jurisdiction out of both the city and parish, which meant that all 911 police emergency calls went automatically into the sheriff’s department, regardless if the police emergency had taken place inside or outside the city limits.
I had just left a mayoral meeting downtown when Helen Soileau called me on my handheld radio. “Where are you?” she said.
“In the parking lot, behind City Hall,” I replied.
“There’s a racial beef of some kind going down at McDonald’s. Monarch Little and Bello Lujan’s kid may be involved in it. I’ve got two cars on the way. Can you get down there?”
“I’m on my way.”
“One of the black kids may have a gun. Watch your ass, Streak. But get a fire extinguisher on this. Nobody gets hurt out there.”
I dropped the handheld on the seat of the cruiser I was using and turned into the one-way traffic on East Main, the gray-green arch of live oaks sliding by overhead, then swung around on St. Peter and headed back in the opposite direction, toward the McDonald’s.
New Iberia is not New Orleans and we do not share its violent history, one that in the past has included a homicide rate equaled only by that of Washington, D.C. Here, whites and people of color work and live side by side. But nonetheless a peculiar kind of racial ill ease still exists in our small city on Bayou Teche. Maybe it’s indicative of the shadow that the pre-civil rights era still casts upon all the states of the old Confederacy. Perhaps we fear our own memories. I think as white people we know deep down inside ourselves the exact nature of the deeds we or our predecessors committed against people of color. I think we know that if our roles were reversed, if we had suffered the same degree of injury that was imposed upon the Negro race, we would not be particularly magnanimous when payback time rolled around. I think we know that in all probability we would cut the throats of the people who had made our lives miserable.
So we are excessively conscious of manners and protocol in dealing with one another. Unfortunately, we have no control over a rogue cop with a sexual agenda or a closet racist at the post office or a newly elected black official wetting his lips his first night on the city council or a white college kid who thinks he can splatter a gangbanger’s grits on a sidewalk without all of us paying his tab.
Two uniformed deputies were already on the scene when I reached the McDonald’s, but they obviously had their hands full. A crowd had gathered, and two carloads of Monarch’s friends had pulled to the curb and were forming a phalanx on the sidewalk. A witness evidently had told the deputies that one of the black kids in the Firebird had dumped a semiautomatic in the trash barrel, and the deputies were now trying to search all five kids from the fray for concealed weapons while at the same time keeping an eye on the crowd and Monarch’s newly arrived compatriots.
But most of the real trouble was coming from only one person-Tony Lujan’s friend. He had been told to lean against the side of the SUV and to spread his feet, but he kept turning around and talking without stop, feeding his own anger, one cheek flecked with blood from Monarch’s mouth.
I shoved him against the SUV, hard, and kicked his feet wider apart. “We make the rules, podna. Time for you to take Trappist vows,” I said.
“Take what?” he said.
“That means shut your face,” I said.
I motioned the deputy away and began to shake down Tony Lujan’s friend. When I ran my hands down under his arms I could feel his body humming with energy, the way you can feel an electrical current coursing through a heavily insulated power line.
“Put your wrists behind you,” I said.
“You’re arresting me? These guys pulled a gun on us. They vandalized my vehicle.”
But he put his hands behind him just the same. On one hand he wore a high school graduation ring, on the other a gold ring inset with a ruby and the insignia of his fraternity. I snipped the cuffs on each of his wrists and began walking him toward the backseat of my cruiser. Already his manner had changed and I realized he was exactly like all the middle-class kids we run in for possession or DWI. Many of them are the children of physicians and attorneys and prominent businesspeople. When they deal with someone dressed in a suit, or in sports clothes, as I was, someone who represents a form of authority they associate with their parents, their vocabulary becomes sanitized and their manners miraculously reappear. In fact, their degree of humility and cooperation is so impressive, they usually skate on the charges or at worst receive probationary sentences.
“Watch your head,” I said as I put him in the backseat of the cruiser.
“Sir, we told you the truth about what happened out there,” he said. “The fat black guy keyed my father’s new paint job. If I had it to do over, I’d just drive away and eat the loss. But that kid with the rag on his head aimed a nine-millimeter at us. Over nothing.”
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“Sam Bruxal. But everybody calls me Slim.”
“You took down Monarch Little, Slim. At gunpoint. That’s impressive. But I’d watch my ass for a while. What’s your last name again?”
“Bruxal,” he said.
“Ever hear of a guy by the name of Whitey Bruxal?”
“That’s my father,” he said, his eyes lifting into mine.
“From Florida?”
“That’s right. We moved to Lafayette from Miami five years ago.”
“Really?” I said, looking at him now with much more interest.
“Yeah, what’s going on?”
“I’d like to have a chance to meet your dad.”
“Oh, you’ll meet him, all right,” Slim replied, then realized he had allowed his manufactured persona to slip. “I mean-”
“Yeah, I know exactly what you mean, kid,” I said, and rejoined the deputies, one of whom had hooked up Monarch Little and was about to take him to emergency receiving at Iberia General.
The deputy was a stout, red-haired man with a brush mustache who had been one of the city cops absorbed into the sheriff’s department when the two agencies merged last year. He was a retired NCO and was called “Top” by his colleagues, although he had been a cook in the Marine Corps and never a first sergeant. Top’s admonition about surviving in a bureaucracy was simple: “Make friends with all the clerks and don’t get in the way of a supervisor who wants to be on the links by two p.m.”
“Let me talk to Monarch a minute, will you, Top?” I said.
“Take him home to dinner with you,” he replied.
Monarch was seated in the back of the cruiser, his wrists cuffed in front of him so he could hold a blood- spotted towel to his mouth and nose.
“You going to make it, Monarch?” I said.
“I done tole y’all, I tripped on the curb and busted my face. Ain’t filing no charges. Don’t even remember what happened,” he replied.
Through the back window I saw Helen pull into the parking lot, the reflected image of a giant live oak sliding off her windshield. “You got a history with Slim Bruxal?” I said.
“Who?”
“The guy who remodeled your face.”
“A white guy picked me up after I fell. That the one you talking about?”
“Cute,” I said.
But Monarch was no longer looking at me. His eyes were on Helen, who had walked over to the trash barrel where a deputy had just recovered the nine-millimeter dumped by Monarch’s friend. “I’m ready to go to the hospital. I swallowed blood. I t’ink I’m gonna t’row up again,” he said, pressing the towel to his face.
“Sheriff Soileau might want to talk with you first.”
“I ain’t got nothing to say.”
I straightened up from the passenger window and looked across the top of the cruiser. “He’s all yours, Top,” I said.
Helen came up to me after the cruiser had disappeared down the street. “Looks like you got the cap on it,” she said.
