Moth

“But of course you ain’t no biblebeater, are you?”

“No sir, I have to tell you I’m not. But I do wonder if you might do me the favor of answering a question or two. I won’t trouble you to take much of your time.”

“And why would I answer any questions you’d have? Unless you have a warrant, that is.”

“Warrant?”

“Come on, you got cop on you like slime on a snail.”

Another, shorter man with a close-cut helmet of hair, vaguely elfish, had joined him at the door. Squinting beneath monumental eyebrows he said, “Yeah, man, this the new South. Nigger cops ever’where.”

“You go on back inside now, Bobo. We’re doing just fine out here.”

“So that’s the way it is here in America. What made us great,” he said to me. “You come back with a warrant, or the next time it’s clear trespass. You hear what I’m saying?”

Uh-oh. This guy watched cop shows; I was in trouble.

He shut the door.

When it stopped against my foot, he glanced down.

Then he looked back up at me and, for a split second before he caught himself, over my shoulder.

It was enough.

I went down, rolling, as the guy behind me swung and, meeting no resistance, connected with Mr. Warrant midchest, a glancing blow, then toppled himself.

I pivoted back like a break dancer and slammed my feet into Warrant’s kidneys. His glass bounced off the front wall and rebounded, spinning, into the small entryway, came up against vinyl coping and stopped there, rocking back and forth. I hooked fingers into his neck now that he was down. Put a heel hard against the other one’s balls and felt him curl in on himself.

“Your call,” I told him. “Funny how so much of life comes down to attitude, huh?”

“Hold on, man,” he said. “We can talk about this.” And the minute I started backing off his windpipe and carotid: “Bobby Ray!”

Who trotted in from a room to the right where the face of some talk-show host filled a TV screen like an egg in a bottle, nailing live audience and viewers with sincere clear eyes.

Bobby Ray had a sincere Walther PPK in one hand.

I had a coat rack.

It caught him full across neck and chest. Remember Martin Balsam pedaling backward down the stairs in Psycho?

His head came up off the floor like a turtle’s, trying for air. Didn’t get it. The head went back down. He was still.

I set the coat rack back down in the corner. A few well-anchored coats swung to a stop on its hooks; most were on the floor.

“You have a right not to move,” I told Mr. Warrant. “You get up and I use you to clean furniture. You hear what I’m saying?”

He nodded.

I picked up the PPK and walked into the next room. Faces turned toward me. Petals on a wet black bough. A modest buffet of drugs was set out on a card table: joints, bowls of colored pills, a couple of small covered plastic containers, a marble cheese board with razor and some remains of white powder on it.

Feeding time at the zoo.

“Our savior.”

“Ecce homo. And I do mean mo’.”

“Show-and-tell time, obviously.”

“Black’s definitely beautiful.”

“Validate your parking ticket, sir?”

“Pizza dude’s here.”

“Help.”

Alouette said nothing.

I found her in the back bedroom, lying on two stacked mattresses, nude, between a skinny black man and a fat 44-D blonde. They were passing a fifth of Southern Comfort back and forth over her. The Green Acres theme erupted from a bedside TV.

I dug into the hollow of her neck. There was a pulse, albeit a weak one.

“Where’s the phone?”

He looked at me and, without looking away, handed the bottle across to the blonde. She grappled and found it, hauled it in, breast swinging.

In one continuous move I took it from her and smashed it against the headboard. Held a most satisfying handle and bladelike shard of glass against the man’s throat as I watched his hard-on dwindle to nothing, with the impossibly sweet reek of oranges washing over us.

“Now,” I said.

His eyes swept toward the floor. Again, again. I reached under the bed and pulled out the phone. Dialed 911.

“Thirty-two sixteen Zachary Taylor,” I said. Overdose, I was going to say, but heard instead: “Officer down.” There’d be hell to pay. But the ambulance was there in four minutes.

While we were waiting, new muscle came into the room. Three of them.

“That’s the guy did Lonnie,” one of them said. “Busted his jaw.”

“Son of a bitch.”

“Oyster time.”

I lifted the PPK.

We were still facing one another off when the ambulance and four police cars careened into place.

Chapter Twenty-Three

Time to remember lots of prison films. Lisping Tony Curtis chained to a black stud, spoon handles ground down to knives against cement floors, lights dimming all over town as Big Lou got fried moments before the stay of execution came, college students on summer vacation in the South pulled over by big-bellied cops and railroaded onto chain gangs. And the novels: Malcolm Braly’s On the Yard, Chester Himes’s Cast the First Stone.

On the way in, in the squad car, one of the cops asked me what the hell I thought I was doing.

A good question.

A very good question for this fifty-year-old, unsmiling, resolutely unpublic man.

What was I doing?

Besides sitting in a holding cell in West Memphis, Arkansas, that is-home at last, or close enough.

Besides not telling mostly indifferent juniors, seniors and a scatter of grad students about modern French novels-which is what I was supposed to be doing.

The thought occurred to me that I’d disappeared from my school as precipitately and incommunicably as, a few years ago, my son David had vanished from his.

I really was getting far too old for this.

And besides, basically the whole thing just wasn’t any of my business.

And so I sat there, watching dawn lightly brush, then nudge, then fill a single high window, drinking cup after cup of coffee deputies brought me and declining their offer of cigarettes, my mind curving gently inward, backward, toward things long shut away.

David: his final postcard and consummate disappearance, those moments of silence on the phone machine’s tape.