over the table and busted an eight-ball rack all over the felt. A solitary ball dropped into a corner pocket, but he didn’t move toward his next shot. Instead, he set his cue butt-down on the floor and casually chalked his cue again, stroking the talc across the rounded surface, taking his time, ignoring the other shooter, who waited by the wall rack, obviously impatient for the game to go forward.
“Tell you what,” Raguza said. “Three bucks on each ball in the string. Three to you for each one I leave.”
The other shooter, a heavy man who looked like a Mexican laborer, nodded without speaking.
Raguza bent over the table and sank one ball after another with the geometrical precision of an artist, banking shots, making combinations, using reverse English, crawling the cue ball along the rail until it whispered against the target ball and dropped it with a deep thud into a leather pocket.
Then he scratched, with three balls still on the felt, the signature of a hustler who never allows the sucker to feel he’s been taken. But when Raguza went back to his table and joined a high-yellow woman who wore a knit tank top over a bulging bra, I could see the look of triumph in his eyes, the curl at the corner of his mouth.
The back door opened and I felt the building decompress, the walls creaking slightly, as Clete came in from the storm and walked through the shadows, past a latticework partition into the men’s room.
Clete had accused me of planning to take Lefty Raguza off the board. The truth was I had no plan. Or perhaps more honestly I had no conscious one. But I knew that Raguza belonged to that group of human beings whose pathology is always predictable. By reason of either genetic defect, environmental conditioning, or a deliberate choice to join themselves at the hip with the forces of darkness, they incorporate into their lives a form of moral insanity that is neither curable nor subject to analysis. They enjoy inflicting pain, and view charity and forgiveness as signals of both weakness and opportunity. The only form of remediation they understand is force. The victim who believes otherwise condemns himself to the death of a thousand cuts.
So, if your profession requires that you remain within the parameters of the law, how do you deal with the Lefty Raguzas of the world?
The answer is you don’t. You turn their own energies against them. You treat their personal histories with contempt. You yawn at their stories of neglect and deprivation and beatings by alcoholic fathers and promiscuous mothers. Worse, you laugh at them in front of other people. The effect can be like a bolt of lightning bouncing around inside a steel box.
The bartender put a bowl of peanuts in front of me. His black hair looked like oily wire combed across his pate. “You a cop?” he said.
“I look like a cop?”
“Yeah,” he replied.
“You never can tell,” I said.
“We got free gumbo tonight. It’ll be done in a minute.” Behind him, a stainless-steel cauldron was starting to bubble on a ring of butane flame.
I looked in the mirror at the reflection of Lefty Raguza. But now he had more company than the mulatto woman in the knit top. A man with washed-out blue eyes that did not fit his negroid face and ropelike black hair plaited down tightly on his scalp sat next to him. Sitting across from them was a man whose size and proportions took me all the way back to a specific moment in Opa-Locka, Florida, when Dallas Klein had burst out the back of the bar, trying to flee the consequences of his gambling addiction, and had collided into a man who seemed as big as the sky.
What was the name? Nestor? Ernest? No, Ernesto. His neck rose into his gigantic head with no taper, as though his neck and jowls were one tubular column of meat and bone. The width and curvature of his upper back made me think of a whale breaking the surface of a wave.
I looked toward the men’s room. Clete was still inside.
“What are they drinking over there by the pool table?” I said.
“Beer,” the bartender replied.
I placed a twenty-dollar bill on the bar. “Send them a pitcher on me.”
“Something I should know about here?” he asked.
“Nothing I can think of,” I replied.
A few moments later I watched in the mirror as the bartender set the pitcher in the midst of Lefty Raguza’s group. I saw Raguza glance in my direction, then tell the bartender to take the pitcher away. Clete was still not out of the restroom. But showtime was showtime, I told myself. I picked up my club soda and walked past the pool table until I was standing behind Raguza’s chair.
“You don’t like draft beer?” I said.
The tin-shaded light over the pool table threw my shadow across Raguza’s hands and wrists. He waited a long time before he spoke. “This is a private party here,” he said.
“Does this lady know your history, Lefty?” I said.
“You need to beat feet, Jack. This is not your jurisdiction.” His hands were folded, his thumbs motionless. He didn’t turn his head when he spoke.
I scraped a chair up behind him and sat down, so that I was looking over his shoulder, like a kibitzer at a card game. I stared into the face of the woman next to him. She tried to smile, then her eyes broke and her face went flat.
“Lefty ever tell you about his psychiatric problems?” I said.
“Excuse me?”
“He likes to beat up women with his fists. It happens so fast they rarely know what hit them.”
“I’m not sure what we’re talking about,” she said. She lowered her eyes and placed one hand on the tabletop. Then she took it away and placed it in her lap.
“A prison psychiatrist once described Lefty as an anal-retentive. That means he was strapped on the training pot for long periods of time. I suspect his Jockey underwear is loaded with skid marks.” I laughed and clapped Raguza hard on the back, snorting when I inhaled. “How about it, Lefty? You ever download into your Fruit of the Looms?”
I could see the back of his neck darken, like a shadow creeping from his collar to his boxed hairline. “Lefty has a problem with animals, too,” I said to the woman. “If you ask him why he’s cruel to a gentle and defenseless creature, he’ll probably tell you about all the hard breaks he had when he was a kid. The truth is Lefty hurts pets and innocent people because he’s a gutless punk and never could cut it on his own, either as a child or an adult. Lefty was probably a good bar of soap in prison, but don’t let him ever tell you he was stand-up or a solid con. He had sissy status even before he got to Raiford and was probably giving head in the bridal suite his first day down. Right, Lefty?”
I let out a wheezing laugh and slapped him hard between the shoulder blades again. The muscles in his back were corded as tight as cable. The woman started to get up from her chair.
“Sit down,” Lefty said. “This guy’s a drunk. He got run out of Miami, he got run out of New Orleans. He makes a lot of noise, then he goes away.”
“Wish I could do that, Lefty, I mean just kind of disappear. But you poisoned ole Tripod. It takes a special sort of guy to do something like that.”
Even from the side I could see his face scrunch. “I did what?” he said.
“That’s the name of my daughter’s pet raccoon. He almost died because you mixed roach paste with sardines and put them in his pet bowl.” I looked across the table. “What would you do if you were in my place, Ernesto?”
Ernesto’s eyes were small and brown, deep-set, nonexpressive. His hair was tied in a matador’s twist on the nape of his neck. He shrugged his shoulders and smiled in a self-deprecating fashion.
“How about you?” I said to the man whose blue eyes didn’t match his face.
He glanced from side to side, as though the answer to my question lay in some other part of the bar. His plaits looked like centipedes on his scalp. He wore a purple silk shirt and a crucifix and a P- 38 G.I. can opener on a chain around his neck. “I don’t got nothing to do wit’ dis, mon,” he said.
“Glad to hear that, because Lefty here has been a bad boy. I wonder if Whitey knows that Lefty has been causing a lot of trouble over in Iberia Parish, like pouring acid all over Clete Purcel’s car. I thought you were a pro, Lefty, but the more I see your handiwork, the more I get the impression you’re just a little jailhouse bitch who can’t get it up unless he’s whacking on a helpless female. Is that because you’re short?”
I saw the thumb on his left hand twitch slightly.
