Pegasus Descending

THAT NIGHT I DREAMED of New Orleans. Not the New Orleans of today but the city where Clete and I had been young patrolmen, in a cruiser, sometimes even walking a beat with nightsticks, at a time when the city in its provincial i

This was before crack cocaine hit New Orleans like a hydrogen bomb in the early eighties and the administration in Washington, D.C., cut federal aid to the city by half. Oddly, prior to the eighties, New Orleans enjoyed a kind of sybaritic tranquillity that involved a contract between the devil and the forces of justice. The Giacano family ran the vice and maintained implicit understandings with NOPD about the operation of the city. The Quarter was the cash cow. Anyone who jackrolled a tourist got his wheels broken. Anyone who jackrolled an old person anywhere or stuck up a bar or café frequented by cops or who molested a child got his wheels broken and got thrown from a police car at high speed on the parish line, that is, if he was lucky.

The Giacanos were stone killers and corrupt to the core, but they were pragmatists as well as family men and they realized no society remains functional if it doesn’t maintain the appearances of morality.

New Orleans was a Petrarchan so

Traditional New Orleans was like a piece of South America that had been sawed loose from its moorings and blown by trade winds across the Caribbean, until it affixed itself to the southern rim of the United States. The streetcars, the palms along the neutral grounds, the shotgun cottages with ventilated shutters, the Katz and Betz drugstores whose neon lighting looked like purple and green smoke in the mist, the Irish and Italian dialectical influences that produced an accent mistaken for Brooklyn or the Bronx, the collective eccentricity that drew Te

Or at least that is the perception of one police officer who was there when it happened.

But in my dream I didn’t see the deleterious effects of the drug trade on the city I loved. I saw only Clete and me, neither of us very long out of Vietnam, walking down Canal in patrolmen’s blues, past the old Pearl Restaurant, where the St. Charles streetcar stopped for passengers under a green-painted iron colo

When I woke in the early dawn, with Molly beside me, I didn’t know where I was. It was misting and gray in the trees, and out on the bayou I could hear the heavy droning sound of a tug pushing a barge down toward Morgan City. The ventilated shutters on the front windows were closed, and the light was slitted and green, the way it had been in the cottage where I lived on Ursulines.

“You okay, Dave?” Molly asked, curled on her side under the sheet.

“I thought I was in New Orleans,” I replied.

She rolled on her back and looked up at me, her hair spread on the pillow like points of fire. She cupped her hand around the back of my neck. “You’re not,” she said.

“It was a fu

“Come here,” she said.

She kissed me on the mouth, then touched me under the sheet.

Later, after I had showered and dressed, Molly made coffee and heated a pan of milk and poured our orange juice while I filled our bowls with Grape-Nuts and sliced bananas. Both Tripod and Snuggs came inside, and I split a can of cat food between the two of them and gave each his own water bowl (Tripod, like all coons, washed his food before he ate it) and spread newspaper on the linoleum to preempt problems with Tripod’s incontinence. The mist outside had become as thick and gray in the trees as fog, and I couldn’t see the green of the park on the far side of the bayou.

But my problem was not with the weather. I could not get rid of the sense that something bad was about to happen, that an evil medium of some kind, if left unchecked, was about to hurt someone.

All drunks, particularly those who grew up in alcoholic homes, have that same sense of angst and trepidation, one that has no explainable origins. The fear is not necessarily self-centered, either. It’s like watching someone point a revolver at his temple while he cocks and dry-fires the mechanism, over and over again, until the cylinder rotates a loaded chamber into firing position.

What was it that bothered me so much? Loss of my youth? Fear of mortality? The systemic destruction of the Cajun world in which I had grown up?

Yes to all those things. But my greatest fear was much more immediate than the abstractions I just mentioned. As every investigative law officer will tell you, the clues that lead to a crime’s solution are always there. It’s a matter of seeing or touching or hearing or smelling them. Nothing aberrant happens in a vacuum. The causality and co

“Lost in thought?” Molly said.

“The deaths of Crustacean Man, Yvo

“Time’s on your side.”

“How?”

“Down the line, everybody pays his tab,” she said.

“I’m not always so sure about that.”

“Yes, you are.”

“How you know?” I asked.

“Because you’re a believer. Because you can’t change what you are, no matter what you say about yourself.”

“Is that right?” I said.

“I don’t hang around with the B team, troop,” she said.

Five minutes later, the phone rang. It was Wally, our dispatcher. “Got a nine-one-one from Bello Lujan’s wife. She said the black man who works for her went out to the stable and found Bello on the flo’, inside the stall. She said a horse kicked him. We got Acadian Ambulance on the way.”