James Sallis - Moth

“Thank you.”

I wrote down the address he gave me.

“One thing,” he said.

“Yeah?”

“Try to keep from going nuclear on this one? You’re not in the big city now. We try to keep a lower profile out here, not draw too much attention to ourselves.”

I told him I’d do what I could. Neither of us believed it.

The house was up in West Memphis, on the outskirts, in a part of town owing its existence to the spillover from Memphis military bases during World War II, a warren of apartment-size simple wood homes set close in row after row like carrots in a garden. Narrow, bobtail driveways had eroded through the years, cowlicks of grass and hedge pushing through them; many of the carports had become extra rooms, utility sheds, screened-in porches; trailers were grafted onto some. Abandoned refrigerators, motorcycles and decaying cars sat in yards beside swing sets and inflatable pools.

I pulled to the curb at 3216 Zachary Taylor. Out my side window in the distance I could see the wing-like curve of the Arkansas-Mississippi Bridge. I’d had to drive on into Memphis, drop onto Riverfront Drive, and loop back across the bridge into Arkansas. I started up the brief walk, hearing what sounded like reggae country music from inside. Marley in Nashville, maybe. Jimmy Cliff and His Country Shitkickers.

Remembering Camaro’s admonitions, I knocked politely at the door. No one responded, so I knocked, politely, again. Then, with still no response, as politely as possible I started kicking.

The door opened and a man maybe half my age stood there. Brush-style blond hair, fatigue pants with a white Hanes T, lizard cowboy boots. Pumper muscles and an earring. Tumbler in hand. Tequila, from the smell of it.

“What is your problem ?”

Behind him, from different rooms, both Randy Travis and reggae were playing at high volume, crashing onto one another’s beach, from time to time blending in an oddly beautiful way.

“Oh. Sorry. Didn’t think you’d heard me.”

“We heard you. They heard you over in Little Rock, man.”

“Good. It’s so hard to be heard in this world. Thank you.”

“Mama brought you up right, did she? Manners like that, I’d think you couldn’t be anything but one of those biblebeaters that come through here every week or so. They’re always wearing a coat and tie, too. Don’t nobody else ‘round here.”

He took a sip of his drink.

“But of course you ain’t no biblebeater, are you?”

“No sir, I have to tell you I’m not. But I do wonder if you might do me the favor of answering a question or two. I won’t trouble you to take much of your time.”

“And why would I answer any questions you’d have? Unless you have a warrant, that is.”

“Warrant?”

“Come on, you got cop on you like slime on a snail.”

Another, shorter man with a close-cut helmet of hair, vaguely elfish, had joined him at the door. Squinting beneath monumental eyebrows he said, “Yeah, man, this the new South. Nigger cops ever’where.”

“You go on back inside now, Bobo. We’re doing just fine out here.”

“So that’s the way it is here in America. What made us great,” he said to me. “You come back with a warrant, or the next time it’s clear trespass. You hear what I’m saying?”

Uh-oh. This guy watched cop shows; I was in trouble.

He shut the door.

When it stopped against my foot, he glanced down.

Then he looked back up at me and, for a split second before he caught himself, over my shoulder.

It was enough.

I went down, rolling, as the guy behind me swung and, meeting no resistance, connected with Mr. Warrant midchest, a glancing blow, then toppled himself.

I pivoted back like a break dancer and slammed my feet into Warrant’s kidneys. His glass bounced off the front wall and rebounded, spinning, into the small entryway, came up against vinyl coping and stopped there, rocking back and forth. I hooked fingers into his neck now that he was down. Put a heel hard against the other one’s balls and felt him curl in on himself.

“Your call,” I told him. “Funny how so much of life comes down to attitude, huh?”

“Hold on, man,” he said. “We can talk about this.” And the minute I started backing off his windpipe and carotid: “ Bobby Ray !”

Who trotted in from a room to the right where the face of some talk-show host filled a TV screen like an egg in a bottle, nailing live audience and viewers with sincere clear eyes.

Bobby Ray had a sincere Walther PPK in one hand.

I had a coat rack.

It caught him full across neck and chest. Remember Martin Balsam pedaling backward down the stairs in Psycho ?

His head came up off the floor like a turtle’s, trying for air. Didn’t get it. The head went back down. He was still.

I set the coat rack back down in the corner. A few well-anchored coats swung to a stop on its hooks; most were on the floor.

“You have a right not to move,” I told Mr. Warrant. “You get up and I use you to clean furniture. You hear what I’m saying?”

He nodded.

I picked up the PPK and walked into the next room. Faces turned toward me. Petals on a wet black bough. A modest buffet of drugs was set out on a card table: joints, bowls of colored pills, a couple of small covered plastic containers, a marble cheese board with razor and some remains of white powder on it.

Feeding time at the zoo.

“Our savior.”

“Ecce homo. And I do mean mo’.”

“Show-and-tell time, obviously.”

“Black’s definitely beautiful.”

“Validate your parking ticket, sir?”

“Pizza dude’s here.”

“Help.”

Alouette said nothing.

I found her in the back bedroom, lying on two stacked mattresses, nude, between a skinny black man and a fat 44-D blonde. They were passing a fifth of Southern Comfort back and forth over her. The Green Acres theme erupted from a bedside TV.

I dug into the hollow of her neck. There was a pulse, albeit a weak one.

“Where’s the phone?”

He looked at me and, without looking away, handed the bottle across to the blonde. She grappled and found it, hauled it in, breast swinging.

In one continuous move I took it from her and smashed it against the headboard. Held a most satisfying handle and bladelike shard of glass against the man’s throat as I watched his hard-on dwindle to nothing, with the impossibly sweet reek of oranges washing over us.

“ Now ,” I said.

His eyes swept toward the floor. Again, again. I reached under the bed and pulled out the phone. Dialed 911.

“Thirty-two sixteen Zachary Taylor,” I said. Overdose, I was going to say, but heard instead: “Officer down.” There’d be hell to pay. But the ambulance was there in four minutes.

While we were waiting, new muscle came into the room. Three of them.

“That’s the guy did Lonnie,” one of them said. “Busted his jaw.”

“Son of a bitch.”

“Oyster time.”

I lifted the PPK.

We were still facing one another off when the ambulance and four police cars careened into place.

Time to remember lots of prison films. Lisping Tony Curtis chained to a black stud, spoon handles ground down to knives against cement floors, lights dimming all over town as Big Lou got fried moments before the stay of execution came, college students on summer vacation in the South pulled over by big-bellied cops and railroaded onto chain gangs. And the novels: Malcolm Braly’s On the Yard , Chester Himes’s Cast the First Stone .

On the way in, in the squad car, one of the cops asked me what the hell I thought I was doing.