James Burke - A Morning for Flamingos

"When are you getting them out?" he said.

"Tomorrow."

"Something on your mind, Dave?"

"I guess I was still thinking about my apartment."

"Don't go back there. Stay with me as long as you're in New Orleans. You don't need an apartment."

"I'm still trying to figure out Boggs, too."

"Why? You like trying to put yourself inside the head of a moron? Look, why do you think a guy like me is successful in this business? I'll tell you. A guy who can walk down the street and chew gum at the same time is king of the block. Take Jess there, and remember he's one of the few I trust, he thinks Peter Pan is the washbasin in a whorehouse."

"Boggs is smarter than you think."

"He's a psychopath. Look, the real badasses are in prison or the graveyard. If they're not there yet, they will be. About every two or three months I hear a rumor somebody's going to whack me out. And once in a while somebody tries. But I'm still hitting tennis balls. And a couple of other guys, guys who somebody wound up in Houston or Miami, Jess has driven down into Lafourche Parish and no telling what happened. So if you want into the life, Dave, you don't worry over it. Hey, come on, man, most people grow old and sit on the porch and listen to their livers rot."

"I've got another problem, too, Tony. My people back in Lafayette want a chance to get their money back. A half million is a lot to lose."

He picked up his racket cover and began pulling it over the head of his racket.

"They're not looking for a major buy," I said. "They just want to recover what they lost."

He zipped up the leather cover and rested the racket across his thighs.

"Clete says there's a major score about to go down in the projects. I'd like to get in on it," I said.

He nodded attentively, his eyes looking off into the trees.

"I hear you talking, Dave, but like I once said to you, I don't do business at my house." Then he glanced into my face.

"I respect that, Tony, but these guys back in Lafayette are turning some dials on me."

"Fuck 'em."

"I've got to live around there."

"Hey, give me a break. Do I take care of you or not?" His small mouth made that strange butterfly shape.

"I'm just telling you about my situation."

"All right, for God's sakes. We'll take a drive. You're worse than my wife."

A few minutes later we were in the Lincoln, driving across the twenty-four-mile causeway that spans Lake Pontchartrain, with Jess and the other bodyguards behind us in the Cadillac. The sun was high in the hard, blue sky, and the waves were green and capping in the wind. Tony drove with his arm on the window, a Marine Corps utility cap pulled down snugly to the level of his sunglasses. His gray and black ringlets whipped on his neck. He looked out at a long barge whose deck was loaded with industrial metal drums of some kind.

"We used to fish and swim in the lake when I was a kid," he said. "Now the lake's so polluted it's against the law to get in the water."

"New Orleans has changed a lot."

"All for the bad, all for the bad," he said.

"Can you tell me where we're going now?"

"A place I bet you've never seen. Maybe I'll show you my plane, too."

"Can we talk now?"

"You can talk, I'll listen," he said, and smiled at me from behind his glasses.

"These guys want to give me another fifty or sixty thou if I can buy into some quick action."

"So?"

"Can I get in on the score?"

"Dave, the score you're talking about is all going right into the projects. It involves a lot of colored dealers and some guys out in Metairie I don't like to mess with too much."

"You don't do business with the projects?"

"It's hot right now. Everybody's pissed because these kids are killing each other all over town and scaring off the tourists. Another thing, I never deliberately sold product to kids. I know they get hold of it, but I didn't sell it to them. Big fucking deal. But if you want me to connect you, I can do it."

"I'd appreciate it, Tony. I figure this is my last score, though. I'm not cut out for it."

"Like I am?" he said. His face was flat and expressionless when he looked at me.

"I didn't mean anything by that."

"Yeah, nobody does. I tell you what, Dave, go into Copeland's up on St. Charles some Wednesday night. Wednesday is yuppie night in New Orleans. These are people who wouldn't spit on an Italian who grew up in a funeral home. But they got crystal bowls full offtake on their coffee tables. They carry it in their compacts, they chop up lines when they ball each other. In my opinion a lot of them are degenerates. But what the fuck do I know? These are people with law degrees and M.B.A.s. I went to a fucking juco in Miami. You know why? Because it had the best mortuary school in the United States. Except I studied English and journalism. I was on the fucking college newspaper, man. Just before I joined the crotch."

"I'm not judging you, Tony."

"The fuck you're not," he said.

I didn't try to answer him again. He drove for almost a mile without speaking, his tan face as flat as a shingle, the wind puffing his flannel shirt, the sunlight clicking on his dark glasses. Then I saw him take a breath through his nose.

"I'm sorry," he said. "When you try to get off crank, it puts boards in your head."

"It's all right."

"Let's stop up here and buy some crabs. If I don't feed those guys behind us, they'll eat the leather out of the seats. You're not pissed?"

"No, of course not."

"You really want me to connect you?"

"It's what my people need."

"Maybe you should let those white-collar cocksuckers make their own score."

I had a feeling Clete would agree with him.

We ate outside Covington, then took a two-lane road toward Mississippi and the Pearl River country. Finally we turned onto a dirt road, crossed the river on a narrow bridge, and snaked along the river's edge through a thick woods. The water in the river was low, and the sides were steep and covered with brush and dried river trash.

"It's weird-looking country, isn't it?" Tony said. "Have you ever been around here before?"

"No, not really. Just on the main highway," I said.

But I could never hear the name of the Pearl River without remembering the lynchings that took place in Mississippi in the 1950s and 1960s and the bodies that had been dredged out of the Peal with steel grappling hooks. "Why do you keep your plane over here?"

"A beaver's always got a back door," he said. "Besides, nobody over here pays any attention to me."

We wound our way down toward the coast, splashing yellow water out of the puddles in the road. Then the pines thinned and I could see the river again. It was wider here, and the water was higher, and sunk at an angle on the near bank was an old seismographic drill barge. It was orange with rust, and its deck and rails and four hydraulic pilings were strung with gray webs of dried algae.

"What are you looking at?" Tony said.

"I used to work on a drill barge like that. Back in the fifties," I said. "They were called doodlebug rigs because they moved from drill hole to drill hole."

"Huh," he said, not really interested.

I turned and looked at the drill barge again. All the glass was broken out of the iron pilothouse, and leaves drifted from the tree branches through the windows.

"You want to stop and take a look?" Tony said.

"No."

"We got plenty of time."

"No, that's all right."

"It makes you remember your youth or something?"

"Yeah, I guess," I said.

But that wasn't it. The drill barge disturbed me, as though I were looking at something from my future rather than my past.

"You see that hangar and airstrip?" Tony said.

The woods ended, and up ahead was a cow pasture with a mowed area through the center of it, and a solitary tin hangar with closed doors and a wind sock on the roof.