Moth

by James Sallis

  “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 passé 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 & 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 wunful 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.)

  “I get it,” he said. “You’re crazy, right? Like ol’ Banghead Terence over there. Hey: you been buttin’ down any walls lately, boy?”

  “No sir,” Terence said. My informant.

  “Nigger got his head scrambled right good back there in Nam, so now every few days we’ll find him in some alley somewhere and he’ll be running headfirst into the wall over and over again till he falls down and can’t get up no more. Wall just sits there.”

  He finished his drink, rolled ice around the bottom of the glass.

  “Figure something like that must of happened to you. Ain’t no other possible reason you be comin’ here this way, rubbing up against me like this. You got to be crazy too. Now you tell me: am I right?”

  I smiled, ordered a couple more drinks for us, and started telling him
why I was there. That Sheryl wanted me to talk to him, explain why he had to leave her alone.

  “So you just run on out and do whatever any pussy tell you. That it, man?”

  I started over. Clare was a friend of Sheryl’s and—

  “So you be fucking them both at the same time? Or they do each other while you watch.”

  I tried once more. I really did intend, or at least had convinced myself that I intended, just to talk to him. But intentions are slippery things.

  When the gun came over the table’s edge, suddenly, at the exact moment he switched his eyes toward the door and lifted his face as though in greeting, I slammed my glass down as hard as possible on that hand. The glass shattered, but I didn’t feel it then. I did feel bones give way under the glass. My other hand was already moving toward him with a heavy ashtray, and that connected just above his left eye.

  “Righteous,” Terence said from the bar.

  T.C. went back out of the chair, toppling it, but sprang almost at once to his feet and made a grab for my shirtfront. Suckered, I leaned back with the top half of my body—and he swept my feet out from under me.

  “Moves,” Terence said. “ ‘Member that shit.”

  Things looked quite different from down there. It was absolutely amazing, for instance, how much bigger T.C. had gotten. Or how many cockroaches there were skittering about under chairs and things. At one point when T.C. was sitting on top of me kind of boxing my head from side to side playfully, I saw by a table leg what I’m certain was a severed, dried-up ear.

  Then I watched two fingers jam up hard into his nose and heard cartilage give way there. When he lifted his hands to pull mine away, I struck him full force in the throat and he fell off me, gasping. I kicked him in the ribs, then a couple of times in the head before I noticed he was lying still and turning blue. No one made any move toward us; they simply watched.

  “Better call the paramedics,” I told the bartender, staggering over to him. It sounded like: Btr. Kawl. Thpur. Medix.

  He looked about the room, timing it.

  “Man does comedy too,” he said.

  There was skittery laughter.

  But he also said, to me: “You better get on out of here. We’ll just ‘low Mr. T.C. to sleep it off a while. But come closing I ‘spect I’ll notice him there. Don’t see no way ‘round that. And then the Man’s gonna want to know things.”

  I started out.

  “That be two-ninety for the last round,” the bartender said.

  Chapter Eight

  I RANG THE BELL AND THEN JUST KIND OF leaned there against the sill to wait. I didn’t know what time it was. After one, maybe closer to two. Lights still burned in many of the houses. Streetlights, moon and windows all had a red haze about them. I’d wrapped a handkerchief around my hand, but it was soaked through now, and periodically thick gobbets of blood would squeeze their way out and fall like slugs.

  After a while I heard her coming to the door, duh-DA, duh-DA, duh-DA, in perfect iambs. She wore a short, sky-blue, kimonolike robe.

  “Don’t tell me,” she said. “You wanted to beat the rest of the kids to the candied apples and other treats.”

  “Already been tricked,” I said. Then: “You should see the other guy.”

  “Who won?”

  “I did.”

  “Then I don’t think I want to see the other guy. Aren’t you getting a little old for this?”

  “Tried to tell you that. Damn glad now I didn’t wear my tie-dye.”

  “Sheryl’s ex-live-in?”

  “The chicken man himself.”

  “Oh Lew. I’m so sorry.”

  “Sorry enough to let me come in?”

  “What? Oh, sorry. Sure. You really do look like shit, by the way.” She turned and stepped away from the door. I took a step forward. Nations disappeared, new suns appeared in the sky, planets formed around them. I took another step.

  “Are you okay?” she asked.

  “Just a little damaged in transit, as they say at the post office. Then, of course, they hand you this thing that’s taped back together three ways from Sunday and whatever was inside is crushed beyond recognition.”

  “Are you?”

  “Crushed? Absolutely. Many times over. But it always springs back. Well, these days I guess it’s more like it seeps back.”

  “Stronger than before?”

  “Not that I’ve noticed. You?”

  She shook her head. “Be nice if it were true, though. Like a lot of things.”

  I eased myself onto the couch.

  “Tell Sheryl T.C. won’t be bothering her anymore. Actually, I’m not sure he’ll be bothering anyone anymore.”

  “Must have been one hell of a talk.”

  “I won’t forget it soon. You got anything to drink?”

  “Might be some scotch under the cabinet from when my parents were here. Want me to look?”

  “Oh yes.”

  There were a couple of inches left in the bottle she put on the coffee table before me. Ignoring the glass, I tilted the bottle up. Seemed easier that way: less movement, less pain. I remembered O’Carolan asking for Irish whiskey on his deathbed, saying it would be a terrible thing if two such friends should part without a final, farewell kiss. I tilted the bottle again.

  “I feel like I just blinked and twenty years went by—backwards,” I said. “Definitely an old TV science fiction show. Can’t be real life.” I looked at her. “Sorry. It’s late.”

  “It’s okay, Lew. Really.”

  “Tell you what. I’m going into that bathroom down there at the end of the hall to face up to some hot water and soap. Pay no attention to screams, and if I’m not out in ten minutes, you can decide on your own whether to call paramedics or the funeral home. I sure as hell don’t know which, even now.”

  “Need any help?”

  “Me? Look at what I’ve already accomplished, all by myself.”

  “I’ll make coffee, then. Once I’m up, that’s usually it for the night.”

  I stepped carefully down the hall. Must be heavy winds and a storm coming up: the ship listed badly both to port and starboard.

  Ablution accomplished, nerve ends singing like power lines in a hurricane, I came back and sat as Clare poured something yellow into the cuts, smeared on antibiotic salve and bound my hand tightly in gauze.

  “That’s going to need stitches. Lucky you didn’t cut a tendon or an artery.”

  “It’s not bleeding anymore. It’ll be okay.”

  “Lew, don’t you think you’ve worn your balls as a hat long enough for one night? Jesus!”

  “Okay, okay. You’re right.”

  “You’ll go to the ER?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “Promise?”

  I nodded and she went out to the kitchen, brought back a lacquered wooden tray with coffee in one of those thermal pitchers, two mugs, packets of sugar and sweetener, an unopened pint of Half & Half.

  She poured for both of us and we sat there like some ancient married couple, sipping coffee together in the middle of the night without speaking. The moon hung full and bright in the sky outside, and after a while Clare got up and turned off the room’s lights. Then, after sitting again, finishing her coffee, pouring anew for us both, she said quietly, “I don’t understand what happened between us, Lew.”

  I said nothing, and finally she laughed. “Guess I’ll put that on the list with quantum mechanics, the national debt and the meaning of life, huh?”

  I looked at her.

  “I’d come over there and sit at your feet now if I could, Lew. Just lean back against you and forget everything else. That’s what I’d do if I could. But I can’t. Probably fall, if I tried. Coffee okay? You want a sandwich or anything?”

  “The coffee’s wonderful, Clare. You’re wonderful. And I’m sorry.”

  A silence. Then: “You have things you’d do, too—if you could?”

  I nodded. Oh yes.

  Another, longer silence. “Think maybe yo
u’d consider spending the night in this wonderful coffee maker’s bed?”

  “I’m not in very good shape.”

  She laughed, suddenly, richly. “Hey, that’s my line.”

  Later as we lay there with moonlight washing over us and the ceiling fan thwacking gently to and fro, I mused that pain was every bit as wayward, as slippery and inconsistent, as intentions.

  “Half in love with easeful death,” Clare said, striking her right side forcibly with the opposite hand and laughing. “Little did he know. But what’s left is for you, sailor.”

  Human voices didn’t wake us, and we did not drown.

  Chapter Nine

  IT WAS NOT A HUMAN VOICE AT ALL TO which I woke, in fact, but a cat’s. Said cat was sitting on my chest, looking disinterested, when I opened my eyes. Its own eyes were golden, with that same color somewhere deep in a coat that otherwise would have been plain tabby. Mowr, it said again, inflection rising: closer to a pigeon’s warble than anything else.

  “You didn’t tell me there was a new man in your life,” I said when Clare came in with coffee moments later.

  “Yeah, and just like all the rest, too: only way I can keep him is to lock him in at night. Lew, meet Bat.”

  She put a mug of café au lait on the table by me and held on to the other, which I knew would be only half filled, to allay spillage.

  “I was in the kitchen one morning, bleary-eyed as usual, nose in my coffee. Glasses fogging over since I hadn’t put my contacts in yet. I heard a sound and looked up and there he was on the screen. Just hanging there, like a moth. I shooed him down but a minute later he jumped back up. That went on a while, till I finally just said what the hell and let him in. From the look of it, he hadn’t eaten for a long time.

  “He was just a kitten then. There wasn’t much to him but these huge ears sticking straight up—that’s how he got the name. I asked around the neighborhood, but no one knew anything. So now we’re roomies. He’s shy.”

  “I can tell.” I wanted the coffee bad, but the cat didn’t seem to understand that.

  “No, really. I bet he spent all night behind the stove, just because he didn’t know you.”