Moth (17 page)

No: Hurt.

I
HURT
.

And what I said then, unintended, unexpectedly, came in a rush.

I
HAD
BEEN
IN
NEW
O
RLEANS
A
LITTLE
MORE
than a year when I met your mother. I was a fatback-and-grits kid from Arkansas who’d read a few books and thought they’d taught him whatever secrets he needed to know. I had this black gabardine suit that I’d wear all the time, press it and one of my three shirts every morning, put on a tie of some kind, buff my shoes with a towel. I wasn’t drinking much, then. That came later. But I always tried to look presentable.

I’d been in and out of several jobs by that time. Bell-hopped at the Royal Orleans for a little while, worked the ticket counter at the bus station, even did some short-order cooking and janitored at a grade school when times got really hard. I was living with half a dozen or more people, the number kept changing from week to week, or even day to day, in a house on Dryades, an old camelback double. People used to kid me because everywhere I went I wore that suit.

I was sitting at the counter in a diner one morning about four, nursing a cup of coffee, wearing my suit. I’d been fired the day before for “talking back” to my supervisor (actually, I’d told him to go to hell), and I left the store, went out and got drunk by midafternoon, somehow got home and passed out there till thirst and jittery nerves shook me awake a little before midnight.

Someone sat down beside me. When I looked at her, she smiled, sipped her coffee and said “Nice suit.”

I thanked her, and after a moment she said, “Things kind of slow for you tonight too, I guess.”

And that was your mother, the first time I ever saw her. And that’s all we said. But the next night I was there at that same diner from two to six, and the
next
night she came in, around five, and sat down by me again when she saw me, and we talked. So then we started having breakfast together most mornings. And after a couple of weeks I asked her to have dinner with me that night. “You mean like a date?” she said. And I said, “Yeah, like a date.”

By the end of the month I’d had two more jobs, quit one and got fired from the other, and had moved in with her on a more or less permanent basis. She helped me get another job, someone she knew from her work knew someone else, that kind of thing. It was with this furniture and appliance outfit over on Magazine. They’d sell all this stuff on time at inflated prices and have people sign contracts agreeing to forfeit everything if there was ever a missed payment. Mostly poor black people, and most of them not even able to read the contracts. But the company was considerate. They always sent their man around to try to collect before they were forced “to invoke the terms of contract.” And I was their man.

So I’d go humping all over town doing what I could to help these people keep their things. I’d explain what the contract said, tell them if they didn’t scrape a payment together by Friday, or Monday, or whatever, the truck would back up to their door and haul it all away and they’d
still
owe the company money for whatever payments were outstanding at the time of repossession. A couple of times I even threw in some of my own money.

Then one day the owner wants to see me in his office. “You doin’ okay, Lew?” he says. Then he tells me word’s got to him how I’ve been going about my collections, that I know damn well that’s not the way it’s done and he never wanted to hire me in the first place, and I had better get my black butt in the groove or out of his store, did I understand.

It went on like that a little while, not too much longer. Finally I just reached across the desk, pulled him toward me by his shirtfront and started pounding at his face. Afterwards, I went on home.

The police picked me up within the hour. I was sitting out on the porch, cleaned up and dressed in my black suit and waiting for them. The officers and I were polite. A few days later, the judge was polite. He said, politely, that I had a choice: prison for assault and battery, or the armed services, who might be able to put to some good use my, ah, talent for mayhem. A squad car delivered me directly from courtroom to recruiter who, once I’d signed papers, took over. I never even had the chance to call your mother.

It didn’t last long. The army didn’t think I was nearly as desirable as that judge had. And when I got out, your mother was there at the bus station in New Orleans waiting for me. Wearing, since she was working that night, a blue satin dress and blood-red heels, and looking unbelievably beautiful.

After that, we were together, even when we were apart, for almost thirty years. She never let me down. She was always there when I needed her, even when I didn’t
know
I needed her, even though I was a mess for a long time—more years than you’ve been alive. All that time, I didn’t do much besides hurt myself and other people. Your mother was the one I hurt most.

I’m trying to tell you that I know a little about what you’ve been through. And that I’d like to help, however I can. If you want that help. If you’ll accept it.

And that I loved your mother.

T
HREE
DAYS
LATER,
WHEN
SHE
WAS
UP
AND
about, we told Alouette that her baby had died and she said, “Yeah, I thought so.” She was still on sedation, her eyes dull stones.

I went out that afternoon and bought clothes for her. Jeans and sweatshirts, for the most part, but also a plain cotton dress. That’s what she chose to wear when I came by to take her, out on pass, to dinner.

“Well?” she said, standing at half-slouch in the doorway of her room. She had pulled her hair, damaged from months of poor nutrition and utter lack of care, behind her head with a barrette and tried to fluff it out, to give it some body. She wore lipstick that, pale as it was, only emphasized her waxy, sallow complexion. She’d borrowed shoes, navy pumps, from one of the nurses, I guess, along with the lipstick and barrette; I’d bought her a pair of knockoff Nikes.

“
Well
,” I said. “Your mother’s daughter. No doubt about it.”

“Yeah? Well you can be pretty charming for an old fart, even if you are full of shit.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment.”

“Take it any way you want. Where we going?”

“Up to you. Kids still live off pizza?”

“I don’t know. Next time I see one, I’ll ask.”

“I stand corrected, and apologize. How about burgers?”

“How about steaks?”

“That was going to be my very next suggestion.”

“Big ones. What time do the gates slam shut on me here, anyway?”

“Ten. So there’s plenty of time for a movie too, if you’d like.”

“You’re pretty ordinary, aren’t you, Lewis?”

“I try.”

“Okay,” she said. We stepped together out of the hospital into a warm fall evening, day’s final light fading in a blush of pink and gray just above the trees. “I’ll try too.”

The place we decided on, with the improbable name of Fred’s Steak-Out, looked as though it had slipped through a crack in time from Dodge City or Abilene circa 1860. You could see space between the bare boards of floor and wall, the tables were slabs of wood nailed to lengths of four-by-four and covered with butcher paper and drinks came in old canning jars. The spitoons must have been out back for cleaning. And of course the food was wonderful.

Alouette had prime rib that looked like about half a small cow, a baked potato the size of a football, and mixed greens, mostly kale and collard greens, from the look of it. I ordered grilled tuna with a Caesar salad. We both had iced tea. Lots of iced tea. She still complained of a sore throat from having had the tube in, and thirst from all the drugs.

That night I talked to her more about her mother and me, about our time together. Specific things, things she asked, like had we ever gone here, or done that, and how had it felt when Verne got married and I didn’t see her for so long, did it bother me when she was on the streets, what made her decide to give it up finally, how had she managed to do that. We talked, too, about what was going to happen when she got out of the hospital, where she’d go, what her options were (as everybody says these days), and by the time I delivered her back to the hospital, there were glints of light deep within her eyes, stray emotions tugging at the hard lines of her face. Or at least I imagined there were.

Alouette wasn’t the only one who needed to check in with reality.

I went back to my room and dialed Chip Landrieu. He’d obviously been asleep.

“Lew Griffin,” I said.

There was a long silence.

“It’s usually only bad news comes in the night,” he finally said.

“Not this time. Look, I’m sorry I haven’t been in touch. I’m calling from Memphis, and I’ve spent the last few weeks down in Mississippi. But I wanted to tell you I’ve found Alouette.”

Another silence. A breath.

“Is she all right?”

“I think so, basically. She’s been on some hard drugs, and it’s going to be rocky for a while. But I’ve talked to her a lot these last few days. I think she has a good chance of making it.”

I told him about the baby, about Mississippi and my straggling path toward Alouette.

“She’ll be getting out of the hospital soon.”

“What then?”

“I’m not sure. We’ve talked about a treatment center up here, or some kind of halfway house. She may want to come back to New Orleans. Right now, it’s still one-day-at-a-time time.”

“You
will
let me know if there’s anything I can do to help, won’t you?”

“Absolutely.”

“Thanks, Lew. Keep me posted.”

“I will.”

“You need anything? Money?”

“I’m fine.”

“Let me know if you do. Guess I’ll owe you a few dozen lunches when you get back.”

“You’re on.”

I sat looking at the phone for a while, finally dialed again but when Clare’s answering machine came on the line, hung up.

A minute or two later I called back and told the machine: “It’s Lew, Clare. I’m in Memphis. I found Alouette. Sorry I haven’t called, but I have been thinking of you.”

After hanging up again, I realized that I should have left my number and thought about calling back, but decided to put it off till morning.

I pulled out my notebook and looked up Richard Garces’s home number. His machine came on the line, its recorded message in rapid-fire, oddly staccato Spanish, but then Garces himself broke in with “Rick.”

I told him who it was and he said, “Hey,” stretching it out like a yawn, “good to hear from you.”

He’d spoken with Mickey Francis from the hospital and was up to date on pretty much all of it.

“I need some help, Richard. Advice, really.”

“You’ve got it.”

“What’s Alouette’s legal situation?”

“Shaky—as it always is when contentions of mental health are part of the package. Of course in this case there’s really no established history of mental health problems, and the girl
is
in her majority.”

“If her father doesn’t know by now, he will soon enough. I’m expecting lawyers to swoop down on her like a pack of crows.”

“I’ll have to check to be sure. Laws could be different there; a lot of them are, since everything here is based on the Napoleonic Code. But there’s no formal charge as far as the courts are concerned, right? No talk of sanity hearings, anything like that?”

“None.”

“That would probably be the way he’d want to go. Claim that the girl was financially dependent, stress her runaway status, abandonment of the baby and its subsequent death. That’s all public record. The lawyers could lean hard on her overdose as a suicide attempt. After that, mostly it would depend on the judge. Down here, I could pretty much call it according to whose court it was set for. There, I just don’t know. But they’d probably get
some
kind of exclusionary ruling. Commitment to one of the diagnostic centers for observation, possibly, or mandatory court-monitored therapy.”

“Is there anything we could do to counter it?”

“This isn’t science we’re talking, Lew. Not even law, really—and law itself is unpredictable enough. More like magic where the correspondences are skewed and whatever rules there are, keep changing. Let me do some checking. I’ll get on the network and see what I can turn up. I have some contacts scattered around up there. I’ll get back to you. May be a while. The girl able to sit up straight and say what
she
wants?”

“Yes. Once she decides.”

“She look okay?”

“Yeah. A little shopworn.”

“Good. That counts for a lot. Okay, let me fire up the circuits and read some smoke. Where you gonna be?”

I gave him my phone number and said if I missed him, which was likely under the circumstances, I’d check back with him sometime tomorrow.

I hung up and sat remembering light gouging at my eyes.

Once years ago, surfacing briefly in a diner during a week-long drunk, I found Mephistopheles himself sitting across from me in the booth, pouring Tabasco sauce into his coffee. At the time it seemed the most natural thing in the world. We talked a while (I remember the waitress coming by to ask if I needed anything, and a couple of times to ask if I was all right, and some other people staring over at us), I declined his offers, and he left, telling me to keep up the good work.

Naturally, I later used the whole thing in a novel.

Tomorrow morning, too, I would call the university, try to mend
that
tattered sail as best I could, if it were mendable at all. Then Clare. Hoping for wind and calm seas.

I
FOUND
HER
STANDING
AT
THE
SIDE
OF
the two-lane highway near a gas-station-and-foodstore crossroad, wearing the cotton dress and navy pumps.

My phone had chirred that morning at eight. Crickets were devouring the Superdome, then there were incoming missiles. The door to my elevator wouldn’t close despite a formless something lurking out there in shadow. When my beeper went off, the thing tracking me turned its head suddenly, tipped by the sound—then the sound was only a phone.