“Those elevator soles on your stomps aren’t strong indicators of self-confidence,” I said. I patted him softly in the middle of the back and felt his skin constrict from the blow that didn’t come.
“You’re wrapped too tight,” I said. “Relax, I’m not going to hurt you. You’re probably one of those guys who-” I started laughing again, my words breaking apart. “Seriously, you’re one of those guys who has a legitimate beef with the universe. It’s not easy being a little guy or the product of a busted rubber.” I hit him again, and laughed harder, coughing on the back of my wrist, my eyes watering. “Did your mother ever pick you up by inserting Q-tips in your ears? That’s a sure sign there are problems in the family.”
His neck was blood-dark, the skin around his mouth drawn down like a shark’s. His hands were set squarely on the tabletop. He coughed deep in his throat and spoke in a clotted whisper, his eyes fastened on the opposite wall.
“You got to speak up, Lefty,” I said.
“I did thirty-seven days in isolation, in the dark, a cup of water and one slice of white bread a day. I can take the worst you got and spit it in your face.”
“Really?”
“I’m done talking with you. Find yourself an alcoholic titty to suck on. I can direct you to a topless bar full of guys like you,” he said.
A man walked over from the bar and scraped up the cue ball from the pool table. He bounced it off two rails and watched it miss a pocket. “Anybody up for a game of rotation?” he asked.
“Yeah, over here,” Raguza said, and threw three quarters on the felt.
Ernesto and the man with the Islands accent grinned at him, happy in the knowledge their friend was back in the groove.
I glanced toward the latticework partition in front of the men’s room. Clete was watching us from behind it, the shotgun still inside his raincoat, the brim of his hat low on his brow. I shook my head at him.
I should have known Raguza wouldn’t rattle. He had stacked too much hard time in too many joints and had probably thrived in the prison population. Also, he may have seen Clete behind the latticework and figured he was being set up to get blown out of his socks.
I got up from the chair and went back to the bar to retrieve my hat. Then Lefty Raguza, like every wiseass on the planet, decided he’d have another run at fate.
“He’s no problem. Believe me, the guy’s a joke,” he said to the others at his table.
A joke. Those words were essentially the same ones Dallas Klein heard just before his executioner pulled the trigger on him.
I put on my rain hat and showed no indication I had heard Raguza’s remark, then walked around the end of the bar onto the duckboards. “Need to borrow this. I’ll settle up with you later,” I said to the bartender.
“Whoa,” he said.
“No ‘whoa’ to it, bud,” I said.
I used two dish towels to pick up the stainless-steel cauldron from the stove, then I headed straight for Raguza. His friends saw me coming, but unfortunately for him, he didn’t. The woman pushed her chair back, knocking it to the floor, holding her purse in front of her. “Where you think you’re going?” Raguza said.
I slipped one wadded towel under the cauldron’s bottom and poured the entire contents-perhaps two gallons of steaming gumbo-on his head.
It must have hit him like a whoosh of flame from a blast furnace. He screamed and clutched his face and tried to wipe the curtain of stewed tomatoes and okra and shrimp off his skin. He rolled on the floor, clawing at his hair, kicking his feet. I picked up a pitcher of beer from another table and poured it onto his face. “You okay down there?” I said.
Ernesto and the man from the Islands had risen from their chairs and were coming around the table. Clete stepped out from behind the partition, opening his raincoat so they could see his shotgun, which he held against his side, muzzle-down, his wrist protruding through a slit in the coat’s pocket. “You guys want to buy into this, that can be arranged,” he said.
The room was absolutely silent, the patrons at the bar frozen in time and place, the bartender’s hand motionless on the telephone.
Clete raised his left hand palm-up, curling his fingers, signaling for me to walk toward him, his eyes on Ernesto and the man from the Islands.
I wiped a smear of gumbo off my fingers onto one of the dish towels and dropped the towel on top of Raguza, then started walking toward Clete and the back door. My mouth was dry, my heart racing, my face suddenly cold and damp in the breeze from an air-conditioning unit. Then I saw Clete’s eyes shift, his expression constrict, and I heard feet running at my back.
Lefty Raguza tackled me around the waist and threw us both into a tangle of chairs and a table laden with beer bottles. His face was bright and shiny, like a painted Indian’s, his skin already swelling where it had been scalded. He clenched his right hand deep into my throat and hit me full in the face with the other. Then he was all over me.
He head-butted me, got a thumb in my eye, and tried to grab my genitalia. I could smell the deodorant under his armpits and the bile in his breath and the testosterone in his clothes; see the patina of blond hair on his skin, the mucus at the corner of his eye, a pearl of sweat drip from a nostril. I could see his buttocks clench as he wrapped his legs around me and the sensual pleasure on his mouth when he thought he was connecting with bone and organ.
I got my fingers around the neck of a beer bottle and broke the bottle across his face. But it did no good. When I was almost to my feet, he tackled me again, this time around the knees, locking his arms around my calves as I toppled forward. Then he felt the.25 automatic Velcro-strapped to my ankle.
“Got you,” he said, working his hand down to the holster. “Gold BB time, dickwad.”
He was on all fours, the.25 auto peeling loose from the holster, his right hand gripped like a machinist’s vise on my foot so I couldn’t move it. The cool green fire in his eyes was like a lascivious burn on my skin. I cocked my left foot and drove my loafer straight into his mouth.
I saw his lips burst against his teeth and the shock of the blow climb into his eyes. I stomped his mouth again, in the same place, at the same angle, doing even more serious damage. Then I caught him across the nose and saw something go out of his eyes and face that was not replaceable.
But the succubus I had tried to exorcise by marrying a woman of peace still held title to my soul. I saw the room distort and the faces of the people around me turn into Grecian masks, and I heard a sound in my ears like the steel tracks of armored vehicles wending their way across an unforgiving land. I heard people screaming and I did not know if their voices were from my sleep or if my own deeds had transformed me into an object of horror and pity in the eyes of my fellow man.
I ran Lefty Raguza’s head into the corner of the pool table and saw a horsetail of blood leap across the felt. I kicked his legs apart, as though I were about to frisk him, then lost my purpose and smashed his face down on the table’s rim-once, twice, perhaps even a third time. When he fell to the floor his nose was roaring blood, his eyes filled with a new knowledge about the potential of evil, namely, that others could possess elements of darkness in their breast that were the equal of his own.
“Suffering Mother of Jesus, back off, Dave!” I heard Clete say.
“What?” I said, my own voice wrapped inside a sound like wind blowing in a tunnel.
“Dude’s finished. He’s bleeding from every hole in his body. You hear me? Back away. He’s not worth it. The guy may be hemorrhaging.”
I could feel the room come back in focus, see the faces staring at me in the gloom, their mouths downturned, their eyes marked with sadness, as though everyone there had in some way been diminished by the violence they had witnessed. Clete was standing between me and Lefty Raguza now, the shotgun still inside his coat.
“I just need a few more seconds with him,” I said. “Can’t just walk away and leave loose ends.”
“No, we bag it and shag it,” he replied, reaching for my arm.
I pulled loose from his grasp and knelt beside Raguza. I reached down in my raincoat pocket, then bent over him, my back obscuring the view of Clete and Raguza’s friends, my hands going down almost involuntarily to Raguza’s face and the blood that rilled back from the corners of his mouth. When I got to my feet, the ends of my fingers looked like they had been dipped in a freshly opened can of paint.
Clete stuck one arm in mine and pulled me with him, out the door, into the night, into the clean smell of ozone
