Pegasus Descending

by James Lee Burke

  Slim studied Tony in the mirror and slipped his comb in his back pocket. He sat down next to him and put his arm over Tony’s shoulders. Tony could smell the clean odor of Slim’s skin, the tinge of testosterone from his armpit. Slim squeezed him fraternally to get him out of his funk. “In no time you’ll be the house’s top cocksman again. Trust me, nobody cares about a winehead who walked in front of a car.”

  “That’s not what happened, Slim.”

  “Yeah, it is.”

  “I can’t hurt my folks like this.”

  Slim’s eyes were filled with the kind of thoughts he never shared. He massaged the back of Tony’s neck a long time, then glanced through the partially opened door and saw two junior classmen studying at a table in the room across the hall. He got up from the bed and quietly shut the door.

  An hour later Tony drove his silver Lexus to St. John’s Cathedral, a nineteenth-century brick church with twin bell towers a few blocks from Lafayette ’s old downtown area. If asked, he probably would not have been able to tell anyone what he was doing there. Before her accident, his mother had dutifully attended the local Episcopalian church, served graciously on all its social committees, and had believed in absolutely none of it. Ironically, Tony became convinced of the spiritual world’s authenticity by his father. Bellerophon Lujan feared no man, but he would quit plowing or avoid proximity to any livestock at the first creak of electricity in the clouds. He was terrified of the prospect of hell and the consequences of his own libidinous nature, and believed it was the devil’s hand that constantly subverted his attempts to achieve social respectability, which in Bellerophon’s mind was the same as morality. For Bello, God was an abstraction, but the devil was real and reminded Bello of his presence each morning when Bello awoke throbbing and hard, chained to unrequited dreams that followed him into the day.

  Tony walked across the church lawn to the St. John Oak and sat down on a stone bench. The oak was supposedly over four hundred years old. The limbs were so thick and so heavy, they not only touched the ground but had formed huge elbows that allowed the limbs to continue growing into the sunlight. The breeze was cool under the tree and smelled of flowers in the garden planted by the rectory. A young priest was watering the flowers with a hose, amusing himself by placing his thumb over the end of the hose and firing a jet into a nest of mud daubers. He caught Tony looking at him and grinned self-consciously.

  Tony did not know how long he sat on the stone bench. He could have stayed there forever. The limbs of the live oak were hung with Spanish moss and encrusted with lichen, the stone under him cool to his touch. How did he get mixed up in so much trouble? Why did Yvonne have to go and kill herself? In his mind he created a fantasy in which he walked through the front door of the church and out the back, free of all the misery that had come into his life since he had started hanging out with Slim Bruxal.

  But in truth he couldn’t put it on Slim. He had sought out Slim; it wasn’t the other way around. There were rumors about Slim’s expulsion for cheating at LSU and a fight with a Texas Aggie in the restroom at Tiger Stadium, one that left the Aggie ruptured and bleeding inside from a broken rib. But Slim had another side to him. He listened to Tony and always sensed what Tony needed to hear. Slim took no guff from anyone. He understood what it was like to have a father he admired, even loved, but who was looked down upon by others. In fact, sometimes Tony looked at Slim soaping himself in the shower and experienced feelings he didn’t like to dwell upon.

  Then Tony realized the priest had turned off the garden hose and was walking toward him. He started to get up and leave. In fact, he didn’t even know why he was there. Should he just tell this stranger about Yvonne and the dead homeless man and the fact that tomorrow he might betray his own family? The man in black pants and a smudged T-shirt was probably not much older than he was, except he was slight of build, almost frail. A baseball glove hung from his belt and another one was folded in his hand, a grass-stained ball buried in the pocket.

  “Feel like a little pitch-and-catch?” he said.

  “I pulled my arm in a fraternity game. I probably won’t be that good at it.”

  “Neither am I. See that piece of cardboard where there used to be a stained-glass pane? My forkball got out of control.”

  Tony fitted the spare glove on his hand, and he and the priest began flinging the ball back and forth under the oak’s drip line, the sunlight breaking like slivers of glass behind the cathedral’s silhouette. Then the priest skipped one across the grass to him. Tony fielded it backhand, then fired it straight into the priest’s glove, straight and hard, with no trajectory, with an accuracy that surprised even himself.

  The priest sent another grounder at him. Tony bobbled it at first, the ball caroming off the heel of his hand. But he pulled it out of midair with his right hand and side-armed it, whap, back into the priest’s waiting glove.

  “You’re pretty good,” the priest said.

  “Not really,” he said, doing a poor job of hiding his pride.

  “Try me now,” the priest said.

  Tony threw a high-hopper that the priest caught easily and tossed back without interest. The next two were faster, at an angle, grounders-with-eyes. The priest was good, scooping them up with his body positioned in front of the ball, his return throw fired from behind the ear. The next one Tony threw was a hummer, whizzing across the lawn like a shot. The priest caught it on the run, spearing it after it took a bad hop on a tree root, whirling and side-arming it back in a half turn.

  The ball flew by Tony’s outstretched glove and hit a passing car on the street. “Oh, boy,” he heard the priest say.

  “I’ll go after it, Father,” Tony said.

  “Are you kidding? This is the third time this has happened this week. Time to take cover,” the priest said.

  Moments later, the priest hid the two gloves in a flower bed, furtively looking around the corner of the building. His face was bright and sweaty in the shade, his eyes wide with apprehension.

  “You’re really a minister?” Tony said.

  “Well, I’m sure not Derek Jeter.”

  “I think the ball hit the car window.”

  “I know. That’s why I’m here and not on the street looking for it. Come on, I have a couple of cold sodas in my cooler.”

  He squatted down on the grass and popped off the top of a small ice chest. He lifted out a can of Pepsi, ripped the tab, and handed it up to Tony. “Were you worried about something out there?” he said.

  “Me? No, not really.”

  “You a Catholic?”

  “No.”

  “If you want to tell me about something, it won’t go any farther than this garden.”

  Had all this been a ruse? Tony wondered. Another do-gooder with an agenda? The priest lifted up his T-shirt and wiped his face with it, staring out at the traffic on the street.

  “My girlfriend killed herself. She was stoned out of her head and maybe went to bed with several men before she did it. I might be arrested tomorrow for the death of a homeless man. I think maybe I’m a coward. I may commit a terrible act of betrayal and send one of my parents to prison.”

  The priest’s mouth parted silently. His face was still flushed from play, the hair on his arms speckled with dirt from his work in the garden. His eyes glistened. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  Sorry about what? Yvonne’s death? Sorry he had nothing to offer? What was he saying?

  But the priest’s gaze had drifted toward the street, where Slim Bruxal’s SUV had just pulled behind Tony’s Lexus. The SUV was loaded with kids from the fraternity house. At least two of them were wearing T-shirts imprinted with the faces of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, which had been one of several ways the fraternity signaled its feelings on the question of race.

  “I have to go,” Tony said.

  “Who are those guys?” the priest said.

  “My friends.”

  The priest looked again at the kids getting out of Slim’s vehicle. �
�You didn’t tell me your name.”

  “I don’t know who I am, Father. I don’t know anything anymore.”

  “Stay,” the priest said.

  But Tony had already fitted a crooked smile on his face and directed his steps toward his friends, who waited for him by the curb. The speckled shade under the St. John Oak seemed to slip off his skin like water sliding off stone.

  IT WAS HOT AND DRY that evening, and heat lightning flickered against a black sky in the south. Molly and I ate a late dinner of cold cuts and potato salad and iced tea on the picnic table in the backyard with Snuggs and Tripod. The air was thick with birds, the bayou coated with a pall of smoke from meat fires in the park.

  “I think it’s going to storm,” Molly said. “You can feel the barometer dropping.”

  Just as she spoke, the wind touched the leaves over our heads and I felt a breath of cool air against my cheek, smelled a hint of distant rain. The phone rang in the kitchen. Molly got up to answer it.

  “Let the machine take it,” I said.

  She sat back down. Then she tapped herself on the forehead with the heel of her hand. “I forgot.”

  “Forgot what?”

  “A kid called just before you got home. He wouldn’t leave a number. He said he’d call back later.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Tony?”

  “Tony Lujan?”

  “He just said ‘Tony.’ He sounded like he’d been drinking.”

  “He probably was. That’s Bello Lujan’s kid. The D.A. and the Feds are about to chain-drag him down East Main.”

  The phone rang again. This time I went inside and answered it. It was Wally, our dispatcher, working the late shift and, I suspected, trying to pass on his discontent about it.

  “We got Monarch Little in a holding cell. He t’rew his food t’rew the bars. What do you t’ink we ought to do?”

  “Tell him to clean it up. Why you calling me with this, Wally?”

  “’Cause he wants to talk to Helen, but she ain’t here.”

  “What’s he in for?”

  “Illegal firearms possession. Maybe littering, too, ’cause he left his burned car on the street.”

  “I’m not in the mood for it, partner.”

  “His car caught fire, down at the corner where he sells dope. Soon as the fire truck gets there, shotgun shells start blowing up inside the car. There was a sawed-off double-barrel on the floor. The firemen found what was left of a truck flare on the backseat. Want to come down?”

  “No.”

  There was a pause. “Dave?”

  “What?”

  “One of the uniforms called Monarch a bucket of black gorilla shit. Monarch axed him if it was true the uniform’s mother still does it dog-style in Master P’s backyard. The same uniform tole me he was recommending suicide watch for Monarch. I go off shift in t’ree hours. I don’t want no accidents happening here after I’m gone.”

  I took the receiver from my ear and pinched the fatigue out of my eyes. “I’ll be down in a few minutes.”

  “T’anks. I knew you wouldn’t mind.”

  I asked Molly to save my dinner and went down to the jail, where Monarch sat in a holding cell, barefoot, beltless, his gold neck chains locked up in a personal possessions envelope. One eye had a deep red blood clot in the corner, the eyebrow ridged, split in the middle.

  “Who popped you?” I asked.

  “Slipped down getting into the cruiser. Check the arrest report if you t’ink I’m lying. I cain’t get ahold of that FBI woman. I’m suppose to be in Witness Protection, not in no holding cell.”

  “This may come as a shock, but Witness Protection doesn’t empower a person to go on committing crimes.”

  “That cut-down shotgun ain’t mine. I ain’t never seen it before.”

  “Why were you on the corner?”

  “I wasn’t on the corner. I was in the back room of the li’l store there, drinking a soda wit’ my friends. I go there every afternoon to have a soda. Then my ’Bird explodes. Next t’ing I know, I got a racial problem wit’ a cracker don’t have no bidness in a black neighborhood.” He brushed at his eye with the back of his wrist.

  “Did you mouth off to the arresting officer?”

  “I tole him what I tole you-that ain’t my gun. He t’ought my ’Bird burning up was funny. He said too bad I wasn’t taking a nap in it.”

  “I’ll see if I can get you kicked. But I want you in my office at oh-eight-hundred tomorrow morning.”

  His eyes wandered around the opposite wall and up on the ceiling. “That’s military talk, ain’t it? Kind of stuff John Wayne like to snap off.”

  “Sometimes you make me wish I was black, Monarch.”

  “Why?”

  “So I could beat the crap out of you and not feel guilty about it,” I said.

  But Monarch was not destined to make the street that night. Before I could get in touch with Helen, Wally took a 911 call from a community of rusted trailers, shacks, weed-grown yards, and piled garbage that was so egregious in the social decay it represented that it seemed planned rather than accidental. The 911 caller said he had heard shots, four of them, that afternoon, down by the bayou. He had thought the shooter was target-practicing and consequently had paid little attention to it. At sunset he had let his dog out to run in the sugarcane. The dog had come back from the field with blood on its muzzle.

  So far, the only deputy at the crime scene was our retired Marine NCO, Top. He had driven his cruiser down a turnrow in the field, his flasher bar rippling with color, and was now standing with the driver’s door open, gazing at the sun’s last reflection on the bayou. A hundred yards up the bayou, the turn bridge’s lights were on, and close to the four corners, a juke joint rimmed by a shell parking lot thundered with music. Behind us, inside the deep evening shade of clustered cedar and locust trees and slash pines, children rode bicycles among trailers and shacks where no one ever responded to a knock on a door without first checking to see who the visitor was.

  “Where’s the vic?” I said.

  Top picked up a rock and threw it at a dog that was slinking through the Johnson grass toward the back of a tin-sided tractor shed. “Still need to ask?”

  “What’s that smell?”

  “You don’t want to know.”

  I took a flashlight from my glove box and walked to the rear of the shed. I have investigated many homicides over the years. They’re all bad and none are easy to look at. Rarely does a fictionalized treatment do them justice. The physical details vary, but the most unforgettable image in any homicide is the stark sense of violation and theft and utter helplessness in the victim’s face. I knew all these things before I rounded the corner of the shed. But I wasn’t prepared for what I saw. I stepped backward, a handkerchief pressed to my mouth, the victim’s remains glistening in the beam of my flashlight.

  The murder weapon was undoubtedly a shotgun, discharged within inches of the face, the shells probably loaded with double-aught bucks. The victim’s right jaw had been blown away, exposing his teeth and tongue. His skullcap had been splattered on the shed wall in a spray of white bone and brain matter. The shooter had put at least one round into the victim’s stomach, virtually disemboweling him. Feral dogs had done the rest. A chrome-plated.25-caliber automatic lay amid a network of dandelions, just beyond the tips of the victim’s right hand. In the distance, I saw the flashers of emergency vehicles coming hard down the road.

  I went back to my truck and pulled on a pair of polyethylene gloves and stuck three Ziploc bags in my back pocket, although I would have to wait for the crime scene photographer to be done before I picked up any evidence.

  “Got any idea who he is?” Top asked.

  I didn’t answer.

  “Streak?” he said.

  “I’m not sure, Top,” I said.

  But it was hard to ignore the victim’s Ralph Lauren shirt, his girlish hips, and his curly brown hair, sun-bleached on the tips, probably by many hours on a tenni
s court. I squatted down next to him and eased his wallet out of his back pocket, swiping at a cloud of gnats in my face.

  The wallet was fat with a sheaf of hundred-dollar bills. I slipped the driver’s license out of a leather slot for plastic cards and shined my light on it. Then I realized I had almost stepped on two twelve-gauge shell casings that lay just behind me, perhaps five feet out from the shed wall. I rose from the ground and kept my face turned into the breeze, away from the odor that caused my nostrils to clench up each time I breathed it. Helen Soileau and Koko Hebert were walking toward me through the grass.

  “You ID the vic?” Helen said.

  “Yeah,” I said, my voice thick.

  Koko shined his light on the body. “We’ll need a front-end loader to get the guy into a bag,” he said.

  Helen’s eyes stayed fastened on my face.

  I handed her Tony Lujan’s driver’s license. Blood from his wounds had seeped into his wallet and dried on his photograph. “I’ll make the family notification, but I want backup when I do it,” I said.

  Chapter 11

  EARLIER THAT EVENING I had tried to get Monarch Little kicked loose on a weapons charge that in all probability would never have gone to trial, since the cut-down shotgun had been seized from his vehicle when he was not anywhere near it. My failure to get Monarch back on the street would probably remain the kindest deed I ever did for him.

  People handle grief in different ways. I once looked into the eyes of a Vietnamese woman and realized that sorrow can sometimes possess a depth that goes deeper than the bottom of one’s soul. I knew if I looked too long into this woman’s eyes, I would drown in their luminosity and silence and lose the sunlight in my own life.

  I believe Bello’s sorrow was as great as that Vietnamese woman’s, and I was almost thankful that as a primitive and ignorant man, he chose to channel it into rage and threats of violence against others, because then I didn’t have to look into his eyes and see the depth of his loss.

  He had met us at his front door, in a crimson robe and house slippers, a bowl of ice cream and blueberries in his hand. He looked at Helen and me and the two uniformed deputies with us and at the flasher lights pulsing on our vehicles, and I saw his jaw tighten and his nostrils swell with air. A college-age girl sat on the sofa behind him. She was the same person I had seen when I had first interviewed Tony Lujan at his house.