Ghost of a Flea Read Online Free PDF Page B

of New Orleans days. If sometimes the clothes were a bit worn, well, so were the two of us. And if coat and slacks didn’t quite go together, what matter: we were both used to mismatches in our lives. Today he wore a drip-dry white shirt with long, pointed collar, tan tie with Hawaiian beach scene, mustard-colored coat, maroon slacks hitched up to show brown nylon socks with figures of dogs as clockwork. The continent of Lester ended at two-tone shoes, off-white on tan.
    He looked up as I approached and, though no one else sat on the bench with him, moved the boy’s backpack closer to himself to make room. A bottle of chocolate drink peeked from out his twisted fingers.
    “Lewis. A pleasure as always. Must of been, what, Thursday a week ago, I saw you last?”
    “Thereabout.” Right now I had about as much time sense as Doo-Wop.
    “Thursday,” Lester said, nodding to confirm it.
    We didn’t shake. I’d done so once, noting in his face (though he was too polite ever to have told me this) the pain it brought him. What I saw in his face now was something different, something I never stopped marveling at. Lester had a genius for attentiveness, for making whatever you said to him, whatever you might say to him, seem vitally important. Everything about him signaled that he’d never before heard the like of it, and that he valued your choosing him to share it with as much as he valued the information itself.
    “You’ve been busy, then.”
    I told him about Don, that I’d just come from seeing Jeanette. She had insisted on making coffee for us, listening for the gurgle as we sat waiting in the front room and, once that had come and subsided, finding only hot water in the carafe, having forgotten to put in coffee. The can of French Market still sat there on the counter by the sink.
    “Tough on her,” Lester said.
    I nodded.
    “She just have to be tougher. Your friend’s okay, though?”
    “Going to be, anyway. How’re things with you?”
    “Things moving right along, Lewis. Like they do most days, ’f we just think to take notice of them. Billy Boy over there seems to have him a new woman. Thinks he might, anyways.” I followed Lester’s nod to a large tan-and-white pigeon strutting before another, smaller bird, periodically bowing and bobbing. “Gertie came up missing some weeks back. Been together a long time. They mate for life, you know. But if one of them dies, sometimes the other one will take a new mate. And it looks like Billy Boy’s of a mind to do just that.”
    When Billy Boy turned to make another pass, I saw that the bird’s foot was clubbed, digits curled back under and withered into a ball, burrlike. Some portion of what I’d assumed to be courtship posturing in fact derived from a rolling limp as he stepped onto the damaged foot.
    “City’s hard on them,” Lester said.
    “Hard on us all.”
    “ That’s God’s truth.”
    Cooing at him and ducking her head twice, Billy’s new lady strolled to the pond for an aperitif, a delicate beakful of scummy water. Billy joined her. There were so many insects skittering across the pond’s surface that they looked like cabs at rush hour in midtown Manhattan.
    Lester’s gold signet ring jangled against the bottle as he raised his hand to gesture, long index finger unfurling from the rest. It spent some time unfurling. Its nail was the size of a demitasse spoon, almost perfectly flat. “Not many birds do that, drink directly by immersing their bills and sucking. Pigeons are one of the few.” Every week, Lester had told me, he carted home an armful of books from the public library. Whenever he became interested in a subject, pigeons for instance, or ancient Greece, he read everything the library had. “During Egyptian times—”
    Lester stopped because the boy had come up to us. He stood there making whimpering sounds, eyes puffy and red though no tears fell. He held out his hands together, palms up. In them a pigeon’s head lolled as it tried to