Free Ghost of a Flea by James Sallis Page B

you’ve got to turn into walls somehow. Find a place for doorways, windows and sills and figure out some way to put them in. But for all that, it’s more like building a tree house, tacking on a porch. This is like remodeling your bathroom: walls a smelly map of mildew and stain, floors torn out, reeking, jagged pipes everywhere. And nothing fits anything else.”
    Those first weeks and for some time after, as the book in its pod (I thought) grew a body, face, hands, I’d been a faithful carpenter. Turned up at local archives and libraries day after day with such regularity that the guards and I came to know one another. Sometimes I’d join them, bearing cups of carryout coffee, on the back steps before opening. Drink and chat a few minutes, then go inside and lay out legal pads, pens, PostIt notes, index cards, retrieve books held for me overnight under the counter, settle in at a table.
    Once during an afternoon break I stood outside with a guard named Jean. Well past fifty, body unbowed and unslowed by time, features smooth as stone, he dismounted the bus each morning with shirt laundered and starched, trousers pressed to a crease that could slice butter. Half a block over, in the square before City Hall, long folding tables had been set up to feed the homeless and indigent. I looked from orderly queues awaiting allotments of stew, bread and applesauce, to the motel across the street where thirty-plus years ago a man named Terence Gully had clambered to the roof with a .44-caliber Magnum rifle, a duffel bag full of ammunition, and four generations of racial pain.
    A man about the same age as my companion, wearing ancient khakis, Madras sportcoat and two or three shirts, all of them in tatters, walked across Poydras from downtown. With him was a girl of perhaps twelve, his daughter, perhaps, the two of them to every appearance living together on the streets. Each bore a backpack, blankets tied into bedrolls and swung under one arm. The girl’s clothes were as hodgepodge as his: oversize men’s jeans, sweatshirt from which cute pawin-paw kittens had long ago faded, grimy John Deere gimme cap. But as they came closer, I saw her face. Base and powder, liner and eye shadow, a touch of rouge, pale lipstick.
    “Pretty girl. Got one ’bout that age myself,” Jean said beside me. He put out his cigarette on the sole of a steel-toed shoe, held it cradled in one hand for disposal. “Had, anyway. Wife up and left me two, three weeks ago.”
    “I’m sorry.”
    Jean shrugged. “Prob’ly for the best.”
    After he’d gone back in, I stood watching father and daughter inch along the line, plates slowly filling. I thought about parents and children, about David and Alouette, Terence Gully, the young man hanging from that pecan tree on the postcard. Had he had children? Not much more than a child himself. Another of America’s horde of invisible men. They pass through life a shadow, leaving no impression. Never in his life would that young black man have had occasion to be photographed. Or to have been entered in any record beyond statistics of birth and death. Now there he hung for all time.
    What research taught me was that such postcards were once common. They’d existed by the hundreds, handed across counters like advertising circulars, stuffed into bags of flour and patent medicine, spread on hallway tables in rooming houses, propped up in shop windows. That fall I traveled to a small town in Pennsylvania whose university library had amassed a major collection, possibly the only collection, of these cards. I went through the lot, made copious notes and photocopies, had dinner, half a dozen weak drinks and lunch the next day with the collection’s curator. An elderly gentleman with pinkish hair and eyes, he spoke with authority and passion while seeming at the same time apologetic, even embarrassed, by his calling. Dressed in the first seersucker suit I’d seen outside New Orleans (though without the accompanying bow