DR04 - A Morning for Flamingos

  Then for no reason that will ever make sense, somebody pulls the pin on a fragmentation grenade, releases the spoon, and rolls it inside a hooch. The explosion blows straw out of the bottom of the walls, lights the doorway in a rectangle of flame, sends a solitary kettle toppling end over end through the clearing. For a moment we can see the shapes of people inside, large ones and small ones, but they've given it up, resigned themselves to this chance ending at the hands of an angry or fearful or bored boy from South Carolina or Texas, and their silhouettes settle onto the burning straw pallet like shadows flattening into the earth.

  But the flames that crack through the sides of the hooch and lick up to the roof do not burn naturally. Instead, it is as though a high wind has struck the fire, fanned it into a vortex that burns with the clean, pure intensity of white gas. Then it becomes as bright and shattering to the eyes as a phosphorous shell exploding, and we wilt back from the heat into the wavering shadows at the edge of the clearing.

  Behind me I hear thin-rimmed wire wheels rolling across the dirt, and I turn and watch Tony push Paul in his wheelchair toward the white brilliance of the fire. Tony's green utilities are sun-faded, caked with salt, streaked with sweat and mud and fecal matter from a rice paddy. He wheels Paul into the burning doorway, and I try to stop them but my feet feel as though they're wired together, and my hand looks like a meaningless, outstretched claw.

  Tony's utilities steam in the heat; then he and Paul both burst into flame like huge candles. The fire has sound now, the roar of wind in a tunnel, the whistle of superheated air cracking through wood, the resinous popping of everything that we are—skin and organ and bone.

  But I am wrong about Tony and Paul. They have not found their denouement in a Vietnamese village. They emerge from the back of the fire and walk side by side into the jungle. Their bodies glow with a cool white brilliance, like a pistol flare's, that is interrupted intermittently by the trunks of trees and tangles of vine as they go deeper into the jungle. The tripping of my heart is the only sound in the clearing.

  Tony leaned forward in the chair next to my bed, his head silhouetted against the early orange sun outside the window. He poked my shoulder with two stiff fingers.

  "Hey, wake up," he said.

  "What?"

  "You're having a real mean one."

  "What?" I was raised up on my elbows now.

  "Do you always wake up with a chain saw in your head? Come on, get out of the rack. We got a lot to do today."

  I sat on the side of the bed in my underwear, my forearms propped on my thighs. I rubbed my face and looked again at Tony, trying to disconnect him from the dream.

  "Did you get crocked last night or something?" he said.

  "No."

  "All right, get dressed and let's eat breakfast."

  "What's going on, Tony?"

  "You're going with me and Paul over to our fishing camp in Mississippi."

  "It's a school day, isn't it?"

  "His school's closed for a couple of days. They've got to tear some asbestos out of the ceilings or something. You want to go or not?"

  "I was going to do some things with Bootsie."

  "Today you put her on hold."

  "I don't think I want to do that."

  "Yeah?"

  "I'm meeting her for lunch, Tony."

  "I owe you, I pay my debts. Are you interested or not?"

  "What are you saying, partner?"

  "Do you have your fifty K in place?"

  "Yes."

  "Where?"

  "Don't worry, I can have it in an hour."

  "So we eat breakfast, then you get it. At ten o'clock we're heading over for my camp. You're going to follow in your truck."

  "This is all a little vague."

  "You wanted the score. I'm giving you the score. It's a onetime offer. Are you in or out? Tell me now."

  "I'm in. When's it going down?"

  "You don't need to know that."

  "Tony, I'm not sure I like being treated like a fish."

  "I don't know when it's going down. That's something I'll find out later. I told you I don't deal with these guys as a rule. But you want the action, so I'm making an exception."

  "Are you mad about something?"

  "No, why?"

  "You sound like you've got a beef."

  "I'd already promised Paul to take him to the camp today. Then last night I got a message at one of my clubs about your deal. So I'm kind of mixing up business with a family trip. Which means I'm breaking one of my own rules, and I don't like that. But I don't go back on my word, either."

  "I'll get dressed and pick up my money."

  "Jess'll drive you."

  "You think I'm going to leave town?" I tried to smile.

  "No offense, Dave, but anyone who does business with me does it in a controlled environment. Anyone." He raised his eyebrows. They looked like grease-pencil lines drawn on his olive skin.

  We ate cereal and toast and drank coffee in the glass-enclosed breakfast room while the Negro houseman helped Paul get dressed. The early sun had grown pale and wispy in the east, and clouds that were as black as oil smoke were forming in a bank over the Gulf.

  "It might be a rough day for a fishing trip," I said.

  "It'll blow over," he said.

  He fiddled with his watchband, tinked his coffee spoon nervously against his saucer, looked out at the darkening line across the southern horizon. Then he said, "You know where Kim might be?"

  "No."

  "The manager at my club said she didn't come into work yesterday and she doesn't answer her phone. She didn't call you?"

  "Why would she call me?"

  "Because she digs you."

  He fluttered his fingers on the tablecloth. "I'd better send a car out to her place," he said. His eyes were narrowed, and they looked out through the glass and roved around the backyard. "Maybe she split. Eventually most of them do. I thought she might be different."

  "Don't worry about her. She's probably all right," I said.

  One of Tony's bodyguards, a black-haired man of about twenty-five, came into the kitchen for coffee. He was barefoot and bare-chested, and his beltless brown slacks hung down low on his flat stomach. He looked at us without speaking, then filled his cup.

  "Put a shirt on when you walk around the house," Tony said.

  The man walked back into the dining room without answering.

  "It's a frigging zoo," Tony said. "I treat people with respect, I pay them decent wages, and they try to wipe their frigging feet on me. You know, I got a cousin runs a lot of action in Panama City. His wife tells him one day he's a drag, he's overweight, he's got bad breath, he's got a putz the size of a Vienna sausage, that the only thing he ever did for her was crush her two feet into the mattress every night. So she dumps him and starts making it with this county judge who's on the pad with the____family in Tampa. Except she and the judge both get juiced out of their minds one night, and both of them get busted while she's blowing the judge in her Porsche behind his nightclub. She gets out of jail in the morning, hung over and trembling and her picture on the front page of the Panama City newspaper, and then she goes home and finds out my cousin had her Porsche towed back to her house, and she thinks maybe something's going right after all, my cousin's going to forgive her and square the sodomy charge with the city. Except she sees the Porsche is sitting flat on its springs because my cousin had a cement truck fill it up with concrete. I ought to take lessons from him."

  He looked again at the sky and at the trees blowing in the yard. He opened his mouth and scratched the tautness of his cheek with his fingernail.

  "What's eating you, Tony?" I said.

  "Nothing."

  "You haven't gotten back into pharmaceuticals, have you?" I smiled at him.

  "I'm cool," he said.

  "You don't have to go into this deal. Let it slide if it doesn't feel right," I said.

  I watched his face. His eyes still roved the backyard. Back out, partner,
I thought.

  "I already committed you for fifty large," he said. "If you don't take it, I have to."

  "I have to call Bootsie."

  "I'll do it for you. While you go for your money with Jess. Nobody needs to know where we're going today, Dave."

  "All right," I said. And there went my opportunity to tip Minos through the phone tap. Then I began to realize what was really on Tony's mind.

  "I guess your little girl misses you," he said.

  "Yes."

  "After today it looks like you'll have everything you need to make your investors happy."

  "I guess I will."

  "To tell you the truth, Dave, I don't think I want to get into distribution over in Southwest Louisiana. There're too many potential problems there, conflicts with the Houston crowd. I don't need it."

  "Suit yourself."

  He didn't answer.

  "I'll brush my teeth, then I'll be ready to go with Jess," I said.

  He nodded and made lines on the tablecloth with his cereal spoon. Through the glass the southern sky was as dark as gunmetal, and white veins of lightning pulsated and trembled in the clouds.

  I brushed my teeth, rinsed my mouth, and spit into the lavatory. Too bad, Tony, I thought. I didn't know you were a closet Rotarian.

  I had seen his kind before. They come into AA and unload some terrible moral guilt, or perhaps the whole travesty of their lives: then they begin to feel better. The ego begins to reassert itself, the tongue licks across the lips for maybe another try at the dirty boogie, and they decide to deep-six the people who've witnessed their moment of weakness and need.

  So I had become Tony's disposable confessor. Wrong way to think, Tony, I thought. You commit the crime, you do the time. One way or another, you do the time.

  Jess drove me to the bus depot, where I picked up the fifty thousand dollars the DEA had put in a locker for me. For a moment I thought I was going to lose Jess so I could phone Minos.

  "I've had a knot in my bowels for two days," he said, gripping his belt buckle with his fist and frowning with his whole face.

  "Go use the men's room and I'll get a cup of coffee. We've got time."

  He thought about it and bent his knees slightly as though he were breaking wind.

  "No, there's piss all over the toilet seats. I'll wait," he said. "Besides, Tony's acting weird again. When Tony gets weird, he needs somebody around him."

  "Weird about what?"

  "Late last night he says to me, 'It's all ending, it's all ending.' I say, 'What the fuck does that mean, Tony?'" Two Catholic nuns in black habits walked past us. "He wouldn't answer me. He just walks off and stands in the middle of the dark tennis court like a statue. He stood out there half an hour."

  Back at the house Jess and one of the gatemen began loading fishing rods, food, and camping gear into the Lincoln and the Cadillac. A soft rain clicked on the trees in the yard. I told Tony I was going into my bedroom to pack an overnight bag; then I locked my bathroom door, took down my khakis, and taped the miniaturized recorder inside my thigh. I could activate it by simply dropping my hand and appearing to scratch my leg.

  What an absurdity, I thought: I had invested all this energy and effort in nailing a man who had nothing to do with my life, who had never harmed me, who lived on the raw edges of narcotic madness. The story about Tony that Jess had told me in the bus depot was no mystery. Psychologists sometimes call it a world destruction fantasy. The recovering addict and drunk are suddenly cut off from their source: they have no fire escape, and the building is burning down. They wake in the middle of the night with a nameless terror and drag it with them like a gargoyle on a chain into their waking hours. Sometimes they can't breathe; then-hearts race, blood veins dilate in the brain, a pressure band forms on one side of the head as though someone were tightening a machinist's vise into the bone. The only image that will adequately describe the fear is right out of the Revelation of Saint John the Divine: The beast is climbing up out of the sea, and the edges of the sky are blackening like an enormous sheet of dry paper held against a flame.

  Psychologists will say that this is a reenactment of the birth experience. But the words bring no solace, no more than they can to the infant who, just delivered from the womb, waits for the slap of life.

  In the meantime, while I was planning to weld the cell door shut on a driven creature like Tony Cardo, I had done little to keep my promise to Tante Lemon and Dorothea to prevent Tee Beau Latiolais from eventually being electrocuted at Angola. And while Tee Beau was twisting in the wind, trying to hide behind a pair of dark glasses in a pizza joint on the corner of St. Charles and Canal, the center of downtown New Orleans, a psychopath like Jimmie Lee Boggs was able to run around painting brain matter on walls in three states.

  I tucked in my flannel shirt, buttoned my khakis, buckled my belt, and looked into the mirror. One way or another, it's show time, I thought, and carried my overnight bag and the briefcase with the fifty thousand out to the driveway just as Tony was latching the safety belt across Paul in the front seat of the Lincoln. Paul grinned happily at me from under a blue fishing cap with a white anchor stitched on it.

  "Dad's going to take us out in the boat after it stops raining," he said.

  "Yeah, they school up in this weather. They'll be in close to shore, too," Tony said. "Dave, keep between us and the Caddy."

  "I won't get lost."

  "You might. We're going to take Interstate Ten instead of the back road. Stay in my rearview mirror, okay?"

  "You got it," I said.

  So I lost all hope of contacting Minos, and I was on my own. We bounced out the front gate in a caravan. The rain was moving across Lake Pontchartrain in a gray sheet, and the yellowed palm fronds on the esplanade clattered and stiffened in the wind.

  The fishing camp was on the lower portion of the Pearl River basin, not far from the Gulf. It was built of unpainted cypress, with a rusty tin roof, and was set back on a sandy bluff above the river, so that the screened-in gallery had to be supported by stilts. The camp was surrounded by live oaks, and the tops of the willows on the bank grew to eye level on the gallery. It was still raining, and the wind off the Gulf blew a fine mist out of the trees into the screens.

  But it was snug and warm inside the cabin, paneled with knotty pine, the floors covered with bright yellow linoleum, the kitchen outfitted with a butane stove, a microwave, and a double-door refrigerator. On the back porch, which gave onto the access road, was a freezer filled with frozen ducks, rib-eye steaks, and gallons of ice cream.

  Tony and Paul sat at the kitchen table, tying leaders and huge lead weights and balsa wood bobbers to the saltwater rods and reels. In the front room, Jess and the four bodyguards who had followed in the Cadillac played bourré and drank canned beer at a plank table. They were a strange lot to watch, a juxtaposed contrast of the generational changes that had taken place inside the mob.

  Jess Ornella was what mob people used to call a soldier. He was built like a hod carrier and looked dumb as dirt and probably was. Tony said that Jess had been in trouble all his life—with the nuns and brothers, truant officers, cops, social workers, probation officers, landlords, jailers, the draft board, bill collectors, wives, and prison psychiatrists (one had recommended that he be lobotomized). He had done time in the Orleans Parish jail for writing bad checks, committing bigamy, and setting fire to a restaurant for refusing him service. In Angola he had been a "big stripe," a name given to those who were considered dangerous or incorrigible, and who usually stayed in lockdown in the Block. He always gave me the feeling that he could destroy a house simply by running back and forth through its walls.

  But the others came from a different mold: young and lithe, tanned year-round, they wore gold chains and religious medallions and thick identification bracelets, and had a hungry look in their eyes. You knew they wanted something, but you weren't sure what it was, in the same way that you stare into a zoo animal's eyes and see an atavistic instinct there that makes you
step back involuntarily. They constantly touched the flatness of their stomach, the boxed hairline on their neck, the gold watchband on their wrist; they made cigarette smoking a stylized art form. They seldom smiled, except with women who were new to them, and they talked incessantly about money, either about the amount they had made, or were about to make, or that someone else had made. Like women, they dressed for their own sex, but usually their loyalties went no further than a sentimental attitude toward their parents, whom in reality they seldom saw.

  Jess accepted me because Tony had moved me into his house, perhaps just as he would not question Tony's choice of lawn furniture. But the others did not speak to me, other than to reply to a direct question. Jess saw me watching the game with a cup of coffee in my hand.

  "You want to play?" he said, and started to move his chair aside.

  But the men sitting on each side of him remained stationary. One of them had the deck of cards in his upturned palm and a matchstick in his mouth.

  "Cecil just bourréd the pot. Wait till we play it out," he said. His eyes never left the game.

  "That's all right. I lose too much at the track, anyway," I said.

  No one looked up or acknowledged my statement, and I went back into the kitchen and began making a sandwich on the sideboard. Rain dripped out of the oak trees in back, and the dirt yard was flooded with a wet green light.

  "Dad says we're going out on the salt even if it doesn't stop raining," Paul said. "We can put the rods in the sockets and stay in the cabin."

  "Sure, this is good tarpon weather," I said. "On a day like this you bounce the bait through the wake and the tarps will hit it so hard the rod will bend all the way to the gunwale."

  "Are you glad you came, even though it's raining?" Paul said.

  "Sure."

  "Dad says you're probably going to move back home with your little girl."