Moth

by James Sallis

  “Sorry about the kid. I know how that feels, and that nothing I can say’s going to help. You know who this is, right?”

  I nodded, then came a little more awake and said, “Camaro.” The world was swimming into focus, albeit soft.

  “You okay, man?”

  “Fine. Just haven’t managed much sleep this last couple of days.”

  “Know how that is, too. I can call back.”

  “No reason to. What’s up?”

  “Well …” It rolled on out for half a minute or so. “Probably shouldn’t be calling you at all. Last time I did, from what I hear, you went apeshit and ralphed those boys right into the hospital. You ever hear of asking a guy first?”

  “I asked.”

  “Oh yeah? Remember to say please?”

  “I’m sure I did. Rarely forget that. I may have left off the thank you, though, now that I think about it.”

  “Ever had your jaw wired, Griffin?”

  “Came close a few times.”

  “I bet you did. Probably chew the wires up and spit them at people. Well, what the fuck, those boys are pretty much garbage anyway. You don’t take them out to the curb, someone else will.”

  “So: you called up to give me a few hot tips on navigating the complex social waters of postcolonial Mississippi. Or just to chat, for old times’ sake? Not that we share any old times.”

  “We all know you’re bad by now, Griffin.”

  “Yeah, well, I need sleep more than I need bullshit right now.”

  “You also need help finding your girl. Though damn if I know why anyone’d want to help you.”

  “It’s my honest face. My purity of heart. My high position in antebellum society. And the twenties I spread around. What do you have?”

  “Thought you always remembered to say please.”

  “Please.”

  “There’s a girl, Louette, that’s been kind of living at this dealer’s house just over the state line. I mean, they finally took a look around and realized she’s been there at least a month. Helping out at first you know, doing the guys when they were able or whatever, but since then just hunkering down there, riding a big free one. Even they know that’s not good business.”

  “Thank you.”

  I wrote down the address he gave me.

  “One thing,” he said.

  “Yeah?”

  “Try to keep from going nuclear on this one? You’re not in the big city now. We try to keep a lower profile out here, not draw too much attention to ourselves.”

  I told him I’d do what I could. Neither of us believed it.

  The house was up in West Memphis, on the outskirts, in a part of town owing its existence to the spillover from Memphis military bases during World War II, a warren of apartment-size simple wood homes set close in row after row like carrots in a garden. Narrow, bobtail driveways had eroded through the years, cowlicks of grass and hedge pushing through them; many of the carports had become extra rooms, utility sheds, screened-in porches; trailers were grafted onto some. Abandoned refrigerators, motorcycles and decaying cars sat in yards beside swing sets and inflatable pools.

  I pulled to the curb at 3216 Zachary Taylor. Out my side window in the distance I could see the wing-like curve of the Arkansas-Mississippi Bridge. I’d had to drive on into Memphis, drop onto Riverfront Drive, and loop back across the bridge into Arkansas. I started up the brief walk, hearing what sounded like reggae country music from inside. Marley in Nashville, maybe. Jimmy Cliff and His Country Shitkickers.

  Remembering Camaro’s admonitions, I knocked politely at the door. No one responded, so I knocked, politely, again. Then, with still no response, as politely as possible I started kicking.

  The door opened and a man maybe half my age stood there. Brush-style blond hair, fatigue pants with a white Hanes T, lizard cowboy boots. Pumper muscles and an earring. Tumbler in hand. Tequila, from the smell of it.

  “What is your problem?”

  Behind him, from different rooms, both Randy Travis and reggae were playing at high volume, crashing onto one another’s beach, from time to time blending in an oddly beautiful way.

  “Oh. Sorry. Didn’t think you’d heard me.”

  “We heard you. They heard you over in Little Rock, man.”

  “Good. It’s so hard to be heard in this world. Thank you.”

  “Mama brought you up right, did she? Manners like that, I’d think you couldn’t be anything but one of those biblebeaters that come through here every week or so. They’re always wearing a coat and tie, too. Don’t nobody else ‘round here.”

  He took a sip of his drink.

  “But of course you ain’t no biblebeater, are you?”

  “No sir, I have to tell you I’m not. But I do wonder if you might do me the favor of answering a question or two. I won’t trouble you to take much of your time.”

  “And why would I answer any questions you’d have? Unless you have a warrant, that is.”

  “Warrant?”

  “Come on, you got cop on you like slime on a snail.”

  Another, shorter man with a close-cut helmet of hair, vaguely elfish, had joined him at the door. Squinting beneath monumental eyebrows he said, “Yeah, man, this the new South. Nigger cops ever’where.”

  “You go on back inside now, Bobo. We’re doing just fine out here.”

  “So that’s the way it is here in America. What made us great,” he said to me. “You come back with a warrant, or the next time it’s clear trespass. You hear what I’m saying?”

  Uh-oh. This guy watched cop shows; I was in trouble.

  He shut the door.

  When it stopped against my foot, he glanced down.

  Then he looked back up at me and, for a split second before he caught himself, over my shoulder.

  It was enough.

  I went down, rolling, as the guy behind me swung and, meeting no resistance, connected with Mr. Warrant midchest, a glancing blow, then toppled himself.

  I pivoted back like a break dancer and slammed my feet into Warrant’s kidneys. His glass bounced off the front wall and rebounded, spinning, into the small entryway, came up against vinyl coping and stopped there, rocking back and forth. I hooked fingers into his neck now that he was down. Put a heel hard against the other one’s balls and felt him curl in on himself.

  “Your call,” I told him. “Funny how so much of life comes down to attitude, huh?”

  “Hold on, man,” he said. “We can talk about this.” And the minute I started backing off his windpipe and carotid: “Bobby Ray!”

  Who trotted in from a room to the right where the face of some talk-show host filled a TV screen like an egg in a bottle, nailing live audience and viewers with sincere clear eyes.

  Bobby Ray had a sincere Walther PPK in one hand.

  I had a coat rack.

  It caught him full across neck and chest. Remember Martin Balsam pedaling backward down the stairs in Psycho?

  His head came up off the floor like a turtle’s, trying for air. Didn’t get it. The head went back down. He was still.

  I set the coat rack back down in the corner. A few well-anchored coats swung to a stop on its hooks; most were on the floor.

  “You have a right not to move,” I told Mr. Warrant. “You get up and I use you to clean furniture. You hear what I’m saying?”

  He nodded.

  I picked up the PPK and walked into the next room. Faces turned toward me. Petals on a wet black bough. A modest buffet of drugs was set out on a card table: joints, bowls of colored pills, a couple of small covered plastic containers, a marble cheese board with razor and some remains of white powder on it.

  Feeding time at the zoo.

  “Our savior.”

  “Ecce homo. And I do mean mo’.”

  “Show-and-tell time, obviously.”

  “Black’s definitely beautiful.”

  “Validate your parking ticket, sir?”

  “Pizza dude’s here.”

  “Help.” />
  Alouette said nothing.

  I found her in the back bedroom, lying on two stacked mattresses, nude, between a skinny black man and a fat 44-D blonde. They were passing a fifth of Southern Comfort back and forth over her. The Green Acres theme erupted from a bedside TV.

  I dug into the hollow of her neck. There was a pulse, albeit a weak one.

  “Where’s the phone?”

  He looked at me and, without looking away, handed the bottle across to the blonde. She grappled and found it, hauled it in, breast swinging.

  In one continuous move I took it from her and smashed it against the headboard. Held a most satisfying handle and bladelike shard of glass against the man’s throat as I watched his hard-on dwindle to nothing, with the impossibly sweet reek of oranges washing over us.

  “Now,” I said.

  His eyes swept toward the floor. Again, again. I reached under the bed and pulled out the phone. Dialed 911.

  “Thirty-two sixteen Zachary Taylor,” I said. Overdose, I was going to say, but heard instead: “Officer down.” There’d be hell to pay. But the ambulance was there in four minutes.

  While we were waiting, new muscle came into the room. Three of them.

  “That’s the guy did Lonnie,” one of them said. “Busted his jaw.”

  “Son of a bitch.”

  “Oyster time.”

  I lifted the PPK.

  We were still facing one another off when the ambulance and four police cars careened into place.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  TIME TO REMEMBER LOTS OF PRISON FILMS. Lisping Tony Curtis chained to a black stud, spoon handles ground down to knives against cement floors, lights dimming all over town as Big Lou got fried moments before the stay of execution came, college students on summer vacation in the South pulled over by big-bellied cops and railroaded onto chain gangs. And the novels: Malcolm Braly’s On the Yard, Chester Himes’s Cast the First Stone.

  On the way in, in the squad car, one of the cops asked me what the hell I thought I was doing.

  A good question.

  A very good question for this fifty-year-old, unsmiling, resolutely unpublic man.

  What was I doing?

  Besides sitting in a holding cell in West Memphis, Arkansas, that is—home at last, or close enough.

  Besides not telling mostly indifferent juniors, seniors and a scatter of grad students about modern French novels—which is what I was supposed to be doing.

  The thought occurred to me that I’d disappeared from my school as precipitately and incommunicably as, a few years ago, my son David had vanished from his.

  I really was getting far too old for this.

  And besides, basically the whole thing just wasn’t any of my business.

  And so I sat there, watching dawn lightly brush, then nudge, then fill a single high window, drinking cup after cup of coffee deputies brought me and declining their offer of cigarettes, my mind curving gently inward, backward, toward things long shut away.

  David: his final postcard and consummate disappearance, those moments of silence on the phone machine’s tape.

  Vicky: red hair drifting in a cloud above me, pale white body opening beneath me, trilled r’s, unvoiced assents, I can’t do this any longer Lew. Seeing her off and for the last time at the airport as she emplaned for Paris.

  LaVerne.

  Till the drifting mind fetched up, finally, on a shore of sorts.

  I thought of two photos of my parents, the only things I’d kept when Francy and I went through the house after Mom died. After these, taken the year they were married, they became shy; only a handful of snapshots remain, and in them, in every case, my parents are turned, or turning, away from the camera: looking off, averting faces, moving toward the borders of the frame. But here my mother, then in a kind of mirror image my father, sit on the hood of a Hudson Terraplane, so that, were the photos placed side by side, they would be looking into one another’s eyes. And that image—their occupancy of discrete worlds, the connection relying upon careful placement, upon circumstance—seems wholly appropriate in light of their subsequent life together, Chekhov’s precisely wrong and telling detail.

  All their silent, ceaseless warfare came later, of course. Here in these photos, momentarily, the world has softened. She is full of life, a plainly pretty woman for whom life is just now beginning. His mixed heritage shows in cheekbones and straight, jet-black hair; his skin is light, like Charlie Patton’s. They are a handsome, a fine, young couple.

  As I myself grew older, into my early teens, I began to notice that my father was slowly going out of focus, blurring at the edges, color washing out to the dun grayish-green of early Polaroids. I can’t be sure this is how I saw it at the time; time’s whispers are suspect, memory forever as much poet as reporter, and perhaps this is only the way that, retrospectively, imaginatively, I make sense for now (though a limited sense, true) of what then bewildered me.

  My mother by then had already begun her own decline, her own transformation, hardening into a bitter rind of a woman who pushed through the stations of her day as though each moment were unpleasant duty; as though the currencies of joy had become so inflated they could no longer purchase anything of worth.

  How had those two young people on the Terraplane ever become the sad, embattled, barricaded couple I grew up with? What terrible, quiet things had happened to them?

  How do any of us become what we are, really: so distant a thing from what we set out to be, and seemed?

  How, for instance, does a part-time college instructor, part-time novelist who believed he’d put his past behind him where it rightfully belonged (and what he couldn’t put behind him, into his books), come to be sitting in an interrogation room across from a quartet of cops at nine in the morning in West Memphis, Arkansas?

  Which is where I was but minutes later.

  The guy who seemed to be in charge had oiled-down hair, a bushy mustache and rolled-up sleeves. I felt a moment’s terror that a barbershop quartet had been sent in to interrogate me. Any moment they were going to start singing “The Whiffenpoof Song,” and I’d tell them everything I knew. Hell, I’d tell them things I didn’t know. As a writer, I was good at that.

  “Can we get you anything, Mr. Griffin, before we start?”

  Had to be the baritone. He and a wiry little guy, probably the tenor, sat at the table. The others sat against the wall behind them on folding chairs. The table between us had nothing on it. Table, floor and walls were spotless, scrubbed. The air smelled faintly of disinfectant and lemon.

  “No, but thanks.”

  “Then could you explain to us why on the emergency line you represented yourself as a police officer?”

  I tried to think of a snappy response. Marlowe certainly would have had one.

  “Strictly speaking, I didn’t,” was the best I could do.

  “ ‘Officer down,’ I believe you said.”

  That kind of set the pace for the whole thing. They’d ask a question and I’d answer it, they’d ask another and circle back to an earlier one. It was a lot like the chants kids use when they’re jumping rope. Or gamelan music.

  “I needed help fast. The girl was in bad shape.”

  We were all very polite, very businesslike. There were things, practical things, to get done, and we were men of the world. Members of the quartet changed from time to time. Toward the end, two hours or more into the morning, Sergeant Travis of Clarksville’s finest came in and sat against the back wall.

  “You went there for a drug buy and the deal went bad,” one of them was saying just then. “We know that, Griffin.”

  I looked across at Travis. He shook his head sadly, looked at the floor.

  This went on a while, as it had been going on, and eventually Travis stood, nodded to me, and left. I had become a tape loop.

  Ten minutes later he walked back in behind a guy in a suit and said, “Come on, Griffin, let’s go.”

  I followed him out into a long bare hallway,
voices raised and clashing behind us.

  “Last I heard, extradition didn’t work like this.”

  “All in who and what you know,” Travis said. “Those boys are kind of pissed, right now. They’ve been planning a raid on that house for three weeks. It was finally set to go down tonight. And here you went and spoiled their party. Luckily, Douglas and I went to high school together. Guy in the suit? He’s the chief here. Caught a hundred long passes from that man if I caught one. You play?”

  “Hate football.” Didn’t dance, either.

  “Look like you could have, easy.”

  We were standing outside the station now. I felt strangely weightless. Travis stopped and turned toward me.

  “They’re not charging you with anything. But god-almighty are they pissed.”

  “Give me a lift?”

  “Be glad to, but you don’t need one.”

  He smiled. Handed me an envelope: wallet, pocket contents, keys.

  “Your car’s in the lot around back. I had a trustee go out there and bring it in.”

  “I don’t suppose you want to tell me how it was that you happened to show up here?”

  “Not really. But in my experience, there’s very little in life that just happens. Know what I mean?”

  “No. And I don’t guess I’m going to.”

  “Doesn’t matter. You’ll be coming back down to Clarksville?”

  “I don’t know. Not right away, at any rate. There may be no reason to. First I have to find out about Alouette.”

  We’d walked around to the back. I opened the car door and reached to shake his hand.

  “Thanks. I appreciate what you’ve done.” Whatever the reasons.

  “The girl’s over at Baptist Hospital, tenth floor. Across the bridge, find Union Avenue and you’re almost there. She’s going to be okay, Griffin. For now, anyway.”

  I got in and started the engine.

  “Thanks again, Sergeant.”

  “Nothing to it.”

  “Tell Camaro thanks for me, too, when you see him?”

  “I’ll do that. If I see him, you understand.”

  It’s still a hell of a river, even if it did seem bigger when I was a kid: not only endless, but also impossibly wide. It was full of boats then, with sandbars the size of islands; and ferries nosed back and forth across the wake of the big ships, cars crouched on their decks, people peering out from within, waiting for things to change.