Free Moth by James Sallis Page B

Thinking now of many things. Walking thick woods in predawn mists beside my father, the smell of oil from his shotgun at once earthy and sharp in my nose. Vicky and I on our first, awkward dates. LaVerne twenty-six years old in a white suit across the table from me at Port of Call. My son’s last postcard, and the taped silences from my answering machine that I somehow always knew were from him and still kept in a desk drawer.
    Ceaselessly into the past. Kierkegaard was right: we understand our lives (to the extent that we understand them at all) only backwards.
    Backwards was the way I caught up with Roach, too, as it turned out.
    Like many city dwellers, I try to carry a kind of bubble of awareness around me always, alert to whatever happens within that radius. And now as I stepped off a curb, without knowing how or where, I sensed the zone had been violated—just seconds before I was seized from behind, arm at my neck, and slammed against a wall.
    “Say you been asking all over for the Roach and don’t no one know you.”
    He was close to my size and at least ten years younger. Hair cut in what these days they’re calling a fade. Black T-shirt, baggy brown cargo pants, British Knight sneakers the size of tugboats. A most impressive scar along almost the full length of the arm pressed against my windpipe. One dainty ceramic earring.
    “Gmmph,” I said.
    He patted me down quickly with the other hand. “You cool?”
    I said “Gmmph” again.
    “Now it’s jus’ too damn hot for running. I have to run after you, that’s gonna make me mad.”
    The tugboats backed out a step or two. Air shuddered into my lungs.
    “Howyou … findme?” I said when I could.
    “Shit, man. You weren’t doing any good at finding me, so I figured I’d best come find you. How many old black farts you think we see down here asking for the Roach, anyhow? And wearing a sportcoat?”
    “I’m not a cop.”
    “Even cops ain’t stupid as that. Not most of them, anyway.”
    He paused to stare at a group coming toward us. They had been looking on inquisitively, but now hurried to cross the street.
    “My name’s Lew Griffin. I—”
    “I be damn. Lew Griffin. You don’t remember me, do you? Course not. No reason you should. I was in a house down here same time as you, man, must be eight, nine years ago. People wondered about you, talked some. You roomed with a guy named Jimmie later got hisself killed. Heard you did something about that.”
    I hadn’t—not the way he meant, anyway—but I let it pass. Never dispute a man who thinks you’re a badass.
    “So how you been, man?”
    “Just about every way there is to be, one time or another,” I told him. “Right now I’m good.”
    “You know it.” He stepped back, as though suddenly noticing me crowded there against the wall. “So what you want with the Roach, Griffin? You’re a drinker, as I recall—and memory’s my other thing that always works fierce. Not behind pills and powder.”
    “I’m looking for a girl named Alouette. Guidry, but I don’t know she’d be using that name. You know her?”
    “Might. She family?”
    I shook my head. “Favor for a friend.”
    “Then I know her. Did, anyway. Stone fox, the way these light women get all of a sudden they’re thirteen, fourteen.”
    “Alouette’s eighteen.”
    “You know, I found that out. Had to cut her loose, too, but that wudn’t the reason. Sorry to have to do it, I tell you that.”
    “What was the reason?”
    “She carrying around some heavy shit, Griffin, you know what I mean? Now I’ll do a line same as the next man, I won’t hold that against no one. But Lou, you let her do a few lines, even get a few drinks and a toke or two in her, and it’d be like this big hairy thing had climbed out of a cage somewhere. She was doing a lot of crack there toward the end, too, and there ain’t nobody don’t go crazy on that shit.”
    “When did you last see her?”
    “Must be four, five months ago, at