DR04 - A Morning for Flamingos

by James Lee Burke

  Some might simply explain it as redneck bigotry, but I think it is much more complex than that. In the minds of rural Acadian people the priest is the representative of God, and they will not share him or Him.

  Their violence seldom has to do with money. Instead, it can reach a murderous intensity within minutes over a betrayed trust, a lie, a wrong against a family member. Their sense of loyalty is atavistic and irrational, their sense of loss at its compromise as painful and unexpected, no matter how many times it happens, as a lesion across the heart.

  I went inside the confessional. The priest slid back the small wooden door behind the screen, and I could see the gray outline of his head. His voice was that of an elderly man, and I also discovered that he was hard of hearing. I tried to explain to him the nature of my problem, but he only became more confused.

  "I'm an undercover police officer, Father. My work requires that I betray some people. These are bad people, I suppose, or what they do is bad, but I don't feel good about it."

  "I don't understand."

  "I'm lying to people. I pretend to be something I'm not. I feel I'm making an enormous deception out of my life."

  "Because you want to arrest these people?"

  "I'm a drunk. I belong to AA. Honesty is supposed to be everything in our program."

  "You're drunk? Now?"

  I tried again.

  "I've become romantically involved with a woman. She's an old friend from my hometown. I hurt her many years ago. I think I'm going to hurt her again."

  He was quiet. He had a cold and he sniffed into a handkerchief.

  "I don't understand what you're telling me," he said.

  "I was shot last summer, Father. I almost died. As a result I developed great fears about myself. To overcome them I became involved in an undercover sting. Now I think maybe other people might have to pay the price for my problem—the woman from my hometown, a man with a crippled child, a young woman I was with today, one I feel an attraction to when I shouldn't."

  His head was bent forward. His handkerchief was crumpled in his hand.

  "Can you just tell me the number of the commandments you've broken and the number of times?" he asked. "That's all we really need to do right now."

  He waited, and it was obvious that his need for understanding, at least in that moment, was as great as mine.

  Sunday morning Tony and I took Paul horseback riding on the farm of one of Tony's mobster friends down in Plaquemines Parish. Tony had dressed Paul in a brown corduroy coat and trousers, with a tan suede bill cap, and he balanced Paul in front of him on the saddle while we walked our horses along the edge of a barbed-wire-fenced hardpan field a hundred yards from the Gulf. The grass in the field was pale green, and white egrets picked in the dry cow flop. The few palm trees along the narrow stretch of beach were yellowed with blight, and they clattered and straightened in the wind that was blowing hard off the water. Behind us, parked by a tight grove of oak trees, were the Lincoln and the white Cadillac limousine. Jess and Tony's other bodyguards and gunmen were drinking canned beer and eating fried chicken out of paper buckets in the sunshine and entertaining themselves by popping their pistols at sea gulls out on a sandspit. Tony wore a white cashmere jacket, a safari hat, and riding breeches tucked inside his knee-high leather boots.

  He kept wetting his lips in the wind. His skin was stretched tight around his eyes.

  "How do I look?" he said.

  "Good."

  "I mean how do I look?" He turned his face toward me and looked into my eyes.

  "You look fine, Tony."

  "It's been two days since I put anything in the tank. It's got butterflies fluttering around in my head."

  "What tank, Daddy?" Paul said.

  "I'm trying to get on a diet and get my blood pressure down. That's all, son," Tony said.

  "What butterflies?" Paul said.

  "When I don't eat what I want, the butterflies start flitting around me. Big purple and yellow ones. Boy, do I got 'em today. Listen to those guys shooting back there. You go out to a quiet spot in the country, they turn it into a war zone."

  "Who's trying to hurt us, Daddy?" Paul asked.

  "Nobody. Who told you that?"

  "Jess. He said some bad man wants to hurt us."

  "Jess isn't too bright sometimes, son. He imagines things. Don't pay attention to him." Tony looked back over his shoulder at the grove of oak trees, where his hired men lounged around the automobile fenders in sport clothes and shoulder holsters. His eyes were dark, and he rubbed his tongue hard against the back of his teeth. Then he took a deep breath through his nose.

  "Paul and me have got a place down in Mexico, don't we, Paul?" he said. "It's not much, thirty acres outside of Guadalajara, but it's got a fishing pond, a bunch of goats and chickens and stuff like that, doesn't it, Paul? It's quiet, too. Nobody bothers us there, either."

  "My mother says it's full of snakes. She won't go there anymore."

  "Which means there's no shopping mall where she can spend three or four hundred bucks a day. You ever been down there, Dave?"

  "No."

  "If I could ever get some things straightened out here in the right way, I might want to move down there. If you're a gringo, you've got to pay off a few of the local greasers, but after that, they treat you okay."

  "Can we go eat now, Dad?"

  "Sure," Tony said. "You want to eat, Dave?"

  "That's a good idea."

  We could hear the flat popping sound of the pistols in the wind. We would see the smoke first, men hear the report carried to us across the flattened grass.

  "Those guys and their guns. What a pain in the ass," Tony said.

  "You said not to use bad words, Daddy," Paul said.

  Tony smiled and popped up the bill of his little boy's cap.

  "You got me there. But what do you do with a bunch like that? Not one of them could rub two thoughts together on his best day." Then Tony twisted in the saddle and lifted his finger at me. In the chill sunlight his face looked as though it had been boiled empty of all heat and coherence. "I've got to talk with you, man," he said.

  We tethered our horses in the oak grove, and Tony put Paul in his wheelchair and fixed him a paper plate of fried chicken and potato salad. Then he picked up a half-filled bucket of chicken, tossed it at me, and climbed over the barbed-wire fence out onto the beach. I followed him out onto the damp gray sand.

  "I got something bugging the fuck out of me," he said. "I got to get rid of it, or I'm gonna shoot up again. I get back on the spike, I'm gonna end. I've got no illusions about that."

  "Maybe it's time to unload, Tony."

  "I already did. It didn't do any good. It just made it worse."

  "Then you're holding on to it for some reason."

  "That's what you think, huh?" He had a half-eaten drumstick in his hand. He flung it hard at a sea gull that was hovering above the waves. The water was dark green and full of kelp. "Try this. I went to a psychiatrist, a ninety-buck-an-hour Tulane fruit, in a peppermint-stripe shirt with one of these round white collars. You dig the type I'm talking about? A guy about six and a half feet long, except he's made out of marshmallows. So I told him finally about some stuff back there in Vietnam, and he starts to make fun of me. With this simpering voice, like psychiatrists use when they got no answers for the problem. He says, 'Ah, I see, you're the big brave warrior who can't have weaknesses like everybody else. Tony's the superstud, the macho man from Mother Green's killing machine. Tony's not going to let anyone know he's human, too. Why, that'd be a disappointment to the whole human race.'

  "Then he stretches his legs out and looks me in the eye like he's just taken my soul out of my chest with a pair of tweezers. So I say, 'Doc, you're one clever guy. But there're certain things you don't say to certain guys unless you've gotten your own ticket punched a couple of times. I've got the feeling you're short on dues. And when you're short on dues and you run off at the mouth with the wrong people, you ought to expect certa
in consequences. What that means is you get the shit stomped out of you.'"

  Tony sat down on a beached cypress tree that was white with rot. The sand was littered with jellyfish that had been left behind by the tide. Their air sacs were pink and blue and translucent, their stingers coated with grit.

  "So he stops smiling," Tony said. "In fact, his mouth is looking a little rubbery, like he just stopped sucking on a doorknob. I say, 'But don't sweat it, Doc, because I don't beat up on fruits. But if you ever talk to me like that again, or you talk to other shrinks about me, or you put any of this dog shit in your files, somebody's gonna pull you out of Lake Pontchartrain with some of your parts missing.'"

  Tony breathed the salt wind through his nose, then popped the air sac of a jellyfish with the tip of his boot.

  "Yeah, I guess that really solved your problem," I said.

  "You cracking wise with me, Dave?"

  "I just don't know what I can tell you. Or what you want from me."

  "Tell me how come I don't get any relief."

  "I never figured out all my own problems. I'm probably the wrong guy to talk to, Tony."

  "You're the right guy."

  "I think you want forgiveness. From somebody who counts. The psychiatrist didn't count because he hadn't paid any dues."

  "Who's gonna hand out this forgiveness?"

  "It'll have to come from somebody who's important to you. God, a priest, somebody whose experience you respect. Finally yourself, Tony. A psychiatrist with any brains would have told you that."

  "A guy like me is going to a priest?" He grinned and scraped out long divots in the sand with his boot heel. In the quiet I could hear the hiss of the waves as they receded from the beach. Then he cocked his eye and looked up at me from under the brim of his safari hat. "Hey, don't be offended. You know stuff. You know more than any shrink."

  "You inflate my value, Tony."

  "No, I don't. You're an all-together, copacetic motherfucker, Robicheaux."

  His head nodded up and down, one eye squinting at me as though he were fixing me inside telescopic sights.

  "You've got the wrong man," I said.

  That evening Tony and Paul and I ate supper by candlelight in his dining room. We had boiled early potatoes, string beans cooked with mushrooms, and lamb glazed with a sauce made from orange marmalade; the burgundy that Tony drank must have cost fifty dollars a bottle. The tablecloth was Irish linen; in the center was a crystal bowl of water filled with floating camellias. The dessert was a choice of chocolate mousse or French vanilla ice cream or both.

  Later, while Tony and his son watched television, I strolled through the grounds behind the house in the twilight. The Saint Augustine grass was thick and stiff under my feet, the flower beds absolutely weedless, the dead banana leaves and palm fronds trimmed back daily so that everything in Tony's yard looked green and full of bloom, regardless of the season.

  But what was life like for most people in New Orleans that year? I asked myself. Or what had become of the city itself in the last five years?

  Even a tourist could answer those questions. The bottom had dropped out of the oil market and the economy was worse than it had been anytime since the Depression. Cardboard boxes and sacks of raw garbage sat on the sidewalks for days, humming with flies; derelicts and bag ladies rooted in trash cans on Canal for food. The homicide rate had reached an average of one murder a day. If your automobile was burglarized, or all its windows smashed out with bricks, you probably would not be able to get a policeman at the scene for an hour and a half. The St. Louis Cemetery off Basin, which had always been one of the city's most interesting tourist attractions, was now so dangerous that you could enter it only on a group tour conducted by an off-duty police officer. The welfare projects—the St. Bernard, the St. Thomas, the Iberville off Canal, or, the worst of them all, the Desire—were spread throughout the city, and within them was everything bad that human society could produce: rats, cockroaches, incest, rape, child molestation, narcotics, and sadistic street gangs. Black teenagers armed with nine-millimeter pistols and semiautomatic assault rifles made large profits trafficking in crack, and they would kill absolutely anyone who tried to stop them. A black leader in the Desire project announced publicly that he was going to run the drug dealers out of the neighborhood. Two days later he was gunned down by a pair of fifteen-year-old kids, and while he lay bleeding on the sidewalk they broke his ribs with a baseball bat.

  I sat on a stone bench by Tony's clay tennis court and watched the twilight fade in the stillness. The western sky was the dull gray color of scraped bone. One of the gatemen turned on the flood lamps that were anchored in the oak trees along the outer walls, and the fish ponds, the birdbaths, the alabaster statues on the lawn, seemed to glow with a humid, electric aura as though the coming of the night had no application to Tony's world.

  I could see him through the glassed-in sun porch, watching television with Paul, his face laughing at a joke told by a comedian. I wondered if Tony ever thought about life in New Orleans's welfare projects or that army of teenage crack addicts who cooked their brains for breakfast. I thought he probably did not.

  I called Bootsie twice that evening. She wasn't home either time, but the next morning I was up early and caught her at six. Her voice was warm and full of sleep. "I've been trying to get hold of you," I said.

  "I've been out of town."

  "Where?"

  "Over at Houston. At Baylor."

  "At the hospital?"

  "Yes."

  "What were you doing at Baylor?"

  "Oh, it's nothing."

  "Boots?"

  "Yes?"

  "What are you holding out on me?"

  "Don't worry about it, hon. When am I going to see you?"

  "Can I come by now?" I said.

  "Mmmm, what'd you have in mind?"

  I suddenly realized that I didn't have an honest answer to her question.

  "Because I have to go to work, hon," she said.

  "I just wanted to see you, to talk to you."

  "Is something wrong?"

  "No, not really," I said. "Look, Boots, I have to go over to the apartment in a little bit and pick up some things. Your office is only a few blocks away. Can you come by for a few minutes? I'll fix breakfast for us."

  "I'll try," she said. "Dave, what is it?"

  I took a breath.

  "People just need to talk sometimes. This is one of them," I said.

  "Yes, I think it is," she said.

  I gave her my address on Ursulines.

  "Dave?" she said.

  "Yes."

  "I don't get hurt easily anymore. If that's what we're talking about."

  "We're not talking about that at all," I said.

  After I hung up the phone I looked out the window at the early sun shining through the trees in Tony's yard, the wind ruffling on his fish ponds, the flapping of the dew-soaked canvas screens on his tennis court. But I took no joy in the new morning.

  I drove into the center of the city and parked my truck in the garage on Ursulines, then went through the domed brick archway into the courtyard. The flagstones were streaked with water, and I could smell coffee and bacon from someone's apartment. Upstairs on the balcony a fat woman in a print dress was sweeping dust out through the grillwork into the sunlight.

  I had my keys in my hand before I noticed the soft white gashes, in the shape of a screwdriver head, between the door and jamb of my apartment. I slipped my .45 out of the back of my trousers, let it hang loosely at my side, pushed the sprung door back on its hinges with my foot, and stepped inside.

  My eyes would not encompass or accept the interior of the apartment all at once, in the way that your mind rejects the appearance of your car after a street gang has worked it over with curbstones. A large bullfrog was nailed to the back of the door. Its puffed white belly was split by the force of the nail, its legs hung down limply, and its wide, flat mouth stretched open as though it were waiting for a fly.


  The ceiling, the walls, the cheap furniture, were dotted with blood as though it had been slung there in patterns. Above the kitchen doorway, painted redly into the plaster, were the words you are ded. The blood had run in strings down the plaster and dripped onto the linoleum.

  But my bedroom was untouched, and I thought I had seen the worst of it until I looked into the bathroom. The toilet lid was closed, but blood and water had swelled over the lip and streamed down the white porcelain, too thick and dark for the dilution that should have taken place. Written with a ballpoint pen on a damp sheet of lined paper that lay on the toilet lid were the words dont flush, my baby is inside.

  I stuck the .45 through the back of my belt and started to raise the lid, then withdrew my hand. Don't rattle, I thought. They didn't do it, they didn't do that.

  I went into the kitchen, tore off a section of paper towel, folded it in a neat square, and went back into the bathroom to lift the toilet lid. My neighbor's bluetick dog floated in the purple water, one eye of his severed head staring up at me, his entrails bulging out of the slit that ran from his testicles to a flap of skin on his neck.

  I dropped the bloody piece of paper towel in the wastebasket, turned around, and saw Bootsie frozen in the doorway, her hand pinched to her mouth, her cheeks discolored, her pulse leaping in her neck.

  * * *

  CHAPTER 12

  She sat alone in the bedroom while I talked to two uniformed cops who had been called by the apartment owner. A black man from the city health department dipped the dog's remains out of the toilet with a fishnet, while my neighbors stared through the open front door of the apartment. I told the cops a second time that I had no idea who had done it.