James Burke - A Morning for Flamingos

"Don't worry about me. I'm solid, man." He gripped the edge of the bunk and shuddered as though he had malaria. "Did anybody make you?"

"I don't think so. I've been out of New Orleans too long now."

"Anybody make you, get in your face, tell them we're tight."

"All right, Tony."

"There's guys in here who'll do an ex-cop, Dave. That's not a shuck."

"I think you just figured out Nate Baxter."

"Yeah, well, I'm going to square it with that cat. The word is he's getting freebies from French Quarter street whores. I know one who's got AIDS. I'm going to fix it so she gets in the sack with him."

Then he bent over and squeezed his palm across the back of his neck and said, "Oh man, the tiger's got me."

I stood him up and walked him by the arm down to the shower. Inmates lounging in the open doors of their cells or sitting on the big water pipe against the corridor wall looked at him with the curiosity and reverence of their kind-prisoners in a parish or city jail-when they were in the actual proximity of a mainline con or Mafia don. Some rose to their feet, offered to help, made an extravagant show of sympathy.

"He just got hold of some bad food," I said.

"Yeah, it's rotten, Tony," one man said.

"A roach crawled out of the grits one time, man. That's no shit," another said.

"We got a stinger and some canned goods. You're welcome to it, Tony," a third said.

Tony stood naked under the shower with his hands propped against the tiles. The water boiled his scalp white and sluiced over his olive skin and the knotted muscles in his back. In one pale buttock was a puckered red scar just above the colon. He held his face into the rush of hot water and opened and closed his small mouth like a guppy. When he turned off the faucets he breathed deeply through his nose, as though he were inhaling the morning air, and wiped his face slick with his palm.

"That's a little better," he said.

Two men farther down the shower were staring at his phallus.

"You guys got a problem with your gender or something?" he said.

"Sorry, Tony. We don't mean anything," one man said.

"Then act decent," he said.

"Sure, Tony. Everybody's glad to have you here. No, I mean, we're sorry you're busted but-"

"Get out of here," Tony said.

"Sure, anything you want. We-" Then the man lost his words, and he and his friend walked quickly out of the shower with their towels wrapped around their hips.

"That's what nobody understands about a jail. It's full of degenerates," Tony said.

I walked with him back to our cell. Through the corridor windows I could see downtown New Orleans and the glow of the city against the clouds. He put on his slacks and shirt and lay down barefoot on the bunk across from me. He folded his arm behind his head. Water dripped out of his hair onto the striped mattress.

"I'm supposed to take Paul to a soccer game tomorrow afternoon," he said.

"He'll understand," I said.

"That's not the way it works with kids. You're either there for them or you're not there."

He let out a long breath and stared at the ceiling. Somebody down the corridor shouted, "Lockup, five minutes."

"How do I get out of it, man?" he said.

"What?"

"I'm addicted. Big-time. On the spike. I got blood pressure you could cook an egg with."

"Maybe you should think about a treatment program."

"One of those thirty-day hospital jobs? What about Paul? What about my fucking wife?"

"What about her?"

"She never dresses him or plays with him. She won't take him shopping with her or to a show. But I kick her out, she'll sue for custody. That's her big edge. And, man, does she work it. I should have used that psycho Boggs to whack her out. Her and that prick over in Houston."

"Who?"

"She makes it with one of the Dio crowd from Houston. They meet in Miami. That's why she's always flying over there. Come on, man. You read a lot of books. What would you do?"

"You're trying to deal with all the monsters at the same time. Start with the addiction."

"I tried. Out at the V.A. I think I'm in it for the whole ride."

"There're ways out, Tony."

"Yeah, and you can scrub the stink out of shit, too. You came home okay, Dave. I blew it."

He turned on his side and faced the wall. When I spoke to him again, he did not answer.

The daytime noise level in any jail is grinding and ceaseless, particularly on a Saturday morning. I woke to the clanging of cell doors, shoes thudding on spiral metal stairs, cleaning crews scraping buckets across the cement floors, shower water drumming on the tile walls, radios tuned to a dozen different stations, someone cracking wind into a toilet bowl or roaring out a belch from the bottom of his bowels, inmates shouting from the windows to friends on the other side of the razor wire that bordered the street-a dirty, iron-tinged, cacophonous mix that echoed down the long concrete corridor with such an ear-numbing intensity that the individual voice was lost in it.

We lined up when the trusties wheeled in the steam carts loaded with grits, sausage, black coffee, and white bread, and later Tony and I played checkers on a homemade board in our cell. Then, because we had nothing else to do, we followed Jess down to the weight room at the end of the corridor. The weather was warm and sunny, so the solitary barred window high up on the wall was open, but the room reeked of the men clanking barbells up and down on the cement. They were stripped to the waist, or wore only their Jockey undershorts or cutoff sweatpants, their bodies laced with rivulets of sweat. They had bulging scrotums, necks like tree stumps, shoulders you could break a two-by-four across. Some of the Negroes were as black as paint, the Caucasians so white their skin had a shine to it. And they all seemed to contain a reservoir of rut and power and ruthless energy that made you shudder when you considered the fact that soon they would be back on the street.

Their tattoos were a marvel: spiders in purple webs stretched across the shoulder blades, serpents twined around biceps and forearms, beret-capped skulls, hearts impaled on knives, swastikas clutched in eagle claws, green dragons blowing fire across the loins, Confederate flags, lily-wrapped crucifixes, and the face of Christ with beads of blood upon his tortured brow.

For a moment we almost had trouble. A tall white man with a black goatee, wearing only a jockstrap and tennis shoes, sat against the wall and wiped his chest and stomach with a tattered gray towel. His eyes focused on my face and stayed there; then he said, "I know that guy. He's a cop."

The clanking of the barbells stopped. The room was absolutely quiet.

Then a big black man, with a nylon stocking crimped on his head, set down his weights and said to me, "What about it, Home?"

"I look like heat? Take a look at my charge sheet," I said.

"No, we don't look at nothing. This guy came in with me," Tony said. He looked down at the tall white man sitting on the floor with his knees splayed open. "You saying I brought a cop in with me?"

The man's eyes met Tony's, then became close-set and focused on nothing.

"He looked like a guy I used to see around," he said. "Some other guy."

The room remained quiet. I could hear traffic out on the street. Everyone was watching Tony.

"So don't worry about it," he said. He laughed, pulled the towel from the man's hand, and rubbed the man's head with it. "Hey, what's with this crazy guy? Y'all made him weird or is that the way they come in from Jump Street these days?"

The man grinned sheepishly; then everyone was laughing, clanging the barbells again, grabbing themselves, nodding to one another in admiration of Tony's intelligence and wit or whatever quality it was that allowed him to charm a snake back into a basket.