Moth

looked up from his cup. “Just as she did you, Lew.”

Something grabbed my throat and wouldn’t let go. I swallowed coffee. It didn’t help much.

“There have to be a lot of reasons why I came here. Maybe there’ll be a time to sort them all out later. But primarily I came here to hire you.”

“Hire me?” I said. It sounded more like hrm.

“I need a detective, Lew. A good one.”

“I don’t do that anymore. Hell, I never did it very much. I sat in bars and drank, and eventually guys I was looking for would stumble by and trip over my feet. I’m a teacher now.”

“And a writer.”

“Yeah, well, that too. Once you’ve lost your pride, it gets easier, you know: you’ll do almost any damned thing. You start off small, a piece for the local paper, or maybe this tiny little story about growing up, something like that. That’s how they hook you. Then before you know it, you’re writing a series for them.”

“Yeah. Yeah, LaVerne told me a thing or two about your pride.”

“Which in my particular case went after a fall.”

“And I read your books, Lew. All of them.”

“Then you must be one hell of a man for sure. Don’t know if I could do it.”

“Yeah,” he said, placing cup and saucer on the floor beside him and waving off my tacit offer of more. Some people still know how to let a good thing be. “You wanta stop pushing me away here, Lew? ‘S’not much about this whole thing that’s funny. You know?”

I shook my head. Not disputing him: agreeing. The invisible something eased off on my throat and went back to its dark corner.

“I’m listening,” I said.

“Good.” He took a cream-colored envelope out of his inside breast pocket and held it, edge-down like a blade, against one thigh. “You know anything about LaVerne having a kid?”

“She never had any. Always told me she couldn’t.”

“Not only could, it seems, but also did. Back when she was married to Horace Guidry-”

“Her doctor.”

He nodded. “Went on fertility drugs or something, I guess, when he kept insisting. Then when they split, I guess he got full custody, no visitation. Even a restraining order.”

“In consideration of the respondent’s unwholesome past, no doubt.”

“And of the petitioner’s large sums of money and standing in the community, right. You got it.”

“Why would she never have said anything?”

“I asked her that once, when she first told me. She couldn’t say. But I think maybe it was kind of like she shut that door completely-like she had to, just to keep on getting by. Know what I mean?”

I did. I also knew that winds have a way of coming out of nowhere and blowing those doors open again.

We sat there silently a moment and he said, “Yeah, I guess we don’t ever know anybody as well as we think we do, huh?”

“I’m beginning to think we don’t ever know anyone at all.”

“Yeah. Well anyway, we’re sitting in Burger King one night, we’d been together seven or eight months by then, and LaVerne looks across at me between bites and she says: I’ve got a kid, you know. Talk about getting hit by a semi. And she proceeds to tell me all about it, right there and then, with these teenage kids blowing wrappers off straws at each other in the next booth. So what you think I should do about it? she asks me afterward. What you wanta do? I say. And she goes: I think maybe I have to try and talk to her, Chip. I think I want my daughter to know who her mother was. Cause of course she’d be like eighteen now, able to make her own decisions about things like this. And the stuff LaVerne saw every day at that shelter she was working at, it had to make her think about all that. Parents and children, husbands and wives, all the things they can do to one another. About being all alone, too.”

“You find her?”

“We started looking. Retained a lawyer to contact the father-”

“Anything there?”

“Damn little. Lots of fast footwork from his lawyers. Including, as I understand it, a brief admonitory call from a judge.”

“I take it, then, that the girl-what’s her name?”

“Alouette. We’re not sure what last name she’s using.”

“I take it she’s not with the father. With Guidry.”

“Apparently not for some time. And short of a court order, which wasn’t about to happen, that’s pretty much all we could get out of the good doctor’s lawyers. Then finally our own lawyer suggested we might want to get in touch with a PI out in Metairie, a guy who specializes in finding people-”

“Who was that?”

“A. C. Boudleaux.”

“Achille. I know him. He come up with anything? If he didn’t, you might as well hang it on the line, ‘cause nobody else will either. He’s good.”

“Here’s his report.” He handed over the envelope. “It’s not much, but he was only on it for a couple weeks. Then LaVerne … Well, you know what happened. And that kind of ate up most of the money I had left. Don’t ever let anybody tell you medical insurance is good for shit, cause it ain’t, not when the time comes you need it. Besides, nothing else much seemed to matter then but her. Not that I could really do anything for her.”

“So now you’re trying to do exactly that.”

“Do something for her, you mean. Yeah. I guess. What the hell else is there? If it’s money you’re thinking about, how I’m gonna pay you, don’t worry. I’ll get it. I always manage.”

I’d been looking through the contents of the envelope as he spoke. There wasn’t much, but it proved enough to wash this reluctant Sinbad up, days later, on the foreign shores of the Mississippi. Nigger Lew looking around, and no raft or Huck anywhere in sight.

“I don’t want your money,” I told him.

“What, then?”

“How about a sandwich and a beer or two, for a start. On me.”

“You drive a hard bargain, Griffin.”

“Okay, I’m flexible. You buy.”

Chapter Three

The novel’s true protagonist, I tell my students, is always time. With the years, it’s gotten somewhat easier to say things like that without immediately looking over my shoulder or down at the floor. And then, of course, you go on and talk about the flow of time in Proust, about Faulkner’s sequestrations of history, about the abrogation of time and history in Beckett.

So by commodious vicus (you all know the tune: feel free to sing along) we arrive now at a point one week before Chip Landrieu showed up like an orphan at my doorstep, this being three weeks before I stood watching someone repast on chips and cola from a trashcan in Mississippi.

Everybody with me so far?

Nine in the morning, then. I was sitting in that same white rocker with a bottle of Courvoisier on the floor alongside and an espresso cup in hand. I’d gone from beer to scotch to the strongest thing I had. I hadn’t been able to find anything like a proper glass but figured the cup would do.

Some people have aquariums, into which they stare for hours. Here in New Orleans, we have patios. And in those patios, likely as not, we have banana trees. Lots of banana trees if we’re not careful, because they grow almost while you watch. The parts you see are shoots off the real tree underground, and there’s not much to them: just an awful lot of water bound in honeycombs of thin tissue, topped by enormous leaves the wind shreds to green fringe. They’ll go down with a single hard swipe from a machete (looking in cross section much like celery stalks), but a week later there’ll be two more already shooting up, two or three feet high.