Moth lg-2

by James Sallis

  “Yeah, that’s pretty much it.”

  “Did you know LaVerne had tried to get in touch with her daughter? To see her?”

  “No, she never told me that. I know there were court orders involved, at one time. Those would no longer apply, of course. But LaVerne always said she wouldn’t contact her daughter, that it would be easier on Alouette that way.”

  “She changed her mind. You know anything about what the problems might have been between Verne and the good doctor?”

  “No, I’m sorry. Though I’m not certain I’d tell you even if I did. If I thought I did, that is. There’s a kind of professional reflex at work here.”

  I thanked him again. I’d got almost out the door when he said behind me: “You’re trying to find Alouette, is that it?”

  I turned back. “Chip Landrieu asked me to. I figure it’s little enough.”

  “Yeah. Well, I could probably help you with that.”

  Chapter Five

  One of the first things I fell in love with in New Orleans was its cemeteries. The house I lived in on Dryades when I first came here had one nearby, a block of gravesites smack in the middle of street after street of houses and apartments, with a low brick wall and, just beyond, a border of the tiers of vaults here called ovens-all of it white and dazzling in the sunlight. There was at the same time such gravity and such lightness to it; and ever since, when things crowd too closely in upon me, I tend to head to the cemeteries for a strange solace I find nowhere else.

  The largest (though really it’s a blur of many smaller, distinct ones) is at Canal and City Park, a wilderness of tombs stretching far into the distance, a sprawling city of the dead. Many older crypts have sunk almost completely into the ground. And above them, as though reaching for sky, loom thickets of crosses, angels, statues large and small, figures of women shrouded in grief.

  The oldest is on Basin Street, St. Louis Cemetery No. 1, at what was long ago the edge of town and later the edge of Storyville. Marie Laveau, Paul Morphy and the city’s first mayor dwell there now. Occupying but a single square block, it’s pure chaos: a riot of twisted pathways that end as often as not in cul-de-sacs. Tombs sit askew, at every conceivable angle and tilt, the lower corners of many of them wrenched free of the ground.

  My personal favorite is on Washington. It fills two or three blocks in a well-decayed part of town, chockful of gravesites in a bewildering jumble of styles, size and age, cut through by narrow, corridor-like paths, yet in its own way rigidly symmetrical: disorder’s cur brought to heel. Whenever I’m down that way, I make a point of going by.

  Which I did that afternoon on the way home, wandering its pathways for half an hour or more, reading off names at random. Intimate stories began unfurling. Then I moved on to the next, or the one after.

  Finally I left and ambled along Washington. Stopped off at a corner grocery for a quick po-boy and beer. Took the beer with me to finish as I walked up La Salle, jagging from sidewalk (where there was one) to street (where there wasn’t, or where, from blockage or a quakelike upheaval of tree roots, it proved impassable).

  A couple of blocks up, I turned into an alley between shoulder-to-shoulder doubles to trash the Dixie bottle. Most of the places along here seemed to be occupied-presumptive Christmas decorations hung on some abbreviated porches, leftover Halloween skeletons on one-but the houses either side of this particular alley, for whatever reasons, had been scuttled. One, to the left, once lime-green, had all windows and doors boarded over; its yellowish neighbor lacked windows and doors entirely and was heaped with refuse ranging from rotting lumber and linoleum to remains of impromptu parties (fast-food bags, bottles, candles) and grocery sacks of garbage, perhaps from adjoining quarters.

  I lifted the lid of one of the bins, La Salle painted on in red, and saw just beyond, at the back of the alley against the latticework wall, a body. A woman’s, I confirmed, stepping closer. She lay face-down, skirt thrown up over back and head. Pale, bloody rump in open air.

  Twentyish, I decided, after turning her over. And dead. Possibly from a blow to the head: temples were spongy, eyes pushed forward and swollen. Possibly from a knife held against the neck as they butt-raped her, nicking a carotid.

  Not that it mattered.

  I knocked on the nearest occupied door, pushed my way in before the woman who answered could protest or ask questions, and dialed 911.

  “Walsh,” I told them.

  “We’ll have to get your name, number and location,” the guy said.

  “Walsh-or I hang up. There’s a body. You decide.”

  Two minutes later, Don was on the line.

  I spent an hour or so answering the usual array of police-type questions to at least three different groups of people, then went home. Later that night I sat with a glass of gin, neat, one of my own books face-down, unheeded, against my thigh, open to a particularly violent scene. I didn’t need to read it, I knew it-by heart, as they used to say.

  For years now, sequestered in this house, the one Vicky and I lived in together, the one Verne often visited, I had written book after book about street life, crime, about violence both random and purposeful, about frustration and despair and, occasionally, vengeance. But what I wrote, all those supposed “realistic” scenes, were only a kind of nostalgia, a romancification, sheerest dissembling; I could never portray what it was really like out there.

  It wasn’t that, in the years of my retreat, violence and pain had grown; but that I myself, believing I understood, believing I was saying important things, huddled down there, had steadily grown smaller.

  I did not and do not understand. I will never understand.

  Chapter Six

  They never really knew what happened to Clare Fellman.

  One morning in late October she’d been conjugating the verb parler for her first-period students and suddenly, between first- and second-person present du sub-jonctif, she was on the floor, unconscious, all sensation and control (as she would discover, three days later, upon waking) gone from her body’s right side. Because they didn’t know what else to call it, after sending her off on numerous day trips through CAT scanners and MRI’s and the like, the doctors at Oschner called it a CVA.

  She was twenty-two at the time. Now she was thirty-six.

  Nothing much ever came back to that right side. Over the next year, first at Oschner, then at a rehab hospital near Covington, she had painstakingly learned again to reach and pick up things and hold on to them, to guide a spoon from lift-off to touchdown through the uncertain space between planets of bowl and mouth, to negotiate the fall between chair and bed and wheelchair and toilet, and finally to walk. Life had become all new conjunctions for her, she told me: impossible joinings and connections others took for granted. She still wears braces at knee and ankle, canvas with Velcro these days, and a slight drag in her gait shows the extra focus required whenever that side is called on. It reminds me, oddly enough, of the way a jazz player, confronted with straight eighth notes, instinctively drags them out into dotted eighths and sixteenths.

  Her speech, too, bears the mark of having been relearned. She speaks slowly, carefully, as though each word carries in its wake its own small period, filling the spaces with quick smiles and, often, with laughter that seems as much at her own halting progress as at anything else.

  We’d met a year or so back at an Alliance Francaise event, a special showing of a film version of L’Etranger and buffet dinner after, to which I’d gone with Tony (Antoine, but don’t dare use it) Roppolo, one of our English Department adjuncts. Absolutely guarantee you the stinkiest cheeses imaginable, Tony told me. And how could a guy pass up a thing like that?

  Moments before the film began, Clare sank into the aisle seat beside me; Tony leaned forward for a quick hello and brief introduction. She held out her left hand and I took it, somewhat awkwardly, with my right. Afterwards we all sat at one of the long folding tables shuffling morsels of Cheshire, Brie and Camembert in among careful mouthsful of wine. By the t
ime we’d switched from nouveau Beaujolais to a dark, ripe cabernet (Kool-Aid! she had exclaimed with her first sip of the Beaujolais) and Tony had washed out to sea (where periodically we caught sight of him bobbing here and there among bodies) Clare and I were well on our way to becoming (as she put it) new best friends.

  For a time then, things moved pretty quickly, certainly far more quickly than made any kind of decent good sense. We were both old enough and, I’m sure, in our own ways damaged enough to know better. Nor did either of us, I think, really anticipate or intend what happened.

  Then over the last couple of months, breathless and blinking, and with no clearer resolve or culpability than that with which we began, we’d found ourselves pulling back from one another. Too many unasked questions between us, maybe; too many wartime raids and too little faith in the cease-fire. Sometimes sitting beside Clare I felt as though unsaid things were growing like vines all around us, filling the room.

  Of course, I felt that way with most of the people close to me.

  And I was surprised, returning home from the Foucher shelter and my cemetery stroll, to find a message from her on my machine.

  It’s Clare, Lew. The spaces between her words were chinked with the tape’s quiet hissing, anonymous background sounds. Yeah, me. I’m sorry to bother you. I know about LaVerne, and I’m so sorry. If there’s anything I can do, just let me know. But I have a friend who’s got a problem, and I thought you might be able to help. A pause. Could you call me when you get a chance? Please?

  She answered, breathing hard, after six or seven rings.

  “Lew. Thanks for calling back. Give me a minute, okay? I was doing my rehab stuff.”

  Threaded on the phone’s fine silver nerve, we hung there. I listened as her breathing slowed.

  “Okay, thanks. I know this is a bad time.”

  “Something about a friend, you said.”

  “Sheryl Silva. She works in dietary at the school and usually takes her break when I do, right before lunchtime. For her it’s a little island of peace between preparation and storm. And after three straight periods, the last one my honors group, I’m pretty desperate. I try to stay away from the teachers’ lounge, which is mostly bitching and conversations about children or new refrigerators, neither of which I have or expect to. So there’d just be the two of us there in the lunchroom, and after a while we fell into the habit of sitting together. Though a lot of the time we wouldn’t say much of anything. Just sit there sipping iced tea, smiling vaguely at one another and looking out a window. Then last week she asks me if I’m ‘married or anything.’ I mean, we know absolutely nothing about one another. And when I tell her no, she asks me if I ever had a man beat me, or try to hurt me. Says she has, when I tell her no, but she thought that was all over.”

  “And it isn’t.”

  “I think it’s just threats, so far, from what she tells me.”

  “Husband?”

  “I don’t know. She wasn’t too clear about that. They lived together, at any rate.”

  “Lived. You sure we’re talking past tense here? Le passe simple?”

  For a moment I was flooded with a sense of unreality, as though lights had dimmed and now I could see the stage set around me for the insubstantial, trumped-up thing it was, and knew the actors very soon must exit to stage-left lives of lunch meat, arrogant children, cars needing tires and new batteries. A cue card flipped up in the back of my mind; or a prompter whispered beyond the footlights. This is none of your business, Griffin, none of your business at all. But I had a longtime habit of ignoring scripted lines and improvising.

  “Not for a while. I asked her what he’d done and she just looked at me. And then, after a minute, she said: Well, he put these dead chickens in my mailbox. And on the back porch. Just kind of hung them out there, like a string of peppers or garlic.”

  “She black or white?”

  “Latin.”

  “Too bad. She be black, she know zackly what to do: fry them suckers.”

  “Very funny, Lew. Maybe I should hang up and call Dr. Ruth instead. She probably knows a few tricks you can do with chickens.”

  “Might read you her favorite salivious, I mean lascivious, passages from Frank Harris. Salacious? Man had a way with geese, as I recall.”

  “Look, this is the thing: You can talk to him, make him see he’s heading for real trouble if this goes on.”

  “Man to man, hm?”

  “Yeah, kind of.”

  “Well, Clare, I tell you. While it’s true I used to do that sort of thing once in a while, it’s also true that at the time I was twenty years younger and hadn’t been riding my buns and a desk for six years straight. Be like all those almost hairless guys from the sixties trying to make their comeback as rock and rollers, i.e., ludicrous. Besides, all my tie-dye’s at the cleaners.”

  “Please, Lew. As a favor to me? How can you turn down a poor little crippled girl?”

  “Oh. Well, since you put it like that.”

  “Then you’ll do it?”

  “I’ll talk to the guy, Clare. Politely. And that’s all. He says boo, I’m a ghost.”

  “You’re a jewel.”

  But when I looked in the mirror afterwards it wasn’t sparkle I saw, more like a dullness that drew everything else to it. I remembered how old and used-up Walsh had looked to me the day of Verne’s funeral. I couldn’t be looking much better, and probably looked a hell of a lot worse. But enough of such reverie, I thought: there were things in the world that needed doing. Missions to be undertaken, wrongs to right, rights to champion.

  Lew the Giant Killer.

  Chapter Seven

  So at midnight or thereabouts, here I am, with a list of this guy’s habitats and less sense than your average lemming, prowling bars along Louisiana and Dryades looking for the chicken man.

  Just like the good old days. Shut away from the world, the heady smell of piss and beer and barely contained fury all around me. And threading through it all, like a Wagnerian leitmotif, the quiet refrain: This is none of your business, Griffin, none at all.

  I remembered a history professor back at LSUNO talking about the Russians’ propensity for throwing themselves beneath tanks just to slow things down; saying that such irrational ferocities made them fearsome fighters.

  But I was just going to talk to this guy, of course.

  The Ave. Social amp; Pleasure Club was my tenth or twelfth try. I’d started at Henry’s Soul Food and Pie Shop over on Claiborne and worked my way here.

  It was a cinderblock affair, the butt half of a grocery whose painted-over windows advertised Big Bo’ Po-Boys and Fresh Seafood, with an unbelievably crude painting of a crab holding a po-boy in its claws and (who would have thought it possible?) leering. The club, alas, didn’t get such star treatment: only its name and a long arrow pointing to the single door.

  Several underfed light bulbs hung here and there from the ceiling as though waiting for their mothers to come take them home. Most of the light came from two pool tables in back. I shuffled to the bar against the right wall, which looked to have been cobbled together from scraps of cabinet wood and countertopping, and ordered a beer. Archaeological layers of odor here: raw whiskey, stale beer, urine and sweat; the edgy smell of fish, rotting greens and sour milk from next door; under it all, mildew and mold, a fusty smell that seems to be everywhere in New Orleans.

  Most of the activity, like most of the light, was concentrated around the pool tables. A man and woman barely old enough to be in here legally sat nearby at one of a number of battered, unmatched tables. The man drained his malt liquor can, reached for the woman’s and said, “Now baby you know where I stays.” There were a couple more guys at the bar perched on wobbly stilt-like stools.

  “Do me a beer, man?” one of them said, turning his whole upper body to look at me. “I’m hurtin’.”

  He got his beer.

  “Here’s to Truth, Justice and the American Way,” he said, lifting his glass in a toast. “All those w
unful things we fought for.” He belched. “ ‘Long with career politics, of course.”

  One of the players in back made a tough shot and for a while everybody kept busy walking around the tables doing high fives, slapping palms, exchanging money.

  “You in here a lot?” I said.

  He thought about it. “I ain’t here, Luther don’t bother opening up.”

  “Know a guy named T.C.? Regular, they tell me. Tall dude-”

  He grinned. Not a good sign.

  “-hair cut short, wears one earring. Light skin.”

  “Man, I tell you, these beers be disappearing in a hurry on a day like this one here. You notice that?”

  I put another five on the bar in front of him.

  “Well, then. He be coming out of the bathroom back there just about any time now, I ‘spect,” he said after ordering and sampling a new beer. “What you want with T.C. anyway? He ain’t much.”

  “Friend asked me to talk to him.”

  “Ain’t much for talk, either.”

  And at that, as if on cue, the man himself stepped into the penumbra of light behind the pool players, six-four or-five and at least two-fifty, all of it muscle except maybe the earring, followed a moment later by two guys in sportcoats and jeans who hurried on out of the bar.

  He watched me approach without registering anything at all: alarm, suspicion, caution, interest. Or humanity, for that matter.

  “Buy you a drink?” I asked.

  “Why th’ hell not?” And after we’d bellied up to the bar over my beer and his double Teacher’s rocks, he said: “So what is it you’re needing, my man? How much and when. And a name, somewhere along the way.”

  Faint tatters of an accent drifted to the surface, Cuban maybe.

  “I’m throwing a chicken fry for my friends,” I said. “Someone told me you were the man to see.”

  He looked at the bridge of my nose for a minute or so. No sign of alarm, suspicion, etc. (See above.)