A Morning for Flamingos

by James Lee Burke

  “Listen—”

  “No, you’ve got it wrong. You listen. We’ve worked on this case eight months. You guys come along and think you’re going to wrap up Tony C. in a few weeks. In the meantime you don’t inform us that you’re working undercover, and then you’ve got the balls to grab my snitch.”

  “You coerced her into prostituting herself.”

  He turned his head and looked at me. The neon bar lights made the neatly trimmed edge of his beard glow with a reddish tinge.

  “She was working at Tony C.’s club before she ever came to our attention,” he said. “He probably had to tie a board across his ass to keep from falling inside.”

  I saw Clete walk out of his office in back and begin changing a light bulb over the bandstand. The back of the club was empty.

  “You’re a bad cop, Baxter. But worse, you don’t have any feelings about people,” I said. “There’s a word for that—pathological.”

  “Take somebody else’s inventory, Robicheaux. I’m not interested. Here’s what it comes down to. You fuck up this investigation, you keep getting in my face, causing me problems, I wouldn’t count on the department protecting your cover. Anyway, I’ve had my say. Just stay away from me.”

  He turned back to his drink and ran his tongue along his gums. I opened and closed my hands at my sides.

  “You gonna have something, suh?” the black barman said.

  “No, thank you,” I said.

  I continued to stare at the side of Baxter’s face, the grained skin on the back of his neck. I could hear my breath in my nostrils. Then I turned and walked toward the open front door. My body felt wooden, my arms and legs disjointed. The sun reflecting off a windshield outside was like a sliver of glass in the eye. I stopped, looked back, and saw Baxter go into the rest room by the bandstand.

  When I pushed open the rest room door he was combing his hair in front of the mirror.

  “If you do anything to hurt that girl again, or if you compromise my situation here in New Orleans, I’m going down to your office, in front of people, and give you the worst day in your insignificant life,” I said.

  He turned from the mirror, slipped his leather comb case out of his shirt pocket, blew in it before he replaced the comb; his breath reflected into my face. He used the back of his left hand to push me aside.

  I heard a sound like a Popsicle stick snapping behind my eyes and saw a rush of color in my mind, like amorphous red and black clouds turning in dark water, and as though it had a life of its own my right fist hooked into his face and caught him squarely in the eye socket. His head snapped sideways, and I saw the white imprints of my knuckles on his skin and the watery electric shock in his eye.

  But I had stepped into it. His right hand came out of his coat pocket with a leather-covered blackjack, an old-fashioned one that was shaped like a darning egg, with a spring built into the braided grip. I tried to raise my forearm in front of me, but the blackjack whopped across the top of my left shoulder and I felt the blow sink deep into the bone. The muscles in my chest and side quivered and then seemed to collapse, as if someone had run a heated metal rod through the trajectory of Jimmie Lee Boggs’s ’bullet.

  I was bent forward, my palm pressed hard against the throbbing pain below my collarbone, my eyes watering uncontrollably, the lip of the washbasin a wet presence across my buttocks. The expression in Baxter’s eyes was unmistakable.

  “Just one more for the road,” he said softly.

  But Clete pushed the door back on its springs and stepped into the room like an elephant entering a phone booth. His unblinking eyes went from me to the blackjack; then his huge fist crashed against the side of Baxter’s head. Baxter’s face went out of round, his automatic flew from his shoulder holster, and he tripped sideways over the toilet bowl and fell on top of the trash can in a litter of crumpled paper towels.

  Clete grimaced and shook his hand in the air, then rubbed his knuckles.

  “Are you all right?” he said.

  “I don’t know.”

  “What happened?”

  “He threatened to blow my cover.”

  Clete looked down at Baxter in the corner. Baxter’s eyes were half-closed, his mouth hung open, and one hand twitched on his stomach.

  “You hit him first?” Clete said.

  “Yep.”

  Clete chewed his lip.

  “He’ll use it, then. That’s not good, not good,” he said, and began making clicking sounds with his tongue. He reached down and patted Baxter on the cheek. “Wake-up time, Nate.”

  Baxter widened his eyes, then started to sit up among the wet towels and fell back down again. Clete lifted him by the back of his herringbone jacket and folded him over the rim of the toilet bowl.

  “What are you doing?” I said.

  “Freshen up, Nate. That’s it, my man. Splash a little on your face and it’s a brand-new day,” Clete said.

  He flushed the toilet and pushed Baxter’s head farther down into the bowl.

  “That’s enough, Clete,” I said.

  Someone tried to open the door.

  “This toilet is occupied right now,” Clete said. He lifted Baxter off the bowl and propped him against the wall, then squatted down and blotted his face with paper towels. “Hey, you’re looking all right, Nate. How many fingers am I holding up? Three. Look, three fingers. That’s it, take a deep breath. You’re going to be fine. Look, I’m putting your piece back in your holster. Here’s your sap. Come on, look up at me, now.”

  Clete patted Baxter’s cheek again. The back of Clete’s thick neck was red from the effort of squatting down. His stomach and love handles hung over his belt.

  “Here’s the way I see this deal,” he said. “We write the whole thing off. It was just a bad day at Black Rock, not even worth talking about later. You had a beef, Dave had a beef, it’s over now. Right?”

  Baxter blinked his eyes and flexed his jaw as though he had a toothache. Water dripped out of his beard.

  “Or you could go back to the First District and get into a lot of paperwork,” Clete said. “Or you might want to cause Dave some grief with Tony C. But I don’t think you’re that kind of guy. Because if you were, it’d create some nasty problems for everybody. See, here’s the serious part in all this. There’s a hooker who comes into the bar. I usually don’t let them in because they’re bad for business. But I’ve known this broad since I was in Vice myself, and she’s basically a nice girl and she respects my place and doesn’t come on to the johns while she’s in here. Anyway, she tells a funny story. She says you’re getting freebies in the Quarter, and you made her ex-room-o cop your joint. I don’t know, maybe she made it up. But you know how those broads are, they carry a grudge a long time. I don’t think it’d take a lot to get one of them to drop the dime on you, Nate.”

  Clete crimped his lips together and looked Baxter steadily in the eyes. Baxter’s face looked as though he were experiencing the first stages of recognition after an earthquake. Clete closed the lid on the toilet and sat Baxter on top of it. His head hung forward. Clete touched him gently on the shoulder with two fingers.

  “It ends here, Nate,” he said quietly. “We’re understood on that, aren’t we?”

  Baxter moved his lips but no sound came out.

  “You don’t have to say anything, as long as we have an understanding,” Clete said. “Get yourself a couple of free doubles at the bar, if you want. I’m going to walk Dave outside now. It’s a nice day. We’re all going back outside into a nice day.”

  Clete looked over the top of Baxter’s head at me and made a motion toward the door with his thumb. I walked back out through the bar onto the sidewalk under the colonnade. Clete followed me. The French Market and the tables in the Café du Monde were crowded with tourists now, and the street was heavy with afternoon traffic. Clete adjusted his tie, lit a cigarette with the lighter cupped in his big hands, and looked up the street as though he had nothing in his mind except a pleasant expectation of the next even
t in his life.

  I rubbed my collarbone and the puckered scar over the .38 wound and straightened my back.

  “How’s it feel?”

  “Like it’s packed in dry ice.”

  He felt along my shoulder with his thumb and forefinger. He saw me flinch.

  “That’s where he got you?”

  “Yes.”

  “There’s no break. When your collarbone’s broken, there’s a knot like a baseball.”

  “Who’s the hooker?”

  “You got me. The ones I knew five years ago are probably hags now. Actually, they were hags then.”

  “You’re pretty slick, Clete.”

  “What can I say?” He grinned at me. “But one word of advice, noble mon. Think about going back to Bayou Teche and let New Orleans go down the drain by itself. For some reason, Dave, having you in town makes me think of a man walking into a clock shop with a baseball bat.”

  She had always loved roses and four-o’clocks. The flower beds in her lawn and the shaded areas around the coulee at her home on Spanish Lake had been bursting with them. Now she grew purple and gold four-o’clocks along the wall of her patio on Camp Street. They had already dropped their winter seeds like big black pepper grains on the worn bricks, but her yellow and hybrid blue roses still bloomed as big as fists. The western sky was streaked with magenta through the oak trees, and leaves floated across the tunnels of underwater light in the swimming pool. The air was heavy with the smoky taste of the meat fire in the hibachi, cool and bittersweet with the smell of fall, like the odor of burning sugarcane stubble, of pecans when they mold inside their husks under the tree.

  She turned the steaks on the grill with a fork, her eyes watering in the smoke, and smiled at me. She wore leather sandals, faded designer jeans, and a black shirt with red flowers sewn into it. Her honey-colored hair was full of lights, and where it was trimmed on her neck it looked thick and stiff and soft and lovely to the touch, all at the same time.

  She saw me press my hand to my shoulder again.

  “Is there something wrong, Dave?” she said.

  “No, I just have a little flare-up when the weather is about to change. I think it’s going to rain. You know how it is this time of year. The leaves turn, then we have a real hard rain and we sort of click into winter.”

  “It’s too early for that,” she said. “Besides, winter is never that bad here, anyway.”

  “No, it’s not. Boots, can I use your phone to call New Iberia? I need to check in on Alafair.”

  “Sure, hon.”

  Alafair’s voice made me want to leave New Orleans that night. Or maybe it made me want to escape even more the brooding premonition that seemed to hang between me and Bootsie like a secret both of us knew, but neither of us would broach.

  She didn’t have to tell me about the Baylor medical center in Houston: I had seen it in her eyes. It’s a detached look, as if the person has stepped briefly around a corner and seen to the end of a long, gray street on which there are no other people. I’d flown in a dustoff loaded with wounded grunts, their foreheads painted with Mercurochrome M’s to indicate morphine injections, and the two who died before we reached battalion aid had had that look in their eyes, as though the hot wind through the doors, the steely blat-blat of the propeller blades, the racing green landscape below, were now all part of somebody else’s filmstrip.

  “It’s bad, isn’t it, Boots?” I said. I sat in the scrolled-iron patio chair by the pool and looked at the tops of my hands when I said it.

  “Yes,” she said quietly.

  “What’s the name for it?”

  “Lupus,” she said. Then she said, “Systemic lupus. The full Latin name means ‘red wolf.’ Sometimes people get a butterfly mask on their face. I don’t have that kind, though. It just lives inside me.”

  I felt myself swallow, and I looked away from her eyes.

  “You know what it is, then?” she said. She pushed the meat to the side of the grill and sat down across from me. Her hair was wreathed in smoke and the lighted turquoise shimmer off the pool.

  “I’ve heard about it. I don’t know a lot,” I said.

  “It attacks the connective tissue. It starts in the hands sometimes and spreads through the joints. In the worst cases, when it’s untreated, people look like they’re wrapped in strips of plastic.”

  I started to speak, but I couldn’t.

  “I didn’t have medical insurance, no savings, nothing but the vending machine business,” she said. “I couldn’t just walk out on the business at twenty cents on the dollar.”

  I saw a flicker of anger in her eyes, a spark, a recrimination that wanted to have its way. But it was only momentary.

  Then she reached forward and touched me on the knee as though it were I who should be consoled.

  “Dave, there’re probably a hundred different degrees of lupus. Today it can be controlled. This new doctor I have in Houston has started me on a different kind of medication, with steroids and some other things. My problem is I ignored some warning signs, some swelling in my fingers in cold weather and stiffness in the joints, and I have some kidney damage. But I’m going to pull it off.”

  “How long have you known?” I said. My voice sounded weak, as though I had borrowed it from someone else.

  “For the last year.”

  Her eyes moved over my face. She took my hand and held it on her knee.

  “You shouldn’t look like that,” she said.

  “I’ve been getting on your case, Bootsie, criticizing you, telling you that you’re mixed up with the greaseballs—”

  “You didn’t have any way of knowing, cher.”

  “Boots—”

  “Yes?”

  “Bootsie, I don’t know what to say to you.” I pressed my thumb and forefinger against my eyelids, but it didn’t do any good. The wilted four-o’clocks, the black silhouettes of floating leaves, the flames in the grill, all became watery and bright like splinters of light shot through crystal. “I majored in being a dumb shit. It’s the one constant in my life.”

  “I know you better than anybody else on earth, Dave. And no matter what you say, or what you believe, you never deliberately hurt anybody in your life.”

  Then she stood up, her face smiling down at me, and sat in my lap. She held my head against her breast and kissed my hair and stroked her fingers along my cheek.

  “You remember when we used to go to Deer’s Drive-In and do this?” she said. “I think yesterday is always only a minute away.”

  I could feel the softness of her breast against my ear and hear the beating of her heart like a clock that told time for both of us.

  Chapter 14

  In the hot darkness I smell the village before I see it—the wet reek of duck and hog shit, dead fish, moldy straw, boiled dog, stagnant pools of water coated with algae and mosquitoes. The air is breathless, so humid and still and devoid of movement that every line of sweat running down inside my fatigues is like the path of an insect across the skin. There is no light in the hooches, nor sound, and Marines sit listlessly on the ground, smoking, waiting for something, their weapons propped against their packs. They chew Red Man and unlit cigars, eat candy bars, and spit constantly between their legs.

  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 v
ortex that burns with the clean, pure intensity of white gas. Then it becomes as bright and shattering to the eyes as a phosphorus 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.