Pegasus Descending

by James Lee Burke

  Clete nodded at a door to a side room.

  Too late.

  Whitey Bruxal came out shooting. He was holding a chrome-plated.25-caliber automatic straight out in front of him, squeezing off rounds as fast as he could pull his finger, his face averted from the shotgun blast he knew he would probably have to eat. One round lasered across my scalp, then a second one caught me on the rotator cuff, just as though someone had punched the bone with a hammer and cold chisel.

  I spun away from him, my left arm held out defensively in front of me, and swung the shotgun haphazardly in his direction. When I fired, the shotgun jerked upward in my hand and I saw Whitey tilt forward, as though he had been struck by a violent attack of nausea. He laced both arms across his stomach, his mouth open, and sat down heavily in a chair. His forehead was pinpointed with sweat and the level of pain and terror in his eyes made me look away from his face.

  I lay the shotgun across the tabletop and pressed a towel between Whitey’s forearms and the exposed entrails he was trying to hold inside his stomach cavity.

  “Hang on,” I said. “I’m calling for the paramedics.”

  “You read it all wrong, Dave. In the bedroom,” I heard Clete say hoarsely behind me.

  But at that point I trusted none of my own faculties. My shoulder ached miserably and my ears were popping as though I were aboard an airplane that had suddenly lost altitude. Who was the man in the burned Caddy? How did the car burn? I sank into a chair and reached for my cell phone.

  Then a shadow cast by a light inside the bedroom fell across my hand. I turned my head and stared into the face of Valerie Lujan.

  “I’m sorry it’s come to this, Mr. Robicheaux. I wish you had left us alone,” she said.

  She was standing in the doorway now, supported by an aluminum brace whose socket fitted around her left forearm. In her other hand she held a small pistol. Her flesh tone was pink, her eyes clear, as though she had been suffused with new life from an iniquitous enterprise.

  I looked at the shotgun, the blue-black of the steel, the damp imprints of my hands still on the stock, the safety still pushed to the off position. But I had not ejected the spent shell after I had shot Whitey. Even if I could pick up the gun, I would never have time to jack another round into the chamber before Valerie Lujan shot me at point-blank range.

  “How many mistakes can one man make?” I said.

  “Did you think an ignoramus like my husband amassed a fortune by running cockfights and handling oil leases that usually resulted in dry holes? He could hardly write his name. Half the money Miss Klein stole from Mr. Bruxal belongs to me.”

  I was losing more blood than I had thought and the room was spinning around me. Whitey was bent forward across from me, the tops of his forearms glistening with blue and red lights.

  “Let me call nine-one-one. It will save this man’s life. You still have a chance to be a friend of the court, Mrs. Lujan,” I said.

  But the resolution in her eyes was of a kind I knew my words would have no effect on. She stepped farther into the room, her metal brace clinking with her weight. I saw Clete strain against the plastic ligatures that held him in the chair.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Robicheaux. But way leads on to way,” she said.

  “You ran over the homeless man, not Tony,” I said.

  “How did you know?”

  “Tony wouldn’t have gone to prison for his father or even Slim. But he would have for his mother.”

  “You need to understand something, sir. A vagrant came out of the darkness and struck the side of my car. When we tried to help him, he bragged on the amount of money he was going to make. Then he laughed at Slim Bruxal. That was a mistake. You keep your mouth off my relationship with my son, Mr. Robicheaux. In fact, you tell your tale to the devil.”

  She raised the pistol and aimed it at my face. I could feel my mind racing, searching for words that would turn the situation around, that would impose humanity on a person whose small wasted hand and crippled mind had the power to shut down my life with the casualness of a fool arbitrarily slamming a door.

  “Mrs. Lujan, you’re not a killer,” I said.

  “We all are,” she said.

  I saw her index finger and hand tighten on the pistol’s trigger and tiny pearl grips. Then there was a solitary pop, like a Chinese firecracker, behind me and the petals of a red flower spilled from the middle of Valerie Lujan’s forehead. For less than a second there was a look in her eyes I will never forget, as though she realized that once again an unfair hand had cheated her out of the life that should have been hers. Then all the neurological motors and complexities that defined who and what she was drained out of her face, just like the features of a wax figure softening in front of a flame. The pistol she had been holding struck the floor with more sound than the weight of her body.

  Cesaire Darbonne stood in the back doorway, Clete Purcel’s throw-down.22 hanging from his hand, the woods behind him thrashing with wind. He stared at the gun, then set it on the kitchen counter and looked at it again. I could hear him breathing in the silence.

  “It was lying out there in the weeds, wit’ a knife and a blackjack,” he said. “I heard the gunfire. I didn’t know what else to do. Did I do the right t’ing?”

  I didn’t reply. Valerie Lujan had said we’re all killers. Was she correct? Does our simian ancestry feed daily at the heart? Perhaps better people than I can answer that question. I cut loose Trish Klein and Clete Purcel and silently asked my old friend Dallas to forgive me for failing him years ago on that flyblown, burning day in Opa-Locka, Florida, when I learned that charnel houses can wait for us on the other side of morning. Then I called both the FBI and the St. Martin Parish Sheriff’s Department and asked them to send everything they had.

  Epilogue

  NOPD EASED UP ON CLETE while he recuperated at Our Lady of Lourdes in Lafayette, although none of us had any doubt that this time Clete was not going to skate. He tried to dismiss his impending legal troubles as well as the events that had taken place at the camp out by Whiskey Bay. Through his window he had a lovely view of the older part of Lafayette, the houses couched deep inside a canopy of live oaks, slash pine, pecan, and hackberry trees. He joked and pretended he had never lost control of the situation on the levee, that bad judgment and mortality still held no sway in his life.

  “I’m telling you, I was never scared. Bruxal and his hired lame-brains just weren’t the first team,” he said. “Soon as they locked me in the trunk, I knew they’d blown it.”

  He had installed a release latch inside the hatch. When Whitey Bruxal and Lefty Raguza and the man named Ernesto had run Clete’s vehicle off the road, they put Trish in the SUV and took Clete’s Beretta from him, tossing his stiletto and throw-down into the weeds. Then they stuffed Clete into the Caddy’s trunk. Clete’s flare pistol, the one he carried with him when he was out on the salt, was behind the spare tire. When Ernesto stopped the Caddy, Clete popped the hatch and fired the flare pistol straight into Ernesto’s face.

  Unfortunately for Ernesto, Trish and Clete had just gone up the levee to fill a ten-gallon gas can to power the generator at his rented camp. Worse yet, the can had evidently fallen on its side and soaked the carpet on the passenger’s side of the car. The explosion of flame from the windows wrapped all the way across the roof.

  But Clete’s dismissal of his experience at Whiskey Bay was not convincing. When no one was watching, I could see the haunted look in his eyes, not unlike the thousand-yard stare that soldiers bring back from places no one should ever have to revisit.

  “Get that expression off your face,” he said to me one evening, just after Trish had left.

  “I think you should leave the United States, Cletus. Check out the Islands, maybe stay gone a year or so,” I said.

  “This is our country, Dave. We fought for it. We’re not going to give it over to these sonsofbitches,” he said. “Get us a couple of Dr Peppers out of the machine, will you? The Bobbsey Twins from Homicide st
omp ass and take names and are here to stay, big mon.”

  That was Clete Purcel, thousand-yard stare or not.

  My feelings about the people who died at the camp by Whiskey Bay are simple: I think each of them got what he or she deserved and I’m glad they’re dead.

  Cesaire Darbonne pled guilty to the premeditated murder of Tony Lujan and was sentenced to life imprisonment at Angola. His lawyer told me later that Cesaire refused to allow him to enter an insanity plea or to ask for leniency from the court. I visit him regularly and believe he is one of those rare individuals who discovers a form of dignity inside jail that would have been denied him outside. I hope one day that his sentence is commuted.

  Slim Bruxal? He not only got a free pass, since there was no substantive evidence against him in the death of Crustacean Man, he also got a job as a card dealer at a casino in Las Vegas. But I think Slim has his own appointment in Samarra waiting for him, at which time he’ll get to see Crustacean Man again.

  But actually within days after Clete’s hospitalization, our concerns about his future and all the events that had ensued since the death of Yvonne Darbonne seemed to telescope into the distant past. Hurricane Katrina, the nightmare that New Orleans had feared for years, struck the city with an intensity that was greater than the destructive force of the nuclear weapons visited upon the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

  The levees broke and the great bowl that surrounds New Orleans filled with water, untreated sewage, and petrochemical sludge. On rooftops and in windowless attics, the residents of the Lower Ninth Ward in Orleans Parish drowned by the hundreds if not thousands. If you have ever heard tapes of those who called on cell phones from those attics and rooftops, you will never forget the desperation in their voices as the water rose around their heads.

  If there are saints who walk among us, many of them wear the uniform of the United States Coast Guard. They flew without rest or sleep day after day, suspended from cables, holding the infirm and the elderly and the helpless against their chests, with no regard for their own safety, with a level of courage that others might equal but never surpass.

  As of this writing, January 29, 2006, the death toll is over 1,000 souls, and 3,400 are still officially listed as missing.

  The irony is that the National Hurricane Center had forecast that New Orleans would be hit head-on by a category five storm. That didn’t happen. In the last hours before landfall, the storm shifted direction to the northeast and its full brunt struck Gulfport, Mississippi, rather than New Orleans. Had the forecasters’ prediction proved correct, the levees surrounding New Orleans would have been turned into little more than strings of silt and the loss of human life would have been incalculable.

  Weeks later, Hurricane Rita churned ashore at Cameron, Louisiana, just south of Lake Charles, the exact same place Audrey made landfall in 1957 when my half brother and I worked on a seismograph barge west of Morgan City. It is no exaggeration to say the southern rim of Louisiana is gone. Fishing villages, towns, hundreds of square miles of sugarcane and rice fields look like surreal footage from a film depicting an apocalyptic event.

  But as Clete suggested, you don’t surrender the country of your birth to either the forces of greed or natural calamity. The songs in our hearts don’t die. The spring will come aborning again, whether we’re here for it or not. Clete Purcel always understood that and as a consequence was never defeated by his adversaries.

  Southern Iberia Parish was under twelve feet of water after Hurricane Rita. East Main, where we live, was virtually untouched. The flowers along the street are blooming, our lawns green, the days balmy, the bayou hammered with a brassy light through the trees. Why is one person spared and another not? Why do the Yvonne Dragoons of the world suffer? If age brings either wisdom or answers to ancient questions, it has made an exception for me.

  But I don’t dwell on the great mysteries anymore. Alafair will be home for Christmas, and Molly and I greet each day as lovers just discovering one another. I live in a place where Confederate soldiers in ragged uniforms hover on the edge of one’s vision, beckoning from the mist, calling us back into the past, reminding us that the mythos of winged horses and Grecian warriors was fashioned in our collective souls, that our story is one of ancient gods and peoples, inseparable from our own.

  I think it’s not bad to be a player against a backdrop like that.

  ***

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