Pegasus Descending

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, either. 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 about 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.”

“Please answer my question.”

“I don’t think Monarch Little is a killer.”

She stared out the window at the lawn and the wind puffing the canopy that had been used at garden parties in a happier time. “You were one of the policemen who found Tony?”

“Yes, I was.”

“Do you think my son suffered?”

“No, I don’t think he did.” I let my eyes go flat so they did not focus on her face.

“But the truth is you don’t know?” she said.

“In this kind of instance-”

“Don’t patronize me, Mr. Robicheaux.”

My words were of no value. I suspected her grief had now become her only possession and in all probability she would nurse it unto the grave. I looked out the window at the green canopy rippling in the wind and the chain tinkling on the aluminum pole.

“I have a videotape of Yvonne Darbonne dancing at a lawn party. In the background there’s a sound like canvas popping and a chain rattling against metal. I think that video was shot in your yard, Mrs. Lujan.”

She lifted her chin. Her eyes were small and green, recessed unequally in her face. “And what if it was?”

“You knew Yvonne Darbonne?”

“I’m not sure that I did. Would you answer my question, please?”

I felt a surge of anger in my chest, less because of her imperious attitude than her callousness toward someone else’s loss. “She died of a gunshot wound in the center of her forehead. She was eighteen years old. I think she was at your house the day of her death. She had red hair and was wearing a short skirt and sleeveless blue tank top at the party. She was dancing to a recording of John Lee Hooker’s ‘Boom Boom.’ Does any of that sound familiar to you?”

“I don’t like the way you’re addressing me.”

“Mr. Darbonne lost his child to a violent act, just like you lost yours. Why should you take offense because I ask whether or not the girl was at your house? Why is that a problem for you, Mrs. Lujan?”

“Get out.”

I placed my business card on a glass tabletop next to her wheelchair. There was a small pitcher of orange juice and crushed ice, with sprigs of mint in it, sitting on the table. The refraction of sunlight from the pitcher looked like shards of glass on her skin.

“Either your son or your husband ran over and killed a homeless man. Moral outrage won’t change that fact,” I said.

“Your cruelty seems to have no bounds,” she replied.

BELLO HAD GONE FIRST to Monarch Little’s home, located in a blue-collar neighborhood that was gradually becoming all black. A woman had been hanging wash in her backyard when she saw Bello come up the dirt driveway, the rottweiler straining at the leash he had double-wrapped around his fist. “You know where Mr. Little is?” he asked, smiling at her.

“No, suh,” she replied.

“You been out in the yard long? Or maybe at your kitchen window? Or maybe out on your gallery, pounding out your broom?” He was grinning at nothing now, his eyes roving about aimlessly, the dog stringing saliva into the dirt.

“He come in a while ago, then left again,” the woman replied. She was overweight, her dress blowing on her body like a tent, her arms wrapped with a skin infection that leached them of their color.

“Wasn’t driving that Firebird, though, was he? ’Cause it got burnt up,” Bello said.

She wasn’t going to reply, then she looked again at his face and felt the words break involuntarily from her throat. “He was wit’ his cousin, in a beat-up truck. It’s got boards stuck up on the sides to haul yard trash wit’.”

“Where they gone to?” Bello was still grinning, his eyes never quite lighting on her. He lifted up on the dog’s choke chain, tightening it until the dog stiffened and sat down in the dirt. “Tell me where he’s at. I owe him some money.”

“That corner where they always standing around under the tree. I heard them say they was going to the li’l sto’ there,” she said.

“The corner they sell dope at?”

“I don’t know nothing about that.”

“But that’s the corner you’re talking about, isn’t it?”

“Yes, suh.”

“If I don’t find him, you don’t need to tell him I was here, do you?”

“No, suh,” she replied, shaking her head quickly.

“T’ank you,” he said. He turned the dog in a circle and walked it back to his Buick, making a snicking sound behind his teeth.

I HAD JUST LEFT Bello ’s house when I got the dispatcher’s call. I hit the siren and the flasher and headed down Loreauville Road, cane fields and horse farms and clumps of live oaks racing past me.

THE AIR-CONDITIONING UNIT in Bello ’s Buick was turned up full blast as he approached the corner that had always served as a secondary home for Monarch and his friends. Bello’s dog sat on the front seat, its yellow eyes looking dully out the window, its choke chain dripping like ice from its neck. The frigid interior of the Buick, with its deep leather seats and clean smell, digital instrument panels, and silent power train, seemed a galaxy away from the dusty, superheated, and litter-strewn environment on the corner. A black kid drinking from a quart bottle of ale eyeballed Bello ’s car, waiting to see if the driver would roll down the window, indicating he wanted to make a buy.

Bello slowed the Buick against the curb, the white orb of sun suddenly disappearing behind the massive canopy of the shade tree. He turned off the ignition, cracked the windows, and waited for his eyes to adjust to the change in light before he got out of the car. Bello had never had a cautionary sense about people of color, and had never thought of them, at least individually, as a viable challenge to his authority as a white man. In the past, they had always done what he told them. That’s the way it was. If they believed otherwise, a phone call to an employer or a manager of rental properties could bring about a level of religious conversion that even a beating could not.

But something had changed at the corner. The gangbangers were there, as always, playing cards, drinking soda pop or beer, or taking turns at the weight set, their hair matted down with black silk scarfs, even in the heat; but they seemed disconnected from Monarch, in the same way that candle moths lose their flight pattern when their light source is removed. Monarch and his cousin, a yardman who looked like he was made from coat-hanger wire, were eating spearmint sno-balls with tiny wood spoons at a plank table under the tree. The yardman’s paint-skinned truck, garden tools bungee-corded to the sides, was parked in the background. Monarch was wearing jeans and old tennis shoes and a colorless denim shirt, the sleeves scissored off at the armpits. He looked at the spangled sunlight bouncing off the windshield of Bello ’s Buick but gave no indication he recognized the man behind the wheel.

A bare-chested black kid, not over seventeen, his shirt wadded up and hanging from his back pocket, tapped on Bello ’s window. His arms were without muscular tone, soft, his chin grown with fuzz that looked like black thread. Bello smiled when he rolled down the window. “Yeah?” Bello said.

“Want some weed?” the kid asked.

“That’s not what I had in mind,” Bello replied.

“You name it, I got it, man,” the kid said, his arm propped on the roof, exposing his armpit. He gazed nonchalantly down the street.

“You gonna hook me up wit’ some cooze?” Bello said.

“There’s a lady or two I can introduce you to.”

“I got a special one in mind,” Bello said, squinting up at him.

“Yeah?”

“Your mama. She still working rough trade?”

The black kid kept his gaze averted and did not look back at him. “Why you want to do that, man?” he said.

“’Cause you put your fucking hand on my car,” Bello said. Then he opened the door and stepped out into the heat. “Want to meet my dog?”

“No, suh,” the boy said, stepping back, lifting his hands in front of him. “T’ought you was someone else, suh.”

Bello snapped his fingers softly and the rottweiler dropped to the asphalt behind him. Bello closed the car door and picked up the animal’s leash. Everyone on the corner was staring at him now, everyone except Monarch Little, who continued eating his sno-ball with his tiny wood spoon, digging out the last grains of spearmint-flavored ice from the bottom of the cone.

Bello stepped up on the curb. The wind puffed the oak tree overhead, and tiny yellow leaves drifted down into the shade. Monarch’s cousin rose from the table and walked to a trash barrel by his truck and dropped his empty sno-ball cone inside. The cousin’s strap overalls looked made from rags, the weave almost washed out of the fabric. His facial expression was bladed, filled with cautionary lights.

“Been t’inking about me?” Bello said to Monarch.

“Don’t know who you are. Ain’t interested, either,” Monarch replied.

“You fixing to find out. You should have stayed in jail, yeah.”

Monarch seemed to think a long time before he spoke. “I ain’t did it. That dog ain’t gonna make me say I did, either. The people on this corner ain’t gonna hurt you, so you ain’t got to be afraid. But don’t come down here no more t’reatening people wit’ dogs, no.”

“My son was gonna be a doctor. You took that from me,” Bello said.

Monarch waved an index finger back and forth. “I ain’t took nothing from you. Do what you gonna do. But you better look around you. This ain’t your pond. Now, I’m walking away from here. I don’t want no trouble.”

Monarch got up from the table, a net of sunlight and shadow sliding over his skin.

That’s when Bello unsnapped the leash from the rottweiler’s choke chain and said, “Sic le neg!”

The dog took only two bounds before it was airborne and aimed right at Monarch’s chest. Monarch twisted away and wrapped his arms across his face, waiting for the dog’s teeth to sink into his flesh. Instead, he felt a suck of air past his head and heard metal whang on bone. Then the dog’s great weight bounced off him, and when he opened his eyes, the dog lay in the dust, its body quivering, its fur split across the crown of its skull.

Monarch’s cousin lowered the shovel he had used on the dog, pointing its tip into the dirt, letting his callused palm slip down the shaft. One of his eyes constantly watered, and he pressed a handkerchief into the socket, all the time watching Bello with his other eye, so that in an odd way he looked like two people, one managing himself while the other studied an adversary. “A mistake got made here ’cause folks was in hot blood. Don’t mean it got to continue, suh,” he said.

“You tear my dog’s head off and lecture me?” Bello said.

The corner was completely silent except for the wind coursing through the leaves overhead. A locomotive engine blew in the distance, the sound climbing into the hot sky.

“My cousin ain’t done you nothing. You come here blaming us for your grief. Now you got more of it, not less. But it ain’t on us,” Monarch said.

No one could say later what thoughts or perhaps memories went through Bello ’s mind at that moment. Did he remember a kid with a shoe-shine box waiting in the cold at the Southern Pacific station? Or the one who worked for tips at the root beer drive-in, where the owner did not allow him to eat his lunch or supper inside the building? Or did he realize, at that particular moment, that no matter what he accomplished in life, he would never separate himself from that class of white men who were considered by other whites to be no better on the social ladder than Negroes and, worse yet, considered even less in stature by people of color themselves?

He ripped into Monarch with both fists. But once again Bello had misjudged both his situation and his adversary. Monarch slipped the first punch, ate the second one, then got Bello in a bear hug, pinning his hands at his sides, crushing the air from his lungs. Bello struggled helplessly against Monarch’s huge arms, his body pressed hard against Monarch’s girth, his shoes leaving the ground.

“Tear him up, Monarch!” somebody yelled.

But instead Monarch wrestled Bello against the Buick, trapping him there, holding him tight against the hot metal while sheriff’s deputies spilled out of three cruisers, Monarch’s sweat mixing with Bello’s inside a cone of heat and dust and the smell of engine oil and rubber tires. The expression of despair and loss and a lifetime of impotent rage on Bello ’s face was one I will never forget. No greater injury could have been imposed upon him. A black man had not only bested him in public but had treated him with mercy and pity while others watched, a deed that Bello was incapable of forgiving.