“There’s nothing you can do. It involves somebody else. Oh God, where’s my stash?” she said.
She got up from the table, took a clear, sealed plastic bag of reefer from a kitchen drawer, sat back down, and began to roll a joint from a sheaf of ZigZag cigarette papers. Her eyes were narrowed with concentration, but her fingers began to shake and strands of reefer fell from both sides of the paper. Then she gave it up, rested her elbows on the table, and pressed a knuckle from each hand against her temples.
I picked up the plastic bag, splayed it open, dropped the papers inside, raked the loose strands of reefer into it, and walked down a short hallway to the bathroom.
“What are you doing?” she said.
I emptied the bag into the toilet and flushed it. Then I dropped the bag into a kitchen garbage sack. When I turned around she was standing a foot from me. Her hair hung on her forehead, and she had accidentally smeared her lipstick.
“Why did you do that?” she said.
“You don’t need it.”
“I don’t need it?”
“No.”
“Tony says it’s all a cluster fuck.”
“He’s wrong.”
Her eyes were green and moist and they looked directly into mine. I could hear the wetness in her throat when she swallowed. The top of her pink-ribboned peasant blouse was crooked on her shoulders.
“There’s always a way out of trouble,” I said. “You just have to trust your friends once in a while.”
I touched her on the upper arm with my palm. I meant it in a protective and friendly way. Yes, I know that was the way I meant it. I could see the freckles on her shoulders, feel her breath on my face. She stepped close to me, and my arms were on her back, my hands lightly touching the coolness of her skin, the thickness of her hair. She rubbed her face under my chin, and I felt a shudder go through her body like tension leaving a metal spring.
Then she remained motionless in my arms, her breath small and regular against my chest. In the distance, I could see the hard, stiff outline of the Huey Long Bridge against a bank of purple rain clouds.
Chapter 11
After I left Kim’s, I drove into the French Quarter and tried to find a place to park close by Clete’s nightclub. But it was Saturday afternoon, the Quarter was crowded with tourists, and I had to park off Elysian Fields and walk back down Decatur to the club. A noisy crowd was at the bar, and a five-piece band was blaring out “Rampart Street Parade” by the dance floor.
“Take a walk with me,” I said to Clete, who was behind the bar in a pair of gray slacks and a green Tulane sweatshirt.
“It’s a little busy right now, Streak.”
“It’s important.”
We crossed the street and walked down to the Café du Monde, where I ordered beignets through the takeout window.
“Beautiful day,” I said.
“I’m not kidding, Dave, I’ve got a bar to run. What is it?”
“Come on,” I said. We walked over the top of the levee and out onto the gentle green slope that led down to the river. On the far side of the water was the shabby outline of Algiers. “I need a cover story.”
His eyes went up and down my shirt.
“What are you talking about?” he said.
“Minos is going to put a wire on me. I need to make Tony talk about a big drug delivery that’s about to go down. I have to have some way of bringing it up.”
“You might need a cover story about something else,” he said, and reached out and removed a long strand of red hair from my shirtfront. “Brush up against somebody on the streetcar, did you?”
“Let’s keep to the subject.”
“Have you lost your mind?”
“Lay off it, Clete.”
“I told you one of the cardinal rules when you get involved with the greaseballs: Don’t mess with their broads.”
“Have you heard anything about a big delivery?”
“I bet she’s one hot item, though, isn’t she?”
“I need your help. Will you cut out the bullshit?”
He took a beignet out of the napkin in my hand and bit off half of it. His green eyes were thoughtful as he looked out at the river.
“I hear crack prices are up in the Iberville welfare project, which means the supply is down,” he said. “But next week everybody is going to have all the rock they can smoke. That’s the word, anyway. What’s the DEA say?”
“Same thing.”
“That crack is some mean shit. You ever watch them huff that stuff? They remind me of somebody having a seizure.”
“You know I’m staying out at Cardo’s?”
“I called Dautrieve. He told me. Why is it that guy makes me feel like anthrax?”
“Boggs has been given a contract on Cardo.”
“And you’re living with him? That’s great, Streak. Maybe you ought to look into some real estate buys on the San Andreas fault.”
“I’m going to play it one more week, then I’m out.”
“I think you’re in. The operative word there, mon, is in. Bootsie Giacano wasn’t dangerous enough. You had to get in the sack with Cardo’s main punch.”
“That’s not the way it is. Don’t talk about her that way, either, Clete.”
“Excuse me. It’s my lack of couth. We’re talking the parochial school sodality here. Dave, you’d better get your head on straight. You live among these people, you start to believe they’re like us. They’re not, mon. When it comes down to saving their own ass, they’d sell their mothers to a puppy farm.”
“Boggs has been in New Iberia. I think he’s got me on his dance card. I’d rather deal with him in New Orleans than around Alafair.”
“I think you’re being used. I think you should forget Cardo and these DEA jerk-offs and you and I should go after Boggs and blow out his candle. What do you care if Cardo sells dope? You shut him down, the price on the street goes up. The dealers come out ahead any way you cut it. Look, most of the dope has gone back to the slums, anyway. That’s where it started, that’s where it’s going to stay. Then one day the poor dumb bastards will get tired of watching their own kind get hauled away in body bags.”
“I was in jail last night. Nate Baxter rousted Tony and me and his driver. Can you get to somebody in the First District, find out what Baxter’s doing?”
“In jail?”
“That’s right.”
“You remind me of these kids with their crack pipes. It takes a guy like me twenty years to go to hell. They can do it in six months. But, Streak, you’ve got a talent for fucking up your life in weeks.”
“Will you see what you can find out about Baxter?”
“A cop who blew the country with a murder warrant on him? I’m your liaison person?”
He put the rest of the beignet in his mouth and laughed while he rubbed his palm clean with his napkin.
I walked back to my truck in the cooling shadows and drove down Canal to the corner of St. Charles, where Clete had seen Tee Beau Latiolais working in a pizza place. Young black men lounged in front of the liquor stores and arcades, their bodies striped with the purple and pink neon glow from the windows. I found Tee Beau in the back of a long, narrow café, his white paper hat pulled down to his eyebrows, so that he seemed to be staring at me from under a visor.
“Take a break. I need to talk with you, Tee Beau,” I said.
His eyes were peculiar, melancholy, as though he were witnessing a bad fate for a friend that the friend was not aware of.
“What is it?” I said.
He didn’t answer. He wiped his hands on his apron and put on a pair of sunglasses. We walked around the corner to the Pearl and sat at the bar. A white man farther down the bar was shucking oysters with a fierce energy on a sideboard. Tee Beau ordered a Falstaff and kept looking at me out of the side of his eye.
“You know, Tee Beau, I don’t think sunglasses in the evening are the best kind of disguise.”
“Why you want to see me, Mr. Dave?”
“I ain’t got to. Talked to her last night. She didn’t say nothing about seeing Jimmie Lee. But she tole me what Gros Mama Goula say about you, Mr. Dave.”
“Oh?”
“You got the gris-gris. She say you been messin’ where you ain’t suppose to be messin’. You ain’t listen to nobody.”
“Listen, Tee Beau, Gros Mama is a big black gasbag. She jerks your people around with a lot of superstition that goes back to the islands, back to the slave days.”
But my words meant nothing to him.
“I made you this, Mr. Dave. I was gonna come find you.”
“I appreciate it, but—”
“You put it on your ankle, you.”
I made no offer to take the perforated dime and the piece of red string looped through it from his hand. He dropped them in my shirt pocket.
“You white, you been to colletch, you don’t believe,” he said. “But I seen things. A man that had snakes crawl all over his grave. They was fat as my wrist. Couldn’t keep them off the grave with poison or a shotgun. You stick a hayfork in them, shake them off in a fire, they be back the next morning, smelling like they been lying in hot ash.
“A woman name Miz Gold, ’cause her skin was gold, she taken a man away from Gros Mama, then come in Gros Mama’s juke with him, wearing a pink silk dress, carrying a pink umbrella, laughing about Gros Mama’s tattoos and saying she ain’t nothing but a nigger putain that does what white mens tells her. The next day Miz Gold woke up with hair all over her face. Just like a monkey. She do everything to get rid of it, Mr. Dave, pull it out of her skin with pliers till blood run down her neck. But it didn’t do no good. That woman so ugly nobody go near her, no white peoples hire her. She use to go up and down the alley, picking rags out of my gran’maman’s trash can.”
“Okay, Tee Beau, I’ll keep it all in mind.”
“No, you ain’t. In one way you like most white folks, Mr. Dave. You don’t hear what a black man saying to you.”
He upended his bottle of Falstaff and looked at me over the top of his glasses.
The evening air was cool and moist, purple with shadow, when I walked back to my truck. I saw a car parked overtime at a meter. I broke the red string off the perforated dime that Tee Beau had given me, slipped the dime into the meter, and twisted the handle. In front of the liquor store two Negro men in bright print shirts and lacquered porkpie hats were snapping their fingers to the music on a boom box. One of them smiled at me for no reason, his teeth a brilliant flash of gold.
I didn’t go back to Tony’s right away. Instead, I parked by Jackson Square and sat on a stone bench in front of St. Louis Cathedral and watched people leaving Saturday evening Mass. My head was filled with confused thoughts, like a clatter of birds’ wings inside a cage. I used a pay phone on the corner to call Bootsie, but she wasn’t home. The square was dark now, the myrtle and banana trees etched in the light from the Café du Monde, and there was a chill in the wind off the river. After the cathedral had emptied, I went inside and knelt in a back pew. A tiny red light, like a drop of electrified blood, glowed at the top of a confessional box, which meant that a priest was inside.
Many people are currently enamored with Cajun culture, but they know little of its darker side: organized dogfights and cockfights, the casual attitude toward the sexual exploitation of Negro women, the environmental ignorance that has allowed the draining and industrial poisoning of the wetlands. Also, few outsiders understand the violent feelings that Cajun people have about the nature of fidelity and human possession.
When I was twenty I worked as a welder’s helper with my father on a pipeline outside of a little town north of the Atchafalaya Basin. Someone discovered that a married woman in the town was having an affair with the priest. A mob came for her at night, in a caravan of cars, and took her from her home and drove her to an empty field next to the church. They formed a circle around her, and while she cried and begged they beat her black and blue with hairbrushes. Simultaneously someone phoned her husband at his job in Baton Rouge and told him of his wife’s infidelity. He was killed driving home that night in a rainstorm.
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, then hear the report carried to us across the flattened grass.
“Those guys and their guns. What a pain in the ass,” Tony said.
A Morning for Flamingos Page 22