A Morning for Flamingos

by James Lee Burke

  It was silent down below now.

  “If you’re hurt and can’t move, tell me so,” I said. “We’ll have you in a hospital in Slidell in a half hour. But first you’ve got to throw out the shotgun.”

  The only sounds were the rain dripping in the water and the tree limbs creaking overhead. Sweat ran out of my hair, and the wind blowing through the windows was cold on my face.

  “Look, Boggs, you’re in an iron box. It all ends right here. If I open up on you, there’s no place you can hide. Use your head. You don’t have to die here.”

  Then I heard him moving fast through the water, from out of a corner that was tilted at an upward angle against the bank, into full view at the bottom of the steps, his neck and shoulder scarlet with blood, his face and threadlike hair and drenched T-shirt strung with algae and spiderwebs. But he was hurt badly, and the tip of the shotgun barrel caught on the handrail of the steps just as I began firing down into the hold with both pistols.

  The bullets ricocheted off the steps and the hull, sparking and whanging from one surface to the next. He dropped the shotgun into the water and tried to cover his face and head with his arms. But he lost his balance on the sloping floor and toppled forward into the machinist’s hoist and suspended engine block. The chains roared loose from the pulleys, and Jimmie Lee Boggs crashed against the flooded bottom of the hull with the engine block and the tangle of chains squarely on top of his loins and lower chest. The blood drained from his face, and he reared back his head and opened his mouth in an enormous O like a man who couldn’t find words for his pain.

  I set both pistols on the floor of the pilothouse and walked down the steps into the water. The water was cold inside my socks and against my shins, and from one corner I smelled the sweet, fetid odor of a dead nutria whose webbed feet bobbed against the hull. The waterline was up to Boggs’s neck, his grease-streaked hands rested on top of the block like claws, and he breathed as though his lungs were filled with some terrible obstruction.

  I reached down under the water and caught the end of the crankshaft with both hands and tried to lift it. I strained until my shirt split along my back, and I slipped on the layer of moss and algae that covered the floor and stumbled sideways against the hull. My knee hit the side of his head.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  He cleared his throat and rubbed one eye hard with his palm, but he did not speak.

  “Can you move at all?” I said.

  He shook his head.

  “I’ve got a jack in the truck,” I said. “I’ll go get it and come back. But you’re going to have to do something for me, Jimmie Lee.”

  His elongated spearmint-green eyes looked up into mine. The pupils were like tiny burnt cinders.

  “Can you talk to me?” I said.

  “Yeah, I can talk.” His voice was thick with phlegm.

  “When I come back I want you to tell me what happened to Hipolyte Broussard. I want you to tell me who stuffed that oil rag down his mouth. Are we agreed on that?”

  “Why do you give a fuck?”

  “Because Tee Beau Latiolais is a friend of mine. Because I’m a police officer.”

  His eyes looked away at the rust-eaten line of holes in the hull. Where there had been light from the outside, the river current was now eddying inside the barge. His face was bright with sweat.

  “Get me out of here, man. The tide’s coming in,” he said.

  I climbed hurriedly up the steps, got the jack and a three-battery flashlight out of the equipment box in the bed of my truck, made my way back across the footbridge, and climbed back down into the engine room. I clicked on the flashlight and balanced it on a step so that the beam struck the hull above where Boggs was pinned. His skin looked bone-white against the blackness of the water.

  I wedged the base of the jack between the tilted floor and the side of the hull and fitted the handle into the ratchet socket. I snugged the top of the jack against the engine block and started pumping the handle.

  “Come on, Boggs, talk to me. It’s not a time to hold back,” I said.

  He strained his chin upward to keep it out of the water.

  “The colored kid didn’t kill the redbone. Fuck, man, get the sonofabitch off me,” he said.

  “Who did?”

  “The woman did.”

  “Which woman?”

  “Mama Goula. Who do you think, man?”

  “How do you know this, Jimmie Lee?”

  “I was out there. The redbone was under the bus, banging on the brake drums, yelling at the kid. The bus fell on him and the kid took off running. Come on, man, I’m busted up inside.”

  “Keep talking to me, Jimmie Lee.”

  “Mama Goula had brought some chippies out to the camp. She found the redbone and poked the rag down his throat with her thumb.”

  I felt the engine block move slightly; then the jack handle slipped out of the socket and my knuckles raked against the hull. Boggs pushed with both hands against the block, his neck cording with the strain.

  “Hang on,” I said, and reset the jack flush against the hull with the other end inserted against the engine’s crankshaft. I jacked the handle slowly with both hands, a notch at a time, to try to move the engine’s weight back on Boggs’s legs so he could sit up higher out of the water.

  “Why did she want to kill Hipolyte?” I said.

  “She didn’t want to split the action. It was a perfect chance to clip the redbone. She knew everybody would blame the kid. Fuck, hurry up, man.”

  “Why would they blame Tee Beau?”

  “The redbone was queer for him. He wanted to make the kid his punk.”

  I eased the jack up another notch, saw it shift the block perhaps a half inch, and then I clicked it up another notch. It popped loose from the crankshaft with such force that it broke through the water’s surface like a spring. Boggs’s mouth opened breathlessly.

  “You sonofabitch, you’re gonna tear my insides out,” he said.

  “Listen, I’ve got to find a piece of hose or some pipe.”

  “What?” His eyes were filled with fright.

  “I’ve got to get you something to breathe through.”

  “No! You get that jack under the block.”

  I held it up in my hand.

  “It’s stripped, Boggs,” I said.

  “Oh man, don’t tell me that.”

  “Come on, we’re not finished yet. I’ll be right back.”

  I hunted through the pilothouse and fore and aft on the deck, but anything of value that could be removed from the barge had long ago been taken by scavengers. Then I recrossed the bridge and tore the radiator hose out of my truck. When I climbed back down into the engine room, Boggs’s head was tilted all the way back, so that his ears were underwater and only his face was clear of the surface.

  I knelt by him and put my hand under the back of his head.

  “Take a breath and lift up your head so you can hear me,” I said.

  Then I said it again and nudged the back of his head. He straightened his neck and looked at me wide-eyed, his mouth crimped tight, his nostrils shuddering at the waterline.

  “We’re going to hold this hose as tight as we can around your mouth,” I said. “I’ll stay with you until the tide goes out. Then I’ll get help and we’ll pull this block off you. You’ve got my word, Jimmie Lee. I’m not going anywhere. But we’ve got to keep the hose sealed against your mouth. Do you understand that?”

  He blinked his eyes, then laid his head back in the water again, and I pressed the hard rubber edges of the radiator hose around his mouth.

  We held it there together for fifteen minutes while the water climbed higher and covered his face entirely. His hair floated in a dirty aura about his head, and his eyes stared up at me like watery green marbles. Then I felt the rubber slip against his skin, heard him choke down inside the hose, and saw a fine bead of air bubbles rise from the side of his mouth.

  I tried to screw the hose tighter into his mouth, but h
e had swallowed water and was fighting now. At first his hands locked on my wrists, as though I were the source of his suffering; then his fists burst through the surface and flailed the air, and finally caught my shirt and tore it down the front of my chest. I pushed the hose down at him again, but there was no way now he could blow the water out of it and regain his breath.

  Then one hand came up from my shirt, and felt my face like a blind man reaching out to discover some fragile and tender human mystery, and a last solitary air bubble floated from his throat to the surface and popped in the dead air.

  Chapter 15

  Tony had walked almost all the way back to his fishing camp when I slowed the truck abreast of him under a row of moss-hung oaks. It had stopped raining now, and out in the pasture the cows had broken out of their clumps and were grazing in the grass again. The hair on the back of Tony’s head was singed the color of burnt copper. He glanced sideways at me, indifferently, and kept walking.

  “Get in,” I said.

  He jumped over a puddle in front of him and brushed a wet branch out of his face. I let the truck idle slowly forward in first gear.

  “Come on, Tony. Get in,” I said.

  “Is this a bust? If it is, do it by the numbers. I’ve got lawyers that’ll eat your lunch.”

  I braked the truck at an angle in front of him and popped open the passenger door.

  “Don’t act like a sprout, Tony,” I said. “I want to tell you something.”

  He paused, looked out over the fields, pinched his nose, then got in the truck and closed the door. His clothes smelled like smoke and ashes. A volunteer fire truck passed us and splashed a curtain of yellow water across my windshield. Tony watched the fire truck disappear down the road through the back window. Finally he said, “Jimmie Lee got away from you?”

  “No.”

  “You popped him?”

  “He drowned.”

  “Drowned?”

  I told him what happened down in the engine room of the drill barge.

  “Then I guess it’s a red-letter day for you, Dave. You got to watch Jimmie Lee shuffle off with the hallelujah chorus, and you get to be the narc who made the case on Tony C.”

  “Is that the way you read it?”

  “I told you once, everybody cuts a piece out of your ass one way or another. Except don’t bank your promotion or your pay raise yet, Dave. What you’ve got here is entrapment. Also, I don’t think you’ve got enough on that tape to get them real excited at the U.S. Attorney’s office. You’re DEA, right?”

  “Indirectly.”

  “I’ll put in a word for you. I’ll tell them you really did your job well.”

  The road bent close to the river again, and up ahead I could see Tony’s fish camp and the Lincoln convertible parked in the back under the trees. Smoke rose from the chimney and flattened in the salt breeze off the Gulf. I pulled the truck onto the shoulder of the road and cut the engine.

  I took Tony’s .45 from the pocket of my fatigue jacket and handed it to him. He looked back at me strangely.

  “Here’s the lay of the land, Tony,” I said. “I think you’ve got a big Purple Heart nailed up in the middle of your forehead. Everybody is supposed to feel you’re the only guy who did bad time in Vietnam. You also give me the impression that somebody else is responsible for your addiction and getting you out of it. But the bottom line is you sell dope to people and they fuck up their lives with it.”

  “I think maybe it’s you who’s got the problem with conscience, Dave.”

  “You’re wrong. As of now you’re on your own. As far as I know, you died in that fire back there. I don’t think a county medical examiner, particularly in a place like this, will ever sort out the bones and teeth in that hangar. If you disappear into Mexico with Paul and stay out of the business, I think the DEA will write you off. I doubt if your wife will be a problem, either, since she’ll acquire almost everything you own.”

  He chewed on his lip and looked up the incline at the camp.

  “You’ve got your plane, you’ve got Jess to fly it, you’ve got that fine little boy to take with you,” I said. “I think if you make the right choice, Tony, you might be home free.”

  “They won’t believe you.”

  “Maybe you inflate your importance. Twenty-four hours after you’re off the board, somebody else will take your place. In a year nobody will be able to find your file.”

  He made pockets of air in his cheeks and switched them back and forth as though he were swishing water around in his mouth.

  “It’s a possibility, isn’t it?” he said. He bit a hangnail off his thumb and removed it from his tongue. “Just pop through a hole in the dimension and leave a big question mark behind. That’s not bad.”

  “Like you said to me the other day, it’s always about money. Stay away from the money, and the Houston and Miami crowd will probably stay away from you.”

  “Maybe.”

  “But any way you cut it, it’s adiós, Tony.”

  “My ranch is outside a little village called Zapopan. Maybe you’ll get a postcard from there.”

  “No, I think your story ends here.”

  He pulled the clip from the handle of his .45, slid back the receiver, removed the round from the chamber, and inserted it in the top of the clip. He tapped the clip idly against the chrome-plated finish of the pistol, then put his hand on the door handle.

  “I don’t guess you’re big on shaking hands,” he said.

  I rested my palm on the bottom of the steering wheel and looked straight ahead at the yellow road winding through the trees.

  “Say good-bye to Paul for me,” I said.

  I heard him get out of the truck and close the door.

  “Tony?” I said.

  He looked back through the window.

  “If I ever hear you’re dealing dope again, we’ll pick it up where we left off.”

  “No, I don’t think so, Dave. I have a feeling your cop days are about over.”

  “Oh?”

  He leaned down on the window jamb.

  “Your heart gets in the way of your head,” he said. “If you don’t know that, the pencil pushers you work for will. They’ll get rid of you, too. Maybe you won’t accept any thanks from me, and maybe I won’t even offer you any, but my little boy up there says thank you. You can wear that in your hat or stick it in your ear. So long, Dave.”

  He walked up the pine-needle-covered slope toward the back of the camp. He took his Marine Corps utility cap from his back pocket, slapped the soot off it against his trousers, and fitted it at an angle on his head. I drove slowly down the road past the camp, the truck lurching in the flooded potholes, and saw him open the screen door and smile at someone inside.

  I came out of the trees and drove through a winter-green field that was filled with snowy egrets and blue herons feeding by a grassy pond. Ahead I could see the coast, the palm fronds whipping in the wind, and the waves cresting and blowing out on Lake Borgne and the Gulf. The air was cool and flecked with sunlight and smelled like salt and distant rain. And I realized that in the west the sun had broken through the gray seal of clouds, and left a rip in the sky like a yellow and purple rose.

  Epilogue

  Tony was right. Minos didn’t believe me, particularly after I gave him a tape recording that contained a long blank space between the fire in the airplane hangar and Jimmie Lee Boggs’s watery statement about Tee Beau’s innocence in the murder of Hipolyte Broussard. But I didn’t care. I had grown weary of federal agents and wiseguys, narcs and stings and brain-fried lowlifes, and all the seriousness and pretense we invest in the province of moral invalids. I had decided it was time to let someone else wander about in that neon-lit moonscape, where we constantly try to define the source of our national discontent, until our unsated addictions target an antithetically mixed, quixotic figure like Tony Cardo, and lead us away from ourselves.

  I don’t know what happened to him. The DEA found his Lincoln, his only means of tra
nsportation, at the camp, but they matched the tire treads to fresh tire tracks at the hangar where he kept his plane. Perhaps he paid somebody to drive the Lincoln back to the camp; however, the DEA also found his plane still in the hangar. One of Minos’s fellow workers, one who was enraged at the fact that the additional fifty thousand dollars given me in the sting had been burned up in the hangar fire, theorized that Tony had had someone else fly a plane into the airstrip and pick up him, Paul, and Jess Ornella. But federal agents in Guadalajara who visited Tony’s ranch outside Zapopan reported that Tony had not been seen in the area for almost a year. The next time I saw Minos in Lafayette, to plan a fishing trip, I mentioned Tony’s name. He yawned, picked up a file folder off his desk, and showed me a photo of a man whose facial features looked back at me with the dirty luminescence and dark clarity characteristic of booking-room photography.

  “You know this guy?” he said.

  “No.”

  “He lives in Metairie. He’s a new boy on the block. We’d like very much to get him into our gray-bar hotel chain. He—”

  But now it was I whose eyes began to glaze, and who tried not to yawn at the sound of the rain on the oak trees outside the window.

  Two months later I received a creased and dog-eared envelope postmarked in Lake Charles. Inside it was a color photograph of Paul smiling in a fighting chair on the stern of a sport fishing boat. Squatted down next to the chair, with a four-foot tarpon held in both arms, the enormous hook still protruding from its dead mouth, was Jess Ornella, his jailhouse tattoos as blue against his tan as the sea behind him. With his back turned to the camera was a shirtless man in a huge Mexican sombrero who was baiting a mullet on a feathered spoon. His curly hair was cut short and glistened with sweat above his tiny ears. In the background was a biscuit-colored beach with a few hot-looking, wilted palm trees on it and a desiccated wooden dock, strung with drying butterfly nets, that extended out into the surf.

  Someone had written in ballpoint on the back of the photograph: