Moth by James Sallis Read Free Book Online Page A

A pause. Could you call me when you get a chance? Please?
    She answered, breathing hard, after six or seven rings.
    “Lew. Thanks for calling back. Give me a minute, okay? I was doing my rehab stuff.”
    Threaded on the phone’s fine silver nerve, we hung there. I listened as her breathing slowed.
    “Okay, thanks. I know this is a bad time.”
    “Something about a friend, you said.”
    “Sheryl Silva. She works in dietary at the school and usually takes her break when I do, right before lunchtime. For her it’s a little island of peace between preparation and storm. And after three straight periods, the last one my honors group, I’m pretty desperate. I try to stay away from the teachers’ lounge, which is mostly bitching and conversations about children or new refrigerators, neither of which I have or expect to. So there’d just be the two of us there in the lunchroom, and after a while we fell into the habit of sitting together. Though a lot of the time we wouldn’t say much of anything. Just sit there sipping iced tea, smiling vaguely at one another and looking out a window. Then last week she asks me if I’m ‘married or anything.’ I mean, we know absolutely nothing about one another. And when I tell her no, she asks me if I ever had a man beat me, or try to hurt me. Says she has, when I tell her no, but she thought that was all over.”
    “And it isn’t.”
    “I think it’s just threats, so far, from what she tells me.”
    “Husband?”
    “I don’t know. She wasn’t too clear about that. They lived together, at any rate.”
    “Lived. You sure we’re talking past tense here? Le passé simple?”
    For a moment I was flooded with a sense of unreality, as though lights had dimmed and now I could see the stage set around me for the insubstantial, trumped-up thing it was, and knew the actors very soon must exit to stage-left lives of lunch meat, arrogant children, cars needing tires and new batteries. A cue card flipped up in the back of my mind; or a prompter whispered beyond the footlights. This is none of your business, Griffin, none of your business at all. But I had a longtime habit of ignoring scripted lines and improvising.
    “Not for a while. I asked her what he’d done and she just looked at me. And then, after a minute, she said: Well, he put these dead chickens in my mailbox. And on the back porch. Just kind of hung them out there, like a string of peppers or garlic.”
    “She black or white?”
    “Latin.”
    “Too bad. She be black, she know zackly what to do: fry them suckers.”
    “Very funny, Lew. Maybe I should hang up and call Dr. Ruth instead. She probably knows a few tricks you can do with chickens.”
    “Might read you her favorite salivious, I mean lascivious, passages from Frank Harris. Salacious? Man had a way with geese, as I recall.”
    “Look, this is the thing: You can talk to him, make him see he’s heading for real trouble if this goes on.”
    “Man to man, hm?”
    “Yeah, kind of.”
    “Well, Clare, I tell you. While it’s true I used to do that sort of thing once in a while, it’s also true that at the time I was twenty years younger and hadn’t been riding my buns and a desk for six years straight. Be like all those almost hairless guys from the sixties trying to make their comeback as rock and rollers, i.e., ludicrous. Besides, all my tie-dye’s at the cleaners.”
    “Please, Lew. As a favor to me? How can you turn down a poor little crippled girl?”
    “Oh. Well, since you put it like that.”
    “Then you’ll do it?”
    “I’ll talk to the guy, Clare. Politely. And that’s all. He says boo, I’m a ghost.”
    “You’re a jewel.”
    But when I looked in the mirror afterwards it wasn’t sparkle I saw, more like a dullness that drew everything else to it. I remembered how old and used-up Walsh had looked to me the day of Verne’s funeral. I couldn’t be looking much better, and probably looked a hell of a lot worse. But enough of such reverie, I