Ghost of a Flea

now too, so maybe you could pour in some water, drop in a filter. Then fill the sucker up-to the top-with French Market.”

“Sure, just tell me where you keep the dirt.”

“Come again?”

“Forget it.”

I did what he asked, pulled a battered ancient Coke tray out from under the counter and used it to carry four cups of fresh coffee back to our table. Santa with a squat bottle tilted into his beard, sixty dollars or more at any flea market. Catherine, Don and Rick were in spirited conversation.

“You can set up systems to provide basic needs. Service, employment, housing. No problem there. But what do you do about incentive? Much as we’d like it to, Maslow’s hierarchy doesn’t just kick in like an afterburner.”

“Same dilemma as at the heart of socialist and communist forms of government.”

“Right.”

“Whereas capitalism tends inevitably to monopolies and centralization of wealth,” Don said.

I stared at him.

He shrugged. “Lots of spare time these days. I’ve been reading some.”

“Because motivation has to come from within,” Catherine said.

“Does it? There’s no greater motivator, for some, than wealth accumulation. Status. Both of those are external counters. Meanwhile, what seems an evergrowing percentage of our population has no motivation.”

I sat listening, watching the steady exchange of customers through the door. When finally the tiniest hairline of a break opened in the conversation, I said, “God I hope the bell rings soon.”

“Anyone know who this man’s with?” Rick asked.

“So what are you guys doing here?”

Don’s eyes met mine. Again I thought: lands and grooves of my own life, my own years, on someone else’s face. “Rick and I were having lunch last week-”

“At Casa Verde.”

“Right.”

“Sandwich, coffee.”

“Three coffees, maybe four.”

“Four coffees?”

“Hey. Small cups.”

“And flan,” Rick said.

“Of course.”

“He wanted to know how you and Alouette were doing, how the baby was. Somewhere along the way-”

“Third napkin, as I recall.”

“Good grease.”

“Absolutely.”

“-I mentioned the letters she’s been getting.”

“He also mentioned the unexpected contact you’d had with Alouette’s father. I went home and the more I thought about that, the odder it seemed to me. What did he want?”

“To find someone, he said.”

“But then he didn’t want that anymore. And why you? With his means, he could hire a battery of folks to do a search.”

“Even people who actually find who they’re looking for,” Don put in.

“Very funny. I assumed it was his roundabout way of trying to make contact with Alouette.”

“Maybe …”

Jessie materialized beside the table, carrying a platter. Enough food on there to feed everyone in the Desire projects.

“We’ve gone to finger-food heaven,” Catherine said.

“Anyone works here gets fed free. Gator tails,” pointing. “Catfish. Meatballs in my own marinara. Pickles-I make them, too. Slices of chicken breast marinated in barbeque sauce and grilled.”

“Good, Jessie,” I said. “This makes an awful lot of sense. I put in six minutes, tops, helping out, and that mainly because we need coffee, so you spend twice that putting this platter together.”

He shrugged and went back to his kitchen, only place he ever felt right.

“Have to admit it’s one hell of a coincidence,” Garces went on. “Dickensian. But life’s never story-shaped. I kept thinking: Whatever’s being said here, it’s not what’s being said.”

There were, along with gator tails, catfish, meatballs, chicken and sliced vegetables, small pots of ranch dressing, mustard with hot peppers chopped into it, a dish of fresh cilantro and mint. We all tucked in. Don went off towards the kitchen to confer with Jessie, then to the bar, and brought back beers.

“Now you work here,” I said, “and he’s gonna bring more.”

“No end to it.”

“We’ll never get out of here.”

“I go home and start poking about, using this loose network that’s developed over the years.”

“One you used to find Alouette.”

“The same. Social workers like myself, psychiatric nurses, aides, people from support groups, family members, expatients. Not too many of those at first. Lots more these past few years. Whole thing’s fishing, drop in tackle and flies, hope for strikes. Nothing jumps right out, maybe for a while, maybe never. But that’s what I do.

“Then one night I can’t get to sleep, finally give up on fighting the bedclothes-it’s so bad that ditties from Carmen and old Randy Newman songs are running loose in my head, rattling around in there like marbles. And the bedclothes are definitely winning, they’ve pinned me eight times out of ten. So after an hour of watching bad movies on TV, women warriors whose acting consists of contorting their mouths, male leads so stupid you wonder how they ever managed to find the dryer and hair spray, I settled down in front of the computer and tossed out a few new lines. Most of them just went spinning on out and didn’t catch anywhere, as usual. But one or two snagged, got responses that brought up new queries, suggested some direction or flight path I hadn’t thought of before. I started feeling my way carefully, like crossing a muddy field on stepping-stones. Around four that morning I found myself talking to a bus driver who’d spent nineteen months in a clinic up near Fort Worth. Bus driver now, but back before the breakdown he’d been a pilot. Not only was his insurance good but his family had money, so he wound up there, one of those got-it-covered private asylums, instead of across the river at Mandeville.

“His name’s Tony Sinclair. Once he started getting better, he asked if there was anything he could do to help out. Always been a hard worker and couldn’t stand the inactivity anymore, feeling so useless, he told me. So he started out doing this and that, not much of anything at all at first, really. Reading to other patients, walking with them out on the grounds, helping them get dressed or write letters home, that kind of thing. But gradually he took on more and more. Before long he’d worked his way into the back wards and was helping take care of the really sick ones. Got to know some of them pretty well, that last year.”

A face appeared in the window beside us, in the scant space left at one edge of the ancient lettering, J E S S E ’S, above placards pitching gospel shows and revivals. The man’s breath fogged the glass, which partially cleared then fogged again with another breath and another, so that, frost building by increments, bit by bit his face disappeared. He wore three or four shirts, a hunter’s cap with earflaps, shiny wool trousers held up by suspenders, one side of which had been replaced by hemp twine.

“Sinclair’s the kind of guy you instinctively trust and want to talk to. He wasn’t, no way I’d be up hitting keys back and forth to him at four or five in the morning.”

“People like that make good investigators,” Don said.

“They make great social workers and therapists, too. Only problem is, they tend to burn out…. Anyhow, some of these guys on back wards started talking to him, guys who hadn’t said anything to anyone, some of them, for years. Not that there’s any kind of dialogue or conversation going on, understand. But things would just jump out there from time to time.

“Early one morning Sinclair’s attending this young man, he’s in his thirties, name given as Danny Eskew.