A Morning for Flamingos

  Five minutes later the bartender appeared in the front door of the juke joint with a small Negro girl at his side and pointed at my car. She ran across the parking lot toward me, with a newspaper spread over her head. When I pushed open the passenger door she jumped inside. She wore black fishnet stockings, a short black waitress’s skirt, and a loose white blouse that exposed her lace bra, but she looked both too young and too small for the job she did, and the type of clothes that she wore. It was her hair that caught your attention, black and thick and brushed in soft swirls around her head, almost like a helmet that made her toy face seem even smaller than it was. She was frightened and would not look at me directly.

  “You know I’m a police officer?” I said.

  “Yes suh.”

  “Tee Beau saved my life, so I don’t want to see him hurt. The man I’m after is named Jimmie Lee Boggs. He killed two people and took Tee Beau with him when he escaped. You know all that, don’t you?”

  “Yes suh, I knows that.”

  “You don’t have to call me sir. If Tee Beau can help me find this man Boggs, maybe I can help Tee Beau.”

  She nodded her head. Her hands were motionless on top of the wet newspaper in her lap.

  “Did he tell you where Boggs dropped him off?” I said.

  “Suh?” Her eyes cut sideways at me, then looked straight ahead again.

  “When you talked to him, did he say anything about Jimmie Lee Boggs?”

  “I ain’t talked to Tee Beau.”

  “I bet you have,” I said, and smiled.

  “No suh, I ain’t. Nobody know where Tee Beau at. Tante Lemon don’t know. Ain’t nobody know.”

  “I see. Look here, Dorothea, I’m going to give you a card. It has my phone number on it. When you talk to Tee Beau, you give him this number. You tell him I appreciate what he did for me, that I want to help him. He can call me collect from a pay phone. I won’t know where he’s living. All I want to do is find Jimmie Lee Boggs.”

  She took the card in her small hand. She looked out at the rain, her eyes quiet with thought.

  “How you gonna he’p him?” she said.

  “We can get his sentence commuted. That means he won’t go to the electric chair. Maybe he can even get a new trial. The jury didn’t hear everything they should have, did they?”

  “What you mean?”

  “About Hipolyte Broussard. Was he a pimp?”

  “Yes suh.”

  “Did he try to make Tee Beau a pimp, too?”

  “He make him drive the bus with the girls out to the camp.”

  “What else did Hipolyte do?”

  “Suh?”

  “Did Hipolyte do something to you?”

  Again her eyes cut sideways, then looked straight ahead. I could see her nostrils quiver when she breathed.

  “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to,” I said. “But maybe Tee Beau had a good reason to kill Hipolyte. Maybe other people might think so, too.”

  She squeezed her fingers and looked down at her lap.

  “He say I got to get on the bus,” she said.

  “Who?”

  “Hipolyte. He say I got to go out to the camp. Tee Beau say I ain’t going, even if Hipolyte hit him and knock him down in the dirt. Hipolyte say I going or I ain’t working here no more.”

  “So that’s why he killed Hipolyte?”

  “I ain’t said that. I ain’t said that at all. You ax me what Hipolyte done to me.”

  I looked out at the trailers behind the parking lot.

  “Is somebody bothering you now, Dorothea?” I said. “Does anybody try to make you do something you don’t want to?”

  “Gros Mama’s good to me.”

  “Does she make you do something you don’t want to?”

  “I wait the table, I pass the mop on the floor ’fore I go home. She don’t let no mens bother me. She pass for me in the morning, carry me to work, tell me not be worrying all the time ’bout Tee Beau, he gonna be all right, he coming back one day. Gros Mama know.”

  “How does she know that?”

  “She a traiteur. She got power. That’s why Hipolyte scared of her. He got the gris-gris. That man you looking for, Jimmie Lee Boggs? You ain’t got to worry about him, no. He got a gris-gris, too. He gonna die, that one.”

  “Wait a minute, Dorothea. You knew Boggs?”

  “I seen him with Hipolyte, back yonder by that trailer. Right there. Gros Mama say they both got the gris-gris, they carry it in them just like a worm. Suh?”

  “What?”

  “Suh?”

  “What is it? And you really don’t need to call me sir.”

  “I wants to ax you something.” She looked at me full in the face for the first time. Her lipstick was on crooked. “You ain’t lying? You can really he’p Tee Beau?”

  “I can try. If he’ll let me. Do you know where he is, Dorothea?”

  “Gros Mama want me back inside now. Friday a real busy day.”

  “If you talk to Tee Beau, tell him I said thank you.”

  “I got to be going now.”

  “Wait a minute. I have an umbrella,” I said.

  I popped it open in the rain and walked her to the entrance of the juke joint. Then she walked hurriedly past the men staring at her from the bar, toward her station by the dance floor.

  I had promised to take Alafair to the open-air restaurant at Cypremort Point for bluepoint crabs, a weekly ritual whose aftermath made the waitresses cringe: Alafair, in a white bib with a big red crawfish on it, went about disassembling the crabs with wood mallet and nutcrackers and such clumsy intensity that the plank table had to be washed down later with a hose. I tried never to disappoint her, or see her hurt any more than she had already been hurt by the drowning of her real mother in the crashed plane, and the death of Annie, my second wife. But since I had been shot by Jimmie Lee Boggs, I had become an ineffectual caretaker in my own home rather than a parent, and I had no idea when I would put everything back in the proper box and see the worry and uncertainty go out of Alafair’s eyes. And I knew absolutely that that moment would not come of its own accord.

  So I drove down to a café on the blacktop, called the house, and asked Clarise, my mulatto housekeeper and baby-sitter, to give Alafair her supper and to stay with her until I got home. I talked with Alafair and told her I would take her out for ice cream later and we would go to Cypremort Point for crabs the next night. I sat at the counter and ate a plate of red beans, rice, and breaded pork chops, and drank coffee until over an hour had passed. Then I headed back to the juke joint.

  It had stopped raining now, and the air was clear and cool, the sky dark except for a lighted band of purple clouds low on the western horizon. I drove through the parking lot to the back of the building, the flattened beer cans and wet oyster shells crunching under my tires, and through the big fan humming in the back wall I could hear the zydeco band pounding it out:

  “Mo mange bien, mo bois bon vin,

  Ça pas coute moi à rien.

  Ma fille aime gumbo filé

  Mo l’aime ma fille aussi.”

  I parked by one of the trailers and walked up on the wood steps. Back under a solitary spreading oak tree was the pickup truck I had seen earlier: only one man was in the cab now. The trailer was made out of tin and had been covered with thick layers of green paint. Curtains were pulled across the windows, but a light was on inside. The inner door was closed and the screen was latched. I tapped on the screen with my knuckles and looked back over my shoulder at the man in the truck. He looked away from me.

  “Sheriff’s department,” I said, and tapped again.

  There was no answer, but I heard movement inside.

  “Open up,” I said.

  Still no answer. I grasped the handle to the screen door firmly and jerked the latch out of the jamb, then opened the inner door, which was unlocked, and stepped into the trailer.

  The musky, thick odor of marijuana struck at my face like a fist. The woman whom I
had seen at the trailer door earlier lay on a narrow bed in a pink bra and pink panties, her head reclining on a pillow, one arm propped casually behind her head, her free hand holding a joint over an ashtray on a small nightstand. She put the joint to her lips, looked me straight in the face, and took a long, deep hit, ventilating the edges of the paper, until the ash was a bright red coal in the gloom of the trailer.

  But the dark-skinned man in denims and work boots, his straw hat clenched against his thigh, his belt buckle still hanging down over his fly, was obviously terrified. His eyes were riveted on the badge in my palm.

  “It’s not a bust, partner. Rest easy,” I said.

  He continued to stare wide-eyed at me. His hands were square with calluses, his fingernails half-mooned with dirt.

  “Do you speak English?” I said. Then to the woman, “Does your friend speak English?”

  “You do it the same way in Mexican or English, honey,” she said.

  “It’s time for you to take off, partner,” I said.

  But he didn’t understand. I folded up my badge and slipped it in my back pocket.

  “You can go now. We don’t need you for anything. There’s no problem. No problema. Your friend is waiting for you,” I said.

  I took him gently by the arm and opened the door for him.

  “Adiós,” I said.

  This time he realized what he was being offered and he was gone into the darkness like a shot. I closed the door behind him.

  “You’re a very cool lady,” I said.

  She took a slow, easy hit on the reefer and let the smoke curl out of her mouth into her nose.

  “I guess I just don’t scare you too much,” I said.

  She flexed herself on the bed and drew one knee up before her. Her toenails were painted red.

  “You gonna do what you gonna do, ain’t you?” she said.

  “Possession can be serious stuff in Louisiana.”

  “Honey, if you was interested in ’resting me, you wouldn’t be tapping on no do’.”

  “You’re pretty hip, too.”

  “Why don’t you tell me what you want, sweetheart? Somebody tole you the black berry got the sweet juice?”

  “Was Hipolyte Broussard your pimp?”

  “That’s a bad word. Like it mean I doing something I ain’t suppose to.”

  I turned a straight-backed chair around backward and straddled it.

  “Let’s understand something,” I said. “I don’t care what y’all do here. I’m after a white man named Jimmie Lee Boggs. I’ll do just about anything to find him. I feel that way about him because he shot me. Are we communicating here?”

  She smiled lazily in the smoke.

  “So you the one?” she said.

  “That’s right. And let’s get rid of this distraction, too.” I took the roach out of her fingers and mashed it out in the ashtray. “Did you know Boggs?”

  “I seen him.”

  “Where?”

  “He come see Hipolyte.”

  “Why?”

  “Where you been, honey? You ever see black folks who ain’t got to give part their money to white folks? You ain’t dumb. You just pretend, you. I think you just here to see me.” She smiled again and stretched both her arms over her head.

  “Did Boggs come see Gros Mama Goula?”

  “That white trash mess with Gros Mama, snakes be crawling out his grave.”

  I heard the screen open on the spring; then the inside door raked back on the buckled linoleum floor, and the black woman in the purple dress with the scrolled blue tattoos on the tops of her breasts stood in the doorway, one hand on her hip, a flowered kerchief curled in her fingers.

  “You taking up too much of people’s time,” she said. “You got jelly roll on your mind, or you think bothering my womens gonna clean that man outta your head?”

  “What?” I said.

  She told the woman on the bed to dress and get up to the juke and help wait tables. She picked up the ashtray with the roach in it and threw it outside into the darkness.

  “Wait a minute, what did you say?” I said.

  She ignored me.

  “And tell that drunk nigger giving Al trouble when I be back up there his skinny ass better be gone,” she said to the other woman, who buttoned her jeans, pulled on her blouse, and went out the door.

  Gros Mama Goula’s face was big and hard-boned, like a man’s, her eyes deep-set and dark, so that they had a cavernous quality under the broad forehead and thick brows. I had heard stories about her from other Negroes, the juju woman who could blow the fire out of a burn; stop bleeding by pressing her palm against a wound; charm worms out of a child’s stomach; cause a witch to invade the marriage bed, straddle the husband, and fornicate with him until his eyes crossed and he would remain forever discontent with his wife.

  “What did you say?” I repeated.

  “Po-licemens after jelly roll just like everybody else. You want it, you come ax me first, don’t be bothering my womens. That ain’t what on your mind, though. You got Jimmie Lee Boggs crawling round in your head. Jelly roll ain’t gonna get him out you. He lying there, waiting.”

  “Is this supposed to impress me?”

  She opened a cabinet over the stove, took out a jelly glass and a pint bottle of rum, poured herself three fingers, sat down at a small breakfast table, and lit a cigarette. She drank down the rum, inhaled from the cigarette, blew smoke out over her hand, and studied her knuckles as though I were not there.

  “What you want?” she said.

  “For openers take a break on the traiteur routine.”

  “What you mean?”

  “You talked with Dorothea. You knew I was looking for Boggs. You’d seen my picture in the newspaper, or you figured out I was one of the men he shot.”

  “Think what you want. I ain’t got the problem.”

  “What I think is you’re operating a place of prostitution.”

  She smoked and flicked her ashes and waited for me to go on.

  “I don’t bother you?” I said.

  “You want to carry me up to the jail, that’s your bidness. They’s people pay my bond make sure I stay open.”

  “Was Jimmie Lee Boggs cutting into Hipolyte’s and your action?”

  “Darlin’, they ain’t nobody cutting into my action.”

  “I don’t believe you, Gros Mama. There’s not a hot-pillow house in South Louisiana that doesn’t have to piece off its action to New Orleans.”

  She poured rum into her glass again, then as an afterthought looked at me and pointed her finger at the bottle.

  “No thanks,” I said.

  She screwed the top slowly onto the bottle.

  “Lookie here,” she said. “You don’t care ’bout them dagos in New Orleans, ’bout what some niggers be doing down here on Saturday night. You want that man ’cause he hurt you, ’cause he walking round in your sleep at night. You wake up tired in the morning, cain’t open and close your hands on the side the bed. You dragging a big chain all day long. Food don’t taste no good, womens just something for other mens. You can tell the whole round world I lying, but me and you knows better.”

  I stared at her woodenly. She continued to smoke idly.

  “I ain’t seen him since they ’rested him for killing that man with the ball bat,” she said. “He in New Orleans, though.”

  “How do you know?”

  “He gonna die over there. In a black room, with lightning jumping all over it. Don’t mess with it, darlin’. Come down see Gros Mama when you wake up with that bad feeling. She make you right,” she said, and squared her shoulders so that the tattoos on her breasts stretched like a spiderweb.

  Chapter 3

  The next morning Alafair and I raked and burned leaves under the pecan trees in my front yard. It was a perfect blue-gold autumn day, and the smoke from the fire hung in the spangled sunlight and drifted out across the bayou into the cypress trees. A little over two years earlier my wife, Annie, and I had been seinin
g for shrimp just the other side of Marsh Island when we saw a twin-engine plane trailing a column of thick black smoke across the sky. It pancaked into a trough, dipped one wing into a wave, and cartwheeled like a child’s stick toy across the water. While Annie called the Coast Guard on the emergency channel, I went over the side with an air tank and weight belt and swam down into the greenish-yellow light to the plane, which had come to rest upside down in a trench. Through the window, among the drowned bodies undulating in their seats, I saw Alafair kicking her legs and fighting to keep her head afloat inside a wobbling envelope of trapped air. Her small mouth looked like a guppy’s above the waterline.

  Later, Annie and I would find the bruise marks on her legs where her mother had held her up in the air pocket while she herself lost her life.

  I gave Alafair my mother’s name, and after Annie’s death I legally adopted her. But even now I still knew little of the Central American world which she had fled, except that memories of it had given her nightmares for a long time and she thought of manual labor almost as play. She loved to work in the yard with me. She held the rake handle midway down and scoured the ground bare with the tines, her elastic-waisted jeans grimed at the knees, her face hot and bright with her work. She wore her yellow T-shirt with a smiling purple whale and the words “Baby Orca” embossed on it, but it was too small for her now and her arms looked fat and round in the sleeves.

  It was too good a day to dwell on Jimmie Lee Boggs and Gros Mama Goula and a lot of mojo claptrap, so Alafair and I took the jugboat and headed out Southwest Pass onto the salt. It was called a jugboat because it had been used by a marine seismograph company to lay out and recover the long rubber-coated cables and instruments, or “jugs,” that recorded the vibrations off the substrata after an explosion was detonated in the drill hole. It was narrow and long, built for speed, with a low draft, a big Chrysler engine, two screws, and the windowed pilot’s cab flush on the stern. I had outfitted it with gear boxes, ice bins, a small galley, a bait well, winches for my trawling nets, iron rod-and-reel sockets for trolling. In the middle of the deck I bolted down a telephone-company spool table, with a collapsible Cinzano umbrella set in the center hole.