James Burke - A Morning for Flamingos

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, men hear the report carried to us across the flattened grass.

"Those guys and their guns. What a pain in the ass," Tony said.

"You said not to use bad words, Daddy," Paul said.

Tony smiled and popped up the bill of his little boy's cap.

"You got me there. But what do you do with a bunch like that? Not one of them could rub two thoughts together on his best day." Then Tony twisted in the saddle and lifted his finger at me. In the chill sunlight his face looked as though it had been boiled empty of all heat and coherence. "I've got to talk with you, man," he said.

We tethered our horses in the oak grove, and Tony put Paul in his wheelchair and fixed him a paper plate of fried chicken and potato salad. Then he picked up a half-filled bucket of chicken, tossed it at me, and climbed over the barbed-wire fence out onto the beach. I followed him out onto the damp gray sand.

"I got something bugging the fuck out of me," he said. "I got to get rid of it, or I'm gonna shoot up again. I get back on the spike, I'm gonna end. I've got no illusions about that."

"Maybe it's time to unload, Tony."

"I already did. It didn't do any good. It just made it worse."

"Then you're holding on to it for some reason."

"That's what you think, huh?" He had a half-eaten drumstick in his hand. He flung it hard at a sea gull that was hovering above the waves. The water was dark green and full of kelp. "Try this. I went to a psychiatrist, a ninety-buck-an-hour Tulane fruit, in a peppermint-stripe shirt with one of these round white collars. You dig the type I'm talking about? A guy about six and a half feet long, except he's made out of marshmallows. So I told him finally about some stuff back there in Vietnam, and he starts to make fun of me. With this simpering voice, like psychiatrists use when they got no answers for the problem. He says, 'Ah, I see, you're the big brave warrior who can't have weaknesses like everybody else. Tony's the superstud, the macho man from Mother Green's killing machine. Tony's not going to let anyone know he's human, too. Why, that'd be a disappointment to the whole human race.'

"Then he stretches his legs out and looks me in the eye like he's just taken my soul out of my chest with a pair of tweezers. So I say, 'Doc, you're one clever guy. But there're certain things you don't say to certain guys unless you've gotten your own ticket punched a couple of times. I've got the feeling you're short on dues. And when you're short on dues and you run off at the mouth with the wrong people, you ought to expect certain consequences. What that means is you get the shit stomped out of you.'"