Pegasus Descending

by James Lee Burke

  Raguza almost got to his feet when Clete blew him into a stall, trapping him between the toilet and stall wall. Raguza was gasping for breath, his feet fighting for purchase, one arm sunk deep inside the bowl, his head thudding against the wall like a rubber ball tethered to a paddle.

  Clete shut down the nozzle and dropped the hose on the floor. The restroom was flooded, the doorway packed with onlookers, security guards in uniform trying to fight their way through.

  “This guy was starting a fire. He said something about hiding a bomb. Somebody better get the cops,” Clete said.

  Suddenly the crowd headed in all directions, the words “fire” and “bomb” rippling like flame across the casino floor. “Hey, you, come back here!” a security man yelled.

  But Clete was now ensconced in the middle of the throng pouring onto Canal. The mist was gray and swirling, as thick and damp as wet cotton, the palm fronds fraying overhead, and he could smell beignets cooking somewhere and the heavy green odor of the Gulf. His shoulder throbbed, his genitals were swollen, his shirt was streaked with blood and his slacks with urine and bathroom disinfectant, but somehow he knew it was going to be a grand day after all. He crossed into the Quarter, splashing through pools of rainwater, wondering if Trish would still be at the café, wondering, for just a moment, why she had not come looking for him.

  He felt his spirits begin to sink. Maybe Dave had been right; maybe he had been a special kind of fool this time out. He was not only over the hill and addicted to most of the major vices, he was still the violent, chaotic, immature man intelligent women might find exciting and even interesting for the short haul but whom they eventually got rid of, as they would an untrained house pet.

  Then he saw Trish coming down the street, without umbrella or raincoat, almost being hit by a car at the intersection, her lovely, heart-shaped face filled with concern and pity when she realized the condition he was in. “Oh, Clete, what did they do to you?” she said, her fingers touching his eyes, his hair, his mouth. “What did they do to you, honey?”

  “Just a little discussion with a guy. What was that surprise you were talking about?”

  She hooked her arm through his and began to pull him across the street toward the parking garage. “I’m taking you to the hospital,” she said, ignoring his question. “It was that guy following us, wasn’t it? I shouldn’t have let you go back there. I hate myself for this.”

  A passing car blew a wall of water across both Clete and Trish. She used a handkerchief to wipe it out of his eyes, her face turned up to his like a flower opening into light. He wrapped both his arms around her and lifted her up on his chest and carried her in that fashion all the way to the car.

  HE SPENT THE NIGHT in a hospital up St. Charles Avenue. In the morning she picked him up in his Caddy and they drove to a marina on Lake Pontchartrain. A gleaming white seaplane waited for them at the end of a dock, rocking in the chop, the wide slate-green expanse of the lake in the background. “Wow, where we going?” Clete said.

  “How about dinner in Mexico?” she said.

  “Why you doing this, Trish?”

  “Because you saved me from getting busted. Because you take chances for other people. Because I like you, big stuff.” She pressed her knuckles playfully into his stomach.

  When they were both inside, the pilot fired the engines and the plane gathered speed across the water, a white froth whipping from the backdraft. Then the plane lurched suddenly into the sky, climbing higher and higher, until Clete could see the alluvial fan of the Mississippi and the immense, soft gray-green outline of the Louisiana wetlands.

  “Where to in Mexico?” he said.

  “Cancún,” she said, then paused for a beat. “More or less.”

  More or less? But there was still a pink mist inside his head from the Demerol drip at the hospital, and he didn’t pursue it. He lay back in the seat and shut his eyes and let the steady vibration of the engines put him to sleep. He dreamed of a jungle in southeastern Asia, one that always flickered whitely under trip flares or bloomed with red-black geysers of fire and dirt from booby-trapped 105 duds. But now the jungle contained no sign of threat and breathed with the sounds of wind and the patter of rain ticking on the canopy overhead.

  When he awoke, the seaplane was descending through thunder-heads, the windows streaked with rain. Then they were below the squall, flying low over water that had the translucence of green Jell-O. The coral reefs were strung with gossamer fans and shadowed by floating pools of hot blue that looked like they had been poured from a bottle of ink.

  But Trish and Clete’s destination was not the postcard picture he had witnessed from the plane. They landed in a bay full of fish-kill and rode across the interior in a misfiring taxi to a village that buzzed with flies and smelled of chickenshit and herbicide. The villagers were all Indians, who waved at Trish when they saw her through the taxi’s back windows. The houses were constructed of unpainted cinder blocks, the cookstove often a sheet of corrugated tin set on rocks under a lean-to. The community water wells were dug within a few feet of hog and goat pens. The only telephone lines Clete could see went into a cantina and a police station.

  Trish had said little since they had gotten off the plane, and in fact had become reflective and somber. The taxi turned up a rutted road that led to a yellow building with a peaked tar-paper roof.

  “I got involved with the guerrillas in El Sal in the eighties,” he said. “I don’t think any of this will change in our lifetimes.”

  “So we shouldn’t try?”

  He looked at the yellow building. “What is this place?”

  “A home for handicapped kids. Either their parents don’t want them or are not equipped to raise them. Without the home, most of them would spend their lives on the street.”

  Some of the children at the home had been born blind or without hands or feet, or with misshapen faces and twisted spines and spastic nervous systems. Some drooled and made unintelligible sounds. Others were harelipped, clubfooted, or had dwarf or bowed legs. Some had never walked.

  When Clete was introduced to them, his smile felt like a surgical wound. He told Trish he had to use the restroom.

  “Out back, the cinder-block building under the cistern. It has plumbing,” she said.

  When he got outside, his eyes were brimming with tears. He washed his face in an aluminum basin and blew his nose on his handkerchief, then returned to the yellow building, a grin on his face.

  The personnel at the home were Mennonites and Catholic lay missionaries, and seemed to glow with a level of humanity that Clete thought had little to do with political or perhaps even religious conviction. In fact, they seemed to be uncomplicated people who had little or no interest in the larger world and did not view themselves as exceptional and would probably not understand why anyone would treat them as such.

  When Clete got back on the plane, he felt ten years older and for some reason could not even remember the details of what he had done the previous day, even the hosing down of Lefty Raguza at the casino. “You just visit here sometimes?” he asked Trish.

  “No, I work here several months a year.”

  “Who finances this place?”

  “A bunch of assholes who don’t know they finance it,” she replied.

  “Ever boost a savings and loan in Mobile?”

  Her response was a deep-throated laugh.

  Chapter 10

  THE FACT THAT NO Jewish, Hispanic, Asian, Mideastern, or black person had ever been admitted to Tony Lujan’s fraternity did not seem significant to him. Clubs were meant to be private in nature. Like families. There was no law that said you had to let people of different religions and races marry into your family, was there? He had heard about a Jewish pledge who had been blackballed-a kid who later dropped out of college and got blinded in Iraq, but that was before Tony had joined the fraternity. Whenever he heard mention of the Jewish kid getting sandbagged by his fraternity brothers, he walked away from the conversation. Tony di
dn’t like problems, particularly when they were caused by wrongheaded people. If the kid was Jewish, why didn’t he just go to Tulane? It wasn’t Tony’s freight to carry.

  Tomorrow morning, Tuesday, he and his attorney were scheduled to meet with the Iberia Parish district attorney. The D.A. had already presented the available choices for Tony in the most draconian terms. He would either accept a grant of immunity for his cooperation in the investigation of his father or be considered a suspect himself. Either way, he or his father was going to prison. Or maybe both of them would. “You’ve got the key to the jailhouse door,” the district attorney had said. “We’ll try to protect you up at Angola, but you wouldn’t be the first white college boy to get spread-eagled on the bars. Let me know what you decide.”

  The image made Tony’s skin crawl, his buttocks constrict.

  All this because of a wino on a road. All this because Monarch Little, in order to save his own black ass, had told the cops where his old man had gotten the Buick repaired. What had he ever done to Monarch Little? He hadn’t even known Monarch Little existed until the run-in at McDonald’s.

  Tony could not get tomorrow’s meeting with the D.A. out of his mind. There had to be a way out. He had told his lawyer he had no knowledge about the wino’s death, but it was obvious the lawyer didn’t believe him.

  “Your father or you ran over the guy, Tony,” the lawyer had said. “Unless you lent the car to somebody. You think that might have happened?”

  “It could have,” Tony replied, watching the lawyer’s face.

  “Forget I mentioned that,” the lawyer said.

  Would his courage fail him? Could he take the weight and actually risk time on Angola Farm, where he would hoe soybeans under mounted guards who carried quirts and shotguns? Was he actually as small and frightened and weak as he felt? The D.A. obviously thought so. For the first time in his life, he understood why people killed themselves.

  When he did not think his morning could get any worse, the professor in his political science class started in on institutionalized class and ethnic prejudice, asking Tony, in front of a hundred other students, if he believed campus fraternities and sororities had the right to discriminate in their admission policies.

  “Isn’t ‘discrimination’ just another word for judgment?” Tony said. “People discriminate in the kind of food they eat or what part of town they live in. That’s how standards are established. People have a right to choose, don’t they, sir?”

  “Let’s put it another way. Is the issue one of inclusion or exclusion?” the professor asked from behind his lectern, which was mounted on a stage, high above the class. “Doesn’t a fraternity pride itself on who it keeps out rather than who it lets in? What’s the value of money if it doesn’t buy privilege? ‘Melting pot’ sounds good on paper, but the mix may not always be good for everyone. Is that the case, Tony?”

  Tony couldn’t keep track of the professor’s logic, but he knew it was a trap of some kind, an effort to make him look like a pampered rich kid who didn’t care about the rights of others. He could feel words forming in his mouth that he knew he shouldn’t speak.

  “I don’t think fraternities and sororities are the problem. I think the problem is people who-”

  “Who what?” the professor said. His face was effeminate and narrow and stippled with gin roses, his teeth small and sharp inside a neatly trimmed gray-and-brown beard that reminded Tony of mouse fur.

  “People who are professional victims,” Tony said. Then he thought of a joke he had heard at the fraternity, one whose implication he didn’t actually share. But the professor had tried to tar him. All right, let’s see how far the professor wanted to run with it. “Like the NAACP-the National Association of Always Complaining People. I mean, should people feel guilty because they work hard and make a lot of money?”

  The lecture hall became absolutely quiet. The black students in the room put their pens down and either looked into space or twisted in their seats to get a better view of Tony Lujan.

  “You raise an interesting point,” the professor said. “Maybe the vote of one group in our society should count more than another group. But which group fights the wars? Rich people or poor people? It seems that blue-collar young men and women go to war in greater numbers than rich ones. So using your own logic, shouldn’t their vote count for more than yours or mine?”

  Tony’s head was pounding, his forehead breaking with sweat. This was about something else. The professor had been Tony’s freshman adviser and had relatives in New Iberia. Did the professor know about Yvonne Darbonne? Was this about Yvonne? Was he calling Tony an elitist hypocrite? Tony felt the room spinning around him. “I didn’t mean to offend anyone, sir. I apologize for my remark.”

  Then he realized his apology was actually sincere, and for just a moment he felt good about himself. Out of the corner of his eye he saw several black students pick up their pens again.

  “I appreciate your candor, Tony. This is a political science class. If you have a thorn in your head, this is the place to pull it out.” The professor looked at the clock on the back wall. “See you all on Wednesday.”

  Candor? What was candor.

  After the lecture hall had emptied, Tony still sat in his desk, his eyes fastened on the professor, who was putting his notes and books in a briefcase. The professor glanced up and smoothed his beard. “Something you want to ask me?” he said.

  “What did you mean by that, Dr. Edwards?”

  “By what?”

  “This being the place to pull a thorn out. Were you saying something about me? Just tell the truth.”

  “Supposedly that’s why I get paid.”

  “Sir?”

  “I get paid to tell the truth.” The professor gave it up. “I was saying that the idea of class superiority has one basic function-it allows people to justify their exploitation of their fellow human beings. The exploitation happens on many levels, Tony, the most common of which is financial or sexual. It’s taught in fraternities, it’s taught in churches. People screw down and marry up.”

  Tony got up from his seat and approached the lectern, his stomach churning, a sound like an electrical short buzzing in his head. “Are you accusing me of sexually using a girl from a poor family?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I didn’t have anything to do with her death,” he said. “We had something special. It just didn’t last. It just went to hell, all at once. I don’t even know why.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t-”

  “You were talking about Yvonne. You were doing it in front of the whole class.”

  The professor stared at him. “You have a few minutes, Tony? Why don’t you and I go for a cup of coffee?”

  Tony looked at the confusion in the professor’s face and realized the terrible mistake he had made. “I’m sorry, I misunderstood. I’m not feeling too good, Dr. Edwards. I didn’t mean to bother you.”

  “You’re a fine boy. One day you’ll discover who you are and none of this will matter.” The professor seemed to smile with a level of compassion Tony did not think him capable of. But was it compassion, or perhaps something else? “Come talk to me when you have a chance. We’ll have a drink in my backyard. I can make a grand martini.”

  But Tony was already walking rapidly up the aisle toward the exit, his footsteps echoing in the empty room, his face red with shame.

  THE FRATERNITY HOUSE had been created out of a large white three-story Victorian home, one whose gables and cornices were visible through the crepe myrtle and azaleas and live oaks like the hard edges of a medieval fortress. The pledges mowed the lawn, raked the leaves, and trimmed the hedges, and kids whose families couldn’t afford the fraternity’s costs worked off their room and board by cooking and serving meals and cleaning the house.

  Tony shared a room on the third floor with Slim Bruxal, one with a small balcony that provided a magnificent view of the trees and rooftops in the neighborhood. The room was the most desirable in the house
, and when Slim requested it, none of his fraternity brothers objected, although others had more seniority than Slim and wanted it.

  Tony’s insides were like water when he returned to the house from his poli-sci class. He tried to tell Slim about what had happened, how he had made a fool out of himself, how Dr. Edwards had looked at him as though he were an object of pity.

  While Tony sat on the side of his unmade bed and went through every detail of his public embarrassment in class, Slim stood bare-chested at a full-length mirror, combing his hair, examining his facial skin for imperfections, checking to see if the barber had etched his sideburns sufficiently. “I got news for you. Dr. Edwards is an alcoholic fudge-packer. He pushes that pinko douche rinse whenever he gets the chance. Be proud you stood up to him.”

  “I’m scared, Slim.”

  “Of what?”

  “My lawyer and I meet with the D.A. tomorrow.”

  “Tell him to stuff it, just like I did. The Feds are using Monarch Little and the Iberia D.A. to get at my old man. They don’t got jack on either one of us. Winos get run over all the time. You’re an innocent man. Keep remembering that. They’re targeting you because of who your father is.”

  “They’ll send him to prison.”

  “No, they won’t. My old man eats guys like that D.A. for lunch. Back in Miami, these local schmucks wouldn’t have been allowed to clean his toilet.”

  “I feel real bad. I keep seeing that guy on the road. I keep thinking about Yvonne. Why did she go nuts like that?”

  “How do I know? She had mental problems. Yvonne doesn’t have anything to do with this. You keep the two issues separate. I don’t want to see you like this.”

  “I can’t help it. I’m coming apart.”