Pegasus Descending

by James Lee Burke

  “I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about. You deal with your own demons, Mr. Purcel. I have to call Mrs. Lujan,” Alridge said.

  He rose from his chair, seeming to tower over Clete. Then he hesitated, his face fraught with concern. “Are you all right to drive?” he said.

  “Am I all-”

  Alridge gestured to the bartender. “Call a cab for this gentleman, will you, Harold?”

  “Yes, sir, Mr. Alridge,” the bartender replied.

  “You hold on, bub,” Clete said, getting to his feet.

  Alridge touched him gently on the shoulder. “You did what you thought you had to do, Mr. Purcel. Rest here a little bit and have a cup of coffee. I’m happy to have met you.”

  Clete searched for a dignified response but could think of none. He watched Colin Alridge walk out of the room. His hands felt thick and stiff and useless on top of the linen-covered table. His face was dilated like a balloon, his ears ringing in the quiet, his mouth bitter with the aftertaste of midafternoon whiskey. He wondered if the role of public fool came in incremental fashion with age, or if you simply crossed a line one day and found yourself in a room full of echoes that sounded almost like laughter.

  THAT EVENING he sat next to me in a canvas chair on the bayou, at the back of my property, flipping a cork and baited hook from a cane pole out on the edge of the current. The evening sky was green, the wind cool in the trees, and the lights had just come on in the park across the water. A dragonfly lit on the Clete’s cork and floated with it past the flowers blooming among the hyacinths.

  “I felt like two cents. Did I read this guy all wrong?” he said.

  “Who cares? You’re a good guy, Cletus. You’ve always been on the right side of things. You don’t have to prove anything,” I said.

  He had eaten and showered after returning from New Orleans, but his face still had an empty look, like that of a man who has just awakened from sleep and isn’t sure where he is. Clete had been on the full-tilt boogie for more than three decades now, and I wondered if the bill was starting to come due.

  “The crazy thing is, I don’t even know why I went after this guy,” he said.

  “Because you don’t like frauds and guys who use religion to sell wars.”

  He rubbed one eye with his fist. “The guy seemed on the square.”

  “He’s not, Clete. He’s a con man, and the guy he’s probably conned the most is himself. But let’s get off the dime here. Alridge knows Bello Lujan’s wife?”

  “Yeah, he was upset about the kid getting blown away. I think it really put a nail in his head.”

  “Like maybe he feels guilt about it?”

  “Something like that. Or maybe he knows why Lujan was killed.”

  “So I’m glad you went after him.”

  “Really?” he said, looking me at me directly for the first time since his return from New Orleans.

  “Really,” I said.

  ONE TIME WHILE SWACKED on Cambodian red and a quart of stolen Scotch, a sergeant in my platoon who had served in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam told me he was the wisest man he had ever known.

  “Why’s that?” I asked.

  “Because I’ve spent a lifetime seeing people in duress,” he replied.

  “So?” I said.

  “That’s when the best and worst in people comes out. When they’re in duress. Most of the time the best comes out. Sometimes it don’t.”

  “What happens when the worst comes out?” I asked.

  “You got to remember who you are so you don’t become like the people around you. Each night you tell yourself over and over you got a special place inside you where you live. It’s like a private cathedral nobody can touch. That’s the secret to sanity, Loot. But you can’t tell anybody about your special place.”

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “Because once they know you got that private place in your head, they’ll strap you down and kill your brain cells with electroshock.”

  I was about to have the opportunity to test the wisdom of the sergeant’s words.

  Chapter 14

  MONARCH LITTLE’S BAIL was reduced Monday morning on the firearms violation to twenty-five thousand dollars. Through a friendly bondsman who allowed his clients to pay off his ten percent fee on the installment plan, Monarch was back on the street in time for lunch at the same McDonald’s where he’d gotten into it with Slim Bruxal and Tony Lujan.

  But the problem with Monarch’s release from jail didn’t lie with Monarch, at least not directly. Helen called me into her office at 1 p.m.

  “How much tolerance do you have for Bello Lujan?” she asked.

  “Considering the fact he broke out a window in a cruiser with his head in order to spit on me, not very much,” I replied.

  “You’re probably the only person in the department he’ll listen to,” she said.

  I knew where she was headed. “No, Bello is not my responsibility. If you want a nursemaid for this guy, find somebody else,” I said.

  “He respects you.”

  “ Bello is an animal. He doesn’t respect anybody or anything.”

  Helen drummed her fingers softly on her desk pad, her eyes lowered. “We’ve come a long way since the civil rights era, Dave. I don’t want to see that progress undone.”

  “Then figure out a way to put Bello in a cage. Just leave me out of it. I don’t like getting spit on. I don’t like getting used, either.”

  She snuffed now in her nose. “I can’t blame you for your feelings. Don’t worry about it. I’ll work out something else,” she said. She swiveled around in her chair and gazed out the window.

  “That’s it?” I said.

  “That’s it,” she said.

  When your slider isn’t working and your fastball couldn’t find the strike zone if it had eyes on it, what’s the only pitch to throw? The answer is always the same: the humble change-up. You hold the ball deep in your palm, then let the batter’s overwrought watch spring destroy his timing. Helen had just floated a beaut down the pipe. I went back to my office and tried to bury myself in paperwork, but I couldn’t get Bellerophon Lujan and the primitive, violent mind-set he represented out of my thoughts.

  He was a creature out of the past, but one that every southerner of my generation recognizes and instinctively avoids if possible. It’s facile to call his kind racist. In fact, race is almost a cosmetic issue when it comes to understanding the Bello Lujans of the world. They’re often fond of black people individually but they resent if not despise them as a group. Their anger lives like a benign form of clap in their blood. Instead of destroying them, it energizes them, defines who they are, and allows them to use social outrage to intimidate other whites.

  Their ignorance is a given. In fact, they take pride in it and use it as a weapon. The threat of violence is implicit in all their rhetoric and in the bold stare of their eyes. Their greatest fear as well as their greatest enemy is knowledge of themselves. Like Plato’s prisoners in “The Allegory of the Cave,” they will perpetrate any hateful act, including murder, on the individual who tries to set them free from their chains.

  South Louisiana ’s cultural mores have always been French Catholic in origin, and hence the Klan has never had a strong foothold here, at least not since Reconstruction and the short-lived influence of the White League. But that doesn’t mean that violence and cruelty and the sexual exploitation of Negroes did not occur here. When I was in high school, white kids went nigger-knocking along rural roads, shooting people of color with BB guns or throwing M-80s on their galleries or hurling “torpedoes,” tightly compacted balls that exploded upon impact, against the paint jobs of their cars and pickup trucks. I remembered seeing Bello leaning out of a speeding junker, his face split with a grin, just before he splattered a black man dressed for church with a half-eaten mayonnaise and tomato sandwich.

  But there was a much darker story that had circulated about Bello, one that gradually died but one that was never quite laid to rest, e
ither. Years ago, in a parish to the north of us, a middle-aged white woman who operated a grocery store on a dirt road had just closed the store for the night when a man of mixed blood, one she later described as a “red-bone,” tapped on the glass and said he needed milk for his baby. The store owner peered through the glass and thought she saw the humped silhouette of a woman in the front seat of his automobile. She was certain she heard the muffled cries of an infant.

  She unlocked the door and let the man in. He walked past her to the cooler in back, an odor like fermented fruit and stale sweat sliding off her face. She turned her back and continued counting the day’s receipts. She heard him slip a heavy glass container of milk from the cooler and place it on the counter. She turned around to take his money, just as his fist exploded on her nose and mouth. Then he came through the swinging gate on the corner, pinned her to the floor, and beat her bloody with both fists. After he sodomized her, he raked the cash off the counter into a paper bag with his forearm, picked up the bottle of milk, and started to leave. But a two-dollar bill thumbtacked on the wall caught his eye. He pulled the bill loose from the tacks and left the store, the bell over the door tinkling behind him.

  A light-skinned Negro who lived in his car and made his living sharpening knives was stopped and questioned at a roadblock on the parish line two hours later. He could not account for his whereabouts that night, except to say he had pulled off the road at sunset to take a nap under a tree. He stank of sweat and Hawaiian Punch that he had laced with sloe gin. A crumpled paper bag of the kind used by the grocery store owner lay on the backseat, along with an empty baby bottle. Both of his hands were swollen, his knuckles skinned.

  His court-appointed attorney introduced evidence to show that the paper bag found in the defendant’s car was manufactured by a company that sold the same type of paper bags all over the state. The lawyer also found a witness who testified that the defendant had been involved in a fistfight two days before his arrest. The black man took the stand and told the jury a hitchhiker had left the baby bottle in the car. But on cross-examination he contradicted himself about where he had picked up the hitchhiker and where he had dropped her off. He also could not explain the fact that at the time of his arrest he had a two-dollar bill in his possession.

  The knife sharpener was sentenced to death by electrocution. But in the ensuing weeks, several of the jurors developed problems of conscience. They mentioned the fact that the two-dollar bill found on the Negro man had no thumbtack holes or apparent indentations on the corners. More important, they remembered that originally the victim had identified her attacker as a “red-bone,” a person of mixed Indian, Negro, and white blood. The man arrested at the roadblock was clearly a mulatto, with no distinguishing Indian features whatsoever.

  Then one night during an electrical storm, three men wearing masks broke the condemned man out of the parish prison, but not to set him free. They beat him senseless with a sap, gagged and handcuffed him, and took him deep into the Atchafalaya Basin in a powerboat. On the edge of the river, while lightning lit the endless gray miles of flooded gum and cypress trees, they dragged him up on a sandspit and pulled his trousers down over his buttocks. One of them produced a cane knife from the boat, then the three began to argue in French over who had the most right to deliver the first cut. But they had made the mistake of cuffing the condemned man’s wrists in front of him. He got to his feet, his trousers tangling around his ankles as he staggered to the edge of the sandspit and plunged into the river.

  By all odds he should have drowned. Instead, he clung to a pile of river trash and uprooted cypress trees, the rain stinging his face, and floated downriver until sunrise, when a man on a houseboat fished him out of the water with a boat hook.

  Three weeks later, Louisiana ’s traveling executioner arrived in town with the flatbed truck that carried the boomed-down generators and rubber-encased cables that powered the instrument of his trade. The mulatto who had escaped a lynching in the Atchafalaya Basin was buckled down in an oak chair and jolted three times against the straps while the victim and her husband sat in folding chairs and watched.

  Two months after that, a man and his wife were arrested outside Oklahoma City for the robbery and sadistic murder of a family who operated a roadside fruit stand. They were caught only because they were turned in by a relative upon whom they had dumped their infant child. They denied ever having been in the state of Louisiana, but a receipt from an Opelousas motel, dated the night before the attack on the female grocery store owner, was found under the front seat of their automobile. The man was half Choctaw Indian. In his wallet was a worn two-dollar bill, each corner pierced by what appeared to be a thumbtack.

  Bellerophon Lujan’s name surfaced again and again whenever the story of the attempted lynching was told. His father had been a close friend of the rape victim’s family. His uncle had gone to Angola for killing a Negro farmworker with a hoe. Bello was notorious for bragging on his sexual conquests of black women, and it was obvious to any reasonable person that his anger toward the Negro race seemed to exist in direct proportion to his libidinal fascination with them. Whenever the subject of race came up in a barroom conversation, Bello ’s eyes became lustrous with secret thoughts and memories he did not share.

  Shortly after 2 p.m. I checked out a cruiser and drove to Bello ’s horse farm up the Teche. After I rang the chimes, I waited in the shade of his porch, watching the shadows of clouds sliding across his pastureland. In the side yard I heard a flapping sound, like fabric lifting in the wind, and a clinking of metal upon metal. Then I remembered where I had heard those sounds before. I started to walk around the side of the house, when a big black woman in a nurse’s uniform, her white hair held in place by chemical spray, opened the front door. “Yes, suh?” she said.

  “I’m Detective Dave Robicheaux, here to see Mr. Lujan,” I said, opening my badge holder.

  “He’s not here, suh.”

  “Where is he, please?”

  “He didn’t say where he was going.” She had been looking me straight in the eye, but her gaze broke. “He took the dog wit’ him. So maybe they went to the park. Or maybe downtown somewheres.” Her eyes came back on mine.

  “Is that Mr. Robicheaux, Regina?” a voice said from the sunporch.

  But I kept my attention on the black woman. “Come out on the front porch with me,” I said.

  “Suh?”

  I stepped backward, taking her hand in mine. She followed me outside, glancing back once.

  “What’s Mr. Bello up to, Miss Regina?” I asked.

  “I’m making ten dollars an hour here. I cain’t lose this job.”

  “Tell me where he went.”

  “He took the rottweiler. That dog mean t’rew and t’rew. You don’t walk a dog like that in the park, no.”

  “Go back inside and tell Mrs. Lujan I’ll be right there,” I said.

  “Suh?”

  I said it again. This time I placed my hand reassuringly on her upper arm. “I give you my word no one will know what you just told me,” I said.

  She went back inside the house uncertainly, leaving the door ajar. With my back to the house, I opened my cell phone and punched in the number to Helen’s office.

  “Sheriff Soileau,” she said.

  “I’m at Bello ’s house now. Mrs. Lujan’s nurse says he left here with a rottweiler. Better get somebody over to Monarch’s place.”

  “You got it, bwana,” she said.

  I stepped inside the living room and saw Mrs. Lujan out on the sunporch, staring at me from her wheelchair. She was dressed in a flowery blouse and beige skirt, but the seasonal cheeriness of the colors only accentuated the pallor of her skin and the obvious deterioration of her bone structure. Through the windows I could see freshly mowed St. Augustine grass and a bank of shade trees in the background and a pale green canopy set up on aluminum poles. The canopy was swelling with wind, a loose chain on one corner rattling against a pole.

  “Are you here ab
out Tony?” she asked.

  “Monarch Little has been released from jail on bond. We’re concerned your husband might want to take the law into his own hands,” I replied.

  She watched me in the same way a bird watches a potential predator from atop its nest. She was originally from the Carrollton district of New Orleans and had come to Lafayette to study drama at the university when she was only a girl. Her parents, who had been successful antique dealers, were killed in a commercial airline accident her freshman year. Mrs. Lujan, whose first name was Valerie, left school and went to work for a man who made breakfast-room furniture out of compressed sawdust and sold it to the owners of double-wides and prefab homes during the domestic oil boom of the 1970s. Then she met Bellerophon Lujan and perhaps decided that the dreams of a young drama major were just that-dreams that a mature woman tries to put aside with only a brief pang of the heart.

  “You’re here because you’re worried about the man who killed my son? Who disfigured him so badly he’s virtually unrecognizable?” she said.

  “I’m sorry for your loss, Mrs. Lujan,” I said. But it was obvious she was not interested in my sympathies. “Monarch Little hasn’t been charged in the murder of your son. He was in jail on a firearms violation. His bond was reduced and now he’s back on the street. And that’s why I’m here.”

  Her face was almost skeletal, her hair like corn silk, her eyes filled with both sorrow and the analytical glint of someone who has probably been systematically deceived. She reminded me of a figure in a Modigliani painting, attenuated, her bones like rubber, her body robbed of both beauty and hope by an unkind hand. “You’re saying there’s doubt about this man’s guilt?” she said.

  “In my mind, yes.”

  “Why?”

  “The investigation is ongoing.”