A Morning for Flamingos

  “You guys got a problem with your gender or something?” he said.

  “Sorry, Tony. We don’t mean anything,” one man said.

  “Then act decent,” he said.

  “Sure, Tony. Everybody’s glad to have you here. No, I mean, we’re sorry you’re busted but—”

  “Get out of here,” Tony said.

  “Sure, anything you want. We—” Then the man lost his words, and he and his friend walked quickly out of the shower with their towels wrapped around their hips.

  “That’s what nobody understands about a jail. It’s full of degenerates,” Tony said.

  I walked with him back to our cell. Through the corridor windows I could see downtown New Orleans and the glow of the city against the clouds. He put on his slacks and shirt and lay down barefoot on the bunk across from me. He folded his arm behind his head. Water dripped out of his hair onto the striped mattress.

  “I’m supposed to take Paul to a soccer game tomorrow afternoon,” he said.

  “He’ll understand,” I said.

  “That’s not the way it works with kids. You’re either there for them or you’re not there.”

  He let out a long breath and stared at the ceiling. Somebody down the corridor shouted, “Lockup, five minutes.”

  “How do I get out of it, man?” he said.

  “What?”

  “I’m addicted. Big-time. On the spike. I got blood pressure you could cook an egg with.”

  “Maybe you should think about a treatment program.”

  “One of those thirty-day hospital jobs? What about Paul? What about my fucking wife?”

  “What about her?”

  “She never dresses him or plays with him. She won’t take him shopping with her or to a show. But I kick her out, she’ll sue for custody. That’s her big edge. And, man, does she work it. I should have used that psycho Boggs to whack her out. Her and that prick over in Houston.”

  “Who?”

  “She makes it with one of the Dio crowd from Houston. They meet in Miami. That’s why she’s always flying over there. Come on, man. You read a lot of books. What would you do?”

  “You’re trying to deal with all the monsters at the same time. Start with the addiction.”

  “I tried. Out at the V.A. I think I’m in it for the whole ride.”

  “There’re ways out, Tony.”

  “Yeah, and you can scrub the stink out of shit, too. You came home okay, Dave. I blew it.”

  He turned on his side and faced the wall. When I spoke to him again, he did not answer.

  The daytime noise level in any jail is grinding and ceaseless, particularly on a Saturday morning. I woke to the clanging of cell doors, shoes thudding on spiral metal stairs, cleaning crews scraping buckets across the cement floors, shower water drumming on the tile walls, radios tuned to a dozen different stations, someone cracking wind into a toilet bowl or roaring out a belch from the bottom of his bowels, inmates shouting from the windows to friends on the other side of the razor wire that bordered the street—a dirty, iron-tinged, cacophonous mix that echoed down the long concrete corridor with such an ear-numbing intensity that the individual voice was lost in it.

  We lined up when the trusties wheeled in the steam carts loaded with grits, sausage, black coffee, and white bread, and later Tony and I played checkers on a homemade board in our cell. Then, because we had nothing else to do, we followed Jess down to the weight room at the end of the corridor. The weather was warm and sunny, so the solitary barred window high up on the wall was open, but the room reeked of the men clanking barbells up and down on the cement. They were stripped to the waist, or wore only their Jockey undershorts or cutoff sweatpants, their bodies laced with rivulets of sweat. They had bulging scrotums, necks like tree stumps, shoulders you could break a two-by-four across. Some of the Negroes were as black as paint, the Caucasians so white their skin had a shine to it. And they all seemed to contain a reservoir of rut and power and ruthless energy that made you shudder when you considered the fact that soon they would be back on the street.

  Their tattoos were a marvel: spiders in purple webs stretched across the shoulder blades, serpents twined around biceps and forearms, beret-capped skulls, hearts impaled on knives, swastikas clutched in eagle claws, green dragons blowing fire across the loins, Confederate flags, lily-wrapped crucifixes, and the face of Christ with beads of blood upon his tortured brow.

  For a moment we almost had trouble. A tall white man with a black goatee, wearing only a jockstrap and tennis shoes, sat against the wall and wiped his chest and stomach with a tattered gray towel. His eyes focused on my face and stayed there; then he said, “I know that guy. He’s a cop.”

  The clanking of the barbells stopped. The room was absolutely quiet.

  Then a big black man, with a nylon stocking crimped on his head, set down his weights and said to me, “What about it, Home?”

  “I look like heat? Take a look at my charge sheet,” I said.

  “No, we don’t look at nothing. This guy came in with me,” Tony said. He looked down at the tall white man sitting on the floor with his knees splayed open. “You saying I brought a cop in with me?”

  The man’s eyes met Tony’s, then became close-set and focused on nothing.

  “He looked like a guy I used to see around,” he said. “Some other guy.”

  The room remained quiet. I could hear traffic out on the street. Everyone was watching Tony.

  “So don’t worry about it,” he said. He laughed, pulled the towel from the man’s hand, and rubbed the man’s head with it. “Hey, what’s with this crazy guy? Y’all made him weird or is that the way they come in from Jump Street these days?”

  The man grinned sheepishly; then everyone was laughing, clanging the barbells again, grabbing themselves, nodding to one another in admiration of Tony’s intelligence and wit or whatever quality it was that allowed him to charm a snake back into a basket.

  Tony walked past me out the door, his smile welded on his face, and nudged me in the side with his thumb. We walked side by side back toward our cell. He kept his face straight ahead. He whistled a disjointed tune and then said, “Do you know who that guy was?”

  “No, I don’t remember him.”

  “He did a snitch with an ice pick in Angola for twenty bucks. Let’s play a lot of checkers today, hang around the cell, talk about books, you get my drift?”

  “You’re a piece of work, Tony.”

  “What I am is too old for this shit.”

  But our worries about the group in the weight room were unnecessary. Tony’s lawyer had us sprung by noon, all charges dropped. Nate Baxter had not had probable cause to stop and search us, Tony’s lawyer produced the permit for Tony’s pistol, and the charge against me—interfering with an officer in the performance of his duty—was a manufactured one that the prosecutor’s office wouldn’t waste time on. The only loser was Jess, who had his .410 shotgun pistol confiscated.

  We picked up the Lincoln at the car pound and Tony treated us to lunch at an outdoor café on St. Charles. It was a lovely fall day, seventy-five degrees, perhaps, with a soft wind out of the south that lifted the moss in the oak trees along the avenue. A Negro was selling snow cones, which people in New Orleans call snowballs, out of a white cart, with a canvas umbrella over it, on the esplanade. The dry fronds of a thick-trunked palm tree covered his white uniform with shifting patterns of etched lines. I heard the streetcar tracks begin to hum, then farther up the avenue I saw the streetcar wobbling down the esplanade in a smoky cone of light and shadow created by the canopy of oaks.

  “When we were kids we used to put pennies on the tracks and flatten them out to the size of half-dollars,” Tony said, wiping the tomato sauce from his shrimp off his mouth with a napkin. “They’d still be hot in your hand when you picked them up.”

  “That’s not all you done when you were a kid,” Jess said. “You remember when you and your cousins found them arms behind the Tulane medical school?” Jess l
ooked at me. “That’s right. They got this whole pile of arms that was supposed to be burned in the incinerator. Except Tony and his cousins put them on crushed ice in a beer cooler and got on the streetcar with them when all the coloreds were just getting off work. They waited until it was wall-to-wall people, then they hung a half dozen of these arms from the hand straps. People were screaming all over the car, trampling each other to get out the door, climbing out the windows at thirty miles an hour. One big fat guy crashed right on top of the snowball stand.”

  “Hey, don’t tell Dave that stuff. He’s going to think I’m a ghoul or something,” Tony said.

  “Tony used to flush M-80s down the commode at the Catholic school,” Jess said. “See, the fire would burn down through the center of the fuse. They’d get way back in the plumbing before they’d explode, then anybody taking a dump would get douched with pot water.”

  People at the other tables turned and stared at us, openmouthed.

  “You finished eating, Jess?” Tony said.

  “I’m going to get some pecan pie,” Jess said.

  “How about bringing the car around? I’ve got to get home,” Tony said.

  “What’d I do this time?”

  “Nothing, Jess. You’re fine.”

  “You make me feel like I ought to be in a plastic bubble or something. I was just telling a story.”

  “It’s okay, Jess. Just get the car,” Tony said. Then after Jess was gone, he said to me, “What am I going to do? He’s the one loyal guy I got. When it comes down to protecting me, you could bust a chair across his face and he wouldn’t blink.”

  A few minutes later Jess came around the corner in the convertible and waited for us in front of the restaurant. Leaves blew under the wire wheels.

  “You guys drop me by my apartment so I can get my truck,” I said. “I’ll be back out to your house a little later.”

  Tony grinned. “I bet you’re off to see Bootsie. Tell her hello for me,” he said.

  His presumption that Bootsie should have been uppermost in my mind was right—but she wasn’t. After they left me at my apartment on Ursulines I called Minos at the guesthouse.

  “I’m sorry you had to spend a night in the bag. How was it?” he said.

  “What do you think?” Through the window I could see my neighbor’s bluetick dog urinating against a banana tree in the flower bed.

  “Look, I’ve got some news about Boggs, some of which I don’t understand. An informant told our Lafayette office that Boggs was in New Iberia two days ago. What would he be doing in New Iberia?”

  “Where’d your snitch see him?”

  “In a black neighborhood, out in the parish. Why would Boggs be in a black neighborhood?”

  “Tony said Boggs told him he was going to blackmail a Negro woman who owned a hot-pillow joint. It had something to do with the murder of a redbone. I think the redbone was a migrant-labor contractor named Hipolyte Broussard. But Boggs told all this to Cardo before he ripped off the coke out on the salt. I don’t know why he’d be interested in some minor-league blackmail when he’s holding a half-million dollars’ worth of cocaine.”

  “I don’t either. Anyway, we have some other information, too. We’ve got some taps on the greaseballs over in Houston. It’s not an open contract on Cardo anymore. Boggs has got the hit. It’s fifty grand, a big-money whack even for these guys. But they want it to go down in the next week.”

  “Why the hurry?”

  “They’re afraid of him. Tony C. isn’t one to take prisoners. One guy on the tape says it might have to be a slop shot. Have you heard that one before?”

  “Yes.”

  “There’re no innocent bystanders. His wife, his kid, anybody around him, they’re all targets if necessary. Dave, if Boggs was in New Iberia, do you think it has something to do with you?”

  “Why?”

  “Who has more reason to want you off the board? It’s turned around on him. I bet he gets up thinking about you in the morning.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Look, I want to push this stuff to a head. Can you get a wire into Cardo’s house?”

  “I think so.”

  “Either you can or you can’t, Dave.”

  “I can try, Minos.”

  “Once again I’m getting a strong impression here of a lack of enthusiasm.”

  “What do you expect? I’m a hired Judas goat. You want me to tell you I like it?”

  He paused a moment; then he said in an even voice, “We hear a big load of coke is going to hit town in three or four days. A lot of it is going to end up as crack in the welfare projects.”

  I looked out the window into the courtyard, where my neighbor was trying to leash his dog in the flower bed.

  “Are you there?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “You know the scene. A human life isn’t worth a stick of chewing gum in those places. All thanks to Tony C. and his friends.”

  “How do you want to work it?”

  “Find out his connection with the shipment. Then we’ll wire you. All we need is a statement that he’s in on the buy or the distribution.”

  “All right.”

  “You sound like you’ve got something else on your mind.”

  “It’s Kim Dollinger. I think somebody’s got her out there twisting in the wind.”

  “Why?”

  “She was terrified when we got busted yesterday.”

  “Who’s she afraid of?”

  “Tony, Nate Baxter, you guys. How should I know?”

  “It’s not us. You want us to pick her up?”

  “She’s a hard-nosed girl. She won’t cooperate. Baxter let her walk. Why would he let her walk when he rousted the rest of us? It was a good opportunity to squeeze her.”

  “From what I hear about this guy, he’s about as complicated as an empty closet. Save yourself a lot of grief and don’t make a mystery out of morons.”

  “If I only had that clarity of line, Minos.”

  “Work on it. It’ll come with time.”

  After I hung up, I shaved, showered, and changed into a pair of clean gray slacks, a maroon shirt, combed my hair in the mirror, put a touch of Vaseline on the hard knot of stitches in my lip and head, and buffed my loafers.

  I tried to keep my mind blank and not think about the care I was putting into my appearance.

  Then I drove down St. Charles to South Carrollton and parked my pickup truck in front of the nineteenth-century building by the levee where Kim Dollinger lived.

  Her apartment was on the second floor, and there was a hand-twist bell on the door. I had to ring it twice before she answered, a towel in her hand, her neck spotted with water. She wore jeans, tan sandals, and a white peasant blouse with a pink ribbon threaded through the top. The front of her blouse hung straight down from her breasts.

  “Oh boy,” she said.

  “May I come in?”

  She blotted the water on her neck and looked into my face.

  “I’m getting ready to go to work,” she said.

  Her back window was open, and I smelled the draft that blew out into the hall.

  “That’s not all you’ve been doing,” I said.

  “Look—”

  “Come on, I just got out of the bag. You can’t offer me a cup of coffee?”

  She stood back from the door for me to enter. I heard her close it behind me. Through the open window I could see the green of the levee and the wide, flat expanse of the Mississippi and the sandy bank and willow trees on the far side. The living room looked furnished from a secondhand store. Off to one side was a small kitchen with bright yellow linoleum. She sat down at a breakfast table that was located between the kitchen and living room. The legs of the table and chairs were chrome and had rusty scratches on them that looked like dismembered parts of insects.

  “Kim, I’m not telling you what to do, but if you’ve already got the dragons after you, reefer just makes the problem a lot worse,” I said.

  She cru
mpled the towel on the tabletop. Her eyes looked out into space.

  “What is it that you want?” she said.

  “To talk with you on the square, with no bullshit.”

  “That’s it? Nothing else?”

  “That’s right.”

  “You wouldn’t like to ball me while you’re at it, would you?”

  “Cut the badass act, Kim. It’s a drag.”

  “I tried to talk with you. You wouldn’t hear me.”

  “I can get you out of this.”

  “You?”

  “That’s right.”

  “A guy with a mouthful of stitches.”

  “I’m tired of being your dartboard. You’d better listen when a friend is talking to you.”

  She put the heel of her hand against her forehead. Her skin reddened from the pressure. She crossed her legs and breathed through her mouth. There were patches of color in her throat and cheeks. She made me think of someone who might have been wrapped in invisible rope.

  “Have you ever been down?” I said.

  “Have I what?” Her mouth hung open.

  “Have you ever done time?”

  “No.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I said no.”

  “Have you been in custody?”

  “You stop talking to me like this. Why are you saying these things to me?” Her voice started to break.

  “Because somebody is turning the screws on you. I suspect it’s Nate Baxter. He’s a sonofabitch, Kim, and I know what he’s capable of.”

  She pushed the heel of her hand along her hairline.

  “What does Tony know?” she said.

  “I couldn’t guess. Do you sleep with him?” My eyes shifted away from her face, and I didn’t want to hear her answer.

  “I used to. When he wanted me to, anyway. He doesn’t want to anymore. It’s the speed. It’s messed him up.”

  I glanced back at her face again. Her eyes met mine, then they looked away. There was a tingling in my throat, like a heated wire trembling against a nerve.

  “Did somebody make you sleep with him?” I said.

  “You don’t have the right to ask me these things.”

  “If Nate Baxter is behind this, he’s going to have the worst experience of his life.”