Moth

doubt about it.”

“Tito: thanks, man.”

“Just don’t forget, Lew Griffin. Next time, maybe I’m the one needs a favor, who knows. Happens.”

“It does indeed.”

I walked to Prytania, got a cab and gave the driver my home address. Halfway there, I told him to swing over to St. Charles and drop me at Louisiana instead.

I was working on pure intuition-maybe the closest thing to principle I had. Connections were being made, switches getting thrown, at some level not accessible to me. I only had to go with it, ride it.

I went up those stairs and into the kitchen as though it were my own. Heard the rasp and scuttle of someone else in the next room.

I stepped in and saw Treadwell’s kid bent over the mattress in the niche. Late sunlight threw a perfect print of miniblinds against one wall.

“Find what you’re looking for?”

How often does it happen, after all?

He straightened. “Who the fuck are you?” He came up and around and had a gun in hand. The.38 from under the chair cushion. I saw his eyes and knew what was going to happen.

The choice was clear: stand still and get shot straight on, or move and possibly, just possibly, minimize damage.

So instinctively I dove to the left. It felt as though someone had slammed the heel of his hand, hard, against my right shoulder. I was watching his face, then suddenly the back wall. Couldn’t feel my right side at all. Then I was out for a while.

I came to on the stretcher. Saw my father’s face upside down as they hoisted me into an ambulance. Lots of other faces watching.

“I’ve been wanting to talk to you,” I told him.

“You’re gonna be okay,” he said. “It’s not bad. Take some deep breaths.”

“I miss you, Dad.”

“We’ve stopped the bleeding. Try to be still. There’s a needle in your hand, for fluids, just a precaution.”

“You both were sitting on the car. You looked so young, so happy. What happened?”

“You’ve been shot, Mr. Griffin. You’re going to be okay.”

I caromed down a hall and into a room with bright lights overhead. An authoritative voice: the resident. Deferential ones: staff nurses. And one other.

“Mr. Griffin. Lewis. I know you can hear me. You’re going to be all right. Listen to me.”

A British accent. Wouldn’t you know.

Chapter Thirty-Eight

It was good theater, as they say, meaning that the playwright’s contrived a way to get all his themes and characters and the underwear of his plot with its bad elastic crowded onstage at play’s end for the big finale.

The old man lies on his sickbed and people file in and out, dragging behind them like bags of wool the very stuff of his life: his forfeitures and silences, his assumptions, his regrets.

So, propped up on pillows in my float of a bed with arm and shoulder taped firmly in place, for several days I held court, an improbable Rex, as faces streamed by: Walsh, Chip Landrieu, Richard Garces, Tito, Alouette.

Once, early on, I dreamed that Treadwell’s son was there. Standing against a blue plaster wall, otherwise surrounded by sky, he held a gun loosely in hand. A flag had come out of the gun’s barrel and unfurled; it read Bang. He said: You will not find me, get this sad certainty firmly in your head. Quoting Cocteau.

Another time LaVerne was there, eyes brimming with the world’s pain and all the things left unsaid between us as she silently approached and leaned down to kiss me. Take care of my girl, she said. I awoke with a jolt of disorientation and loss.

Sometime on the third or fourth day, Walsh brought Treadwell by, as I’d asked, and I told him what I knew, sensing the spill of despair into his life. He kept his head down, thanked me and left. Walsh and I sat looking at one another a moment, then he shook his own head and followed.

Alouette was there when I first awoke, and came by the next two afternoons, after work. Things were fine at home, she told me, and she’d be starting school in January. Her father had called once or twice, but just to talk. And oh, yeah, before she forgot, a couple of things had come up at the house that she needed money for. I gave her most of what I had on me and said if she needed more, let me know.

But I did know, of course. Knew as surely as I think Dean Treadwell must have known. Even if, at the time, I declined putting it into words.

Alouette didn’t show up the next day, and when I called the house, I got myself on the answering machine. I tried again two or three times that night, then again in the morning.

I was standing in front of a mirror, trying to figure out what to do with the other half of the shirt I’d managed to get my left arm into, when the doctor who operated on me came by on rounds. His name was Kowalski, he was chief resident on the surgical service, came from Chicago and was a rock climber. Most of our conversation had been about the last. Three years ago in Arizona a friend climbing beside him, another resident, had fallen and broken his back. Kowalski had immobilized him with climbing rope and sections he hollowed from saguaro cactus, lashed together a rough travois and carried him out. The friend had made a full recovery. Somehow you got the idea that nothing in the surgeon’s formal practice was ever going to live up to that one bright segment of improvisation.

“Good. You’re up,” he said.

“Up. Yes, and going home.”

“I’d have to recommend most urgently against that, Mr. Griffin.”

“Recommend away.” I turned to face him. “Look, I appreciate what you’ve done. And I’m more than willing to accede to whatever continuing treatment you prescribe. But the truth is, I don’t have insurance, I can lie around at home every bit as well as I can here, and meanwhile there are things to be taken care of.”

I suppose I should have said truths are.

“You’ll promise to come in first thing in the morning?”

I nodded.

“Through ER. Just tell them I’m expecting you for a follow-up, and to beep me. It’s against hospital policy, but they’re used to it. I’ll be here-somewhere. That way I can officially discharge you now and you won’t have to go AMA, which can always lead to problems farther down the road.”

“American Medical Association?”

“Against medical advice.”

He helped drape the shirt and button it, then went out to the desk to do the paperwork. I joined him there eventually, shook hands and thanked him again.

“They’re going to ask for a deposit downstairs at the business office. I’m sure they’ll even insist that it’s mandatory, but it isn’t. The hospital’s supported by public funds and legally they can’t demand payment. Just tell them you don’t have any money with you.”

I didn’t have. And as it turned out, they didn’t ask, probably because I didn’t go by the office.

I got a cab outside the hospital, had the driver take me home and wait while I went in to get money. Like most people who’ve been poor and on the streets, I had cash squirreled away in various spots around the house. Alouette had found some of the stashes, but others were intact. I took the driver a ten, doubling his fare, and came back in for the damage report.

Everything was still in her room except for clothes, personal items and a small suitcase. It seemed to me there were a few vacancies on the shelves, with books canting into them where others had been removed, but I couldn’t be sure. Maybe I only wanted it to be so.

I found her note in the kitchen, on the table around which, in the best southern tradition, we’d sat night after