For a time now … You okay under here? You don’t look too comfortable. Noticed a blanket set out to dry on a porch across the way yesterday, probably still be there.

We could go get that for you.”

Moments limped by.

“I want to find them. The ones who are doing it.”

“They’re survivors, you know. Pigeons. You have to respect that.”

Even though he was looking out towards the park and couldn’t see me, I nodded.

“Like us,” he said. “You hungry, Griffin? Miz Miller up the way left a can of Vienna sausages out on the stoop for me last night. Be happy to share them with you, you want.”

Chapter Twenty-Four

The stairway stank of urine, beer, stale cigarette smoke and mold. Once, long in the past, there’d been carpeting. Fragments of green remained in patches, mostly beneath nailheads, like tufts of hair sprouting from old men’s ears. As I entered, someone let loose a bowl of water from the third landing, screaming I told you not to come back here, goddamn it! No one else on the stairway as the cascade came down and I ducked aside. A door slammed.

Each floor held six apartments, A through F, though in no apparent order. A might just as easily be the apartment nearest the stairs, or tucked away between E and B. A pencil eraser would have taken down most of the doors. Walls bore deep gouges, long troughs, as though trucks had been driven repeatedly into them over the years. Here and there plaster had come away in great statuelike chunks; elsewhere it clung on bravely. At one turning I put my hand against the wall and precipitated an avalanche of plaster nuggets, pebbles, powder. This went on for some time. Stairwell corners held stacks of gravid boxes, belongings for which residents had no room inside, presumably. Surprising that these hadn’t long ago been borne off. Posters of Sixties movies and rock shows hung alongside paintings of clowns and seascapes on landings. The whole stairway creaked and swayed like a suspension bridge.

I climbed to the fourth floor. Four’s about as far as it goes for most of New Orleans, outside downtown anyway. The city’s well below sea level, filled-in swampland for the most part, one of those triumphs of man’s imagination and will that the world periodically refutes with such rejoinders as floods and hurricanes. Then I came to 4-A.

This door wasn’t going to be taken down with an eraser. It fit the frame flush. No give to it, no space about the edges, no apparent weak spot. Door and frame both steel.

I knocked. It was like rapping knuckles on a boulder. Whole armies could be on the move in there, tanks, armored vehicles, transports, and I wouldn’t hear them.

Incredibly enough, the door opened.

A thirtyish man in cornrows wearing Tommy Hilfiger’s clothes, barrel-like shorts, oversize rugby-style shirt (I hoped Tommy had more), stood there. Skin color medium brown, eyes blue-gray. Brows and upper lip lifted at the same time, three birds taking flight.

“Those our bitches?” someone behind him said.

“Sure nuff don’t look to be,” the doorman said. Then to me: “Whatchu want?”

Taking that as an invitation, I pushed my way in. Doorman fell back, then recovered and came towards me, leg lifting for a karate kick. When the ankle came up, I grabbed it and twisted as I shoved it towards the ceiling, hammered a fist into his crotch. He went down as the others shot up off the couch.

I’d taken notice of the rock sitting by the door as I entered. Judging from roundness and polish, it had spent several human lifetimes in water somewhere perfecting itself. About the size of an orange and used as a doorstop, no doubt. The one who’d come up off the couch and started towards me went down hard when it hit him square in the forehead. I’d thrown underhanded, like a kid on a softball team. That left two of us on opposite banks with the river of a sky-blue couch between. This one was older, done up in high grunge: plaid shirt with sleeves flapping, long-sleeved T-shirt under, cord jeans bagged into camel’s knees and shiny with wear. Both hands came up, palm out. He stepped out from behind the couch shaking his head.

“Whatever this is, man-”

“You live here?”

He shook his head again.

“Then what are you doing here?”

“Guess I’d best be asking myself that same question ’long about now.” He looked down at the floor, from one to the other of the bodies there, then back at me. “Thing is, I went to high school with Pryor here, guy making that snoring sound? Not that we ever hung out back then, nothin’ like that. But this morning when I ran up against ’im at Hoppin Jon’s, suddenly he’s acting like we’re old-time bros.”

Picking up on my unvoiced question, he said: “It’s a bar and grill just off Claiborne downtown. Serves a kickin’ breakfast, so lots of night workers turn out, hospital workers, firemen, paramedics going off duty, camp followers. I pull graveyard shift at the coroner’s myself, have for years. So I’m sitting at the bar, just gonna have a quick one and head out, when Pryor comes up and says, Hey man, I know you. This here’s Levon, he tells me, my boy. We had a few drinks, scored breakfast, wound up back here. Next thing I know, you’re busting in.”

He still had his hands up. Now slowly he put them down.

“This over, man-or you just puttin’ in a new clip? Anything I can do to help convince you to let me walk out of here?”

“That could happen.” Briefly I told him what brought me there, about the boy, the dead pigeons.

“This bone man’s the one gave them up?”

“He sees everything that goes on in the park. One day these two, never been regulars before, take to hanging ’round, and they get to be like toothaches, just won’t go away. Turn up in the park with paper bags too small for lunches, anything like that, and leave empty-handed. Them boys weren’t proper, he said. Knew it from the first.”

“Proper?”

“What he said.”

“Well, they’re definitely bent. He got that right.”

“Finally one day he hauled himself out from under the house and followed them back here. Never did nothin’ like that before, he told me. Ain’t likely to again.”

“Not your typical concerned citizen.”

“Not the kind you usually hear about, anyway.”

We stood silently with that river of a couch beside us, bodies washed up on its shore. Behind him a