James Sallis - Moth

Starting off for food after leaving the hospital, I’d changed my mind on the way and instead driven back to Missagoula, to my room at the Magnolia Branch and the Teacher’s. I remembered switching on the TV, part of a talk show, a Columbo rerun, and a movie about aliens (it’s possible that I don’t have this quite right) who had learned to survive and indeed flourish by disguising themselves as Coke machines. Obviously I’d drunk the entire bottle in short order. I didn’t want to think too much about what else I might have done. There was a crumpled bag in the trash, and remnants of some kind of sandwich under that, so at some point I’d gone out for food, I had no idea where.

Using what volition I had left, I showered and shaved, dressed, straightened the room, carried bags to the car and went to the office to check out. I stopped for breakfast on the highway, biscuits and gravy and lots of coffee, then drove back into Clarksville and took a room at Dee’s-Lux Inn. Pale pine furniture and kidney-shaped tables from older days when motels were tourist courts and their neon signs advertised Climate Controlled.

I unloaded my suitcase into the top drawer of the low bureau, set my Dopp case out by the sink, and over the following days my routine varied little. I was in and out of NICU constantly, but went mostly at night, after Mrs. Adams, who kept vigil all day, sitting stiff-backed at bedside, departed, and while the British nurse, Teresa Hunt, was on duty. When I wasn’t at the hospital, or trying to catch a few hours’ sleep, I was scrambling after leads on Alouette.

I learned the monitors, what they were for and their various sounds; learned about blood gases and hematocrits, interstitial edemas, fibrosis, fluid overload, lipids and hyperalimentation, surfactant. I got to know several of the nurses and doctors by name, and never missed the fatigue and sadness in their eyes as they answered my questions or told me that all was pretty much as before. I spent hour after hour sitting on metal stools or in rocking chairs by Baby Girl McTell’s incubator, staring in at her and speaking softly (once, not knowing what else to say, I recited “The Raven” and much of the prologue to The Canterbury Tales ), helping Teresa or other nurses whenever I could with small tasks of caring for her.

On the streets by contrast, as I asked after Alouette, shooting pool with young hawks in satiny sweats, going into busy barbershops and sitting there as if waiting my turn for a cut while I talked to others, handing out cigarettes to elderly men clustered in scrubby street-side parks or around bars and convenience stores, I learned nothing.

Teresa and I had dinner a couple of nights, collecting surreptitious looks and the occasional outright glare at Denny’s and a barbeque place, then one morning as we were leaving the hospital together, to no one’s particular surprise, I think, went on to breakfast and to her house on Biscoe Street. It never happened again; there was never much question it would, really; and Teresa and I remained close.

Hospital records, as I anticipated, were of no help at all. None of the usual places a footloose young woman might alight briefly-shelters, Clarksville’s only (church-run) soup kitchen, a strip of music clubs near the heart of the city-bore any visible trace of Alouette’s passage. I showed her picture at malls, game arcades, on streets around what passed here for pricey downtown hotels, always prime panhandling territory.

Finally, after a couple of calls had passed back and forth between Don and myself, I met a Sergeant Travis for coffee and had him fill me in on local drug action. Much of it, he said, took place around schools and downtown bars; nothing new there. And a lot of it was small potatoes, ten or twelve hopheads carting pills, grass and cocaine, scrambling to pay for their own monkey.

I asked him about crack.

That too, he said, though it wasn’t near as big here as in larger cities. Not yet, anyway.

And once you got past those ten or twelve user-friendlies?

He waited till the waitress poured more coffee and moved away. “You do not realize this is an ongoing investigation?”

“I’m not a cop or a fed. I won’t step on anyone’s toes. Or on my own dick.”

“Yeah, well. I’m only here as a favor to NOPD. We really don’t know what you are.”

So, briefly, I told him.

He sat quietly a moment, afterwards.

“Guy calls himself Camaro’s probably the one you’d want to see.”

“I need to guess what he drives?”

“Prob’ly not. Around here, if he didn’t sell it, he knows who did. Got tentacles running out everywhere.”

“Everywhere, huh.”

“I won’t lie to you: there’s been a couple times we were able to do one another a favor. More than a couple. You know how it is.”

“You get a bust, he gets the competition offed.”

“That old sweet song.”

“Where’s Camaro likely to be this time of day?”

“He’s not at the Chick’n Shack up on Jefferson, then he’s at the Broadway, a bar-and grill, the sign says, though I never saw anybody ever cook, or for that matter eat anything there-corner of Lee and Twelfth.”

“Can I say you sent me?”

“You can say whatever you want. He’s only going to hear what he wants to, regardless.”

I stood and thanked him, shook hands.

“No problem,” he told me. “May want to call in the favor someday, who knows?”

I found the eponymous pusher sitting at a booth in the Broadway, near a front window where he could keep an eye on his chariot. It was truly a splendid vehicle, beetle green with strips of chrome highlighting windows, doors, hood and trunk. A filigree of silver paint running down each side. His, their, name in silver script at one edge of the front left fender.

Camaro wore a beige suit, mostly cotton from the look of it, with a blue shirt and rust-colored tie tugged loose at the neck. The clothes set off the deep coffee color of his skin. As he lifted his drink, I caught a glimpse of gold watch and signet ring. He looked for all the world like a successful C.P.A. decompressing after a day at the computer.

He watched me walk over and sit across from him in the booth. The waitress was there instantly, dropping one of those stiff little napkins on the table in front of me. I ordered a scotch, water by. Sat drinking it, smiling over at him.

“Hope I ain’t bothering you too much, sitting here like this,” he said after a while.

I shook my head, smiled some more.

“I mean, you got friends or the rest of your band coming or something, you just let me know and I’ll be glad to make room, okay?”

He took a long pull off his drink, pretty much killing it. Held up a hand to signal the waitress.

“You about ready for another one, too, friend?”

I laid a ten on the table. “My round.”

“Whatever you say.”

I introduced myself and over that drink and another, we talked as freely as two black men with secrets, rank strangers to one another, ever can. Camaro’s mind was orderly and sharp; his world was a kind of pool or glade where the edges of discrete bodies of information glided by one another, sometimes catching. When I told him about Baby Girl McTell, he said he’d had a kid years ago, when he wasn’t much more than one himself, that it had lived three weeks in an incubator, shriveling up the whole time till it looked like a piece of dried fruit, and then died.

I said I was looking for the baby’s mother. Explained that she’d left the hospital and not gone back to her grandmother’s, had dropped out of sight.

“And she’s a user,” he said, at my sudden glance adding: “Only reason you’d be here. That what messed the baby up?”

I nodded.