Clete’s face was burning. “We need to get something straight here.”
“No, we don’t. Thank you for visiting the casino,” the security man said, and walked off.
Suddenly Clete’s shirt felt too tight for his chest. Inside the steady din of coins rattling into metal trays and the excited yelling around the craps table, he could hear the hoarseness of his own breathing and a sound like wind roaring in his ears. It took him five minutes to find Trish, who was watching a blackjack game, one knuckle poised on her chin, a thoughtful expression on her face. Thirty feet away, two security men were talking to each other, glancing in her direction.
“Time to boogie,” Clete said.
“What for?”
“I want to show you the battleground at Chalmette.”
She seemed to consider the idea.
Please, God, Clete thought.
“All right,” she said. “But don’t forget I have a surprise.”
He put one arm over her shoulders, and the two of them began walking toward the entrance. Through the glass doors he could see the dark green of the palm fronds in the rain and the lighted store-fronts along Canal. We’re almost there, he thought.
“I have to stop by the restroom,” she said.
“Now?” he said.
“Yes,” she said, giving him a look. “I might be a minute or two.”
“Sure,” he said, his eyes sweeping the casino. “I’ll wait at the bar. Take your time.”
Just cool it, he told himself. You can’t always dee-dee out of Indian country when you want. Sometimes you just have to brass it out.
He took a seat at the bar and ordered a soda and lime slice. It was a mistake. He heard a stool squeak on its swivel and felt a presence near his left arm, almost like an energy field that had the potential of a beehive.
Clete took the soda and lime from the bartender’s hand, then turned and looked into the sunglasses of the blond man in the reddish-purple shirt.
“Your gash go to the can?” the man asked.
“What did you say?”
“I said did the lady, your gash, stop by the john?”
Clete took a sip from his glass, then put the lime slice in his mouth and chewed it. “What’s your name, buddy?”
“Lefty Raguza,” the man said, and offered his hand. When Clete didn’t take it, he removed his shades and grinned. His eyes made Clete think of a cool green fire, an intense combination of color and light that didn’t indicate thought patterns or moods so much as incipient cruelty that had no specific target.
Clete drank the rest of his soda and crunched ice between his molars. He looked into the bar mirror when he spoke. “Here are the ground rules for you, Lefty. You don’t bird-dog us, you keep your mouth off certain people, and if I see you passing around photos of my lady again, I’m going to rip your wiring out.”
“She looks like a sweet piece of ass is all I was saying. That’s meant as a compliment. Prime cut is prime cut. So far, what I’m doing here isn’t personal. If I were you, I’d let things remain like that.”
Clete gazed into the moral vacuity of Lefty Raguza’s eyes. Then he got off the stool, left a five-dollar bill on the bar, and waited for Trish by the door of the women’s restroom.
“You okay?” she said.
“Sure, I’m solid,” he replied.
“You’re red as a boiled crab.”
“I could go for some of those right now. I know a joint over on Iberville. Then we’ll go out to Chalmette. I’m extremely copacetic today.”
But Clete was neither solid nor copacetic. They walked into the Quarter, in the rain, staying under the colonnades, the music from the clubs drifting out on the sidewalk, but he couldn’t get the words of the man named Lefty Raguza out of his head. He stopped in front of a cafe that was brightly lit and cheerful inside and patted his pants pocket. “I think I left my keys at the bar. Have a coffee in the cafe and I’ll be right back,” he said.
“Don’t you want to call the casino first?”
“No, I’m sure I left them at the bar. It’s not a problem,” he said.
He didn’t wait for her to reply. When he got back to the casino, his loafers were sopping with rainwater. He dried his face with a paper napkin from the bar and scanned the casino but didn’t see Lefty Raguza. “There was a guy sitting next to me, a friend of mine, a guy with a neckerchief and shades, you see where he went?” he said to the bartender.
“To the men’s room,” the bartender replied.
The crowd had grown, and Clete had to thread his way through the people at the machines and tables. His eyes were watering in the cigarette smoke, his ears ringing, his heart pounding in his chest. He passed a neatly folded and stacked fire hose inside a glass door that had been inset in the wall, then entered the restroom. Lefty Raguza was positioned in front of a urinal, his feet slightly spread, one hand propped against the wall, his face turned toward the far wall.
“Put your flopper in your pants and turn around,” Clete said.
Two other men had been washing their hands. They glanced simultaneously in Clete’s direction, then left the room without looking back. Lefty Raguza shook himself off and flexed his knees, tucking his phallus back inside his slacks. Then he turned, grinning from behind his shades, and kicked Clete between the thighs as casually as he would punt a football.
Clete felt a wave of nausea and pain surge through his lower body that was like broken glass being forced up his penis and out his rectum. He fell backward through a stall door, crashing into a toilet bowl, his fingernails raking down the sides of the walls. He could feel the wet rim of the bowl against his back and piss on the seat of his slacks.
Lefty Raguza was staring down at him, a small, triangular-shaped leather case in his hand. “You attacked me in the can and got your ass kicked. Don’t screw with Whitey, don’t screw with me. Show your gash what happened here. Tell her she can have the same. Ready for it, big man?”
Ready for what? Clete thought. He tried to raise himself, but the pain inside his groin made his eyes brim with water.
Lefty Raguza unsnapped the leather case in his hand and removed a metal tool that was like a machinist’s punch with a short crosspiece at the top designed to fit the palm and a hilt one inch from the point. “You’re getting off easy, Blimpo. So act like a man and take your medicine,” he said.
Then he leaned down and jabbed the tool into Clete’s shoulder, thudding it hard with the heel of his hand, feeling for bone, twisting it sideways before removing it. He cleaned the point on a piece of toilet paper. “Now beat feet. I got to finish my piss,” he said.
Clete stumbled toward the door, his hand pressed to the wound under his shoulder bone. The door swung open in his face. Two black men and a white man about to enter the room stepped aside, avoiding eye contact with him, then walked off as though the last five seconds in their lives had not happened.
Clete worked his way along the wall in the concourse to the glass enclosure that housed the emergency fire hose. He fitted his palm inside the handle and ripped the door loose, expecting an alarm to go off. But none did.
The hose was a masterpiece of engineering. It was full-throated at the valve, perhaps four inches across, probably directly connected into a main that could blow paint off a battleship. The nozzle was brass, with a lever to adjust the outflow, the hose itself made of a canvaslike material that unfolded neatly from the stack and slapped on the carpet. Clete pushed the lever on the main valve and watched the hose straighten and harden like an enormous, thick-bodied snake.
Lefty Raguza was combing his hair in the mirror when Clete kicked open the restroom door and dragged the hose inside with him. “Here’s a postcard from New Iberia, motherfucker,” he said. Then he pulled back the lever on the nozzle.
The jet of water blew the shades off Raguza’s face, then blew Raguza into the tile wall. Clete tugged the hose deeper into the room, keeping it trained on Raguza, knocking him down when he tried to get up, skittering him into the urinals, remolding his mouth and cheeks, flattening the flesh against bone and teeth so that his face looked like
