Moth (8 page)

“You know about code-talkers, Lew? Well, he was one of them. The Japanese had managed to break just about every code we came up with, I guess, and finally someone had this idea to use Indians. There were about four hundred of them before it was all done, all of them Navajo, and they passed critical information over the radio in their own language, substituting natural words for manmade things. Grenades were potatoes, bombs were eggs, America was
nihima:
our mother.

“They were all kids. My father had gone directly from the reservation up near Ganado into the Marines. He was seventeen or eighteen at the time. And when he came back, three years later, to Phoenix, he couldn’t find work there. He wandered up into Canada—some sort of pipeline job or something, I’m not sure—and he met Mama there. The sophisticated Frenchwoman. The
Québecoise.
Who devoted the rest of her life, near as I can tell—though who can say: perhaps misery was locked inescapably into his genes—to making the rest of
his
life miserable.

“By the time he died he’d become this heavy dark bag my mother and the rest of us had to drag behind us everywhere we went. What I felt when he died, what my mother must have felt, was, first of all, an overwhelming sense of relief.

“I think about that still, from time to time. The feelings don’t change, and it seems somehow important to me that I don’t lose them, but it does keep flooding back. Like givens that are supposed to lead you on to a new hypothesis… . You have any idea at all what I’m talking about?”

“Not much.”

“Neither do I. But I
almost
had it, just for a moment there.”

“ ‘Keep trying.’ ”

“Tolstoy dying—right?”

“Scratched it with a finger on his sheet, yes.”

“What would
you
scratch out, Lew?”

“Something from a poem I read a while back, I think: ‘find beauty, try to understand, survive.’ ”

Moments later: “You ready for bed?”

“Hey, I just got up.”

“So? What’s your point?”

Mozart replaced Noah Adams, traffic sounds relented, the old house creaked and wheezed. We got up a couple of hours later and walked over to Popeye’s for chicken, biscuits, red beans and rice.

I
GOT
HOME
MIDMORNING
AND
WAS
WALKING
toward the answering machine with its blinking light when the phone itself rang.

“Lew,” Achille Boudleaux said. “You look’n ‘roun’ for me, I hear.” He could speak perfectly proper, unaccented English if he wanted, but rarely bothered without good reason, and never among friends.

I said there was absolutely no way he could know that.

“Why I so damn good. What you wan’?”

I filled him in, including my tracking down Garces at the shelter.

“Is there anything else, A.C.? Something you may have left out of the report? However tenuous it might seem.”

“Hol’ on. I done pull out the notebook cause I know what you wan’ me for.”

Virtual silence on the line. A match striking in Metairie and a long pull on his cigarette. A cough that died aborning, rattling deep in his chest like suppressed memories. Car alarm somewhere down the street. Police siren racing up Prytania.

“Ain’ much here, Lew. One t’ing I din’t put in, but issa long shot, pro’ly don’ lead nowhere. Miss Alouette, she bin keepin’ comp’ny wit’ a guy call hi’self Roach, some say. Make goo’ money, that boy, but he don’ seem to work at anythin’, you know? He from up ‘roun’ Tup’lo.”

“You have any idea how long they’d been a number?”

“Don’t know they were, rilly.”

“Any address for this Roach?”

“You bin off the street too long, Lew. Roaches don’t have no ‘dress, you know that. You wan’ him, you just get on downtown and ax ‘roun’.”

“Okay.
Bien merci,
Achille.”

“
Rien
.”

I cradled the phone and hit
Message.
After a brief pause, a momentary shush of tape past pinions, Richard Garces identified himself, saying: “Give me a call when you can. I think I have a couple of leads on Alouette.”

I dialed, got a busy signal three times in a row, at last got through and was put on hold. “You’re So Vain” fluted into my defenseless ear and I found myself thinking about Carly Simon’s lips. Something I was pretty sure Richard Garces never did.

“Mr. Griffin,” he said. “Sorry to keep you waiting. Something of an emergency with one of my girls.” “Lew—remember? And no problem.”

“Super. Okay, here’s the thing. I’m a hacker, or at least I was a while back, and there was a time there when a lot of us kind of stumbled into one another over the years on various bulletin boards. We were all doing social work, that’s what brought us together. Some like myself in small shelters or support services scattered throughout the country, some in institutions, most in public health—MHMR or other government services. Those early contacts developed into a loose network, a place we could go for information we didn’t otherwise have access to, a kind of information underground.”

“Right.” The country—whatever your special interest: law, liberal politics, magazine sales, white supremacy—was rife with such networks, electronic and otherwise. Often I imagined they might represent this skewed nation’s only true intelligence, skein after skein of fragile webs piling one atop another until a rudimentary nervous system came into being.

“Well, I hadn’t logged on to the network in quite a while. My work here at Foucher’s pretty circumscribed. But after you left the other day, after I’d thought about it a while, I got on-line. And after half an hour or so of ‘Good to see your number come up’ and ‘How’s it been going’ and ‘Where the hell you been, man’—I guess the economy’s gotten so bad that these guys don’t have much else to do but sit home, stroke and get stroked by electronic friends—I started asking about an eighteen-year-old who might give New Orleans as a prior address, might be reluctant to say more and is probably in trouble.

“That’s what the network’s about, after all. Alouette doesn’t have any resources, any skills. Wherever she winds up, sooner or later she’s going to have to hook into one of the available programs.”

“And you can track her that way.”

“Ordinarily, no. Well, I guess you
could,
but it would take forever. There’s no official channel. No central data bank or clearinghouse. The network itself is sketchy, but we’ve got people scattered all through the country, at all levels, and every one of us is facing the same problems day in and day out, a lot of them basically insoluble. So sometimes we’re able to help one another. Provide information or a way around this or that obstacle, maybe cut a corner or two.”

Okay, so it reeked of J. Edgar Hoover-style rationalization. And sure, you had to wonder to what use those less scrupulous might put such information, were it available to them. But I had no reason to believe that Richard Garces was any less liberal in reflex or thought than myself: he’d doubtless covered this same ground many times over.

“You have any indication Alouette was pregnant?” he asked suddenly.

“Not really. Did you?”

“It’s a possibility. You have a pen and paper?”

“Yeah.” I always kept early drafts and aborted pages, folding them in half to make a rough tablet that stayed there by the phone.

“Okay. Out of a couple dozen maybes, I boiled it down to three. These may all be way off base, you understand. Wrong tree—even wrong forest, for all we know. But age, accent and physical description are all good matches.”

“I understand.”

“The first one showed up in Dallas a few months back, brought into Parkland when she was raped by some guys who were looking through the Dumpster she lived in for leftover hamburgers and found her instead. It was behind a Burger King. Right now she’s in the Diagnostic Center. That’s around the corner from Parkland, up on Harry Hines. She’ll be there another few days, then she’ll be farmed out to whatever treatment center or hospital has a bed open up. Gives her name as Delores, and says no next of kin. Right age and general physical appearance.”

“Have a number for the place?”

He gave it to me and said, “I don’t know how much good this will do you. Phones there tend to be answered by untrained attendants who have little comprehension of what they’re up against, even less of any moral and constitutional limits to their protectorship.”

I knew just what he meant, recalling sojourns in psychiatric hospitals and alcohol-treatment centers where constitutional rights, legal principle and simple human dignity were violated unthinkingly and as a matter of course.

“Second is over at Mandeville, the state hospital. Listed as Jane Doe, since all she’ll say is ‘God listens, the angels hear.’ Her social worker’s name is Fran Brown.” He read off a number and extension.

“Third’s up in Mississippi. This is the pregnant one.
Was
pregnant, anyhow: she delivered last week. Way premature. The baby’s in NICU, barely a pound. And barely hanging on, as I understand. As you’d expect. Her case worker is Miss Siler.” He spelled it. “That’s all I could get: Miss Siler. No first name, credentials, job title. Girl gave
her
name as McTell. No record of social dependence—as we put it—in Mississippi. No medical coverage or prenatal care, and no father of record entered.”

Again, he read off a number.

“Got it. Thanks, Richard. You ever want to get into a new line of work, you’d make one hell of a detective.”

“Yeah, well. Once in a while we do something that really helps, you know. I hope this is one of those times. A favor?”

“You got it.”

“Let me know?”

“Absolutely.”

So then I had to go find Roach, of course.

Bars, taverns, street corners. The Hummingbird Grill, the Y at Lee Circle, Please U Restaurant, a group of men seated as usual on the low wall before a parking lot. One establishment had as identification only a piece of cardboard with
Circle View Tavern
hand-lettered on it; it was taped to the window among campaign posters
(Dr. Betty Brown, School Board, Third Ward: Your Children Need Her)
and long-out-of-date showbills
(Catch Some Soul at Fat Eddie’s).

I asked at Canal and Royal, again at Carondelet and Poydras, around Jackson Square, along Decatur, Esplanade and into the Faubourg Marigny. When New Orleans’s founding Creoles overflowed the Quarter, they spilled into the Marigny—years before Irish, British and other Anglo settlers began moving into the regions above Canal. When I first came to New Orleans, the Quarter itself was crumbling and everything below Esplanade was strictly no-man’s-land. Then, gradually, those buildings were reclaimed; and in recent years the Marigny’s become a cozy residential area where alternative bookstores, lesbian theaters, small clubs and flea markets thrive.

One small corner bookstore there has, packed in with Baldwin, Kathy Acker, Virginia Woolf, Gore Vidal and a wall of books on sexuality, what must be the definitive collection of a genre few know exists: lesbian private-eye novels. I counted once, and there were fourteen different titles; whenever I’m in the Marigny I drop by to check for new ones. This time when I stepped in off the sidewalk a face turned up to me and its owner carefully set back on a shelf the book he’d been paging through.

“Lew,” he said.

It was Richard Garces. “What are you doing here?” seemed a pretty stupid question, but I asked it anyway.

“I live here. Buy you a drink?”

“Why not?”

We walked down to Snug Harbor and settled in at a table by the window. Women in cotton dresses and army boots went by. Men with ponytails and expensive Italian suitcoats worn over ragged T-shirts and jeans. Richard and I decided on two Heinekens.

“I’ve been down here almost since it started,” he told me. “Had a store myself for a while, sold prints and original photographs, a lot of it friends’ work. Paid someone else to run it, of course. I still do a turn now and again at the Theater Marigny, and I work weekends on the AIDS hot line.”

“A pillar of the community.”

“
My
community, yes. Actually I am.”

A middle-aged couple came in and stopped by our table to say hello to Richard before moving on to a table of their own. It was obvious from their ease with one another that they’d been together a long time. Both were black, introduced by Garces as Jonesy and Rainer (not René: he spelled it). A youngish woman came and peered into the window, hands curved around her eyes like binoculars, before stomping away. She wore a taffeta party dress, Eisenhower jacket and old high-top black basketball shoes.

“I had no idea you were gay, Lew,” Richard said. “Not often I miss the call, after all these years.”

“You still haven’t missed it.”

“Oh?”

“Oh.”

“Hear that a lot.”

“I bet.”

“And you’re not even going to tell me some of your best friends are gay?”

“No, but just between the two of us, one or two of them are black.”

He laughed, and finished off his beer. “Well, I’m sorry to hear that. The first thing, I mean. And I have to tell you, there’s a certain sense of loss involved here. You want another beer?”

Our waiter glided new bottles soundlessly into the shadow of former ones. Richard leaned across the table and poured anew into my glass.

“I guess you’re sure about that,” he said.

“For the moment, anyhow.”

“So: what? You’re just down here slumming? Looking for Fiesta Ware to complete your set, maybe? Soaking up local color for a new book?”

“Something like that.”

“Yeah, well.” He drank most of his beer at a gulp. “So now I just say good to see you and go home alone, huh?”

“Way things are.”

He killed it. “Okay. That’s cool.” He extended his hand across the table and we shook. “Take care, Lew.”

“And you.”

After he was gone I asked for coffee, got something that had been sitting on the back burner since about 1964 and drank it anyway. Thinking now of many things. Walking thick woods in predawn mists beside my father, the smell of oil from his shotgun at once earthy and sharp in my nose. Vicky and I on our first, awkward dates. LaVerne twenty-six years old in a white suit across the table from me at Port of Call. My son’s last postcard, and the taped silences from my answering machine that I somehow always knew were from him and still kept in a desk drawer.