Moth

by James Sallis

  “I’ve been down here almost since it started,” he told me. “Had a store myself for a while, sold prints and original photographs, a lot of it friends’ work. Paid someone else to run it, of course. I still do a turn now and again at the Theater Marigny, and I work weekends on the AIDS hot line.”

  “A pillar of the community.”

  “My community, yes. Actually I am.”

  A middle-aged couple came in and stopped by our table to say hello to Richard before moving on to a table of their own. It was obvious from their ease with one another that they’d been together a long time. Both were black, introduced by Garces as Jonesy and Rainer (not René: he spelled it). A youngish woman came and peered into the window, hands curved around her eyes like binoculars, before stomping away. She wore a taffeta party dress, Eisenhower jacket and old high-top black basketball shoes.

  “I had no idea you were gay, Lew,” Richard said. “Not often I miss the call, after all these years.”

  “You still haven’t missed it.”

  “Oh?”

  “Oh.”

  “Hear that a lot.”

  “I bet.”

  “And you’re not even going to tell me some of your best friends are gay?”

  “No, but just between the two of us, one or two of them are black.”

  He laughed, and finished off his beer. “Well, I’m sorry to hear that. The first thing, I mean. And I have to tell you, there’s a certain sense of loss involved here. You want another beer?”

  Our waiter glided new bottles soundlessly into the shadow of former ones. Richard leaned across the table and poured anew into my glass.

  “I guess you’re sure about that,” he said.

  “For the moment, anyhow.”

  “So: what? You’re just down here slumming? Looking for Fiesta Ware to complete your set, maybe? Soaking up local color for a new book?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Yeah, well.” He drank most of his beer at a gulp. “So now I just say good to see you and go home alone, huh?”

  “Way things are.”

  He killed it. “Okay. That’s cool.” He extended his hand across the table and we shook. “Take care, Lew.”

  “And you.”

  After he was gone I asked for coffee, got something that had been sitting on the back burner since about 1964 and drank it anyway. Thinking now of many things. Walking thick woods in predawn mists beside my father, the smell of oil from his shotgun at once earthy and sharp in my nose. Vicky and I on our first, awkward dates. LaVerne twenty-six years old in a white suit across the table from me at Port of Call. My son’s last postcard, and the taped silences from my answering machine that I somehow always knew were from him and still kept in a desk drawer.

  Ceaselessly into the past. Kierkegaard was right: we understand our lives (to the extent that we understand them at all) only backwards.

  Backwards was the way I caught up with Roach, too, as it turned out.

  Like many city dwellers, I try to carry a kind of bubble of awareness around me always, alert to whatever happens within that radius. And now as I stepped off a curb, without knowing how or where, I sensed the zone had been violated—just seconds before I was seized from behind, arm at my neck, and slammed against a wall.

  “Say you been asking all over for the Roach and don’t no one know you.”

  He was close to my size and at least ten years younger. Hair cut in what these days they’re calling a fade. Black T-shirt, baggy brown cargo pants, British Knight sneakers the size of tugboats. A most impressive scar along almost the full length of the arm pressed against my windpipe. One dainty ceramic earring.

  “Gmmph,” I said.

  He patted me down quickly with the other hand. “You cool?”

  I said “Gmmph” again.

  “Now it’s jus’ too damn hot for running. I have to run after you, that’s gonna make me mad.”

  The tugboats backed out a step or two. Air shuddered into my lungs.

  “Howyou … findme?” I said when I could.

  “Shit, man. You weren’t doing any good at finding me, so I figured I’d best come find you. How many old black farts you think we see down here asking for the Roach, anyhow? And wearing a sportcoat?”

  “I’m not a cop.”

  “Even cops ain’t stupid as that. Not most of them, anyway.”

  He paused to stare at a group coming toward us. They had been looking on inquisitively, but now hurried to cross the street.

  “My name’s Lew Griffin. I—”

  “I be damn. Lew Griffin. You don’t remember me, do you? Course not. No reason you should. I was in a house down here same time as you, man, must be eight, nine years ago. People wondered about you, talked some. You roomed with a guy named Jimmie later got hisself killed. Heard you did something about that.”

  I hadn’t—not the way he meant, anyway—but I let it pass. Never dispute a man who thinks you’re a badass.

  “So how you been, man?”

  “Just about every way there is to be, one time or another,” I told him. “Right now I’m good.”

  “You know it.” He stepped back, as though suddenly noticing me crowded there against the wall. “So what you want with the Roach, Griffin? You’re a drinker, as I recall—and memory’s my other thing that always works fierce. Not behind pills and powder.”

  “I’m looking for a girl named Alouette. Guidry, but I don’t know she’d be using that name. You know her?”

  “Might. She family?”

  I shook my head. “Favor for a friend.”

  “Then I know her. Did, anyway. Stone fox, the way these light women get all of a sudden they’re thirteen, fourteen.”

  “Alouette’s eighteen.”

  “You know, I found that out. Had to cut her loose, too, but that wudn’t the reason. Sorry to have to do it, I tell you that.”

  “What was the reason?”

  “She carrying around some heavy shit, Griffin, you know what I mean? Now I’ll do a line same as the next man, I won’t hold that against no one. But Lou, you let her do a few lines, even get a few drinks and a toke or two in her, and it’d be like this big hairy thing had climbed out of a cage somewhere. She was doing a lot of crack there toward the end, too, and there ain’t nobody don’t go crazy on that shit.”

  “When did you last see her?”

  “Must be four, five months ago, at least.”

  “Was she pregnant?”

  “Never said so. Didn’t look like it.”

  “You know where she was living?”

  “Not right then. She’d been staying with a friend of mine over by Constantinople. But then he had some new friends move in, you know? She got to talking about ‘going home’ along about then, I remember, and one day I said to her, ‘Lou, you don’t have a home.’ She slapped me. Not real hard, and not the first time. But it was going to be the last.”

  “You didn’t see her again?”

  “Took her to the bus station that night. She ax me to.”

  “Any idea where she was going?”

  “Probably wherever twenty dollars’d get her. Cause that’s what I gave her.”

  “Greyhound station?”

  He nodded and started away.

  “Hey, thanks for the help,” I called after him. “You have a name?”

  “Well,” he said, half turning back, “I used to be Robert McTell, I guess. But I ain’t no more.”

  Chapter Eleven

  TWO DAYS LATER AT SIX IN THE MORNING, behind the wheel of a car for the first time in at least six years, I tooled nervously out I-10 through Metairie and onto the elevated highway stilting over bayou and swampland, past Whiskey Bay, Grosse Tête, looking at walls of tall cypress, standing water carpeted green, pelicans aflight, fishing boats. This is the forest primeval—remember? You’re definitely in the presence of something primordial here, something that underlies everything we are or presume; nor can you escape a sense of the transitory nature of the roadway you’r
e on, perched over these bayous like Yeats’s long-legged fly on the stream of time. With emergency telephones every mile or so.

  Spanish moss everywhere. Gathering it used to be full-time employment hereabouts; before synthetics, it was stuffing for mattresses, furniture, car seats.

  I was being borne back into the past in more ways than one. The rental car was a Mazda very close in design, color and general appearance, even after these several years, to Vicky’s. (In all the wisdom of her own twenty years the agent hedged at turning it over, balking at my lack of a major credit card, but finally accepted a cash deposit.) And my destination, a red umbilicus on the map, was I-55, snaking like a trainer’s car alongside the Mississippi up past river towns like Vicksburg and Helena, with their Confederate cemeteries, tar-paper shacks and antebellum mansions, toward Memphis. Pure delta South. Where the blues and I were born. Since leaving at age sixteen, I had been back just twice.

  First, though—before all this history could begin reiterating—I was called upon to support my local police lieutenant.

  The call came around midnight. I’d climbed, that night, back up out of the Marigny to Canal, tried for the streetcar at St. Charles and then at Carondelet and, encountering veritable prides of conventioneers at both locations, hoofed on up to Poydras and flagged a cab, an independent with Jerusalem Cab stenciled on the side and its owner’s name (something with a disproportionate number of consonants) on front fenders. We miraculously avoided serial collisions as the driver filled me in on the Saints and chewed at a falafel sandwich. Car and karma held, and on half a wing and muttered prayer at last we touched down, at last I was delivered, disgorged, cast up, chez moi.

  I put together a plate of cheese and French bread and opened a bottle of cabernet. It was Brazilian, simply wonderful, and two ninety-five a bottle from the Superstore. It was also only a matter of time before other people discovered it.

  Had dinner and most of the wine by the window, sunk like Archimedes, displacing my own weight, into L’Étranger, life for the duration of that book, as every time I read it, a quiet, constant eureka.

  Then I woke half between worlds, knowing it was the phone I heard, knowing in dreams I’d transformed it to the whine of a plane, trying to hold on, impossibly, to both realities.

  I finally picked the thing up and grunted into it.

  “This the fucking zoo, or what?” Walsh said on the other end.

  “I didn’t do it.”

  “Didn’t do what?”

  “Whatever I’m suspected of. Though I feel I have to mention that back in the good old days when you were just a little younger and a lot more interested in doing your job you actually went out and found the suspects and didn’t just call and tell them to get their butts down to the station. Course, I guess that’s one of the benefits of a reputation. Bad guys hear the phone ring, know it’s you, and start writing out confessions before they even answer.”

  “I told you to fuck yourself lately?” He was slurring his words terribly. I’m a man who knows a lot about slurring words. And not a little about terrible.

  “Only last week. I tried. The chiropractor thinks he’ll be able to help me.”

  “So what’s up?”

  “Well, a lot of people are sleeping, for one thing—for lack of anything better to do, you understand.”

  “Hey. Lew: woke you up. Sorry.”

  “No problem. But look, I’ve got to pee and drink something. Give me a minute, okay?”

  “Want me to call back?”

  “No. Once is enough. Just hang on, okay?” A morse-like bleat on the line. “Whoa, another call. Look. I lose you, you call me back, okay?”

  That other person wanted Sears, but why at this time of night I couldn’t imagine. Maybe they’d sent him the wrong size cardigan.

  I went out to the kitchen and put the kettle on. Had a couple of glasses of water from the tap (glass there by the sink looked okay), then stomped upstairs to the bathroom. Listened to pipes bang and groan behind the walls on the way back down.

  “You still there?”

  “Yeah, I’m here.” Throat clearing. “You got anything else you need to do first? Run out to the corner for a paper? Go grab a burger at the King? Whack off, maybe?”

  “Let me think about it. What can I do for you, in the meanwhile?”

  Outside, a banana-tree leaf long ago frayed by high winds now fluttered in a gentle one in the moonlight, spilling mysterious, ever-changing shapes against the window.

  “Tell you what, Lew. I came home tonight about eight, and ever since, I’ve been sitting here at the kitchen table with a bottle of K&B’s best on the table, a pizza I picked up on the way home and now can’t bear the thought of even opening up, much less eating, and my Police Special. Not the Colt. That’s put away by the bed the way it always is when I get home. This’s the one the department gave me, I first made detective. It stays wrapped in oilcloth in the closet, you know? But tonight I went and got it.”

  The French call what I felt just then a frisson.

  This too, what was happening with Walsh, was something I knew a lot about.

  “Don. What’s going on, man?”

  “New reports came in today. Homicides down to thirty-one for this quarter. Petty crime and misdemeanors down almost twenty percent. Surprised you hadn’t heard. NOPD’s doing a helluva job. You be sure and write Mayor Barthelemy and the chief and tell them, as a citizen, how much you appreciate that. They’re waiting to hear from you. Operators are standing by.”

  I heard ice clink against a glass, a swallow, then what could have been a low sob.

  “She’s married this guy she met, Lew. Owns some fancy-ass sporting goods store, Florida somewhere. Pogoland. Now how the fuck’d she ever meet someone like that, what’s she need with that kind of shit? But she’s already moved down there with him. I finally went around to see the kids—it’d been a while and she’d been dodging me whenever I called, so I was determined, and primed for a fight—and the house was empty, doors wide open, nothing in there but some empty beer cans and paper bags and a rubber or two. So I lean on a neighbor finally and find out she moved out a couple of weeks before. Then the next day, registered mail, I get papers that this guy’s putting in to adopt the kids.”

  Ice against glass again. Don’s breath catching there at the other end. A car engine clattering outside.

  “I called you because you’re the only one I know who’s been as fucked up as I am right now, Lew. Somehow you always get through it. And you’ve always been a good friend.”

  “No I haven’t, not to anyone; we both know that. But you have been. Look, I’m on my way, okay? We’ll talk about it.”

  “Yeah, what the hell. You always did talk good, Lew. You gonna want some pizza when you get here?”

  “Ten minutes.”

  “Tinmins. Right.”

  My neighbor three doors down owns his own cab, a bright-green, shopworn but ever-presentable DeVille. Since it spends evenings against the curb in front of his house and rarely goes back out, I guess he does all right.

  Lights were on there, and a kid about twelve answered my knock and said “Yeah.”

  “Your father home?”

  “Yeah.”

  After a moment I said, “Think I might speak to him?”

  “Don’t see why not.”

  After another moment: “So: what? We’re just going to wait till he has to go somewhere and notices me here in the door?”

  “You some kind of smartass.”

  “Just asking.”

  “Old man don’t like smartasses.”

  This could easily have gone on all night, but the boy’s father appeared behind him, peering out. He wore baggy nylon pants, a loose zipped sweatshirt, a shower cap. I’d wondered what a kid that age was doing up this time of night, but it seemed the whole family lived counter-clockwise, as it were.

  “Hi, we’ve never met, but I live a few houses down.”

  “I know who you are. Raymond, you get on about your b
usiness now.”

  “Who is it, honey?” came a feminine voice from deeper in the house.

  “Neighbor, Cal.”

  “I’m sorry to bother you, but—”

  He held out a hand. Muscles bunched along the forearm as we shook. “Norm Marcus. Call me Norm or Marc, whichever comes easier to you. You want to come on in, have a beer or something?”

  “I’d love to, but a friend of mine just called and things don’t sound so good over there. Since I don’t drive I wondered if—”

  “You need a ride, right?”

  “I’ll make it worth your while.”

  “Worth my while, huh?” He half turned, called into the house “Be right back, Cal” and stepped out, pulling the door shut. “It’s already worth my while, Lew. Man can’t help a neighbor, why’s he bother living anywhere—know what I mean? Where we headed?”

  I got in beside him and told him the address. He punched in a tape of Freddie King, hit the lights, and swung out toward St. Charles.

  I tried to pay him when we pulled up at Don’s place, but he said don’t insult him. “You want me to wait?”

  I thanked him again and said no, and that we had to get together for that beer soon.

  “Absolutely. Or you just come on by for dinner, any night. Eat about nine, usually.”

  The front door was locked, but like mine Don’s house is an old one whose frame and foundation have shifted time and again, and whose wood alternately swells with humidity and shrivels from heat. I pushed hard at the door and it opened.

  He was still there all right, in the kitchen, head down on the table, facing away from me. An inch or so of bourbon remained in the bottle. The pizza, out of the box now, lay upside down on the floor, Police Special nearby.

  I quickly checked a carotid pulse. Strong and steady.

  He bobbed to the surface, without moving or opening his eyes.

  “You, Lew?”

  “Yeah. Let’s get to bed, old friend.”

  “I tell you my wife was fucking Wally Gator?”

  I hauled him more or less to his feet and we caromed from wall to wall down the narrow hall to his bedroom. I let him go slack by the bed, went around and pulled him fully aboard. Took off his shoes and loosened belt, trousers, tie.