Pegasus Descending

by James Lee Burke

  “This is a part of the job I don’t like, Mr. Darbonne,” I said. “I don’t believe you killed Bello Lujan. But even if you did, I and others like me would understand why you did it, even if we considered it wrong.”

  “It ain’t your fault, no.”

  “Look me in the face, sir.”

  He stared at me from the iron bench on which he was seated, perhaps unsure whether my request had contained a veiled insult.

  “Tell me again you didn’t know Bello Lujan assaulted your daughter,” I said.

  “A man who got to repeat himself don’t respect his own word,” he said.

  He looked at the tops of his shoes.

  “I suspect your bail could be as high as a quarter million dollars. Do you have any kind of collateral you can offer the court?” I said.

  “No, suh, I t’ink I’m gonna be here awhile.”

  His intuitions were probably more accurate than he knew. He was in the maw of the system, and anyone who has been caught in it, the guilty or innocent or hapless alike, will be the first to tell you that justice is indeed blind. “I hope it comes out all right for you, sir,” I said.

  “Nothing gonna come out all right. Ain’t no way to turn it around now.”

  “What do you mean it can’t be turned around?”

  “I lost my farm and bidness when the gov’ment let in all that sugar from Central America. Ain’t fair to put all that cheap sugar on the market. Ain’t nothing like it used to be. Li’l people ain’t got no chance.”

  His linkage of his own fate to economic factors was probably self-serving, if not self-pitying, and his condemnation of the world for his own misfortune was the stuff of grandiosity. But who can fault a man with no legs for not being able to run?

  “I’m going to see what I can do,” I said.

  “About what?” he said, his eyes lifting to mine.

  MOLLY WAS WASHING her car under the porte cochere when I got home. She wore a pair of blue-jean shorts and an old white shirt that was too tight for her shoulders, and her clothes and hair and skin were damp from the garden hose she was spraying on the car’s surface while she wiped it down with a rag. Molly’s physical firmness, the curvature of her hips, the way her rump flexed against her shorts, the suggestion of sexual power in her thighs and the swell of her breasts, all reminded me of my dead wife Bootsie, and I sometimes wondered if Bootsie’s spirit had not slipped inside Molly’s skin, as though the two women who had not known each other in life had melded together and formed a third personality after Bootsie’s death.

  But I didn’t care where Molly came from, as long as she remained in my life, and I loved her as much as I did Bootsie, and I loved them both at the same time and never felt a contradiction or a moment of disloyalty about my feelings.

  “Come scratch my back, will you?” Molly said. “A mosquito about six inches long got under my shirt.”

  She propped her arms on the car’s roof while I moved my nails back and forth across her shoulder blades. The water from the hose continued to run, spilling back across her fist, trailing down her forearm. She shifted her weight and her rump brushed against my loins.

  “I had to put Cesaire Darbonne in jail today,” I said. “I suspect he’ll be arraigned tomorrow for capital murder.”

  “Uh-huh,” she said, gazing abstractedly through the shadows in the backyard.

  “The guy’s broke. He’ll probably stay in lockdown out at the stockade.”

  “And?” she said, removing a strand of damp hair from her eye.

  “No bondsman will touch him with a dung fork, at least not without collateral.”

  “You hurt my feelings,” she said.

  “Pardon?”

  She rolled her shoulders to indicate I should continue scratching her back. “I thought you were putting moves on me to get me into the sack,” she said.

  “I’m not above doing that.”

  She deliberately hit me with her rump. “You want to go his bond?” she said.

  “I’ll have to put up the house and lot. They’re half yours.”

  “Not really, but whatever you want to do is fine with me,” she said.

  She turned around, stood on my shoes, and hugged me.

  “What’s that for?” I said.

  “I won’t tell you,” she said, then continued washing her car.

  AFTER SUPPER, I drove to Clete’s cottage at the motor court. He had closed all the blinds and was sitting barefoot on his bed, dressed in a pair of elastic-waisted khakis and a strap undershirt, reaming out the barrel of a.38 revolver with a bore brush. His television set was tuned to The Weather Channel, the sound turned off. A shaded lamp burned on the nightstand, and under its glow were a can of oil, his sap, a throw-down.22 piece of junk with tape on the wood grips, a six-inch stiletto, and a nine-millimeter Beretta that carried a fourteen-round magazine. I took a can of Dr Pepper out of his icebox and sat down in a straight-back wood chair across from him.

  “Expecting the Union Army to come up the Teche?” I said.

  “A bud inside NOPD called me and said I’m about to get picked up for destroying the casino. I rented a camp out in the Atchafalaya Basin. Time to do a survey on the goggle-eye perch population,” he replied.

  Then I made a mistake. I told him about all the recent events involving the deaths of Yvonne Darbonne, Crustacean Man, and Tony and Bello Lujan. I told him about the scam Trish Klein and her crew had pulled on Whitey Bruxal. I also told him about Slim Bruxal’s implication that his father and Lefty Raguza might decide to take their pound of flesh.

  Clete wiped the oil off the blue-black surfaces of his.38, then flipped the cylinder from the frame and began inserting cartridges one by one into the chambers, his blond eyelashes lowered so I could not read his eyes.

  “I can hear your wheels turning, Clete. Forget about it,” I said.

  “I’m glad I’ve finally heard the voice of God. You can actually go into people’s heads now and explain their own thoughts to them.”

  “Don’t be a smart-ass. I’m trying to-”

  He cut me off before I could continue. “We used to do business one way with these assholes-under a black flag. Why do you think Whitey Bruxal is here? It’s because he gets a free pass. In the old days, at least he would have been under the control of the Giacanos. Now he can kick the shit out of cerebral palsy victims and be on the Society page.”

  “You don’t think NOPD can find you in a fishing camp? Use your brain,” I said.

  He spun the cylinder on the.38, the butt end of the loaded cartridges glinting in the light. His green eyes were bright and happy, free of alcoholic influence or fatigue, and I realized when he didn’t reply that I hadn’t listened carefully to what he had said and I had once again misread the complexities of an antithetically mixed man.

  “You were already planning to take out Whitey Bruxal, weren’t you?” I said.

  “Not exactly. But if these guys make a move on us, we hunt them down and pitch the rule book. What’s to lose? We’re dinosaurs anyway. The only guys who haven’t figured that out are us. Pop me a beer, will you?”

  He laid a clear line of oil along the side of the Beretta, then wiped all of its surfaces clean with a rag. He pulled back the slide on an empty magazine and ran the bore brush up and down the inside of the barrel, smiling at me while he did it. In the muted glow of the lamplight he looked like a young man again, one who still believed the world was a magical place full of adventure and goodness and intriguing encounters up every street. In moments like these I sometimes wondered if Clete had ever intended to age and grow old and change from the irresponsible man of his youth, if indeed he had not always courted death as a means of tearing off the hands on his own clock.

  “Why you looking at me like that?” he asked.

  “No reason.”

  “You worry about all the wrong things, Streak. In this case, about me and Trish. All that stuff you told me about the Lujan murders and Crustacean Man and the Darbonne girl? There’s something m
issing. This character in the D.A.’s office, what’s his name?”

  “Lonnie Marceaux.”

  “This Marceaux guy is the one to worry about. It’s these white-collar cocksuckers who’d crank up the gas ovens if they had the chance. You’re really going bail for Yvonne Darbonne’s old man?”

  “I put him in jail. He’s an innocent man. What should I do?” I replied.

  “How many guys have you known inside who were actually innocent?”

  “Some,” I said.

  “But almost all of them were guilty of other crimes, usually worse ones. Right or wrong, noble mon?”

  I poured my Dr Pepper into the sink and dropped the empty can into the trash basket. “See you later,” I said, trying to suppress the anger in my voice.

  “Put it in neutral a minute and check those satellite pictures on the tube,” he said, nodding at the television screen. “The state of Florida must feel like a bowling pin. You were on the water when Audrey hit back in ’fifty-eight?”

  “It was ’fifty-seven.”

  “Think we’ll ever have one that bad again?”

  “Don’t change the subject, Clete. Take Trish and go somewhere a long way from New Iberia. You keep hurting yourself in ways your worst enemies couldn’t think up.”

  He reached under the bed and removed a pint of brandy. He unscrewed the cap and lifted the bottle at me. “Here’s to chaos and mayhem and blowing the bad guys out of their socks,” he said. He drank the brandy down like soda water, one eye cocked at me over the upended bottle.

  I WENT TO AN A.A. meeting in the Episcopalian cottage across the street from old New Iberia High School. When I came out, the sky had turned yellow and purple and was full of dust blowing out of the cane fields. The oak trees in front of the school throbbed with birds, and when the wind changed, the air smelled like a lake that has gone dry. It was an evening when the colors of the sky and the earth and the trees seemed out of accordance with one another. The end of summer in South Louisiana is usually like sliding over the crest of a torpid season of heat and humidity into autumnal days that ring with the sounds of marching bands and smell of burning leaves and the damp, fecund odor of the bayous. But this year was different.

  The skies were red at morning, and at night churning with clouds that looked like curds of smoke from giant oil fires. Afternoon showers turned into violent storms, with trees of lightning bursting across the entirety of the sky. I have never given credence to apocalyptical theology or prophecies, but this year I felt a sense of foreboding that I couldn’t shake. It wasn’t based on an intuitive knowledge about the future, either. I had seen the show before.

  It is hard for someone who has not experienced a hurricane to understand the terror of being inside one. Perhaps the fear has its roots in the unconscious. Psychiatrists say the most terrifying moment in our lives occurs when we are delivered out of the birth canal from the safety of the womb-unable to breathe, shuddering against the light, knowing we will die unless we receive the slap of life. Supposedly that moment is sealed forever in a corner of the mind we wish never to reenter. Then one day the world of predictability, the earth itself, caves under our feet.

  That moment came for me on a seismograph drill barge anchored by deep-water steel pilings in a bay west of Morgan City in the summer of 1957. On board were 160 pounds of canned dynamite and boxes of canned primers and spools of cap wire that were tipped with a vial of nitroglycerin gel that could be detonated with either an electrical spark or a hard knock against a steel surface.

  No one anticipated the ferocity of Hurricane Audrey or the tidal wave it would push ahead of it. Our company chose to ride it out. That experience was one that will remain with me the rest of my life.

  The tide dropped at sunset, and for miles there was hardly a ripple of wind on the water. The sky was lidded with clouds that were the color of scorched pewter, but the horizon was still blue, glowing with an iridescence that seemed trapped behind the earth’s rim. We went to bed on the quarterboat with a sense of peace about the storm, convinced it was passing far to the west, perhaps over in Texas, and that our fears had been unfounded.

  At dawn, the miles of flooded cypress and gum trees surrounding us were thick with birds of every description, as though none of them could find a proper tree upon which to rest. At 9 a.m. my half brother Jimmie and I were building explosive charges for the driller, screwing six cans of dynamite end to end, then screwing on a primer that would attach to a second string of six cans, doing this three times until we had a charge of eighteen cans that we would slide down the drill pipe with the cap wire whipping off the spool behind it.

  Without any transition, the sky erupted with lightning, the barometer dropped so fast our ears popped, a line of whitecaps shot from the mouth of the bay into the swamp, like skin wrinkling, and the miles of flooded trees surrounding us bent simultaneously toward the water.

  I turned away from the drill and the wind struck my face as hard as a fist. The tarp that was used to shade the drill deck, one that was made of heavy canvas and inset with metal rods and brass eyelets, ripped loose from the pilothouse and disappeared in the wind like a discarded Kleenex. What happened next was an event of such magnitude and intensity that neither Jimmie nor I nor anyone else on board would ever quite understand it or the natural causes that created it. Some thought it was a waterspout. Some believed a secondary system, one with its own eye, had passed over us. But whatever it was, it carried its own set of rules and they had nothing to do with the laws of physics, at least not as I understand them.

  There was no sound at all. The wind stopped, the water around the drill barge flattened, then seemed to drop away from the steel pilings, as though all the water were being sucked out of the bay. The gum and cypress trees and willows along the shore straightened in the stillness, their leaves green and bright with sunshine, then the world came apart.

  All the glass exploded from the windows in the pilothouse. The instrument shack, made of aluminum and bolted down on the stern, was shredded into confetti. The crew chief was shouting at everyone on the deck, pointing toward the hatch that led down to the engine room, but his words were lost in the roar of the wind. A curtain of rain slapped across the barge, then we were inside a vortex that looked exactly like millions of crystallized grass cuttings, except it was filled with objects and creatures that should not have been there. Fish of every kind and size, snakes, raccoons, blue herons, turkey buzzards, a pirogue, uprooted trees, possums and wood rabbits, a twisted tin roof, dozens of crab traps and conical fishnets packed with enormous carp, hundreds of frogs, clusters of tar paper and weathered boards-all these things were spinning around our barge, sometimes thudding against the handrails and ladders and bulkheads.

  I got to my feet just as an avalanche of water and mud surged across the decks. It stank of oil sludge, seaweed encrusted with dead shellfish, sewage, and human feces. The driller, who had been huddled under a pipe rack, vomited in his lap.

  Then the sky turned black with rain, and in the west we saw lightning striking the shoreline and in the wetlands and in fishing communities where our relatives lived and in small cities like Lafayette and Lake Charles, and we were glad that it was them and not us who were about to receive the brunt of the storm, even the tidal wave that would curl over Cameron and crush the entire town, drowning over five hundred people.

  I USED WEE WILLIE BIMSTINE and Nig Rosewater’s agency in New Orleans to go bail for Cesaire Darbonne. Willie and Nig kept my name out of the court record, but Cesaire was released from jail on Wednesday morning and was at my house ten minutes after I arrived home for lunch with Molly.

  He removed his straw hat before he knocked on the door. I invited him in but he shook his head. “I just come to t’ank you,” he said.

  “It’s not a big deal, Mr. Darbonne,” I replied.

  “Ain’t many people would do somet’ing like that.”

  “More than you think.”

  He looked out at the traffic on the street, his
expression neutral, his turquoise eyes empty of any thoughts that I could see. He fitted on his hat, his skin darkening in the shadow it made on his face. In absentminded fashion, he scratched the chain of scars on his right forearm. “You ever want to go duck hunting, I got a camp and a blind. I know where the sac-a-lait is at on Whiskey Bay, too,” he said.

  “I appreciate it, sir, but you don’t owe me anything,” I said.

  He turned his eyes on me. They were almost luminous, full of portent, and for just a moment I was sure he was about to tell me something of enormous importance. But if that was his intention, he changed his mind and got in his truck without saying anything further and drove away.

  “Who was that?” Molly said behind me.

  “Mr. Darbonne. He wanted to thank us for getting him out of the can.”

  “Your food is getting cold.”

  “I’ll be there in a second,” I said, still looking down the street, where Cesaire’s truck was stopped at the traffic light in front of an 1831 antebellum home called the Shadows.

  “What’s bothering you, Dave?” Molly said.

  “I’ve never had a more perplexing case. It’s like trying to hold water in your fingers. The real problem is most of the people I keep looking at would probably have led normal lives if they hadn’t met one another.”

  “Start over again.”

  “I have. None of it goes anywhere.”

  She kneaded the back of my neck, then ran her fingers up into my hair, her nails raking my scalp. “I’ll always be proud of you,” she said.

  “What for?”

  “Because you’re incapable of being anyone other than yourself.”

  I closed the door and turned around. I wanted to hold her, to pull her against me, to whisper words to her that are embarrassing when they are spoken in a conventional situation. But she had already gone back into the kitchen.

  AFTER LUNCH, I returned to the office and once again got out all my notes on Yvonne Darbonne’s death. Except this time I had something else to go on: Slim Bruxal’s firsthand account of how Yvonne had died. At 2 p.m. Helen came into my office. “Where’s Clete Purcel?” she asked.