Pegasus Descending Part 12

"What about it?"

"I heard your name mentioned at Second District headquarters, that's all."

Clete waited for him to go on, but he didn't. The security man stepped away from the c.r.a.ps table and glanced casually toward the front of the casino. "Wait here."

"Maybe the guy doesn't know I made him. I'd appreciate being left out of it."

But the security man walked off without acknowledging Clete's last statement, and Clete concluded the reference to his past history at the Second District wasn't a positive indicator of his situation. The security man began talking to the blond man, the silhouette of a potted palm between them and Clete. But he quickly became a listener rather than a talker. He listened and then he listened some more. The blond man slipped what looked like a photo from his pocket and the two men examined it together, the blond man tapping on it for emphasis. Then the blond man gave the photo to the security man, obviously to keep.

When the security man returned to the c.r.a.ps area, he had the photo cupped in his palm. It showed Trish Klein at a blackjack table, laughing, a drink in her hand, one of her crew on the stool next to her. She had five cards turned up on the green felt in front of her, the total sum of which was under 21.

"Is this your girlfriend?" the security man asked.

"That's the lady I'm with."

"She's in the Griffin Book."

"That looks like a photo of somebody who just hit a five-card Johnny. That gets you blackballed here?"

"You and your friend are welcome to play the slots, Mr. Purcel. Just stay away from the tables. If you get near them, you'll be escorted from the building."

"Really?" Clete said, stepping closer to him. "How about my initial question? Who's this geek with the shades following me around?"

"He does the same kind of work I do, at least in my off-duty capacity. You and Miss Klein enjoy yourselves. At the slot machines."

Clete's face was burning. "We need to get something straight here."

"No, we don't. Thank you for visiting the casino," the security man said, and walked off.

Suddenly Clete's s.h.i.+rt felt too tight for his chest. Inside the steady din of coins rattling into metal trays and the excited yelling around the c.r.a.ps table, he could hear the hoa.r.s.eness of his own breathing and a sound like wind roaring in his ears. It took him five minutes to find Trish, who was watching a blackjack game, one knuckle poised on her chin, a thoughtful expression on her face. Thirty feet away, two security men were talking to each other, glancing in her direction.

"Time to boogie," Clete said.

"What for?"

"I want to show you the battleground at Chalmette."

She seemed to consider the idea.

Please, G.o.d, Clete thought.

"All right," she said. "But don't forget I have a surprise."

He put one arm over her shoulders, and the two of them began walking toward the entrance. Through the gla.s.s doors he could see the dark green of the palm fronds in the rain and the lighted store-fronts along Ca.n.a.l. We're almost there, he thought.

"I have to stop by the restroom," she said.

"Now?" he said.

"Yes," she said, giving him a look. "I might be a minute or two."

"Sure," he said, his eyes sweeping the casino. "I'll wait at the bar. Take your time."

Just cool it, he told himself. You can't always dee-dee out of Indian country when you want. Sometimes you just have to bra.s.s it out.

He took a seat at the bar and ordered a soda and lime slice. It was a mistake. He heard a stool squeak on its swivel and felt a presence near his left arm, almost like an energy field that had the potential of a beehive.

Clete took the soda and lime from the bartender's hand, then turned and looked into the sungla.s.ses of the blond man in the reddish-purple s.h.i.+rt.

"Your gash go to the can?" the man asked.

"What did you say?"

"I said did the lady, your gash, stop by the john?"

Clete took a sip from his gla.s.s, then put the lime slice in his mouth and chewed it. "What's your name, buddy?"

"Lefty Raguza," the man said, and offered his hand. When Clete didn't take it, he removed his shades and grinned. His eyes made Clete think of a cool green fire, an intense combination of color and light that didn't indicate thought patterns or moods so much as incipient cruelty that had no specific target.

Clete drank the rest of his soda and crunched ice between his molars. He looked into the bar mirror when he spoke. "Here are the ground rules for you, Lefty. You don't bird-dog us, you keep your mouth off certain people, and if I see you pa.s.sing around photos of my lady again, I'm going to rip your wiring out."

"She looks like a sweet piece of a.s.s is all I was saying. That's meant as a compliment. Prime cut is prime cut. So far, what I'm doing here isn't personal. If I were you, I'd let things remain like that."

Clete gazed into the moral vacuity of Lefty Raguza's eyes. Then he got off the stool, left a five-dollar bill on the bar, and waited for Trish by the door of the women's restroom.

"You okay?" she said.

"Sure, I'm solid," he replied.

"You're red as a boiled crab."

"I could go for some of those right now. I know a joint over on Iberville. Then we'll go out to Chalmette. I'm extremely copacetic today."

But Clete was neither solid nor copacetic. They walked into the Quarter, in the rain, staying under the colonnades, the music from the clubs drifting out on the sidewalk, but he couldn't get the words of the man named Lefty Raguza out of his head. He stopped in front of a cafe that was brightly lit and cheerful inside and patted his pants pocket. "I think I left my keys at the bar. Have a coffee in the cafe and I'll be right back," he said.

"Don't you want to call the casino first?"

"No, I'm sure I left them at the bar. It's not a problem," he said.

He didn't wait for her to reply. When he got back to the casino, his loafers were sopping with rainwater. He dried his face with a paper napkin from the bar and scanned the casino but didn't see Lefty Raguza. "There was a guy sitting next to me, a friend of mine, a guy with a neckerchief and shades, you see where he went?" he said to the bartender.

"To the men's room," the bartender replied.

The crowd had grown, and Clete had to thread his way through the people at the machines and tables. His eyes were watering in the cigarette smoke, his ears ringing, his heart pounding in his chest. He pa.s.sed a neatly folded and stacked fire hose inside a gla.s.s door that had been inset in the wall, then entered the restroom. Lefty Raguza was positioned in front of a urinal, his feet slightly spread, one hand propped against the wall, his face turned toward the far wall.

"Put your flopper in your pants and turn around," Clete said.

Two other men had been was.h.i.+ng their hands. They glanced simultaneously in Clete's direction, then left the room without looking back. Lefty Raguza shook himself off and flexed his knees, tucking his phallus back inside his slacks. Then he turned, grinning from behind his shades, and kicked Clete between the thighs as casually as he would punt a football.

Clete felt a wave of nausea and pain surge through his lower body that was like broken gla.s.s being forced up his p.e.n.i.s and out his r.e.c.t.u.m. He fell backward through a stall door, cras.h.i.+ng into a toilet bowl, his fingernails raking down the sides of the walls. He could feel the wet rim of the bowl against his back and p.i.s.s on the seat of his slacks.

Lefty Raguza was staring down at him, a small, triangular-shaped leather case in his hand. "You attacked me in the can and got your a.s.s kicked. Don't screw with Whitey, don't screw with me. Show your gash what happened here. Tell her she can have the same. Ready for it, big man?"

Ready for what? Clete thought. He tried to raise himself, but the pain inside his groin made his eyes brim with water.

Lefty Raguza unsnapped the leather case in his hand and removed a metal tool that was like a machinist's punch with a short crosspiece at the top designed to fit the palm and a hilt one inch from the point. "You're getting off easy, Blimpo. So act like a man and take your medicine," he said.

Then he leaned down and jabbed the tool into Clete's shoulder, thudding it hard with the heel of his hand, feeling for bone, twisting it sideways before removing it. He cleaned the point on a piece of toilet paper. "Now beat feet. I got to finish my p.i.s.s," he said.

Clete stumbled toward the door, his hand pressed to the wound under his shoulder bone. The door swung open in his face. Two black men and a white man about to enter the room stepped aside, avoiding eye contact with him, then walked off as though the last five seconds in their lives had not happened.

Clete worked his way along the wall in the concourse to the gla.s.s enclosure that housed the emergency fire hose. He fitted his palm inside the handle and ripped the door loose, expecting an alarm to go off. But none did.

The hose was a masterpiece of engineering. It was full-throated at the valve, perhaps four inches across, probably directly connected into a main that could blow paint off a battles.h.i.+p. The nozzle was bra.s.s, with a lever to adjust the outflow, the hose itself made of a canvaslike material that unfolded neatly from the stack and slapped on the carpet. Clete pushed the lever on the main valve and watched the hose straighten and harden like an enormous, thick-bodied snake.

Lefty Raguza was combing his hair in the mirror when Clete kicked open the restroom door and dragged the hose inside with him. "Here's a postcard from New Iberia, motherf.u.c.ker," he said. Then he pulled back the lever on the nozzle.

The jet of water blew the shades off Raguza's face, then blew Raguza into the tile wall. Clete tugged the hose deeper into the room, keeping it trained on Raguza, knocking him down when he tried to get up, skittering him into the urinals, remolding his mouth and cheeks, flattening the flesh against bone and teeth so that his face looked like he was caught in a wind tunnel.

Raguza almost got to his feet when Clete blew him into a stall, trapping him between the toilet and stall wall. Raguza was gasping for breath, his feet fighting for purchase, one arm sunk deep inside the bowl, his head thudding against the wall like a rubber ball tethered to a paddle.

Clete shut down the nozzle and dropped the hose on the floor. The restroom was flooded, the doorway packed with onlookers, security guards in uniform trying to fight their way through.

"This guy was starting a fire. He said something about hiding a bomb. Somebody better get the cops," Clete said.

Suddenly the crowd headed in all directions, the words "fire" and "bomb" rippling like flame across the casino floor. "Hey, you, come back here!" a security man yelled.

But Clete was now ensconced in the middle of the throng pouring onto Ca.n.a.l. The mist was gray and swirling, as thick and damp as wet cotton, the palm fronds fraying overhead, and he could smell beignets cooking somewhere and the heavy green odor of the Gulf. His shoulder throbbed, his genitals were swollen, his s.h.i.+rt was streaked with blood and his slacks with urine and bathroom disinfectant, but somehow he knew it was going to be a grand day after all. He crossed into the Quarter, splas.h.i.+ng through pools of rainwater, wondering if Trish would still be at the cafe, wondering, for just a moment, why she had not come looking for him.

He felt his spirits begin to sink. Maybe Dave had been right; maybe he had been a special kind of fool this time out. He was not only over the hill and addicted to most of the major vices, he was still the violent, chaotic, immature man intelligent women might find exciting and even interesting for the short haul but whom they eventually got rid of, as they would an untrained house pet.

Then he saw Trish coming down the street, without umbrella or raincoat, almost being hit by a car at the intersection, her lovely, heart-shaped face filled with concern and pity when she realized the condition he was in. "Oh, Clete, what did they do to you?" she said, her fingers touching his eyes, his hair, his mouth. "What did they do to you, honey?"

"Just a little discussion with a guy. What was that surprise you were talking about?"

She hooked her arm through his and began to pull him across the street toward the parking garage. "I'm taking you to the hospital," she said, ignoring his question. "It was that guy following us, wasn't it? I shouldn't have let you go back there. I hate myself for this."

A pa.s.sing car blew a wall of water across both Clete and Trish. She used a handkerchief to wipe it out of his eyes, her face turned up to his like a flower opening into light. He wrapped both his arms around her and lifted her up on his chest and carried her in that fas.h.i.+on all the way to the car.

HE SPENT THE NIGHT in a hospital up St. Charles Avenue. In the morning she picked him up in his Caddy and they drove to a marina on Lake Pontchartrain. A gleaming white seaplane waited for them at the end of a dock, rocking in the chop, the wide slate-green expanse of the lake in the background. "Wow, where we going?" Clete said.

"How about dinner in Mexico?" she said.

"Why you doing this, Trish?"

"Because you saved me from getting busted. Because you take chances for other people. Because I like you, big stuff." She pressed her knuckles playfully into his stomach.

When they were both inside, the pilot fired the engines and the plane gathered speed across the water, a white froth whipping from the backdraft. Then the plane lurched suddenly into the sky, climbing higher and higher, until Clete could see the alluvial fan of the Mississippi and the immense, soft gray-green outline of the Louisiana wetlands.

"Where to in Mexico?" he said.

"Cancun," she said, then paused for a beat. "More or less."

More or less? But there was still a pink mist inside his head from the Demerol drip at the hospital, and he didn't pursue it. He lay back in the seat and shut his eyes and let the steady vibration of the engines put him to sleep. He dreamed of a jungle in southeastern Asia, one that always flickered whitely under trip flares or bloomed with red-black geysers of fire and dirt from b.o.o.by-trapped 105 duds. But now the jungle contained no sign of threat and breathed with the sounds of wind and the patter of rain ticking on the canopy overhead.

When he awoke, the seaplane was descending through thunder-heads, the windows streaked with rain. Then they were below the squall, flying low over water that had the translucence of green Jell-O. The coral reefs were strung with gossamer fans and shadowed by floating pools of hot blue that looked like they had been poured from a bottle of ink.

But Trish and Clete's destination was not the postcard picture he had witnessed from the plane. They landed in a bay full of fish-kill and rode across the interior in a misfiring taxi to a village that buzzed with flies and smelled of chickens.h.i.+t and herbicide. The villagers were all Indians, who waved at Trish when they saw her through the taxi's back windows. The houses were constructed of unpainted cinder blocks, the cookstove often a sheet of corrugated tin set on rocks under a lean-to. The community water wells were dug within a few feet of hog and goat pens. The only telephone lines Clete could see went into a cantina and a police station.

Trish had said little since they had gotten off the plane, and in fact had become reflective and somber. The taxi turned up a rutted road that led to a yellow building with a peaked tar-paper roof.

"I got involved with the guerrillas in El Sal in the eighties," he said. "I don't think any of this will change in our lifetimes."

"So we shouldn't try?"

He looked at the yellow building. "What is this place?"

"A home for handicapped kids. Either their parents don't want them or are not equipped to raise them. Without the home, most of them would spend their lives on the street."

Some of the children at the home had been born blind or without hands or feet, or with misshapen faces and twisted spines and spastic nervous systems. Some drooled and made unintelligible sounds. Others were harelipped, clubfooted, or had dwarf or bowed legs. Some had never walked.

When Clete was introduced to them, his smile felt like a surgical wound. He told Trish he had to use the restroom.

"Out back, the cinder-block building under the cistern. It has plumbing," she said.

When he got outside, his eyes were br.i.m.m.i.n.g with tears. He washed his face in an aluminum basin and blew his nose on his handkerchief, then returned to the yellow building, a grin on his face.

The personnel at the home were Mennonites and Catholic lay missionaries, and seemed to glow with a level of humanity that Clete thought had little to do with political or perhaps even religious conviction. In fact, they seemed to be uncomplicated people who had little or no interest in the larger world and did not view themselves as exceptional and would probably not understand why anyone would treat them as such.

When Clete got back on the plane, he felt ten years older and for some reason could not even remember the details of what he had done the previous day, even the hosing down of Lefty Raguza at the casino. "You just visit here sometimes?" he asked Trish.

"No, I work here several months a year."

"Who finances this place?"

"A bunch of a.s.sholes who don't know they finance it," she replied.

"Ever boost a savings and loan in Mobile?"

Her response was a deep-throated laugh.

Chapter.