Moth

by James Sallis

  We sat around the table long after dinner and the second pot of coffee were finished. I’d put music on low, a Yazoo anthology of early jazz guitar including the Eddie Lang-Lonnie Johnson duets (for which Lang had used an assumed name, since black and white musicians didn’t record together in those days), and a recent CD by New Orleans banjoist Danny Barker.

  Walsh bailed out, bleary-eyed, about eleven, Garces within the hour. In each case I threw my arms across the door and explained that they had to take cassoulet with them or would not be allowed to leave. As usual, the cassoulet had gone upscale from a small skillet to the kitchen’s largest ovenworthy vessel.

  Alouette and I for a while made motions toward cleaning up, mostly just picking things up in one place and putting them down somewhere else. Finally we abandoned pretense and sat at the kitchen table to finish off the iced tea. Out in the front room Danny Barker was making his third or fourth trip of the night down to St. James Infirmary.

  I started telling her about David, how I hadn’t been around when he was growing up, how we’d at last got to know one another a little, not really as father and son (though I guessed those feelings were there) but more as two adults living in very different worlds.

  “He’d gone to Europe for the summer, and sent a postcard or two. Bored gargoyles on one of them, I remember. But we had this pattern—nothing at all for months, then one of us would write a ten-page letter—so I didn’t think anything of it. But then his mother called to say she hadn’t heard from him either and couldn’t seem to get in touch with him.”

  Alouette listened silently.

  “I started trying to find him, figuring there’d be nothing to it. He was in Paris. Apparently he boarded a flight to return to the States, and a cabdriver thought he remembered picking him up at Kennedy and letting him off near Port Authority. But then it was as if he’d dropped off the edge of the earth. There was no trace of him, whatever I did.

  “Once about this time, someone called me and said nothing but stayed on the line until the answering machine automatically broke the connection. And somehow, for no good reason, with no idea why he might call like that, or why he wouldn’t speak, I knew it was David.”

  I didn’t tell her that, like one of Beckett’s mad fabulists, I still had the tape with that silence on it.

  Alouette waited, and when she was certain I was through, said: “You never found him, or found out what happened?”

  “Nothing.”

  She reached across the table and laid her hand loosely on mine. “I’m sorry, Lewis. It must hurt terribly.”

  “It should. But what it really feels like, is that the hole in me, the one that’s always been there, just got bigger. And now I know it won’t ever be filled.”

  I removed my hand to pat hers briefly and retrieve my tea. “Well. That last beer seems to have carried me right past philosophical and poetic drunk straight to maudlin.”

  “In vino veritas.”

  “I never found any. And God knows I spent enough years looking. Right now—I’ve been giving this some thought—I’ve decided that I may have just enough energy left to crawl up the stairs to my room.”

  We walked up together, and at the head Alouette turned back.

  “Why did you tell me about David, Lewis?”

  Because it’s the deepest, most guarded thing in me that I have to give you, I thought.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  I SPENT MOST OF THE NEXT DAY CHASING snipe. No one in any bar in New Orleans had ever seen anyone remotely resembling Treadwell’s son. Most of them couldn’t even be bothered to look at the snapshot. He had not registered at any of the employment services, applied for a driver’s license or library card (how’s that for desperation?), rented storage space or a postal box from one of the private facilities. No parking tickets had been issued to any vehicle registered in his name. Local credit and collection agencies had received no inquiries.

  At four that afternoon I was sitting in a coffeehouse on Magazine, Rue de la Course, gulping my second large café au lait from a glass and watching downtown workers bolt for an early start out of the CBD. Nineteenth-century testimonials to the social position and restorative powers of coffeehouses, hand-lettered, hung on the wall at eye level, at least a dozen of them, most with cheap frames askew. It had been some time since anyone took note of them.

  Because I could think of nothing else to do, yet remained more or less in function mode, I called Tito, and was surprised when he picked up.

  “Hey,” he said. “I was gonna call you and couldn’t find that card you gave me. It’s here somewhere. Cause I heard from the guy you were asking about. Told me he got picked up in the Quarter a few nights ago and he’s been in jail all this time, so I guess it wasn’t him that tried to rip me off after all. You still got a message for him, I wanted you to know he says he’s getting out in the morning.”

  “You be there a while?”

  “What for?”

  “Thought I might bring by some solid appreciation.”

  “Hey. It’s a favor, man. Like I say, I heard about you. And besides, it’s the second week of the month. Got to go see my parole officer. Cute little thing. Always got a bow in her hair, different one each time. Great ass, for a white girl.”

  “Has a lot of good advice for you, I bet.”

  “Deep conversations. She know what it like here, no doubt about it.”

  “Tito: thanks, man.”

  “Just don’t forget, Lew Griffin. Next time, maybe I’m the one needs a favor, who knows. Happens.”

  “It does indeed.”

  I walked to Prytania, got a cab and gave the driver my home address. Halfway there, I told him to swing over to St. Charles and drop me at Louisiana instead.

  I was working on pure intuition—maybe the closest thing to principle I had. Connections were being made, switches getting thrown, at some level not accessible to me. I only had to go with it, ride it.

  I went up those stairs and into the kitchen as though it were my own. Heard the rasp and scuttle of someone else in the next room.

  I stepped in and saw Treadwell’s kid bent over the mattress in the niche. Late sunlight threw a perfect print of miniblinds against one wall.

  “Find what you’re looking for?”

  How often does it happen, after all?

  He straightened. “Who the fuck are you?” He came up and around and had a gun in hand. The .38 from under the chair cushion. I saw his eyes and knew what was going to happen.

  The choice was clear: stand still and get shot straight on, or move and possibly, just possibly, minimize damage.

  So instinctively I dove to the left. It felt as though someone had slammed the heel of his hand, hard, against my right shoulder. I was watching his face, then suddenly the back wall. Couldn’t feel my right side at all. Then I was out for a while.

  I came to on the stretcher. Saw my father’s face upside down as they hoisted me into an ambulance. Lots of other faces watching.

  “I’ve been wanting to talk to you,” I told him.

  “You’re gonna be okay,” he said. “It’s not bad. Take some deep breaths.”

  “I miss you, Dad.”

  “We’ve stopped the bleeding. Try to be still. There’s a needle in your hand, for fluids, just a precaution.”

  “You both were sitting on the car. You looked so young, so happy. What happened?”

  “You’ve been shot, Mr. Griffin. You’re going to be okay.”

  I caromed down a hall and into a room with bright lights overhead. An authoritative voice: the resident. Deferential ones: staff nurses. And one other.

  “Mr. Griffin. Lewis. I know you can hear me. You’re going to be all right. Listen to me.”

  A British accent. Wouldn’t you know.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  IT WAS GOOD THEATER, AS THEY SAY, meaning that the playwright’s contrived a way to get all his themes and characters and the underwear of his plot wi
th its bad elastic crowded onstage at play’s end for the big finale.

  The old man lies on his sickbed and people file in and out, dragging behind them like bags of wool the very stuff of his life: his forfeitures and silences, his assumptions, his regrets.

  So, propped up on pillows in my float of a bed with arm and shoulder taped firmly in place, for several days I held court, an improbable Rex, as faces streamed by: Walsh, Chip Landrieu, Richard Garces, Tito, Alouette.

  Once, early on, I dreamed that Treadwell’s son was there. Standing against a blue plaster wall, otherwise surrounded by sky, he held a gun loosely in hand. A flag had come out of the gun’s barrel and unfurled; it read Bang. He said: You will not find me, get this sad certainty firmly in your head. Quoting Cocteau.

  Another time LaVerne was there, eyes brimming with the world’s pain and all the things left unsaid between us as she silently approached and leaned down to kiss me. Take care of my girl, she said. I awoke with a jolt of disorientation and loss.

  Sometime on the third or fourth day, Walsh brought Treadwell by, as I’d asked, and I told him what I knew, sensing the spill of despair into his life. He kept his head down, thanked me and left. Walsh and I sat looking at one another a moment, then he shook his own head and followed.

  Alouette was there when I first awoke, and came by the next two afternoons, after work. Things were fine at home, she told me, and she’d be starting school in January. Her father had called once or twice, but just to talk. And oh, yeah, before she forgot, a couple of things had come up at the house that she needed money for. I gave her most of what I had on me and said if she needed more, let me know.

  But I did know, of course. Knew as surely as I think Dean Treadwell must have known. Even if, at the time, I declined putting it into words.

  Alouette didn’t show up the next day, and when I called the house, I got myself on the answering machine. I tried again two or three times that night, then again in the morning.

  I was standing in front of a mirror, trying to figure out what to do with the other half of the shirt I’d managed to get my left arm into, when the doctor who operated on me came by on rounds. His name was Kowalski, he was chief resident on the surgical service, came from Chicago and was a rock climber. Most of our conversation had been about the last. Three years ago in Arizona a friend climbing beside him, another resident, had fallen and broken his back. Kowalski had immobilized him with climbing rope and sections he hollowed from saguaro cactus, lashed together a rough travois and carried him out. The friend had made a full recovery. Somehow you got the idea that nothing in the surgeon’s formal practice was ever going to live up to that one bright segment of improvisation.

  “Good. You’re up,” he said.

  “Up. Yes, and going home.”

  “I’d have to recommend most urgently against that, Mr. Griffin.”

  “Recommend away.” I turned to face him. “Look, I appreciate what you’ve done. And I’m more than willing to accede to whatever continuing treatment you prescribe. But the truth is, I don’t have insurance, I can lie around at home every bit as well as I can here, and meanwhile there are things to be taken care of.”

  I suppose I should have said truths are.

  “You’ll promise to come in first thing in the morning?”

  I nodded.

  “Through ER. Just tell them I’m expecting you for a follow-up, and to beep me. It’s against hospital policy, but they’re used to it. I’ll be here—somewhere. That way I can officially discharge you now and you won’t have to go AMA, which can always lead to problems farther down the road.”

  “American Medical Association?”

  “Against medical advice.”

  He helped drape the shirt and button it, then went out to the desk to do the paperwork. I joined him there eventually, shook hands and thanked him again.

  “They’re going to ask for a deposit downstairs at the business office. I’m sure they’ll even insist that it’s mandatory, but it isn’t. The hospital’s supported by public funds and legally they can’t demand payment. Just tell them you don’t have any money with you.”

  I didn’t have. And as it turned out, they didn’t ask, probably because I didn’t go by the office.

  I got a cab outside the hospital, had the driver take me home and wait while I went in to get money. Like most people who’ve been poor and on the streets, I had cash squirreled away in various spots around the house. Alouette had found some of the stashes, but others were intact. I took the driver a ten, doubling his fare, and came back in for the damage report.

  Everything was still in her room except for clothes, personal items and a small suitcase. It seemed to me there were a few vacancies on the shelves, with books canting into them where others had been removed, but I couldn’t be sure. Maybe I only wanted it to be so.

  I found her note in the kitchen, on the table around which, in the best southern tradition, we’d sat night after night talking.

  Lewis,

  I think you’re okay, your arm I mean, and I think by now you have to know something’s wrong. You probably have a good idea what it is.

  I tried so hard, I really did. I hope you can give me credit for that. But everything’s so ordinary now, so plain.

  I can’t do this any longer. I don’t want to hurt you, and I know that I will unless I go now. Of course, I’ll hurt you either way, won’t I? There’s just not any way to win.

  It would be nice if I could believe I’m doing something good by leaving, but I guess that would only be fooling myself. And I don’t need any more practice at that.

  Thank you for everything you did and tried to do for me, Lew. And thank you most of all for loving my mother. Yes, I remember that.

  Alouette

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  YEARS WERE TO PASS BEFORE I SAW Alouette again.

  I rented a car that very afternoon, of course, and drove back up to Mississippi, scouting roadsides the whole way. I had midnight dinner with Sergeant Travis, left my suitcase for a few days at Dee’s-Lux Inn but was mostly away from the room, spent two nights at a Quality Inn in Memphis. Then drove one-armed and empty-handed back to New Orleans. No sign of Alouette anywhere.

  Mardi Gras is just over as I sit on a bright Ash Wednesday by the window in the upstairs front room writing this. All week I’ve looked down to watch crowds swarm toward St. Charles for parades, people stroll past at all hours in mask and costume, young women in pairs with backpacks and cotton sweaters, men with the plastic webbing of six-packs looped into their belts. Now the street is awash in trash: beer and soft-drink cans, waxed paper cups, containers from Popeye’s and Taco Bell, discarded strings of beads, broken doubloons. The old house creaks around me. A tree limb screeches at the pane, and from somewhere behind, deep within the house, a dull moan starts up each time the wind peaks.

  Some inchoate equation between the masking and forced revelry of Mardi Gras, the expert self-deception Alouette recognized in herself, and my own in this account, suggests itself. Finally there’s little enough difference between them.

  I remember that Robbe-Grillet, at work on Le Voyeur, traveled briefly to the Brittany coast to refresh his memory of its setting and found that he had no interest in actual gulls, that he cared now only for the gulls of his fiction.

  This much is true: Alouette was gone. And I was left thinking, in that self-engaged manner we all have when suddenly alone, that it all had been for nothing.

  But maybe (I thought then) something would come of it after all. Maybe we do good things, things that matter, without ever realizing it. Maybe those are the best things we do.

  Or maybe, just as Alouette tried so hard to believe her departure might be virtuous, that is just something I want to believe. We betray ourselves into going on; but it’s also given us to choose the form of that betrayal.

  Alouette was gone. Gone into the darkness that took my son, the darkness that took her mother, the darkness that is so much in us all.

  I sat
looking for a long time out into that darkness. It was almost midnight, with a chance of rain. The phone’s ringing brought me around. I answered.

  “Lew,” and when she took time getting the next word out, I knew it was Clare. “How are you? I just heard, a few minutes ago. About Alouette.”

  “It’s not like it’s wholly unexpected.”

  “That does nothing to diminish the pain.”

  “No,” I said. “It doesn’t. Except maybe in movies about boys learning to be men.”

  “Pain can be good, Lew. The same as other strong feelings. Love, fear, devotion. It can give us reasons to go on when there aren’t any others. It can become a new center for a new self.”

  Or an excuse for all sorts of evasions.

  But I said: “You’re proof of that, Clare.”

  “Of course, it can also give us a reason to make a perfect fool of ourself at eleven o’clock at night.”

  “Is that what you’re doing?”

  “God. I hope not.” She was silent for a few moments. “I guess what I’m doing, really, is using the situation as an excuse to call and say how much I miss you. Yeah. I’m pretty sure that’s it.”

  “I miss you too. More than you can know.”

  “You could have called.”

  “No, Clare. I couldn’t.”

  “Okay. So I never was much good at these coy, girlish ploys. Give me credit for trying. I was supposed to call you. And now I’m doing that.”

  “It’s good to hear your voice,” I said after a moment.

  “I’d like to see you, Lew.”

  A moth fluttered into my window’s light again and again.

  “Okay.”

  “If that’s all right with you.”

  “It is.”

  “You understand …”

  “I think so. I’d like to see you, whatever I do or don’t understand.”

  “Maybe we could have a drink.”

  “That would be great. Where?”

  “I don’t know. Tip’s, maybe?”