A Morning for Flamingos (34 page)

Clete patted Baxter’s cheek again. The back of Clete’s thick neck was red from the effort of squatting down. His stomach and love handles hung over his belt.

“Here’s the way I see this deal,” he said. “We write the whole thing off. It was just a bad day at Black Rock, not even worth talking about later. You had a beef, Dave had a beef, it’s over now. Right?”

Baxter blinked his eyes and flexed his jaw as though he had a toothache. Water dripped out of his beard.

“Or you could go back to the First District and get into a lot of paperwork,” Clete said. “Or you might want to cause Dave some grief with Tony C. But I don’t think you’re that kind of guy. Because if you were, it’d create some nasty problems for everybody. See, here’s the serious part in all this. There’s a hooker who comes into the bar. I usually don’t let them in because they’re bad for business. But I’ve known this broad since I was in Vice myself, and she’s basically a nice girl and she respects my place and doesn’t come on to the Johns while she’s in here. Anyway, she tells a funny story. She says you’re getting freebies in the Quarter, and you made her ex-room-o cop your joint. I don’t know, maybe she made it up. But you know how those broads are, they carry a grudge a long time. I don’t think it’d take a lot to get one of them to drop the dime on you, Nate.”

Clete crimped his lips together and looked Baxter steadily in the eyes. Baxter’s face looked as though he were experiencing the first stages of recognition after an earthquake. Clete closed the lid on the toilet and sat Baxter on top of it. His head hung forward. Clete touched him gently on the shoulder with two fingers.

“It ends here, Nate,” he said quietly. “We’re understood on that, aren’t we?”

Baxter moved his lips but no sound came out.

“You don’t have to say anything, as long as we have an understanding,” Clete said. “Get yourself a couple of free doubles at the bar, if you want. I’m going to walk Dave outside now. It’s a nice day. We’re all going back outside into a nice day.”

Clete looked over the top of Baxter’s head at me and made a motion toward the door with his thumb. I walked back out through the bar onto the sidewalk under the colonnade. Clete followed me. The French Market and the tables in the  du Monde were crowded with tourists now, and the street was heavy with afternoon traffic. Clete adjusted his tie, lit a cigarette with the lighter cupped in his big hands, and looked up the street as though he had nothing in his mind except a pleasant expectation of the next event in his life.

I rubbed my collarbone and the puckered scar over the .38 wound and straightened my back.

“How’s it feel?”

“Like it’s packed in dry ice.”

He felt along my shoulder with his thumb and forefinger. He saw me flinch.

“That’s where he got you?”

“Yes.”

“There’s no break. When your collarbone’s broken, there’s a knot like a baseball.”

“Who’s the hooker?”

“You got me. The ones I knew five years ago are probably hags now. Actually, they were hags then.”

“You’re pretty slick, Clete.”

“What can I say?” He grinned at me. “But one word of advice, noble mon. Think about going back to Bayou Teche and let New Orleans go down the drain by itself. For some reason, Dave, having you in town makes me think of a man walking into a clock shop with a baseball bat.”

She had always loved roses and four-o’clocks. The flower beds in her lawn and the shaded areas around the coulee at her home on Spanish Lake had been bursting with them. Now she grew purple and gold four-o’clocks along the wall of her patio on Camp Street. They had already dropped their winter seeds like big black pepper grains on the worn bricks, but her yellow and hybrid blue roses still bloomed as big as fists. The western sky was streaked with magenta through the oak trees, and leaves floated across the tunnels of underwater light in the swimming pool. The air was heavy with the smoky taste of the meat fire in the hibachi, cool and bittersweet with the smell of fall, like the odor of burning sugarcane stubble, of pecans when they mold inside their husks under the tree.

She turned the steaks on the grill with a fork, her eyes watering in the smoke, and smiled at me. She wore leather sandals, faded designer jeans, and a black shirt with red flowers sewn into it. Her honey-colored hair was full of lights, and where it was trimmed on her neck it looked thick and stiff and soft and lovely to the touch, all at the same time.

She saw me press my hand to my shoulder again.

“Is there something wrong, Dave?” she said.

“No, I just have a little flare-up when the weather is about to change. I think it’s going to rain. You know how it is this time of year. The leaves turn, then we have a real hard rain and we sort of click into winter.”

“It’s too early for that,” she said. “Besides, winter is never that bad here, anyway.”

“No, it’s not. Boots, can I use your phone to call New Iberia? I need to check in on Alafair.”

“Sure, hon.”

Alafair’s voice made me want to leave New Orleans that night. Or maybe it made me want to escape even more the brooding premonition that seemed to hang between me and Bootsie like a secret both of us knew, but neither of us would broach.

She didn’t have to tell me about the Baylor medical center in Houston: I had seen it in her eyes. It’s a detached look, as if the person has stepped briefly around a corner and seen to the end of a long, gray street on which there are no other people. I’d flown in a dustoff loaded with wounded grunts, their foreheads painted with Mercurochrome M’s to indicate morphine injections, and the two who died before we reached battalion aid had had that look in their eyes, as though the hot wind through the doors, the steely
blat-blat
of the propeller blades, the racing green landscape below, were now all part of somebody else’s filmstrip.

“It’s bad, isn’t it, Boots?” I said. I sat in the scrolled-iron patio chair by the pool and looked at the tops of my hands when I said it.

“Yes,” she said quietly.

“What’s the name for it?”

“Lupus,” she said. Then she said. “Systemic lupus. The full Latin name means ‘red wolf.’ Sometimes people get a butterfly mask on their face. I don’t have that kind, though. It just lives inside me.”

I felt myself swallow, and I looked away from her eyes.

“You know what it is, then?” she said. She pushed the meat to the side of the grill and sat down across from me. Her hair was wreathed in smoke and the lighted turquoise shimmer off the pool.

“I’ve heard about it. I don’t know a lot,” I said.

“It attacks the connective tissue. It starts in the hands sometimes and spreads through the joints. In the worst cases, when it’s untreated, people look like they’re wrapped in strips of plastic.”

I started to speak, but I couldn’t.

“I didn’t have medical insurance, no savings, nothing but the vending machine business,” she said. “I couldn’t just walk out on the business at twenty cents on the dollar.”

I saw a flicker of anger in her eyes, a spark, a recrimination that wanted to have its way. But it was only momentary.

Then she reached forward and touched me on the knee as though it were I who should be consoled.

“Dave, there’re probably a hundred different degrees of lupus. Today it can be controlled. This new doctor I have in Houston has started me on a different kind of medication, with steroids and some other things. My problem is I ignored some warning signs, some swelling in my fingers in cold weather and stiffness in the joints, and I have some kidney damage. But I’m going to pull it off.”

“How long have you known?” I said. My voice sounded weak, as though I had borrowed it from someone else.

“For the last year.”

Her eyes moved over my face. She took my hand and held it on her knee.

“You shouldn’t look like that,” she said.

“I’ve been getting on your case, Bootsie, criticizing you, telling you that you’re mixed up with the grease-balls—”

“You didn’t have any way of knowing,
cher
.”

“Boots—”

“Yes?”

“Bootsie, I don’t know what to say to you.” I pressed my thumb and forefinger against my eyelids, but it didn’t do any good. The wilted four-o’clocks, the black silhouettes of floating leaves, the flames in the grill, all became watery and bright like splinters of light shot through crystal. “I majored in being a dumb shit. It’s the one constant in my life.”

“I know you better than anybody else on earth, Dave. And no matter what you say, or what you believe, you never deliberately hurt anybody in your life.”

Then she stood up, her face smiling down at me, and sat in my lap. She held my head against her breast and kissed my hair and stroked her fingers along my cheek.

“You remember when we used to go to Deer’s Drive-In and do this?” she said. “I think yesterday is always only a minute away.”

I could feel the softness of her breast against my ear and hear the beating of her heart like a clock that told time for both of us.

CHAPTER 14

In the hot darkness I smell the village before I see it—the wet reek of duck and hog shit, dead fish, moldy straw, boiled dog, stagnant pools of water coated with algae and mosquitoes. The air is breathless, so humid and still and devoid of movement that every line of sweat running down inside my fatigues is like the path of an insect across the skin. There is no light in the hooches, nor sound, and Marines sit listlessly on the ground, smoking, waiting for something, their weapons propped against their packs. They chew Red Man and unlit cigars, eat candy bars, and spit constantly between their legs.

Then for no reason that will ever make sense, somebody pulls the pin on a fragmentation grenade, releases the spoon, and rolls it inside a hooch. The explosion blows straw out of the bottom of the walls, lights the doorway in a rectangle of flame, sends a solitary kettle toppling end over end through the clearing. For a moment we can see the shapes of people inside, large ones and small ones, but they’ve given it up, resigned themselves to this chance ending at the hands of an angry or fearful or bored boy from South Carolina or Texas, and their silhouettes settle onto the burning straw pallet like shadows flattening into the earth.

But the flames that crack through the sides of the hooch and lick up to the roof do not burn naturally. Instead, it is as though a high wind has struck the fire, fanned it into a vortex that burns with the clean, pure intensity of white gas. Then it becomes as bright and shattering to the eyes as a phosphorous shell exploding, and we wilt back from the heat into the wavering shadows at the edge of the clearing.

Behind me I hear thin-rimmed wire wheels rolling across the dirt, and I turn and watch Tony push Paul in his wheelchair toward the white brilliance of the fire. Tony’s green utilities are sun-faded, caked with salt, streaked with sweat and mud and fecal matter from a rice paddy. He wheels Paul into the burning doorway, and I try to stop them but my feet feel as though they’re wired together, and my hand looks like a meaningless, outstretched claw.

Tony’s utilities steam in the heat; then he and Paul both burst into flame like huge candles. The fire has sound now, the roar of wind in a tunnel, the whistle of superheated air cracking through wood, the resinous popping of everything that we are—skin and organ and bone.

But I am wrong about Tony and Paul. They have not found their denouement in a Vietnamese village. They emerge from the back of the fire and walk side by side into the jungle. Their bodies glow with a cool white brilliance, like a pistol flare’s, that is interrupted intermittently by the trunks of trees and tangles of vine as they go deeper into the jungle. The tripping of my heart is the only sound in the clearing.

Tony leaned forward in the chair next to my bed, his head silhouetted against the early orange sun outside the window. He poked my shoulder with two stiff fingers.

“Hey, wake up,” he said.

“What?”

“You’re having a real mean one.”

“What?” I was raised up on my elbows now.

“Do you always wake up with a chain saw in your head? Come on, get out of the rack. We got a lot to do today.”

I sat on the side of the bed in my underwear, my forearms propped on my thighs. I rubbed my face and looked again at Tony, trying to disconnect him from the dream.

“Did you get crocked last night or something?” he said.

“No.”

“All right, get dressed and let’s eat breakfast.”

“What’s going on, Tony?”

“You’re going with me and Paul over to our fishing camp in Mississippi.”

“It’s a school day, isn’t it?”

“His school’s closed for a couple of days. They’ve got to tear some asbestos out of the ceilings or something. You want to go or not?”

“I was going to do some things with Bootsie.”

“Today you put her on hold.”

“I don’t think I want to do that.”

“Yeah?”

“I’m meeting her for lunch, Tony.”

“I owe you, I pay my debts. Are you interested or not?”

“What are you saying, partner?”

“Do you have your fifty K in place?”

“Yes.”

“Where?”

“Don’t worry, I can have it in an hour.”

“So we eat breakfast, then you get it. At ten o’clock we’re heading over for my camp. You’re going to follow in your truck.”

“This is all a little vague.”

“You wanted the score. I’m giving you the score. It’s a onetime offer. Are you in or out? Tell me now.”

“I’m in. When’s it going down?”

“You don’t need to know that.”

“Tony, I’m not sure I like being treated like a fish.”

“I don’t know when it’s going down. That’s something I’ll find out later. I told you I don’t deal with these guys as a rule. But you want the action, so I’m making an exception.”

“Are you mad about something?”

“No, why?”

“You sound like you’ve got a beef.”

“I’d already promised Paul to take him to the camp today. Then last night I got a message at one of my clubs about your deal. So I’m kind of mixing up business with a family trip. Which means I’m breaking one of my own rules, and I don’t like that. But I don’t go back on my word, either.”