A Morning for Flamingos (7 page)

“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 smell 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.

“You already talked to the sheriff?” he asked.

“He says it’s between me and you. I’ll be on lend-lease to the Presidential Task Force, but my salary will still come from the department. Evidently everybody thinks this task force is big stuff right now.”

“You’re not impressed?”

“Who cares what I think?”

“Come on, you don’t believe we’re winning the war on drugs?” He was smiling. He had to squint against the yellow orb of sun that shone through the oak limbs overhead.

“The head of the DEA says the contras deal cocaine. Reagan and the Congress give them guns and money. It’s hard to put all that in the same basket and be serious about it,” I said.

He stopped smiling.

“But there’s one difference,” he said. “No matter what those guys in Washington do, we still send the lowlifes up the road and we trash their operation everywhere we can.”

“All right.”

“I’m not making my point very well,, though.”

“Yes, you are. Look, I respect your agency, I appreciate its problems.”

“Respect’s not enough. When you work for the federal government, you have to obey its rules. There’s no area there for negotiation.”

“This whole business was your idea, Minos.”

“It’s a good idea, too. But let’s look at your odometer again. Sometimes you’ve had a way of doing things on your own.”

“Maybe that’s a matter of perception.”

“You remember that guy you busted with a pool cue in Breaux Bridge? They had to use a mop to clean up the blood. And the guy you cut in half through an attic floor in New Orleans? I won’t mention a couple of other incidents.”

“I never dealt the play. You know that.”

“I can see you’ve had a lot of regret about it, too.”

“I’m just not interested in the past anymore.”

“There are some people who aren’t as confident in you as I am.”

“Then let them do it.”

He smiled again.

“That happens to be what I told them,” he said. “It didn’t light up the room with goodwill. But seriously, Dave, we can’t have Wyatt Earp on the payroll.”

“You’re the skipper. If I do something that causes problems for your office, you cut me loose. What’s the big deal?”

“You know, I think you have another potential. Maybe in scholarship. Like reducing the encyclopedia to a simple declarative sentence.”

I set my empty glass on a table. The wafer of sun was low in the sky now, the air cooler, the leaves in the goldfish pond dark and sodden. A neighbor was barbecuing, and smoke drifted over the garden wall into the yard. I leaned forward in the chair, one hand pinched around my wrist.

“I think your concern is misplaced,” I said. “When I got hurt the second time in Vietnam, it was a million-dollar wound. I was out of it. I didn’t have to prove anything, because there was no place to prove it. This one’s different. It’s ongoing, and I don’t know if I’ll measure up. I don’t know if you have the right man.”

I saw his eyes move over my face.

“You’re going to do fine,” he said.

I didn’t answer.

“Like I said, it’s not much more complicated than a simple sting,” he continued. “We take it a step at a time and see where it leads. If it starts to get nasty, we pull you out. That has nothing to do with you. We don’t want any of our people hurt. It’s not worth it. We figure the shitbags all take a fall sooner or later.

“Look, this is the way it’s going to work. We’ve got an apartment for you on Ursulines in the Quarter, and the word’s going to be out on the street that you’re fired and dirty. There are five or six dealers around there you can approach to make a buy. Nothing real big right now, four or five keys, maybe a fifty-thousand-dollar buy. They’re not going to trust you. They’ll jerk you around, give you a lot of bullshit probably, maybe test you in some way. But these are low-level, greedy guys who are also dumb, and they get a hard-on when they see money. You set up the score, we let it go through, then we move up to bigger things.”

“Where’s all this money coming from?”

“It’s confiscated from drug deals. Don’t worry, we’ll get it back. Anyway, once these guys are convinced you’re the real article, you tell them you want to rein-vest your profits. Then we offer them some serious gelt. They don’t want the action, you tell them you can make the score in Houston. Tony Cardo hates the guy who runs the action out of Houston. The word is he screwed Tony’s wife in a bathroom stall at the Castaways in Miami. We’re talking about a real class bunch here. The goal, though, is to get Cardo involved in the deal. He’s a weird fucking guy.”