A Morning for Flamingos (6 page)

“What did you say?” I repeated.

“Po-licemens after jelly roll just like everybody else. You want it, you come ax me first, don’t be bothering my womens. That ain’t what on your mind, though. You got Jimmie Lee Boggs crawling round in your head. Jelly roll ain’t gonna get him out you. He lying there, waiting.”

“Is this supposed to impress me?”

She opened a cabinet over the stove, took out a jelly glass and a pint bottle of rum, poured herself three fingers, sat down at a small breakfast table, and lit a cigarette. She drank down the rum, inhaled from the cigarette, blew smoke out over her hand, and studied her knuckles as though I were not there.

“What you want?” she said.

“For openers take a break on the
traiteur
routine.”

“What you mean?”

“You talked with Dorothea. You knew I was looking for Boggs. You’d seen my picture in the newspaper, or you figured out I was one of the men he shot.”

“Think what you want. I ain’t got the problem.”

“What I think is you’re operating a place of prostitution.”

She smoked and flicked her ashes and waited for me to go on.

“I don’t bother you?” I said.

“You want to carry me up to the jail, that’s your bidness. They’s people pay my bond make sure I stay open.”

“Was Jimmie Lee Boggs cutting into Hipolyte’s and your action?”

“Darlin’, they ain’t nobody cutting into my action.”

“I don’t believe you, Gros Mama. There’s not a hot-pillow house in South Louisiana that doesn’t have to piece off its action to New Orleans.”

She poured rum into her glass again, then as an afterthought looked at me and pointed her finger at the bottle.

“No thanks,” I said.

She screwed the top slowly onto the bottle.

“Lookie here,” she said. “You don’t care ‘bout them dagos in New Orleans, ‘bout what some niggers be doing down here on Saturday night. You want that man ‘cause he hurt you, ‘cause he walking round in your sleep at night. You wake up tired in the morning, cain’t open and close your hands on the side the bed. You dragging a big chain all day long. Food don’t taste no good, women’s just something for other mens. You can tell the whole round world I lying, but me and you knows better.”

I stared at her woodenly. She continued to smoke idly.

“I ain’t seen him since they ‘rested him for killing that man with the ball bat,” she said. “He in New Orleans, though.”

“How do you know?”

“He gonna die over there. In a black room, with lightning jumping all over it. Don’t mess with it, darlin’. Come down see Gros Mama when you wake up with that bad feeling. She make you right,” she said, and squared her shoulders so that the tattoos on her breasts stretched like a spiderweb.

CHAPTER 3

The next morning Alafair and I raked and burned leaves under the pecan trees in my front yard. It was a perfect blue-gold autumn day, and the smoke from the fire hung in the spangled sunlight and drifted out across the bayou into the cypress trees. A little over two years earlier my wife, Annie, and I had been seining for shrimp just the other side of Marsh Island when we saw a twin-engine plane trailing a column of thick black smoke across the sky. It pancaked into a trough, dipped one wing into a wave, and cartwheeled like a child’s stick toy across the water. While Annie called the Coast Guard on the emergency channel, I went over the side with an air tank and weight belt and swam down into the greenish-yellow light to the plane, which had come to rest upside down in a trench. Through the window, among the drowned bodies undulating in their seats, I saw Alafair kicking her legs and fighting to keep her head afloat inside a wobbling envelope of trapped air. Her small mouth looked like a guppy’s above the waterline.

Later, Annie and I would find the bruise marks on her legs where her mother had held her up in the air pocket while she herself lost her life.

I gave Alafair my mother’s name, and after Annie’s death I legally adopted her. But even now I still knew little of the Central American world which she had fled, except that memories of it had given her nightmares for a long time and she thought of manual labor almost as play. She loved to work in the yard with me. She held the rake handle midway down and scoured the ground bare with the tines, her elastic-waisted jeans grimed at the knees, her face hot and bright with her work. She wore her yellow T-shirt with a smiling purple whale and the words “Baby Orca” embossed on it, but it was too small for her now and her arms looked fat and round in the sleeves.

It was too good a day to dwell on Jimmie Lee Boggs and Gros Mama Goula and a lot a mojo claptrap, so Alafair and I took the jugboat and headed out Southwest Pass onto the salt. It was called a jugboat because it had been used by a marine seismograph company to lay out and recover the long rubber-coated cables and instruments, or “jugs,” that recorded the vibrations off the substrata after an explosion was detonated in the drill hole. It was narrow and long, built for speed, with a low draft, a big Chrysler engine, two screws, and the windowed pilot’s cab flush on the stern. I had outfitted it with gear boxes, ice bins, a small galley, a bait well, winches for my trawling nets, iron rod-and-reel sockets for trolling. In the middle of the deck I bolted down a telephone-company spool table, with a collapsible Cinzano umbrella set in the center hole.

The day was warm, the ground swells long and gentle and rolling, so that when they crested the wave broke into a thin froth and blew in the wind. I kept the bow into the wind and idled through the swells while Alafair set the rods into the sockets, spun out the lines behind us so the lures bounced in our wake, clicked on the drags, and threw chum overboard as if she were flinging shot. High up against the blue dome of sky, brown pelicans drifted in formation on the wind stream. Then suddenly their wings would collapse, cock into their sides like fins, and they would plummet with the speed of an aerial bomb into the water and rise from the foam with a menhaden or flying fish dripping from their pouched beak.

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.