Ghost of a Flea. James Sallis by James Sallis

Author:James Sallis [James Sallis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, General, Mystery & Detective, Crime
ISBN: 9781842437162
Google: Wr8vuAAACAAJ
Publisher: Oldcastle Books, Limited
Published: 2012-06-01T22:15:39+00:00

Chapter Eighteen

I WASN’T LOOKING FOR HIM, you understand.

Long since an adult, he was equally capable of making his own choices and declining to make them; he’d never hedged at accepting the fallout from either. Nor could I plead to having had much impression or influence on his life, not having been around to offer understanding, a sympathetic ear, least of all an example. I knew something, myself, about not making choices.

So as I rummaged the city, touching down with beer-drinker fishermen at their ordained posts on the levee off Tchoupitoulas, benching myself to reminisce in a statue-guarded, pie-slice park on Magazine, prowling Decatur with its shoulder-narrow sidewalks and balconies like shrugs above, wading across river-wide Canal down Esplanade to the Faubourg Marigny and rising back up through the Quarter past Simple Suzies, Eds and Professor Bills, past lean-to missions with tureens of watery soup and hope, past the library and City Hall, Leidenheimer Bakery, wooden stoops and swayback cement stairways, shipwreck islands of storm-tossed furniture, cable spools and milk crates on the neutral ground, I wasn’t looking for my son.

For something within myself, rather. At some level that’s what all our searches are about, of course.

“Can’t help you much, Lew,” his mother said that morning when I called. “Far as I knew, everything was going well. Last heard from him—I’d have to check to be sure—four, five weeks back? One of those trademark postcards of his, where the message starts off in regular script and becomes ever more crabbed, final sentences squeezed in sideways at the margins or asterisked in between lines.”

“No sense of what was going on in his life?”

“You’re kidding, right? You know what those cards are like. Sometimes he’d touch down, sure. Bring up some play or movie or concert he’d seen, string together bits of overheard conversation, remark that both of you’d taken to hanging around the house too much. Mostly, though, he just wrote about what he saw at his job. People he got to know there, their stories, where they lived, how. Hang on, I’ve got to pull something out of the oven.” Two, three minutes later she was back. “Been a long time since we’ve talked, Lew.”

“True enough.”

“No reason for that, you know. You have my address, you could write from time to time, even do something outrageous like send the occasional Christmas or birthday card. Scrawl a satirical line or two in there if it made you feel better, whatever space’s left. A quote, maybe, something appropriately snarly. Swift, Laurence Sterne, Thomas Bernhard, like that. It’s always Serious Friday somewhere.”

Serious Fridays had begun as a joke when David and his friends were students, all of them casually bohemian. No television, parties, dumb movies or other mindless escapism allowed on Fridays, the screed read. Exalted conversation only. High-end jug wine. Smelly, mysterious cheese. Books tucked underarm, coolly they’d stroll towards bars and ethnic restaurants, skirling intellectual happy hours like bullfighter’s capes about them out there in a hot world.

“I hadn’t imagined there was any way you’d want to hear from me, Jane.

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