four nine-millimeter rounds in the chest from a drive-by while he was watering his grass on Easter morning.
Monday afternoon the lawns of the Victorian and antebellum homes along East Main were sprinkled with azalea bloom. Great bluish-purple clumps of wisteria hung from the trellised entrances to terraced gardens that sloped down to Bayou Teche. The wind ruffled the canopy of oaks that arched over the street; the air was balmy and smelled of salt and warm flowers and the promise of rain. Monarch, with two of his cohorts, pulled into McDonald’s and parked his Firebird next to an SUV, in the shade of a live oak tree. He went inside and ordered a bag of hamburgers and cartons of fries while his two friends listened to the stereo, the speakers pounding so loudly the window glass in other vehicles vibrated.
Tony Lujan sat in the passenger seat of the SUV, spooning frozen yogurt into his mouth. His friend, the driver, was darkly handsome, his cheeks sunken, his lips thick and sensuous, his hair growing in locks on his neck. He was dressed in black leather pants, a black vest, and a long-sleeved striped shirt, like a nineteenth-century gunfighter might wear.
“How about it on the Tupac?” he shouted at the black kids in the Firebird, at the same time flinging his half- eaten hamburger over the top of the SUV at a garbage can.
“Easy, Slim,” Tony said, his eyes raising from his frozen yogurt.
The hamburger’s trajectory was short. Half of a bun glazed across the Firebird’s hood, stippling it with mustard.
Monarch had just walked out the front door of the McDonald’s. He paused on the walkway, his bag of food in one hand, and fingered the skin under his neck chains. He walked to the driver’s window of the SUV. “You just t’rew baby shit on my ride,” he said.
“It was an accident,” Tony said, leaning forward in the passenger seat so Monarch could see his face. He dipped his fingers into his shirt pocket and removed a five and a one. He extended the money toward Monarch. “It’s six bucks at the car wash up on Lewis Street.”
But the driver took Tony’s extended wrist in his hand and moved it and the money back from the window. “You said ‘baby thit’?” the driver asked Monarch, unable to suppress a laugh.
Monarch picked a leaf off his arm and watched it blow away in the wind. He pinched the saliva from the corners of his mouth and looked at the wetness on his fingers, then glanced at the university sticker on the back window. “You going to colletch?”
“Colletch? Yeah, man, that’s us,” the driver said. “Look, I’d really like to talk to you, but unless you dial down Snoopy Dog Dump or whatever, we’re going to have to boogie, because right now I feel like somebody poured cement in my ears. How do you listen to that crap, anyway?”
“The mustard on my ’Bird need somebody to clean it off, not at no car wash, either,” Monarch said.
“Look, this is from the heart, okay?” Tony Lujan’s friend said. “That lisp you got probably isn’t a speech defect. It’s because you’ve got damaged hearing. You pronounce words the way you hear them, and you hear them incorrectly because you’ve blown out your eardrums listening to guys whose biggest talent is grabbing their dicks in front of an MTV camera.”
Monarch tilted up his chin and massaged his throat. The moles on his face looked as hard and shiny as almonds. His stomach rose and fell under his shirt; his eyes seemed to grow sleepy. He reached down into his bag of hamburgers and fries and removed a wadded-up handful of paper napkins. Then he proceeded to wipe the mustard off his car hood, his expression flat, even yawning while he cleaned the last yellow smear off the paint.
He opened his door to get back in the Firebird, the edge of the door touching the side of the SUV.
“That damn nigger,” Tony’s friend said.
“Say what?” Monarch said.
“Cool it, Slim. The guy’s not worth it,” Tony said to his friend.
Monarch reached inside his Firebird, gathered an object in his hand, and dropped it in his pocket. Then he turned around and opened the passenger door of the SUV. “Both of y’all out on the pave,” he said.
“You don’t want to do this, man,” Tony said.
“If a nigger scratch your ’sheen, we gotta check it out, call the insurance man, make sure everyt’ing get done right,” Monarch said.
Tony’s friend was already coming around the front of the SUV. “Hey, man, I told you we don’t understand jungle drums. Can you translate ‘’sheen’ for me?” He started laughing. “I’m sorry, man, you ever see those Tweety Bird cartoons? You sound just like him. I ain’t dissing you. It’s cool. You could turn it into a nightclub act. It’s like Tweety Bird married Meat Loaf and they had a kid.”
“That mean your ‘machine,’ see, and the reason I knowed you was going to colletch was I seen this ’sheen before, down on Ann Street, when you and a UL girl was scoring some Ex. See, we knowed who the UL girl was ’cause she was balling down the line long before she was balling you. Except none of us would ball her anymore ’cause of her gonorrhea. One guy still lets her give him head, but he say it ain’t very good.”
The street was quiet except for the rustle of the wind, a plastic cup rattling in the parking lot.
“Slim can hurt you, man,” Tony said.
Monarch’s right thumb was hooked on the edge of his pants pocket, his knuckles like pale quarters under his skin. His eyes shifted sideways, out toward the street. His hand worked its way into his pocket and Tony Lujan involuntarily stepped back. Monarch smiled and lifted his car keys jingling from his pocket. “Is that where I hit it, that li’l line in the dust?” he said, examining the SUV’s door.
He rubbed away the dirt and then dug a bronze-colored key into the paint, peeling it back in a long curlicue, cutting through the primer, exposing a shiny strip of metal. His face clouded with concern. “No, that ain’t where I hit it. It was just a smudge in the dirt. Or maybe I ain’t hit it at all. What y’all t’ink?”
He raked a long silver line across the first one, forming an X, then straightened up and blew his nose softly into a Kleenex. No one had moved. While Monarch had vandalized the SUV, one of his cohorts had squirmed bare-chested through a window on the passenger side of the Firebird and had positioned himself on the window jamb, his underwear bunched on his stomach, a black bandanna tied down tightly on his scalp. In his right hand was a semiautomatic that he held flatly against the roof, the muzzle pointed at Tony Lujan and his friend Slim.
Monarch removed a roll of currency from his pocket and peeled off several bills. He crumpled the bills inside his soiled Kleenex and tossed the balled Kleenex on the seat of the SUV.
“Them dead presidents gonna take care of the scratch. Y’all want some more Ex, come see me. Get tired of white schoolgirl stuff, I can hep you there, too. In the meantime, check out Snoop and P. Diddy and improve your musical taste,” he said. “You want to call us niggers, just don’t do it where we can hear you.”
A thick green vein that looked like knotted twine pulsed in Slim’s forehead. He inhaled deeply, as though he were deciding whether or not to leap out the door of an airplane at a high altitude. Then he said, “Fuck you,” and hit Monarch with a blow that slung a rope of spittle and blood across the Firebird’s rolled white leather seat.
Monarch clutched his mouth with one hand, breathing hard through his nose, as though he could not allow himself to realize how badly he had been hurt. He stared at his palm, his lips as red and shiny as a clown’s. He stepped toward Slim, his hands balling into fists.
“Don’t touch me,” Slim said.
Monarch swung at the air, off balance, tripping on his shoelaces, his body caroming off Slim’s shoulder.
Slim pushed him away, whirled, and delivered a tae kwon do kick that exploded on Monarch’s eye and snapped his head sideways, knocking him against the Firebird. Then Slim’s foot shot out again, spearing Monarch in the center of his face.
“Clear my line of fire, Monarch! That motherfucker dead!” the shirtless kid in the black head scarf shouted.
But Monarch behaved like a king. With a siren pealing in the distance, his mouth and nose streaming blood, a piece of broken tooth glistening on his chin, he lifted one hand as though he were giving a benediction, his body positioned between his armed friend and the boy whose nickname was Slim. “Lose the-” he began. He pressed his palm against his mouth, swallowed, and tried again. “Lose the nine. I tripped on the curb. We was just getting burgers. Don’t know nothing about these motherfuckers here. Don’t got nothing against them,” he said.
Then he sat down heavily on the white leather seat of his Firebird and vomited on his shoes.
LAST YEAR, for economic reasons, our city police force was subsumed by the sheriff’s office, creating one
