Moth

by James Sallis

  I nodded. It was home, after all, whatever else it was.

  “She would like to find a job, to live independently while participating in an outpatient program.”

  “Sounds good to me.”

  “She was wondering if you might be willing to give her a place to live while she did this. She would like to come back to New Orleans with you, Mr. Griffin.”

  I looked at Alouette. She nodded. “Yes, Lewis. That’s what I want. If it’s all right with you. I know it’s a lot to ask.”

  “You can think about it, Mr. Griffin. You don’t have to decide right away. This must come as something of a surprise.”

  “I’m not much of a role model,” I said, “but that house has always been too big for me alone. It would be good to have someone else living there again.”

  Alouette looked down at the floor a moment, then up at me, smiling. With her mother’s eyes.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  AD HOMINEM TIME.

  The following Thursday at nine in the morning, I arrived at the hospital to take Alouette home, stepped off the elevator and found her in conversation with a stately, lean man in blazer, knit shirt and charcoal slacks who, following her eyes, turned and immediately walked toward me. Italian shoes of soft cordovan.

  “You must be Griffin,” he said, holding out a hand. His shake was firm, relaxed, momentary.

  “Lewis, this is my father.”

  I nodded.

  “When I refused to see his lawyers, he canceled everything and flew up himself. He wants to set me up in my own apartment, even has a job arranged for me—no questions, no obligations.”

  “A generous offer. Not many free lunches left these days.”

  “I’m sure you’d do the same in my place, Griffin. Do you have children yourself?”

  I suspected he knew the answer to that, along with my financial status, personal history and (not inconceivably) the contents of my trash.

  And I supposed the answer to his question must be no, so I said that.

  Alouette spoke to me over his shoulder: “I told him thanks, but I was going home with you.”

  “Which I’m certain you must realize is just not … possible,” Guidry added, smiling. Between men.

  I smiled back.

  White teeth gleaming.

  Maybe I should break into a chorus of O massuh, how my heart grow weary.

  “I see. Then I have to assume you’re no more willing to listen to reason than she is.”

  “It’s her decision, Guidry. Not yours, not mine.”

  “She’s a child. A confused child.”

  “Laws say that she’s an adult, and protect her rights the same way they protect yours or mine.”

  “One has to wonder what you expect to get out of this.”

  “Wonder away.”

  Instinctively, he had squared off with me. Now he backed away a half step. “I know about you, Griffin. You’re a weak man. Always have been. One hard push, your knees’ll give.”

  “Push away. Find out.”

  “A drinker. And inherently a violent man—a killer, some say. That’s no environment for a troubled young woman who needs desperately to work out her own problems.”

  He turned back to Alouette without moving closer.

  “I sincerely hope you’ll take time to think this whole thing over, come to your senses. See what needs to be done here. I’ve always taken care of your needs. I always will.”

  “Needs change,” she said with a glance toward me. “Maybe you can’t take care of my needs anymore, Daddy.”

  “And this man can.”

  “I don’t know. Maybe only I can. Or maybe I can’t. That’s part of what I have to find out.”

  “I’m telling you here and now that this will not happen. I simply can’t allow it.”

  “I’ve talked to the social workers and hospital lawyers, Daddy. Short of alleging burglary and having me thrown into jail, there doesn’t seem to be much you can do about it.”

  “We’ll see about that.”

  “Do what you think you have to. That’s all I’m doing.”

  “I’ll see you both again then—very soon.”

  He walked to the elevator and stood with his finger on the down button.

  “Daddy.”

  “Yes?”

  “There’s something I never asked. You always made me feel I couldn’t ask it, but I don’t feel that way any longer.”

  He held out an arm to keep the elevator doors from closing. They bucked convulsively. “What is it?”

  “Why did you think you had any right to keep me away from my mother?”

  He stood looking at her, a squall of emotions ticking at his face in the moment before calm restored itself, then turned and stepped into the elevator.

  We spent the next hour extricating Alouette from the hospital’s coils. A formal discharge visit from her attending physician; a trip down to the administrative offices where our walleyed champion had prepared the way and we were in and out in minutes, Alouette signing papers to pay off her bill in low biweekly installments; a ride back up to retrieve the clothes I’d bought her and say good-bye to staff and patients.

  Then we were walking out into another bright, clear day. Were in the Mazda curving along Riverside Drive. I asked if she wanted to stop for something to eat since there wouldn’t be much chance for a while after this, and she said no. She found music on the radio, cranked both that and the seat down low, leaned back and fell promptly asleep. Tunica, Mound Bayou, Cleveland and Greenville rolled over her closed eyes. Hollandale, Redwood. But mostly the same furrowed fields, the same narrow straight roads and blanketing dust, huge spindly irrigation systems linked together like Tinkertoys, little more than hoop wheels and perforated pipe.

  Erratic traffic as we approached Vicksburg brought her awake in late afternoon. She opened one eye to peek out the windshield, turned it on me and said hoarsely: “Food?”

  Which we partook at a truck stop just off the highway, in accordance with her express desire (when I asked more specifically what she might want) for “food, just food, in large quantities, with lots of grease.”

  Neither wish was disappointed.

  Nor did we fail to attract looks, just looks, also in large quantities, also (for lack of more appropriate synonym) greasy.

  It was a place of basics: stand after stand of fuel pumps out front, Spartan restaurant area, cashier’s counter with boxes of cheap cigars, pocket knives and belt buckles under its glass top and a rack of T-shirts with clever slogans alongside, bunkerlike bathrooms with rentable showers for truckers.

  Clouds had been gathering for some time, bumping up against one another, and as we sat over burned-smelling coffee with oils afloat on its surface, several of them coalesced into one, like a dark fist closing, and rain began pounding at the windows and blacktop outside.

  I’d spent those hours on the road thinking of many things.

  That, for instance, I’d never got around to calling the university after all.

  Or got back to Chip Landrieu.

  Or talked to Clare.

  Composing in my mind, between Tunica and Shelby, the second chapter of what was to become Mole.

  And thinking how, during travel, the mind instinctively shifts mode. Eyes fix on something far off, something unattainable, as you go on about mechanics appearing to have little to do with end or destination: steering, stopping for gas, working pedals; and time itself, unfolding into a plane, a kind of veldt, a portable horizon, all but disappears.

  That was also as good a description as any of the life Alouette, and in reflection I myself, would have to live over the coming months.

  Perhaps after all, for all our talk of change, redemption or personal growth, for all our dependence on therapists, religious faith or mood-altering drugs both legal and non, we’re doomed simply to go on repeating the same patterns over and over in our lives, dressing them up in different clothes like children at play so we can pretend we don’t recognize them when
we look into mirrors.

  After lunch, as we drove on through Vicksburg and veils of rain toward Natchez, Alouette began talking about the hospital. Though barely conscious at the time, she remembered the intubation, fighting against it, to her mind then a worse violation than anything sexual, worse than anything possible.

  “But then, suddenly, I broke free. Really free. I was floating, drifting, nothing could touch me, nothing could hold me down. I remember thinking: How wonderful this is, I don’t even have to breathe now.”

  Later, pain made its way in, though a pain she could at first easily ignore: therapists drawing blood from her radial artery for ABG’s, as she later learned.

  “For a long time I was floating just under the surface of things. I could decide whether to come to the top or stay where I was, or at least it felt like I had that choice—though I always stayed right there.”

  But then after a time, half an eternity, the time it took to rebuild the world, light flooded in. “Light everywhere, so much light that it hurt. God, how it hurt!”

  She settled back in her seat and closed her eyes, staring, I suppose, into the face of her own pain and the world’s, as I drove on.

  We reached New Orleans a little before nine that night.

  Chapter Thirty

  ACROSS THE STREET NEW APARTMENTS were going up. Broussard General Contractors had torn down the 140-year-old Greek Revival manse with its rotting gingerbread, burst columns and disintegrating friezes, left wing for years drooping at an ever steeper angle. Doorways, newels, mantels and windowwork had been stacked in trucks and carted off for resale. Only a few stanchions still stood totemlike near the lot’s borders, exposing a once-enclosed central courtyard, the bare heart around which new luxury apartments would be constructed. On the balconies of these apartments in four months, or six, young men and women would stand squinting into the sun, memories watching silently over their shoulders.

  We sat outside at steel tables painted yellow and green, under a sky whose sagging bellies of clouds reminded me of the upholstered walls and draped ceilings of old Russia. Every few moments wind puffed its cheeks and Clare put a hand on her napkin to hold it in place.

  “I’m sorry, Lew,” she said suddenly.

  I’d been telling her about Alouette’s baby. “It’s for the best.”

  She shook her head. A gesture I’d seen often before, when the wrong words came, or when words wouldn’t come at all. “I don’t mean that.”

  I looked back at the clouds, lower now. Something was blowing in across the lake, groping for new ground here.

  “I don’t know how to say this. I don’t even know what it is I want to say. And I was never good at speeches—even before.”

  A sketchy wave touched at the length of her body, hinted at the difficult thing her world had become.

  “But I won’t ever understand it, won’t even begin to understand it, if I don’t.”

  She moved her fork in a gentle sweep through pasta. There was a fleur-de-lis on the plate, and she had pushed sautéed bits of green pepper into one leaflet of the trefoil, red into another.

  “I never wanted anything to work out more than I wanted this, Lew. Not that I ever really thought it would.”

  I reached across the table and put my hand over hers.

  “Somehow as women we learn to say that all the time: ‘I’m sorry.’ As though it’s our all-purpose social formula, good for any occasion, one size fits all. And a lot of time we’re not sorry at all; we don’t mean to apologize, only to say ‘I understand’ or ‘too bad.’ But right now, that’s exactly what I mean.”

  She looked at me, smiled.

  “Where do messages like that come from? How can we learn to read them so well without even recognizing that they exist?”

  I remembered a poem I’d seen recently in a magazine at Beaucoup Books: We must learn to put our distress signals in code.

  “That’s what socialization is, Clare. Most of the messages—maybe all the most important ones—are silent.”

  “I guess.”

  She took a mouthful of pasta, chewed slowly, sipped at her wine. Pacing herself, making herself hold back. Like a runner, or like a hard drinker taking the first one slow, half convincing himself for the few minutes it lasts that this is only recreational drinking.

  “I think I love him, Lew. I think he loves me. And I have to do everything I can to give this a chance. Maybe later on we’ll be able to see one another again, if you want to. But for now … It bothers him, Lew. He doesn’t say anything about it, but I can tell. It hurts him, in some very quiet way he probably doesn’t even know or understand himself. But I see it. And I can’t do that any longer.”

  Clenched about her regret and misgivings, her hand had become a small fist beneath mine.

  “It’s okay, Clare.”

  “No, it’s not okay, Lew, not at all. But it’s how it has to be. Do you think we could go now?”

  On the way to her car, wind swirling torn paper wrappers and magnolia leaves around our ankles in tides, I asked how Bat was.

  “Gone. I got home last Tuesday and he wasn’t there on top of the refrigerator where he always was. Or anywhere else. I still don’t know how he got out. Or why, for that matter, since he never seemed to have much interest at all in going out. I waited, thinking he’d show up again. Last night I finally admitted he wasn’t coming back and put his things away in the pantry, his bowl and all.”

  She unlocked the door and I reached around to open it for her. I told her I was sorry about Bat.

  “Life goes on,” she said. We kissed and said goodbye. “I’ll call, Lew. When I can.”

  I watched her drive away, holding my hand up in a wave as she took the corner onto Joseph. I walked back, crossed the street and stood for a while in the empty courtyard, looking across at the restaurant with its yellow and green tables and chairs, its laughing, chattering people. I imagined the new apartments going up around me in stop-time, slowly shutting out that world, marooning me here in this ancient, sequestered place.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  WHEN I GOT BACK TO THE HOUSE ALOUETTE was on the phone, as she’d been on the phone pretty much nonstop since the morning before. Thus far she had set up two job interviews, attended another, arranged for information to be mailed concerning GED testing and night classes at Delgado, Xavier and UNO, and spoken with an MHMR counselor about vocational programs. Now she was talking to Richard Garces about outpatient therapy and local support groups.

  Not long after I came in, she hung up, scribbled one final note and shut the notebook.

  “How’d it go?”

  I shrugged.

  “That bad, huh?”

  “Maybe a little worse.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  So of course I had to laugh, then explain why.

  “Did you know Richard was a hippie? And a junkie? A long time ago, of course.”

  “It doesn’t surprise me.”

  “Were you a hippie, Lewis? You know, wearing vests without shirts and bell-bottoms and flowers in your hair? Back in the sixties, I mean.”

  “What I was in the sixties, mostly, was drunk—at least from about ‘68 on. I didn’t pay a lot of attention to social movements. Or to other people, for that matter.”

  “You were a bodyguard then, right?”

  I looked up, surprised. Not many people knew about that. Verne had, naturally. And Walsh, because that was how we’d first met.

  “I haven’t said anything before, but I know quite a bit about you, Lewis. More than you think.”

  I poured tea into my cup, added milk.

  “When I was in grade school I had this friend, your classic nerd type, glasses and ugly print shirts, the whole thing, but he was a computer whiz. What everybody calls a hacker now. He was really weird. Look, this is kind of a long story.”

  “I’ll drink slowly.”

  “And probably a dull one.”

  “About me? Impossible.”

  “Yeah, right. Well a
nyway, Cornell’s dad was an engineer with IBM or Apple or someone, and he always had these new computers around the house, products they were developing, or marketing. Cornell told me he grew up with these things as playmates instead of other kids. He thought everybody did. And he could do anything he wanted with them.

  “I was twelve or thirteen. And I just decided one day that my father couldn’t really be my father. Mother was gone, I was hopelessly miserable. I couldn’t talk to him, or to anyone else in the house, and I knew there was just no way I belonged there.”

  “Most children go through that at some point.”

  “I know that, now. I think I kind of knew it even then. I was never lucky enough to be stupid.”

  “But you had to set yourself apart.”

  She nodded. “And I knew a little about you, just from things I’d heard. So I decided you had to be my father. It made a lot of sense at the time; it was the only thing that did. This was about when Cornell and I started being friends. Neither of us had ever had friends before, and I can’t remember now how it happened, but somehow he started coming over after school, spending recess and lunch hour with me. One afternoon we sneaked into this office my father had at home, though I wasn’t ever supposed to be in there, and Cornell showed me how to use the computer. If you knew how, you could dial into all kinds of information banks, he told me; you could find out almost anything you wanted to know.

  “I thought about that for days. Then the next Saturday when Cornell came over—my father was at work, as usual—I told him about you. What little I knew, and a lot more I made up. And Monday he brought me this folder full of stuff. Copies of official forms, printouts of what I guess had been newspaper articles, parts of some kind of dossier the FBI had on you. That one said you killed a man.”

  I nodded.

  “A sniper, according to the dossier. It said he’d killed at least eight people.”

  “At least.”

  “You stopped working as a bodyguard after that.”

  “I stopped doing much of anything. Just kind of drifted into it. Drank a lot. It was a bad time.”

  “Every night I’d get out that folder and read it. It was like making constellations out of stars: just raw information, that you could fill out any way you wanted. So every night I’d look at some facts, facts I knew by heart by then, and use them to make up stories about you. Those stories became more real to me than the world around me, more real than anything else, and for a time, far more important. Though all along I knew it wasn’t true. I knew you weren’t my father.”