A Morning for Flamingos

by James Lee Burke

  Even Clete quickly fell into the ambience, his arms spread out on the tile trough in the deep end, his pale blue canvas hat low on his brow, a twenty-year-old girl hovering within the crook of his arm. Her mouth was red and cold from the whiskey sour she sipped from a glass in one hand, and she laughed at everything he said and balanced herself by cupping his shoulder whenever she started to float away from the pool’s edge. I could see her knee rake against his thigh.

  The air was becoming cooler now, and I treaded water to stay warm. It was impossible to get Cardo alone. He sat at the redwood table in a white terry cloth robe, one leg crossed on his knee, smoking a Pall Mall in a gold cigarette holder, while four of his guests sat around him and smiled brightly into his words. I hung from the diving board by one arm and began to think it was better to mark the day off.

  “How do you like being in the life?” a voice said behind me.

  She sat on the diving board mat in a light green dress covered with tiny pink flowers. She had tucked her red hair up into a green beret, but one side of it had fallen down on her neck. Her lipstick was bright red, and she wore too much of it, but when she parted her mouth and looked directly at me, she disturbed me and made me keenly aware that there is no safety for the male in either age or pride.

  “What’s happening, Kim?” I said.

  “What’s happening with you, hotshot?”

  “Like you say, enjoying the life. You don’t want to swim?”

  “I think I’ll pass. Two nights ago they were screwing in here.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “You heard me. On a rubber raft, with the lights on. What a bunch.”

  I lifted myself out of the pool and walked to the guest cottage to shower and dress. I heard her laugh behind me. When I came back out she was sitting on a cushioned, scrolled iron chair with her legs crossed. I sat down on the dry mat on the back edge of the diving board.

  “You’re a case,” she said.

  “How’s that?” I said, looking toward the shallow end, where Tony was tapping a beach ball back and forth with two girls.

  “You make me think of a cat that’s trying to like sitting on a hot stove,” she said.

  “Where did you say you’re from?”

  “I didn’t.”

  “I need to talk to Tony alone. It’s hard to do.”

  “You’re still out for the big score, huh, hotshot?”

  “How about cutting me a little slack?”

  “All you want, babe.”

  “Are you his girl?”

  She looked away from me at the trees in the yard, her face cool and sculpted, her hair thick and dark red where it was pinned up on the back of her neck. She touched at an area between her teeth with her little fingernail, then glanced back into my face. Her eyes looked directly into mine, but they were impossible to read.

  “What?” I asked her.

  Still she didn’t answer, and instead continued to stare into my face. I took a breath.

  “I think I need to get something to eat,” I said.

  “If you want to see Tony alone, he’ll be going up to the house soon to check on his little boy. He always does.”

  “His little boy?”

  “It’s the reason his wife’s always taking off. She can’t handle it.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Do yourself a favor and go home, Robicheaux.”

  She stood up, tucked her hair under her beret, and walked off alone toward the tennis court. A moment later I saw her leaning on her arms against the wire mesh, looking at nothing, her face wan and empty in the shadow of the myrtle bushes.

  She was right about Tony Cardo, though. Ten minutes later, when I was about to signal Clete that it was time to hang it up, Cardo excused himself from his guests and walked across his lawn to a glassed-in sun porch at the back of his house. I went to the side door of the house and knocked. The Negro houseman answered, a polishing cloth in his hand.

  “I’d like to see Mr. Cardo,” I said.

  “He be out directly.”

  “I’d like to see him inside, please.”

  “Just a moment, suh,” he said, and walked into the back of the house. Then he returned and unlatched the screen. “Mr. Cardo want you to wait in the library.”

  I followed the houseman through a huge, gleaming kitchen, a living room furnished with French antiques and hung with a chandelier the size of a beach umbrella, into a pine-paneled study whose shelves were filled with encyclopedias, sets of science and popular history books, novels from book clubs, and plastic-bound collections of classics, the kind that are printed on low-grade paper and advertised on cable TV stations. The chairs and couch were red leather, the big glass-topped mahogany desk one that would perhaps befit Leo Tolstoy.

  Tony slid open the far door and stepped inside in his terry cloth robe and sandals. Before he closed the door again, I looked out on the sun porch and saw the back of a wheelchair framed against a lighted television screen. The floor around the chair was strewn with toys and stuffed animals.

  “I didn’t give you your magazine,” I said, and took the copy of the Atlantic out of my pocket and handed it to him.

  “Hey, thanks, Dave. I appreciate it.”

  “I have to go, too. I just wanted to tell you I’d like to do business with you, but I have to have something firm. Like this afternoon, Tony.”

  “I want you to understand something, and I don’t want you to take offense. The house is a family place, I don’t do business in it. Call Ray Fontenot tomorrow. We’ll work something out. You got my word on it.”

  “All right.”

  “Your face looks a little cloudy.”

  “I don’t trust Fontenot. I don’t know that you should, either.”

  “Serious charge. What’d he do?”

  “He’s an addict and he looks after his own butt.”

  “They all do.”

  “Thanks for having us out.”

  “Wait a minute, don’t run off. I heard you were in ‘Nam.”

  “Ten months, before it got real hot.”

  “Those scars on your thigh, you got hit?”

  “A bouncing Betty on a trail. It was a dumb place to be at night.”

  “Sit down a second. Come on, you’re not in that big a hurry. Then you got to go back to the States?”

  “Sure. A million-dollar wound.”

  “In the corps, unless you get the big one, you got to earn two Hearts before you skate.”

  “You were hit?”

  “Right in the butt. A zip up in a tree, maybe three hundred yards out.”

  I looked at my watch. I didn’t want to talk more about the war, but it was obvious that he did. His eyes wandered over my face, as though he were searching for a piece of knowledge there that had eluded him in his own life. Then because I had to say something, I asked him a question that produced a strange consequence.

  “What was your outfit?”

  “Third Battalion, Seventh Regiment, First Marine Division,” he said, and smiled.

  “Oh yeah, you guys were around Chu Lai.”

  The skin of his face tightened.

  “How do you know that?” he said.

  “I was there,” I said, confused.

  “You were in Chu Lai?” The skin around his eyes and nostrils was white.

  “No, I mean I was in Vietnam. I knew some Marines who were around Chu Lai, that’s all.”

  “Who were these guys?”

  “I don’t even remember their names, Tony.”

  “I just wondered.”

  “Are you all right, partner?”

  He widened his eyes and breathed air up through his nose.

  “It was a fucking meat grinder, man,” he said.

  “Maybe it’s time to give it the deep six.”

  “What?”

  “We didn’t ask to get sent over there. A time comes when we stop dragging the monsters around.”

  “You saying I did something over there?”

>   “If you didn’t, you saw it done.”

  He looked at me a long moment, his mouth a tight line.

  “You’re an unusual man,” he said.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “One day just kick the door shut on Shitsville?”

  “You already lived it. Why watch the replay the rest of your life?”

  “Some guys say the war’s never over.”

  “It is for me.”

  “No dreams?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “That’s what I thought,” he said. His body was deep in a leather chair. He smiled crookedly at me.

  But my strange afternoon at Tony C.’s was not over. When Clete and I walked out to my truck, I noticed that my wallet was gone. I looked in the guest cottage and out by the pool, then realized that it had probably fallen out of my pocket when I was sitting in the library. The black man let me in the side of the house again. This time the sliding door of the library that gave onto the sun porch was open, and I saw Tony dressing a little boy in the wheelchair surrounded by a litter of toys. He did not see me, not at first. The little boy might have been seven or eight. His face was handsome and bright, but his head rested on his shoulders as though he had no neck, his legs were too short for his truncated body, and his back was deformed terribly. His hair was brown and wet, and Tony Cardo parted and combed it and leaned over and kissed him on the brow. Then his eyes glanced up into my face.

  “I’m sorry. I dropped my wallet in the chair,” I said.

  He walked to the door and slid it shut.

  That night it rained. It ran off the roof, the gutters, the balconies, clattered on the palm fronds and banana trees, spun like a vortex of wet light inside the courtyard. Lightning cracked across the sky and rattled the windows, and I slept with a pillow crimped across my head. I did not hear the lock pick in the door nor the handle turn when the bolt clicked free of the jamb. Instead, I felt a drop in the room’s temperature, and smelled leaves and rain. I raised up on one elbow and looked into the face of Tony Cardo, who leaned forward on a straight-backed chair by the side of my bed. One of his gatemen stood behind him, dripping water on the floor.

  “How scared you ever been?” he said. His narrow, elongated face looked white in the glow of the electric light that shone through the window from the courtyard.

  “What?” My hand went toward the drawer of the nightstand.

  “No,” he said, took my wrist, and pushed my arm back on the bed.

  “What are you—”

  “How scared you ever been?” he repeated. His eyes were absolutely black and glazed with light, as though they had no pupils.

  I was sitting straight up now. The front door was halfway open, and leaves and mist were blowing inside the living room.

  “Listen, Tony—”

  “It was after you got hit, wasn’t it? When you had to lie in the dark by yourself and think about it.”

  I couldn’t smell alcohol on him. Then I looked again at his eyes, the lidless intensity, the heat that was like a match burning inside of black glass.

  “Admit it,” he said.

  “I was scared every minute I was over there. Who cares? You’re speeding, Tony.”

  Then I saw him raise the revolver from between his thighs.

  “You know how you overcome it?” he said.

  I looked at the gateman. His face was empty of expression, beaded with raindrops.

  “You confront the dragon,” Tony said.

  “Ease up, partner. This isn’t your style.”

  “What the fuck you know about my style?”

  “I didn’t do it to you. I don’t have anything to do with your life. You’re taking it to the wrong guy.”

  “You’re the right guy. You know you’re the right guy.”

  “Everybody was afraid over there. It’s just human. What’s the matter with you?”

  “You buy that? I say fuck you. You stare it in the face. Can you stare it in the face?”

  His mouth looked purple in the glow from the window. His ears were like tiny white cauliflowers pressed against his scalp.

  “I think you’re loaded, Tony. I think we’re talking black beauties here. I’m not going to help you with this bullshit. Go fuck yourself.”

  I could see his thin nostrils quiver as he breathed. He rested the revolver on the top of his right thigh. Then he said, “This is how you do it, my man.”

  He flipped out the cylinder from the frame and ejected six .38 cartridges into his palm. He clinked them all into his coat pocket except one. He fitted it into a chamber and snapped the cylinder back into place.

  “Tony, pull the plug on this before it goes any further. It’s not worth it,” I said.

  He set the hammer on half cock, spun the cylinder twice, then brought the hammer all the way back with his thumb and fitted the barrel’s opening under his chin. The skin of his face became as stiff and gray as cardboard, his eyes focused on a distant thought somewhere behind my ear. Then he pulled the trigger.

  “Jesus Christ, Tony,” I heard the gateman say, his breath rushing out of his chest.

  Tony put an unlit cigarette in his mouth, opened the cylinder again, and fitted the five rounds from his pocket back into the chambers.

  “It wasn’t even close, two chambers away from the firing pin,” he said. “Don’t ever let me see pity in your face when you look at me and my little boy again.”

  A solitary drop of water fell out of his hair and spotted the unlit cigarette in his mouth.

  Chapter 7

  The next morning the streets in the Quarter were thick with mist, and I could hear the foghorns of tugs and oil barges out on the river. I had coffee and beignets at a table inside the Café du Monde; then the sun broke out of the clouds and Jackson Square looked bright and wet and green after the night’s rain. I walked over to Ray Fontenot’s T-shirt shop on Bourbon and found him practicing his trombone in a small weed-grown, rubble-strewn courtyard in back. He wore a purple turtleneck sweater, gray slacks, and shades, even though there was little sunlight in the enclosure. He was not a gelatinous man. The rings of fat across his stomach looked hard, the kind your fist would do little harm to.

  My conversation with him did not go well.

  “So we’re agreed on everything,” he said. “You’ll bring your boat over from Morgan City, and we’ll take a little tarpon-fishing trip out on the salt. By the way, what’s your boat doing in Morgan City if you live in New Iberia?”

  “I just had the engine overhauled.”

  “That’s good. And you’ll have all the money?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Because we want lots of product for all the little boys and girls. It’s what keeps everybody’s genitalia humming. Like little nests of bees.”

  “Day after tomorrow, two A.M. at Cocodrie. Dress warm. It’ll be cold out there,” I said, and started to leave.

  “Thank you, kind sir. But there’s one change.”

  He drained the spittle out of his trombone slide onto the weeds at his feet.

  “What’s that?” I said.

  “Your friend Purcel is not going with us.”

  “He’s my business partner. He’s in.”

  “Not on this trip.”

  “Why not?”

  “He hasn’t quite learned how to behave. Besides, we don’t need him.”

  “Listen, Fontenot, if Clete gave you a bad time over Tony’s phone number, that’s a personal beef you work out on your own. This is business.”

  “He no play-a, he no go-a.”

  “What does Tony say?”

  “I make the deals for Tony, I make the terms. When you talk to me, it’s just like you’re talking to Tony.”

  “You mind if I make a call?”

  “I wouldn’t have it any other way, good sir.” He took off his sunglasses and smiled. His eyes were flat and dead and looked as if they belonged in another face.

  I used the telephone in Fontenot’s office. I could hear him blowing
into his trombone.

  “Hey, good morning. How you doing today?” Tony Cardo said.

  “I’m fine.”

  “Sure?”

  “I’m just fine, Tony.”

  “You don’t have a hard-on about last night?”

  “You’ve got your own point of view about things. I don’t want to intrude upon it.”

  “I got strong emotions. About family stuff. I get a little weird sometimes. You got to bear with me.”

  “I respect your feelings, Tony.”

  “You don’t rattle, do you?”

  “Morning and night, podna. I’ve got a problem here. Ray doesn’t want my friend along on the tarpon trip.”

  “That’s too bad.”

  “I think my friend should be able to go.”

  “I can’t interfere, Dave. It’s Ray’s call.”

  “He’s got his nose bent out of joint over a personal affront. It’s not the way a pro does things.”

  “Indulge the man.”

  “He’s a fat shit, Tony.”

  “Hey, catch a big fish for me. And I want you out to dinner this weekend. Bring your buddy, too. I like him.”

  He hung up the phone. Ray Fontenot stood in the doorway to the courtyard, his eyes filled with merriment, his tongue thick and pink on his teeth.

  At noon I went to Clete’s to pick him up for lunch. We drove in his car to a Fat Albert’s off St. Charles and ordered paper plates of red beans and dirty rice with lengths of sausage. It was warm enough to eat outside, and we sat at a green-painted picnic table under a live oak whose roots had lifted up the slabs of sidewalk and cracked the edge of the parking lot. Out on St. Charles I saw the old iron streetcar rattle past the palm trees on the esplanade.

  I told Clete about my conversation that morning with Fontenot. He chewed quietly without speaking, his green eyes thoughtful. I waited for him to say something. He didn’t.

  “Anyway, he says you’re out, and Cardo backed him up.”

  He wiped the juice from his sausage off his mouth with a paper napkin, then sucked on the corner of his lip.