James Burke - A Morning for Flamingos

"What about Dave?" Paul said.

"He's got to do some stuff. We'll see him later."

"Aren't you going fishing, Dave?" Paul said.

"We'll see how it works out. I might have to take off for a while," I said.

"I thought you were going with us." He was turned sideways in his wheelchair to talk to me. His blue jeans looked brand-new and stiff and too big for him.

"I might have to go back home," I said. "I've been gone a long time."

"Your little girl wants you to come home?"

"Yes, she does."

He nodded, picked up a piece of leader, and began poking it in a crack on the table.

"Are you coming back to visit at all?" he said.

"I'd like to take you fishing to some places I know around New Iberia. The bass are so big there we have to knock them back into the water with tennis rackets."

His whole face lighted with his smile.

Tony and I rode in my pickup truck, and the white Cadillac full of his hoods followed us up the dirt road that bordered the river. The chuckholes were deep and full of rainwater, and we bounced so hard on the springs that Tony had to prop one hand against the dashboard. I rubbed my thigh with my palm and used my thumb to hit the small button on the side of the tape recorder. Before we had left the camp, Tony had put on a raincoat and dropped his chrome-plated.45 automatic in the pocket. I banged through another chuck-hole, and the.45 clanked against the door handle. Tony pulled his raincoat straight and kept the weight of the gun on his thigh.

"You think you might need that?" I asked.

"I carry it so I won't need it."

"Did you ever have trouble with these guys?"

"These are guys who operate on the bottom of the food chain. They're not a bold bunch."

"You don't think highly of them."

"I don't think about them at all."

"I appreciate what you're doing for me."

"You've already told me that, so forget it. Look, my son likes you. You know why? It's because children recognize integrity in adults. I've got some advice for you, Dave. After this score, get out of the business. It's not worth it. There's not a morning I don't get up thinking about the IRS, the DEA, city dicks like Nate Baxter, cowboys who'll clip you just to get invited over to a certain guy's table at the Jockey Club in Miami. It's like they say about marriage: You do it for money and you'll earn every nickel of it."

"I guess a guy makes his choices, Tony," I said, and looked at the side of his face.

He turned his head slowly and looked back at me.

"That's right," he said, "and I'm making one now. When I got put in with the wet brains at the V.A., there was a lot of talk in the therapy sessions about character defects. I've got lots of those, but lying's not one of them. I choose to honor my word, and I don't like righteousness in people, particularly when they're talking about my life."

He rubbed the moisture off the front glass with his sleeve. Beyond the tunnel of trees we could see pasture and sky up ahead.

"There's my airstrip. We only have another mile to go," he said. "Dave, after you get your goods, I think we say good-bye."

"All right, Tony."

"You think I'm a hypocrite, don't you?"

"I've got too many problems of my own to be taking other people's inventory."

"Before you write me off, I want you to understand something. You helped me a lot, man. But right now I've got some heavy shit to work through-with my habit, my douche-bag wife, these fuckheads in Houston and Miami-and I've got to simplify my life and concentrate on Paul and nobody else. That's the way it is."

He waited for me to reply.

"You're not going to say anything?" he asked.

"It all works out one way or another."

"Yeah, that's the way I figure it. Semper fi , Mac, and fuck it." He rolled down the window, let the mist blow inside, and took a deep breath. A bolt of lightning splintered into the tree line at the south end of the pasture where Tony kept his plane. The air smelled as metallic and cold as brass.

A mile farther on we drove out of the hackberry and pine trees into the pasture with the mowed airstrip and tin hangar that Tony had told me to remember on our first trip to the Pearl River country. Two cars and a van were parked in front of the hangar, and the hangar's main door was slid open about three feet. The surrounding fields were pale green and sopping wet, and from horizon to horizon steel-gray clouds roiled across the sky.

"The plane's not in yet, or these guys wouldn't still be hanging around," Tony said. "I'll stay with you through the buy, then I'll ride back in the Caddy and you're on your own."

"All right, Tony."

"Make sure you're satisfied with the quality of everything before you leave. Don't think you can go back to these guys with a complaint. They're basically punks, and they won't make it right. In fact, they usually try to cannibalize each other whenever they have a chance."

"Where's the plane coming in from?"

"They make out like it's a direct connection from Colombia. But I think it's coming out of Florida. There're a lot of abandoned housing developments in the Everglades. So they use these paved roads out in the saw grass for airstrips. What the Miami crowd doesn't need or doesn't want, because maybe the prices are going down too fast, they lay it off on these guys."

I drove along a two-track dirt road through the pasture to the front of the hangar. Through the opening in the door I could see the canary-yellow wings of a crop-duster biplane and rows of industrial metal drums and bright silver liquid propane tanks. I cut the ignition. In the rearview mirror I saw the white limo stop behind me. No one got out.

"What is this place?" I said.

"The guy who owns it is a local peckerwood who runs a farm-supply business or something. Look, Dave, when we go in there, I talk and you just hand them the money."

"What about them back there?" I nodded toward the limo.

"They're paid to watch my back, not my business dealings. Come on, let's go."

We walked through the wet grass and drizzling rain and stepped inside the dryness of the hangar. It was immaculately clean; there was another biplane, a red one, at the far end, and a small green John Deere tractor next to it, but there was not a spot of oil or a tread mark from a tire on the concrete floor slab. By a windowed side office were a picnic table and benches that had probably been moved in from outside, because there were pieces of grass on the bottoms of the legs. A fat man in rumpled brown slacks and a T-shirt was turning and flattening hamburger patties on a hibachi with a spatula. The smoke drifted off in the draft created by an opening in the far door that gave onto the mowed landing strip. Three men sat at the table. Two of them had their backs to us, and the third man was telling them a story, gesturing with his hands, and he did not look at us. On one end of the table was a washtub filled with crushed ice and green bottles of Heineken.

We walked a few feet forward and then stopped. To my right, stacked in a row along the front sliding door, were more metal drums, each of them containing dry chemical fertilizers, and at the end of the drums was a fingernail-polish-red Coca-Cola machine, the old kind with a big, thick lead-colored handle. Tony's eyes were riveted on the picnic table.

I looked at him.

"It's the wrong guys," he whispered.

"What?"

"The black guys aren't here. The black guys are always in on the score."

Then I heard the Cadillac's transmission in reverse, backing across the wet ground.

"It's a hit. It's a fucking hit. Get out of here," Tony said, and he shoved me with one arm toward the opening in the door just as Jimmie Lee Boggs stepped out from behind the Coca-Cola machine and threw a pump ventilated-rib shotgun to his shoulder and let off the round in the chamber.