"It's the wrong place for trouble, sugar," she said quietly.
"Do I look like bad news?"
"A lot of people do. But the guy that owns this place really is. For kicks, he heats up the wires in that monkey's cage with a cigarette lighter."
"Why do you work here?"
"I couldn't get into the convent," she said, and walked away with her drink tray as though a door were closing behind her.
Later a muscular, powerful man came in, sat at the bar, had the bartender bring him a collins, and began shelling peanuts from a bowl and eating them while he talked to one of the hookers. He wore purple suede cowboy boots, expensive cream-colored slacks, a maroon V-necked terry-cloth shirt, and gold chains and medallions around his neck. His long hair was dyed blond and combed straight back like a professional wrestler's. He took his package of Picayune cigarettes from his pants pocket and set it on the bar while he shelled peanuts from the bowl. He couldn't see me because I was sitting far back in the gloom and he had no reason to look in my direction, but I could see his face clearly, and even though I had never seen it before, its details had the familiarity of a forgotten dream.
His head was big, the neck as thick as a stump, the eyes green and full of energy; a piece of cartilage flexed behind the jawbone while he ground peanuts between his back teeth. The tanned skin around his mouth was so taut that it looked as if you could strike a kitchen match on it. His hands were big, too—the fingers like sausages, the wrists corded with veins. The hooker smoked a cigarette and tried to look cool while he talked to her, watching the red tracings of her cigarette in the bar mirror, but whenever she replied to him her voice seemed to come out in a whisper.
However, I had no trouble hearing his voice. It sounded like there was a blockage in the nasal passages; it was a voice that didn't say but told things to people. In this case he was telling the hooker that she had to square her tab, that she was juicing too much, that the Jungle Room wasn't a trough where a broad got free soda straws.
I said earlier I didn't have a plan. That wasn't true. Every drunk always has a plan. The script is written in the unconscious. We recognise it when the moment is convenient.
&
nbsp; I slipped sideways out of the vinyl booth. I almost drank from the filled beer glass before I did. In my years as a practicing alcoholic I never left an unemptied glass or bottle on a table, and I always got down that last shot before I made a hard left turn down a one-way street. Old habits die hard.
I took down one of the cues from the wall rack by the entrance to the poolroom. It was tapered and made of smooth-sanded ash and weighted heavily at the butt end. He didn't pay attention to me as I walked toward him. He was talking to the bartender now, snapping peanut shells apart with his thick thumb and popping the nuts into his mouth. Then his green eyes turned on me, focused in the dim light, his glance concentrating as though there were a stitch across the bridge of his nose, then he brushed his hands clean and swivelled the stool casually so that he was facing me directly.
"You're on my turf, butthole," he said. "Start it and you'll lose. Walk on out the door and you're home free."
I kept walking toward him and didn't answer. I saw the expression in his eyes change, the way green water can suddenly cloud with a groundswell. He reached over the bar for a collins bottle, the change rattling in his slacks, one boot twisted inside the brass foot rail. But he knew it was too late, and his left arm was already rising to shield his head.
Most people think of violence as an abstraction. It never is. It's always ugly, it always demeans and dehumanises, it always shocks and repels and leaves the witnesses to it sick and shaken. It's meant to do all these things.
I held the pool cue by the tapered end with both hands and whipped it sideways through the air as I would a baseball bat, with the same force and energy and snap of the wrists, and broke the weighted end across his left eye and the bridge of his nose. I felt the wood knock into bone, saw the skin split, saw the green eye almost come out of its socket, heard him clatter against the bar and go down on the brass rail with his hands cupped to his nose and the blood roaring between his fingers.
He pulled his knees up to his chin in the litter of cigarette butts and peanut hulls. He couldn't talk and instead trembled all over. The bar was absolutely silent. The bartender, the hookers, the oilfield workers in their hardhats, the waitresses in their pink shorts and cut-off black blouses, the rockabilly musicians, the half-undressed mulatto stripper on the dance floor, all stood like statues in the floating layers of cigarette smoke.
I heard someone dial a telephone as I walked out into the night air.
The next morning I drove into New Iberia and picked up a supply of red worms, nightcrawlers, and shiners. It was a clear, warm day with little wind, and I rented out almost all my boats. While I worked behind the counter in the bait shop and, later, started the fire in the barbecue pit for the lunch customers, I kept looking down the dirt road for a sheriff's car. But none came. At noon I called Minos Dautrieve at the DEA in Lafayette.
"I need to come in and talk to you," I said.
"No, I'll come over there. Stay out of Lafayette."
"Why's that?"
"I don't think the town's ready for Wyatt Earp this morning."
An hour later he came down the dirt road under the oak trees in a government car, parked by the dock, and walked into the shop. He stooped automatically as he came through the door. He wore a pair of seersucker slacks, shined loafers, a light blue sports shirt, and a red and gray striped tie pulled loose at the collar. His scalp and crewcut blond hair shone in the light. He looked around the shop and nodded with a smile on his face.
"You've got a nice business here," he said.
"Thanks."
"It's too bad you're not content to just run it and stop over-extending yourself."
"You want a soft drink or a cup of coffee?"
"Don't be defensive. You're a legend this morning. I came into the office late, because somebody woke me up last night, and everybody was having a big laugh about the floor show at the Jungle Room. I told you we don't get to have that kind of fun. We just fill out forms, advise the slime-o's of their rights, and make sure they have adequate counsel to stay on the street. I heard they had to use a mop to soak up all the blood."
"Are they cutting a warrant?"