Moth lg-2

by James Sallis

  “I get it,” he said. “You’re crazy, right? Like ol’ Banghead Terence over there. Hey: you been buttin’ down any walls lately, boy?”

  “No sir,” Terence said. My informant.

  “Nigger got his head scrambled right good back there in Nam, so now every few days we’ll find him in some alley somewhere and he’ll be running headfirst into the wall over and over again till he falls down and can’t get up no more. Wall just sits there.”

  He finished his drink, rolled ice around the bottom of the glass.

  “Figure something like that must of happened to you. Ain’t no other possible reason you be comin’ here this way, rubbing up against me like this. You got to be crazy too. Now you tell me: am I right?”

  I smiled, ordered a couple more drinks for us, and started telling him why I was there. That Sheryl wanted me to talk to him, explain why he had to leave her alone.

  “So you just run on out and do whatever any pussy tell you. That it, man?”

  I started over. Clare was a friend of Sheryl’s and-

  “So you be fucking them both at the same time? Or they do each other while you watch.”

  I tried once more. I really did intend, or at least had convinced myself that I intended, just to talk to him. But intentions are slippery things.

  When the gun came over the table’s edge, suddenly, at the exact moment he switched his eyes toward the door and lifted his face as though in greeting, I slammed my glass down as hard as possible on that hand. The glass shattered, but I didn’t feel it then. I did feel bones give way under the glass. My other hand was already moving toward him with a heavy ashtray, and that connected just above his left eye.

  “Righteous,” Terence said from the bar.

  T.C. went back out of the chair, toppling it, but sprang almost at once to his feet and made a grab for my shirtfront. Suckered, I leaned back with the top half of my body-and he swept my feet out from under me.

  “Moves,” Terence said. “ ‘Member that shit.”

  Things looked quite different from down there. It was absolutely amazing, for instance, how much bigger T.C. had gotten. Or how many cockroaches there were skittering about under chairs and things. At one point when T.C. was sitting on top of me kind of boxing my head from side to side playfully, I saw by a table leg what I’m certain was a severed, dried-up ear.

  Then I watched two fingers jam up hard into his nose and heard cartilage give way there. When he lifted his hands to pull mine away, I struck him full force in the throat and he fell off me, gasping. I kicked him in the ribs, then a couple of times in the head before I noticed he was lying still and turning blue. No one made any move toward us; they simply watched.

  “Better call the paramedics,” I told the bartender, staggering over to him. It sounded like: Btr. Kawl. Thpur. Medix.

  He looked about the room, timing it.

  “Man does comedy too,” he said.

  There was skittery laughter.

  But he also said, to me: “You better get on out of here. We’ll just ‘low Mr. T.C. to sleep it off a while. But come closing I ‘spect I’ll notice him there. Don’t see no way ‘round that. And then the Man’s gonna want to know things.”

  I started out.

  “That be two-ninety for the last round,” the bartender said.

  Chapter Eight

  I rang the bell and then just kind of leaned there against the sill to wait. I didn’t know what time it was. After one, maybe closer to two. Lights still burned in many of the houses. Streetlights, moon and windows all had a red haze about them. I’d wrapped a handkerchief around my hand, but it was soaked through now, and periodically thick gobbets of blood would squeeze their way out and fall like slugs.

  After a while I heard her coming to the door, duh-DA, duh-DA, duh-DA, in perfect iambs. She wore a short, sky-blue, kimonolike robe.

  “Don’t tell me,” she said. “You wanted to beat the rest of the kids to the candied apples and other treats.”

  “Already been tricked,” I said. Then: “You should see the other guy.”

  “Who won?”

  “I did.”

  “Then I don’t think I want to see the other guy. Aren’t you getting a little old for this?”

  “Tried to tell you that. Damn glad now I didn’t wear my tie-dye.”

  “Sheryl’s ex-live-in?”

  “The chicken man himself.”

  “Oh Lew. I’m so sorry.”

  “Sorry enough to let me come in?”

  “What? Oh, sorry. Sure. You really do look like shit, by the way.” She turned and stepped away from the door. I took a step forward. Nations disappeared, new suns appeared in the sky, planets formed around them. I took another step.

  “Are you okay?” she asked.

  “Just a little damaged in transit, as they say at the post office. Then, of course, they hand you this thing that’s taped back together three ways from Sunday and whatever was inside is crushed beyond recognition.”

  “Are you?”

  “Crushed? Absolutely. Many times over. But it always springs back. Well, these days I guess it’s more like it seeps back.”

  “Stronger than before?”

  “Not that I’ve noticed. You?”

  She shook her head. “Be nice if it were true, though. Like a lot of things.”

  I eased myself onto the couch.

  “Tell Sheryl T.C. won’t be bothering her anymore. Actually, I’m not sure he’ll be bothering anyone anymore.”

  “Must have been one hell of a talk.”

  “I won’t forget it soon. You got anything to drink?”

  “Might be some scotch under the cabinet from when my parents were here. Want me to look?”

  “Oh yes.”

  There were a couple of inches left in the bottle she put on the coffee table before me. Ignoring the glass, I tilted the bottle up. Seemed easier that way: less movement, less pain. I remembered O’Carolan asking for Irish whiskey on his deathbed, saying it would be a terrible thing if two such friends should part without a final, farewell kiss. I tilted the bottle again.

  “I feel like I just blinked and twenty years went by-backwards,” I said. “Definitely an old TV science fiction show. Can’t be real life.” I looked at her. “Sorry. It’s late.”

  “It’s okay, Lew. Really.”

  “Tell you what. I’m going into that bathroom down there at the end of the hall to face up to some hot water and soap. Pay no attention to screams, and if I’m not out in ten minutes, you can decide on your own whether to call paramedics or the funeral home. I sure as hell don’t know which, even now.”

  “Need any help?”

  “Me? Look at what I’ve already accomplished, all by myself.”

  “I’ll make coffee, then. Once I’m up, that’s usually it for the night.”

  I stepped carefully down the hall. Must be heavy winds and a storm coming up: the ship listed badly both to port and starboard.

  Ablution accomplished, nerve ends singing like power lines in a hurricane, I came back and sat as Clare poured something yellow into the cuts, smeared on antibiotic salve and bound my hand tightly in gauze.

  “That’s going to need stitches. Lucky you didn’t cut a tendon or an artery.”

  “It’s not bleeding anymore. It’ll be okay.”

  “Lew, don’t you think you’ve worn your balls as a hat long enough for one night? Jesus!”

  “Okay, okay. You’re right.”

  “You’ll go to the ER?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “Promise?”

  I nodded and she went out to the kitchen, brought back a lacquered wooden tray with coffee in one of those thermal pitchers, two mugs, packets of sugar and sweetener, an unopened pint of Half amp; Half.

  She poured for both of us and we sat there like some ancient married couple, sipping coffee together in the middle of the night without speaking. The moon hung full and bright in the sky outside, and after a while Clare got up and turned off the room’s lights
. Then, after sitting again, finishing her coffee, pouring anew for us both, she said quietly, “I don’t understand what happened between us, Lew.”

  I said nothing, and finally she laughed. “Guess I’ll put that on the list with quantum mechanics, the national debt and the meaning of life, huh?”

  I looked at her.

  “I’d come over there and sit at your feet now if I could, Lew. Just lean back against you and forget everything else. That’s what I’d do if I could. But I can’t. Probably fall, if I tried. Coffee okay? You want a sandwich or anything?”

  “The coffee’s wonderful, Clare. You’re wonderful. And I’m sorry.”

  A silence. Then: “You have things you’d do, too-if you could?”

  I nodded. Oh yes.

  Another, longer silence. “Think maybe you’d consider spending the night in this wonderful coffee maker’s bed?”

  “I’m not in very good shape.”

  She laughed, suddenly, richly. “Hey, that’s my line.”

  Later as we lay there with moonlight washing over us and the ceiling fan thwacking gently to and fro, I mused that pain was every bit as wayward, as slippery and inconsistent, as intentions.

  “Half in love with easeful death,” Clare said, striking her right side forcibly with the opposite hand and laughing. “Little did he know. But what’s left is for you, sailor.”

  Human voices didn’t wake us, and we did not drown.

  Chapter Nine

  It was not a human voice at all to which I woke, in fact, but a cat’s. Said cat was sitting on my chest, looking disinterested, when I opened my eyes. Its own eyes were golden, with that same color somewhere deep in a coat that otherwise would have been plain tabby. Mowr, it said again, inflection rising: closer to a pigeon’s warble than anything else.

  “You didn’t tell me there was a new man in your life,” I said when Clare came in with coffee moments later.

  “Yeah, and just like all the rest, too: only way I can keep him is to lock him in at night. Lew, meet Bat.”

  She put a mug of cafe au lait on the table by me and held on to the other, which I knew would be only half filled, to allay spillage.

  “I was in the kitchen one morning, bleary-eyed as usual, nose in my coffee. Glasses fogging over since I hadn’t put my contacts in yet. I heard a sound and looked up and there he was on the screen. Just hanging there, like a moth. I shooed him down but a minute later he jumped back up. That went on a while, till I finally just said what the hell and let him in. From the look of it, he hadn’t eaten for a long time.

  “He was just a kitten then. There wasn’t much to him but these huge ears sticking straight up-that’s how he got the name. I asked around the neighborhood, but no one knew anything. So now we’re roomies. He’s shy.”

  “I can tell.” I wanted the coffee bad, but the cat didn’t seem to understand that.

  “No, really. I bet he spent all night behind the stove, just because he didn’t know you.”

  “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 cl
ock. 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 Quebecoise. 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.