Ghost of a Flea

hour in America’s history and our own, we no longer know, maybe can’t know, who we are or what we think.

Year by year by year the poison drips in. We’re told it will heal us.

Chapter Five

I’d got up that morning (off the bench, so to speak), taken a long look at the reef of bottles, and climbed upstairs to bed. During the day I awoke several times and lay there listening to the old house’s creaks and groans, remembering Whitman’s I think I will do nothing for a long time but listen/And accrue what I hear unto myself, before falling back asleep. I got up for good when I heard Deborah down in the kitchen. It was dark.

“And here we thought you’d become just another brave explorer claimed by the desert,” she said when I stumbled in.

“Bad news, I’m afraid. We had to kill the camels for food. And the bwana, of course.”

“Bwana first, I hope.”

“Damned right. Not much meat on Ol’ Massuh, though. Tell me there’s coffee.”

“I was thinking about making some. You can chew the beans, if you’re really desperate.”

“Desperate, yes-but chewing beans would only remind me of the camels. I loved those camels.”

“You do need coffee.”

That was the first pot, as we sat idly talking, both of us too tired to give much thought to food or other routines of the day. We pulled various corners, edges and butt ends of cheese out of the fridge and ate them with the remains of a loaf of French bread. Deborah had stopped off at her set designer’s apartment after leaving the flower shop, and it was now past nine. I’d slept, in bed as opposed to on bench, fourteen hours.

“I just didn’t have the heart to wake you this morning when I came down. You were, by the way, doing a fine imitation of Bat, half on the bench and half off, no bones anywhere.”

I squeezed both eyes shut and opened them again: Bat, wincing.

“You didn’t get caught in the storm, then?” she asked.

“Only the beginnings of it. Which is just as well, from what I saw this morning. I’m surprised the streets were clear.”

“They weren’t. Passable, though. Everything bleached-out and blasted-looking, but with this brilliant sun and bright blue sky overhead. There had to have been all kinds of trash in the streets, tree limbs, trash cans, African drums, a bloated politician’s body or two, but I guess the rain washed most of it away.”

So, veering from prattle about Aristophanes and the play to news of her day at the shop, the latest on Pakistan’s earthquake and the saga of my purposeless sit-in at Joe’s, we went on talking till almost midnight, when Deborah cashed in the chip or two she had left and left the casino.

Coming back in from the slave quarters, I’d brought Fearing’s spirit with me. Kenneth and I sat together in the dark not talking for a couple more hours. Bat followed me in, too, made another plea for food and, failing, curled up beside me on the chair’s overstuffed, well-worn, moderately clawed arm.

I was sitting in pretty much the same place and attitude when Deborah came down the next morning. I’d had three or four hours’ sleep upstairs myself, and now I was contemplating piles of laundry that needed doing. An Iwo Jima of whites, Allegheny of darks, a veritable Everest of colors. Where was Teddy Roosevelt when you needed him to go storming up these hills and take them? Even if the famous footage, and in large part the event itself, was faked.

“It’s a start,” Deborah said, “kind of. Which one’s Krakatoa?”

“You’re always complaining that I don’t sort things properly.”

“I just had in mind not putting everything in the washer at once, Lew. It somehow escaped me that the creation of new continents would be involved.” She looked ceilingward, as though for steerage. “Oh well. Just passing through.”

“City be full of tourists. Always underfoot. Speaking of which: any sign of David?”

“I didn’t hear him this morning. Want me to go look?”

“He’d be up and about if he were here. I suspect he’ll wander home when he’s-as my father always said-of a mind to.”

She went on to the kitchen, where I heard her rummaging: cabinet doors chattered, a drawer slid shut with the sound of an arrow thunking into its target. Dull smack of the refrigerator door opening. Minutes later she walked into the front hallway. A voice, none of which I could make out, unrolled on the answering machine. Then she was there in the doorway.

“Lew, you better come listen to this.”

She wore a light green housecoat that matched the glass in her hand turning the orange juice within a sickly color.

“It’s the third one,” she said, pushing the button on the machine. “It must be from last night. Neither of us thought to check.”

Mr. Griffin, this is Marie at Book News. I don’t seem to have an e-mail address on file for you. We were wondering if you might have time to review a new translation of Cendrars for us. Give us a call? Thanks.

The second caller had so much trouble trying to say what he wanted that, after repeated stammering, he finally hung up.

Then the third. Jeanette’s voice.

Lew, are you there? … I guess not … Can you call me when you get in? It’s Don, Lew. He’s been shot.

When the elevator doors opened on the second floor, three heads turned towards me. Two of the heads nodded. The owner of the largest of them came to meet me.

“Griffin,” he said.

“Santos.”

No hand was offered. Cops don’t much like shaking hands. And when all was said and done, Santos himself, though his skin was as dark as my own, didn’t much favor black men. No way in hell we were ever going to like one another, his attitude told me; but since I was a friend of Don’s, he always treated me with deference. Don’s retirement had left him chief of detectives.

“What happened?”

“Jeanette called you, right?”

I nodded.

“She told you Don’s been shot.”

“And that’s the whole of what I know.”

One of the other cops approached, and Santos stepped away for a moment to confer.

“We had kind of a send-off for Walsh last night,” he said upon return. “Nothing formal, just a lot of us who wanted to get together and say hey, we’re here, we appreciate what you’ve been doing all this time. Man did a fuckin’ hero’s job for a lotta years. You think anyone noticed? Anyone but us? So we got together at O’Brien’s, a bar down on-”

“I know it.”

“Yeah. Yeah, sure you do.” His eyes met mine. O’Brien’s was the closest thing New Orleans had to a cop’s bar. Citizens knowing cop stuff is another thing cops don’t much like. “Anyhow, Tony Colado snagged a cake half the size of a football field from his uncle’s bakery, a deli a lot of the guys eat at up on Magazine kicked in a tray of sandwiches, like that. Whole thing ran maybe five in the afternoon to eight, eight-thirty.”

Automatic doors from the ICU sprang open and a young man in blue scrubs ambled through. The scrubs, probably the largest available, struggled to cover the man’s chest and bulky shoulders. Weightless blond hair clung to his scalp like damp flower petals; a tiny silver and blue-enamel cross hung from one ear. Beckoning for me to come along, Santos went to meet him.

“Dr. Lieber,” he said. “This is Lew Griffin, he and the Captain go way back.”

Don’s rank and title had changed several times over the years. When he first took the job, not too long after