James Burke: Pegasus Descending

“Well,” she said finally, then turned to go, somehow saddened, even aged, by our exchange.

“Where are you from?” I said.

“ Chugwater, Wyoming.”

“They must be frank as hell in Chugwater, Wyoming.”

“That’s what happens when you mess with cows,” she replied.

I didn’t need this.

THAT EVENING I TOOK Yvonne Darbonne’s diary home with me, and after supper walked down to the bayou with a folding chair and began to reread the thirty pages of entries that offered a small glimpse into the soul of an eighteen-year-old Cajun girl who had fallen in love with the world.

The last four pages contained the following entries:

We ate ice cream on the square in St. Martinville and walked out on the dock behind the old church. The moon was high above the oaks, and the moss looked like silver thread against the moon. He kissed me and wrapped me inside his coat. I could feel him against me, down there…

Today we took a boat out to his father’s camp in the swamp. I know he wants to do it, but he’s afraid to ask. He touched my breast, then said he was sorry. I told him it’s not wrong if people love each other. His eyes are dark brown, the way water is when starlight is trapped inside it. He hasn’t asked me if I’m a virgin. I wonder if he’ll think less of me. His goodness is in everything he does…

Last night he introduced me to his friends. They’re nice boys, I think, except for one. He has a hawk’s eyes and a mouth that always looks hungry. I saw him watching me in the mirror when he thought no one was looking.

But Yvonne Darbonne’s concern with an imperfection in her new-found world was brief. Her last entry returned to the boyfriend:

I told him I wanted him to do it and for him not to be afraid. When we were finished, he kissed my nipples and the tops of my fingers. It was hot in the cabin and his hair was wet and fell in curls on his forehead. I know now I love him in a way that’s different from anyone else I’ve loved. I can’t believe we’ll be going to college together this summer. He wants to meet my father. He told me never to be ashamed of the place I lived.

Molly walked down the slope and placed her hand on my shoulder. “What are you reading?” she asked.

“The diary of the Darbonne girl. How does a kid like this end up shooting herself?”

I handed the diary to her, with my thumb inserted between the last two pages of entries. Molly turned the pages into the light and read for a moment, then closed the covers and looked into space.

“Who’s the boy?” she asked.

“I’m not sure. Her cell phone contained the number of Bello Lujan. Evidently he’s got a son at UL. Maybe he and Yvonne Darbonne were an item.”

“The Daily Iberian said her death has been ruled a suicide.”

“That doesn’t mean someone else isn’t responsible. Where did she get the revolver she shot herself with? Who’s the bastard who left her drunk and stoned in the yard with a handgun?”

“Maybe she already had it.”

“Her father says otherwise,” I replied.

“Family members feel guilty. They often lie.”

I took the diary from Molly’s hand. “The weapon was stolen from a fraternity house at Ole Miss. How would Mr. Darbonne come to have possession of it?”

I could see a quiet sense of exasperation working its way into her face. “I don’t know, Dave. I say don’t grieve on what you can’t change,” she said.

I felt a sharp reply start to rise in my throat. But I kept my own counsel and looked across the bayou at the lights coming on in City Park. Then I followed Molly inside the house and helped her wash the dishes and put away the leftovers from supper.

I AWOKE AT FOUR in the morning and sat at the kitchen table in the darkness and listened to the sound of the wind in the trees. A few minutes later, Molly turned on the light and came into the kitchen in her robe and slippers. She sat down across the table from me. “The Darbonne girl?” she said.

“It’s the language in her diary. There’s no self-pity or anger in it,” I replied.

Molly waited, then said, “Go ahead.”

“People like Yvonne Darbonne don’t kill themselves. It’s that simple. Someone else did it.”

Molly propped her elbows on the table, knitted her fingers together, and rested her chin on her fingers. She gazed wanly into my face, trying to hide her fatigue, her eyes filled with the foreboding sense that the dead were about to lay claim upon the quick.

SATURDAY MORNING I drove out to the home of Bello Lujan. His first name was actually Bellerophon, a name that on the surface seems absurd and grandiose in a working-class culture. But South Louisiana is filled with the names of ancient gods and heroes given to our French ancestors during the Reign of Terror when Robespierre and his friends attempted to purge Christian influence from French culture. The irony is that today Cajun pipefitters and waitresses sometimes bear names that Homer would recognize but not most contemporary Americans.

I can’t say I ever liked Bello Lujan. He was aggressive, visceral in his language, naked in his attitudes about wealth and status. When you shook hands with him, he gave you a two-second squeeze that left no doubt about his physical potential. At a professional wrestling match in New Orleans, he got into an exchange of insults with one of the wrestlers and climbed into the ring with a wood stool and beat the wrestler bloody with it. Bello claimed that being a good loser required only one essential element-practice.

But even if I didn’t like him, I tried to understand him or at least the background that had produced him. His father had been a pinball machine repairman who worked for a crime family that operated out of the old Underpass area in Lafayette. When his father was shot to death, Bello ’s family moved back and forth between the Iberville Project in New Orleans, the old brothel district in New Iberia, and a dirt-road rural slum in north Lafayette. He shined shoes in saloons and carhopped at a root beer drive-in owned by a mean-spirited man who never allowed him to eat his lunch or supper inside the building. Sometimes I would see Bello on a wintry day at the Southern Pacific station, his wood shine box hung by a leather strap on his shoulders, his face pinched in the cold as he waited to catch a customer stepping down from a Pullman car. Even though my own young life had been marked by privation, I knew Bello had paid more dues than I had. I also knew that he kept a longer memory than I and was not to be crossed.

Supposedly he made his early money in cockfighting and later in the oil and gas business. Others said he pimped for Lafayette ’s old crime family when they used to operate a pickup bar and brothel above the Underpass. If asked what he did for a living, he would grin good-naturedly and say, “Anything that makes money, podna.”

But if there was a single characteristic always associated with Bello Lujan’s reputation, it was the fact he could be an almost feral adversary when it came to protection of his interests and his family.

He lived with his wife and son in a big white house on rolling woodland along Bayou Teche, just outside Loreauville. His wife had been crippled in an automobile accident many years ago and seldom appeared in public. The details of the accident had softened around the edges with time, but a child had died in the other vehicle and some said Mrs. Lujan would have been charged had she not been so severely injured herself. Regardless, her lot had not been an easy one. Sometimes people saw her in her wheelchair, peering from behind the curtains in an upstairs window, her face as small and pointed as a bird’s.

Across the road from the trellised entrance to Bello ’s driveway were thirty acres of the best pasture in the parish, where he raised thoroughbreds and gaited horses, all of it surrounded by white-painted plank fence. Bello was not simply a gentleman rancher, either. His horse trainers came from Kentucky; his thoroughbreds raced in both the Louisiana and Florida derbies. Winter and spring, Bello got to pose with the roses.