A Morning for Flamingos (39 page)

Minos persuaded the DEA to replace the boat I lost south of Cocodrie, and he said that actually the DEA was happy with the work that I had done for them, because Tony was gone and the man who had moved in on his action, one of the Houston crowd, had evidently been having an affair with Tony’s wife. They spent a lot of their time quarreling, even throwing drinks at one another on one occasion, in public places.

But my financial debts are paid off, and I’ve given up law enforcement, at least for the time being. Bootsie and I run our boat-rental and bait business on the bayou. We barbecue chickens and links of sausage for midday fishermen, and we seine for shrimp out on the long green roll of the Gulf. It’s still winter, but we treat winter in South Louisiana as a transitory accident. Even when the skies are black with ducks, the oak and cypress limbs along the bayou teeming with robins, the eye focuses on the tightly wrapped pink buds inside the dark green leaves of the camellia bush, the azaleas and the flaming hibiscus that have bloomed right through the season. South Louisiana is a party, and I’ve grown old enough to put away vain and foolish concerns about mortality, and to stop imposing the false measures of calendars and clocks upon my life, or, for that matter, upon eternity.

Sometimes in the evening, when I’m closing up the bait shop and my shoulder twinges from picking up crates of Jax and Pearl beer, when the wind lifts the moss on the dead cypress in the marsh and blows red embers from a burnt cane field into the darkening sky, I think of juju magic and
gris-gris
charms, I think of Tony and Paul, Kim and Clete, Dorothea, Tee Beau, and Tante Lemon, even ole Jess Ornella, and I have to pause, almost fearfully, at the beating of my heart. Then I see Bootsie and Alafair walk down from the lighted gallery to get me for supper, hand in hand through the pecan trees, and I turn keys in locks and Bootsie and I go back up the path, with Alafair swinging from our arms, our mismatched shadows fused into a single playful shape under the rising moon. H