Moth lg-2

by James Sallis

  Miss Mara acquitted herself well, the students had actually read Zazie, and discussion was lively. One of the young men took a particular, keen delight in Zazie’s Uncle Gabriel, pitching his voice throughout the discussion in a high, thin flutter he obviously imagined similar to the uncle’s own during his performances as a female impersonator.

  As the students filed out, Dean Treadwell came up to me and held out his hand.

  “Fine class. Somehow you have a way of making it all real to them, making them care. I wish half of my other teachers could do that.”

  “You caught me on a good day. Most others, the snoring would have distracted you.”

  “Fascinating. And I never even heard of Queneau before this.”

  “Three weeks ago, none of the students had either. A semester from now, most of them will have forgotten him.”

  “You have a minute, Lew?”

  “Actually, I have about four hours-till my seminar after lunch.”

  “Walk with me, then. I’ll buy you a coffee.”

  “Sure. But if the coffee’s from one of the faculty lounges, I’ll pay you not to have to drink it.”

  We ambled out into the hallway and along it, heads together like two monks strolling the cloisters as they kicked Boethius back and forth.

  “I don’t know how you’ll feel about this …”

  I let it hang there.

  “I understand from some of the faculty members, and from my wife as well, that you worked for many years as a detective.”

  “Worked at it, anyway.”

  Two of my students from Advanced Conversational passed us. One of them said Bonjour, the other Hey, how’s it going?

  We wound up off-campus, at one of the coffeehouses that suddenly seem to be springing up everywhere in New Orleans. This one was a Tennessee Williams set: a hodgepodge of rickety ancient tables and chairs, crumbling plaster walls, windows so hazed you could safely watch eclipses through them, door open onto a dank inner patio where a three-legged cat furiously eyed all trespassers. A massive mahogany counter built directly into the tiled floor and topped with a slab of green marble dominated the room. A cork bulletin board took up most of the back wall, scaled in layers of handbills for alternative music, scribbled ads offering musical equipment for sale, notices of tutors and roommates wanted.

  Like many such places in the city, it was a museum exhibit in other ways as well: here, an unregenerate hippie in jeans, work shirt and vest, scraggly hair stuffed into a bandanna; a fifties young professional in polyester “smart” frock and bouffant hair, or facsimile beatnik with goatee, shades and beret; over there, a black man natted out in suit and impossibly wide tie dating from the forties, slicked hair close to his scalp under a wool slouch hat. People have a way of getting stuck in time here in New Orleans. Once a student fresh from New Hampshire asked “Are all these strange-looking people here for Mardi Gras?” and another student told her, “Those are the ones who live here.”

  “Why did you give it up?” Treadwell asked me when we were seated over tall, untouchably hot glasses of cafe latte. “Detective work, I mean.”

  “I’d tell you I found honest work instead, but you know better.”

  He laughed silently, a single brief paroxysm, and looked off toward the patio. Sitting in the doorway with its stump raised for cleaning, the cat glared back at him.

  “You’ve been married, haven’t you, Lewis?”

  “Once, a long time ago.”

  “And you had children?”

  “I did. A son. He’s gone now.”

  Treadwell’s eyes came back to me.

  “Gone?”

  I shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. But all this has to be leading up to something.”

  “I was married once, when I was younger than seems possible now. It didn’t last long, and afterward, I was by myself for a long time, one of those academic bachelors who comes out of the house on his way to classes slapping dust and crumbs off his coat. I never imagined I’d live any other way. But-What’s the old saying? Life’s all conjunctions, just one thing after another?”

  “More like punctuation, I think. Colons and exclamations for some, dashes for the rest.”

  “One day in Victorian Life I looked up from my notes and, I still don’t know why, noticed a young woman sitting there in the front row. Older than the other students, but still young to me. And while I was looking, while the fact of her existence was slowly sinking in as I prattled on about the monarchy or somesuch, she winked at me. Not coquettishly at all, you understand, but with this amazing sense of maturity somehow, of being very much her own person … solid.

  “I dismissed class shortly thereafter. That was on a Thursday. And by Monday we were married. Twelve years ago. Twelve years. From the first I felt as though I’d packed up everything and moved to a new country. A different language, different customs, different weather-who knows, maybe even different physical laws. Everything changed.”

  I waited. Good interviewers never have to say much; they turn themselves into voids, into receptacles.

  “Laura is my life now, everything else revolves around her, her and the university. But I have a son by that first, youthful marriage. He’s an adult himself now, of course. We never had much to do with one another, never communicated much; he grew up on the West Coast, mostly. But a couple of months ago he moved back here, to New Orleans, and we began seeing one another. He’d call every week or so. We’d meet for lunch, a glass of wine. It’s an ambiguous relationship, at best. Would you like more coffee?”

  I declined, and after a moment he said, “I’m afraid he’s in trouble. I wondered if you might be able to help him.” Then he added: “Laura’s dead against my getting involved.”

  This is none of your business, Griffin echoed far back in my head. I said: “I’d have to know two things. What kind of trouble-”

  “Drugs. I don’t know how deeply.”

  “Then your wife may be right. The other thing I’d have to know is what you’d expect me to do. There’s probably not much you, or I, or anyone else can do. You have to know that.”

  He nodded, head remaining momentarily bowed. “I suppose in a sense I’ve dedicated my life to the belief that knowledge, that learning, intellect, reason, matter.” He looked back up. “Yes, I know. I’ve dealt with this in my usual manner: I settled into the library and read everything available. But now I seem to be flying in the face of all that, don’t I?”

  “If not flying, at least taking one hell of a leap of faith.”

  “Too close to the son,” he said. I wouldn’t have thought he had it in him.

  And because of that, as much as anything else, I told him I would do it.

  I got the son’s address, a snapshot (his only one, he told me as he pulled it from his wallet) and as many details of his son’s life as he knew. There weren’t many: a workplace that might or might not be current, a bar he’d mentioned a couple of times, a few friends’ first names. His son drove an old mustard-color Volvo, loved spicy food and war movies, was not a reader and had no particular taste for music.

  “I want to know how bad it is,” Dean Treadwell said, “how deeply he’s into this. That’s all I expect of you. Maybe then I can find a way to help him.”

  “I’ll do what I can. I still have a few contacts out there. I’ll ask around, turn over some stones.”

  Treadwell had pulled a checkbook out of his coat pocket and was uncapping a pen.

  I shook my head. “This is a favor. Besides, it may well come to nothing.”

  “I insist.”

  “So do I.”

  “Very well, then.” He clipped pen to checkbook and slipped them back into his pocket. “At least promise that you’ll come over for a meal with Laura and me, soon.”

  “I’ll be in touch.”

  Outside, he turned back.

  “Lew. I almost forgot: my wife made me promise to ask when there’s going to be a new book. She’s read them all, and said to tell you she loves them, especia
lly the ones set in New Orleans.”

  “Tell her thanks, but I’m not sure. Lately I seem to be getting distracted by life a lot.”

  Neither of us knew, of course, that the next book when it came, written in a two-week binge of twenty-hour days and published just before Mole, would be the story of his own son’s last days.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  It was much worse than he said, of course. Probably even worse than he thought.

  The first thing I did that afternoon, from my airless, shared office in the basement of Monroe Hall, was call Walsh. They couldn’t find him for a while, and I sat listening to a rumble of shouts and clatter, indecipherable conversations, other phones buzzing. Finally he came on with “Yeah?”

  “Lew.”

  “Listen, I don’t care how much you beg, I’m not buying you any more dinners.”

  “Two desirable bachelors like us, both our calendars are probably filled anyway, bubba.”

  “Well, I might just be able to squeeze you in-but you’d have to buy.”

  “I’m not that desperate yet.”

  “You will be.”

  “So I’ll call you back when I am.”

  “Sure you will.” Someone spoke to him, and he turned away briefly, came back. “How’s the girl?”

  “Doing okay, this far.”

  “Good sign. Any word from Clare?” When I said nothing, he went on. “Yeah, well, I’m sorry about that, Lew, I really am.”

  “Life goes on.”

  “Yeah. Such as it is. So what kind of favor you need this time? Not a big one, I hope. The city just dumped a new load of shit on us and now the mayor and his boys are down here smearing it all around.”

  I told him.

  “You at home?”

  “School.” I gave him the number.

  Twenty minutes later, he called back.

  “What about the mayor and his boys?” I asked.

  “Hey, urgent police business came up. It happens like that. They’re cooling their buns on the bench out in the squad room, staring at me in here. Told them I’d be right out, soon as I took care of this emergency. First time I’ve sat down today.”

  “Maybe I should thank them.”

  “Maybe you should shoot the whole lot of them.”

  “So what’s the story?”

  “Well, it looks like your boy’s cut himself a little swath down the coast from Seattle to Portland.”

  “Drugs?”

  “Initially. Possession, PI, sales. Then your man went to school somewhere: suddenly B amp;E, suspicion of auto theft and attempted fraud start rolling up. No convictions on any of it, so a lot of this isn’t on the record, but he became a familiar face. A couple of short falls, one for assault and battery, the other for, get this, unpaid traffic tickets. He’s been lucky. But the captain I talked to up there said he’s a body ready to drop. That help?”

  “You bet. Thanks, Don.”

  “You want me to keep the net open on this?”

  “No. Good enough.”

  “This guy’s in town, I take it.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Yet another fine example of scuz rising to the bottom. I’m sure he’ll be in to say hello sooner or later.”

  “Good chance of it.”

  “So I have to go feed the lions now, right?”

  “Guess so. Pull a tail for me.”

  “You got it.”

  I could have just called Dean Treadwell then, of course. It was what he wanted to know-more than he wanted to know. My favor was done. But I didn’t want to break the old man’s heart, I told myself, not in such an impersonal fashion.

  If you’re in New Orleans with time to kill and a taste for alcohol, sooner or later you run into Doo-Wop. And sooner or later you’ll probably buy him a drink and get into a conversation with him.

  Every day Doo-Wop makes his steady round of bars from the Quarter up through the Irish Channel and along Oak Street. That’s what he does, that’s his job, and he pursues it with single-minded devotion. And because after all this time he’s as much part of the city landscape as palm trees or the buildings along St. Charles, he gets free drinks, a lot of them from the bartenders themselves, a lot from bar regulars, some from drop-in drinkers. Anybody who buys Doo-Wop a drink buys a conversation too.

  And if you ever had one of those conversations, Doo-Wop remembers it. He can’t remember if he ever had another name or where he’s from, he doesn’t know the year or who the President is and probably can’t tell you where he stayed last night, but if you talked to him, last week, last month, or back in the summer of ‘68, Doo-Wop’s still got it all.

  I found him after a couple of hours, in the twelfth or fourteenth place I tried. He was seated on a stool at the bar, drinking tequila since that’s what the guy buying was drinking, and talking about his days as a Navy SEAL. I doubt he was ever a SEAL, but he’d probably spent a few hours with one sometime in a bar much like this one. That’s what he did with all that conversation, why he collected all those stories. They were his stock in trade, the product he traded for drinks and companionship of a sort.

  “Big guy,” he said as I came in, looking into a mirror so silvered that it turned the whole world into an antique photograph. “Long time.” He was wearing high-top black tennis shoes laced halfway up, a purplish gabardine suit, plaid sport shirt with thin black tie.

  “Too long.” I signaled the barkeep, who shuffled over and simply stared at me till I said, “Two more tequilas for these gentlemen and whatever’s on draft for me.”

  “No draft.”

  “An Abita, then.”

  “No Abita.”

  “Dixie?”

  He nodded and shuffled toward the bend in the bar, sliding his feet along stiffly as though on skis.

  “Big guy, this’s …”

  We both waited a moment.

  “Newman,” his companion said.

  “From Missoula, Montana.” Doo-Wop hurriedly threw back what remained of his old drink before the new one got there. He didn’t like things in life getting ahead of him. “Has him a little ranch up there, breeds horses.” He nodded toward Newman in the mirror. “Next time we run into each other, remind me to tell you about that Arabian stable I worked at down in Waco.”

  Since he’d finished the drink Newman bought him, the subtle morality of Doo-Wop’s enterprise allowed him now to cut Newman loose in my favor, and he motioned toward a booth in one corner. We waited at the bar for our drinks, then settled in there.

  “So what’s up, big guy? Who you looking for?”

  “How do you know I’m looking for someone?”

  “Big guy. You ever come see me just to have a quiet drink? You got your business, I got mine, right? And sometimes they kind of fetch up against one another. Way the world works. Damn glass empty again.”

  I motioned for the barkeep to refill it and showed Doo-Wop the snapshot Dean Treadwell had given me.

  “Twice. Once at the Cajun Bar on Tulane, the other time over on Magazine, the Greek’s place.”

  It wouldn’t do any good to ask when; time didn’t exist for Doo-Wop.

  “From Washington. Near Seattle, he said. Did a stretch or two up there. Not very interesting. Didn’t have any stories that amounted to anything, didn’t pay much attention to mine.”

  “I don’t suppose he wrote his address on a matchbook and gave it to you?”

  “Not as I recall.”

  “That was a joke, Doo-Wop.”

  He thought about it a minute. “Never did quite get the hang of that joke thing.”

  “What I meant was, did he happen to say anything about where he was staying.”

  “Not a word. Said he had a couple of things going. Usually means a man’s right next to eating rats off the street.”

  “Okay. Thanks, guy. You see him again, and remember to, you call me?” I laid a ten-dollar bill and a business card on the table.

  He picked up the bill, leaving the card. “I already got one of those from last time
.”

  I stood to leave, Doo-Wop to move back to the bar.

  “Ask the Greek,” he said. “Guy did some work for him. Heard that, anyway.”

  I got a twenty out of my wallet and handed it to him. He stuck it down in his shoe with the other bill.

  “You come have a drink with me sometime when it ain’t business. I’ll buy,” he said. “You know where to find me.”

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  The Greek wasn’t Greek, but Puerto Rican. He was from a foreign country-New York-and wore the sort of bushy, untrimmed mustache often seen on Mediterranean males. His name was Salas, which upon his arrival in New Orleans had sounded to someone enough like the Greek surname Salus to earn the sobriquet he’d had ever since. He’d worked as maitre d’ for years at restaurants from Kolb’s to Upperline before a heart attack dropped him flat into a client’s swordfish steak with bearnaise at age twenty-nine. Coming out of the hospital, he’s simplified his life: got rid of most of what he owned, bought this place, a decaying, abandoned corner grocery store on Magazine with Spartan apartment above, and turned it into a neighborhood bar, a remarkably laid-back, low-key one, even for New Orleans. He served some of the best gumbo and sandwiches in town, if you didn’t mind waiting a while.

  The weekend after papers were signed, an army of uncles, brothers and cousins had appeared from nowhere and set about shoring the place up. It was as though they converged on a derelict grocery store, swarmed briefly and stepped back from a bar; and not much had changed since. The beams and supports they’d fashioned from two-by-twos, still bare wood but now gone green with mildew and mold, still propped up corners and ceiling. Cracks in the plaster troweled over with little or no effort to match the color of new plaster to old now looked like skin grafts long since rejected.

  Living in a third-floor apartment across the street at the time, with nothing much to do on weekends till seven o’clock rolled over and I allowed myself to begin the night’s drinking, I’d watched the whole thing. The Greek’s was on my parade route, the place I started and more often than not ended my nights. It was also one of the few bars in the city I’d never been thrown out of. There had been a name on the window at one point, but no one ever paid any attention to it, and when the name faded away, it was never replaced.