Moth

by James Sallis

  “Go on.”

  “She be here a coupla times. Been a while.”

  “How long?”

  No response. I set the heel of my hand against the wedge and drove it in deeper. This time the mandible gave for sure.

  “Jesus, man,” Silky said. “I don’t know. A week, maybe two.”

  “Mrff, gdfftm, lfft,” the dwarf said. Blood bubbled up out of his nose when he breathed.

  “You didn’t have to do that,” Silky said.

  Probably not.

  I stopped off at the Clarksville Regional ER for stitches and X rays. Nothing was broken, but everything hurt like hell. What else was new? I declined Tylenol 3, went back to my room, swallowed half a handful of aspirin and poured three fingers of scotch into the plastic cup. Watched part of a movie about child abuse. Poured another drink. Fell asleep there in the chair.

  Then someone was pounding at my door.

  I opened it. Sergeant Travis had two quart-size Styrofoam containers of coffee balanced piggyback in one hand, a paper bag of doughnuts in the other.

  “Thought you might could use this.”

  He held out the cups so I could take one and came on in. Put the bag on the dresser. The TV was still on and he sat watching a Tom and Jerry cartoon and sipping at coffee. I did the same.

  “Your name kind of came up, Griffin.”

  “Names have a way of doing that.”

  “Made me wonder enough that I called your friend on the force in New Orleans, Walsh, and talked to him about you. He told me if he sent you out to the corner for a paper, chances would be about fifty-fifty of his actually getting one, but that he’d trust you with his life. One of your stranger character references.”

  “Two of your stranger characters.”

  He finished his coffee and dropped the cup into the trashcan. “You guys go back a ways, huh?”

  “There’s history, yes.”

  “You want one of these?” He’d snagged the bag of doughnuts and pulled one out. Chewed on it a moment and dropped it into the trashcan too. “Damn things always look so good. But they taste like sugared cardboard and turn into fists in your gut somewhere. Thing is, we had a report of probable assault from the hospital—”

  “I made no such complaint.”

  “Didn’t have to. We like to stay on top of things around here, Griffin. Man comes into ER all beat to hell, the staff’s just naturally going to let me know about it.”

  “They’re not big fans of legal fine points such as patient confidentiality, I take it.”

  “Well you know, city people are the ones that seem always to be worried about protecting their anonymity. Maybe that has something to do with why they’re city people. Town this size, everybody tends to know everybody else’s business anyway. This has to be one of the new ones,” he said, nodding toward the TV. “The old ones were rough as a cob—jerky and poorly drawn, violent—but they had a magic to them somehow.”

  He shook his head sadly for all lost things.

  “So I hear about this apparent assault and I have to wonder if there might be a connection between that and an incident out on county road one-seventeen a little earlier. Because someone big and black swooped in there like some kind of avenging angel—avenging what, no one knows—and beat the bejesus out of a couple of our self-employed businessmen. One of them’s having his jaw wired about now, gonna be getting tired of liquids pretty soon. People who were watching said this guy just walked up and took them down, just like that, no reason or anything.”

  “There was probably reason.”

  “Yeah.” His eyes hadn’t left the TV, where a cat, chasing a mouse, crossed offscreen right to offscreen left and moments later came fleeing back across, pursued by the mouse. “Probably so. Look: Walsh tells me you’re okay, I’m willing to go along with that, at least until I see different. But if you’re going to be running around busting jaws, I need to know now.”

  “Things got a little out of hand.”

  “Things have a way of doing just that. What I want is for you to tell me you’re going to be able to keep that hand closed, so things don’t get out of it anymore.”

  I nodded.

  “I’ll bust you quick as I will anyone else, if it comes to that, friends or no friends. And whether I personally want to or not. The point could come. You understand that, don’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “So I’m trusting you to walk carefully, and watch your back. Especially watch your back. Camaro didn’t have any way of knowing you were going to go in there and John Wayne those boys all to shit, or he wouldn’t have sent you out there. But those boys have a lot of business associates.”

  “Also self-employed.”

  “Yeah, well, it does tend to be an at-home kind of industry. But I’m saying they might take it personally, some of the others. Especially if they find you getting in their faces again.”

  “I understand.”

  “Take care then, Griffin. You get in too deep, you give me a call.”

  “So you can lead a cavalry charge?”

  He laughed. “Hell no. So I can step back out of the way.”

  Chapter Twenty

  WHENEVER THINGS BEGIN TO LOOK absolutely, unremittingly impossible and I find myself sinking into despair for myself and the human race, I read Thomas Bernhard. It always cheers me up. No one is more bitter, no one has ever lived in a bleaker world than Thomas Bernhard.

  The only contender is Jonathan Swift, whose epitaph might do as well for Bernhard: “He has gone where fierce indignation can lacerate his heart no more.”

  All Bernhard’s work is visible struggle: invectives against his Austrian homeland, combats occurring solely within the human mind and imagination, blustery dialogues that finally surrender pretense and paragraphs to become clotted, hundred-page soliloquies. And beneath it all, his certainty that language above all embodies humanity’s refusal to accept the world as it is, that it is a machinery of essential falsehoods and fabrications.

  Unable to get back to sleep following Sergeant Travis’s visit that afternoon, having no Thomas Bernhard at hand and little prospect of finding any there in the hinterestlands, I did the next-best thing. I made a cemetery run.

  Confederate cemeteries are scattered throughout the South, some with only a half-dozen or dozen gravesites, others sprawling over the equivalent of a city block. They’re often grand places, with elaborate headstones and inscriptions, generally well-kept and -visited. And one of the most celebrated, I knew, was not far from Clarksville.

  It was almost dark when I got there. You turned off the highway just past Faith Baptist Church (I stopped twice along the way to ask), drove down a narrow asphalt road (pulling to the shoulder whenever vehicles appeared on the other side) and onto a wider dirt one, then through a modern graveyard of low headstones and bright green grass into a copse where half-lifesize statues of soldiers reared up among the trees. Still farther along lay a separate Negro graveyard with wooden markers.

  The trees were mostly magnolias, mostly dormant now. Clusters of leaves, still green but curiously unalive, hung as though holding their breath, waiting.

  Marble and cement soldiers, horses, angels, beloved dogs, pylons, pinnacles, sad women.

  A squat obelisk of veined marble bearing the figure of a child, though he wore an officer’s uniform: Let Us Remember That After Midnight Cometh Morn.

  A casket-shaped headstone with a central spire of wrought iron: Honor. Family. Faith.

  And on a small, simple marker hand-carved to resemble a scroll, far more appropriate to New Orleans (where it would have indicated the young man died in a duel, not war): Mort sur le champ d’honneur.

  Poor ol’ Tom Jefferson with his slave mistress Sally Hemings and his two hundred slaves at Monticello and his denouncements of slavery as a great political and moral evil, knowing all the time he would suffer economic ruin if his own slaves were freed. And that the neighbors would talk something awful.

  Life, Mr. Jefferson, is an unqual
ified, neo-Marxist bitch.

  Everything comes down to simple economics, however fine-spirited we are.

  Looking up, I saw that a white boy of twelve or so stood off at the side of the field with a shotgun cradled in his arms, watching me.

  I nodded his way.

  He nodded back and kept watching.

  As Robert Johnson said: Sun goin’ down, boy, dark gon’ catch me here.

  Maybe not a good idea, even this late in the American game. So I mounted my Mazda and rode into the sunset, leaving the dead, those dead, forever behind.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  BABY GIRL MCTELL DIED ON NOVEMBER 19th, on a starless, overcast morning, a little after 2:00 A.M.

  The phone in my motel room dredged me from sleep. Topmost levels of my mind came instantly awake; I waited as others drifted up to join them. Lights from a car in the lot outside made a shadow screen of my wall, everything outsize and tipped at odd angles as in old German Expressionist films. The car’s idle was set too low; every few seconds it began sputtering out and the driver had to tap the gas pedal.

  “Yeah?” I said.

  “Mr. Griffin?”

  I said yes, and Doctor Arellano told me they had done all they could.

  I thanked him, said I’d be in later to see to arrangements, and hung up. There was nothing to drink, or I would have drunk it. Outside, a car door slammed and a woman shouted, as the car pulled away, Damn you! You hear me? God damn you!

  I splashed water on my face and sat for a while staring out into the darkness with late-night radio blathering behind me. Then I turned on water in the shower to give it time to warm while I shaved. I was climbing in when the phone rang again.

  “Lew? Teresa. Becky Walden just called. The nurse who was taking care of our girl tonight. She knew I’d want to know. I’m so sorry, Lew.”

  I watched dampness spread slowly over the carpet at my feet.

  “Lew, are you okay?”

  “Fine.” Clearing my throat, I said it again.

  “Listen, it’s my night off. Would you like me to come over? Maybe it’s not a good idea for you to be alone tonight. I’m up anyway—I can’t ever sleep like a normal person, even on my nights off—and watching old movies. I could be right there, provided you don’t mind stay-at-home old clothes and aboriginal hair. There’s no sense in your going in to the hospital till morning, anyway. None of the administrators are there before nine.”

  “I’d like you here,” I said after a moment.

  “Then I’m on my way.”

  Her stay-at-home old clothes turned out to be designer, French and recently pressed. The aboriginal hair looked pretty much the way it always did.

  Myself, I’d barely managed a dash through the shower, jeans and a T-shirt.

  “Lew,” she said when I opened the door, “I’d like you to meet Beth Ann, the only reason I’m still here in the States. I hope you don’t mind my bringing her along.”

  Her companion was a stunning, tall woman with light brown skin, golden eyes and elaborate Old South manners. She took my hand and seemed for a moment on the verge of curtsying.

  “Beth Ann’s from Charleston. She’s never been able to quite get over it.”

  “Now that I’ve seen her, I’d be surprised if Charleston ever got over her.”

  “What did I tell you?” Teresa said to Beth Ann.

  “You told me he was a good-looking charmer. And you were at least half right.”

  “Does the word coquettish come to mind?” Teresa asked me.

  “Among others,” I said. Mutual admiration was flowing thick in there. Pretty soon we’d have to hack our way through it with machetes.

  “I’m sorry about the little girl, Mr. Griffin.”

  “Lew. And thank you. Though I guess it’s what we all had to expect.”

  “That doesn’t make it any easier.”

  “No. No, it doesn’t.”

  Teresa lowered a paper bag onto the dresser and reached in, pulling out three mugs, each fitted with its own lid. She handed one to each of us, kept one herself. Mine was so hot I could hardly hold on to it.

  “Mistake,” Teresa said. “Trade. This is coffee: yours. B.A. and I have tea.”

  “Tea’s wonderful. Split it with me?”

  “Of course. But I didn’t know you were a tea drinker. You’ve always had coffee.”

  “When in Rome,” I said.

  “Quite.”

  I had never told her about Vicky. Now I did.

  “You loved her,” Teresa said when I finished.

  “Oh yes.”

  “And you let her go.”

  “The way one lets the wind blow, or the sun come up. She made her own choices, her own decisions. There wasn’t much I could do.”

  “There are always things we can do, Lew. You could have gone back with her. She asked.”

  I shook my head, much as I had done all those years ago. I handed Teresa the mug. She drank and passed it back.

  “Do you hear from her?”

  “I did, for a while. Less and less as time went on. She had a family, a son, a busy husband doing important things, a new daughter. And her own career, of course. Ties loosen. Memories get hung on walls or put away in the corners of drawers and life goes on.”

  Teresa held out the almost-empty mug and, when I shook my head, drank off the last swig of tea herself. Then she pried the lid off the coffee, sipped, passed it on to me. We were all sitting on a long plastic-covered couch under the picture window with its theater-curtain drape, looking at cinderblock painted green and light from the bathroom spilling out over brown carpeting.

  “You miss her,” Teresa said.

  “I miss a lot of things—”

  “She wasn’t a thing, Lew.”

  “—but the train keeps moving on.”

  “When I was ten,” Beth Ann said, “my sister, the one who raised me after my folks died, put me on a train to Chicago, to see my grandparents. I’d never been out of Charleston, never been much of anywhere but home and the Catholic school I attended. I was scared to death. I didn’t even know there were bathrooms on the train. And I was starved. I’d left home at six in the morning without breakfast and everybody around me now was eating chicken or sandwiches out of bags and boxes. I hadn’t moved this whole time. I was just sitting there, half a step from peeing my pants, when a conductor walked up. I’ll never forget him. A white man, in his thirties I guess, though he seemed horribly old at the time. And he just said: Come with me, girl. Took me back to the club car, showed me where the bathroom was, the one he and the other employees used. And the rest of that trip he kept bringing me ham sandwiches. Just a slice of ham, two pieces of white bread and mayonnaise, but they tasted better than anything else I’d ever had in my life.”

  We’d long ago finished the coffee, but had kept passing the mug back and forth in one of those spontaneous, unspoken inspirations that occasionally arise. Whoever held the mug (we now realized, all at once) had to speak.

  Teresa: “Many women have loved you, Lew.”

  Beth Ann: “Life could be worthwhile without Terri, I know that. There would be reasons to go on living. I would find them. But right now I can’t imagine what they might be.”

  Teresa: “Coming here, to the States to live—for a single year, I thought then—I felt as Columbus must have felt. I was falling off the edge of the world, leaving civilization behind me. Then I discovered malls! fast food! credit cards!”

  Me: “Once in the sixties I remember seeing spray-painted on the wall of a K&B: Convenience Kills.”

  Teresa: “ ‘For arrogance and hatred are the wares peddled in the thoroughfares.’ ”

  B.A.: “Yeats.”

  Me: “ ‘A Poem for My Daughter.’ Now I’m the fifty-year-old, unsmiling, unpublic man.”

  “I think we need to give some thought to food,” Teresa said. “Food seems essential.”

  “I think we’re all still waiting for that conductor,” Beth Ann said.

  Chapter Twenty-
Two

  THE SUN WAS EDGING UP BY THE TIME we climbed into Teresa’s car to head for a restaurant out on the loop. I sat between her and Beth Ann in the front seat. Morning light filled our conversation, too; shadows fell away. When they dropped me back at the motel an hour or so later, after two pecan waffles and a gallon of coffee, I’d begun filling slowly with light myself.

  I showered, put on real clothes (Verne called them “grown-up clothes,” I suddenly remembered) and went to the hospital to see what I needed to do. Day Administrator Katherine Farrell, a woman in her late fifties and more handsome than pretty, striking nonetheless, expressed her condolences and said that Mrs. Adams had already signed the necessary papers.

  I found her sitting in the covered bus stop outside the hospital. I sat down beside her. We watched traffic go by.

  “Ain’t the first or the last time either of us lost something,” she said after a while.

  “No, m’am.”

  A workhorse of an old Ford pickup, fenders ripped away, heaved past, wearing the latest of several coats of primer. A beetle-green new Toyota followed close behind. Rap’s heavy iambs, its booming bass, washed over us.

  “I want you to know I’ve been talking to those nurses in there. They tell me you loved that little girl, that you’re a good man. And judging from what you said on the way here, my daughter turned out a fair good woman.”

  “Yes, m’am. She did. She always was.”

  “Been wrong before.”

  “Yes, m’am.” Then, after a moment, nothing more forthcoming: “Thank you.”

  I stood. “My car’s in the lot, Mrs. Adams. I’ll drive you back home now, if you’re ready.”

  She put her hand out and I took it. It was like holding on to dry twigs.

  “I’d appreciate that, Lewis,” she said.

  I was back in Clarksville by midafternoon and, after a quick meal at a place called The Drop, stretched out at the motel for a few hours’ sleep. I’d got almost half of one of those hours when the phone rang.

  I struggled to the surface and said, “Yeah?”