“Don’t blame the kid, Gina. How much do you owe her?”
“Ten dollars.”
The petite girl grabbed up a few textbooks and her purse that were on the coffee table and shuffled to the door. I gave her a twenty and she made a quick exit.
“Did you sweet talk her or bully your way in?”
“Neither. I live here.”
“Not anymore. Didn’t you get the papers?”
“Of course, that’s why I’m here. What in hell is this all about?”
“My lawyer said Washington received those papers weeks ago, and you’re here now?” She stopped and thought for a moment, then said, “Why am I not surprised, as far down as we are on your priority list.”
“I just got them this morning. I have people for you to call if you want proof.”
Her voice grew louder as she spoke. “Don’t bother. I’ve had it, Tony. We don’t have a life together.
"I haven’t seen you for months, haven’t even spoken to you except for a few minutes at a time. Six months before that you lived out of a suitcase God knows where or on some Secret Service detail. I don’t know if you’re dead or alive, well or sick, or even where you are. What kind of marriage is that? What kind of bullshit life is it? Your son is growing up without you, and we’ve had to make a life for ourselves.”
“I don’t get it. A few weeks ago you seemed fine on the phone, even upbeat. What happened?"
“The papers were filed before that conversation. I was relieved, on something of a high, knowing that I was taking control for a change. Besides, there was no sense in upsetting you since you couldn’t do anything about it. I figured ATF would hold those papers away from you for a while, maybe until the case was finished. I was right.”
“Wrong. It’s not finished . . . unless I don’t go back.” I looked directly into Gina’s face and promised to stay home. I told her I had lots of leave time accumulated and I’d spend it all at home, and to hell with the job. Gina rolled her eyes. We both knew it was a half-hearted gesture and the idea was dismissed. She folded her arms and her eyes hardened. I was surprised by her question.
“Who are you screwing, Tony?”
“What kind of question is that?”
“You’re gone this long, I’m sure you’re doing it to somebody unless you’re tying it in a knot.”
I sat on the couch, buried my face in my hands and collected my thoughts. I hadn’t been unfaithful to her except for the teasing and flirting with Cheri, and the occasional pinch on the behind I delivered to the cocktail waitresses at the track. The idea of explaining this to Gina quickly passed.
“Look, there’s nobody. I could ask you the same question.”
Wrong move. Her face reddened and she reached over for the closest thing near her, which was a grocery bag. She grabbed a large bunch of shallots held together with a small red rubber band and dashed over to where I was sitting. She lunged on top of me with her knees digging into the top of my thighs and raised the shallots high with her arm, landing them squarely on top of my head. She repeated the thrashing several times as I covered up with my arms. Each time she came down, a spray of wet green onions landed on my head as she shouted in cadence, “You son-of-a-bitch! son-of-a-bitch! son-of-a-bitch!, landing one stroke with each syllable.
“Wait! Hold up!” I shouted just as the rubber band snapped and her baton of shallots finally fell apart. Green, frayed stalks were scattered all over me, the couch, and the floor.
“I had no right to say that, I’m sorry. Look, this whole thing is crazy.” Next, I tried the heavy artillery.
“We’re Catholic, we’re Italian. Divorce goes against the things we believe in.”
She was slightly out of breath and leaned her body on me. We said nothing for a while, then I heard Nick jostling around in his room. The argument had wakened him. He ran from his room and jumped up on both of us, spread his arms and legs, and held on tight. I enjoyed the momentary group hug but was mostly taken by surprise when he ran into the room. The last I remembered, he was merely toddling, unsure of his steps. Gina was right, he was growing up without me.
I helped clean up, then played with Nick. Gina gave me the silent treatment but acted civil in front of our son. We all sat down to a meal she hastily prepared, and after dinner I walked Nick around the block and carried him on my shoulders. We watched television for a while, then I bathed him and read him to sleep from one of the many story books I had mailed home for him. These were the things I missed so much. The house seemed especially quiet and I tried to break the ice.
“You’re losing your touch, Gina. Last time you beat me on the head it was with a shoe. Now you’re down to flogging me with veggies.”
She managed a slight smile and said, “That was a long time ago. I’m out of practice.”
We sat down across the kitchen table from each other. She somehow seemed older than I remembered. Stress had made its mark on her face. Her hair and clothes were not as neat as usual. What could I say to fix things? Would pleading do any good, or simply prolong the inevitable?
“Gina, we both love each other, don’t we? Then you can’t go through with this.”
She gave me an icy glare. “Watch me,” she said. “We need a husband and father around here, not some phantom. Nick doesn’t know if you’re real or some imaginary figure from one of his books.” She squared her shoulders and became businesslike. “This wasn’t a whim, Tony. And, it’s not just this case. There will always be another case, another emergency, another assignment you can’t tell me anything about. Go back to your case, to what’s important to you.”
I was crushed. She had made up her mind, and any further argument was useless. She wouldn’t let me touch her or get close. I fell asleep on the couch and was awakened at nine o’clock the next morning by the sound of Nick running around in circles next to me. I tried several times to start up a conversation with Gina, but all I got from her was a cold stare and silence. I prepared to leave and gave Nick an extra hug as Gina hustled me to the front door. I made a final plea for her to drop the divorce proceedings, then left. Nick stood near the front door waving as I drove away.
By the time I reached the airport, there was only four minutes to flight time. I ran to the ticket counter and broke in front of a long line of passengers waiting to check in. I showed my badge to the ticket agent, a middle-aged woman neatly attired in her Eastern Airlines smock, and explained that I had to be on the flight to New Orleans that was leaving the gate. She immediately picked up the phone and made contact with the flight tower.
“They’re holding the flight for five minutes. Gate forty-one. You’d better hurry.”
I ran down the concourse onto the jetway and 'badged' the flight attendant standing in the doorway of the plane. I made the way to my seat and plopped down. As we taxied onto the airfield, I felt the familiar captivity of being in a large tube. I was depressed by the failure of my visit home. I resigned myself to put the family matters aside and get on with the task of completing the undercover assignment. I harbored a faint hope that after finishing things up I could put my personal life back together. From the window, the trees, cars, and buildings, now miniature size, looked as if they were in a diorama. I took off my coat, and two small pieces of green onions fell from the pocket. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
* * *
Chapter 20
I expected the customary rookie agent to pick me up at the gate when I deplaned in New Orleans. Instead, I found Lyle leaning against a wall with his arms folded. There was a straight red line under his chin, held together with several black stitches. He said nothing as I extended my hand to him. He didn’t hesitate and gripped it tightly.
“Gina told me you knew nothing about it. I’m sorry I clipped you.”
Lyle pointed to the catgut knots sticking out of his chin and said, “Lucky punch.” Then he asked about Gina.
“It doesn’t look good. I did everything but beg.”
Lyle was sympathetic, but thought the same way I did.
Block it out. Concentrate on the case, get it done, then maybe I could try to salvage what was left of my personal life. We talked on the way downtown to pick up my car.
“The boys will be pleased you were on that flight. They wanted me to notify them immediately if you weren’t on it. Their asses are biting button holes waiting to find out. Let ‘em sweat a little longer.”
Three messages were waiting for me at the Plantation. Two were from T-Red, one from Ritmo Angelle. I got T-Red on the phone.
“Glad you caught me, Tony, I’m on my way to the track. Have you talked to Ritmo? He’s trying to reach you in a big way, asked me to bird-dog you.”
“I’ll get hold of him.”
“By the way, Frank Duplessis is still giving me the chill. That asshole makes me uneasy.”
“Good, Red. Maybe it’ll keep you on your toes.”
I drove to The Gallop since it was almost time for Ritmo’s shift. He was already there behind the bar, but dressed in a loud, plaid sport jacket instead of his bar outfit. His toupee was squarely on his head and he had an aroma of cheap aftershave.
“Where you been, Dago?”
“Damn, Ritmo, I was only gone two days. What’s the issue?”
“Money. Cliff wants us to meet him about that deal. He’ll be at the cock fights tonight. Also, Frank Duplessis has been in here looking for you. That guy never comes in here alone, usually he’s with his horse owners. He thinks he’s too good for the place. But he’s been here twice looking for you. He’s creepy.”
I laughed at Ritmo calling anyone else creepy. He poured us both a drink and I asked him about the cock fights, which I had never seen.
“Let’s go. We might make some extra scratch tonight.”Ritmo and I got into his dated, dark brown Lincoln and headed to a little town named Scott outside of Lafayette. It was a particularly dark night. As we drove along the highway the smooth ride of the big car and baritone hum of the defective muffler almost put me to sleep. The news report on the radio announced that California governor Ronald Reagan, the long-shot candidate to wrestle the Republican nomination from Gerald Ford, would make a campaign swing through Louisiana. He was giving a campaign speech at a fundraiser in Lafayette the following weekend.
“Not many presidential candidates come to the bayou,” Ritmo cracked. “Half the town will show up, even Democrats will show. Cops will be working overtime and they’ll be bunched near the speech at the college. It wouldn’t be a bad time to pull a score on the other side of town while the heat is all tied up.”
“Think so, Ritmo? What about all those fucking feds that will be crawling all over the place? And I’m sure the state police will be in force. You could bump into them by accident they’ll be so many. Bad idea.”
“I hadn’t thought of that, Tony. I guess you were a step ahead of me."
The big car turned slowly onto a narrow oyster shell road that cut through a large swamp. The road was only wide enough for one vehicle. I wondered what happened when a car exiting the road approached one coming in. The answer was, there was no quick exit. The road wound for about two miles into the woods and I could hear and feel the oyster shells crunch beneath the car tires. We came to the end of the road where there was a large, tall structure that looked like an old barn. It was made of wide, unpainted cypress planks. Slivers of light slipped through the cracks between the boards and the wide door, which gave off the only light in a pitch-black area.
There were at least a hundred vehicles, mostly pickup trucks, parked all around the building. The sound of frogs and crickets filled the swamp. As Ritmo parked, his headlights illuminated an old pickup truck with a half dozen wire cages in the bed, each containing a rooster. Two men stood behind the truck unloading the cages, and I recognized one of them as old Comeaux, the horse trainer. Before we got out of the car Ritmo told me to leave my gun because we would be checked for weapons. I placed my .38 snub-nose under the front seat. We approached Comeaux and the other man and Ritmo gave them a greeting in French. I shook hands with Comeaux and asked about his old horse, Bob’s Dream.
“A bowed tendon forced me to turn him out to pasture for a while. The old boy knows when he needs a rest so he goes lame on me. But you can cash a bet on this red chicken tonight. He’s small, but he’s hell on wheels.”
We left the men at the truck and Ritmo led us to the front door. He knocked, and a slat on the door slid open. A pair of dark eyes appeared on the other side and looked back and forth at Ritmo and me before the door was opened. We walked into a closet-sized room, and there was another door in front of us. The young Cajun who let us in then locked the door we came through. The three of us were locked between two doors in the tiny room. The sentry had a large, .44 caliber magnum revolver, a Dirty Harry weapon, stuck in the front of his waistband. He patted us down for weapons and, satisfied that we had none, opened the door to the main building. I knew the checkpoint wasn’t so much to keep the cops out, but to prevent any bust-out bandits from jacking the men inside and robbing them of the sums of cash they were holding.
The inside of the old barn was like no structure I had been in before. It was built entirely of heavy cypress planks. Bare light bulbs hung from the rafters and lit the place with a rather dim yellow glow. There were tiered sections of spectator stands where men stood, talking and haggling in French over the contestants in the next cock fight. The standing-only sections were built like an amphitheater in circular fashion, and the center of the building was a large dirt floor used as a fighting pit. The room was filled with smoke and a thick haze hung in the rafters, adding to the dim atmosphere. Most of the men clutched stacks of cash in their hands.
Five house men stood in a large circle on the edges of the dirt arena, facing the crowd. They held up large wads of cash and fingers to indicate the odds the house was laying on each bird. When a bettor accepted the odds they took his cash and wrote out a receipt on a small brown piece of paper. The Cajuns in the stands shot fingers back at the odds-makers, and the whole scene reminded me of a crude stock exchange or commodities pit. Some of the spectators wagered with each other if they negotiated better odds than the house men offered. The entire procedure was a throwback to the days before pari-mutuel betting at racetracks, when bookmakers operated the legal betting and set the odds.
Lined up on the floor on opposite sides of the arena was a number of wire cages containing roosters of all sizes and breeds. A small roar erupted from the crowd when a tall, burly man wearing worn denim overalls brought two cages to the center of the floor. He placed the cages about a yard apart, and the men yelled and furiously waved their fists full of cash. One cage contained a small, reddish-brown rooster with black on the end of his feathers. He had a large spot below his neck where no feathers grew because of scar material, and a talon was missing on one of his feet. The other cage held a snow white rooster, highlighted by the red of his eyes and crown and the yellow of his talons. The yelling peaked when the burly man took the brown rooster from his cage and held the bird over his head, turning in all directions so each section of the crowded building could get a good look. Then a smaller man with a scraggly salt-and-pepper beard, wearing a floppy straw hat, took the white rooster from his cage and did the same thing.
Ritmo pointed at one of the house men. He walked up to us and pulled out a brown betting slip. Ritmo handed him two one-hundred dollar bills and the man quickly scribbled on the paper with a stubby pencil and stuck it in Ritmo’s hand.
“What’s the action, Ritmo?”
“Gotta lay two to one on the brown bird, but he’s a pro, been around a while. You get two to one for your sugar if you like the white one, but he’s a rookie.”
The house man booking Ritmo’s bet looked hard at me, poking his fist full of cash in my direction and shouted,
“Rouge o blanche?
“He’s motioning for you to get your money out and bet,” Ritmo explained. “ Ignore him and he’ll go away and find another bettor.”
The room was now quite warm and damp fr
om the humidity of the swamp and from so many men being closed up in it. I took off my coat and noticed sweat beads forming on Ritmo’s forehead just under the edge of his toupee. Why he even wore that rug to a place like this was amusing to me. We both began to perspire through our shirts, as did most of the others.
The two men holding the roosters walked to opposite sides of the arena and turned to face each other. They affixed sharp, stainless steel blades to the talons of their respective roosters. The blades were double-edged and about four inches long. Then, as in an old-fashioned duel, the men slowly walked toward each other in the center. They thrust the roosters toward each other then quickly pulled them back, taunting and teasing them. They repeated this several times until the birds could barely be held back any more. Suddenly, they threw them both down in the dirt toward each other and backed away.
The birds wasted no time in pecking and jumping at each other. The crowd shouted loudly as in a boxing match, and cheered on their favorite with each blow delivered. The birds pecked and clawed at each other in close quarters for several minutes. The white rooster, somewhat bigger than his foe, seemed to establish himself early with a couple of strong leaps on his smaller opponent. He spread his large wings and crowed loudly each time he jumped. He knocked the reddish-brown bird to the dirt, and a few brown feathers shook loose from his body and floated in the air. The weight of the white bird seemed to surprise and overpower the brown one. The smaller bird paused, like a fighter getting up off the canvas after a knockdown. The hackles raised around his neck, and he leaped several feet into the air and came down with his bladed talon on top of the other rooster in a stomping motion, driving the double edged blade through the white wing. Severely stunned, the white bird hobbled a short distance, then launched a flying attack of his own, jumping feet first. He clawed at the smaller bird but his blade barely made contact. He used his larger beak to bite at the brown rooster’s neck. The panic screeching from the birds was now quite severe.
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