James Burke: Pegasus Descending

“‘Presumption’?” he replied, nodding profoundly.

“Yeah, you’re indicating you have the right to say whatever you wish to other people. It’s not a good habit.”

He nodded again. “Right now I’m waiting on somebody and I need a little solitude. Do me a favor and don’t piss in my cage, okay?”

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” I said. “Were you in ’ Nam? Dallas was. He’s a good kid.”

The collector got off the barstool and combed his hair, his eyes roving over the crooked smile on my face, the booze stains on my shirt, the table-wet on the sleeves of my new jacket, the fact that I had to keep one arm on the bar to steady myself. “I stacked time in a place you couldn’t imagine in your worst dreams,” he said.

“Yeah, I’ve heard the bitch suite up at Raiford is a hard ride,” I said.

He put away his comb and looked at his reflection in the bar mirror. His cheeks were pooled with tiny pits, like the incisions of a knifepoint. He placed a roll of breath mints by my hand. “No, go ahead and take them. Gratis from Elmer Fudd. Enjoy.”

MY TENURE WITH the exchange program was running out in June, and I wanted to carry good memories of South Florida back to New Orleans. I boat-fished out of Key West in the most beautiful water I had ever seen. It was green, as clear as glass, with pools of indigo blue in it that floated like broken clouds of ink. I visited the old federal prison at Fort Jefferson on a blistering-hot day and swore I could smell the land breeze blowing from Cuba. I slept in a pup tent on a coral shelf above water that was threaded with the smoky green phosphorescence of organisms that had no names. I saw the ocean turn wine-dark under a sky bursting with constellations and knew that the truth of Homer’s line would never be diminished by time.

But wherever I went, a frozen daiquiri winked at me from an outdoor bar roofed by palm fronds; beaded cans of Budweiser protruded from the ice in a fisherman’s cooler; a bottle of Cold Duck clamped between a woman’s thighs burst alive with the pop of a cork and a geyser of foam.

Delirium tremens or not, I knew I was in for the whole ride.

During my last week in Miami, I drove up to Opa-Locka to pay my bar tab and buy a round for whoever was trying to escape the noonday heat. The bar was dark and cool inside, the street out beyond the colonnade baking under a white sun. I knocked back a brandy and soda, counted my change, and prepared to go. Through the front window I could see dust blowing along the pavement, heat waves bouncing off a parked car, a bare-chested black man drilling a jackhammer into the asphalt, his skin pouring sweat. I ordered another brandy and soda and looked at the order-out menu on the bar. Then I tossed the menu aside, dropped a half dollar into the jukebox, and kicked it on up into overdrive with four inches of Beam and a beer back.

By three-thirty I was seriously in the bag. Across the street, I saw an armored car pull up in front of the bank. It was a shimmering box-like vehicle with a red-and-white paint job that pulsed in the heat like a fresh dental extraction. Three armed guards piled out, opened up the back, and began to lift big canvas satchels with padlocks on the tops onto the pavement. One of the guards was Dallas Klein.

I crossed the street, my drink in one hand, shading my eyes from the glare with the other.

“Where you been, fellow? I’ve had to knock ’em back for both of us,” I said.

Dallas was standing in the shade of the bank, the armpits of his gray shirt dark with moisture. “I’m on the job, here, Dave. Catch you later,” he said.

“What time you get off?”

“I said beat it.”

“Say again?”

“This is a security area. You’re not supposed to be here.”

“You’ve got things mixed up, podna. I’m a police officer.”

“What you are is shit-faced. Now stop making an ass out of yourself and go back in the bar.”

I turned around and walked toward the colonnade, the sun like a wet flame on my skin. I looked back over my shoulder at Dallas, who was now busy with his work, hefting bags of money and carrying them into the bank. My face felt small and tight, the skin dead, freeze-dried in the heat.

“Something wrong, Dave?” the bartender asked.

“Yeah, my glass is empty. Double Beam, beer back,” I said.

While he poured into a shot glass from a bourbon bottle with a chrome nipple on it, I blotted the humidity out of my eyes with a paper napkin, my ears still ringing from the insult Dallas had delivered me. I looked back out the window at the armored car. But the scene had suddenly become surreal, divorced from any of my expectations about that day in my life. A white van came out of nowhere and braked behind the armored car. Four men with cut-down shotguns jumped out on the sidewalk, leaving the driver behind the wheel. They were all dressed in work clothes, their hair and facial features a beige-colored blur under nylon stockings.

“Call nine-one-one, say, ‘Armed robbery in progress,’ and give this address,” I said to the bartender.

I unsnapped the.25 automatic that was strapped to my right ankle. When I got off the barstool, one side of the room seemed to collapse under my foot.

“I wouldn’t go out there,” the bartender said.

“I’m a cop,” I said.

I thought my grandiose words could somehow change the condition I was in. But in the bartender’s eyes I saw a sad knowledge that no amount of rhetoric would ever influence. I walked unsteadily to the front door and jerked it open. The outside world ballooned through the door in a rush of superheated air and carbon monoxide. The street I looked out upon was no longer a part of South Florida. It was a wind-sculpted place in the desert, bleached the color of a biscuit by the sun, home to carrion birds and jackals and blowflies. It was the place that awaits us all, one we don’t allow ourselves to see in our dreams. The.25 auto felt as small and light as plastic in my hand.

I positioned myself behind one of the Arabic columns under the colonnade and steadied my automatic against the stone. “Police officer! Put down your weapons and get on your faces!” I shouted.

But the men robbing the armored car did little more than glance in my direction, as they would at a minor annoyance. It was obvious their timing on the takedown of the car had gone amiss. The van had arrived seconds later than it should have, allowing the guards time to start carrying the canvas money satchels inside the bank. The car guards and the elderly bank guard were down on their knees, against the wall of the bank, their fingers laced behind their heads. The robbers simply needed to pick up the satchels that were within easy reach, head out of Opa-Locka, and dump the van, which was undoubtedly stolen. A few minutes later, they could have disappeared back into the anonymity of the city. But one of them had gotten greedy. One of them had gone into the bank to retrieve the satchels there, racking a round into the chamber of his shotgun.

A teller was already pushing the vault door shut. The robber shot him at point-blank range.

When the shooter emerged from the bank, he was dragging two satchels that were whipsawed with blood, his pump propped against his hip.

“I said on your faces, you motherfuckers!” I shouted.

The first shotgun blast from the robbers on the sidewalk patterned all over the column and the metal door of the bar. A second one caved the window. Then the robbers were shooting at me in unison, blowing dust and powdered stone in the air, peppering the metal door with indentations that looked like shiny nickels.

I crouched at the bottom of the column, unable to move or return fire without being chewed up. Then I heard someone shouting, “Go, go, go, go!” and the sounds of the van doors slamming shut.