"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?"
"He wouldn't sign the complaint. A sheriff's detective took it to the hospital on a clipboard."
"But he identified me?"
"He didn't have to. One of his hookers got your license number. Eddie Keats doesn't like courtrooms. But don't mess with the Lafayette cops anymore. They get provoked when somebody comes into their parish and thinks he can start strumming heads with a pool cue."
"Too bad. They should have rousted him when I got my face kicked in."
"I'm worried about you. You don't hear well."
"I haven't been sleeping a lot lately. Save it for another time, all right?"
"I'm perplexed, too. I know you've been into some heavy-metal shit before, but I didn't figure you for a cowboy. You know, you could have put out that guy's light."
Two fishermen came in and bought a carton of worms and a dozen bottles of beer for their ice chest. I rang up their money on my old brass cash register and watched them walk out into the bright sunlight.
"Let's take a ride," I said.
I left Batist in charge of the shop, and Minos and I rode down the dirt lane in my pickup. The sunlight seemed to click through the thick green leaves overhead.
"I called you up for a specific reason this morning," I said. "If you don't like the way I do things, I'm sorry. You're not in the hotbox, partner. I didn't invite any of this bullshit into my life, but I got it just the same. So I don't think it's too cool when you start making your observations in the middle of my shop, in front of my help and my customers."
"Okay. You've got your point."
"I never busted up a guy like that before. I don't feel good about it."
"It's always dumb to play on the wiseguys' terms. But if you needed to scramble somebody's eggs, Keats was a fine selection. But believe it or not, we have a couple of things in his file that are even worse. The kid of a federal witness disappeared a year ago. We found him in a-"
"Then why don't you put the fucker away?"
He didn't answer. He turned the wind vane in his face and looked out at the Negro families fishing in the shade of the cypress trees.
"Is he feeding you guys?" I said.
"We don't use hit men as informants."
"Don't jerk me around, Minos. You use whatever works."
"Not hit men. Never. Not in my office." He turned and looked me directly in the face. There was color in his cheeks.
"Then give him a priority and weld the door shut on him."
"You think you're twisting in the wind while we play pocket pool. But maybe we're doing things you don't know about. Look, we never go for just one guy. You know that. We throw a net over a whole bunch of these shitheads at once. That's the only way we get them to testify against each other. Try learning some patience."
"You want Bubba Rocque. You've got a file on everybody around him. In the meantime his clowns are running loose with baseball bats."
"I think you're unteachable. Why did you call me up, anyway?"
"About Immigration."
"I didn't eat breakfast this morning. Stop up here somewhere."
"You know this guy Monroe that was sniffing around New Iberia?"
"Yeah, I know him. Are you worried about the little girl you have in your house?"
I looked at him.
"You have a way of constantly earning our attention," he said. "Stop there. I'm really hungry. You can pay for it, too. I left my wallet on the dresser this morning."
I stopped at a small wooden lunch stand run by a Negro, set back in a grove of oak trees. We sat at one of the tables in the shade and ordered pork chop sandwiches and dirty rice. The smoke from the stove hung in the sunlit branches of the trees.
"What's this about Immigration?" Minos said.
"I heard they busted both Johnny Dartez and Victor Romero."
"Where'd you get that?" He watched some black children playing pitch-and-catch next to the lunch stand. But I could see that his eyes were troubled.
"From a bartender in New Orleans."
"Sounds like a crummy source."
"No games. You knew that a government agency of some kind had a connection with Dartez or his body wouldn't have disappeared. You just weren't sure about Victor Romero."
"So?"
"I think Immigration was using these guys to infiltrate the sanctuary movement."