James Sallis - Moth

I always forget how very much alike rural and inner-city attitudes are.

Asking at the motel office, a gas station nearby, another on the highway and, finally, a postman I drove by a couple of times on a dirt road six or eight miles outside Clarksville, I found the house, a two-story frame, white many years ago. A jeep and a ‘55 Chevy rusted away on blocks in the front yard. There were some appliances, including a vintage avocado refrigerator, sitting at precarious angles at the side of the house. A tractor covered in vines at the back. Two Mustangs and a BMW in the circular front drive.

I knocked at the door and politely inquired after Alouette to the young man in the beige silk suit and black T-shirt who eventually answered. A relative, I told him.

“Ain’t here,” he said after a moment.

“Thank you. But allow me to make an assumption, possibly unwarranted, from that. To wit: that she has, at some unspecified point in the past, been here, though she is not presently.”

“Say what?”

Another youngish man, unseen, joined him at the door: “What’s up, Clutch?”

“Nigger looking for his squeeze.”

“Yeah? He think we run some kind of dating service here? Tell him to get missing.”

“You heard the man,” Silky said.

“What man? All I heard’s your boy hiding back there behind the door.”

Silky sighed, and said door flew open. I have to tell you he was one ugly black man. Someone had been really creative with a knife or razor down both sides of his face and in one long jagged pull across his neck. The nose had spent as much time taped as not. He would have struck terror in all hearts, save for his stature: he was well under five feet tall. His body looked to be normal size, but everything else seemed oddly foreshortened. Neck, arms, legs, fingers. Temper.

“ I got your assumption, motherfucker. Right here.”

“Excuse me,” I said, looking straight ahead, “I hear something, but I don’t see anyone.”

Which was how I got the shit beat out of me again. Or how it started, anyway. I’d never make it as a standup comic, I guess.

The first guy went low, tumbling me over, as his dwarfish buddy scrambled up my back like a chimp and started hammering temples and kicking kidneys with considerable fervor. The taller one was trying valiantly to get a knee into my groin. I reached down and grabbed his nuts, crushing them together in my fist, bringing him up off the floor like an epileptic.

At the same time, holding on, I reached out and snagged in my left hand a thick wedge of wood used in warmer days to hold the door ajar. Slammed it hard into the dwarf’s mouth, as teeth caught at it and sinews, possibly the mandible, gave. Lodged it there.

I had a dim, peripheral perception of others standing just inside the door, watching.

I got up onto my knees. Blood ran down my face. I tossed my head to clear it out of my eyes. My lower back throbbed with pain and for days, whenever I peed, the water in the bowl went red.

“Where’s Alouette?”

“Man, if we knew, we’d tell you.”

This was from the tall guy, kind of grunting it out, hugging his nuts with both hands.

“Go on.”

“She be here a coupla times. Been a while.”

“How long?”

No response. I set the heel of my hand against the wedge and drove it in deeper. This time the mandible gave for sure.

“Jesus, man,” Silky said. “I don’t know. A week, maybe two.”

“Mrff, gdfftm, lfft,” the dwarf said. Blood bubbled up out of his nose when he breathed.

“You didn’t have to do that,” Silky said.

Probably not.

I stopped off at the Clarksville Regional ER for stitches and X rays. Nothing was broken, but everything hurt like hell. What else was new? I declined Tylenol 3, went back to my room, swallowed half a handful of aspirin and poured three fingers of scotch into the plastic cup. Watched part of a movie about child abuse. Poured another drink. Fell asleep there in the chair.

Then someone was pounding at my door.

I opened it. Sergeant Travis had two quart-size Styrofoam containers of coffee balanced piggyback in one hand, a paper bag of doughnuts in the other.

“Thought you might could use this.”

He held out the cups so I could take one and came on in. Put the bag on the dresser. The TV was still on and he sat watching a Tom and Jerry cartoon and sipping at coffee. I did the same.

“Your name kind of came up, Griffin.”

“Names have a way of doing that.”

“Made me wonder enough that I called your friend on the force in New Orleans, Walsh, and talked to him about you. He told me if he sent you out to the corner for a paper, chances would be about fifty-fifty of his actually getting one, but that he’d trust you with his life. One of your stranger character references.”

“Two of your stranger characters.”

He finished his coffee and dropped the cup into the trashcan. “You guys go back a ways, huh?”

“There’s history, yes.”

“You want one of these?” He’d snagged the bag of doughnuts and pulled one out. Chewed on it a moment and dropped it into the trashcan too. “Damn things always look so good. But they taste like sugared cardboard and turn into fists in your gut somewhere. Thing is, we had a report of probable assault from the hospital-”

“I made no such complaint.”

“Didn’t have to. We like to stay on top of things around here, Griffin. Man comes into ER all beat to hell, the staff’s just naturally going to let me know about it.”

“They’re not big fans of legal fine points such as patient confidentiality, I take it.”

“Well you know, city people are the ones that seem always to be worried about protecting their anonymity. Maybe that has something to do with why they’re city people. Town this size, everybody tends to know everybody else’s business anyway. This has to be one of the new ones,” he said, nodding toward the TV. “The old ones were rough as a cob-jerky and poorly drawn, violent-but they had a magic to them somehow.”

He shook his head sadly for all lost things.

“So I hear about this apparent assault and I have to wonder if there might be a connection between that and an incident out on county road one-seventeen a little earlier. Because someone big and black swooped in there like some kind of avenging angel-avenging what, no one knows-and beat the bejesus out of a couple of our self-employed businessmen. One of them’s having his jaw wired about now, gonna be getting tired of liquids pretty soon. People who were watching said this guy just walked up and took them down, just like that, no reason or anything.”

“There was probably reason.”

“Yeah.” His eyes hadn’t left the TV, where a cat, chasing a mouse, crossed offscreen right to offscreen left and moments later came fleeing back across, pursued by the mouse. “Probably so. Look: Walsh tells me you’re okay, I’m willing to go along with that, at least until I see different. But if you’re going to be running around busting jaws, I need to know now.”

“Things got a little out of hand.”

“Things have a way of doing just that. What I want is for you to tell me you’re going to be able to keep that hand closed, so things don’t get out of it anymore.”

I nodded.

“I’ll bust you quick as I will anyone else, if it comes to that, friends or no friends. And whether I personally want to or not. The point could come. You understand that, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“So I’m trusting you to walk carefully, and watch your back. Especially watch your back. Camaro didn’t have any way of knowing you were going to go in there and John Wayne those boys all to shit, or he wouldn’t have sent you out there. But those boys have a lot of business associates.”