Moth

“Prob’ly not. Around here, if he didn’t sell it, he knows who did. Got tentacles running out everywhere.”

“Everywhere, huh.”

“I won’t lie to you: there’s been a couple times we were able to do one another a favor. More than a couple. You know how it is.”

“You get a bust, he gets the competition offed.”

“That old sweet song.”

“Where’s Camaro likely to be this time of day?”

“He’s not at the Chick’n Shack up on Jefferson, then he’s at the Broadway, a bar-and grill, the sign says, though I never saw anybody ever cook, or for that matter eat anything there-corner of Lee and Twelfth.”

“Can I say you sent me?”

“You can say whatever you want. He’s only going to hear what he wants to, regardless.”

I stood and thanked him, shook hands.

“No problem,” he told me. “May want to call in the favor someday, who knows?”

I found the eponymous pusher sitting at a booth in the Broadway, near a front window where he could keep an eye on his chariot. It was truly a splendid vehicle, beetle green with strips of chrome highlighting windows, doors, hood and trunk. A filigree of silver paint running down each side. His, their, name in silver script at one edge of the front left fender.

Camaro wore a beige suit, mostly cotton from the look of it, with a blue shirt and rust-colored tie tugged loose at the neck. The clothes set off the deep coffee color of his skin. As he lifted his drink, I caught a glimpse of gold watch and signet ring. He looked for all the world like a successful C.P.A. decompressing after a day at the computer.

He watched me walk over and sit across from him in the booth. The waitress was there instantly, dropping one of those stiff little napkins on the table in front of me. I ordered a scotch, water by. Sat drinking it, smiling over at him.

“Hope I ain’t bothering you too much, sitting here like this,” he said after a while.

I shook my head, smiled some more.

“I mean, you got friends or the rest of your band coming or something, you just let me know and I’ll be glad to make room, okay?”

He took a long pull off his drink, pretty much killing it. Held up a hand to signal the waitress.

“You about ready for another one, too, friend?”

I laid a ten on the table. “My round.”

“Whatever you say.”

I introduced myself and over that drink and another, we talked as freely as two black men with secrets, rank strangers to one another, ever can. Camaro’s mind was orderly and sharp; his world was a kind of pool or glade where the edges of discrete bodies of information glided by one another, sometimes catching. When I told him about Baby Girl McTell, he said he’d had a kid years ago, when he wasn’t much more than one himself, that it had lived three weeks in an incubator, shriveling up the whole time till it looked like a piece of dried fruit, and then died.

I said I was looking for the baby’s mother. Explained that she’d left the hospital and not gone back to her grandmother’s, had dropped out of sight.

“And she’s a user,” he said, at my sudden glance adding: “Only reason you’d be here. That what messed the baby up?”

I nodded.

“Shit does that. People ought to know it. Course, people ought to know a lot of things.” He held up his glass, looked through its amber to the light outside. I knew from long experience just how that warms the world and softens it. “You want another one?”

“Better not. Still a lot to do. We square with the tab?”

“It’s cool.” He looked at his watch. “Well, I’ve got an appointment myself. Tell you what.” He slid out of the booth and stood. Bent to pick up, yes, a briefcase. “I’ll ask around, see what I can come up with. You have a picture of this girl?”

I took out my wallet and gave him one of the copies. Also one of my cards, scribbling the motel’s phone number on the back, then, after a second’s thought, the NICU number and Teresa.

“If you can’t get me, leave a message for her. And thanks, man.”

He shrugged. I sat and watched as he climbed into the Camaro, buckled up, started the engine, hit his turn signal and eased out into traffic, sunlight lancing off the chrome.

Chapter Eighteen

My second week in Clarksville, on a Tuesday, I got back to the motel midmorning, having left the hospital at five or so and been on the streets since (with a stopover at Mama’s Homestyle for a kickass breakfast), and found two messages waiting. I didn’t look at the second one till later. But Teresa had called to say they were “having some trouble” with Baby Girl McTell and she thought I might want to be there.

A nurse I hadn’t met before, Kristi Scarborough, brought me up to date. Around six that morning, stats had dropped into the seventies and hovered there; ABG’s confirmed a low PO₂ and steadily increasing PCO₂. It could, of course, be a number of things: cardiac problems, a sign that the lungs were stiffening beyond our capacity to inflate them, infection, pulmonary edema. The baby was back on 100 percent oxygen, and ventilator pressures had been raised. Gases were slowly improving. I stood before an X-ray viewer staring at loops of white in Baby Girl McTell’s belly. Like those ancient maps where the round, unknown world has been cleft in half and laid out flat. Necrosis of the bowel, Nurse Scarborough told me; a further complication. It almost always happens with these tiny ones. But for now she’s holding her own.

Kristi used to work the unit full-time, she told me, but last year had married one of the residents and now put in only the hours necessary to keep her license, a day or two every other week, while husband John oversaw an emergency room just across the Tennessee line, broken bones, agricultural accidents and trauma from the regional penitentiary mostly (once, a hatchet buried in a head), and “they” tried as best they could to “get pregnant.”

I left at three or four, finally, once Baby Girl McTell seemed to be out of immediate danger, and over a cheeseburger and fries at Mama’s looked at the second message.

Call me. Clare.

I went back to my room and did just that. She answered on the third ring, breathing hard.

“Greetings from the great state of Mississippi.”

“Lew! I’ve been worried about you.”

I told her about Baby Girl McTell.

“Hospitals are tough. You haven’t found Alouette yet, I take it?”

“She’s as gone as gone gets. But I will.”

“I know. I’ve missed you, Lew. Any idea when you’ll be back in town?”

“Not really. I don’t know what I’m into here, or how long it may take. I’ll give you a call.”

Outside, a fire truck and police car went screaming by.

“I spent about half of my teenage years waiting for people to call who said they would, Lew.”

“I’m sorry,” I said after a moment.

“I know. You really are-that’s what makes it so difficult.” I listened to the sirens fade. Wondered if she could hear them, all those miles away. “But it is good to hear your voice.”

The door slammed in the room next to mine and a woman stalked toward her car, a pearl-gray Tempo. She got in and started it, then sat there with the engine running. A man came out of the room and leaned down to the window, holding his hands palm up.

“You’re very important to me, Clare.”

“I know, Lew. I know I am.”

The man walked around the car and got in. They drove away.

“When I get back-if it’s possible, and if you want to, that is-I’d like for us to spend some time together. A lot