DR04 - A Morning for Flamingos

by James Lee Burke

  I looked at Tony. He had one eye closed and was threading a nylon leader through the eye of a hook.

  "Yes, I guess that's true, Paul," I said.

  "Can we come see you? And ride your horse?"

  "Anytime you want to."

  Tony tied a blood knot with the leader and snipped off the loose end close to the hook's eye with a pair of fingernail clippers. He held the hook by the shank and pulled on the leader to test the strength of the knot. "There," he said to Paul. "They won't bust that one."

  He wore bell-bottomed denims, a long-sleeved candy-striped shirt, and his Marine Corps utility cap with the brim propped up. His eyes avoided mine, and like his hired help who rode in the Cadillac he did not speak to me unless to answer a question, or to indicate to me that I could entertain myself with whatever was available in the camp.

  I walked out under the dripping trees, then down under the screened gallery supported on stilts. The riverbanks were thick with wet brush and wild morning glory vines, and because the river emptied into the Gulf and its level was affected by the tides, trotlines were strung at crazy angles between tree trunks and logs and stakes driven into the mud. The tide was out now, and the highest water level of the river was marked by a gray line of dead hyacinths along the banks. Thunder boomed and rolled out over the Gulf, and the air was charged with the electric smell of ozone. The tree trunks glistened blackly, the canopy overhead and the scrub brush and canebrakes and layers of rotting leaves literally creaked with moisture. I thought of Alafair and Bootsie and realized that I had never felt more alone in my life.

  Later, inside, the phone on the kitchen wall rang. Tony answered it, and after he said hello, he listened without speaking, and looked at me over the top of Paul's head. Then he hung up the receiver and said, "Let's take a ride, Dave. Paul, I have to take care of a little business with Dave. You stay here with Jess, and I'll be back in an hour."

  "What about Dave?" Paul said.

  "He's got to do some stuff. We'll see him later."

  "Aren't you going fishing, Dave?" Paul said.

  "We'll see how it works out. I might have to take off for a while," I said.

  "I thought you were going with us." He was turned sideways in his wheelchair to talk to me. His blue jeans looked brand-new and stiff and too big for him.

  "I might have to go back home," I said. "I've been gone a long time."

  "Your little girl wants you to come home?"

  "Yes, she does."

  He nodded, picked up a piece of leader, and began poking it in a crack on the table.

  "Are you coming back to visit at all?" he said.

  "I'd like to take you fishing to some places I know around New Iberia. The bass are so big there we have to knock them back into the water with tennis rackets."

  His whole face lighted with his smile.

  Tony and I rode in my pickup truck, and the white Cadillac full of his hoods followed us up the dirt road that bordered the river. The chuckholes were deep and full of rainwater, and we bounced so hard on the springs that Tony had to prop one hand against the dashboard. I rubbed my thigh with my palm and used my thumb to hit the small button on the side of the tape recorder. Before we had left the camp, Tony had put on a raincoat and dropped his chrome-plated .45 automatic in the pocket. I banged through another chuck-hole, and the .45 clanked against the door handle. Tony pulled his raincoat straight and kept the weight of the gun on his thigh.

  "You think you might need that?" I asked.

  "I carry it so I won't need it."

  "Did you ever have trouble with these guys?"

  "These are guys who operate on the bottom of the food chain. They're not a bold bunch."

  "You don't think highly of them."

  "I don't think about them at all."

  "I appreciate what you're doing for me."

  "You've already told me that, so forget it. Look, my son likes you. You know why? It's because children recognize integrity in adults. I've got some advice for you, Dave. After this score, get out of the business. It's not worth it. There's not a morning I don't get up thinking about the IRS, the DEA, city dicks like Nate Baxter, cowboys who'll clip you just to get invited over to a certain guy's table at the Jockey Club in Miami. It's like they say about marriage: You do it for money and you'll earn every nickel of it."

  "I guess a guy makes his choices, Tony," I said, and looked at the side of his face.

  He turned his head slowly and looked back at me.

  "That's right," he said, "and I'm making one now. When I got put in with the wet brains at the V.A., there was a lot of talk in the therapy sessions about character defects. I've got lots of those, but lying's not one of them. I choose to honor my word, and I don't like righteousness in people, particularly when they're talking about my life."

  He rubbed the moisture off the front glass with his sleeve. Beyond the tunnel of trees we could see pasture and sky up ahead.

  "There's my airstrip. We only have another mile to go," he said. "Dave, after you get your goods, I think we say good-bye."

  "All right, Tony."

  "You think I'm a hypocrite, don't you?"

  "I've got too many problems of my own to be taking other people's inventory."

  "Before you write me off, I want you to understand something. You helped me a lot, man. But right now I've got some heavy shit to work through—with my habit, my douche-bag wife, these fuckheads in Houston and Miami—and I've got to simplify my life and concentrate on Paul and nobody else. That's the way it is."

  He waited for me to reply.

  "You're not going to say anything?" he asked.

  "It all works out one way or another."

  "Yeah, that's the way I figure it. Semper fi, Mac, and fuck it." He rolled down the window, let the mist blow inside, and took a deep breath. A bolt of lightning splintered into the tree line at the south end of the pasture where Tony kept his plane. The air smelled as metallic and cold as brass.

  A mile farther on we drove out of the hackberry and pine trees into the pasture with the mowed airstrip and tin hangar that Tony had told me to remember on our first trip to the Pearl River country. Two cars and a van were parked in front of the hangar, and the hangar's main door was slid open about three feet. The surrounding fields were pale green and sopping wet, and from horizon to horizon steel-gray clouds roiled across the sky.

  "The plane's not in yet, or these guys wouldn't still be hanging around," Tony said. "I'll stay with you through the buy, then I'll ride back in the Caddy and you're on your own."

  "All right, Tony."

  "Make sure you're satisfied with the quality of everything before you leave. Don't think you can go back to these guys with a complaint. They're basically punks, and they won't make it right. In fact, they usually try to cannibalize each other whenever they have a chance."

  "Where's the plane coming in from?"

  "They make out like it's a direct connection from Colombia. But I think it's coming out of Florida. There're a lot of abandoned housing developments in the Everglades. So they use these paved roads out in the saw grass for airstrips. What the Miami crowd doesn't need or doesn't want, because maybe the prices are going down too fast, they lay it off on these guys."

  I drove along a two-track dirt road through the pasture to the front of the hangar. Through the opening in the door I could see the canary-yellow wings of a crop-duster biplane and rows of industrial metal drums and bright silver liquid propane tanks. I cut the ignition. In the rearview mirror I saw the white limo stop behind me. No one got out.

  "What is this place?" I said.

  "The guy who owns it is a local peckerwood who runs a farm-supply business or something. Look, Dave, when we go in there, I talk and you just hand them the money."

  "What about them back there?" I nodded toward the limo.

  "They're paid to watch my back, not my business dealings. Come on, let's go."

  We walked through the wet grass and drizzling rain and stepped inside the drynes
s of the hangar. It was immaculately clean; there was another biplane, a red one, at the far end, and a small green John Deere tractor next to it, but there was not a spot of oil or a tread mark from a tire on the concrete floor slab. By a windowed side office were a picnic table and benches that had probably been moved in from outside, because there were pieces of grass on the bottoms of the legs. A fat man in rumpled brown slacks and a T-shirt was turning and flattening hamburger patties on a hibachi with a spatula. The smoke drifted off in the draft created by an opening in the far door that gave onto the mowed landing strip. Three men sat at the table. Two of them had their backs to us, and the third man was telling them a story, gesturing with his hands, and he did not look at us. On one end of the table was a washtub filled with crushed ice and green bottles of Heineken.

  We walked a few feet forward and then stopped. To my right, stacked in a row along the front sliding door, were more metal drums, each of them containing dry chemical fertilizers, and at the end of the drums was a fingernail-polish-red Coca-Cola machine, the old kind with a big, thick lead-colored handle. Tony's eyes were riveted on the picnic table.

  I looked at him.

  "It's the wrong guys," he whispered.

  "What?"

  "The black guys aren't here. The black guys are always in on the score."

  Then I heard the Cadillac's transmission in reverse, backing across the wet ground.

  "It's a hit. It's a fucking hit. Get out of here," Tony said, and he shoved me with one arm toward the opening in the door just as Jimmie Lee Boggs stepped out from behind the Coca-Cola machine and threw a pump ventilated-rib shotgun to his shoulder and let off the round in the chamber.

  It was a deer slug, a solid, round piece of lead as thick as the ball of your thumb, and it whanged off a metal barrel just in front of us and ricocheted into the tin wall of the hangar. Tony and I both dove between the barrels at the same time. I heard Boggs eject the spent shell onto the cement and ratchet another into the chamber. Tony was squatted down, breathing hard, his chrome-plated .45 held at an upward angle. I was standing, pressed back against the wall, and I got my .45 out of my fatigue jacket pocket, slid back the receiver, and eased a hollow-point round into the chamber. The men who had been drinking beer and cooking hamburgers at the picnic table had fallen to the floor or piled inside the office below the level of the windows.

  Tony tried to look around the side of the barrel, and Boggs fired again, this time a round that was loaded with buckshot. It scoured off the side of the barrel behind us and ripped a pattern of five holes that I could cover with my fingers in the tin wall. Then somebody inside the office started firing with a pistol, probably a revolver, for he let off five rounds that danced all over the concrete; then he stopped to reload. When he did I aimed my .45 with both hands over Tony's head and fired at the office until my palms were numb from the recoil. My ears roared with a sound like the sea, and the breech locked open on the empty clip. The hollow-points blew holes as big as baseballs out of the toppled picnic table and sent triangular panes of glass crashing into the office's interior, but the lower half of the office wall was built of cinderblock, and the hollow-points splintered apart inside the concrete and did no harm to the men on the floor.

  My hands were shaking as I pulled out the empty clip and shoved a full one into the .45 's magazine. Tony raked his springlike curls back with his fingers.

  "We're seriously fucked," he whispered.

  "We wait them out," I said.

  "Are you kidding? If Jimmie Lee or one of those other guys gets outside, he can come around behind us and put it to us through the wall. It's a matter of time. I only got this clip. What have you got?"

  "You're looking at it."

  The skin of his face was dry and tight, his eyes as darkly bright as when he'd been loaded on black speed. He began breathing deeply in his chest, as though he were trying to oxygenate his blood. He looked at the big, round silver tanks of liquid propane that were lined against the adjacent wall.

  "No," I said.

  "You heard stories about it. But I lived through it, man. The captain called it right in on top of us."

  "Don't do it, Tony."

  "Bullshit. You got to go out there on the screaming edge. That's the only place to win. You don't know that, you don't know anything."

  I wanted to put out my hand, push his gun down toward the floor, somehow in that last terrible moment exorcise the insanity that lived in his soul. Instead, I stared down at him numbly while he pivoted on one knee, aimed at a propane tank, and fired. The automatic leapt upward in his hand, and the round clanged off the top of the tank and hit an iron spar in the wall.

  He rested one buttock on his heel, propped his wrist across his knee, lowered his sights, and pulled the trigger again.

  This time the round hit the tank dead center and cored a hole in it as cleanly as a machinist's punch. The propane gushed out on the cement, its bright, instant reek like a slap across the face.

  His .45 lay on the floor now, and his hands were trembling as he tore a match from a matchbook and folded the cover back from the striker. I could hear the men inside the office moving around on top of the broken glass.

  "Tony—," I said. I was pressed back against the wall, between the barrels. The air was thick and wet with the smell of the propane.

  "What?" he said.

  "Tony—"

  "It's the only way, man. You know it."

  I touched my religious medal and closed my eyes and opened them again. My heart was thundering against my rib cage.

  "Do it," I said.

  "Listen, you get out of this and I don't, you keep your fucking promise. You look after my son."

  "All right, Tony."

  Boggs stepped out wide from behind the Coca-Cola machine and fired a pattern of buckshot that thropped past my ear and blew the top off a metal barrel. It rolled in a circle on the cement. Tony struck the loose match in his hand, touched the other matches with the flame, and flipped the burning folder out into the pool of propane.

  The pool burst into white and blue flames; then the fire crawled up the silvery jet of propane squirting from the tank. I heard a window crash on the far side of the Coca-Cola machine, and I heard the men inside the office fighting with one another to get out the office door; but now Tony and I were out from behind the barrels, unprotected, and running for the opening in the hangar door.

  The ignition of the propane tanks, the fertilizers, the air itself, was like a bolt of lightning striking inside the building. Through the hangar door I saw the rain falling outside, the sodden fields, the wind ruffling the tree line, then Tony hit me hard on the back and knocked me through the door just as the whole building exploded.

  His body was framed against the flash, like a tin effigy silhouetted against a forge. He tumbled across the ground, his clothes smoking, his hair singed and stinking like a burnt cat's. The heat was so intense I couldn't feel the rain on my skin. We stumbled forward, past my pickup, into the field, as Jimmie Lee Boggs floored his van down the two-track road. Behind us, for only a moment, I heard screams inside the fire.

  But Tony was not finished yet. He sat down in a puddle of water, his knees pulled up before him, aimed the .45 with both hands, and let off two quick founds. One tore through the van's back panel, but the second spiderwebbed the window in the driver's door and blew out the front windshield. It hung down like a crumpled glass apron, and the van careered off the road, whipping the grass under its bumper, spinning divots of mud from under the tires.

  "Suck on that one, Jimmie Lee," Tony said.

  The van seemed to slow as it made a wide arc through the field; then it lurched on its back springs as the driver shifted down, righted the wheel, and hit the gas again. The tin sides of the building were white with heat, as though phosphorus were burning inside; then they folded softly in upon themselves, like cellophane being consumed, and the roof crashed onto the cement slab. Boggs's van hit the main dirt road and disappeared into the corridor of tr
ees.

  Tony tried to get to his feet, but gave it up and sat back down in the water. His face was drawn and empty and dotted with mud.

  "I'm going to leave you and come back for you, Tony. I'm borrowing your piece, too." I took the .45 gingerly from his hand and eased the hammer back down.

  He wiped his eyes clear with the back of his wrist and looked up and down my trouser legs. Then his hand felt inside my thigh, almost as though he were molesting me. His mouth shaped itself into a small butterfly, and his eyes roved casually over my face.

  "Where's your backup people?" he said.

  "I don't know. My guess is, though, they've got the road sealed on each end."

  "Yeah, that'd make sense."

  "Will you wait for me here?"

  "I'm going to start walking back."

  "I don't think it'd be good for you to meet the guys in the limo."

  "My limo's in the bottom of a pond by now, and those guys are halfway across Lake Pontchartrain." Then he said, "Was Kim in on it?"

  "No. I never saw her before I got involved with your people."

  "That's good. She's a good kid. Do me a favor, will you?"

  "What?"

  "Get the fuck away from me."

  I didn't answer him. I got in my pickup and followed Jimmie Lee Boggs's sharply etched tire tracks down the dirt road bordered on each side by pine and hackberry trees, and cows that poked through the underbrush and lowed fearfully each time lightning snapped across the sky.

  I didn't have to go far. His van was in a ditch opposite the old seismograph drill barge that was sunk at an angle on the other side of the river. I stopped my truck, stuck Tony's .45 inside my belt, and walked up on the driver's side of the van. The light was gray through the trees, and the air had the cold smell of a refrigerator that has been closed up too long with produce inside. The driver's door was partly open, and the dashboard and steering column were littered with chips of broken glass, and painted with blood.

  I pulled the door wide open and pointed the .45 inside, but the van was empty. Twelve-gauge shotgun shells, their yellow casings red with bloody finger smears, were scattered on the passenger's seat and on the floor. A paintless, narrow, wooden footbridge, with a broken handrail and boards hanging out the bottom, spanned the river just downstream from the drill barge. Deep foot tracks led from the opposite side of the bridge along the mudbank through the morning glory vines and cypress roots to the starboard side of the barge, which rested at an upward angle against the incline.