DR04 - A Morning for Flamingos

  "All right."

  "Your face looks a little cloudy."

  "I don't trust Fontenot. I don't know that you should, either."

  "Serious charge. What'd he do?"

  "He's an addict and he looks after his own butt."

  "They all do."

  "Thanks for having us out."

  "Wait a minute, don't run off. I heard you were in 'Nam."

  "Ten months, before it got real hot."

  "Those scars on your thigh, you got hit?"

  "A bouncing Betty on a trail. It was a dumb place to be at night."

  "Sit down a second. Come on, you're not in that big a hurry. Then you got to go back to the States?"

  "Sure. A million-dollar wound."

  "In the corps, unless you get the big one, you got to earn two Hearts before you skate."

  "You were hit?"

  "Right in the butt. A zip up in a tree, maybe three hundred yards out."

  I looked at my watch. I didn't want to talk more about the war, but it was obvious that he did. His eyes wandered over my face, as though he were searching for a piece of knowledge there that had eluded him in his own life. Then because I had to say something, I asked him a question that produced a strange consequence.

  "What was your outfit?"

  "Third Battalion, Seventh Regiment, First Marine Division," he said, and smiled.

  "Oh yeah, you guys were around Chu Lai."

  The skin of his face tightened.

  "How do you know that?" he said.

  "I was there," I said, confused.

  "You were in Chu Lai?" The skin around his eyes and nostrils was white.

  "No, I mean I was in Vietnam. I knew some Marines who were around Chu Lai, that's all."

  "Who were these guys?"

  "I don't even remember their names, Tony."

  "I just wondered."

  "Are you all right, partner?"

  He widened his eyes and breathed air up through his nose.

  "It was a fucking meat grinder, man," he said.

  "Maybe it's time to give it the deep six."

  "What?"

  "We didn't ask to get sent over there. A time comes when we stop dragging the monsters around."

  "You saying I did something over there?"

  "If you didn't, you saw it done."

  He looked at me a long moment, his mouth a tight line.

  "You're an unusual man," he said.

  "I don't think so."

  "One day just kick the door shut on Shitsville?"

  "You already lived it. Why watch the replay the rest of your life?"

  "Some guys say the war's never over."

  "It is for me."

  "No dreams?"

  I didn't answer.

  "That's what I thought," he said. His body was deep in a leather chair. He smiled crookedly at me.

  But my strange afternoon at Tony C.'s was not over. When Clete and I walked out to my truck, I noticed that my wallet was gone. I looked in the guest cottage and out by the pool, then realized that it had probably fallen out of my pocket when I was sitting in the library. The black man let me in the side of the house again. This time the sliding door of the library that gave onto the sun porch was open, and I saw Tony dressing a little boy in the wheelchair surrounded by a litter of toys. He did not see me, not at first. The little boy might have been seven or eight. His face was handsome and bright, but his head rested on his shoulders as though he had no neck, his legs were too short for his truncated body, and his back was deformed terribly. His hair was brown and wet, and Tony Cardo parted and combed it and leaned over and kissed him on the brow. Then his eyes glanced up into my face.

  "I'm sorry. I dropped my wallet in the chair," I said.

  He walked to the door and slid it shut.

  That night it rained. It ran off the roof, the gutters, the balconies, clattered on the palm fronds and banana trees, spun like a vortex of wet light inside the courtyard. Lightning cracked across the sky and rattled the windows, and I slept with a pillow crimped across my head. I did not hear the lock pick in the door nor the handle turn when the bolt clicked free of the jamb. Instead, I felt a drop in the room's temperature, and smelled leaves and rain. I raised up on one elbow and looked into the face of Tony Cardo, who leaned forward on a straight-backed chair by the side of my bed. One of his gatemen stood behind him, dripping water on the floor.

  "How scared you ever been?" he said. His narrow, elongated face looked white in the glow of the electric light that shone through the window from the courtyard.

  "What?" My hand went toward the drawer of the nightstand.

  "No," he said, took my wrist, and pushed my arm back on the bed.

  "What are you—"

  "How scared you ever been?" he repeated. His eyes were absolutely black and glazed with light, as though they had no pupils.

  I was sitting straight up now. The front door was halfway open, and leaves and mist were blowing inside the living room.

  "Listen, Tony—"

  "It was after you got hit, wasn't it? When you had to lie in the dark by yourself and think about it."

  I couldn't smell alcohol on him. Then I looked again at his eyes, the lidless intensity, the heat that was like a match burning inside of black glass.

  "Admit it," he said.

  "I was scared every minute I was over there. Who cares? You're speeding, Tony."

  Then I saw him raise the revolver from between his tights.

  "You know how you overcome it?" he said.

  I looked at the gateman. His face was empty of expression, beaded with raindrops.

  "You confront the dragon," Tony said.

  "Ease up, partner. This isn't your style."

  "What the fuck you know about my style?"

  "I didn't do it to you. I don't have anything to do with your life. You're taking it to the wrong guy."

  "You're the right guy. You know you're the right guy."

  "Everybody was afraid over there. It's just human. What's the matter with you?"

  "You buy that? I say fuck you. You stare it in the face. Can you stare it in the face?"

  His mouth looked purple in the glow from the window. His ears were like tiny white cauliflowers pressed against his scalp.

  "I think you're loaded, Tony. I think we're talking black beauties here. I'm not going to help you with this bullshit. Go fuck yourself."

  I could see his thin nostrils quiver as he breathed. He rested the revolver on the top of his right thigh. Then he said, "This is how you do it, my man."

  He flipped out the cylinder from the frame and ejected six .38 cartridges into his palm. He clinked them all into his coat pocket except one. He fitted it into a chamber and snapped the cylinder back into place.

  "Tony, pull the plug on this before it goes any further. It's not worth it," I said.

  He set the hammer on half cock, spun the cylinder twice, then brought the hammer all the way back with his thumb and fitted the barrel's opening under his chin. The skin of his face became as stiff and gray as cardboard, his eyes focused on a distant thought somewhere behind my ear. Then he pulled the trigger.

  "Jesus Christ, Tony," I heard the gateman say, his breath rushing out of his chest.

  Tony put an unlit cigarette in his mouth, opened the cylinder again, and fitted the five rounds from his pocket back into the chambers.

  "It wasn't even close, two chambers away from the firing pin," he said. "Don't ever let me see pity in your face when you look at me and my little boy again."

  A solitary drop of water fell out of his hair and spotted the unlit cigarette in his mouth.

  * * *

  CHAPTER 7

  The next morning the streets in the Quarter were thick with mist, and I could hear the foghorns of tugs and oil barges out on the river. I had coffee and beignets at a table inside the Café du Monde; then the sun broke out of the clouds and Jackson Square looked bright and wet and green after the night's rain. I walked over to Ray Fontenot's T-shirt sh
op on Bourbon and found him practicing his trombone in a small weed-grown, rubble-strewn courtyard in back. He wore a purple turtleneck sweater, gray slacks, and shades, even though there was little sunlight in the enclosure. He was not a gelatinous man. The rings of fat across his stomach looked hard, the kind your fist would do little harm to.

  My conversation with him did not go well.

  "So we're agreed on everything," he said. "You'll bring your boat over from Morgan City, and we'll take a little tarpon-fishing trip out on the salt. By the way, what's your boat doing in Morgan City if you live in New Iberia?"

  "I just had the engine overhauled."

  "That's good. And you'll have all the money?"

  "That's right."

  "Because we want lots of product for all the little boys and girls. It's what keeps everybody's genitalia humming. Like little nests of bees."

  "Day after tomorrow, two a.m. at Cocodrie. Dress warm. It'll be cold out there," I said, and started to leave.

  "Thank you, kind sir. But there's one change."

  He drained the spittle out of his trombone slide onto the weeds at his feet.

  "What's that?" I said.

  "Your friend Purcel is not going with us."

  "He's my business partner. He's in."

  "Not on this trip."

  "Why not?"

  "He hasn't quite learned how to behave. Besides, we don't need him."

  "Listen, Fontenot, if Clete gave you a bad time over Tony's phone number, that's a personal beef you work out on your own. This is business."

  "He no play-a, he no go-a."

  "What does Tony say?"

  "I make the deals for Tony, I make the terms. When you talk to me, it's just like you're talking to Tony."

  "You mind if I make a call?"

  "I wouldn't have it any other way, good sir." He took off his sunglasses and smiled. His eyes were flat and dead and looked as if they belonged in another face.

  I used the telephone in Fontenot's office. I could hear him blowing into his trombone.

  "Hey, good morning. How you doing today?" Tony Cardo said.

  "I'm fine."

  "Sure?"

  "I'm just fine, Tony."

  "You don't have a hard-on about last night?"

  "You've got your own point of view about things. I don't want to intrude upon it."

  "I got strong emotions. About family stuff. I get a little weird sometimes. You got to bear with me."

  "I respect your feelings, Tony."

  "You don't rattle, do you?"

  "Morning and night, podna. I've got a problem here. Ray doesn't want my friend along on the tarpon trip."

  "That's too bad."

  "I think my friend should be able to go."

  "I can't interfere, Dave. It's Ray's call."

  "He's got his nose bent out of joint over a personal affront. It's not the way a pro does things."

  "Indulge the man."

  "He's a fat shit, Tony."

  "Hey, catch a big fish for me. And I want you out to dinner this weekend. Bring your buddy, too. I like him."

  He hung up the phone. Ray Fontenot stood in the doorway to the courtyard, his eyes filled with merriment, his tongue thick and pink on his teeth.

  At noon I went to Clete's to pick him up for lunch. We drove in his car to a Fat Albert's off St. Charles and ordered paper plates of red beans and dirty rice with lengths of sausage. It was warm enough to eat outside, and we sat at a green-painted picnic table under a live oak whose roots had lifted up the slabs of sidewalk and cracked the edge of the parking lot. Out on St. Charles I saw the old iron streetcar rattle past the palm trees on the esplanade.

  I told Clete about my conversation that morning with Fontenot. He chewed quietly without speaking, his green eyes thoughtful. I waited for him to say something. He didn't.

  "Anyway, he says you're out, and Cardo backed him up."

  He wiped the juice from his sausage off his mouth with a paper napkin, then sucked on the corner of his lip.

  "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 wit
h 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 match-stick 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."