James Sallis - Moth

“Quite.”

I had never told her about Vicky. Now I did.

“You loved her,” Teresa said when I finished.

“Oh yes.”

“And you let her go.”

“The way one lets the wind blow, or the sun come up. She made her own choices, her own decisions. There wasn’t much I could do.”

“There are always things we can do, Lew. You could have gone back with her. She asked.”

I shook my head, much as I had done all those years ago. I handed Teresa the mug. She drank and passed it back.

“Do you hear from her?”

“I did, for a while. Less and less as time went on. She had a family, a son, a busy husband doing important things, a new daughter. And her own career, of course. Ties loosen. Memories get hung on walls or put away in the corners of drawers and life goes on.”

Teresa held out the almost-empty mug and, when I shook my head, drank off the last swig of tea herself. Then she pried the lid off the coffee, sipped, passed it on to me. We were all sitting on a long plastic-covered couch under the picture window with its theater-curtain drape, looking at cinderblock painted green and light from the bathroom spilling out over brown carpeting.

“You miss her,” Teresa said.

“I miss a lot of things-”

“She wasn’t a thing, Lew.”

“-but the train keeps moving on.”

“When I was ten,” Beth Ann said, “my sister, the one who raised me after my folks died, put me on a train to Chicago, to see my grandparents. I’d never been out of Charleston, never been much of anywhere but home and the Catholic school I attended. I was scared to death. I didn’t even know there were bathrooms on the train. And I was starved. I’d left home at six in the morning without breakfast and everybody around me now was eating chicken or sandwiches out of bags and boxes. I hadn’t moved this whole time. I was just sitting there, half a step from peeing my pants, when a conductor walked up. I’ll never forget him. A white man, in his thirties I guess, though he seemed horribly old at the time. And he just said: Come with me, girl. Took me back to the club car, showed me where the bathroom was, the one he and the other employees used. And the rest of that trip he kept bringing me ham sandwiches. Just a slice of ham, two pieces of white bread and mayonnaise, but they tasted better than anything else I’d ever had in my life.”

We’d long ago finished the coffee, but had kept passing the mug back and forth in one of those spontaneous, unspoken inspirations that occasionally arise. Whoever held the mug (we now realized, all at once) had to speak.

Teresa: “Many women have loved you, Lew.”

Beth Ann: “Life could be worthwhile without Terri, I know that. There would be reasons to go on living. I would find them. But right now I can’t imagine what they might be.”

Teresa: “Coming here, to the States to live-for a single year, I thought then-I felt as Columbus must have felt. I was falling off the edge of the world, leaving civilization behind me. Then I discovered malls! fast food! credit cards!”

Me: “Once in the sixties I remember seeing spray-painted on the wall of a K amp;B: Convenience Kills.”

Teresa: “ ‘For arrogance and hatred are the wares peddled in the thoroughfares.’ ”

B.A.: “Yeats.”

Me: “ ‘A Poem for My Daughter.’ Now I’m the fifty-year-old, unsmiling, unpublic man.”

“I think we need to give some thought to food,” Teresa said. “Food seems essential.”

“I think we’re all still waiting for that conductor,” Beth Ann said.

The sun was edging up by the time we climbed into Teresa’s car to head for a restaurant out on the loop. I sat between her and Beth Ann in the front seat. Morning light filled our conversation, too; shadows fell away. When they dropped me back at the motel an hour or so later, after two pecan waffles and a gallon of coffee, I’d begun filling slowly with light myself.

I showered, put on real clothes (Verne called them “grown-up clothes,” I suddenly remembered) and went to the hospital to see what I needed to do. Day Administrator Katherine Farrell, a woman in her late fifties and more handsome than pretty, striking nonetheless, expressed her condolences and said that Mrs. Adams had already signed the necessary papers.

I found her sitting in the covered bus stop outside the hospital. I sat down beside her. We watched traffic go by.

“Ain’t the first or the last time either of us lost something,” she said after a while.

“No, m’am.”

A workhorse of an old Ford pickup, fenders ripped away, heaved past, wearing the latest of several coats of primer. A beetle-green new Toyota followed close behind. Rap’s heavy iambs, its booming bass, washed over us.

“I want you to know I’ve been talking to those nurses in there. They tell me you loved that little girl, that you’re a good man. And judging from what you said on the way here, my daughter turned out a fair good woman.”

“Yes, m’am. She did. She always was.”

“Been wrong before.”

“Yes, m’am.” Then, after a moment, nothing more forthcoming: “Thank you.”

I stood. “My car’s in the lot, Mrs. Adams. I’ll drive you back home now, if you’re ready.”

She put her hand out and I took it. It was like holding on to dry twigs.

“I’d appreciate that, Lewis,” she said.

I was back in Clarksville by midafternoon and, after a quick meal at a place called The Drop, stretched out at the motel for a few hours’ sleep. I’d got almost half of one of those hours when the phone rang.

I struggled to the surface and said, “Yeah?”

“Sorry about the kid. I know how that feels, and that nothing I can say’s going to help. You know who this is, right?”

I nodded, then came a little more awake and said, “Camaro.” The world was swimming into focus, albeit soft.

“You okay, man?”

“Fine. Just haven’t managed much sleep this last couple of days.”

“Know how that is, too. I can call back.”

“No reason to. What’s up?”

“Well …” It rolled on out for half a minute or so. “Probably shouldn’t be calling you at all. Last time I did, from what I hear, you went apeshit and ralphed those boys right into the hospital. You ever hear of asking a guy first?”

“I asked.”

“Oh yeah? Remember to say please?”

“I’m sure I did. Rarely forget that. I may have left off the thank you, though, now that I think about it.”

“Ever had your jaw wired, Griffin?”

“Came close a few times.”

“I bet you did. Probably chew the wires up and spit them at people. Well, what the fuck, those boys are pretty much garbage anyway. You don’t take them out to the curb, someone else will.”

“So: you called up to give me a few hot tips on navigating the complex social waters of postcolonial Mississippi. Or just to chat, for old times’ sake? Not that we share any old times.”

“We all know you’re bad by now, Griffin.”

“Yeah, well, I need sleep more than I need bullshit right now.”

“You also need help finding your girl. Though damn if I know why anyone’d want to help you.”

“It’s my honest face. My purity of heart. My high position in antebellum society. And the twenties I spread around. What do you have?”

“Thought you always remembered to say please.”

“Please.”

“There’s a girl, Louette, that’s been kind of living at this dealer’s house just over the state line. I mean, they finally took a look around and realized she’s been there at least a month. Helping out at first you know, doing the guys when they were able or whatever, but since then just hunkering down there, riding a big free one. Even they know that’s not good business.”