A Morning for Flamingos

  This time I got out of the car.

  “What’s the matter with you?” Lester said.

  “You’re doing too many things wrong.” I came around the front of the car toward him. The headlights were still on.

  “Look, I’m in charge of this assignment. You don’t like the way I handle it, you write up a complaint when we get back.”

  “Boggs has killed three people. He killed the bar owner with a baseball bat. Does that tell you something?”

  “Yeah, that maybe you’re a little bit obsessive. You think that might be the problem here?”

  I unsnapped the holster on my .45 and banged on the rest room door with my fist.

  “Open it up, Boggs,” I yelled.

  “I’m on the toilet,” he said.

  “Open the door!”

  “I can’t reach it. I got the shits, man. What’s going on?” Boggs said.

  “You’re fucking unbelievable,” Lester said.

  I hit the door again.

  “Come on, Boggs,” I said.

  “I’m going to get some cigarettes. You can do what you want to,” Lester said, and walked toward the front of the station.

  I stepped back from the door, rested my palm on the butt of the .45, and kicked the door hard under the knob. It didn’t give. I saw Lester turn and stare at me. I kicked it again, and this time the lock splintered out of the jamb and the door crashed back on its hinges.

  My eyes saw the paper towel dispenser torn apart on the wall and the paper towels scattered all over the floor even before I saw Boggs, his knees squatted slightly in a shooting position, the links of chain crimped tightly into his body, one manacled hand frozen against his side like a bird’s claw, his right arm outstretched with a nickel-plated revolver. His spearmint-green eyes were alive with excitement, and his mouth was smiling, as though we were in this joke together.

  I got the .45 halfway out of my holster before he fired. The report was no louder than a firecracker, and I saw sparks from the barrel fly out into the darkness. In my mind’s eye I was twisting sideways, raising my left arm in front of my face, and clearing my holster with the .45, but I do not think I was doing any of these things. Instead, I’m sure that my mouth opened wide in disbelief and fear as the round struck me high up in the chest like a fist that was wrapped in chain mail. My breath exploded out of my lungs, my knees caved, my chest burned as though someone had cored through sinew and bone with a machinist’s drill. The .45 fell uselessly from my hand into the weeds, and I felt my left arm go limp, the muscles in my neck and shoulder collapsing as though all the linkage were severed. Then I was stumbling backward in the rain toward the coulee, my hand pressed over a wet hole in my shirt, my mouth opening and closing like a fish’s.

  Lester had a .38 strapped to his ankle. He had once told me that a cop he knew in Miami Beach carried his weapon in the same fashion. His knee came up in the air, his hand dropped toward his shoe, and in the light from the filling station front window his face looked absolutely white, frozen, beaded with raindrops, just before Jimmie Lee Boggs doubled him over with a round through the stomach.

  But I wasn’t thinking about Lester, nor in honesty can I say that I cared about him at that moment. Amid the pistol shots and the pop of lightning on the horizon, I heard a black medic from my outfit say, Sucking chest wound, motherfucker. Close it, close it, close it. Chuck got to breathe through his mouth. Then I crashed backward through a canebrake and tumbled down the slope of the coulee through the reeds and tangle of underbrush. I rolled on my back, my ears thundering with bugles and distant drums, and my breath came out of my mouth in a long sigh. The limbs of oak trees arched over the top of the coulee, and through the leaves I could see lightning flicker across the sky.

  My legs were in the water, my back covered with mud, the side of my face matted with black leaves. I felt the warmness from the wound spread from under my palm into my shirt.

  “Get in there, you sonofabitch,” Boggs said up in the darkness.

  “Mr. Boggs,” I heard Tee Beau say.

  “Get the car keys and open the trunk,” Boggs said.

  “Mr. Boggs, they ain’t no need to do that. That boy too scared to hurt us.”

  “Shut up and get the guns out of the trunk.”

  “Mr. Boggs…”

  I heard a sound like someone being shoved hard into a wall, then once again the report of the pistol, like a small, dry firecracker popping.

  I swallowed and tried to roll on my side and crawl farther down the coulee. A bone-grinding, red-black pain ripped from my neck all the way down to my scrotum, and I rolled back into the ferns and the thick layer of black leaves and the mud that smelled as sour as sewage.

  Then I heard the unmistakable roar of a shotgun.

  “Try some Pepto Bismol for it,” Boggs said, and laughed in a way that I had never heard a human being laugh before.

  I slipped my palm away from my chest, put both of my hands behind me in the mud, dug the heels of my shoes into the silt bottom of the stream, and began to push myself toward a rotted log webbed with dried flotsam and morning glory vines. I could breathe all right now; my fears of a sucking chest wound had been groundless, but it seemed that all my life’s energies had been siphoned out of me. I saw both Tee Beau and Boggs silhouetted on the rim of the coulee. Boggs held the pistol-grip twelve-gauge from the car trunk at port arms across his chest.

  “Do it,” he said, took the nickel-plated revolver from his blue jeans pocket, and handed it to Tee Beau.

  “Suh, let’s get out of here.”

  “You finish it.”

  “He dying down there. We ain’t got to do no more.”

  “You don’t get a free pass, boy. You’re leaving here dirty as I am.”

  “I cain’t do it, Mr. Boggs.”

  “Listen, you stupid nigger, you do what I tell you or you join the kid up in the can.”

  In his oversized clothes Tee Beau looked like a small stick figure next to Boggs. Boggs shoved him with one hand, and Tee Beau skidded down the incline through the wet brush, the branches whipping back across his coat and pants. The pistol was flat against his thigh. He splashed through the water toward me.

  I ran my tongue across my lips and tried to speak, but the words became a tangle of rusty nails in my throat.

  He knelt in front of me, his face spotted with mud, his eyes round and frightened in his small face.

  “Tee Beau, don’t do it,” I whispered.

  “He done killed that white boy in the bat’room,” he said. “He put that shotgun up against Mr. Benoit face and blowed it off.”

  “Don’t do it. Please,” I said.

  “Close your eyes, Mr. Dave. Don’t be moving, neither.”

  “What?” I said, as weakly as a man would if he were slipping forever beneath the surface of a deep, warm lake.

  He cocked the pistol, and his bulging eyes stared disjointedly into mine.

  Some people say that you review your whole life in that final moment. I don’t believe that’s true. You see the folds in a blackened leaf, mushrooms growing thickly around the damp roots of an oak tree, a bullfrog glistening darkly on a log; you hear water coursing over rocks, dripping out of the trees, you smell it blowing in a mist. Fog can lie on your tongue as sweet and wet as cotton candy, the cattails and reeds turning a silver-green more beautiful than a painting in one flicker of lightning across the sky. You think of the texture of skin, the grainy pores, the nest of veins that are like the lines in a leaf. You think of your mother’s powdered breasts, the smell of milk in her clothes, the heat in her body when she held you against her; then your eyes close and your mouth opens in that last strangled protest against the cosmic accident that suddenly and unfairly is about to end your life.

  He was crouched on one knee when he pulled the trigger. The pistol went off ten inches from my face, and I felt the burnt powder scald my skin, the dirt explode next to my ear. My heart twisted in my chest.

  I heard Tee Beau rise to his feet and brus
h his knees.

  “I done it, Mr. Boggs,” he said.

  “Then get up here.”

  “Yes suh, I’m moving.”

  I remained motionless, my hands turned palm upward in the stream. The night was filled with sound: the crickets in the grass, the rumble of thunder out on the Gulf, the cry of a nutria farther up the coulee, Tee Beau laboring up through the wet brush.

  Then I heard the car doors slam, the engine start, and the tires crunching over the gravel out onto the two-lane road.

  It rained hard once more during the night. Just before dawn the sky cleared, and the stars were bright through the oak branches overhead. The sun came up red and hot above the tree line in the east, and the fog that clung to the bottom of the coulee was as pink as blood diffused in water. My mouth was dry, my breath foul in my own nostrils. I felt dead inside, disconnected from all the ordinary events in my life, my body trembling with spasmodic waves of shock and nausea, as though I lay once again on the side of a trail in Vietnam after a bouncing Betty had filled my head with the roar of freight trains and left me disbelieving and voiceless in the scorched grass. I heard early morning traffic on the road and car tires cutting into the gravel; then a car door opened and someone walked slowly along the side of the filling station.

  “Oh Lawd God, what somebody done done,” a Negro man said.

  I tried to speak, but no sound would come out of my voice box.

  A small Negro boy in tattered overalls, with the straps hanging by his sides, stared down at me from the lip of the coulee. I raised my fingers off my chest and fluttered them at him. I felt one side of my mouth try to smile and the web of dried mud crack across my cheek. He backed away from the coulee and clattered through the cane, his voice ringing in the hot morning air.

  Chapter 2

  Three months later I spent much of my day out on the gallery at home. The days were cool and warm at the same time, the way they always are during the fall in southern Louisiana, and I liked to put on a pair of khakis, a soft flannel shirt, and my loafers, and sit on the gallery and watch the gold light in my pecan trees, the hard blue ceramic texture of the sky above the marsh, the red leaves floating like rose petals on the bayou, the fishermen on my dock shaking sacks of cracked ice on their catches of sac-à-lait and bigmouth bass.

  Sometimes after a couple of hours I would walk down through the grove of pecan trees and across the dirt road to the dock and bait shop and help Batist, the Negro man who worked for me, count the receipts, seine the dead shiners out of the aluminum bait tanks, or paint sauce piquante on the split chickens and links of sausage that we barbecued in an old oil drum I had cut longways with an acetylene torch and welded hinges and metal legs on. It was a good season that year, and I made a lot of money renting boats and selling bait and beer and serving barbecue lunches to the fishermen who came in at noon and sat around my Southern Bell spool tables with beach umbrellas set in the centers. But I would tire of my own business in a short while, and walk back up on the gallery and look out at the round shafts of light in the trees, and the gray squirrels that ran through the piles of leaves around the trunks.

  My left shoulder and arm and upper chest didn’t hurt me anymore when I moved around, or even when I turned onto my left side in my sleep. I was all right unless I picked up a lot of weight suddenly with my left hand. Sometimes I unbuttoned my shirt and fingered the round scar that was an inch and a half below my collarbone. It was the size of a dime, red, indented, rubbery to the touch. In an almost narcissistic fascination with my own mortality, I could reach over the top of my shoulder and touch the rubbery scar that had grown over the exit wound. The bullet had gone through me as clean and as straight as an arrow shaft.

  On some afternoons I unfolded a card table on the gallery and took apart my guns—a double-barrel twelve-gauge, a .25-caliber hide-away Beretta, and the .45 automatic that I had brought home from Vietnam—and oiled and wiped and polished all the springs and screws and tiny mechanisms. Then I’d oil them again and run bore brushes through the barrels before I reassembled them. I liked the heavy weight of the .45 in my palm, the way the clip snugged up inside the handle, the delicate lines of my fingerprints on the freshly oiled metal. One day I loaded the clip with hollow-points, walked down to the duck pond at the back of my property, eased a round into the chamber, and sighted on a broad green hyacinth leaf. But I didn’t pull the trigger. I lowered the automatic, then raised it and aimed again. The afternoon was bright and warm, and the grass in my neighbor’s pasture was dull green in the sunlight. I lowered the .45 a second time, released the clip from the magazine, slipped it into my back pocket, pulled back the receiver, and ejected the round in the chamber. I told myself that the pistol’s report, which was a deafening one, would be unsettling to the neighbors.

  I walked back to the house, put the .45 under some shirts in my dresser drawer, and took no more interest in it.

  I did not handle the nights well. Sometimes after supper I took Alafair, my adopted daughter, to Vezey’s in New Iberia for ice cream; later, we would drive back down the dirt road along the bayou in the waning twilight, the fireflies lighting in the sky, and I would begin to feel a nameless apprehension that seemed to have no cause. I would try to hide my self-absorption from her, but even though she was only in the second grade, she always read my moods accurately and saw through my disguises. She was a beautiful child, with a round, tan face, wide-set Indian teeth, and shiny black hair cut in bangs. When she smiled her eyes would squint almost completely shut, and you would not guess that she had witnessed a massacre in her Salvadoran village, or that I had pulled her from a pocket of air inside a crashed plane, carrying illegal refugees, out on the salt.

  One evening on the way home from the ice cream parlor I could feel her eyes watching the side of my face. I looked over at her and winked. We had bought some new Curious George and Baby Squanto Indian books, and she rode with them stacked on her knees.

  “Why you always thinking about something, Dave?” she said. She wore her elastic-waisted jeans, pink tennis shoes, a USL T-shirt with the words “Ragin’ Cajuns” printed on it, and an oversized Houston Astros ball cap.

  “I’m just tired today, little guy.”

  “A man in Vezey’s said hello to us and you didn’t say anything.”

  “I guess I didn’t hear him.”

  “You don’t smile or play anymore, Dave. It’s like something’s always wrong.”

  “I’m not that bad, am I?”

  She looked straight ahead, her cap bouncing with the bumps in the road.

  “Alf?” I said.

  But she wouldn’t turn her head or reply.

  “Hey, Baby Squanto, come on.”

  Then she said in a quiet voice, “Did I do something that made you sad?”

  “No, of course not. Don’t ever think a thing like that, little guy. You’re my partner, right?”

  But her face was morose in the purple light, her dark eyes troubled with questions she couldn’t answer.

  After I said her prayers with her and kissed her good-night, I read until very late, until my eyes burned and I couldn’t register the words on the page and the darkness outside was alive with the cries of night birds and nutrias in the marsh. Then I watched the late show on television, drank a glass of milk, and fell asleep with my head on the kitchen table. I woke during the night to the sound of Alafair’s slippered feet shuffling across the linoleum. I looked up bleary-eyed into her face. Her pajamas were covered with smiling clocks. She patted me on top of the head as she would a cat.

  He waited for me in my dreams. Not Tee Beau Latiolais or Jimmie Lee Boggs but a metamorphic figure who changed his appearance every night but always managed to perform the same function. Sometimes it was ole Victor Charlie, his black pajamas glued against his body with sweat, his face strung with human feces out of a rice paddy, one bulging walleye aimed along the iron sights of a French bolt-action rifle. When he squeezed the trigger I felt the steel-jacketed bullet rip through my throat
as easily as it would core a cantaloupe.

  Or I would see myself down a narrow, unlighted brick passageway off Dauphine in the French Quarter. I could smell the damp stone, the mint and roses growing in the courtyard, see the shadows of the banana trees waving on the flagstones beyond the piked gate that hung open at the end of the passageway. My hand tightened on the grips of the .45; the mortar between the bricks in the wall felt like claws in my back. I worked my way up to the courtyard entrance, my breath ballooning in my chest; then suddenly the scrolled iron gate swung into my face, broke two of my fingers as if they were sticks, raked the .45 out of my hand, and knocked me backward into a pool of rainwater. An enormous black man in a child’s T-shirt, in lavender slacks at least three sizes too small for him, so that his scrotum was outlined like a bag of metal washers, squatted down with a .410 shotgun pistol resting on his thigh and looked at me through the bars of the gate. He was toothless, his lips purple with snuff, his eyes red-rimmed, his breath rank with funk.

  “Your turn to beg, motherfucker,” he said. “That’s right, beg for your worthless shitass life.”

  Then he smiled, lifted the point of my chin with the shotgun barrel, and cocked the hammer.

  I would awake on the couch, my T-shirt and shorts damp with perspiration, and sit in a square of moonlight on the edge of the couch, my head bent down, my jaws clenched tight to keep them from shaking.

  I was given full pay during my three months’ leave, and when I returned to work I was assigned to restricted duty. I stayed in the office most of the time; I interviewed witnesses for other detectives; or sometimes I investigated traffic accidents out in the parish. I did a great deal of paperwork. I was treated with the deference you often see extended to a wounded and recuperating soldier. The attitude is one of kindness, but perhaps a degree of fear is involved also, as though mortality is an infectious condition that must be treated by isolation.