James Sallis - Moth

“It should. But what it really feels like, is that the hole in me, the one that’s always been there, just got bigger. And now I know it won’t ever be filled.”

I removed my hand to pat hers briefly and retrieve my tea. “Well. That last beer seems to have carried me right past philosophical and poetic drunk straight to maudlin.”

“In vino veritas.”

“I never found any. And God knows I spent enough years looking. Right now-I’ve been giving this some thought-I’ve decided that I may have just enough energy left to crawl up the stairs to my room.”

We walked up together, and at the head Alouette turned back.

“Why did you tell me about David, Lewis?”

Because it’s the deepest, most guarded thing in me that I have to give you, I thought.

“I don’t know,” I said.

I spent most of the next day chasing snipe. No one in any bar in New Orleans had ever seen anyone remotely resembling Treadwell’s son. Most of them couldn’t even be bothered to look at the snapshot. He had not registered at any of the employment services, applied for a driver’s license or library card (how’s that for desperation?), rented storage space or a postal box from one of the private facilities. No parking tickets had been issued to any vehicle registered in his name. Local credit and collection agencies had received no inquiries.

At four that afternoon I was sitting in a coffeehouse on Magazine, Rue de la Course, gulping my second large cafe au lait from a glass and watching downtown workers bolt for an early start out of the CBD. Nineteenth-century testimonials to the social position and restorative powers of coffeehouses, hand-lettered, hung on the wall at eye level, at least a dozen of them, most with cheap frames askew. It had been some time since anyone took note of them.

Because I could think of nothing else to do, yet remained more or less in function mode, I called Tito, and was surprised when he picked up.

“Hey,” he said. “I was gonna call you and couldn’t find that card you gave me. It’s here somewhere. Cause I heard from the guy you were asking about. Told me he got picked up in the Quarter a few nights ago and he’s been in jail all this time, so I guess it wasn’t him that tried to rip me off after all. You still got a message for him, I wanted you to know he says he’s getting out in the morning.”

“You be there a while?”

“What for?”

“Thought I might bring by some solid appreciation.”

“Hey. It’s a favor, man. Like I say, I heard about you. And besides, it’s the second week of the month. Got to go see my parole officer. Cute little thing. Always got a bow in her hair, different one each time. Great ass, for a white girl.”

“Has a lot of good advice for you, I bet.”

“Deep conversations. She know what it like here, no doubt about it.”

“Tito: thanks, man.”

“Just don’t forget, Lew Griffin. Next time, maybe I’m the one needs a favor, who knows. Happens.”

“It does indeed.”

I walked to Prytania, got a cab and gave the driver my home address. Halfway there, I told him to swing over to St. Charles and drop me at Louisiana instead.

I was working on pure intuition-maybe the closest thing to principle I had. Connections were being made, switches getting thrown, at some level not accessible to me. I only had to go with it, ride it.

I went up those stairs and into the kitchen as though it were my own. Heard the rasp and scuttle of someone else in the next room.

I stepped in and saw Treadwell’s kid bent over the mattress in the niche. Late sunlight threw a perfect print of miniblinds against one wall.

“Find what you’re looking for?”

How often does it happen, after all?

He straightened. “Who the fuck are you ?” He came up and around and had a gun in hand. The.38 from under the chair cushion. I saw his eyes and knew what was going to happen.

The choice was clear: stand still and get shot straight on, or move and possibly, just possibly, minimize damage.

So instinctively I dove to the left. It felt as though someone had slammed the heel of his hand, hard, against my right shoulder. I was watching his face, then suddenly the back wall. Couldn’t feel my right side at all. Then I was out for a while.

I came to on the stretcher. Saw my father’s face upside down as they hoisted me into an ambulance. Lots of other faces watching.

“I’ve been wanting to talk to you,” I told him.

“You’re gonna be okay,” he said. “It’s not bad. Take some deep breaths.”

“I miss you, Dad.”

“We’ve stopped the bleeding. Try to be still. There’s a needle in your hand, for fluids, just a precaution.”

“You both were sitting on the car. You looked so young, so happy. What happened?”

“You’ve been shot, Mr. Griffin. You’re going to be okay.”

I caromed down a hall and into a room with bright lights overhead. An authoritative voice: the resident. Deferential ones: staff nurses. And one other.

“Mr. Griffin. Lewis. I know you can hear me. You’re going to be all right. Listen to me.”

A British accent. Wouldn’t you know.

It was good theater, as they say, meaning that the playwright’s contrived a way to get all his themes and characters and the underwear of his plot with its bad elastic crowded onstage at play’s end for the big finale.

The old man lies on his sickbed and people file in and out, dragging behind them like bags of wool the very stuff of his life: his forfeitures and silences, his assumptions, his regrets.

So, propped up on pillows in my float of a bed with arm and shoulder taped firmly in place, for several days I held court, an improbable Rex, as faces streamed by: Walsh, Chip Landrieu, Richard Garces, Tito, Alouette.

Once, early on, I dreamed that Treadwell’s son was there. Standing against a blue plaster wall, otherwise surrounded by sky, he held a gun loosely in hand. A flag had come out of the gun’s barrel and unfurled; it read Bang. He said: You will not find me, get this sad certainty firmly in your head. Quoting Cocteau.

Another time LaVerne was there, eyes brimming with the world’s pain and all the things left unsaid between us as she silently approached and leaned down to kiss me. Take care of my girl, she said. I awoke with a jolt of disorientation and loss.

Sometime on the third or fourth day, Walsh brought Treadwell by, as I’d asked, and I told him what I knew, sensing the spill of despair into his life. He kept his head down, thanked me and left. Walsh and I sat looking at one another a moment, then he shook his own head and followed.

Alouette was there when I first awoke, and came by the next two afternoons, after work. Things were fine at home, she told me, and she’d be starting school in January. Her father had called once or twice, but just to talk. And oh, yeah, before she forgot, a couple of things had come up at the house that she needed money for. I gave her most of what I had on me and said if she needed more, let me know.

But I did know, of course. Knew as surely as I think Dean Treadwell must have known. Even if, at the time, I declined putting it into words.

Alouette didn’t show up the next day, and when I called the house, I got myself on the answering machine. I tried again two or three times that night, then again in the morning.

I was standing in front of a mirror, trying to figure out what to do with the other half of the shirt I’d managed to get my left arm into, when the doctor who operated on me came by on rounds. His name was Kowalski, he was chief resident on the surgical service, came from Chicago and was a rock climber. Most of our conversation had been about the last. Three years ago in Arizona a friend climbing beside him, another resident, had fallen and broken his back. Kowalski had immobilized him with climbing rope and sections he hollowed from saguaro cactus, lashed together a rough travois and carried him out. The friend had made a full recovery. Somehow you got the idea that nothing in the surgeon’s formal practice was ever going to live up to that one bright segment of improvisation.