Moth

by James Sallis

  “No one outside my family ever calls me Juan. And no one, period, calls me Mr. Garces. But I’m afraid I don’t understand.”

  “I mean, did the two of you ever talk? About personal things.”

  He shook his head. “I’m sorry. Once I found out who you were, I naturally assumed … We really should start this whole encounter again from scratch, I think. I assumed you knew LaVerne and I were close. That this was why you came here.”

  The phone buzzed. He excused himself, picked it up, listened for a moment, then responded in Spanish that was far too rapid for me to follow. He hung up and penned a note that he added to the board.

  “Over the years LaVerne and I became good friends, yes. It happened slowly, very slowly, and without either of us planning or even expecting it. People have always come to me to talk, that’s kind of how I got into all this. But that’s as far as it ever goes. And LaVerne was one to keep her distance; you knew that when you first talked to her. We were both private people. Never mixed much socially with those we work with. Try to keep it professional.”

  “But you and Verne…”

  “Yeah, and it was funny. I’d always been the one to listen. But after a while—we’d go out for coffee after work, or sometimes later on we’d meet for breakfast in the morning—I found myself babbling on and on about my problems, my previous or current live-in. Or my relationship with my parents, for God’s sake. That had never happened before, and I’ve been doing this work for a long time. Then one morning when the plates have been cleared and we’re sitting there over a final cup of coffee she says to me: I want to tell you about my life, I want someone to know all this.”

  “People here didn’t know?”

  “What they knew was that this woman had paid her dues at one of the country’s toughest rape centers, and then on her own she had gone back to school and got a degree in psychology and now here she was, twelve or fourteen hours a day sometimes. That’s all they had to know.”

  He looked briefly out the window. A jay screamed as it swept across the pane and out of sight.

  “I listen, sometimes all day and part of the night, to people’s problems. I know what it’s like out there, and how little I can do. One of my clients, last month her boyfriend fucked their year-old daughter and then slammed her headfirst against the wall ‘so she wouldn’t tell.’ I’ve got pregnant mothers trying to live out of Dumpsters and a shopping cart. And husbands or parents swooping in all the time with their lawyers and threats trying to take my clients’ kids away, always with this same attitude, like if I just’ll listen to them, I’ll know what’s right. I don’t know what’s right, Lew.”

  He looked back at me. “I’m sorry. A little off track there. But there are days, and this is one of them, when I have to wonder what my place really is in all this.”

  “I understand.”

  “Yeah. You pretty much lived it, LaVerne said.”

  “Not anymore.”

  “Well. Maybe not. Not on the surface, anyway.”

  I thought of a review of my third novel, published in a small magazine specializing in mysteries. I’ve had dozens of bad reviews, most of them justified, I’m sure, but that was the only one I ever felt unfair. Cadging personal details from my publisher and a common acquaintance, the reviewer proceeded to ignore my novel and instead to review me, claiming that Black Hornet was nothing more than a record, a document, of my personal failures.

  Maybe that reviewer was right. And maybe Richard Garces was right, too. Who knows what evil … ? Well, the Shadow do. Or he be sposed to, at any rate.

  “Over the next months,” Garces went on, “LaVerne told me what I guess must be her whole life story. Even for me, I have to say, it was something of a revelation. And then, to think that she could come through all that and arrive where she did.”

  “She was rather an amazing woman.”

  “I don’t think any of us ever quite realized how amazing.”

  “We don’t, usually. Not till afterwards. Things happening in the wrong order, like you say.”

  “Yeah.” We were both quiet a moment. “She told me one night how she waited for you for over two hours outside, what was it, a bus station? Your friend from Paris—”

  “Vicky.”

  “—had just gotten on the plane to go back, and I guess this was a little after LaVerne and Guidry split up, when she’d already been working rape-crisis for a while. You hadn’t seen each other, I guess, for a long time by then, and she went down there without any idea what to expect, how you’d react. Or even how she felt about it all herself.”

  “ ‘Whatever works. You wait and see.’ ”

  “Right. And she told me that that was maybe the hardest thing she’d ever done in her life. That she’d never been more afraid than she was that night, and the next few days. I don’t know. But that story has really stayed with me. Whenever I think about making decisions, really hard ones, I still think about that.”

  “She ever talk much about when she and Guidry were together?”

  He shook his head. “That whole period was kind of walled off. She did once tell me that the whole time she was married to Dr. Guidry she felt she was masked, as for Mardi Gras, and that no one would ever be able to see who she really was, however closely they looked. I remember thinking it was something like the way people remember war experiences: these brief, incredibly concentrated periods of time that become central to their lives and all-consuming, but then that time’s gone and the experiences are essentially meaningless in the everyday practical world around them, and they let them go. Except in a way I guess LaVerne was talking about a period of peace, surrounded by war.”

  “You sure of that?”

  “Which part?”

  “The peace part.”

  “You mean, was the period as tranquil as it appeared?”

  “Right.”

  “Few periods are, really—even after our memory’s got to work on them. But I more or less felt she wanted somehow to preserve that time, keep it apart. Pure, in a manner of speaking.”

  “Maybe so. But she and Guidry split, not at all too peacefully from what little I know. So what happened? Did they get along? Were there problems between them, even early on?”

  Garces shrugged. “The book’s closed.”

  “So maybe we’ll have to go see the movie.”

  I stood and thanked him for his time and help. Then in a time-honored tradition stretching back from Columbo at least to Porfiry Petrovich, I thought of one more thing. “So why do you think LaVerne wouldn’t talk about that period with you, when she talked about everything else?”

  “I really don’t know any more than I’ve told you.”

  “Was there something different about it? Not just that she was chasing the American Dream and it almost caught her. But something—I don’t know—traumatic, maybe?”

  He hesitated, but when he glanced at me then, we both knew.

  “You mean her daughter.”

  I nodded. He exhaled.

  “I’m sorry, I wasn’t trying to mislead you. Hell, of course I was; nothing else I can call it. But LaVerne had told me you didn’t know about Alouette. She didn’t talk about her very much herself. I guess things hadn’t gone well for a long time.”

  “And then they didn’t go at all.”

  “Yeah, that’s pretty much it.”

  “Did you know LaVerne had tried to get in touch with her daughter? To see her?”

  “No, she never told me that. I know there were court orders involved, at one time. Those would no longer apply, of course. But LaVerne always said she wouldn’t contact her daughter, that it would be easier on Alouette that way.”

  “She changed her mind. You know anything about what the problems might have been between Verne and the good doctor?”

  “No, I’m sorry. Though I’m not certain I’d tell you even if I did. If I thought I did, that is. There’s a kind of professional reflex at work here.”

  I thanked him again. I’d got almo
st out the door when he said behind me: “You’re trying to find Alouette, is that it?”

  I turned back. “Chip Landrieu asked me to. I figure it’s little enough.”

  “Yeah. Well, I could probably help you with that.”

  Chapter Five

  ONE OF THE FIRST THINGS I FELL IN LOVE with in New Orleans was its cemeteries. The house I lived in on Dryades when I first came here had one nearby, a block of gravesites smack in the middle of street after street of houses and apartments, with a low brick wall and, just beyond, a border of the tiers of vaults here called ovens—all of it white and dazzling in the sunlight. There was at the same time such gravity and such lightness to it; and ever since, when things crowd too closely in upon me, I tend to head to the cemeteries for a strange solace I find nowhere else.

  The largest (though really it’s a blur of many smaller, distinct ones) is at Canal and City Park, a wilderness of tombs stretching far into the distance, a sprawling city of the dead. Many older crypts have sunk almost completely into the ground. And above them, as though reaching for sky, loom thickets of crosses, angels, statues large and small, figures of women shrouded in grief.

  The oldest is on Basin Street, St. Louis Cemetery No. 1, at what was long ago the edge of town and later the edge of Storyville. Marie Laveau, Paul Morphy and the city’s first mayor dwell there now. Occupying but a single square block, it’s pure chaos: a riot of twisted pathways that end as often as not in cul-de-sacs. Tombs sit askew, at every conceivable angle and tilt, the lower corners of many of them wrenched free of the ground.

  My personal favorite is on Washington. It fills two or three blocks in a well-decayed part of town, chockful of gravesites in a bewildering jumble of styles, size and age, cut through by narrow, corridor-like paths, yet in its own way rigidly symmetrical: disorder’s cur brought to heel. Whenever I’m down that way, I make a point of going by.

  Which I did that afternoon on the way home, wandering its pathways for half an hour or more, reading off names at random. Intimate stories began unfurling. Then I moved on to the next, or the one after.

  Finally I left and ambled along Washington. Stopped off at a corner grocery for a quick po-boy and beer. Took the beer with me to finish as I walked up La Salle, jagging from sidewalk (where there was one) to street (where there wasn’t, or where, from blockage or a quakelike upheaval of tree roots, it proved impassable).

  A couple of blocks up, I turned into an alley between shoulder-to-shoulder doubles to trash the Dixie bottle. Most of the places along here seemed to be occupied—presumptive Christmas decorations hung on some abbreviated porches, leftover Halloween skeletons on one—but the houses either side of this particular alley, for whatever reasons, had been scuttled. One, to the left, once lime-green, had all windows and doors boarded over; its yellowish neighbor lacked windows and doors entirely and was heaped with refuse ranging from rotting lumber and linoleum to remains of impromptu parties (fast-food bags, bottles, candles) and grocery sacks of garbage, perhaps from adjoining quarters.

  I lifted the lid of one of the bins, La Salle painted on in red, and saw just beyond, at the back of the alley against the latticework wall, a body. A woman’s, I confirmed, stepping closer. She lay face-down, skirt thrown up over back and head. Pale, bloody rump in open air.

  Twentyish, I decided, after turning her over. And dead. Possibly from a blow to the head: temples were spongy, eyes pushed forward and swollen. Possibly from a knife held against the neck as they butt-raped her, nicking a carotid.

  Not that it mattered.

  I knocked on the nearest occupied door, pushed my way in before the woman who answered could protest or ask questions, and dialed 911.

  “Walsh,” I told them.

  “We’ll have to get your name, number and location,” the guy said.

  “Walsh—or I hang up. There’s a body. You decide.”

  Two minutes later, Don was on the line.

  I spent an hour or so answering the usual array of police-type questions to at least three different groups of people, then went home. Later that night I sat with a glass of gin, neat, one of my own books face-down, unheeded, against my thigh, open to a particularly violent scene. I didn’t need to read it, I knew it—by heart, as they used to say.

  For years now, sequestered in this house, the one Vicky and I lived in together, the one Verne often visited, I had written book after book about street life, crime, about violence both random and purposeful, about frustration and despair and, occasionally, vengeance. But what I wrote, all those supposed “realistic” scenes, were only a kind of nostalgia, a romancification, sheerest dissembling; I could never portray what it was really like out there.

  It wasn’t that, in the years of my retreat, violence and pain had grown; but that I myself, believing I understood, believing I was saying important things, huddled down there, had steadily grown smaller.

  I did not and do not understand. I will never understand.

  Chapter Six

  THEY NEVER REALLY KNEW WHAT HAPPENED to Clare Fellman.

  One morning in late October she’d been conjugating the verb parler for her first-period students and suddenly, between first- and second-person présent du sub-jonctif, she was on the floor, unconscious, all sensation and control (as she would discover, three days later, upon waking) gone from her body’s right side. Because they didn’t know what else to call it, after sending her off on numerous day trips through CAT scanners and MRI’s and the like, the doctors at Oschner called it a CVA.

  She was twenty-two at the time. Now she was thirty-six.

  Nothing much ever came back to that right side. Over the next year, first at Oschner, then at a rehab hospital near Covington, she had painstakingly learned again to reach and pick up things and hold on to them, to guide a spoon from lift-off to touchdown through the uncertain space between planets of bowl and mouth, to negotiate the fall between chair and bed and wheelchair and toilet, and finally to walk. Life had become all new conjunctions for her, she told me: impossible joinings and connections others took for granted. She still wears braces at knee and ankle, canvas with Velcro these days, and a slight drag in her gait shows the extra focus required whenever that side is called on. It reminds me, oddly enough, of the way a jazz player, confronted with straight eighth notes, instinctively drags them out into dotted eighths and sixteenths.

  Her speech, too, bears the mark of having been relearned. She speaks slowly, carefully, as though each word carries in its wake its own small period, filling the spaces with quick smiles and, often, with laughter that seems as much at her own halting progress as at anything else.

  We’d met a year or so back at an Alliance Française event, a special showing of a film version of L’Étranger and buffet dinner after, to which I’d gone with Tony (Antoine, but don’t dare use it) Roppolo, one of our English Department adjuncts. Absolutely guarantee you the stinkiest cheeses imaginable, Tony told me. And how could a guy pass up a thing like that?

  Moments before the film began, Clare sank into the aisle seat beside me; Tony leaned forward for a quick hello and brief introduction. She held out her left hand and I took it, somewhat awkwardly, with my right. Afterwards we all sat at one of the long folding tables shuffling morsels of Cheshire, Brie and Camembert in among careful mouthsful of wine. By the time we’d switched from nouveau Beaujolais to a dark, ripe cabernet (Kool-Aid! she had exclaimed with her first sip of the Beaujolais) and Tony had washed out to sea (where periodically we caught sight of him bobbing here and there among bodies) Clare and I were well on our way to becoming (as she put it) new best friends.

  For a time then, things moved pretty quickly, certainly far more quickly than made any kind of decent good sense. We were both old enough and, I’m sure, in our own ways damaged enough to know better. Nor did either of us, I think, really anticipate or intend what happened.

  Then over the last couple of months, breathless and blinking, and with no clearer resolve or culpability than that with which we began,
we’d found ourselves pulling back from one another. Too many unasked questions between us, maybe; too many wartime raids and too little faith in the cease-fire. Sometimes sitting beside Clare I felt as though unsaid things were growing like vines all around us, filling the room.

  Of course, I felt that way with most of the people close to me.

  And I was surprised, returning home from the Foucher shelter and my cemetery stroll, to find a message from her on my machine.

  It’s Clare, Lew. The spaces between her words were chinked with the tape’s quiet hissing, anonymous background sounds. Yeah, me. I’m sorry to bother you. I know about LaVerne, and I’m so sorry. If there’s anything I can do, just let me know. But I have a friend who’s got a problem, and I thought you might be able to help. A pause. Could you call me when you get a chance? Please?

  She answered, breathing hard, after six or seven rings.

  “Lew. Thanks for calling back. Give me a minute, okay? I was doing my rehab stuff.”

  Threaded on the phone’s fine silver nerve, we hung there. I listened as her breathing slowed.

  “Okay, thanks. I know this is a bad time.”

  “Something about a friend, you said.”

  “Sheryl Silva. She works in dietary at the school and usually takes her break when I do, right before lunchtime. For her it’s a little island of peace between preparation and storm. And after three straight periods, the last one my honors group, I’m pretty desperate. I try to stay away from the teachers’ lounge, which is mostly bitching and conversations about children or new refrigerators, neither of which I have or expect to. So there’d just be the two of us there in the lunchroom, and after a while we fell into the habit of sitting together. Though a lot of the time we wouldn’t say much of anything. Just sit there sipping iced tea, smiling vaguely at one another and looking out a window. Then last week she asks me if I’m ‘married or anything.’ I mean, we know absolutely nothing about one another. And when I tell her no, she asks me if I ever had a man beat me, or try to hurt me. Says she has, when I tell her no, but she thought that was all over.”