James Burke - Pegasus Descending

He tapped the edge of his loafer against my right ankle. “What’s that, a steel brace?”

“Stay in the truck.”

He pulled at his belt and made a face, but this time it wasn’t about me. “You got any Tums? I ate some shrimp spaghetti for lunch that smelled like three-day-old fish bait.”

I got out in the rain. The power wire on the pole fell into the darkness, then struck a pool of water and snapped like a coach whip. Clete got out on the other side of the truck, the shotgun stiff and hard-looking inside his raincoat. He walked heavily toward the rear of the club, his big shoulders bent forward, the back of his neck glistening with rainwater.

I pushed open the front door and stepped inside the smoky, air-conditioned coolness of the club. A long wood bar ran the length of one wall. The people drinking there glanced at the door and the inrush of rain, as though expecting an event, a messenger, a harbinger that would indicate a change in their lives. Then they returned to their drinks or watching their reflections in the bar mirror, hypnotized somehow by the stylized ways they smoked their own cigarettes.

In an alcove to the right of the bar was a cone of yellow light, under which Lefty Raguza stood by a pool table, chalking the tip of his cue. He wore a pleated short-sleeved lavender shirt and cream-colored slacks and suede shoes with thick soles and heels. His sleeves were folded neatly on his upper arms so that his biceps bulged against the fabric with the tautness of muskmelons. He gave no indication of noticing my entry into the club, but I knew that he saw me, in the same way you know when a predator’s eyes brush across your skin, like the touch of a soiled hand.

I ordered a glass of club soda and ice with a lemon twist at the bar and watched him in the mirror. He leaned over the table and busted an eight-ball rack all over the felt. A solitary ball dropped into a corner pocket, but he didn’t move toward his next shot. Instead, he set his cue butt-down on the floor and casually chalked his cue again, stroking the talc across the rounded surface, taking his time, ignoring the other shooter, who waited by the wall rack, obviously impatient for the game to go forward.

“Tell you what,” Raguza said. “Three bucks on each ball in the string. Three to you for each one I leave.”

The other shooter, a heavy man who looked like a Mexican laborer, nodded without speaking.

Raguza bent over the table and sank one ball after another with the geometrical precision of an artist, banking shots, making combinations, using reverse English, crawling the cue ball along the rail until it whispered against the target ball and dropped it with a deep thud into a leather pocket.

Then he scratched, with three balls still on the felt, the signature of a hustler who never allows the sucker to feel he’s been taken. But when Raguza went back to his table and joined a high-yellow woman who wore a knit tank top over a bulging bra, I could see the look of triumph in his eyes, the curl at the corner of his mouth.

The back door opened and I felt the building decompress, the walls creaking slightly, as Clete came in from the storm and walked through the shadows, past a latticework partition into the men’s room.

Clete had accused me of planning to take Lefty Raguza off the board. The truth was I had no plan. Or perhaps more honestly I had no conscious one. But I knew that Raguza belonged to that group of human beings whose pathology is always predictable. By reason of either genetic defect, environmental conditioning, or a deliberate choice to join themselves at the hip with the forces of darkness, they incorporate into their lives a form of moral insanity that is neither curable nor subject to analysis. They enjoy inflicting pain, and view charity and forgiveness as signals of both weakness and opportunity. The only form of remediation they understand is force. The victim who believes otherwise condemns himself to the death of a thousand cuts.

So, if your profession requires that you remain within the parameters of the law, how do you deal with the Lefty Raguzas of the world?

The answer is you don’t. You turn their own energies against them. You treat their personal histories with contempt. You yawn at their stories of neglect and deprivation and beatings by alcoholic fathers and promiscuous mothers. Worse, you laugh at them in front of other people. The effect can be like a bolt of lightning bouncing around inside a steel box.

The bartender put a bowl of peanuts in front of me. His black hair looked like oily wire combed across his pate. “You a cop?” he said.

“I look like a cop?”

“Yeah,” he replied.

“You never can tell,” I said.

“We got free gumbo tonight. It’ll be done in a minute.” Behind him, a stainless-steel cauldron was starting to bubble on a ring of butane flame.

I looked in the mirror at the reflection of Lefty Raguza. But now he had more company than the mulatto woman in the knit top. A man with washed-out blue eyes that did not fit his negroid face and ropelike black hair plaited down tightly on his scalp sat next to him. Sitting across from them was a man whose size and proportions took me all the way back to a specific moment in Opa-Locka, Florida, when Dallas Klein had burst out the back of the bar, trying to flee the consequences of his gambling addiction, and had collided into a man who seemed as big as the sky.

What was the name? Nestor? Ernest? No, Ernesto. His neck rose into his gigantic head with no taper, as though his neck and jowls were one tubular column of meat and bone. The width and curvature of his upper back made me think of a whale breaking the surface of a wave.

I looked toward the men’s room. Clete was still inside.

“What are they drinking over there by the pool table?” I said.

“Beer,” the bartender replied.

I placed a twenty-dollar bill on the bar. “Send them a pitcher on me.”

“Something I should know about here?” he asked.

“Nothing I can think of,” I replied.

A few moments later I watched in the mirror as the bartender set the pitcher in the midst of Lefty Raguza’s group. I saw Raguza glance in my direction, then tell the bartender to take the pitcher away. Clete was still not out of the restroom. But showtime was showtime, I told myself. I picked up my club soda and walked past the pool table until I was standing behind Raguza’s chair.

“You don’t like draft beer?” I said.

The tin-shaded light over the pool table threw my shadow across Raguza’s hands and wrists. He waited a long time before he spoke. “This is a private party here,” he said.

“Does this lady know your history, Lefty?” I said.

“You need to beat feet, Jack. This is not your jurisdiction.” His hands were folded, his thumbs motionless. He didn’t turn his head when he spoke.

I scraped a chair up behind him and sat down, so that I was looking over his shoulder, like a kibitzer at a card game. I stared into the face of the woman next to him. She tried to smile, then her eyes broke and her face went flat.

“Lefty ever tell you about his psychiatric problems?” I said.

“Excuse me?”

“He likes to beat up women with his fists. It happens so fast they rarely know what hit them.”

“I’m not sure what we’re talking about,” she said. She lowered her eyes and placed one hand on the tabletop. Then she took it away and placed it in her lap.

“A prison psychiatrist once described Lefty as an anal-retentive. That means he was strapped on the training pot for long periods of time. I suspect his Jockey underwear is loaded with skid marks.” I laughed and clapped Raguza hard on the back, snorting when I inhaled. “How about it, Lefty? You ever download into your Fruit of the Looms?”