James Burke: A Morning for Flamingos

Psychologists will say that this is a reenactment of the birth experience. But the words bring no solace, no more than they can to the infant who, just delivered from the womb, waits for the slap of life.

In the meantime, while I was planning to weld the cell door shut on a driven creature like Tony Cardo, I had done little to keep my promise to Tante Lemon and Dorothea to prevent Tee Beau Latiolais from eventually being electrocuted at Angola. And while Tee Beau was twisting in the wind, trying to hide behind a pair of dark glasses in a pizza joint on the corner of St. Charles and Canal, the center of downtown New Orleans, a psychopath like Jimmie Lee Boggs was able to run around painting brain matter on walls in three states.

I tucked in my flannel shirt, buttoned my khakis, buckled my belt, and looked into the mirror. One way or another, it's show time, I thought, and carried my overnight bag and the briefcase with the fifty thousand out to the driveway just as Tony was latching the safety belt across Paul in the front seat of the Lincoln. Paul grinned happily at me from under a blue fishing cap with a white anchor stitched on it.

"Dad's going to take us out in the boat after it stops raining," he said.

"Yeah, they school up in this weather. They'll be in close to shore, too," Tony said. "Dave, keep between us and the Caddy."

"I won't get lost."

"You might. We're going to take Interstate Ten instead of the back road. Stay in my rearview mirror, okay?"

"You got it," I said.

So I lost all hope of contacting Minos, and I was on my own. We bounced out the front gate in a caravan. The rain was moving across Lake Pontchartrain in a gray sheet, and the yellowed palm fronds on the esplanade clattered and stiffened in the wind.

The fishing camp was on the lower portion of the Pearl River basin, not far from the Gulf. It was built of unpainted cypress, with a rusty tin roof, and was set back on a sandy bluff above the river, so that the screened-in gallery had to be supported by stilts. The camp was surrounded by live oaks, and the tops of the willows on the bank grew to eye level on the gallery. It was still raining, and the wind off the Gulf blew a fine mist out of the trees into the screens.

But it was snug and warm inside the cabin, paneled with knotty pine, the floors covered with bright yellow linoleum, the kitchen outfitted with a butane stove, a microwave, and a double-door refrigerator. On the back porch, which gave onto the access road, was a freezer filled with frozen ducks, rib-eye steaks, and gallons of ice cream.

Tony and Paul sat at the kitchen table, tying leaders and huge lead weights and balsa wood bobbers to the saltwater rods and reels. In the front room, Jess and the four bodyguards who had followed in the Cadillac played bourré and drank canned beer at a plank table. They were a strange lot to watch, a juxtaposed contrast of the generational changes that had taken place inside the mob.

Jess Ornella was what mob people used to call a soldier. He was built like a hod carrier and looked dumb as dirt and probably was. Tony said that Jess had been in trouble all his life-with the nuns and brothers, truant officers, cops, social workers, probation officers, landlords, jailers, the draft board, bill collectors, wives, and prison psychiatrists (one had recommended that he be lobotomized). He had done time in the Orleans Parish jail for writing bad checks, committing bigamy, and setting fire to a restaurant for refusing him service. In Angola he had been a "big stripe," a name given to those who were considered dangerous or incorrigible, and who usually stayed in lockdown in the Block. He always gave me the feeling that he could destroy a house simply by running back and forth through its walls.

But the others came from a different mold: young and lithe, tanned year-round, they wore gold chains and religious medallions and thick identification bracelets, and had a hungry look in their eyes. You knew they wanted something, but you weren't sure what it was, in the same way that you stare into a zoo animal's eyes and see an atavistic instinct there that makes you step back involuntarily. They constantly touched the flatness of their stomach, the boxed hairline on their neck, the gold watchband on their wrist; they made cigarette smoking a stylized art form. They seldom smiled, except with women who were new to them, and they talked incessantly about money, either about the amount they had made, or were about to make, or that someone else had made. Like women, they dressed for their own sex, but usually their loyalties went no further than a sentimental attitude toward their parents, whom in reality they seldom saw.

Jess accepted me because Tony had moved me into his house, perhaps just as he would not question Tony's choice of lawn furniture. But the others did not speak to me, other than to reply to a direct question. Jess saw me watching the game with a cup of coffee in my hand.

"You want to play?" he said, and started to move his chair aside.

But the men sitting on each side of him remained stationary. One of them had the deck of cards in his upturned palm and a matchstick in his mouth.

"Cecil just bourréd the pot. Wait till we play it out," he said. His eyes never left the game.

"That's all right. I lose too much at the track, anyway," I said.

No one looked up or acknowledged my statement, and I went back into the kitchen and began making a sandwich on the sideboard. Rain dripped out of the oak trees in back, and the dirt yard was flooded with a wet green light.

"Dad says we're going out on the salt even if it doesn't stop raining," Paul said. "We can put the rods in the sockets and stay in the cabin."

"Sure, this is good tarpon weather," I said. "On a day like this you bounce the bait through the wake and the tarps will hit it so hard the rod will bend all the way to the gunwale."

"Are you glad you came, even though it's raining?" Paul said.

"Sure."

"Dad says you're probably going to move back home with your little girl."

I looked at Tony. He had one eye closed and was threading a nylon leader through the eye of a hook.

"Yes, I guess that's true, Paul," I said.

"Can we come see you? And ride your horse?"

"Anytime you want to."

Tony tied a blood knot with the leader and snipped off the loose end close to the hook's eye with a pair of fingernail clippers. He held the hook by the shank and pulled on the leader to test the strength of the knot. "There," he said to Paul. "They won't bust that one."

He wore bell-bottomed denims, a long-sleeved candy-striped shirt, and his Marine Corps utility cap with the brim propped up. His eyes avoided mine, and like his hired help who rode in the Cadillac he did not speak to me unless to answer a question, or to indicate to me that I could entertain myself with whatever was available in the camp.

I walked out under the dripping trees, then down under the screened gallery supported on stilts. The riverbanks were thick with wet brush and wild morning glory vines, and because the river emptied into the Gulf and its level was affected by the tides, trotlines were strung at crazy angles between tree trunks and logs and stakes driven into the mud. The tide was out now, and the highest water level of the river was marked by a gray line of dead hyacinths along the banks. Thunder boomed and rolled out over the Gulf, and the air was charged with the electric smell of ozone. The tree trunks glistened blackly, the canopy overhead and the scrub brush and canebrakes and layers of rotting leaves literally creaked with moisture. I thought of Alafair and Bootsie and realized that I had never felt more alone in my life.

Later, inside, the phone on the kitchen wall rang. Tony answered it, and after he said hello, he listened without speaking, and looked at me over the top of Paul's head. Then he hung up the receiver and said, "Let's take a ride, Dave. Paul, I have to take care of a little business with Dave. You stay here with Jess, and I'll be back in an hour."