Moth

“Might. She family?”

I shook my head. “Favor for a friend.”

“Then I know her. Did, anyway. Stone fox, the way these light women get all of a sudden they’re thirteen, fourteen.”

“Alouette’s eighteen.”

“You know, I found that out. Had to cut her loose, too, but that wudn’t the reason. Sorry to have to do it, I tell you that.”

“What was the reason?”

“She carrying around some heavy shit, Griffin, you know what I mean? Now I’ll do a line same as the next man, I won’t hold that against no one. But Lou, you let her do a few lines, even get a few drinks and a toke or two in her, and it’d be like this big hairy thing had climbed out of a cage somewhere. She was doing a lot of crack there toward the end, too, and there ain’t nobody don’t go crazy on that shit.”

“When did you last see her?”

“Must be four, five months ago, at least.”

“Was she pregnant?”

“Never said so. Didn’t look like it.”

“You know where she was living?”

“Not right then. She’d been staying with a friend of mine over by Constantinople. But then he had some new friends move in, you know? She got to talking about ‘going home’ along about then, I remember, and one day I said to her, ‘Lou, you don’t have a home.’ She slapped me. Not real hard, and not the first time. But it was going to be the last.”

“You didn’t see her again?”

“Took her to the bus station that night. She ax me to.”

“Any idea where she was going?”

“Probably wherever twenty dollars’d get her. Cause that’s what I gave her.”

“Greyhound station?”

He nodded and started away.

“Hey, thanks for the help,” I called after him. “You have a name?”

“Well,” he said, half turning back, “I used to be Robert McTell, I guess. But I ain’t no more.”

Chapter Eleven

Two days later at six in the morning, behind the wheel of a car for the first time in at least six years, I tooled nervously out I-10 through Metairie and onto the elevated highway stilting over bayou and swampland, past Whiskey Bay, Grosse Tete, looking at walls of tall cypress, standing water carpeted green, pelicans aflight, fishing boats. This is the forest primeval-remember? You’re definitely in the presence of something primordial here, something that underlies everything we are or presume; nor can you escape a sense of the transitory nature of the roadway you’re on, perched over these bayous like Yeats’s long-legged fly on the stream of time. With emergency telephones every mile or so.

Spanish moss everywhere. Gathering it used to be full-time employment hereabouts; before synthetics, it was stuffing for mattresses, furniture, car seats.

I was being borne back into the past in more ways than one. The rental car was a Mazda very close in design, color and general appearance, even after these several years, to Vicky’s. (In all the wisdom of her own twenty years the agent hedged at turning it over, balking at my lack of a major credit card, but finally accepted a cash deposit.) And my destination, a red umbilicus on the map, was I-55, snaking like a trainer’s car alongside the Mississippi up past river towns like Vicksburg and Helena, with their Confederate cemeteries, tar-paper shacks and antebellum mansions, toward Memphis. Pure delta South. Where the blues and I were born. Since leaving at age sixteen, I had been back just twice.

First, though-before all this history could begin reiterating-I was called upon to support my local police lieutenant.

The call came around midnight. I’d climbed, that night, back up out of the Marigny to Canal, tried for the streetcar at St. Charles and then at Carondelet and, encountering veritable prides of conventioneers at both locations, hoofed on up to Poydras and flagged a cab, an independent with Jerusalem Cab stenciled on the side and its owner’s name (something with a disproportionate number of consonants) on front fenders. We miraculously avoided serial collisions as the driver filled me in on the Saints and chewed at a falafel sandwich. Car and karma held, and on half a wing and muttered prayer at last we touched down, at last I was delivered, disgorged, cast up, chez moi.

I put together a plate of cheese and French bread and opened a bottle of cabernet. It was Brazilian, simply wonderful, and two ninety-five a bottle from the Superstore. It was also only a matter of time before other people discovered it.

Had dinner and most of the wine by the window, sunk like Archimedes, displacing my own weight, into L’Etranger, life for the duration of that book, as every time I read it, a quiet, constant eureka.

Then I woke half between worlds, knowing it was the phone I heard, knowing in dreams I’d transformed it to the whine of a plane, trying to hold on, impossibly, to both realities.

I finally picked the thing up and grunted into it.

“This the fucking zoo, or what?” Walsh said on the other end.

“I didn’t do it.”

“Didn’t do what?”

“Whatever I’m suspected of. Though I feel I have to mention that back in the good old days when you were just a little younger and a lot more interested in doing your job you actually went out and found the suspects and didn’t just call and tell them to get their butts down to the station. Course, I guess that’s one of the benefits of a reputation. Bad guys hear the phone ring, know it’s you, and start writing out confessions before they even answer.”

“I told you to fuck yourself lately?” He was slurring his words terribly. I’m a man who knows a lot about slurring words. And not a little about terrible.

“Only last week. I tried. The chiropractor thinks he’ll be able to help me.”

“So what’s up?”

“Well, a lot of people are sleeping, for one thing-for lack of anything better to do, you understand.”

“Hey. Lew: woke you up. Sorry.”

“No problem. But look, I’ve got to pee and drink something. Give me a minute, okay?”

“Want me to call back?”

“No. Once is enough. Just hang on, okay?” A morse-like bleat on the line. “Whoa, another call. Look. I lose you, you call me back, okay?”

That other person wanted Sears, but why at this time of night I couldn’t imagine. Maybe they’d sent him the wrong size cardigan.

I went out to the kitchen and put the kettle on. Had a couple of glasses of water from the tap (glass there by the sink looked okay), then stomped upstairs to the bathroom. Listened to pipes bang and groan behind the walls on the way back down.

“You still there?”

“Yeah, I’m here.” Throat clearing. “You got anything else you need to do first? Run out to the corner for a paper? Go grab a burger at the King? Whack off, maybe?”

“Let me think about it. What can I do for you, in the meanwhile?”

Outside, a banana-tree leaf long ago frayed by high winds now fluttered in a gentle one in the moonlight, spilling mysterious, ever-changing shapes against the window.

“Tell you what, Lew. I came home tonight about eight, and ever since, I’ve been sitting here at the kitchen