Pegasus Descending

by James Lee Burke

  Over the years the streets had become paved and the privies replaced by indoor plumbing, but the Caribbean nature of the neighborhood and the function of the bar, one that Joe Dupree had referred to as a zebra hangout, remained unchanged.

  I turned off the asphalt into a gravel parking lot that was pooled with gray water and layered with flattened beer cans. The club was oblong, built of both cinder blocks and wood, all of it painted red and purple, the corrugated roof the color of an old nickel. Behind the building, a transformer on a pole was leaking sparks into the darkness, but a gasoline generator was roaring inside a wooden shed, powering the lights inside the bar. When I turned off the ignition, killing the windshield wipers, the rain cascaded down the glass.

  “That’s his Ford Explorer,” Clete said.

  “You’re sure?” I said.

  “He followed me all the way to New Orleans in it.”

  Clete’s humped shape, his porkpie hat tilted down on his forehead, was silhouetted against a streetlight. My twelve-gauge pump rested between his thighs, the barrel leaning away from him, against the dash.

  “I’m going through the front door. Watch the back,” I said.

  “How far you want to take this?”

  “That’s up to Raguza.”

  “I know you, Dave. You get us into rooms without doors or windows, then give yourself absolution for leaving hair on the walls.”

  “This from you?”

  “If you want to smoke the guy, I got a throw-down on my ankle. But get him out of the bar before you do it.”

  “You’re exaggerating the nature of the situation, Clete.”

  “Right,” he said.

  I unclipped my holster and my.45 from my belt and set them on the floor of the cab. Then I took my slapjack out of my raincoat pocket and set it on top of the holster. “Satisfied?”

  “Where’s your hideaway?” he asked.

  “Which hideaway?” I said.

  He tapped the edge of his loafer against my right ankle. “What’s that, a steel brace?”

  “Stay in the truck.”

  He pulled at his belt and made a face, but this time it wasn’t about me. “You got any Tums? I ate some shrimp spaghetti for lunch that smelled like three-day-old fish bait.”

  I got out in the rain. The power wire on the pole fell into the darkness, then struck a pool of water and snapped like a coach whip. Clete got out on the other side of the truck, the shotgun stiff and hard-looking inside his raincoat. He walked heavily toward the rear of the club, his big shoulders bent forward, the back of his neck glistening with rainwater.

  I pushed open the front door and stepped inside the smoky, air-conditioned coolness of the club. A long wood bar ran the length of one wall. The people drinking there glanced at the door and the inrush of rain, as though expecting an event, a messenger, a harbinger that would indicate a change in their lives. Then they returned to their drinks or watching their reflections in the bar mirror, hypnotized somehow by the stylized ways they smoked their own cigarettes.

  In an alcove to the right of the bar was a cone of yellow light, under which Lefty Raguza stood by a pool table, chalking the tip of his cue. He wore a pleated short-sleeved lavender shirt and cream-colored slacks and suede shoes with thick soles and heels. His sleeves were folded neatly on his upper arms so that his biceps bulged against the fabric with the tautness of muskmelons. He gave no indication of noticing my entry into the club, but I knew that he saw me, in the same way you know when a predator’s eyes brush across your skin, like the touch of a soiled hand.

  I ordered a glass of club soda and ice with a lemon twist at the bar and watched him in the mirror. He leaned over the table and busted an eight-ball rack all over the felt. A solitary ball dropped into a corner pocket, but he didn’t move toward his next shot. Instead, he set his cue butt-down on the floor and casually chalked his cue again, stroking the talc across the rounded surface, taking his time, ignoring the other shooter, who waited by the wall rack, obviously impatient for the game to go forward.

  “Tell you what,” Raguza said. “Three bucks on each ball in the string. Three to you for each one I leave.”

  The other shooter, a heavy man who looked like a Mexican laborer, nodded without speaking.

  Raguza bent over the table and sank one ball after another with the geometrical precision of an artist, banking shots, making combinations, using reverse English, crawling the cue ball along the rail until it whispered against the target ball and dropped it with a deep thud into a leather pocket.

  Then he scratched, with three balls still on the felt, the signature of a hustler who never allows the sucker to feel he’s been taken. But when Raguza went back to his table and joined a high-yellow woman who wore a knit tank top over a bulging bra, I could see the look of triumph in his eyes, the curl at the corner of his mouth.

  The back door opened and I felt the building decompress, the walls creaking slightly, as Clete came in from the storm and walked through the shadows, past a latticework partition into the men’s room.

  Clete had accused me of planning to take Lefty Raguza off the board. The truth was I had no plan. Or perhaps more honestly I had no conscious one. But I knew that Raguza belonged to that group of human beings whose pathology is always predictable. By reason of either genetic defect, environmental conditioning, or a deliberate choice to join themselves at the hip with the forces of darkness, they incorporate into their lives a form of moral insanity that is neither curable nor subject to analysis. They enjoy inflicting pain, and view charity and forgiveness as signals of both weakness and opportunity. The only form of remediation they understand is force. The victim who believes otherwise condemns himself to the death of a thousand cuts.

  So, if your profession requires that you remain within the parameters of the law, how do you deal with the Lefty Raguzas of the world?

  The answer is you don’t. You turn their own energies against them. You treat their personal histories with contempt. You yawn at their stories of neglect and deprivation and beatings by alcoholic fathers and promiscuous mothers. Worse, you laugh at them in front of other people. The effect can be like a bolt of lightning bouncing around inside a steel box.

  The bartender put a bowl of peanuts in front of me. His black hair looked like oily wire combed across his pate. “You a cop?” he said.

  “I look like a cop?”

  “Yeah,” he replied.

  “You never can tell,” I said.

  “We got free gumbo tonight. It’ll be done in a minute.” Behind him, a stainless-steel cauldron was starting to bubble on a ring of butane flame.

  I looked in the mirror at the reflection of Lefty Raguza. But now he had more company than the mulatto woman in the knit top. A man with washed-out blue eyes that did not fit his negroid face and ropelike black hair plaited down tightly on his scalp sat next to him. Sitting across from them was a man whose size and proportions took me all the way back to a specific moment in Opa-Locka, Florida, when Dallas Klein had burst out the back of the bar, trying to flee the consequences of his gambling addiction, and had collided into a man who seemed as big as the sky.

  What was the name? Nestor? Ernest? No, Ernesto. His neck rose into his gigantic head with no taper, as though his neck and jowls were one tubular column of meat and bone. The width and curvature of his upper back made me think of a whale breaking the surface of a wave.

  I looked toward the men’s room. Clete was still inside.

  “What are they drinking over there by the pool table?” I said.

  “Beer,” the bartender replied.

  I placed a twenty-dollar bill on the bar. “Send them a pitcher on me.”

  “Something I should know about here?” he asked.

  “Nothing I can think of,” I replied.

  A few moments later I watched in the mirror as the bartender set the pitcher in the midst of Lefty Raguza’s group. I saw Raguza glance in my direction, then tell the bartender to take the pitcher away. Clete was still not out
of the restroom. But showtime was showtime, I told myself. I picked up my club soda and walked past the pool table until I was standing behind Raguza’s chair.

  “You don’t like draft beer?” I said.

  The tin-shaded light over the pool table threw my shadow across Raguza’s hands and wrists. He waited a long time before he spoke. “This is a private party here,” he said.

  “Does this lady know your history, Lefty?” I said.

  “You need to beat feet, Jack. This is not your jurisdiction.” His hands were folded, his thumbs motionless. He didn’t turn his head when he spoke.

  I scraped a chair up behind him and sat down, so that I was looking over his shoulder, like a kibitzer at a card game. I stared into the face of the woman next to him. She tried to smile, then her eyes broke and her face went flat.

  “Lefty ever tell you about his psychiatric problems?” I said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “He likes to beat up women with his fists. It happens so fast they rarely know what hit them.”

  “I’m not sure what we’re talking about,” she said. She lowered her eyes and placed one hand on the tabletop. Then she took it away and placed it in her lap.

  “A prison psychiatrist once described Lefty as an anal-retentive. That means he was strapped on the training pot for long periods of time. I suspect his Jockey underwear is loaded with skid marks.” I laughed and clapped Raguza hard on the back, snorting when I inhaled. “How about it, Lefty? You ever download into your Fruit of the Looms?”

  I could see the back of his neck darken, like a shadow creeping from his collar to his boxed hairline. “Lefty has a problem with animals, too,” I said to the woman. “If you ask him why he’s cruel to a gentle and defenseless creature, he’ll probably tell you about all the hard breaks he had when he was a kid. The truth is Lefty hurts pets and innocent people because he’s a gutless punk and never could cut it on his own, either as a child or an adult. Lefty was probably a good bar of soap in prison, but don’t let him ever tell you he was stand-up or a solid con. He had sissy status even before he got to Raiford and was probably giving head in the bridal suite his first day down. Right, Lefty?”

  I let out a wheezing laugh and slapped him hard between the shoulder blades again. The muscles in his back were corded as tight as cable. The woman started to get up from her chair.

  “Sit down,” Lefty said. “This guy’s a drunk. He got run out of Miami, he got run out of New Orleans. He makes a lot of noise, then he goes away.”

  “Wish I could do that, Lefty, I mean just kind of disappear. But you poisoned ole Tripod. It takes a special sort of guy to do something like that.”

  Even from the side I could see his face scrunch. “I did what?” he said.

  “That’s the name of my daughter’s pet raccoon. He almost died because you mixed roach paste with sardines and put them in his pet bowl.” I looked across the table. “What would you do if you were in my place, Ernesto?”

  Ernesto’s eyes were small and brown, deep-set, nonexpressive. His hair was tied in a matador’s twist on the nape of his neck. He shrugged his shoulders and smiled in a self-deprecating fashion.

  “How about you?” I said to the man whose blue eyes didn’t match his face.

  He glanced from side to side, as though the answer to my question lay in some other part of the bar. His plaits looked like centipedes on his scalp. He wore a purple silk shirt and a crucifix and a P- 38 G.I. can opener on a chain around his neck. “I don’t got nothing to do wit’ dis, mon,” he said.

  “Glad to hear that, because Lefty here has been a bad boy. I wonder if Whitey knows that Lefty has been causing a lot of trouble over in Iberia Parish, like pouring acid all over Clete Purcel’s car. I thought you were a pro, Lefty, but the more I see your handiwork, the more I get the impression you’re just a little jailhouse bitch who can’t get it up unless he’s whacking on a helpless female. Is that because you’re short?”

  I saw the thumb on his left hand twitch slightly.

  “Those elevator soles on your stomps aren’t strong indicators of self-confidence,” I said. I patted him softly in the middle of the back and felt his skin constrict from the blow that didn’t come.

  “You’re wrapped too tight,” I said. “Relax, I’m not going to hurt you. You’re probably one of those guys who-” I started laughing again, my words breaking apart. “Seriously, you’re one of those guys who has a legitimate beef with the universe. It’s not easy being a little guy or the product of a busted rubber.” I hit him again, and laughed harder, coughing on the back of my wrist, my eyes watering. “Did your mother ever pick you up by inserting Q-tips in your ears? That’s a sure sign there are problems in the family.”

  His neck was blood-dark, the skin around his mouth drawn down like a shark’s. His hands were set squarely on the tabletop. He coughed deep in his throat and spoke in a clotted whisper, his eyes fastened on the opposite wall.

  “You got to speak up, Lefty,” I said.

  “I did thirty-seven days in isolation, in the dark, a cup of water and one slice of white bread a day. I can take the worst you got and spit it in your face.”

  “Really?”

  “I’m done talking with you. Find yourself an alcoholic titty to suck on. I can direct you to a topless bar full of guys like you,” he said.

  A man walked over from the bar and scraped up the cue ball from the pool table. He bounced it off two rails and watched it miss a pocket. “Anybody up for a game of rotation?” he asked.

  “Yeah, over here,” Raguza said, and threw three quarters on the felt.

  Ernesto and the man with the Islands accent grinned at him, happy in the knowledge their friend was back in the groove.

  I glanced toward the latticework partition in front of the men’s room. Clete was watching us from behind it, the shotgun still inside his raincoat, the brim of his hat low on his brow. I shook my head at him.

  I should have known Raguza wouldn’t rattle. He had stacked too much hard time in too many joints and had probably thrived in the prison population. Also, he may have seen Clete behind the latticework and figured he was being set up to get blown out of his socks.

  I got up from the chair and went back to the bar to retrieve my hat. Then Lefty Raguza, like every wiseass on the planet, decided he’d have another run at fate.

  “He’s no problem. Believe me, the guy’s a joke,” he said to the others at his table.

  A joke. Those words were essentially the same ones Dallas Klein heard just before his executioner pulled the trigger on him.

  I put on my rain hat and showed no indication I had heard Raguza’s remark, then walked around the end of the bar onto the duckboards. “Need to borrow this. I’ll settle up with you later,” I said to the bartender.

  “Whoa,” he said.

  “No ‘whoa’ to it, bud,” I said.

  I used two dish towels to pick up the stainless-steel cauldron from the stove, then I headed straight for Raguza. His friends saw me coming, but unfortunately for him, he didn’t. The woman pushed her chair back, knocking it to the floor, holding her purse in front of her. “Where you think you’re going?” Raguza said.

  I slipped one wadded towel under the cauldron’s bottom and poured the entire contents-perhaps two gallons of steaming gumbo-on his head.

  It must have hit him like a whoosh of flame from a blast furnace. He screamed and clutched his face and tried to wipe the curtain of stewed tomatoes and okra and shrimp off his skin. He rolled on the floor, clawing at his hair, kicking his feet. I picked up a pitcher of beer from another table and poured it onto his face. “You okay down there?” I said.

  Ernesto and the man from the Islands had risen from their chairs and were coming around the table. Clete stepped out from behind the partition, opening his raincoat so they could see his shotgun, which he held against his side, muzzle-down, his wrist protruding through a slit in the coat’s pocket. “You guys want to buy into this, that can be arranged,” he said.

/>   The room was absolutely silent, the patrons at the bar frozen in time and place, the bartender’s hand motionless on the telephone.

  Clete raised his left hand palm-up, curling his fingers, signaling for me to walk toward him, his eyes on Ernesto and the man from the Islands.

  I wiped a smear of gumbo off my fingers onto one of the dish towels and dropped the towel on top of Raguza, then started walking toward Clete and the back door. My mouth was dry, my heart racing, my face suddenly cold and damp in the breeze from an air-conditioning unit. Then I saw Clete’s eyes shift, his expression constrict, and I heard feet running at my back.

  Lefty Raguza tackled me around the waist and threw us both into a tangle of chairs and a table laden with beer bottles. His face was bright and shiny, like a painted Indian’s, his skin already swelling where it had been scalded. He clenched his right hand deep into my throat and hit me full in the face with the other. Then he was all over me.

  He head-butted me, got a thumb in my eye, and tried to grab my genitalia. I could smell the deodorant under his armpits and the bile in his breath and the testosterone in his clothes; see the patina of blond hair on his skin, the mucus at the corner of his eye, a pearl of sweat drip from a nostril. I could see his buttocks clench as he wrapped his legs around me and the sensual pleasure on his mouth when he thought he was connecting with bone and organ.

  I got my fingers around the neck of a beer bottle and broke the bottle across his face. But it did no good. When I was almost to my feet, he tackled me again, this time around the knees, locking his arms around my calves as I toppled forward. Then he felt the.25 automatic Velcro-strapped to my ankle.

  “Got you,” he said, working his hand down to the holster. “Gold BB time, dickwad.”

  He was on all fours, the.25 auto peeling loose from the holster, his right hand gripped like a machinist’s vise on my foot so I couldn’t move it. The cool green fire in his eyes was like a lascivious burn on my skin. I cocked my left foot and drove my loafer straight into his mouth.