A Morning for Flamingos

  “I’d be careful,” he said.

  “What are you thinking?”

  “He’s up to something.”

  “I think he just doesn’t like you. What did you do to him to get Cardo’s phone number?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Clete?”

  “I told him I wasn’t leaving till I got the number. I made a little noise in front of his customers. I didn’t touch him.”

  “It surprises you he doesn’t want to see you again?”

  “What if I have another talk with him?”

  “That’s out. The deal has to go through.”

  “I’m worried about you, mon. You’re not seeing things straight. You’re doing the grunt work for the DEA, they take the glory. There’s something else to think about, too. How’s a drug buy out on the salt going to put Cardo away?”

  “I’ve got to get next to him with a wire.”

  “Why not get a Pap smear while you’re at it?” He lit a cigarette and blew smoke off into the dappled sunlight. “We used to call the FBI ‘Fart, Barf, and Itch,’ remember? Why do you think these DEA cocksuckers are any different? If you ask me, this deal down at Cocodrie stinks.”

  There was no point in arguing. I also felt that he was more disappointed in being cut out of the sting than anything else. But his eyes continued to wander over my face while he smoked.

  “For God’s sakes, what is it?” I said.

  “I don’t know if you need this right now, but a colored kid was in the bar looking for you this morning. He wouldn’t give his name, but I have an idea who he is.”

  “Oh?”

  “That kid from New Iberia you were taking up to Angola with Jimmie Lee Boggs.”

  “What did he say?”

  “‘Tell Mr. Dave I seen Jimmie Lee yesterday on Bourbon.’” Clete continued to look at my face. “I’m right, that’s the kid who got loose from you?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re in contact with him?”

  “More or less.”

  “Are you out of your mind?”

  “Does he look like a dangerous and violent man to you? You think I ought to send him to the chair?”

  “I think you ought to watch out for your own butt once in a while.”

  “What else did he say?”

  “Nothing. A weird kid. If a black ant wore a pizza uniform, that’s what it’d look like. You really think he saw Boggs?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why would Boggs be walking around on Bourbon?”

  “I don’t know, Clete.”

  “Come on, don’t look so disturbed. The kid’s probably imaginative.” Then he pressed his lips together in a tight line. “Listen, Dave, keep your attitudes simple about this guy. You see him, you smoke him. No warning, no talk, you just blow his fucking head off. Case closed.”

  I didn’t finish my plate. I rolled it up, dropped it in a trash barrel, then sat back down at the wood table under the tree. Clete kept pushing a ring around on his index finger while his eyes studied me.

  “You think you lost your guts?” he said.

  “No.”

  “Like Boggs has got the Indian sign on you or something?”

  “I’m cool. Don’t worry about it.”

  “You bothered because you want to do this guy?”

  “No.”

  “You listen to me. It’s a perk when you get a chance to grease a guy like that. You take him off at the neck and the world applauds.” But he saw his words were having no effect. “What happened in that coulee?”

  “I thought my clock had run out. I don’t think I behaved very well. I always thought I would do better.”

  “Nobody handles it well. They cry, they call out for their mother. It’s a bad moment. It’s supposed to be.”

  “You don’t feel the same about yourself later.”

  He picked at the calluses on his hands, his eyes downcast.

  “My noble, grieving mon,” he said.

  “Look, Clete, I appreciate—”

  “You know what I think all this is about? You want to drink. Whenever I went out on the edge of the envelope, I’d mellow out with some skull-fuck muta and JD on the rocks. You can’t drink anymore, so you walk around with this ongoing horror show inside you.”

  “How about we put the cork in the five-and-dime psychology? Look, I think Cardo’s heavy into crank.”

  “He’s a speed freak?”

  “He came into my apartment in the middle of the night and snapped a revolver under his chin.”

  Clete grinned, shook his head, and rolled a matchstick across his teeth.

  “What’s funny?” I said.

  “This is the guy you’re going to get next to with a wire? And you worry about Boggs or whether you still got your guts? Streak, you’re a pistol.”

  I talked with Minos Dautrieve that afternoon and made arrangements to have my converted jugboat moved from Morgan City to a commercial dock at Cocodrie, near Terrebonne Bay. Over the phone I sensed a fine wire of anxiety in Minos’s voice.

  “What is it?” I said.

  “It bothers me they don’t want Purcel with you.”

  “He got in Fontenot’s face. Clete has a way of scaring the hell out of people he doesn’t like.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Are you worried about the half million?”

  “I’m worried about you. But some other people are having misgivings about the operation. It’s a big expenditure. Cardo’s not getting brought into things the way he should.”

  “I can’t help that.”

  “They’re thinking about their own butts. They don’t want to get burned. But that’s not your problem. The Coast Guard’s going to track the mother boat and nail it after you’re gone. So the government’ll get its money back. I don’t know why these guys are sweating it. They piss me off.”

  “Run Cardo’s military record for me.”

  “What for?”

  “Something about Vietnam is eating his lunch.”

  “What’s new about that?”

  “I think he’s a complex man. You didn’t tell me about his son.”

  “Yeah, that’s a sad case.”

  “Evidently he really looks after him.”

  The phone was silent a moment.

  “Cardo’s a drug dealer, and his hired shitheads kill people. Anything else is irrelevant. It’s important to understand that, Dave.”

  “I’m just saying you can’t dismiss the guy as a geek.”

  “Right. He hires them instead. Like Jimmie Lee Boggs. Get your head on straight. I’ll be back with you later. Carry your piece out there on the salt. I want your ass back home safe on this one.”

  He hung up the phone.

  That night I wanted to take Bootsie out for supper, but she had to work late at her office, and when she finally finished it was after ten o’clock. So I read a book in bed and went to sleep sometime after midnight with the light on and a pillow over my head.

  The twilight is purple and the willow trees along the banks of the Mississippi are filled with fireflies when they take the black kid out of the van and walk him inside the Red Hat House in a waist chain. His hair has been shaved down to the scalp and his ears look abnormally large on the sides of his head. The wind is blowing off the river, ruffling the corn and stalks of sugarcane in the fields, but his face is dripping with sweat as though he’s been locked inside an iron box. He smokes an unfiltered cigarette without being able to take it from his lips, because his hands are manacled at his sides. Before they go inside the squat, off-white concrete building, a gun-bull takes the cigarette out of the boy’s mouth and flips it into a pool of rainwater, where it is suddenly extinguished.

  Inside, I sit on one of the wood benches with the other witnesses—television and newspaper reporters, a medical examiner, a Negro preacher, and the parents of the girl the convict shot to death in a filling station robbery. They’re Cajuns from New Iberia. They sit rigidly and without expression, their eyes never quite
focusing on the boy while he is being strapped arm and leg to the electric chair. The woman keeps twisting a handkerchief in her fingers; finally, her husband wipes his hand across his mouth and puts a cigarette between his lips, but he looks at the gun-bull and doesn’t light it. Through the barred window the tip of the setting sun is crimson above the green line of willow trees on the river.

  Then suddenly the boy begins fighting. It’s the moment that no one wants, that embarrasses and shames. His terror has eaten through the Thorazine he’s been fed all day, and he gets a foot loose and kicks wildly at a guard. But the guard is a professional and knows how to grab the ankle and calf and use his weight to press the leg firmly back against the oak chair and buckle the leather strap quickly across the shinbone.

  The beat and humidity inside the room are almost unbearable. I can smell my own odor and the sweat in the clothes of the people around me. The mother of the murdered girl is looking at the floor now with one white knuckle pressed against her teeth. No one speaks, and I hear the boy’s breath sucking in and out of his throat. His eyes are bloodshot and wide, his mouth quivering, and his neck so swollen with fear and blood that it looks as rigid as a fire hydrant. Before the cloth hood and metal skullcap go down over his head he stares straight into my face. An unanswered expectation bulges from his eyes.

  I nailed him in New Orleans, busted him in a Negro hot-pillow joint off Magazine, took a .32 automatic and a straight razor off him and dropped them in a toilet bowl while a half dozen of his friends watched, threatened, and finally did nothing. Later I escorted him back to Iberia Parish for trial. For some reason he has asked me to be here in the Red Hat House. I think he is a borderline psychotic or retarded, or perhaps he has simply melted down his head with cocaine. But I’m convinced that in these last few moments he believes I can wave a wand over his circle of torment, pop the straps and buckles loose from his body, and lead him back outside into the wind, the ruffling sugarcane, the smell of distant rain.

  When the voltage hits him his body leaps against the straps, stiffens, trembles violently with a life of its own, like that of a man having a seizure. A curl of smoke rises from under the facecloth. They hit him again, and we can hear the leather straining against the oak arms and legs of the chair. The smell is like the electric scorch of a streetcar, like the smell of hair burning in a barbershop trash barrel. A newsman next to me puts his handkerchief in his mouth and begins gagging.

  Later I’m in a bar one mile down the road from Angola Penitentiary. The bar is in a remote and thickly wooded area, and the few people who drink in there either work at the penitentiary or in a piney-woods sawmill nearby. It’s a joyless place where personal and economic failure and institutional cruelty are not made embarrassing by comparisons with the outside world. The light in the bar is hard and yellow, the wood floor scorched with cigarette and cigar burns.

  Dry lightning leaps outside the window and turns the oak trees white. I order a schooner of Jax and a shot of Jim Beam. I lower the jigger into the schooner, release it, and watch it slide down the side of the glass to the bottom. The sour mash rises in a cloud and turns the beer from gold to amber, and I cup the schooner with my fingers and drink it empty with one long swallow.

  “You were up at the Red Hat tonight?” the bartender asks. He’s a barrel-chested man, with gray hair curling over his shirt lapels. A blue chain is tattooed around his thick neck.

  “Yes.”

  “What’s a guy think in those last few seconds?”

  “He begs.”

  “I wouldn’t do that. Would you?”

  I don’t answer.

  “Would you?” he says again.

  I tell him to hit me again. He refills my schooner and pours another shot of Beam on the side.

  I empty the jigger into the beer and raise the schooner to my mouth. In the bar mirror the cloud of whiskey floating in beer is the color of blood that has dried in the sun, that has been burned with an electric arc. I can feel the glass begin to boil in my hands. Lightning explodes in the shell parking lot outside, illuminating the battered cars and pickup trucks and racist bumper stickers. The air is filled with a wet sulfurous smell; my ears ring with a sound that is like a scream muffled under a black cloth.

  It was two in the morning when I awoke from the dream and sat listlessly on the side of the bed. What did the dream mean? Was it simply a replay of the electrocution that I had in fact witnessed when I was a newly promoted detective with the New Orleans Police Department? Old-timers at AA would probably say it had to do with fear, which they believe is the cause of all the problems of alcoholics. Fear of mortality, fear that we’ll drink again, fear of the self’s dark potential. And for an alcoholic, fear is the acronym for Fuck Everything And Run. Clete had had his hand on it. I had loved bars and bust-head whiskey with the adoration and simple trust of a man kneeling before a votive shrine. That kind of emotional faith and addiction dies no less easily than one’s religion.

  The phone rang at one the next afternoon. It was Kim Dollinger.

  “I want to talk to you,” she said.

  “Go ahead.”

  “No, come down to your buddy’s place. I’ll buy you a drink.”

  “What is it you want to tell me?”

  “What’s the matter, your social calendar all full?”

  “No, I just—”

  “Then come on over, hotshot.”

  “I’m not up to nicknames today. My name is Dave. To tell you the truth, Kim, you sound like you got started a little early today.”

  “Then buy me a cup of coffee. You have that paternal quality. Are you coming or not?”

  Ten minutes later I was at Clete’s Club. Clete and his black helper were filling the beer coolers, and she was at the far end of the bar. She wore black stockings, a denim skirt, and a sleeveless orange sweater, and she had had her hair cut so that it was short and thick on her pale neck.

  “I want to tell you something before you leave,” Clete said to me as I passed him.

  “What is it?”

  “Later, noble mon.”

  I sat on the stool next to Kim. She had a gin gimlet wrapped in a napkin in front of her.

  “You want one?” she asked.

  “No, thanks.”

  “You don’t go to a whorehouse to play the jukebox, do you?”

  “I joined the Dr Pepper crowd a few years ago.”

  “Too much. You want to be in the candy business, but you don’t touch the juice?”

  “How about holding it down?”

  “You sure you’re not just a big put-on?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I think somebody shook up your puzzle box, that’s what I mean.”

  “How about I buy you some gumbo?”

  “I think you’re weird. Do people in the bayou country grow up weird and think they can make big money in the city dealing with somebody like Ray Fontenot? Are you that dumb?”

  “What is it you want to tell me, Kim?”

  “I don’t know what I want to tell you.” She looked away into space. The green and purple neon tubing on the bar mirror glowed on her face. “You don’t listen to people. Back there where you come from, don’t you have something better going than this stuff in New Orleans? You want to risk it for a score with a bunch of dipshits who wouldn’t take a leak on you if you were burning?”

  “Why all this concern for me?”

  “Because you didn’t try to put moves on me. Because there’re things about you that are nice. Also, because I think you’re a fish.”

  “I look like a fish?”

  “I know you’re a fish, hon.”

  She finished her gimlet and signaled the black barman for another. He took her glass away and filled a fresh one from the blender. The color in her green eyes deepened when she sipped from the glass.

  “Is there something I should know, Kim?” I asked.

  “You’re a big boy. Make up your own mind. Look at the flamingos.”

  “What?”

/>   “Painted on the edge of the mirror. The pink flamingos. When I was a little girl we lived in Miami. My father was the guy who took care of the flamingos at the Hialeah racetrack. Before the seventh race he’d chase them with a broom in the center ground and make them fly high above the stands. That was his job. He thought it was a real important job.”

  She drank again from her glass and closed and opened her eyes slowly. Her mouth was bright red.

  “I see,” I said.

  “One morning he took me to work with him and told me to sit on this wood bench by the finish line while he picked up paper from the track with a stick that had a nail in it. But I wandered out in the center ground and started feeding the flamingos. There was a bucket of ground-up shrimp by the lake, and I was throwing handfuls of it at these big, beautiful pink birds. I didn’t see or hear him come up behind me. My hair was long then, and he twisted it in his hand and jerked it against my scalp like you’d snap a rope. He pulled me back to the bench and told me if I cried any more I’d get it again when I got home.

  “Then this horse trainer walked up and shook his finger at my father and said, ‘Don’t you hurt that little girl, Bill. She didn’t mean no harm.’ He picked me up in his arms like my father wasn’t there and carried me to his car. ‘She don’t belong out here. I’m going to take her to the zoo. You go on about your work,’ he said. ‘I’ll bring her back to your trailer later. Don’t be giving me any trouble about it, either, Bill.’

  “He drove me down to Crandon Park to see the flamingos. He said my father wouldn’t hurt me anymore, not as long as he was around. Then he bought me some ice cream and parked the car in some palmettos and sat me in his lap. Then he unbuttoned my blouse. I’ve always thought of it as my morning for flamingos.”

  “That’s a bad story, Kim.”

  “You learn early or you learn late. What difference does it make?”

  “Are you really that hard?”

  “No, I just like hanging around people like Ray and Lionel and the raghead for kicks. You’ll see. It’s a great life.”

  She finished her drink, went to the women’s room, and came back. I could smell mints on her breath. The Negro barman started to pour her another gimlet from the blender but she shook her head negatively. Somebody had put an old recording of “Please Don’t Leave Me” by Fats Domino on the jukebox.