DR04 - A Morning for Flamingos

  In the middle of a long green trough I saw a greasy slick on the water and smelled the fecund odor of speckled or white trout in a big school. I cut the engine, threw the anchor, and let the jugboat swing back against the tension in the rope. We reeled in our lines and rigged them with heavy teardrop weights, bait hooks, and big corks. Alafair's two-handed cast sent a lead weight and hook singing past my ear.

  The clouds in the west looked like strips of flame above the green horizon when we headed back through the Pass into Vermilion Bay. The ice bin was loaded with gaff-top catfish and speckled trout, gutted and stiff and laid out in cold rows, their mouths hooked open, their eyes black and shiny as glass. Alafair sat on my lap and steered us between the buoys into the channel; when I touched her head with my chin I could feel the sun's heat in her hair.

  "Let's take some to Batist tonight," she said.

  "That's a good idea, little guy."

  She twisted her head around and grinned up at me.

  "Then maybe rent a movie," she said.

  "You got it, Alf."

  "Buy some boudin and fix some Kool-Aid, too."

  "That's actually been on my mind all day."

  "All right, big guy."

  We were happy and tired when we drove down the dirt road under the oaks toward my house on the bayou. Our clothes were flecked with fish blood and membrane, our skin salty and dry from the wind and the sun. It had been a fine day. I was determined that it would remain so, even though I saw Minos Dautrieve's car parked by my gallery and Minos sitting on my front step.

  Alafair rinsed the fish in the sink while Minos and I went out in the backyard and sat at my redwood picnic table under the mimosa tree. The moon was up, and I could see my neighbor's sugarcane in the field.

  "I've got a proposal for you," he said.

  "What's that, Minos?"

  "You know I'm on that Presidential Task Force on Drugs?"

  "Yeah."

  "It's an election year, and everybody wants to stomp the shit out of the drug dealers. Never mind the fact that we've had our budgets cut for years. But that's all right, it's all rock 'n' roll, anyway. We'll cripple up as many lowlifes as we can and let somebody else worry about the rest, right?"

  "Minos—"

  "Okay, take it easy. Have you tried to turn up that black kid?"

  "It's all dead-end stuff. His grandmother and his girlfriend probably know where he is, but they're not saying. I ended up last night talking with a traiteur woman named Big Mama Goula in a hot-pillow joint. That's a long way from Jimmie Lee Boggs."

  "Look, I think your life's been too dull. So I talked with some people on the task force, then I talked with the Iberia sheriff. We want to put you inside the mob."

  "What?"

  "You're the perfect guy."

  "Are you out of your mind?"

  "Hear me out."

  "No. I went back with the sheriff's department to pay off some big debts. I got shot. You think I want to go undercover now?"

  "That's why you're the perfect guy, Dave. It wouldn't be undercover. You resign from the department, we set you up in New Orleans, give you a lot of money to flash around the lowlifes. Then we put out the word with a couple of our snitches that you were encouraged to resign, you're a burnout, maybe you've been on a pad."

  I was shaking my head, but he kept talking.

  "There's a new player in New Orleans we want to nail real bad. His name's Anthony Cardo, also known as Tony C. and Tony the Cutter. No, he's not a shank artist. He's supposed to have a schlong that's a foot and a half long, the Johnny Wad of the Mafia. He grew up across the river in Algiers, but he's got operations in Miami and Fort Lauderdale. In fact, we think he's a linchpin between the dope traffic in South Florida and southern Louisiana."

  "I'm not interested."

  "Look, it'd be a three- or four-week scam. If it doesn't work, we'll mark it off."

  "It won't work."

  "Why not?"

  "They won't buy a cop who just turned in his badge."

  "Yeah, they will. They'll buy you," he said, and tapped his finger at the air.

  "I have a feeling you're about to say something else complimentary."

  "Let's look at your record, fair and square, podna. You were almost fired from the force in New Orleans, you have an alcoholic history, you've been in your own drunk tank, you were up on a murder charge, for God's sakes. All right, it was a frame, and that situation with the New Orleans P.D. was a rotten shake, too, but like I told you when I first met you, it makes socko reading material. How about your old Homicide partner, what's his name?"

  "Cletus Purcel."

  "He didn't have any trouble going to work for the wiseguys, did he? They bought him, toenails to hairline."

  "He's clean now. He owns a club on Decatur."

  "That's right. But he still knows the greaseballs. They come in his place."

  "It's a free country."

  "You've got the conduit into the mob, Dave. They'll buy it."

  "Not interested."

  "It's no more complicated than a simple sting."

  "I told you you're talking to the wrong guy, Minos."

  "There's another factor. We think Jimmie Lee Boggs might be back in New Orleans."

  "Why?"

  "A telephone tap. Last week one of Tony Cardo's people was talking about bringing in a mechanic from Florida to take care of a guy who held back twenty thou on a sale. Then yesterday somebody did this black street dealer with a baseball bat in Louis Armstrong Park. Sound familiar?"

  "Why would he go back to a state where he's already been sentenced to the chair?"

  "It doesn't make any difference where he is. There're warrants on him in three other states, and the FBI's after him as an interstate fugitive. Number two, he'll go where Tony Cardo tells him to go."

  "I'm not up to it. You'll have to get somebody else."

  "That's it, huh?"

  "Yep."

  He looked at me reflectively in the moonlight. I could see his scalp glisten through his thin crew cut.

  "How you feeling?" he said.

  "Fine."

  "You're a good cop, Dave. The best."

  After he was gone, I sat by myself in the yard awhile and tried to put my thoughts into separate envelopes. Then I gave it up and went inside to eat supper with Alafair at the kitchen table.

  So the days went by and I watched the leaves fall and my neighbor harvest his sugarcane, which was now thick and gold and purple in the fields. Each evening I jogged three miles down the dirt road to the drawbridge on the bayou, the air like a cool burn on my skin, and as the sun set over the bare field behind my house I did sit-ups and stomach crunches in my backyard, curled a fifty-pound dumb-bell with my right arm, a ten-pound bar with my left, and sat down weary and glazed with sweat in the damp grass. I could feel my body mending, the muscles tightening and responding in my upper chest and neck the way they had before a bullet had torn through the linkage and collapsed it like a broken spiderweb.

  But to be honest, the real purpose in my physical regimen was to induce as much fatigue in my body as possible. Morpheus' gifts used to come to me in bottles, Beam and black Jack Daniel's, straight up with a frosted schooner of Jax on the side, while I watched the rain pour down in the neon glow outside the window of an all-night bar not far from the Huey Long Bridge. In a half hour I could kick open a furnace door and fling into the flames all the snakes and squeaking bats that lived inside me. Except the next morning they would writhe with new life in the ashes and come back home, stinking and hungry.

  Now I tried to contend with my own unconscious, and the dreams it brought, with a weight set, a pair of Adidas shoes, and running shorts.

  Then one evening, a week after Minos had appeared again, a pickup truck with two cracked front windows, crumpled fenders, and a bumper that hung down like a broken mouth bounced through the depressions in my drive, the tailgate slamming on the chain, the rust-gutted muffler roaring like a stock-car racer. Tante Lemon's head barely
extended above the steering wheel; her chin was pointed upward, her small hands pinched on the wheel, her frosted eyes pinpoints of concern as she tried to maneuver through the trunks of the pecan trees. Dorothea sat next to her, one hand propped against the dashboard.

  "She wanta tell you something," Tante Lemon said.

  "Come in," I said, and I opened the truck door for her.

  "We ain't got to do that," she said.

  "Yeah, you do," I said.

  They both followed me up onto the gallery. I opened the screen door. I wondered how many times Tante Lemon had walked through a white person's front door. Once inside, neither of them would sit until I told them to.

  "What is it?" I said.

  "Ax her," Tante Lemon said.

  I looked at Dorothea. She wore an orange polyester dress and a straw purse on a strap, but her black pumps were scuffed and dusty.

  "Tee Beau say maybe he can find out where that man's at," she said.

  "You talked to him?"

  She looked at her hands in her lap.

  "You got to promise somet'ing, Mr. Dave," she said. "Tee Beau say you a good man. Tante Lemon say your daddy good to her, too. It ain't right if you try to trick Tee Beau, no."

  "What do you mean?"

  "You tole me Tee Beau can call you collect. From a pay phone. But you can find out where he's at that way, cain't you?"

  "You mean trace the call?"

  "That's right. I seen them do that on TV. You gonna do that to Tee Beau, suh?" she said, and looked down at her lap again.

  "If he'll call me, I'll promise not to do that, Dorothea. Look, I can't tell Tee Beau what to do, but isn't it better that he talk to somebody like me, who knows something about his case, who owes him a debt, than let some other cops hunt him down as an escaped killer?"

  "Tee Beau say that man mean all the way through. He tell Tee Beau anybody stop them and Tee Beau open his mouth, he shoot everybody there and he shoot Tee Beau first."

  "Where does he think Boggs is?"

  "He say he keep talking about the Italians, how they owe him a lot of money, how they gonna take care of him, how if Tee Beau smart he stay in New Orleans and sell dope. All the time Tee Beau sitting in back, scared that man gonna find out he ain't killed you in the coulee."

  "Tell him to call me at home. I'll write down my number."

  "He gonna find out where that man at first."

  "No, he shouldn't do that."

  "That little boy got courage," Tante Lemon said. "People ain't never see that in him. All they see is a little throwaway baby in a shoe box, him. Like when he took Mr. Dore car. He ain't stole it. Our track was broke and I didn't have no way to go to the Charity in New Orleans. Me going blind, couldn't see to light my stove in the morning. He come flying round the corner in Mr. Dore car, couldn't even drive, smash right over the church mailbox. Po-licemens come out and put handcuffs on him, shove him in their car with their stick like he's a raccoon. Ain't nobody ever ax why he done it."

  "You tell him I said to stay away from Boggs. That's not his job."

  "That ain't what you said before," Tante Lemon said.

  "I didn't tell him to go looking for Boggs."

  "No suh, you say Tee Beau he'p you find that man, you he'p Tee Beau," Dorothea said. "That's what you tell me at the juke, out there in your car, out there in the rain. When I tell that to Tee Beau I say I don't knows what to think. He say Mr. Dave a white man, but he don't never lie."

  Then both of them looked at me silently in the half-light of my living room. Tante Lemon's frosted turquoise eyes were fixed on me with the lidless glare of a bird's.

  A therapist once told me that everyone has a dream box in his head. He said that sometimes an event provides us with a rusty key to it that we can well do without. Jimmie Lee Boggs had turned all the tumblers in the lock, and I discovered that, like a perverse nocturnal demiurge, he had taken my ten months in Vietnam from me, reactivated every fearful moment I had lived through, and written himself into the script as a player.

  The sun is hot in the sky but I cannot see it through the thick canopy of trees overhead. The light is diffused a yellow-green through the sweating vegetation, as though I am looking at it through water. The trunks of the banyan trees are striped with moisture; the blades of elephant grass, which can leave your skin covered with paper-thin cuts, are beaded with wet pinpoints of light. I lie flat on my chest in the grass, and the air is so humid and superheated I cannot keep the sweat out of my eyes—my forearm only rubs more sweat and dirt into them. I can feel ants crawling inside my shirt and belt, and ahead of me, where the elephant grass slopes down to a coulee, a gray cloud of mosquitoes hovers over a dead log, and a red centipede, as thick as a pencil and six inches long, is wending his way across the humus.

  I can smell the sour odor of mud, stagnant water in the coulee, the foul reek of fear from my own armpits. An eighteen-year-old kid nicknamed Doo-Doo, from West Memphis, Arkansas, lies next to me, his bare chest strung with bandoliers, a green sweat-soaked towel draped from under the back of his pot.

  His ankle is broken, and he keeps looking back at it and the boot that he has worked halfway off his foot. His sock looks like rotted cheesecloth. The whites of his eyes are filled with ruptured blood veins.

  "They got Martinez's blooker. Don't go out there, Lieutenant. They waiting for you in the tree line," he says.

  "They'll hang him up in a tree."

  "He at the bottom of the ditch. You cain't get him out. They waiting for you, Lieutenant. I seen them."

  The rivulets of sweat leaking out of his pot and running down his face and shoulders look like lines of clear plastic against his black skin.

  I crawl on my stomach through the grass with the barrel of the .45 lifted just above the mud. The underside of my body is slick with green-black ooze; my elbows, knees, and boots make sucking sounds with each movement forward. My face is alive with cuts and mosquitoes. Behind me I hear Doo-Doo easing a clip into his rifle.

  The grass thins at the edge of the coulee, and down the incline Martinez lies crucified in a half inch of water, his flak jacket blown off his chest, his face white with concussion, his dented pot twenty yards down from him. He has long eyelashes like a girl's, and they keep fluttering as he looks up at me; his mouth opens and closes as though he's trying to clear his ears.

  The ground on the other side of the coulee is flat and clear for thirty yards back to a line of rubber trees. The sunlight here is bright and hazy, and I shield my eyes with my hand and try to look deep into the shadows of the rubber trees. The air is breathless, the reeds and elephant ears along the bank absolutely still. I drop over the lip of the coulee and slide erect down the embankment with my boot heels dug into the mud.

  Martinez tries to speak, but I see the sucking chest wound now and the torn, wet cloth of his undershirt that flutters in the cavity from the release of air. He sounds like a man strangling in his own saliva.

  I try to lift him on my shoulders and hold one of his arms and legs in front of me, but my knee folds and we both go down in a pool of muddy water that's hotter than the air. Then I see them walk out of the rubber trees against the sun. They look no bigger than children. Their black pajamas stick wetly to their bodies; their faces are skeletal and filled with teeth. One of them squats down and aims Martinez's blooker at me. A man behind him shakes cigarettes out of a pack of Lucky Strikes for his friends. They are all laughing.

  My .45 lies somewhere in the clouded water, my boots are locked in mud. I hear Doo-Doo firing, but it makes no difference at this point. I stare at my executioner, my body painted with the tropical stink of his country, an unformed prayer wheezing like sand from my throat. The short, fat barrel of the grenade launcher recoils upward in his hands with a deep-throated roar, and a moment later I'm caught in an envelope of flame and I feel a pain in my chest like jagged iron twisting its way through tendon and bone.

  Then I am on all fours, like a dog, vomiting blood on my hands, and in the smoke and the sme
ll of burnt powder I stare up the embankment at where the small men in pajamas should be but are not. Instead, Jimmie Lee Boggs takes his package of Lucky Strikes from his blue jeans pocket and lights one. His mannequinlike head is perfectly still as he puffs on his cigarette and lets the smoke drift from his lips. Then he flips the butt in an arc out on the coulee, works his way down the embankment, and finds my .45 in the water.

  He works the receiver and knocks the barrel clean of mud on his jeans. He casually points it behind my ear, lets the iron sight bite into my scalp.

  "You thought the zips were going to get you, but I'm the one can make you cry," he says.

  I woke up with the sheets twisted across my chest, my body hot in the cold square of moonlight that shone through the window. Outside, the pecan trees were black against the sky. I lay awake until dawn, when the light became gray, then pink, in the flooded cypress on the far side of the bayou. Then I tried to sleep again, but it was no use. I helped Batist open up the bait shop, and at eight o'clock I drove to work at the sheriff's office and began processing traffic accident reports, my eyes weak with fatigue.

  That afternoon, four days after Tante Lemon and Dorothea's visit, I drove to Minos Dautrieve's house in Lafayette. He lived in the old part of town on the north side, a neighborhood of Victorian homes, deep lawns, enormous live oak trees, iron tethering posts, gazebos, screened galleries, and cascading leaves. He had grown up in a shotgun farmhouse outside of Abbeville, but I always suspected that inside his cynicism he had a jaded reverence for the ways of late-nineteenth-century southern gentility.

  We sat on cushioned wood lawn chairs in his backyard and drank lemonade amid the golden light and the leaves that scratched across the flagstones, or floated in an old stone well that he had turned into a goldfish pond.