Moth by James Sallis Read Free Book Online Page B

thought: there were things in the world that needed doing. Missions to be undertaken, wrongs to right, rights to champion.
    Lew the Giant Killer.

Chapter Seven
    S O AT MIDNIGHT OR THEREABOUTS, HERE I AM , with a list of this guy’s habitats and less sense than your average lemming, prowling bars along Louisiana and Dryades looking for the chicken man.
    Just like the good old days. Shut away from the world, the heady smell of piss and beer and barely contained fury all around me. And threading through it all, like a Wagnerian leitmotif, the quiet refrain: This is none of your business, Griffin, none at all.
    I remembered a history professor back at LSUNO talking about the Russians’ propensity for throwing themselves beneath tanks just to slow things down; saying that such irrational ferocities made them fearsome fighters.
    But I was just going to talk to this guy, of course.
    The Ave. Social & Pleasure Club was my tenth or twelfth try. I’d started at Henry’s Soul Food and Pie Shop over on Claiborne and worked my way here.
    It was a cinderblock affair, the butt half of a grocery whose painted-over windows advertised Big Bo’ Po-Boys and Fresh Seafood, with an unbelievably crude painting of a crab holding a po-boy in its claws and (who would have thought it possible?) leering. The club, alas, didn’t get such star treatment: only its name and a long arrow pointing to the single door.
    Several underfed light bulbs hung here and there from the ceiling as though waiting for their mothers to come take them home. Most of the light came from two pool tables in back. I shuffled to the bar against the right wall, which looked to have been cobbled together from scraps of cabinet wood and countertopping, and ordered a beer. Archaeological layers of odor here: raw whiskey, stale beer, urine and sweat; the edgy smell of fish, rotting greens and sour milk from next door; under it all, mildew and mold, a fusty smell that seems to be everywhere in New Orleans.
    Most of the activity, like most of the light, was concentrated around the pool tables. A man and woman barely old enough to be in here legally sat nearby at one of a number of battered, unmatched tables. The man drained his malt liquor can, reached for the woman’s and said, “Now baby you know where I stays.” There were a couple more guys at the bar perched on wobbly stilt-like stools.
    “Do me a beer, man?” one of them said, turning his whole upper body to look at me. “I’m hurtin’.”
    He got his beer.
    “Here’s to Truth, Justice and the American Way,” he said, lifting his glass in a toast. “All those wunful things we fought for.” He belched. “ ‘Long with career politics, of course.”
    One of the players in back made a tough shot and for a while everybody kept busy walking around the tables doing high fives, slapping palms, exchanging money.
    “You in here a lot?” I said.
    He thought about it. “I ain’t here, Luther don’t bother opening up.”
    “Know a guy named T.C.? Regular, they tell me. Tall dude—”
    He grinned. Not a good sign.
    “—hair cut short, wears one earring. Light skin.”
    “Man, I tell you, these beers be disappearing in a hurry on a day like this one here. You notice that?”
    I put another five on the bar in front of him.
    “Well, then. He be coming out of the bathroom back there just about any time now, I ‘spect,” he said after ordering and sampling a new beer. “What you want with T.C. anyway? He ain’t much.”
    “Friend asked me to talk to him.”
    “Ain’t much for talk, either.”
    And at that, as if on cue, the man himself stepped into the penumbra of light behind the pool players, six-four or-five and at least two-fifty, all of it muscle except maybe the earring, followed a moment later by two guys in sportcoats and jeans who hurried on out of the bar.
    He watched me approach without registering anything at all: alarm, suspicion, caution, interest. Or humanity, for that matter.
    “Buy you a