Moth

by James Sallis

  Using what volition I had left, I showered and shaved, dressed, straightened the room, carried bags to the car and went to the office to check out. I stopped for breakfast on the highway, biscuits and gravy and lots of coffee, then drove back into Clarksville and took a room at Dee’s-Lux Inn. Pale pine furniture and kidney-shaped tables from older days when motels were tourist courts and their neon signs advertised Climate Controlled.

  I unloaded my suitcase into the top drawer of the low bureau, set my Dopp case out by the sink, and over the following days my routine varied little. I was in and out of NICU constantly, but went mostly at night, after Mrs. Adams, who kept vigil all day, sitting stiff-backed at bedside, departed, and while the British nurse, Teresa Hunt, was on duty. When I wasn’t at the hospital, or trying to catch a few hours’ sleep, I was scrambling after leads on Alouette.

  I learned the monitors, what they were for and their various sounds; learned about blood gases and hematocrits, interstitial edemas, fibrosis, fluid overload, lipids and hyperalimentation, surfactant. I got to know several of the nurses and doctors by name, and never missed the fatigue and sadness in their eyes as they answered my questions or told me that all was pretty much as before. I spent hour after hour sitting on metal stools or in rocking chairs by Baby Girl McTell’s incubator, staring in at her and speaking softly (once, not knowing what else to say, I recited “The Raven” and much of the prologue to The Canterbury Tales), helping Teresa or other nurses whenever I could with small tasks of caring for her.

  On the streets by contrast, as I asked after Alouette, shooting pool with young hawks in satiny sweats, going into busy barbershops and sitting there as if waiting my turn for a cut while I talked to others, handing out cigarettes to elderly men clustered in scrubby street-side parks or around bars and convenience stores, I learned nothing.

  Teresa and I had dinner a couple of nights, collecting surreptitious looks and the occasional outright glare at Denny’s and a barbeque place, then one morning as we were leaving the hospital together, to no one’s particular surprise, I think, went on to breakfast and to her house on Biscoe Street. It never happened again; there was never much question it would, really; and Teresa and I remained close.

  Hospital records, as I anticipated, were of no help at all. None of the usual places a footloose young woman might alight briefly—shelters, Clarksville’s only (church-run) soup kitchen, a strip of music clubs near the heart of the city—bore any visible trace of Alouette’s passage. I showed her picture at malls, game arcades, on streets around what passed here for pricey downtown hotels, always prime panhandling territory.

  Finally, after a couple of calls had passed back and forth between Don and myself, I met a Sergeant Travis for coffee and had him fill me in on local drug action. Much of it, he said, took place around schools and downtown bars; nothing new there. And a lot of it was small potatoes, ten or twelve hopheads carting pills, grass and cocaine, scrambling to pay for their own monkey.

  I asked him about crack.

  That too, he said, though it wasn’t near as big here as in larger cities. Not yet, anyway.

  And once you got past those ten or twelve user-friendlies?

  He waited till the waitress poured more coffee and moved away. “You do not realize this is an ongoing investigation?”

  “I’m not a cop or a fed. I won’t step on anyone’s toes. Or on my own dick.”

  “Yeah, well. I’m only here as a favor to NOPD. We really don’t know what you are.”

  So, briefly, I told him.

  He sat quietly a moment, afterwards.

  “Guy calls himself Camaro’s probably the one you’d want to see.”

  “I need to guess what he drives?”

  “Prob’ly not. Around here, if he didn’t sell it, he knows who did. Got tentacles running out everywhere.”

  “Everywhere, huh.”

  “I won’t lie to you: there’s been a couple times we were able to do one another a favor. More than a couple. You know how it is.”

  “You get a bust, he gets the competition offed.”

  “That old sweet song.”

  “Where’s Camaro likely to be this time of day?”

  “He’s not at the Chick’n Shack up on Jefferson, then he’s at the Broadway, a bar—and grill, the sign says, though I never saw anybody ever cook, or for that matter eat anything there—corner of Lee and Twelfth.”

  “Can I say you sent me?”

  “You can say whatever you want. He’s only going to hear what he wants to, regardless.”

  I stood and thanked him, shook hands.

  “No problem,” he told me. “May want to call in the favor someday, who knows?”

  I found the eponymous pusher sitting at a booth in the Broadway, near a front window where he could keep an eye on his chariot. It was truly a splendid vehicle, beetle green with strips of chrome highlighting windows, doors, hood and trunk. A filigree of silver paint running down each side. His, their, name in silver script at one edge of the front left fender.

  Camaro wore a beige suit, mostly cotton from the look of it, with a blue shirt and rust-colored tie tugged loose at the neck. The clothes set off the deep coffee color of his skin. As he lifted his drink, I caught a glimpse of gold watch and signet ring. He looked for all the world like a successful C.P.A. decompressing after a day at the computer.

  He watched me walk over and sit across from him in the booth. The waitress was there instantly, dropping one of those stiff little napkins on the table in front of me. I ordered a scotch, water by. Sat drinking it, smiling over at him.

  “Hope I ain’t bothering you too much, sitting here like this,” he said after a while.

  I shook my head, smiled some more.

  “I mean, you got friends or the rest of your band coming or something, you just let me know and I’ll be glad to make room, okay?”

  He took a long pull off his drink, pretty much killing it. Held up a hand to signal the waitress.

  “You about ready for another one, too, friend?”

  I laid a ten on the table. “My round.”

  “Whatever you say.”

  I introduced myself and over that drink and another, we talked as freely as two black men with secrets, rank strangers to one another, ever can. Camaro’s mind was orderly and sharp; his world was a kind of pool or glade where the edges of discrete bodies of information glided by one another, sometimes catching. When I told him about Baby Girl McTell, he said he’d had a kid years ago, when he wasn’t much more than one himself, that it had lived three weeks in an incubator, shriveling up the whole time till it looked like a piece of dried fruit, and then died.

  I said I was looking for the baby’s mother. Explained that she’d left the hospital and not gone back to her grandmother’s, had dropped out of sight.

  “And she’s a user,” he said, at my sudden glance adding: “Only reason you’d be here. That what messed the baby up?”

  I nodded.

  “Shit does that. People ought to know it. Course, people ought to know a lot of things.” He held up his glass, looked through its amber to the light outside. I knew from long experience just how that warms the world and softens it. “You want another one?”

  “Better not. Still a lot to do. We square with the tab?”

  “It’s cool.” He looked at his watch. “Well, I’ve got an appointment myself. Tell you what.” He slid out of the booth and stood. Bent to pick up, yes, a briefcase. “I’ll ask around, see what I can come up with. You have a picture of this girl?”

  I took out my wallet and gave him one of the copies. Also one of my cards, scribbling the motel’s phone number on the back, then, after a second’s thought, the NICU number and Teresa.

  “If you can’t get me, leave a message for her. And thanks, man.”

  He shrugged. I sat and watched as he climbed into the Camaro, buckled up, started the engine, hit his turn signal and eased out into traffic, sunlight lancing off the chrome.

  Chapter Eighteen


  MY SECOND WEEK IN CLARKSVILLE, ON a Tuesday, I got back to the motel midmorning, having left the hospital at five or so and been on the streets since (with a stopover at Mama’s Homestyle for a kickass breakfast), and found two messages waiting. I didn’t look at the second one till later. But Teresa had called to say they were “having some trouble” with Baby Girl McTell and she thought I might want to be there.

  A nurse I hadn’t met before, Kristi Scarborough, brought me up to date. Around six that morning, stats had dropped into the seventies and hovered there; ABG’s confirmed a low PO2 and steadily increasing PCO2. It could, of course, be a number of things: cardiac problems, a sign that the lungs were stiffening beyond our capacity to inflate them, infection, pulmonary edema. The baby was back on 100 percent oxygen, and ventilator pressures had been raised. Gases were slowly improving. I stood before an X-ray viewer staring at loops of white in Baby Girl McTell’s belly. Like those ancient maps where the round, unknown world has been cleft in half and laid out flat. Necrosis of the bowel, Nurse Scarborough told me; a further complication. It almost always happens with these tiny ones. But for now she’s holding her own.

  Kristi used to work the unit full-time, she told me, but last year had married one of the residents and now put in only the hours necessary to keep her license, a day or two every other week, while husband John oversaw an emergency room just across the Tennessee line, broken bones, agricultural accidents and trauma from the regional penitentiary mostly (once, a hatchet buried in a head), and “they” tried as best they could to “get pregnant.”

  I left at three or four, finally, once Baby Girl McTell seemed to be out of immediate danger, and over a cheeseburger and fries at Mama’s looked at the second message.

  Call me. Clare.

  I went back to my room and did just that. She answered on the third ring, breathing hard.

  “Greetings from the great state of Mississippi.”

  “Lew! I’ve been worried about you.”

  I told her about Baby Girl McTell.

  “Hospitals are tough. You haven’t found Alouette yet, I take it?”

  “She’s as gone as gone gets. But I will.”

  “I know. I’ve missed you, Lew. Any idea when you’ll be back in town?”

  “Not really. I don’t know what I’m into here, or how long it may take. I’ll give you a call.”

  Outside, a fire truck and police car went screaming by.

  “I spent about half of my teenage years waiting for people to call who said they would, Lew.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said after a moment.

  “I know. You really are—that’s what makes it so difficult.” I listened to the sirens fade. Wondered if she could hear them, all those miles away. “But it is good to hear your voice.”

  The door slammed in the room next to mine and a woman stalked toward her car, a pearl-gray Tempo. She got in and started it, then sat there with the engine running. A man came out of the room and leaned down to the window, holding his hands palm up.

  “You’re very important to me, Clare.”

  “I know, Lew. I know I am.”

  The man walked around the car and got in. They drove away.

  “When I get back—if it’s possible, and if you want to, that is—I’d like for us to spend some time together. A lot of time.”

  She was silent a moment, then said, “I’d like that too, Lew.”

  “Good. I guess I’d better try to get some sleep now.”

  “Take care.”

  I hung up and watched my neighbors pull the Tempo back into its slot, get out together and go back into their room.

  An hour later I got up and, sitting naked on the side of the bed, improvising abbreviations in my rush to get it all down, scribbled ten pages of notes.

  In a featureless gray room with light slanting in through windows set high in the wall a man says goodbye to a group of men we slowly realize are his fellow prisoners, the community he’s lived among for almost ten years. He is being released because another man has confessed to the murder for which he was convicted, and which he in fact committed. He distributes his few possessions: half a carton of cigarettes, a transistor radio, a badly pilled cardigan. No one says much of anything. He turns and walks to the door, where a guard joins him to escort him out. “Don’t do nothing I wouldn’t do,” Bad Billy says behind him, but he can’t imagine anything Bad Billy would not do—or hasn’t done, for that matter. He will go out into the world and find that he is absolutely alone and hopelessly unsuited for the narrow life available to him. And so he will invent a life, a thing that makes a virtue of his apartness, cobbled together from routine, false memories, old movies, half-read books. Until one day a woman will come suddenly, unexpectedly (“like a nail into cork”) into his life’s ellipsis to disrupt it; and, as he struggles up out of his aloneness, as he fights against his own instincts and the circumstances of his life just to make this single human connection, his careful, wrought life collapses. When he steps out into sunlight now, it blinds him.

  Those ten pages, virtually word for word as I scribbled them in the motel room that night, became the first chapter, and the very heart, of Mole, a book unlike anything else I had written, purely fiction in that every character, every scene was invented, purely true in that it is in purest form the story of all our lives.

  Chapter Nineteen

  THE DESK CLERK AND I OBVIOUSLY WERE NOT destined to become close friends. He wasn’t accustomed to taking messages for guests and didn’t like it much, and as I came in from the hospital the next morning, he motioned at me through the front glass (a hand held high, opening and closing twice, as though waving good-bye to himself) then wordlessly shoved a couple of slips of paper over to me.

  Of course, one had to take into account that he seemed to work around the clock—whenever my erratic va et vient took me by the office, day or night, I’d look in and see him here—which is enough to make even one of Rilke’s angels growl.

  Teresa had called to let me know that, minutes after I left the unit that morning, someone had tried to reach me. I flipped over to the second slip of paper, which just read Camaro, then back to the first. Said you might want to check out a house in Moon Point. No direct connection that he knows, but things happen there. Hope this makes sense to you, Lew. And an address, of sorts.

  They grow their boys tough out there by the catfish channels, I want you to know, and they ain’t about to bend over for no big-city dude in a coat and tie.

  I always forget how very much alike rural and inner-city attitudes are.

  Asking at the motel office, a gas station nearby, another on the highway and, finally, a postman I drove by a couple of times on a dirt road six or eight miles outside Clarksville, I found the house, a two-story frame, white many years ago. A jeep and a ‘55 Chevy rusted away on blocks in the front yard. There were some appliances, including a vintage avocado refrigerator, sitting at precarious angles at the side of the house. A tractor covered in vines at the back. Two Mustangs and a BMW in the circular front drive.

  I knocked at the door and politely inquired after Alouette to the young man in the beige silk suit and black T-shirt who eventually answered. A relative, I told him.

  “Ain’t here,” he said after a moment.

  “Thank you. But allow me to make an assumption, possibly unwarranted, from that. To wit: that she has, at some unspecified point in the past, been here, though she is not presently.”

  “Say what?”

  Another youngish man, unseen, joined him at the door: “What’s up, Clutch?”

  “Nigger looking for his squeeze.”

  “Yeah? He think we run some kind of dating service here? Tell him to get missing.”

  “You heard the man,” Silky said.

  “What man? All I heard’s your boy hiding back there behind the door.”

  Silky sighed, and said door flew open. I have to tell you he was one ugly black man. Someone had been really creative with a knife or razor down
both sides of his face and in one long jagged pull across his neck. The nose had spent as much time taped as not. He would have struck terror in all hearts, save for his stature: he was well under five feet tall. His body looked to be normal size, but everything else seemed oddly foreshortened. Neck, arms, legs, fingers. Temper.

  “I got your assumption, motherfucker. Right here.”

  “Excuse me,” I said, looking straight ahead, “I hear something, but I don’t see anyone.”

  Which was how I got the shit beat out of me again. Or how it started, anyway. I’d never make it as a standup comic, I guess.

  The first guy went low, tumbling me over, as his dwarfish buddy scrambled up my back like a chimp and started hammering temples and kicking kidneys with considerable fervor. The taller one was trying valiantly to get a knee into my groin. I reached down and grabbed his nuts, crushing them together in my fist, bringing him up off the floor like an epileptic.

  At the same time, holding on, I reached out and snagged in my left hand a thick wedge of wood used in warmer days to hold the door ajar. Slammed it hard into the dwarf’s mouth, as teeth caught at it and sinews, possibly the mandible, gave. Lodged it there.

  I had a dim, peripheral perception of others standing just inside the door, watching.

  I got up onto my knees. Blood ran down my face. I tossed my head to clear it out of my eyes. My lower back throbbed with pain and for days, whenever I peed, the water in the bowl went red.

  “Where’s Alouette?”

  “Man, if we knew, we’d tell you.”

  This was from the tall guy, kind of grunting it out, hugging his nuts with both hands.