Ghost of a Flea

Chapter Thirty

At first I couldn’t think why I knew the place, then remembered: the ex-ranger back at the pigeon hunters’ apartment.

Hoppin Jon’s. From outside it looked like a cement bunker. Inside, it was one room the size of a dance hall or bowling alley. At the far end, a low brick wall set off kitchen area and cooks; a round bar stood dead center. Otherwise the floor space was broken only by homemade tables of whitewashed wood, some of them small, others picnic-size, pushed about the floor into casual combinations and collisions. Even now, at breakfast, the place smelled, as so many New Orleans restaurants do, of fried shrimp.

Three dozen or so patrons sat, stood or milled about. Looked a little like a prison yard during an eclipse. Most of them had plates of food, all of them had drinks. The drinks came in what appeared to be honest-to-God jelly glasses. Terence Braly was at a communal table halfway in. Santos had remained behind at the door as we entered; now he leaned easily against the wall, looking around with no expression on his face. Don had kept moving to take position in the rear, near bathrooms and whatever exit they or the kitchen might offer. When I sat down by him, our boy’s friends all found their feet and went away. Most of them no doubt saw me come in with Santos and Don and figured us all for cops. The others just had feelers out-kind of work they did, they developed feelers-and knew when to (as Chandler said) be missing.

“Excuse me,” he said. White, five-six or right around there, dark hair with tight curls. Pushing thirty but hanging back in the breezeway. He still had on his hospital uniform. He’d unzipped the green top. A ribbed undershirt showed beneath; his employee badge, alligator-clipped to the collar, flapped underarm. White pants bore a permanent crease you could use to slice bagels. Shoes white too, Reeboks, recently polished but with traces of grime and possibly dry blood around eyelets and seams. “Do you mind?”

Smiling, I said nothing, and moved still closer to him. Sensed, as though they were my own, heartbeat and respirations increasing.

“I know you?”

“Nope.” I reached over and picked up his glass. Took, as my old friend O’Carolan and several centuries of traditional singers might say, a healthy dram. Put the glass back exactly where it had been, in the ring it came out of. “Okay, one question down, nine to go.”

“Man,” he said, drawing the n out to its breaking point, “that’s my fucking drink. You wanta get out of my face here?”

“No. Eight.”

He took a long breath. Maybe a change of tactic was in order. “Look, man, whatever your thing is, can we get into it some other time? Been a long night, I’m just not up to this.”

“Those old folks do take their toll, don’t they?”

He braced himself from glancing at me and instead looked off, something he’d seen tough guys do in movies. Eyes stayed there in the middle distance when he spoke.

“Man, whoever you are, I don’t have anything you need, you know? And what I do have, you don’t want.”

But he was crimping. Part of the reason he did the work he did and hung on to it was that it allowed him a control wholly absent from the rest of his life. Whatever tension or danger he faced, whatever bad guys, the weight of authority bulked behind him, the deliverance of routine bore him up. Now he found himself face-to-face with one of those bad guys outside the palace grounds, no one else around, rules gone south.

I put my hand over his, joints bulky as pecans beneath my palm, and bore down. When he tried to pull away, for a moment I bore down still harder, then let him withdraw.

“Maybe I could buy you a drink,” I said. “Several drinks.”

Cage door left open, free at last, free at last, his eyes came back to me.

“Okay. Tha’d be all right.”

“Canadian Club and 7-Up, right?”

“Sweet…. Don’t worry, man. I saw your posse, I ain’t going nowhere. They step back long enough to let me have a piss, you think?”

“Absolutely. Nod to Cerberus as you go by, guy in the yellow shirt. Best keep your distance, though. He recently got shot. It’s made him edgy.”

“I hear you.” He started off towards the back as Don and I exchanged glances. I snagged a CC-and-7 and a brandy at the bar, waited for Terence back at the table.

“Alouette says hello,” I told him, pushing the drink his way.

He picked it up and took a long pull. “Damn that’s good. Guess I’m screwed, huh?”

“Sure looks that way.”

“So how’d you find me?”

“Does it matter?”

He shrugged.

We’d flagged his name, along with others, on the list of employees sent us by Dr. Ball. He’d been an orderly at the psychiatric facility in Fort Worth, assigned for the most part (a call to Dr. Ball’s Miss Eddington disclosed) to back wards, when Tony Sinclair was there, and left shortly thereafter. Over the next several years, as Rick was able to track, his name showed up on rosters at half a dozen or more facilities in Louisiana, Alabama and Texas. Now he worked at a geriatric hospital here in the city. Most human resources records are elliptical, Rick said, and in a kind of code, but it isn’t a hard code to read, and what it comes down to is that Terence had started getting too close to his patients, identifying with them, claiming communication and levels of interaction no one else ever witnessed.

“I didn’t mean to hurt anyone.”

“I’m willing to believe that.”

I’d never drunk Courvoisier from a jelly glass before. Aroma and taste of the brandy coloring my world, smoothing it, pulling things together as it always does, I told him who I was. Told him about LaVerne and our life together, how I’d gone looking for Alouette and found her up in Mississippi with her baby. How after the baby died, I brought her home. How she’d stayed around a while, left, and years later returned.

“She was on the streets, then.”

I nodded. “You didn’t know much about her.”

“No. I didn’t.” He looked off again, nothing histrionic about it this time, and for some moments grew silent. “I thought I was helping. I was trying to.”

I got us new drinks at the bar. Terence sampled his and said, “I was on the street myself till I was nineteen, twenty. Starting when I was, I don’t know, ten? eleven?”

“What happened to your parents?”

He shrugged. “They died, maybe. Or I ran off. I don’t remember much of anything before being on the streets, really. Seems like I was always out there. I learned everything I know from people I met-how to get along, how to find food, where to sleep. I’d watch them, copy what they did. Got older, I started wondering if there was a me somewhere in there. Maybe I was just this pasteup, this artificial thing. A bad copy, you know?”

All signs being that our boy wasn’t going to bolt or attack, Don and Santos came in from the field.

“You gonna be okay here, Griffin?” Santos said.

I nodded.

“Then I better get back to the work the citizens pay me for.”

“I’m grabbing breakfast. You want anything, Lew?” Don asked. He started off.

“Captain …” Santos said.

“Yeah?”

“Dinner, man. That rain check you’ve been holding has to be faded out by now. My wife’s a patient woman, but you put it off much longer she’s likely to turn up at your door. One thing you don’t want’s a pissed-off Cuban coming round. I ever tell you about the time her father ran into Lee Harvey Oswald on the street handing out communist pamphlets?”

“I’ll check with Jeanette, give you a call.”

Santos nodded to Don, then to me. He headed for the door, Red Sea of patrons parting before him.

“Every few months,” Terence went on, “I’d get scooped up off the streets and sent to some holding center, or farmed out to foster homes. I’d escape-one time, I crawled out through holes knocked in old walls to make room for air-conditioning, another time I hid in barrels of garbage-or more often I’d just walk away.

“Then late one afternoon I ran smack into a wall I couldn’t get through or around. Don’t think I didn’t try. But instead of packing me off upstate or exiling me to some godawful suburb, Judge Branning took me home with him. The house was filled with kids, three or four of them his own (I was never sure how many or which), the rest a mixture of neighborhood kids, other kids hooked up with one or the other for schoolwork or projects, and kids who’d come through his court and still dropped by from time to time.

“I wasn’t a kid, of course, and I made sure they all knew that. Way I walked, talked, way I kept myself apart from the rest. I’d been on my own a long time. Late that night, the judge found me out on the porch. Everyone else was either gone or in bed. I was sitting there with my feet hanging off. He’d had a few drinks by then-Judge loved his bourbon-and his speech was a little slurred.

“‘Don’t do what most of us do, son,’ he said. ‘Don’t get along towards the end of your life, look around you, and realize you’ve wasted it.’

“That’s all he said. We sat there, him on the big swing, me on the floor by the edge. A shooting star sliced through the sky. Cars and trucks passed by on the street, heavier traffic out on the interstate. ‘How you figure I can get ’round that?’ I asked him. ‘I been thinkin’ on it,’ he said. ‘I still am.’

“Next morning he took me down to the local hospital. Not to the employment office, but right on into the hospital administrator’s. ‘Got a good man here,’ he said after he’d introduced us, ‘who needs good work.’ Administrator looked me over. ‘Well, I don’t know about good,’ he said, ‘but we sure enough got hard work needs doing. Good might come later.’ Judge looked over at me: ‘What you think?’ ‘I reckon that should do for now,’ I told them.”

Don rejoined us bearing a plate of eggs, sausage, home fries and toast aswim in grease.

“Yum.”

“Get your own.”

“One way or another,” Terence said, “I been at it ever since. Felt like I was doing something that mattered, you know? Not just moving papers around, trying to sell people something they don’t need.” I nodded.

“Funny thing can happen to people who work health care for a long time. I don’t know, maybe they just see too much, reach some kind of limit. Or have to protect themselves. But they lose sight of what it’s all about, stop feeling anything for those they’re taking care of. Not hard to see how that might happen, but with me it was just the opposite. More time I spent doing the work, the more I felt for those I was caring for, the more I wanted to do for them. Taking care of their basic needs, medical needs, just being there, wasn’t enough anymore.”

“Danny Eskew, for instance.”

“Right. You know what it’s like to be rejected by your family, cast off like old clothing, furniture that clashes with new curtains? He was the man in the iron mask, shut away for life from everything human. Sitting there unable to feed himself, messing himself as often as not, staring at walls and waiting-with nothing to wait for. Meanwhile there’s this family elsewhere, this half-sister his father absolutely adores. Danny knew all that. How do you think it made him feel?”

“The doctors taking care of him say there’s no way he could have known.”

“Psychiatrists …”

“And even if he did know, there’s no way he could have communicated it.”

“Not to them. But I think I knew the first time I walked into his room. It’s like that sometimes. You walk close enough to them, their soul leaps into your own. It’s an electric arc. Blue, and all but blinding-you can almost smell it afterwards. Like a welder’s torch.”

“You guys want another drink?” Don asked.

“No. No, I don’t think so. But thanks, man.” I shook my head.

“Okay. So you identified with Danny Eskew. I can understand that. What I’m not clear on is how you get from there to stalking Alouette.”

“No, no. That’s not it, not at all, I don’t identify with Danny. This has nothing to do with me. Stalking her? God, no. I’m only trying to help. The girl doesn’t know about her brother, doesn’t even know he exists. She should. And he’s stranded, marooned, all alone. I’m just a channel, a conduit, from Danny to his sister. Through me he’s reaching out, speaking to her.”

“There on the porch, for instance?”

“I’m sorry about that. I didn’t think she was home. When I heard her coming out, I panicked-started to run, then in my confusion turned around and ran right into her. I’m glad she wasn’t hurt.”

“Where’d William Blake come from?” Don said suddenly. You’d have sworn he hadn’t been paying the least attention.

“Another patient of mine. Old soul, he called himself. Always going on about Madame Blavatsky, Nostradamus, Native Americans. Had a book about Blake on top of a stack of them in his room. I picked it up one morning and it fell open to this picture of a painting, some kind of monster walking across a wooden floor, with curtains right by him so that it looks like he’s on a stage. The book was there for me to find. Instantly I realized that I’d known that painting forever, though I’d never seen it before. Since then I’ve read everything by and about Blake there is…. Maybe I will have that drink.

“Blake talked to angels, you know,” he said when Don came back with our drinks.

“Yeah. Yeah, I heard that. You?”

Terence nodded. “They don’t answer very often, though.”