Moth

by James Sallis

  “Help?” I made clawing motions toward the coffee mug.

  “What? Oh sure.” She scooped the cat up in an arm (it hung there limper, surely, than anything alive can possibly be) and dropped it onto the floor (where it grew suddenly solid and bounded away into the next room). “Hungry?”

  “Yes, but it’s my treat. What time is it, anyway?”

  “Eight-thirty.”

  “Aren’t you late?”

  “I called in.”

  “Not feeling good, huh?”

  “Au contraire, believe me.”

  “Okay. So we can make the Camellia when it opens. Before the crowd hits. If that’s all right.”

  “That’s great.”

  We splashed water on faces, brushed teeth (unbelievably, she still had a toothbrush of mine there), dressed (as well as clothes to replace encrusted ones from the night before), and took her car uptown. Since the car was specially outfitted, there was never any question who would drive. She parked by an elementary school on the far side of the neutral ground and we walked across Carrollton, dodging a streetcar that lugged its way toward St. Charles beneath towering palms, bell aclang. She was wearing sneakers, jeans and an old sweatshirt from the rehab hospital that read Do It—Again.

  Lester told us how good it was to see us after so long, wiped quickly at the counter, set out tableware rolled into crisp white napkins. Without asking, he brought coffees with cream, and within minutes was also sliding our breakfasts onto the counter before us, pecan waffle for Clare, chili omelette for me.

  We ate pretty much in silence, smiling a lot, then walked over to Lenny’s so she could get a New York Times.

  “What now, Lew?”

  “Maybe you could drop me off at Touro’s ER.”

  “Would you mind too much if I stayed with you? It’ll probably be a long wait, and you never know how you might be feeling afterward.”

  “You don’t have to do that, Clare.”

  “I know I don’t.”

  So she did.

  At the triage desk I gave my name and other information to the clerk, answered that no I had no medical insurance but would be paying by check for services rendered, and earned for that a lingering, weighty glance, as though it were now moot whether I was the worst sort of social outcast and deadbeat, or someone important who perhaps should be catered to.

  “Please wait over there, Mr. Griffin,” he said, pointing to row upon row of joined plastic chairs I always think of as discount-store pews. “A doctor will see you shortly.”

  Shortly turned out to be just under three hours.

  The place was more like a bus station than anything else. That same sense of being cut off from real time, much the same squalor and spread. Everything stank of cigarette smoke, stale ash and bodies. Stains on the chairs, floor, most walls. Steady streams of people in and out. Some of them picnicking alone or in groups from fast-food bags and home-packed grocery sacks, a few to every appearance (with their belongings piled alongside) homesteaded here.

  Periodically police or paramedics pushed through the automatic doors with drunks, trauma victims, vacuum-eyed young people, sexless street folk wound in layers of rags, rapists and rapees, resuscitations-in-progress, slowly cooling bodies. Every quarter hour or so a name would boom over the intercom and that person would vanish into the leviathan interior. None of them ever seemed to emerge. Nurses and other personnel strolled past regularly on their way outdoors to smoke.

  A young woman from Audubon Zoo came in with the hawk she’d been feeding attached to her by the talons it had sunk into her left cheek.

  A detective from Kenner arrived to inquire after a body that had been dumped on the ER ramp earlier that morning allegedly by a funeral home that claimed the next of kin refused to pay them.

  An elderly woman inched her way in and across to the desk to ask please could anyone tell her if her husband had been brought here following a heart attack last night, she couldn’t remember where they said they were bringing him and had tried several other hospitals already and didn’t have any more money for cab fare.

  Clare, it turned out, was right on several counts. Once the whale finally got around to swallowing me, I emerged with a dozen or so stitches. I emerged also, barely able to walk, on wobbly legs, demonstrably in poor condition to attempt wending my way home unaided.

  To her credit, she made only one comment as she watched me wobble toward her in the waiting room: “Well, here’s my big strong man.” Then she took me home.

  I woke to bleating traffic and looked at the clock on my bedside table. Four fifty-eight. From the living room I could hear, though the volume was low, Noah Adams on NPR, interviewing a man who had constructed a scale model of the solar system in his barn.

  Clare sat in the wingback reading, a glass of wine beside her.

  “I know it would be far, far too much to hope that, anticipating this second, unexpected morning of mine, you might have coffee waiting.”

  “Fresh coffee, as a matter of fact.” She glanced at the wall clock. Time—thief of life and all good intentions. “Well, an hour ago, anyway.”

  It was wonderful.

  I drank the first cup almost at a gulp, poured bourbon into the next and nursed it deliciously. We sat listening to traffic sounds from Prytania, a block or so away, and to an update on Somalia relief efforts.

  “I ever tell you about my father?” Clare asked.

  “Some. I know he died of alcoholism when you were still pretty young. And you told me he was a championship runner in college.”

  “Leaves a lot of in-between, doesn’t it?”

  “That’s what life mostly is, all the in-between stuff.”

  “Yeah. Yeah, I guess so.” She crossed her leg and leaned toward me, wine washing up the side of her glass in a brief tide. “I don’t remember a lot, myself. Mostly I have these snapshots, these few moments that come back again and again, vividly. So vividly that I recall even the smells, or the way sun felt on my skin.”

  A woman walked down the middle of the street pushing a shopping cart piled with trash bags. White ones, brown ones, black ones, gray ones. An orange one with a jack-o’-lantern face.

  “I remember once I’m sitting in his lap and he’s telling me about the war. That’s what he always calls it, just the war.’ And he says, every time: a terrible thing, terrible. And I can smell liquor on his breath and the sweat that’s steeped into his clothes from the roofing job he’s been on all day over near Tucson.

  “You know about code-talkers, Lew? Well, he was one of them. The Japanese had managed to break just about every code we came up with, I guess, and finally someone had this idea to use Indians. There were about four hundred of them before it was all done, all of them Navajo, and they passed critical information over the radio in their own language, substituting natural words for manmade things. Grenades were potatoes, bombs were eggs, America was nihima: our mother.

  “They were all kids. My father had gone directly from the reservation up near Ganado into the Marines. He was seventeen or eighteen at the time. And when he came back, three years later, to Phoenix, he couldn’t find work there. He wandered up into Canada—some sort of pipeline job or something, I’m not sure—and he met Mama there. The sophisticated Frenchwoman. The Québecoise. Who devoted the rest of her life, near as I can tell—though who can say: perhaps misery was locked inescapably into his genes—to making the rest of his life miserable.

  “By the time he died he’d become this heavy dark bag my mother and the rest of us had to drag behind us everywhere we went. What I felt when he died, what my mother must have felt, was, first of all, an overwhelming sense of relief.

  “I think about that still, from time to time. The feelings don’t change, and it seems somehow important to me that I don’t lose them, but it does keep flooding back. Like givens that are supposed to lead you on to a new hypothesis… . You have any idea at all what I’m talking about?”

  “Not much.”

  “Neither do I. But
I almost had it, just for a moment there.”

  “ ‘Keep trying.’ ”

  “Tolstoy dying—right?”

  “Scratched it with a finger on his sheet, yes.”

  “What would you scratch out, Lew?”

  “Something from a poem I read a while back, I think: ‘find beauty, try to understand, survive.’ ”

  Moments later: “You ready for bed?”

  “Hey, I just got up.”

  “So? What’s your point?”

  Mozart replaced Noah Adams, traffic sounds relented, the old house creaked and wheezed. We got up a couple of hours later and walked over to Popeye’s for chicken, biscuits, red beans and rice.

  Chapter Ten

  I GOT HOME MIDMORNING AND WAS WALKING toward the answering machine with its blinking light when the phone itself rang.

  “Lew,” Achille Boudleaux said. “You look’n ‘roun’ for me, I hear.” He could speak perfectly proper, unaccented English if he wanted, but rarely bothered without good reason, and never among friends.

  I said there was absolutely no way he could know that.

  “Why I so damn good. What you wan’?”

  I filled him in, including my tracking down Garces at the shelter.

  “Is there anything else, A.C.? Something you may have left out of the report? However tenuous it might seem.”

  “Hol’ on. I done pull out the notebook cause I know what you wan’ me for.”

  Virtual silence on the line. A match striking in Metairie and a long pull on his cigarette. A cough that died aborning, rattling deep in his chest like suppressed memories. Car alarm somewhere down the street. Police siren racing up Prytania.

  “Ain’ much here, Lew. One t’ing I din’t put in, but issa long shot, pro’ly don’ lead nowhere. Miss Alouette, she bin keepin’ comp’ny wit’ a guy call hi’self Roach, some say. Make goo’ money, that boy, but he don’ seem to work at anythin’, you know? He from up ‘roun’ Tup’lo.”

  “You have any idea how long they’d been a number?”

  “Don’t know they were, rilly.”

  “Any address for this Roach?”

  “You bin off the street too long, Lew. Roaches don’t have no ‘dress, you know that. You wan’ him, you just get on downtown and ax ‘roun’.”

  “Okay. Bien merci, Achille.”

  “Rien.”

  I cradled the phone and hit Message. After a brief pause, a momentary shush of tape past pinions, Richard Garces identified himself, saying: “Give me a call when you can. I think I have a couple of leads on Alouette.”

  I dialed, got a busy signal three times in a row, at last got through and was put on hold. “You’re So Vain” fluted into my defenseless ear and I found myself thinking about Carly Simon’s lips. Something I was pretty sure Richard Garces never did.

  “Mr. Griffin,” he said. “Sorry to keep you waiting. Something of an emergency with one of my girls.” “Lew—remember? And no problem.”

  “Super. Okay, here’s the thing. I’m a hacker, or at least I was a while back, and there was a time there when a lot of us kind of stumbled into one another over the years on various bulletin boards. We were all doing social work, that’s what brought us together. Some like myself in small shelters or support services scattered throughout the country, some in institutions, most in public health—MHMR or other government services. Those early contacts developed into a loose network, a place we could go for information we didn’t otherwise have access to, a kind of information underground.”

  “Right.” The country—whatever your special interest: law, liberal politics, magazine sales, white supremacy—was rife with such networks, electronic and otherwise. Often I imagined they might represent this skewed nation’s only true intelligence, skein after skein of fragile webs piling one atop another until a rudimentary nervous system came into being.

  “Well, I hadn’t logged on to the network in quite a while. My work here at Foucher’s pretty circumscribed. But after you left the other day, after I’d thought about it a while, I got on-line. And after half an hour or so of ‘Good to see your number come up’ and ‘How’s it been going’ and ‘Where the hell you been, man’—I guess the economy’s gotten so bad that these guys don’t have much else to do but sit home, stroke and get stroked by electronic friends—I started asking about an eighteen-year-old who might give New Orleans as a prior address, might be reluctant to say more and is probably in trouble.

  “That’s what the network’s about, after all. Alouette doesn’t have any resources, any skills. Wherever she winds up, sooner or later she’s going to have to hook into one of the available programs.”

  “And you can track her that way.”

  “Ordinarily, no. Well, I guess you could, but it would take forever. There’s no official channel. No central data bank or clearinghouse. The network itself is sketchy, but we’ve got people scattered all through the country, at all levels, and every one of us is facing the same problems day in and day out, a lot of them basically insoluble. So sometimes we’re able to help one another. Provide information or a way around this or that obstacle, maybe cut a corner or two.”

  Okay, so it reeked of J. Edgar Hoover-style rationalization. And sure, you had to wonder to what use those less scrupulous might put such information, were it available to them. But I had no reason to believe that Richard Garces was any less liberal in reflex or thought than myself: he’d doubtless covered this same ground many times over.

  “You have any indication Alouette was pregnant?” he asked suddenly.

  “Not really. Did you?”

  “It’s a possibility. You have a pen and paper?”

  “Yeah.” I always kept early drafts and aborted pages, folding them in half to make a rough tablet that stayed there by the phone.

  “Okay. Out of a couple dozen maybes, I boiled it down to three. These may all be way off base, you understand. Wrong tree—even wrong forest, for all we know. But age, accent and physical description are all good matches.”

  “I understand.”

  “The first one showed up in Dallas a few months back, brought into Parkland when she was raped by some guys who were looking through the Dumpster she lived in for leftover hamburgers and found her instead. It was behind a Burger King. Right now she’s in the Diagnostic Center. That’s around the corner from Parkland, up on Harry Hines. She’ll be there another few days, then she’ll be farmed out to whatever treatment center or hospital has a bed open up. Gives her name as Delores, and says no next of kin. Right age and general physical appearance.”

  “Have a number for the place?”

  He gave it to me and said, “I don’t know how much good this will do you. Phones there tend to be answered by untrained attendants who have little comprehension of what they’re up against, even less of any moral and constitutional limits to their protectorship.”

  I knew just what he meant, recalling sojourns in psychiatric hospitals and alcohol-treatment centers where constitutional rights, legal principle and simple human dignity were violated unthinkingly and as a matter of course.

  “Second is over at Mandeville, the state hospital. Listed as Jane Doe, since all she’ll say is ‘God listens, the angels hear.’ Her social worker’s name is Fran Brown.” He read off a number and extension.

  “Third’s up in Mississippi. This is the pregnant one. Was pregnant, anyhow: she delivered last week. Way premature. The baby’s in NICU, barely a pound. And barely hanging on, as I understand. As you’d expect. Her case worker is Miss Siler.” He spelled it. “That’s all I could get: Miss Siler. No first name, credentials, job title. Girl gave her name as McTell. No record of social dependence—as we put it—in Mississippi. No medical coverage or prenatal care, and no father of record entered.”

  Again, he read off a number.

  “Got it. Thanks, Richard. You ever want to get into a new line of work, you’d make one hell of a detective.”

  “Yeah, well. Once in a while we do something that really helps
, you know. I hope this is one of those times. A favor?”

  “You got it.”

  “Let me know?”

  “Absolutely.”

  So then I had to go find Roach, of course.

  Bars, taverns, street corners. The Hummingbird Grill, the Y at Lee Circle, Please U Restaurant, a group of men seated as usual on the low wall before a parking lot. One establishment had as identification only a piece of cardboard with Circle View Tavern hand-lettered on it; it was taped to the window among campaign posters (Dr. Betty Brown, School Board, Third Ward: Your Children Need Her) and long-out-of-date showbills (Catch Some Soul at Fat Eddie’s).

  I asked at Canal and Royal, again at Carondelet and Poydras, around Jackson Square, along Decatur, Esplanade and into the Faubourg Marigny. When New Orleans’s founding Creoles overflowed the Quarter, they spilled into the Marigny—years before Irish, British and other Anglo settlers began moving into the regions above Canal. When I first came to New Orleans, the Quarter itself was crumbling and everything below Esplanade was strictly no-man’s-land. Then, gradually, those buildings were reclaimed; and in recent years the Marigny’s become a cozy residential area where alternative bookstores, lesbian theaters, small clubs and flea markets thrive.

  One small corner bookstore there has, packed in with Baldwin, Kathy Acker, Virginia Woolf, Gore Vidal and a wall of books on sexuality, what must be the definitive collection of a genre few know exists: lesbian private-eye novels. I counted once, and there were fourteen different titles; whenever I’m in the Marigny I drop by to check for new ones. This time when I stepped in off the sidewalk a face turned up to me and its owner carefully set back on a shelf the book he’d been paging through.

  “Lew,” he said.

  It was Richard Garces. “What are you doing here?” seemed a pretty stupid question, but I asked it anyway.

  “I live here. Buy you a drink?”

  “Why not?”

  We walked down to Snug Harbor and settled in at a table by the window. Women in cotton dresses and army boots went by. Men with ponytails and expensive Italian suitcoats worn over ragged T-shirts and jeans. Richard and I decided on two Heinekens.