James Sallis - Moth

“I live here. Buy you a drink?”

“Why not?”

We walked down to Snug Harbor and settled in at a table by the window. Women in cotton dresses and army boots went by. Men with ponytails and expensive Italian suitcoats worn over ragged T-shirts and jeans. Richard and I decided on two Heinekens.

“I’ve been down here almost since it started,” he told me. “Had a store myself for a while, sold prints and original photographs, a lot of it friends’ work. Paid someone else to run it, of course. I still do a turn now and again at the Theater Marigny, and I work weekends on the AIDS hot line.”

“A pillar of the community.”

“ My community, yes. Actually I am.”

A middle-aged couple came in and stopped by our table to say hello to Richard before moving on to a table of their own. It was obvious from their ease with one another that they’d been together a long time. Both were black, introduced by Garces as Jonesy and Rainer (not Rene: he spelled it). A youngish woman came and peered into the window, hands curved around her eyes like binoculars, before stomping away. She wore a taffeta party dress, Eisenhower jacket and old high-top black basketball shoes.

“I had no idea you were gay, Lew,” Richard said. “Not often I miss the call, after all these years.”

“You still haven’t missed it.”

“Oh?”

“Oh.”

“Hear that a lot.”

“I bet.”

“And you’re not even going to tell me some of your best friends are gay?”

“No, but just between the two of us, one or two of them are black.”

He laughed, and finished off his beer. “Well, I’m sorry to hear that. The first thing, I mean. And I have to tell you, there’s a certain sense of loss involved here. You want another beer?”

Our waiter glided new bottles soundlessly into the shadow of former ones. Richard leaned across the table and poured anew into my glass.

“I guess you’re sure about that,” he said.

“For the moment, anyhow.”

“So: what? You’re just down here slumming? Looking for Fiesta Ware to complete your set, maybe? Soaking up local color for a new book?”

“Something like that.”

“Yeah, well.” He drank most of his beer at a gulp. “So now I just say good to see you and go home alone, huh?”

“Way things are.”

He killed it. “Okay. That’s cool.” He extended his hand across the table and we shook. “Take care, Lew.”

“And you.”

After he was gone I asked for coffee, got something that had been sitting on the back burner since about 1964 and drank it anyway. Thinking now of many things. Walking thick woods in predawn mists beside my father, the smell of oil from his shotgun at once earthy and sharp in my nose. Vicky and I on our first, awkward dates. LaVerne twenty-six years old in a white suit across the table from me at Port of Call. My son’s last postcard, and the taped silences from my answering machine that I somehow always knew were from him and still kept in a desk drawer.

Ceaselessly into the past. Kierkegaard was right: we understand our lives (to the extent that we understand them at all) only backwards.

Backwards was the way I caught up with Roach, too, as it turned out.

Like many city dwellers, I try to carry a kind of bubble of awareness around me always, alert to whatever happens within that radius. And now as I stepped off a curb, without knowing how or where, I sensed the zone had been violated-just seconds before I was seized from behind, arm at my neck, and slammed against a wall.

“Say you been asking all over for the Roach and don’t no one know you.”

He was close to my size and at least ten years younger. Hair cut in what these days they’re calling a fade. Black T-shirt, baggy brown cargo pants, British Knight sneakers the size of tugboats. A most impressive scar along almost the full length of the arm pressed against my windpipe. One dainty ceramic earring.

“Gmmph,” I said.

He patted me down quickly with the other hand. “You cool?”

I said “Gmmph” again.

“Now it’s jus’ too damn hot for running. I have to run after you, that’s gonna make me mad.”

The tugboats backed out a step or two. Air shuddered into my lungs.

“Howyou … findme?” I said when I could.

“Shit, man. You weren’t doing any good at finding me, so I figured I’d best come find you. How many old black farts you think we see down here asking for the Roach, anyhow? And wearing a sportcoat?”

“I’m not a cop.”

“Even cops ain’t stupid as that. Not most of them, anyway.”

He paused to stare at a group coming toward us. They had been looking on inquisitively, but now hurried to cross the street.

“My name’s Lew Griffin. I-”

“I be damn. Lew Griffin. You don’t remember me, do you? Course not. No reason you should. I was in a house down here same time as you, man, must be eight, nine years ago. People wondered about you, talked some. You roomed with a guy named Jimmie later got hisself killed. Heard you did something about that.”

I hadn’t-not the way he meant, anyway-but I let it pass. Never dispute a man who thinks you’re a badass.

“So how you been, man?”

“Just about every way there is to be, one time or another,” I told him. “Right now I’m good.”

“You know it.” He stepped back, as though suddenly noticing me crowded there against the wall. “So what you want with the Roach, Griffin? You’re a drinker, as I recall-and memory’s my other thing that always works fierce. Not behind pills and powder.”

“I’m looking for a girl named Alouette. Guidry, but I don’t know she’d be using that name. You know her?”

“Might. She family?”

I shook my head. “Favor for a friend.”

“Then I know her. Did, anyway. Stone fox, the way these light women get all of a sudden they’re thirteen, fourteen.”

“Alouette’s eighteen.”

“You know, I found that out. Had to cut her loose, too, but that wudn’t the reason. Sorry to have to do it, I tell you that.”

“What was the reason?”

“She carrying around some heavy shit, Griffin, you know what I mean? Now I’ll do a line same as the next man, I won’t hold that against no one. But Lou, you let her do a few lines, even get a few drinks and a toke or two in her, and it’d be like this big hairy thing had climbed out of a cage somewhere. She was doing a lot of crack there toward the end, too, and there ain’t nobody don’t go crazy on that shit.”

“When did you last see her?”

“Must be four, five months ago, at least.”

“Was she pregnant?”

“Never said so. Didn’t look like it.”

“You know where she was living?”

“Not right then. She’d been staying with a friend of mine over by Constantinople. But then he had some new friends move in, you know? She got to talking about ‘going home’ along about then, I remember, and one day I said to her, ‘Lou, you don’t have a home.’ She slapped me. Not real hard, and not the first time. But it was going to be the last.”

“You didn’t see her again?”

“Took her to the bus station that night. She ax me to.”

“Any idea where she was going?”

“Probably wherever twenty dollars’d get her. Cause that’s what I gave her.”

“Greyhound station?”

He nodded and started away.

“Hey, thanks for the help,” I called after him. “You have a name?”

“Well,” he said, half turning back, “I used to be Robert McTell, I guess. But I ain’t no more.”

Two days later at six in the morning, behind the wheel of a car for the first time in at least six years, I tooled nervously out I-10 through Metairie and onto the elevated highway stilting over bayou and swampland, past Whiskey Bay, Grosse Tete , looking at walls of tall cypress, standing water carpeted green, pelicans aflight, fishing boats. This is the forest primeval-remember? You’re definitely in the presence of something primordial here, something that underlies everything we are or presume; nor can you escape a sense of the transitory nature of the roadway you’re on, perched over these bayous like Yeats’s long-legged fly on the stream of time. With emergency telephones every mile or so.