Pegasus Descending Part 5

"I go, 'How about a drink? Or something to eat?'

"She looks over my shoulder and sees the security guys coming for us. Then she looks all around for her friends, but she'd already lost them in the crowd. She goes, 'I'm up s.h.i.+t's Creek, handsome. Can you get us out of here?' My big-boy started flipping around in my slacks, like it had gone on autopilot and was trying to break out of jail."

Molly shut the kitchen window.

"Sorry," Clete said.

"What happened?" I asked.

"She said her name is Trish Klein. She says you and her old man were buds. She says you were there when some guys took his head off with a shotgun."

I stared through the trees at the bayou, trying to a.s.similate Clete's story and connect it with the other information I had on Dallas Klein's daughter. But Clete wasn't finished. "This morning an FBI broad knocked on my door. Her name is Betsy Mossbacher and she's got a king-size broom up her a.s.s. The Feds had a tail on Trish Klein last night, and now they've connected me with her and you with me. What's this bulls.h.i.+t about, Dave?"

"You're getting it on with grifters now?"

"Don't change the subject."

"I knew Trish Klein's father in Miami. He was a guard on an armored truck. He owed money to some wiseguys and I think they made him give up the truck's schedule. They cleaned the slate when they boosted the truck. I think Trish Klein is here on a vendetta. The Feds think she was mixed up in taking down a savings and loan in Mobile that was a laundry operation for the Mob."

His big arms were propped on his knees, his face pointed straight ahead. But I could tell he was thinking about the girl now and not about her father.

"You were in the sack with her?" I asked.

"I wish. Do I look old, Dave? Tell me the truth," he said, fixing his eyes on mine.

Chapter.

5.

I F YOU EVER BECOME a low-bottom boozer, you will learn that the safest places to drink, provided you know the rules, are blue-collar saloons, pool halls, hillbilly juke joints, and blind pigs where two thirds of the clientele have rap sheets.

Upscale hotel bars and Dagwood-and-Blondie lounges in the suburbs have a low tolerance for drunks and shut you down or call security before you can get seriously in the bag. When you drink in a rat hole, you can get s.h.i.+t-faced out of your mind and not be molested as long as you understand that the critical issue is respect for people's privacy. Marginalized people don't want confrontation. Violence for them means life-threatening injuries, bail bond fees, fines paid at guilty court, and loss of work. It could also mean a trip back to a work camp or a mainline joint. They couldn't care less about your opinion of them. They just ask that you not violate their boundaries or pretend you understand the dues they have paid.

In New Iberia, most of the dope is sold on inner-city street corners by g.a.n.g.b.a.n.gers. At dusk they a.s.semble in dirt yards or in front of boarded-up shacks, their caps on backward, sometimes wearing gang colors, and wait for pa.s.sing cars to slow by the curb. They're territorial, armed, street-smart, and dangerous if pushed into a corner. Most of them do not know who their fathers are and have sentimental attachments to their grandmothers. Oddly, few of them expect to do mainline time. None of them will deliberately challenge authority. Most important of all, none of them has any desire to become involved with respectable society, except on a business level.

But Tony Lujan and a friend knew none of these things about marginal people or chose to ignore them on Monday afternoon, when they decided to stop at the McDonald's on East Main, far from the black neighborhood where a dealer by the name of Monarch Little sold crystal meth and rock and sometimes brown skag to all comers, curb service free.

Monarch had a thick pink tongue that caused him to lisp, a gnarled forehead, and skin whose s.h.i.+ny pigmentation made me think of a walrus. He wore two-hundred-dollar tennis shoes with gas cus.h.i.+ons in the soles, the stylized baggy pants of a professional weight lifter, and a huge ball cap turned sideways on his head, which, along with a washtub stomach and the shower of brown moles on his face, gave him the harmless appearance of a cartoon character.

But in a street beef, with nines, shanks, or Molotovs, Monarch did not take prisoners. As a teenager he had been in juvie three times, once for setting fire to the house of a city cop who had felt up his sister in the backseat of a cruiser. He marked his eighteenth birthday by shoving a pimp in the face and watching him tumble down a staircase. The pimp's brother, a human mastodon who had once torn a parking meter out of concrete and thrown it through a saloon window, put out the word he was going to cook Monarch in a pot. The pimp's brother caught four nine-millimeter rounds in the chest from a drive-by while he was watering his gra.s.s on Easter morning.

Monday afternoon the lawns of the Victorian and antebellum homes along East Main were sprinkled with azalea bloom. Great bluish-purple clumps of wisteria hung from the trellised entrances to terraced gardens that sloped down to Bayou Teche. The wind ruffled the canopy of oaks that arched over the street; the air was balmy and smelled of salt and warm flowers and the promise of rain. Monarch, with two of his cohorts, pulled into McDonald's and parked his Firebird next to an SUV, in the shade of a live oak tree. He went inside and ordered a bag of hamburgers and cartons of fries while his two friends listened to the stereo, the speakers pounding so loudly the window gla.s.s in other vehicles vibrated.

Tony Lujan sat in the pa.s.senger seat of the SUV, spooning frozen yogurt into his mouth. His friend, the driver, was darkly handsome, his cheeks sunken, his lips thick and sensuous, his hair growing in locks on his neck. He was dressed in black leather pants, a black vest, and a long-sleeved striped s.h.i.+rt, like a nineteenth-century gunfighter might wear.

"How about it on the Tupac?" he shouted at the black kids in the Firebird, at the same time flinging his half-eaten hamburger over the top of the SUV at a garbage can.

"Easy, Slim," Tony said, his eyes raising from his frozen yogurt.

The hamburger's trajectory was short. Half of a bun glazed across the Firebird's hood, stippling it with mustard.

Monarch had just walked out the front door of the McDonald's. He paused on the walkway, his bag of food in one hand, and fingered the skin under his neck chains. He walked to the driver's window of the SUV. "You just t'rew baby s.h.i.+t on my ride," he said.

"It was an accident," Tony said, leaning forward in the pa.s.senger seat so Monarch could see his face. He dipped his fingers into his s.h.i.+rt pocket and removed a five and a one. He extended the money toward Monarch. "It's six bucks at the car wash up on Lewis Street."

But the driver took Tony's extended wrist in his hand and moved it and the money back from the window. "You said 'baby thit'?" the driver asked Monarch, unable to suppress a laugh.

Monarch picked a leaf off his arm and watched it blow away in the wind. He pinched the saliva from the corners of his mouth and looked at the wetness on his fingers, then glanced at the university sticker on the back window. "You going to colletch?"

"Colletch? Yeah, man, that's us," the driver said. "Look, I'd really like to talk to you, but unless you dial down Snoopy Dog Dump or whatever, we're going to have to boogie, because right now I feel like somebody poured cement in my ears. How do you listen to that c.r.a.p, anyway?"

"The mustard on my 'Bird need somebody to clean it off, not at no car wash, either," Monarch said.

"Look, this is from the heart, okay?" Tony Lujan's friend said. "That lisp you got probably isn't a speech defect. It's because you've got damaged hearing. You p.r.o.nounce words the way you hear them, and you hear them incorrectly because you've blown out your eardrums listening to guys whose biggest talent is grabbing their d.i.c.ks in front of an MTV camera."

Monarch tilted up his chin and ma.s.saged his throat. The moles on his face looked as hard and s.h.i.+ny as almonds. His stomach rose and fell under his s.h.i.+rt; his eyes seemed to grow sleepy. He reached down into his bag of hamburgers and fries and removed a wadded-up handful of paper napkins. Then he proceeded to wipe the mustard off his car hood, his expression flat, even yawning while he cleaned the last yellow smear off the paint.

He opened his door to get back in the Firebird, the edge of the door touching the side of the SUV.

"That d.a.m.n n.i.g.g.e.r," Tony's friend said.

"Say what?" Monarch said.

"Cool it, Slim. The guy's not worth it," Tony said to his friend.

Monarch reached inside his Firebird, gathered an object in his hand, and dropped it in his pocket. Then he turned around and opened the pa.s.senger door of the SUV. "Both of y'all out on the pave," he said.

"You don't want to do this, man," Tony said.

"If a n.i.g.g.e.r scratch your 'sheen, we gotta check it out, call the insurance man, make sure everyt'ing get done right," Monarch said.

Tony's friend was already coming around the front of the SUV. "Hey, man, I told you we don't understand jungle drums. Can you translate ''sheen' for me?" He started laughing. "I'm sorry, man, you ever see those Tweety Bird cartoons? You sound just like him. I ain't dissing you. It's cool. You could turn it into a nightclub act. It's like Tweety Bird married Meat Loaf and they had a kid."

"That mean your 'machine,' see, and the reason I knowed you was going to colletch was I seen this 'sheen before, down on Ann Street, when you and a UL girl was scoring some Ex. See, we knowed who the UL girl was 'cause she was balling down the line long before she was balling you. Except none of us would ball her anymore 'cause of her gonorrhea. One guy still lets her give him head, but he say it ain't very good."

The street was quiet except for the rustle of the wind, a plastic cup rattling in the parking lot.

"Slim can hurt you, man," Tony said.

Monarch's right thumb was hooked on the edge of his pants pocket, his knuckles like pale quarters under his skin. His eyes s.h.i.+fted sideways, out toward the street. His hand worked its way into his pocket and Tony Lujan involuntarily stepped back. Monarch smiled and lifted his car keys jingling from his pocket. "Is that where I hit it, that li'l line in the dust?" he said, examining the SUV's door.

He rubbed away the dirt and then dug a bronze-colored key into the paint, peeling it back in a long curlicue, cutting through the primer, exposing a s.h.i.+ny strip of metal. His face clouded with concern. "No, that ain't where I hit it. It was just a smudge in the dirt. Or maybe I ain't hit it at all. What y'all t'ink?"

He raked a long silver line across the first one, forming an X, then straightened up and blew his nose softly into a Kleenex. No one had moved. While Monarch had vandalized the SUV, one of his cohorts had squirmed bare-chested through a window on the pa.s.senger side of the Firebird and had positioned himself on the window jamb, his underwear bunched on his stomach, a black bandanna tied down tightly on his scalp. In his right hand was a semiautomatic that he held flatly against the roof, the muzzle pointed at Tony Lujan and his friend Slim.

Monarch removed a roll of currency from his pocket and peeled off several bills. He crumpled the bills inside his soiled Kleenex and tossed the balled Kleenex on the seat of the SUV.

"Them dead presidents gonna take care of the scratch. Y'all want some more Ex, come see me. Get tired of white schoolgirl stuff, I can hep you there, too. In the meantime, check out Snoop and P. Diddy and improve your musical taste," he said. "You want to call us n.i.g.g.e.rs, just don't do it where we can hear you."

A thick green vein that looked like knotted twine pulsed in Slim's forehead. He inhaled deeply, as though he were deciding whether or not to leap out the door of an airplane at a high alt.i.tude. Then he said, "f.u.c.k you," and hit Monarch with a blow that slung a rope of spittle and blood across the Firebird's rolled white leather seat.

Monarch clutched his mouth with one hand, breathing hard through his nose, as though he could not allow himself to realize how badly he had been hurt. He stared at his palm, his lips as red and s.h.i.+ny as a clown's. He stepped toward Slim, his hands balling into fists.

"Don't touch me," Slim said.

Monarch swung at the air, off balance, tripping on his shoelaces, his body caroming off Slim's shoulder.

Slim pushed him away, whirled, and delivered a tae kwon do kick that exploded on Monarch's eye and snapped his head sideways, knocking him against the Firebird. Then Slim's foot shot out again, spearing Monarch in the center of his face.

"Clear my line of fire, Monarch! That motherf.u.c.ker dead!" the s.h.i.+rtless kid in the black head scarf shouted.

But Monarch behaved like a king. With a siren pealing in the distance, his mouth and nose streaming blood, a piece of broken tooth glistening on his chin, he lifted one hand as though he were giving a benediction, his body positioned between his armed friend and the boy whose nickname was Slim. "Lose the-" he began. He pressed his palm against his mouth, swallowed, and tried again. "Lose the nine. I tripped on the curb. We was just getting burgers. Don't know nothing about these motherf.u.c.kers here. Don't got nothing against them," he said.

Then he sat down heavily on the white leather seat of his Firebird and vomited on his shoes.

LAST YEAR, for economic reasons, our city police force was subsumed by the sheriff's office, creating one jurisdiction out of both the city and parish, which meant that all 911 police emergency calls went automatically into the sheriff's department, regardless if the police emergency had taken place inside or outside the city limits.

I had just left a mayoral meeting downtown when Helen Soileau called me on my handheld radio. "Where are you?" she said.

"In the parking lot, behind City Hall," I replied.

"There's a racial beef of some kind going down at McDonald's. Monarch Little and Bello Lujan's kid may be involved in it. I've got two cars on the way. Can you get down there?"

"I'm on my way."

"One of the black kids may have a gun. Watch your a.s.s, Streak. But get a fire extinguisher on this. n.o.body gets hurt out there."

I dropped the handheld on the seat of the cruiser I was using and turned into the one-way traffic on East Main, the gray-green arch of live oaks sliding by overhead, then swung around on St. Peter and headed back in the opposite direction, toward the McDonald's.

New Iberia is not New Orleans and we do not share its violent history, one that in the past has included a homicide rate equaled only by that of Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C. Here, whites and people of color work and live side by side. But nonetheless a peculiar kind of racial ill ease still exists in our small city on Bayou Teche. Maybe it's indicative of the shadow that the preacivil rights era still casts upon all the states of the old Confederacy. Perhaps we fear our own memories. I think as white people we know deep down inside ourselves the exact nature of the deeds we or our predecessors committed against people of color. I think we know that if our roles were reversed, if we had suffered the same degree of injury that was imposed upon the Negro race, we would not be particularly magnanimous when payback time rolled around. I think we know that in all probability we would cut the throats of the people who had made our lives miserable.

So we are excessively conscious of manners and protocol in dealing with one another. Unfortunately, we have no control over a rogue cop with a s.e.xual agenda or a closet racist at the post office or a newly elected black official wetting his lips his first night on the city council or a white college kid who thinks he can splatter a g.a.n.g.b.a.n.ger's grits on a sidewalk without all of us paying his tab.

Two uniformed deputies were already on the scene when I reached the McDonald's, but they obviously had their hands full. A crowd had gathered, and two carloads of Monarch's friends had pulled to the curb and were forming a phalanx on the sidewalk. A witness evidently had told the deputies that one of the black kids in the Firebird had dumped a semiautomatic in the trash barrel, and the deputies were now trying to search all five kids from the fray for concealed weapons while at the same time keeping an eye on the crowd and Monarch's newly arrived compatriots.

But most of the real trouble was coming from only one person-Tony Lujan's friend. He had been told to lean against the side of the SUV and to spread his feet, but he kept turning around and talking without stop, feeding his own anger, one cheek flecked with blood from Monarch's mouth.

I shoved him against the SUV, hard, and kicked his feet wider apart. "We make the rules, podna. Time for you to take Trappist vows," I said.

"Take what?" he said.

"That means shut your face," I said.

I motioned the deputy away and began to shake down Tony Lujan's friend. When I ran my hands down under his arms I could feel his body humming with energy, the way you can feel an electrical current coursing through a heavily insulated power line.

"Put your wrists behind you," I said.

"You're arresting me? These guys pulled a gun on us. They vandalized my vehicle."

But he put his hands behind him just the same. On one hand he wore a high school graduation ring, on the other a gold ring inset with a ruby and the insignia of his fraternity. I snipped the cuffs on each of his wrists and began walking him toward the backseat of my cruiser. Already his manner had changed and I realized he was exactly like all the middle-cla.s.s kids we run in for possession or DWI. Many of them are the children of physicians and attorneys and prominent businesspeople. When they deal with someone dressed in a suit, or in sports clothes, as I was, someone who represents a form of authority they a.s.sociate with their parents, their vocabulary becomes sanitized and their manners miraculously reappear. In fact, their degree of humility and cooperation is so impressive, they usually skate on the charges or at worst receive probationary sentences.

"Watch your head," I said as I put him in the backseat of the cruiser.

"Sir, we told you the truth about what happened out there," he said. "The fat black guy keyed my father's new paint job. If I had it to do over, I'd just drive away and eat the loss. But that kid with the rag on his head aimed a nine-millimeter at us. Over nothing."

"What's your name?" I asked.

"Sam Bruxal. But everybody calls me Slim."

"You took down Monarch Little, Slim. At gunpoint. That's impressive. But I'd watch my a.s.s for a while. What's your last name again?"

"Bruxal," he said.

"Ever hear of a guy by the name of Whitey Bruxal?"

"That's my father," he said, his eyes lifting into mine.

"From Florida?"

"That's right. We moved to Lafayette from Miami five years ago."

"Really?" I said, looking at him now with much more interest.

"Yeah, what's going on?"

"I'd like to have a chance to meet your dad."

"Oh, you'll meet him, all right," Slim replied, then realized he had allowed his manufactured persona to slip. "I mean-"

"Yeah, I know exactly what you mean, kid," I said, and rejoined the deputies, one of whom had hooked up Monarch Little and was about to take him to emergency receiving at Iberia General.

The deputy was a stout, red-haired man with a brush mustache who had been one of the city cops absorbed into the sheriff's department when the two agencies merged last year. He was a retired NCO and was called "Top" by his colleagues, although he had been a cook in the Marine Corps and never a first sergeant. Top's admonition about surviving in a bureaucracy was simple: "Make friends with all the clerks and don't get in the way of a supervisor who wants to be on the links by two p.m."

"Let me talk to Monarch a minute, will you, Top?" I said.

"Take him home to dinner with you," he replied.