DR04 - A Morning for Flamingos

  "Under the seat," Baxter said.

  His partner leaned into the car, worked his hand around under the seat, and pulled out the shotgun pistol. He snapped open the breech and removed the two slender .410 shells and dropped them in his pocket.

  "You're under arrest for possession of an illegal firearm, Ornella," Baxter said.

  "You got to have cause to get in the car, Lieutenant," Jess said.

  "You took some law courses up at Angola?" Baxter said.

  "You got to have cause," Jess said.

  Baxter's partner cuffed him and led him over to the curb. Two squad cars, the backup that Baxter had probably called for, turned into the park. Baxter opened the back door of the convertible and told me to step out.

  "It looks like you finally found your element," he said.

  "It must be a dull day, Nate."

  "How do you like working for the greaseballs?"

  "You ought to brush up on your procedure. Probably talk a little bit with your partner. He seems to know what he's doing."

  "No kidding?"

  "Nobody here was serious. Otherwise you might have gotten your hash cooked, Nate."

  "I'm probably just lucky you were along to cool things out," he said, put a filter-tipped cigarette between his teeth at an upward angle, and lit it with a Zippo lighter. He snapped the lighter shut and blew smoke out into the sunlight. Then he said, "I like your threads. They're elegant."

  "Get to it, Nate. You're wasting a lot of people's time."

  "No, I mean it. You're stylish. I remember you when you smelled like an unflushed toilet with booze poured in it." He rubbed his fingers up and down the edge of my coat lapel. Then he touched my tie, put one finger under it, drew it slowly out from my chest and let it drop.

  I looked away at the grassy lake and the way the wind made the light break on the water. The golfers on the other side of the lake had stopped their game and were watching us.

  "You like the pockets in that shirt?" And his two fingers slid down inside the cloth, so that I could feel them against the nipple.

  "Don't do that, Nate."

  "It's got a nice feel to it. It pays to buy a quality shirt."

  I could see the peppery grain of his skin along the edge of his beard, a piece of yellow mucus in the corner of his eye, the pucker in his mouth that almost made a smile. His fingers felt as thick and obscene as sausages inside my pocket.

  I raised my hand and pushed his arm slowly away from me.

  "That's not smart," he said quietly, and reached his hand toward me again.

  I put the flat of my hand against his forearm and moved it away from me as you would press back a slowly yielding spring. He smiled and took a puff off the filter tip of his cigarette, his lips making a soft popping sound.

  "Bust him. Interference with an officer in the performance of his duty," he said to his partner. Then to me, "I'll ask them to process you right into the population so you can eat mainline tonight."

  "Fuck you, Baxter. We'll make bail in two hours," Tony said as a uniformed cop raised him to his feet.

  "It's Friday afternoon, Tony," Baxter said. "Next arraignment is Monday morning."

  "What about the broad?" his partner said.

  "Tell her to take a cab. Tow his car in and tear it apart."

  "Nate, we might be on shaky ground here," the partner said.

  "Not with this bunch," Baxter said.

  A few minutes later I sat handcuffed next to Tony behind the wire-mesh screen of a squad car. Through the window I could see Kim walking hurriedly out of the park toward the avenue, her face as white as bone.

  Tony, Jess, and I were put in a holding cell a short distance from the drunk tank. Because it was a holding cell, it had no toilet or running water and contained only an iron bench that was bolted to one wall. The bars of the door had been repainted so many times that the layers of white paint formed a shell around the metal. The walls were grimed with handprints and scuff marks from people's shoes, covered with scratched drawings of genitalia and names that had been scorched into the paint with butane cigarette lighters. The heat was turned up and the cell was hot. Someone in the drunk tank began screaming and was taken out by two uniformed cops.

  Tony paced up and down, took off his rust-colored sports shirt, then worked his T-shirt over his head and used it to wipe his skin.

  "What's the drill with this guy? Somebody tell me what the fucking drill is," he said.

  "It's Baxter. He's a bad cop. He can't make his case, so he finds something he can do," I said.

  "We ain't sitting in this shithole three days. That's out," he said.

  "Your lawyer had better know a judge, then."

  "You got it," Tony said.

  "I got to use the toilet," Jess said.

  "Hey, you hear that?" Tony shouted through the bars. "We got a man in here needs to use the toilet."

  His olive skin glistened with perspiration, and he kept biting his lower lip. By the time we were booked and moved up to the general population, on the second floor, his hands trembled and he couldn't drink enough water. I sat next to him on the edge of an iron bunk that hung from wall chains. His back was running with sweat now. He leaned forward on his thighs and ran his hand through his wet hair.

  "Lockup is at eight o'clock," I said. "Let's go down to the shower."

  "I'm cool," he answered.

  "You'll feel better after a shower."

  "Don't worry about me. I'm solid, man." He gripped the edge of the bunk and shuddered as though he had malaria. "Did anybody make you?"

  "I don't think so. I've been out of New Orleans too long now."

  "Anybody make you, get in your face, tell them we're tight."

  "All right, Tony."

  "There's guys in here who'll do an ex-cop, Dave. That's not a shuck."

  "I think you just figured out Nate Baxter."

  "Yeah, well, I'm going to square it with that cat. The word is he's getting freebies from French Quarter street whores. I know one who's got AIDS. I'm going to fix it so she gets in the sack with him."

  Then he bent over and squeezed his palm across the back of his neck and said, "Oh man, the tiger's got me."

  I stood him up and walked him by the arm down to the shower. Inmates lounging in the open doors of their cells or sitting on the big water pipe against the corridor wall looked at him with the curiosity and reverence of their kind—prisoners in a parish or city jail—when they were in the actual proximity of a mainline con or Mafia don. Some rose to their feet, offered to help, made an extravagant show of sympathy.

  "He just got hold of some bad food," I said.

  "Yeah, it's rotten, Tony," one man said.

  "A roach crawled out of the grits one time, man. That's no shit," another said.

  "We got a stinger and some canned goods. You're welcome to it, Tony," a third said.

  Tony stood naked under the shower with his hands propped against the tiles. The water boiled his scalp white and sluiced over his olive skin and the knotted muscles in his back. In one pale buttock was a puckered red scar just above the colon. He held his face into the rush of hot water and opened and closed his small mouth like a guppy. When he turned off the faucets he breathed deeply through his nose, as though he were inhaling the morning air, and wiped his face slick with his palm.

  "That's a little better," he said.

  Two men farther down the shower were staring at his phallus.

  "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 sai
d.

  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 street car 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 looked 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 streaming 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 exp
lode, 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."