James Burke - Pegasus Descending

I could see the back of his neck darken, like a shadow creeping from his collar to his boxed hairline. “Lefty has a problem with animals, too,” I said to the woman. “If you ask him why he’s cruel to a gentle and defenseless creature, he’ll probably tell you about all the hard breaks he had when he was a kid. The truth is Lefty hurts pets and innocent people because he’s a gutless punk and never could cut it on his own, either as a child or an adult. Lefty was probably a good bar of soap in prison, but don’t let him ever tell you he was stand-up or a solid con. He had sissy status even before he got to Raiford and was probably giving head in the bridal suite his first day down. Right, Lefty?”

I let out a wheezing laugh and slapped him hard between the shoulder blades again. The muscles in his back were corded as tight as cable. The woman started to get up from her chair.

“Sit down,” Lefty said. “This guy’s a drunk. He got run out of Miami, he got run out of New Orleans. He makes a lot of noise, then he goes away.”

“Wish I could do that, Lefty, I mean just kind of disappear. But you poisoned ole Tripod. It takes a special sort of guy to do something like that.”

Even from the side I could see his face scrunch. “I did what?” he said.

“That’s the name of my daughter’s pet raccoon. He almost died because you mixed roach paste with sardines and put them in his pet bowl.” I looked across the table. “What would you do if you were in my place, Ernesto?”

Ernesto’s eyes were small and brown, deep-set, nonexpressive. His hair was tied in a matador’s twist on the nape of his neck. He shrugged his shoulders and smiled in a self-deprecating fashion.

“How about you?” I said to the man whose blue eyes didn’t match his face.

He glanced from side to side, as though the answer to my question lay in some other part of the bar. His plaits looked like centipedes on his scalp. He wore a purple silk shirt and a crucifix and a P- 38 G.I. can opener on a chain around his neck. “I don’t got nothing to do wit’ dis, mon,” he said.

“Glad to hear that, because Lefty here has been a bad boy. I wonder if Whitey knows that Lefty has been causing a lot of trouble over in Iberia Parish, like pouring acid all over Clete Purcel’s car. I thought you were a pro, Lefty, but the more I see your handiwork, the more I get the impression you’re just a little jailhouse bitch who can’t get it up unless he’s whacking on a helpless female. Is that because you’re short?”

I saw the thumb on his left hand twitch slightly.

“Those elevator soles on your stomps aren’t strong indicators of self-confidence,” I said. I patted him softly in the middle of the back and felt his skin constrict from the blow that didn’t come.

“You’re wrapped too tight,” I said. “Relax, I’m not going to hurt you. You’re probably one of those guys who-” I started laughing again, my words breaking apart. “Seriously, you’re one of those guys who has a legitimate beef with the universe. It’s not easy being a little guy or the product of a busted rubber.” I hit him again, and laughed harder, coughing on the back of my wrist, my eyes watering. “Did your mother ever pick you up by inserting Q-tips in your ears? That’s a sure sign there are problems in the family.”

His neck was blood-dark, the skin around his mouth drawn down like a shark’s. His hands were set squarely on the tabletop. He coughed deep in his throat and spoke in a clotted whisper, his eyes fastened on the opposite wall.

“You got to speak up, Lefty,” I said.

“I did thirty-seven days in isolation, in the dark, a cup of water and one slice of white bread a day. I can take the worst you got and spit it in your face.”

“Really?”

“I’m done talking with you. Find yourself an alcoholic titty to suck on. I can direct you to a topless bar full of guys like you,” he said.

A man walked over from the bar and scraped up the cue ball from the pool table. He bounced it off two rails and watched it miss a pocket. “Anybody up for a game of rotation?” he asked.

“Yeah, over here,” Raguza said, and threw three quarters on the felt.

Ernesto and the man with the Islands accent grinned at him, happy in the knowledge their friend was back in the groove.

I glanced toward the latticework partition in front of the men’s room. Clete was watching us from behind it, the shotgun still inside his raincoat, the brim of his hat low on his brow. I shook my head at him.

I should have known Raguza wouldn’t rattle. He had stacked too much hard time in too many joints and had probably thrived in the prison population. Also, he may have seen Clete behind the latticework and figured he was being set up to get blown out of his socks.

I got up from the chair and went back to the bar to retrieve my hat. Then Lefty Raguza, like every wiseass on the planet, decided he’d have another run at fate.

“He’s no problem. Believe me, the guy’s a joke,” he said to the others at his table.

A joke. Those words were essentially the same ones Dallas Klein heard just before his executioner pulled the trigger on him.

I put on my rain hat and showed no indication I had heard Raguza’s remark, then walked around the end of the bar onto the duckboards. “Need to borrow this. I’ll settle up with you later,” I said to the bartender.

“Whoa,” he said.

“No ‘whoa’ to it, bud,” I said.

I used two dish towels to pick up the stainless-steel cauldron from the stove, then I headed straight for Raguza. His friends saw me coming, but unfortunately for him, he didn’t. The woman pushed her chair back, knocking it to the floor, holding her purse in front of her. “Where you think you’re going?” Raguza said.

I slipped one wadded towel under the cauldron’s bottom and poured the entire contents-perhaps two gallons of steaming gumbo-on his head.

It must have hit him like a whoosh of flame from a blast furnace. He screamed and clutched his face and tried to wipe the curtain of stewed tomatoes and okra and shrimp off his skin. He rolled on the floor, clawing at his hair, kicking his feet. I picked up a pitcher of beer from another table and poured it onto his face. “You okay down there?” I said.

Ernesto and the man from the Islands had risen from their chairs and were coming around the table. Clete stepped out from behind the partition, opening his raincoat so they could see his shotgun, which he held against his side, muzzle-down, his wrist protruding through a slit in the coat’s pocket. “You guys want to buy into this, that can be arranged,” he said.

The room was absolutely silent, the patrons at the bar frozen in time and place, the bartender’s hand motionless on the telephone.

Clete raised his left hand palm-up, curling his fingers, signaling for me to walk toward him, his eyes on Ernesto and the man from the Islands.

I wiped a smear of gumbo off my fingers onto one of the dish towels and dropped the towel on top of Raguza, then started walking toward Clete and the back door. My mouth was dry, my heart racing, my face suddenly cold and damp in the breeze from an air-conditioning unit. Then I saw Clete’s eyes shift, his expression constrict, and I heard feet running at my back.

Lefty Raguza tackled me around the waist and threw us both into a tangle of chairs and a table laden with beer bottles. His face was bright and shiny, like a painted Indian’s, his skin already swelling where it had been scalded. He clenched his right hand deep into my throat and hit me full in the face with the other. Then he was all over me.

He head-butted me, got a thumb in my eye, and tried to grab my genitalia. I could smell the deodorant under his armpits and the bile in his breath and the testosterone in his clothes; see the patina of blond hair on his skin, the mucus at the corner of his eye, a pearl of sweat drip from a nostril. I could see his buttocks clench as he wrapped his legs around me and the sensual pleasure on his mouth when he thought he was connecting with bone and organ.