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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 he was caught in a wind tunnel.
Raguza almost got to his feet when Clete blew him into a stall, trapping him between the toilet and stall wall. Raguza was gasping for breath, his feet fighting for purchase, one arm sunk deep inside the bowl, his head thudding against the wall like a rubber ball tethered to a paddle.
Clete shut down the nozzle and dropped the hose on the floor. The restroom was flooded, the doorway packed with onlookers, security guards in uniform trying to fight their way through.
“This guy was starting a fire. He said something about hiding a bo
mb. Somebody better get the cops,” Clete said.
Suddenly the crowd headed in all directions, the words “fire” and “bomb” rippling like flame across the casino floor. “Hey, you, come back here!” a security man yelled.
But Clete was now ensconced in the middle of the throng pouring onto Canal. The mist was gray and swirling, as thick and damp as wet cotton, the palm fronds fraying overhead, and he could smell beignets cooking somewhere and the heavy green odor of the Gulf. His shoulder throbbed, his genitals were swollen, his shirt was streaked with blood and his slacks with urine and bathroom disinfectant, but somehow he knew it was going to be a grand day after all. He crossed into the Quarter, splashing through pools of rainwater, wondering if Trish would still be at the café, wondering, for just a moment, why she had not come looking for him.
He felt his spirits begin to sink. Maybe Dave had been right; maybe he had been a special kind of fool this time out. He was not only over the hill and addicted to most of the major vices, he was still the violent, chaotic, immature man intelligent women might find exciting and even interesting for the short haul but whom they eventually got rid of, as they would an untrained house pet.
Then he saw Trish coming down the street, without umbrella or raincoat, almost being hit by a car at the intersection, her lovely, heart-shaped face filled with concern and pity when she realized the condition he was in. “Oh, Clete, what did they do to you?” she said, her fingers touching his eyes, his hair, his mouth. “What did they do to you, honey?”
“Just a little discussion with a guy. What was that surprise you were talking about?”
She hooked her arm through his and began to pull him across the street toward the parking garage. “I’m taking you to the hospital,” she said, ignoring his question. “It was that guy following us, wasn’t it? I shouldn’t have let you go back there. I hate myself for this.”
A passing car blew a wall of water across both Clete and Trish. She used a handkerchief to wipe it out of his eyes, her face turned up to his like a flower opening into light. He wrapped both his arms around her and lifted her up on his chest and carried her in that fashion all the way to the car.
HE SPENT THE NIGHT in a hospital up St. Charles Avenue. In the morning she picked him up in his Caddy and they drove to a marina on Lake Pontchartrain. A gleaming white seaplane waited for them at the end of a dock, rocking in the chop, the wide slate-green expanse of the lake in the background. “Wow, where we going?” Clete said.
“How about dinner in Mexico?” she said.
“Why you doing this, Trish?”
“Because you saved me from getting busted. Because you take chances for other people. Because I like you, big stuff.” She pressed her knuckles playfully into his stomach.
When they were both inside, the pilot fired the engines and the plane gathered speed across the water, a white froth whipping from the backdraft. Then the plane lurched suddenly into the sky, climbing higher and higher, until Clete could see the alluvial fan of the Mississippi and the immense, soft gray-green outline of the Louisiana wetlands.
“Where to in Mexico?” he said.
“Cancún,” she said, then paused for a beat. “More or less.”
More or less? But there was still a pink mist inside his head from the Demerol drip at the hospital, and he didn’t pursue it. He lay back in the seat and shut his eyes and let the steady vibration of the engines put him to sleep. He dreamed of a jungle in southeastern Asia, one that always flickered whitely under trip flares or bloomed with red-black geysers of fire and dirt from booby-trapped 105 duds. But now the jungle contained no sign of threat and breathed with the sounds of wind and the patter of rain ticking on the canopy overhead.
When he awoke, the seaplane was descending through thunder-heads, the windows streaked with rain. Then they were below the squall, flying low over water that had the translucence of green Jell-O. The coral reefs were strung with gossamer fans and shadowed by floating pools of hot blue that looked like they had been poured from a bottle of ink.
