James Burke - A Morning for Flamingos

"Would you rather another night?" She looked at a distant spot in the restaurant.

"No, I'll do everything I can to be there."

"You'll do everything?"

"What time? I'll be there. I promise."

"They're not easy people to deal with, are they? You don't always get to set your own schedule, do you? You don't have control over everything when you lock into Tony Cardo's world, do you?"

"All right, Bootsie, I was hard on you."

"No, you were hard on both of us. When you love somebody, you give up making decisions just for yourself. I loved you so much that summer I thought we had one skin wrapped around us."

I looked back at her helplessly.

"Six-thirty," she said.

"All right," I said. Then I said it again. "And if anything goes wrong, I'll call. That's the best I can do. But I know I'll be there."

And I was the one who'd just suggested we eighty-six it all and go back to Bayou Teche.

Her dark eyes were unreadable in the light of the candle burning inside the little red chimney on the table.

When I got back to Tony's house, I hid the tape recorder in my closet. The house was empty, so quiet that I could hear clocks ticking. I put on my gym shorts and running shoes, jogged for thirty minutes through the neighborhood and along Lakeshore Drive, then tried to do ten push-ups out on the lawn. But the network of muscles in my left shoulder was still weak from the gunshot wound, and after three push-ups I collapsed on my elbow.

I showered, put on a pair of jeans and a long-sleeved sports shirt, and walked out by the pool with a magazine just as Tony and Jess came through the front gate in the Lincoln, with the white limo behind them.

Tony slammed the car door and walked toward me, pulling off his coat and tie.

"Come inside with me. I got to get a drink," he said. He kept pulling off his clothes as he went deeper into the house, kicking his shoes through a bedroom door, flinging his shirt and trousers into a bathroom, until he stood at the bar in his Jockey undershorts. His body was hard, knotted with muscle, and beaded with pinpoints of perspiration. He poured four inches of bourbon into a tumbler with ice and took a big swallow. Then he took another one, his eyes widening above the upended glass.

"I think I'm heading into the screaming meemies," he said. "I feel like somebody's pulling my skin off with pliers."

"What is it?"

"I'm a fucking junkie, that's what it is." He poured from the decanter into his glass again.

"Better ease up on the fluids."

"This stuff's like Kool-Aid compared to what my system's used to. What you're looking at, Dave, is a piece of cracked ceramic. Those guys are weirding me out, too. We're in my real estate office out by Chalmette, and I'm talking to my salespeople at a meet while the guys are milling around out there by the front desks. These salespeople are mostly middle-class broads who pretend they don't know what other kinds of businesses I'm in. So we end the meet and walk out to the front door and everybody is bouncy and laughing until they see the guys comparing different kinds of rubbers they bought at some sex shop. It's like my life is part of a Marx Brothers comedy. Except it ain't funny."

He put his head down on the bar. "Oh man, I ain't fucking gonna make it."

"Yeah, you will."

"Have you ever seen a set-brain ward at the V.A.? They wear Pampers, they drool on themselves, they eat mush with their hands. I've been there, man, and this is worse."

"I've had dead people call me up long-distance. Do you think it gets any worse than that?" I said.

"You think that's a big deal? I'll tell you about a smell-" He stopped and drank out of his glass. The ice clinked against the sides. His eyes were dilated. "Come inside, I want to show you something."

He picked up the decanter and walked out the side door onto the lawn. Jess looked up from dipping leaves out of the pool.

"Hey, Tony, you forgot your pants," he said, then saw the expression on Tony's face and said, "So it's a good day to get some sun."

I followed Tony across the lawn, through the trees, and past the goldfish ponds and birdbaths and tennis court to the back wall of his property. A hooded air vent protruded from the ground close to the base of the wall.

"Find it," he said.

"What?"

"The trapdoor."

"I don't see one."

He bent over and pulled on an iron ring set next to a sprinkler head, and a door covered with grass sod raised up out of the lawn and exposed a short, subterranean stairwell.

"It's an atom bomb shelter," he said. "But I heard the guy who built it used to pump the maid down here."

We went down inside, and he clicked on a light and pulled the door shut with a hanging rope. The walls and floor were concrete, the roof steel plate. There were two bunk beds inside the room, a pile of moldy K rations in one corner, and a stack of paperback novels and a disassembled AR-15 rifle on top of a bridge table.

"I come down here when things are bugging me," he said. "Sometimes I make up a picnic basket and Paul and me spend the night down here, like we're camping. It's got a chemical toilet, I can hook up a portable TV, nobody knows where I am unless I want them to know."

He sat down on the bunk bed and leaned back against the concrete wall. A dark line of hair grew up the center of his stomach from the elastic band of his underwear. He stirred the ice in his drink with his finger. Then he was quiet for what seemed a long time.

"After I got hit they didn't send me back to my old platoon," he said. "Instead I got reassigned to a bunch of losers. Or maybe they'd just been out too long. One guy had a scalp lock from a woman on his rifle, another guy gave a little boy a heat tab and told him it was candy. Anyway, I didn't like any of them. Which was all right, because they didn't like me, either, and they kept treating me like a newbie.

"So one night the lieutenant tells us to set up an ambush about four klicks up this trail, so we pass a real small ville by a stream after one klick and we go on another klick, and finally everybody says, 'Fuck it, we sandbag it, let the loot set his own ambush.'

"But while we're sitting out there in the dark it's like everybody's got something else on his mind. It's hot and quiet, and water's dripping out of the trees and we're slapping mosquitoes and smelling ourselves and looking at our watches and thinking we got six more hours out here. Then the guy with the scalp lock on his rifle-his name was Elvis Doolittle, that's right, I'm not making it up-Elvis rubs his whiskers with his hand and keeps looking back down the trail and finally he puts a cigarette in his mouth. The doc says, 'What the fuck you doing, Elvis?'

"He says, 'I'm going back to the ville.'

"Then nobody says anything. But everybody had seen these two teenage sisters with their mama-san in front of the hooch. And they know what Elvis is thinking. Then he says, 'We'll leave Mouse and the new guy. Nobody'll know. That ville's got something coming anyway. That booby trap that got Brown. They set it.'

"'You don't know that,' Mouse says.

"'If they didn't set it, they know who did,' Elvis says.

"Then they all talked it over and my heart started beating. Not because of what they were going to do, either, but because I was afraid to be left on the trail with just one guy.

"Elvis turns to me and says, 'You ever say anything about this, you ain't getting back home, man.' Then they were gone. The trees were so thick all those guys just melted away into the blackness. You could hear monkeys clattering around in the canopy and night birds and sounds like sticks breaking out there in the jungle. Sweat was running out of my pot and my breath started catching in my throat. Then we hear something clank.

"Mouse whispers, 'It's up the trail. It's up the fucking trail.'