Moth

by James Sallis

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  HOSPITALS, LIKE BUS STATIONS AND PRISONS, are all much the same. Their makers conjure up the soul of the thing, then drape skin around it. This one was like the one where I woke all those years ago, light like fists in my eyes, with Vicky’s face hovering over me; like the one unseen in which my father died; like the one that broke Cordelia Davis’s long fall; like the one in which Verne had lain dying.

  Tenth floor was a limited-admittance wing, and after being turned away at the nurse’s station I had to go back down to the administrative offices, where the atmosphere was so different that it was like stepping into another world, to clear permissions. I gave my name and relationship to Alouette to a walleyed young man whose expression suggested that he found what he saw out here perpetually just beyond his understanding, and added that he might call Travis for corroboration.

  “Oh that won’t be necessary, Mr. Griffin,” he said, handing a small paper across to me. “Sergeant Travis has already called. Let me wish you and the girl both the best of luck. It’s tough, I know.”

  I shared the ride back up with a stretcher and two attendants, probably a nurse and respiratory therapist. An old lady with skin like dried mud flats lay on the stretcher surrounded by monitors, oxygen cylinder, IV bags and portable pump, a compact drug box, charts, a box of disposable diapers. Tubes and drains snaked out from under the sheet covering her. She was trached, and the attendant at the head of the stretcher was squeezing an Ambu bag regularly, monotonously, to give her breath. Her eyes locked on to mine and I was surprised at how clear, how filled with intelligence, they were. Those eyes followed me as I got off on the tenth floor.

  I handed over my scrip to the nurse at the gateway. She’d summon Charon, who’d ferry me across. But she only looked at it and signaled to another beyond the double doors. That one buzzed the doors to unlock them, holding her finger on the button until I was in.

  A young woman sitting behind the desk just inside stood. “Mr. Griffin?” She was in her midtwenties, a blonde with perfect fair skin and a bow in her hair. Typical valley girl sort, but she was wearing jeans, cowboy boots and a denim shirt with snaps for buttons. Barbie at the Bar-B, I thought inanely.

  She held out a hand to shake mine. “I’m Mickey Francis, a social worker on the staff here. We don’t have very much information about Alouette, I’m afraid. Do you have a few minutes to answer some questions? It would be a great help to us.”

  “I have the time, Miss Francis. But I don’t know if I’ll have any answers for you.”

  “Anything will help.”

  So we went down the hall to a conference room looking much like the police interrogation room back across the river, poured two cups of coffee and sat down. A calendar on the wall showed a swatch of New England forest in the throes of fall, an impossible array of gold and scarlet and chrome yellow; each leaf on each tree seemed a different color. Starting with Chip Landrieu’s arrival at my doorstep, backtracking to Verne’s and my lengthy relationship, jump-cutting forward to Baby Girl’s death, I told her what I knew.

  As I talked, she made brief notes in a pocket memo book. I thought of Eddie Lang, who kept the cues for the entire Whiteman Orchestra repertoire on an index card. And of how he had tried so hard, in those amazing duets with Lonnie Johnson, to transcend his heavy, European style. Lang could hear the difference, that loose urgency, in Johnson’s playing—sensed but somehow couldn’t seize it.

  “Do you mind if I contact Richard Garces?” she asked when I finished. “He might be able to get some of the information we need. Legally I suppose we’re going to have to notify the father, but we can probably hold off on that for a while.”

  “When you do, be prepared for the descent of the Valkyries.”

  “Oh, we’re used to Valkyries around here, Mr. Griffin.” She stood and held out her hand. “Thank you for your help. We’ll do what we can. But as you know, Alouette will have to do most of it herself. Jane, at the desk, will take you in to see her. The police have cleared her from the jail ward, by the way: she’ll be moved to a regular ICU as soon as a bed comes available. Good luck.”

  She walked away. Because the boots’ heels tipped her forward and she leaned back just a little too hard against it, she seemed above the waist to carry herself stiffly and unnaturally straight. But her legs, long and looking still longer in jeans and heels, moved freely.

  Jane escorted me into a four-bed room just within the double doors. To the right, propped on his or her side with rolled pillows, lay a hairless individual with intersecting scars like two zippers across the crown of his/her head. He or she was trached, and an aerosol generator in the wall above the bed, hissing, delivered continuous humidity to the airway through a corrugated tube and T-piece, outflow disappearing when the patient breathed in, spuming back into the room on exhalation. In the bed behind this one, a middle-aged woman sat upright, eyes following my progress into the room, face and eyes equally blank.

  Alouette was in the rear left corner, past an unoccupied bed. Soft restraints at ankles and wrists were tied to the bed rails, and a half dozen sandbags chucked along her sides helped hold her in place, so that she could move only her eyes. Towels covered breasts and abdomen. She had peripheral IVs in each arm, happy-face patches for the cardiac monitor on her chest, yet another line in her neck. An endotracheal tube was taped in place at her mouth and connected to a ventilator alongside the bed. Its bellows rose, hesitated and fell, accordionlike.

  A nurse had just finished bathing her and was gathering up the plastic basin half filled with water, wash-cloths, talcum, bottle of liquid soap, toothbrush, toothpaste. “Are you the father?”

  I shook my head. “A friend.”

  Alouette’s eyes had locked on to me. I imagined that I saw all sorts of things in them. Perhaps I did. She tried to speak, prompting a loud buzz and flashing light from the ventilator.

  “You can’t talk, sweetheart, remember?”

  She put down the basin and reached for a clipboard on the bedside table.

  “I’ll undo an arm, honey, if you promise me you won’t try to pull anything loose. And then I can leave you folks alone a minute.”

  Alouette looked at her and blinked several times.

  “You’ll have to help her,” the nurse said to me. “Things are still pretty thin for her. Will be, for a while.”

  She started to untie her right arm, but when I told her that Alouette was left-handed (like her mother), she redid the knot and pulled the other free instead. Handed me the clipboard.

  I walked around to the side and held it up for her, gave her the pencil. She made several tries at it—lines huge and shaky and often not meeting, other times over-scoring one another, tip of the pencil lead breaking away at one point—before I could make out what it was.

  LEW.

  I nodded, surprised that she knew who I was.

  I—

  Hope? Hate?

  She tried again.

  No: Hurt.

  I HURT.

  And what I said then, unintended, unexpectedly, came in a rush.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  I HAD BEEN IN NEW ORLEANS A LITTLE MORE than a year when I met your mother. I was a fatback-and-grits kid from Arkansas who’d read a few books and thought they’d taught him whatever secrets he needed to know. I had this black gabardine suit that I’d wear all the time, press it and one of my three shirts every morning, put on a tie of some kind, buff my shoes with a towel. I wasn’t drinking much, then. That came later. But I always tried to look presentable.

  I’d been in and out of several jobs by that time. Bell-hopped at the Royal Orleans for a little while, worked the ticket counter at the bus station, even did some short-order cooking and janitored at a grade school when times got really hard. I was living with half a dozen or more people, the number kept changing from week to week, or even day to day, in a house on Dryades, an old camelback double. People used to kid me because everywhere I went I wore that suit.

  I wa
s sitting at the counter in a diner one morning about four, nursing a cup of coffee, wearing my suit. I’d been fired the day before for “talking back” to my supervisor (actually, I’d told him to go to hell), and I left the store, went out and got drunk by midafternoon, somehow got home and passed out there till thirst and jittery nerves shook me awake a little before midnight.

  Someone sat down beside me. When I looked at her, she smiled, sipped her coffee and said “Nice suit.”

  I thanked her, and after a moment she said, “Things kind of slow for you tonight too, I guess.”

  And that was your mother, the first time I ever saw her. And that’s all we said. But the next night I was there at that same diner from two to six, and the next night she came in, around five, and sat down by me again when she saw me, and we talked. So then we started having breakfast together most mornings. And after a couple of weeks I asked her to have dinner with me that night. “You mean like a date?” she said. And I said, “Yeah, like a date.”

  By the end of the month I’d had two more jobs, quit one and got fired from the other, and had moved in with her on a more or less permanent basis. She helped me get another job, someone she knew from her work knew someone else, that kind of thing. It was with this furniture and appliance outfit over on Magazine. They’d sell all this stuff on time at inflated prices and have people sign contracts agreeing to forfeit everything if there was ever a missed payment. Mostly poor black people, and most of them not even able to read the contracts. But the company was considerate. They always sent their man around to try to collect before they were forced “to invoke the terms of contract.” And I was their man.

  So I’d go humping all over town doing what I could to help these people keep their things. I’d explain what the contract said, tell them if they didn’t scrape a payment together by Friday, or Monday, or whatever, the truck would back up to their door and haul it all away and they’d still owe the company money for whatever payments were outstanding at the time of repossession. A couple of times I even threw in some of my own money.

  Then one day the owner wants to see me in his office. “You doin’ okay, Lew?” he says. Then he tells me word’s got to him how I’ve been going about my collections, that I know damn well that’s not the way it’s done and he never wanted to hire me in the first place, and I had better get my black butt in the groove or out of his store, did I understand.

  It went on like that a little while, not too much longer. Finally I just reached across the desk, pulled him toward me by his shirtfront and started pounding at his face. Afterwards, I went on home.

  The police picked me up within the hour. I was sitting out on the porch, cleaned up and dressed in my black suit and waiting for them. The officers and I were polite. A few days later, the judge was polite. He said, politely, that I had a choice: prison for assault and battery, or the armed services, who might be able to put to some good use my, ah, talent for mayhem. A squad car delivered me directly from courtroom to recruiter who, once I’d signed papers, took over. I never even had the chance to call your mother.

  It didn’t last long. The army didn’t think I was nearly as desirable as that judge had. And when I got out, your mother was there at the bus station in New Orleans waiting for me. Wearing, since she was working that night, a blue satin dress and blood-red heels, and looking unbelievably beautiful.

  After that, we were together, even when we were apart, for almost thirty years. She never let me down. She was always there when I needed her, even when I didn’t know I needed her, even though I was a mess for a long time—more years than you’ve been alive. All that time, I didn’t do much besides hurt myself and other people. Your mother was the one I hurt most.

  I’m trying to tell you that I know a little about what you’ve been through. And that I’d like to help, however I can. If you want that help. If you’ll accept it.

  And that I loved your mother.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  THREE DAYS LATER, WHEN SHE WAS UP AND about, we told Alouette that her baby had died and she said, “Yeah, I thought so.” She was still on sedation, her eyes dull stones.

  I went out that afternoon and bought clothes for her. Jeans and sweatshirts, for the most part, but also a plain cotton dress. That’s what she chose to wear when I came by to take her, out on pass, to dinner.

  “Well?” she said, standing at half-slouch in the doorway of her room. She had pulled her hair, damaged from months of poor nutrition and utter lack of care, behind her head with a barrette and tried to fluff it out, to give it some body. She wore lipstick that, pale as it was, only emphasized her waxy, sallow complexion. She’d borrowed shoes, navy pumps, from one of the nurses, I guess, along with the lipstick and barrette; I’d bought her a pair of knockoff Nikes.

  “Well,” I said. “Your mother’s daughter. No doubt about it.”

  “Yeah? Well you can be pretty charming for an old fart, even if you are full of shit.”

  “I’ll take that as a compliment.”

  “Take it any way you want. Where we going?”

  “Up to you. Kids still live off pizza?”

  “I don’t know. Next time I see one, I’ll ask.”

  “I stand corrected, and apologize. How about burgers?”

  “How about steaks?”

  “That was going to be my very next suggestion.”

  “Big ones. What time do the gates slam shut on me here, anyway?”

  “Ten. So there’s plenty of time for a movie too, if you’d like.”

  “You’re pretty ordinary, aren’t you, Lewis?”

  “I try.”

  “Okay,” she said. We stepped together out of the hospital into a warm fall evening, day’s final light fading in a blush of pink and gray just above the trees. “I’ll try too.”

  The place we decided on, with the improbable name of Fred’s Steak-Out, looked as though it had slipped through a crack in time from Dodge City or Abilene circa 1860. You could see space between the bare boards of floor and wall, the tables were slabs of wood nailed to lengths of four-by-four and covered with butcher paper and drinks came in old canning jars. The spitoons must have been out back for cleaning. And of course the food was wonderful.

  Alouette had prime rib that looked like about half a small cow, a baked potato the size of a football, and mixed greens, mostly kale and collard greens, from the look of it. I ordered grilled tuna with a Caesar salad. We both had iced tea. Lots of iced tea. She still complained of a sore throat from having had the tube in, and thirst from all the drugs.

  That night I talked to her more about her mother and me, about our time together. Specific things, things she asked, like had we ever gone here, or done that, and how had it felt when Verne got married and I didn’t see her for so long, did it bother me when she was on the streets, what made her decide to give it up finally, how had she managed to do that. We talked, too, about what was going to happen when she got out of the hospital, where she’d go, what her options were (as everybody says these days), and by the time I delivered her back to the hospital, there were glints of light deep within her eyes, stray emotions tugging at the hard lines of her face. Or at least I imagined there were.

  Alouette wasn’t the only one who needed to check in with reality.

  I went back to my room and dialed Chip Landrieu. He’d obviously been asleep.

  “Lew Griffin,” I said.

  There was a long silence.

  “It’s usually only bad news comes in the night,” he finally said.

  “Not this time. Look, I’m sorry I haven’t been in touch. I’m calling from Memphis, and I’ve spent the last few weeks down in Mississippi. But I wanted to tell you I’ve found Alouette.”

  Another silence. A breath.

  “Is she all right?”

  “I think so, basically. She’s been on some hard drugs, and it’s going to be rocky for a while. But I’ve talked to her a lot these last few days. I think she has a good chance of making it.”

  I tol
d him about the baby, about Mississippi and my straggling path toward Alouette.

  “She’ll be getting out of the hospital soon.”

  “What then?”

  “I’m not sure. We’ve talked about a treatment center up here, or some kind of halfway house. She may want to come back to New Orleans. Right now, it’s still one-day-at-a-time time.”

  “You will let me know if there’s anything I can do to help, won’t you?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Thanks, Lew. Keep me posted.”

  “I will.”

  “You need anything? Money?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Let me know if you do. Guess I’ll owe you a few dozen lunches when you get back.”

  “You’re on.”

  I sat looking at the phone for a while, finally dialed again but when Clare’s answering machine came on the line, hung up.

  A minute or two later I called back and told the machine: “It’s Lew, Clare. I’m in Memphis. I found Alouette. Sorry I haven’t called, but I have been thinking of you.”

  After hanging up again, I realized that I should have left my number and thought about calling back, but decided to put it off till morning.

  I pulled out my notebook and looked up Richard Garces’s home number. His machine came on the line, its recorded message in rapid-fire, oddly staccato Spanish, but then Garces himself broke in with “Rick.”

  I told him who it was and he said, “Hey,” stretching it out like a yawn, “good to hear from you.”

  He’d spoken with Mickey Francis from the hospital and was up to date on pretty much all of it.

  “I need some help, Richard. Advice, really.”

  “You’ve got it.”

  “What’s Alouette’s legal situation?”

  “Shaky—as it always is when contentions of mental health are part of the package. Of course in this case there’s really no established history of mental health problems, and the girl is in her majority.”