Moth (6 page)

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.”

“And it isn’t.”

“I think it’s just threats, so far, from what she tells me.”

“Husband?”

“I don’t know. She wasn’t too clear about that. They lived together, at any rate.”

“Lived. You sure we’re talking past tense here?
Le passé simple?”

For a moment I was flooded with a sense of unreality, as though lights had dimmed and now I could see the stage set around me for the insubstantial, trumped-up thing it was, and knew the actors very soon must exit to stage-left lives of lunch meat, arrogant children, cars needing tires and new batteries. A cue card flipped up in the back of my mind; or a prompter whispered beyond the footlights.
This is none of your business, Griffin, none of your business at all.
But I had a longtime habit of ignoring scripted lines and improvising.

“Not for a while. I asked her what he’d done and she just looked at me. And then, after a minute, she said: Well, he put these dead chickens in my mailbox. And on the back porch. Just kind of hung them out there, like a string of peppers or garlic.”

“She black or white?”

“Latin.”

“Too bad. She be black, she know zackly what to do:
fry
them suckers.”

“Very funny, Lew. Maybe I should hang up and call Dr. Ruth instead. She probably knows a few tricks you can do with chickens.”

“Might read you her favorite salivious, I mean lascivious, passages from Frank Harris. Salacious? Man had a way with geese, as I recall.”

“Look, this is the thing: You can talk to him, make him see he’s heading for real trouble if this goes on.”

“Man to man, hm?”

“Yeah, kind of.”

“Well, Clare, I tell you. While it’s true I used to do that sort of thing once in a while, it’s also true that at the time I was twenty years younger and hadn’t been riding my buns and a desk for six years straight. Be like all those almost hairless guys from the sixties trying to make their comeback as rock and rollers, i.e., ludicrous. Besides, all my tie-dye’s at the cleaners.”

“Please, Lew. As a favor to me? How can you turn down a poor little crippled girl?”

“Oh. Well, since you put it like that.”

“Then you’ll do it?”

“I’ll talk to the guy, Clare. Politely. And that’s all. He says boo, I’m a ghost.”

“You’re a jewel.”

But when I looked in the mirror afterwards it wasn’t sparkle I saw, more like a dullness that drew everything else to it. I remembered how old and used-up Walsh had looked to me the day of Verne’s funeral. I couldn’t be looking much better, and probably looked a hell of a lot worse. But enough of such reverie, I thought: there were things in the world that needed doing. Missions to be undertaken, wrongs to right, rights to champion.

Lew the Giant Killer.

S
O
AT
MIDNIGHT
OR
THEREABOUTS,
HERE
I
AM
, with a list of this guy’s habitats and less sense than your average lemming, prowling bars along Louisiana and Dryades looking for the chicken man.

Just like the good old days. Shut away from the world, the heady smell of piss and beer and barely contained fury all around me. And threading through it all, like a Wagnerian leitmotif, the quiet refrain: This is none of your business, Griffin, none at all.

I remembered a history professor back at LSUNO talking about the Russians’ propensity for throwing themselves beneath tanks just to slow things down; saying that such irrational ferocities made them fearsome fighters.

But I was just going to talk to this guy, of course.

The Ave. Social & Pleasure Club was my tenth or twelfth try. I’d started at Henry’s Soul Food and Pie Shop over on Claiborne and worked my way here.

It was a cinderblock affair, the butt half of a grocery whose painted-over windows advertised
Big Bo’ Po-Boys
and
Fresh Seafood,
with an unbelievably crude painting of a crab holding a po-boy in its claws and (who would have thought it possible?) leering. The club, alas, didn’t get such star treatment: only its name and a long arrow pointing to the single door.

Several underfed light bulbs hung here and there from the ceiling as though waiting for their mothers to come take them home. Most of the light came from two pool tables in back. I shuffled to the bar against the right wall, which looked to have been cobbled together from scraps of cabinet wood and countertopping, and ordered a beer. Archaeological layers of odor here: raw whiskey, stale beer, urine and sweat; the edgy smell of fish, rotting greens and sour milk from next door; under it all, mildew and mold, a fusty smell that seems to be everywhere in New Orleans.

Most of the activity, like most of the light, was concentrated around the pool tables. A man and woman barely old enough to be in here legally sat nearby at one of a number of battered, unmatched tables. The man drained his malt liquor can, reached for the woman’s and said, “Now baby you
know
where I stays.” There were a couple more guys at the bar perched on wobbly stilt-like stools.

“Do me a beer, man?” one of them said, turning his whole upper body to look at me. “I’m hurtin’.”

He got his beer.

“Here’s to Truth, Justice and the American Way,” he said, lifting his glass in a toast. “All those wunful things we fought for.” He belched. “ ‘Long with career politics, of course.”

One of the players in back made a tough shot and for a while everybody kept busy walking around the tables doing high fives, slapping palms, exchanging money.

“You in here a lot?” I said.

He thought about it. “I ain’t here, Luther don’t bother opening up.”

“Know a guy named T.C.? Regular, they tell me. Tall dude—”

He grinned. Not a good sign.

“—hair cut short, wears one earring. Light skin.”

“Man, I tell you, these beers be disappearing in a hurry on a day like this one here. You notice that?”

I put another five on the bar in front of him.

“Well, then. He be coming out of the bathroom back there just about any time now, I ‘spect,” he said after ordering and sampling a new beer. “What you want with T.C. anyway? He ain’t much.”

“Friend asked me to talk to him.”

“Ain’t much for talk, either.”

And at that, as if on cue, the man himself stepped into the penumbra of light behind the pool players, six-four or-five and at least two-fifty, all of it muscle except maybe the earring, followed a moment later by two guys in sportcoats and jeans who hurried on out of the bar.

He watched me approach without registering anything at all: alarm, suspicion, caution, interest. Or humanity, for that matter.

“Buy you a drink?” I asked.

“Why th’ hell not?” And after we’d bellied up to the bar over my beer and his double Teacher’s rocks, he said: “So what is it you’re needing, my man? How much and when. And a name, somewhere along the way.”

Faint tatters of an accent drifted to the surface, Cuban maybe.

“I’m throwing a chicken fry for my friends,” I said. “Someone told me you were the man to see.”

He looked at the bridge of my nose for a minute or so. No sign of alarm, suspicion, etc. (See above.)

“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.”