Ghost of a Flea

Chapter Eight

A few days later, I was able to tell Don: “You look like shit.”

I don’t know why I had been thinking about that incident back in basic on my way to see Don. Just musing on mayhem in general, maybe. Or sending telegrams to myself in code. Sometimes memories are like dreams, artifacts of unknowable civilizations falling into ruin even as you approach them.

Santos had come in with me, then after a few minutes’ badinage left us alone. Don was in one of fifteen glassed-in rooms set like petals of a flower around a central nurses’ station. Phones rang unrelentingly at the station, buzzers and mysterious, unsettling pneumatic sounds came from other rooms, snatches of conversation ricocheted off walls and ceiling.

“Well, that’s some comfort, at least. Good to know I look better than I feel.”

“You’ll want this coffee.” I set the cup down by him. “And today’s newspaper.”

“You could have saved yourself the trouble-”

“-and brought last week’s, I know.” It was an old joke with us: they’re all the same. “Doctors tell me you’re going to live.”

“Ah, still more reassurance. Interesting … They look to be happy with this news?”

“Hard to say. Consensus seems to be you’re one thoroughgoing, uncooperative son of a bitch.”

“All because I told that male nurse I couldn’t use a bedpan, never had been able to use a bedpan, and if he brought the damn thing in here one more time I’d put it away for good where no one would ever find it. You could tell he was giving it some thought.”

“On the other hand, they probably figure that means they’ll eventually get rid of you.”

Don sipped tepid coffee. “My God, that’s wonderful. You forget all the small things, don’t you? Take them for granted. Taste of coffee, or the feel of clean sheets against your skin. When maybe in the end they’re what’s important, what stays with you once most of the rest is gone.”

I sat by his bed. “You’re going to be okay.”

“We always are, you and me.”

“Way a philosopher friend of mine once put it, we carry our okay with us.”

He laughed. A tube went from the upper part of his left chest to a plastic box sitting on the floor beside his bed. When he laughed, valves of some sort fluttered in the box, making a sound like grasshopper wings. Don looked down at the box. Then he laughed again, at a different tempo and rhythm. “Hey, maybe I could learn a few tunes while I’m lying here.” He shifted on the bed. Plastic mattress covers crinkled. “Feel like something from a horror movie, all these tubes growing out of me.”

“Ze pain, it ees not-ing. Endure it, Herr Valshman, endure it in ze knowledge that zoon jew vill be … more than human.”

Don finished his coffee and set the cup down with a soft click.

“I’m tired, Lew. Used up.”

“Been a rough few days. Then there’s that retirement thing, wear down the best of men.”

“You see a wheelchair coming in?”

“Yeah, there’s one right outside your room.”

“You wanta get it? I don’t think I can walk and carry all this shit. Hell, I’m not sure I can walk at all.”

“We’re going somewhere?”

“Just down the hall.”

Seeing me fetch the chair, a nurse came flying out of the central station and through the room’s open doorway with a shrill litany of can’t-allow-its and absolutely-nots. Rose Price-Jamison, her name tag read. I stood quietly by and let her and Don talk it through, their discourse a stew of pigheadedness, tacit invective and (for me) the all-too-familiar condescension of medical personnel. Authorities were called to bear, a charge nurse, a baffled and battle-fatigued surgical resident, a hospital administrator; finally Dr. Lieber, who after listening to the resident’s summary said more or less, Man thinks he can do it, let him. Miss Price-Jamison helped us gather up tubes, monitor lines and IVs and hang them strategically about the chair.

“And you wonder why phrases like ‘thoroughgoing, uncooperative son of a bitch’ follow you around.”

“Image is everything.”

“Yeah. Well right now you look like something from a cheapie version of Mad Max. Big finale’s gonna be you and the bad guy chasing one another in wheelchairs across the wasteland.” I rolled us out into the circle. It suddenly occurred to me how much the layout of the ICU resembled a roulette wheel. “Where we going?”

“Prison ward. Up one floor, go to the end of the corridor, Santos says.”

We shared the elevator with another reverse-rickshaw pair, pusher and pushee alike twentyish black men. Urine in the bag attached to the latter’s wheelchair was the dull red of rust. His head kept falling onto his chest, then he’d catch himself and come around again. His unfocused eyes were that startling gold color you see often around New Orleans.

I pushed Don off the elevator and down the hall. He thumbed the buzzer by locked double doors beyond which only a wall could be seen. Within moments a voice issued from the tiny speaker: “Can I help you?”

“Yes, ma’am. This is Captain Don Walsh, NOPD. There’s an officer on duty in there, I take it?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Could you ask him to step out here, please?”

“I would, sir, but he can’t-”

“Just to the door.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Thanks.”

Shortly an officer stepped into sight around the wall and stood close behind the doors, squinting out. Not old, in his forties maybe, but had an old man’s gait and posture. His head jutted forward rather than upward from his neck, making him look turtlelike. He moved head and neck together from left to right and back, then smiled with a lipless mouth.

“What can I do for you, Captain?”

“Boy apprehended during a robbery over on Louisiana, a Circle K-he doing okay?”

“I think. Looks like someone took a tenderizer to him. Bad concussion, they say. But I’ve seen ’em hurt far worse get up and do more damage.”

“I want to see him.”

For just a moment the officer looked doubtful, as though he were going to recite regulations Don probably knew better than anybody else in the department, but then he said, “You got it,” and sprang the door. He hesitated again before asking,

“Be okay if I came along?”

“You bet.”

“Down this way.”

“What do we know about him?” Don asked.

“About this much.” The officer held up thumb and index finger joined in a circle. “Looks to be about eighteen, says he’s sixteen. No ID on him, no police, juvenile or court records. No mailing address or record of residence. Not a shred of paperwork anywhere, that we’ve been able to find.”

“Boy doesn’t exist.”

“Probably more of them like that out there than you’d think.”

“Could be.”

“Joe Papi works that ward pretty hard,” the officer continued after a moment. “Came up there himself. He says he remembers seeing the kid around, starting maybe four, five months back.”

“Boy was on the streets.”

The officer nodded. With his weird neck, it put me in mind of those dogs with bobbing heads you see in cars, on back window ledges.

We were at the door by then. Inside, looking a bit like Claude Rains, the kid had the bed cranked up high and was sitting there watching Ricki Lake. One after another, fat black women hanging four-fifths out of various outfits strutted from the wings, paraded through the audience and settled into overstuffed chairs onstage before launching into harangues about how sexy they were and how they could have any man they wanted anytime. Big and Bootieful showed at one corner of the screen, the first B stylized to suggest breasts, the second tipped on its side and bulging ludicrously in a caricature of buttocks. Wholly untouched by irony or by any sensibility at all, this spectacle was a kind of assault, as insulting to the audience as it was degrading to the women. Still, it bore manifest of a certain crude innocence; and to every appearance the kid found it hilarious.

He looked over finally at the three of us crowding into the room, eyes in their field of bandage moving from Don and his barge to me, the toter.

“Ain’t that always the way it is, though.”

Then his eyes went back to Don. Briefly his tongue, shockingly pink, naked-looking, larval, protruded past bandages.

“You don’t look so good neither, man.”

Don glanced over his shoulder at me. I shrugged. “Second opinion.”

“Shit, man.” The kid shook his head. “Shit.” His eyes went back to the TV. “Look-a that. Man could hide under there, no one goan ever find him. Whoa! Hold that thing still, mama!”

He watched several moments before saying, “I’d lack that beer now, officer.”

Don smiled up at him. “Could use one myself. More than one.”

“I hear that.” His eyes swung towards me. “You think they pay them bitches or what, they go up there, shake it loose like that? Why they do that?”

“Got me. Maybe they just want the attention.”

“Gotta be it.”

“My name’s Don Walsh. How you doing?”

“Man, whatchu care? You the one did this. Now you goan come in here, ’pologize?”

Don didn’t say anything more, just kept eye contact, his expression neutral. After a moment the kid said, “I’m okay, man. You know.” Then he looked away.

“Yeah. Well, case you didn’t notice, I ain’t gonna be up dancing much sooner than you are.”

“Won’t look near as good when you do, neither.”

“That’s for damn sure…. You ever get tired of watching that TV?”

“Sometimes. Mornings ’specially. Ain’t never much on then. News ’n’ shit, all them ol’ dudes in their richass suits.”

“Could I get you some books or something?”

“What the fuck’m I gonna do with books?”

“Okay…. How about this, then? We’re both gonna be here awhile. You don’t mind, I could come over now and then, maybe a couple times a day, we could hang out.”

“Why would you wanta do that?”

“Hey, there’s not any more to do in my room than there is in yours. Nothing else, it’d help pass the time. We could talk.” Don glanced up at the TV. “Or just watch all these fine women.”

“You wanta come, how’m I gonna stop you? Yeah. Yeah, I guess that be all right.”

“Good.”

Don motioned, and I started backing out the door. Just as I was about to swing the chair around, the kid said, “My name’s Derick. Derick Soames. Most ever’one calls me Jeeter, though.”

“Good to meet you, Jeeter,” Don said. “This is Lew. You’re on the streets, he’s a good man to know.”

“He is, huh, him and his richass suit. Why? He goan save me from getting myself punked by the like of you?” What might have been a laugh almost made it out of him. We started out the door again.

“Don Walsh.”

“Yeah?”

“I did used to play some checkers, back when I was a kid.” Don nodded.

“One more thing …”

“Okay.”

“You know where my tooth is?”