James Burke - Pegasus Descending

“You don’t want to do this, man,” Tony said.

“If a nigger 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 shifted 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 shiny 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 passenger 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 niggers, 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 altitude. Then he said, “Fuck 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 shiny 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 motherfucker dead!” the shirtless 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 motherfuckers 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 ass, Streak. But get a fire extinguisher on this. Nobody 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 Washington, 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 pre-civil 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 sexual 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 gangbanger’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.