A Morning for Flamingos

CHAPTER 14

In the hot darkness I smell the village before I see it-the wet reek of duck and hog shit, dead fish, moldy straw, boiled dog, stagnant pools of water coated with algae and mosquitoes. The air is breathless, so humid and still and devoid of movement that every line of sweat running down inside my fatigues is like the path of an insect across the skin. There is no light in the hooches, nor sound, and Marines sit listlessly on the ground, smoking, waiting for something, their weapons propped against their packs. They chew Red Man and unlit cigars, eat candy bars, and spit constantly between their legs.

Then for no reason that will ever make sense, somebody pulls the pin on a fragmentation grenade, releases the spoon, and rolls it inside a hooch. The explosion blows straw out of the bottom of the walls, lights the doorway in a rectangle of flame, sends a solitary kettle toppling end over end through the clearing. For a moment we can see the shapes of people inside, large ones and small ones, but they've given it up, resigned themselves to this chance ending at the hands of an angry or fearful or bored boy from South Carolina or Texas, and their silhouettes settle onto the burning straw pallet like shadows flattening into the earth.

But the flames that crack through the sides of the hooch and lick up to the roof do not burn naturally. Instead, it is as though a high wind has struck the fire, fanned it into a vortex that burns with the clean, pure intensity of white gas. Then it becomes as bright and shattering to the eyes as a phosphorous shell exploding, and we wilt back from the heat into the wavering shadows at the edge of the clearing.

Behind me I hear thin-rimmed wire wheels rolling across the dirt, and I turn and watch Tony push Paul in his wheelchair toward the white brilliance of the fire. Tony's green utilities are sun-faded, caked with salt, streaked with sweat and mud and fecal matter from a rice paddy. He wheels Paul into the burning doorway, and I try to stop them but my feet feel as though they're wired together, and my hand looks like a meaningless, outstretched claw.

Tony's utilities steam in the heat; then he and Paul both burst into flame like huge candles. The fire has sound now, the roar of wind in a tunnel, the whistle of superheated air cracking through wood, the resinous popping of everything that we are-skin and organ and bone.

But I am wrong about Tony and Paul. They have not found their denouement in a Vietnamese village. They emerge from the back of the fire and walk side by side into the jungle. Their bodies glow with a cool white brilliance, like a pistol flare's, that is interrupted intermittently by the trunks of trees and tangles of vine as they go deeper into the jungle. The tripping of my heart is the only sound in the clearing.

Tony leaned forward in the chair next to my bed, his head silhouetted against the early orange sun outside the window. He poked my shoulder with two stiff fingers.

"Hey, wake up," he said.

"What?"

"You're having a real mean one."

"What?" I was raised up on my elbows now.

"Do you always wake up with a chain saw in your head? Come on, get out of the rack. We got a lot to do today."

I sat on the side of the bed in my underwear, my forearms propped on my thighs. I rubbed my face and looked again at Tony, trying to disconnect him from the dream.

"Did you get crocked last night or something?" he said.

"No."

"All right, get dressed and let's eat breakfast."

"What's going on, Tony?"

"You're going with me and Paul over to our fishing camp in Mississippi."

"It's a school day, isn't it?"

"His school's closed for a couple of days. They've got to tear some asbestos out of the ceilings or something. You want to go or not?"

"I was going to do some things with Bootsie."

"Today you put her on hold."

"I don't think I want to do that."

"Yeah?"

"I'm meeting her for lunch, Tony."

"I owe you, I pay my debts. Are you interested or not?"

"What are you saying, partner?"

"Do you have your fifty K in place?"

"Yes."

"Where?"

"Don't worry, I can have it in an hour."

"So we eat breakfast, then you get it. At ten o'clock we're heading over for my camp. You're going to follow in your truck."

"This is all a little vague."

"You wanted the score. I'm giving you the score. It's a onetime offer. Are you in or out? Tell me now."

"I'm in. When's it going down?"

"You don't need to know that."

"Tony, I'm not sure I like being treated like a fish."

"I don't know when it's going down. That's something I'll find out later. I told you I don't deal with these guys as a rule. But you want the action, so I'm making an exception."

"Are you mad about something?"

"No, why?"

"You sound like you've got a beef."

"I'd already promised Paul to take him to the camp today. Then last night I got a message at one of my clubs about your deal. So I'm kind of mixing up business with a family trip. Which means I'm breaking one of my own rules, and I don't like that. But I don't go back on my word, either."

"I'll get dressed and pick up my money."

"Jess'll drive you."

"You think I'm going to leave town?" I tried to smile.

"No offense, Dave, but anyone who does business with me does it in a controlled environment. Anyone." He raised his eyebrows. They looked like grease-pencil lines drawn on his olive skin.

We ate cereal and toast and drank coffee in the glass-enclosed breakfast room while the Negro houseman helped Paul get dressed. The early sun had grown pale and wispy in the east, and clouds that were as black as oil smoke were forming in a bank over the Gulf.

"It might be a rough day for a fishing trip," I said.

"It'll blow over," he said.

He fiddled with his watchband, tinked his coffee spoon nervously against his saucer, looked out at the darkening line across the southern horizon. Then he said, "You know where Kim might be?"

"No."

"The manager at my club said she didn't come into work yesterday and she doesn't answer her phone. She didn't call you?"

"Why would she call me?"

"Because she digs you."

He fluttered his fingers on the tablecloth. "I'd better send a car out to her place," he said. His eyes were narrowed, and they looked out through the glass and roved around the backyard. "Maybe she split. Eventually most of them do. I thought she might be different."

"Don't worry about her. She's probably all right," I said.

One of Tony's bodyguards, a black-haired man of about twenty-five, came into the kitchen for coffee. He was barefoot and bare-chested, and his beltless brown slacks hung down low on his flat stomach. He looked at us without speaking, then filled his cup.

"Put a shirt on when you walk around the house," Tony said.

The man walked back into the dining room without answering.

"It's a frigging zoo," Tony said. "I treat people with respect, I pay them decent wages, and they try to wipe their frigging feet on me. You know, I got a cousin runs a lot of action in Panama City. His wife tells him one day he's a drag, he's overweight, he's got bad breath, he's got a putz the size of a Vienna sausage, that the only thing he ever did for her was crush her two feet into the mattress every night. So she dumps him and starts making it with this county judge who's on the pad with the____________________family in Tampa. Except she and the judge both get juiced out of their minds one night, and both of them get busted while she's blowing the judge in her Porsche behind his nightclub. She gets out of jail in the morning, hung over and trembling and her picture on the front page of the Panama City newspaper, and then she goes home and finds out my cousin had her Porsche towed back to her house, and she thinks maybe something's going right after all, my cousin's going to forgive her and square the sodomy charge with the city. Except she sees the Porsche is sitting flat on its springs because my cousin had a cement truck fill it up with concrete. I ought to take lessons from him."

He looked again at the sky and at the trees blowing in the yard. He opened his mouth and scratched the tautness of his cheek with his fingernail.

"What's eating you, Tony?" I said.

"Nothing."

"You haven't gotten back into pharmaceuticals, have you?" I smiled at him.

"I'm cool," he said.

"You don't have to go into this deal. Let it slide if it doesn't feel right," I said.

I watched his face. His eyes still roved the backyard. Back out, partner, I thought.

"I already committed you for fifty large," he said. "If you don't take it, I have to."

"I have to call Bootsie."

"I'll do it for you. While you go for your money with Jess. Nobody needs to know where we're going today, Dave."

"All right," I said. And there went my opportunity to tip Minos through the phone tap. Then I began to realize what was really on Tony's mind.

"I guess your little girl misses you," he said.

"Yes."

"After today it looks like you'll have everything you need to make your investors happy."

"I guess I will."

"To tell you the truth, Dave, I don't think I want to get into distribution over in Southwest Louisiana. There're too many potential problems there, conflicts with the Houston crowd. I don't need it."

"Suit yourself."

He didn't answer.

"I'll brush my teeth, then I'll be ready to go with Jess," I said.

He nodded and made lines on the tablecloth with his cereal spoon. Through the glass the southern sky was as dark as gunmetal, and white veins of lightning pulsated and trembled in the clouds.

I brushed my teeth, rinsed my mouth, and spit into the lavatory. Too bad, Tony, I thought. I didn't know you were a closet Rotarian.

I had seen his kind before. They come into AA and unload some terrible moral guilt, or perhaps the whole travesty of their lives: then they begin to feel better. The ego begins to reassert itself, the tongue licks across the lips for maybe another try at the dirty boogie, and they decide to deep-six the people who've witnessed their moment of weakness and need.

So I had become Tony's disposable confessor. Wrong way to think, Tony, I thought. You commit the crime, you do the time. One way or another, you do the time.

Jess drove me to the bus depot, where I picked up the fifty thousand dollars the DEA had put in a locker for me. For a moment I thought I was going to lose Jess so I could phone Minos.

"I've had a knot in my bowels for two days," he said, gripping his belt buckle with his fist and frowning with his whole face.

"Go use the men's room and I'll get a cup of coffee. We've got time."

He thought about it and bent his knees slightly as though he were breaking wind.

"No, there's piss all over the toilet seats. I'll wait," he said. "Besides, Tony's acting weird again. When Tony gets weird, he needs somebody around him."

"Weird about what?"

"Late last night he says to me, 'It's all ending, it's all ending.' I say, 'What the fuck does that mean, Tony?'" Two Catholic nuns in black habits walked past us. "He wouldn't answer me. He just walks off and stands in the middle of the dark tennis court like a statue. He stood out there half an hour."

Back at the house Jess and one of the gatemen began loading fishing rods, food, and camping gear into the Lincoln and the Cadillac. A soft rain clicked on the trees in the yard. I told Tony I was going into my bedroom to pack an overnight bag; then I locked my bathroom door, took down my khakis, and taped the miniaturized recorder inside my thigh. I could activate it by simply dropping my hand and appearing to scratch my leg.

What an absurdity, I thought: I had invested all this energy and effort in nailing a man who had nothing to do with my life, who had never harmed me, who lived on the raw edges of narcotic madness. The story about Tony that Jess had told me in the bus depot was no mystery. Psychologists sometimes call it a world destruction fantasy. The recovering addict and drunk are suddenly cut off from their source: they have no fire escape, and the building is burning down. They wake in the middle of the night with a nameless terror and drag it with them like a gargoyle on a chain into their waking hours. Sometimes they can't breathe; then-hearts race, blood veins dilate in the brain, a pressure band forms on one side of the head as though someone were tightening a machinist's vise into the bone. The only image that will adequately describe the fear is right out of the Revelation of Saint John the Divine: The beast is climbing up out of the sea, and the edges of the sky are blackening like an enormous sheet of dry paper held against a flame.

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."

"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.

It was a deer slug, a solid, round piece of lead as thick as the ball of your thumb, and it whanged off a metal barrel just in front of us and ricocheted into the tin wall of the hangar. Tony and I both dove between the barrels at the same time. I heard Boggs eject the spent shell onto the cement and ratchet another into the chamber. Tony was squatted down, breathing hard, his chrome-plated.45 held at an upward angle. I was standing, pressed back against the wall, and I got my.45 out of my fatigue jacket pocket, slid back the receiver, and eased a hollow-point round into the chamber. The men who had been drinking beer and cooking hamburgers at the picnic table had fallen to the floor or piled inside the office below the level of the windows.

Tony tried to look around the side of the barrel, and Boggs fired again, this time a round that was loaded with buckshot. It scoured off the side of the barrel behind us and ripped a pattern of five holes that I could cover with my fingers in the tin wall. Then somebody inside the office started firing with a pistol, probably a revolver, for he let off five rounds that danced all over the concrete; then he stopped to reload. When he did I aimed my.45 with both hands over Tony's head and fired at the office until my palms were numb from the recoil. My ears roared with a sound like the sea, and the breech locked open on the empty clip. The hollow-points blew holes as big as baseballs out of the toppled picnic table and sent triangular panes of glass crashing into the office's interior, but the lower half of the office wall was built of cinderblock, and the hollow-points splintered apart inside the concrete and did no harm to the men on the floor.

My hands were shaking as I pulled out the empty clip and shoved a full one into the.45 's magazine. Tony raked his springlike curls back with his fingers.

"We're seriously fucked," he whispered.

"We wait them out," I said.

"Are you kidding? If Jimmie Lee or one of those other guys gets outside, he can come around behind us and put it to us through the wall. It's a matter of time. I only got this clip. What have you got?"

"You're looking at it."

The skin of his face was dry and tight, his eyes as darkly bright as when he'd been loaded on black speed. He began breathing deeply in his chest, as though he were trying to oxygenate his blood. He looked at the big, round silver tanks of liquid propane that were lined against the adjacent wall.

"No," I said.

"You heard stories about it. But I lived through it, man. The captain called it right in on top of us."

"Don't do it, Tony."

"Bullshit. You got to go out there on the screaming edge. That's the only place to win. You don't know that, you don't know anything."

I wanted to put out my hand, push his gun down toward the floor, somehow in that last terrible moment exorcise the insanity that lived in his soul. Instead, I stared down at him numbly while he pivoted on one knee, aimed at a propane tank, and fired. The automatic leapt upward in his hand, and the round clanged off the top of the tank and hit an iron spar in the wall.

He rested one buttock on his heel, propped his wrist across his knee, lowered his sights, and pulled the trigger again.

This time the round hit the tank dead center and cored a hole in it as cleanly as a machinist's punch. The propane gushed out on the cement, its bright, instant reek like a slap across the face.

His.45 lay on the floor now, and his hands were trembling as he tore a match from a matchbook and folded the cover back from the striker. I could hear the men inside the office moving around on top of the broken glass.

"Tony-," I said. I was pressed back against the wall, between the barrels. The air was thick and wet with the smell of the propane.

"What?" he said.

"Tony-"

"It's the only way, man. You know it."

I touched my religious medal and closed my eyes and opened them again. My heart was thundering against my rib cage.

"Do it," I said.

"Listen, you get out of this and I don't, you keep your fucking promise. You look after my son."

"All right, Tony."

Boggs stepped out wide from behind the Coca-Cola machine and fired a pattern of buckshot that thropped past my ear and blew the top off a metal barrel. It rolled in a circle on the cement. Tony struck the loose match in his hand, touched the other matches with the flame, and flipped the burning folder out into the pool of propane.

The pool burst into white and blue flames; then the fire crawled up the silvery jet of propane squirting from the tank. I heard a window crash on the far side of the Coca-Cola machine, and I heard the men inside the office fighting with one another to get out the office door; but now Tony and I were out from behind the barrels, unprotected, and running for the opening in the hangar door.

The ignition of the propane tanks, the fertilizers, the air itself, was like a bolt of lightning striking inside the building. Through the hangar door I saw the rain falling outside, the sodden fields, the wind ruffling the tree line, then Tony hit me hard on the back and knocked me through the door just as the whole building exploded.

His body was framed against the flash, like a tin effigy silhouetted against a forge. He tumbled across the ground, his clothes smoking, his hair singed and stinking like a burnt cat's. The heat was so intense I couldn't feel the rain on my skin. We stumbled forward, past my pickup, into the field, as Jimmie Lee Boggs floored his van down the two-track road. Behind us, for only a moment, I heard screams inside the fire.

But Tony was not finished yet. He sat down in a puddle of water, his knees pulled up before him, aimed the.45 with both hands, and let off two quick founds. One tore through the van's back panel, but the second spiderwebbed the window in the driver's door and blew out the front windshield. It hung down like a crumpled glass apron, and the van careered off the road, whipping the grass under its bumper, spinning divots of mud from under the tires.

"Suck on that one, Jimmie Lee," Tony said.

The van seemed to slow as it made a wide arc through the field; then it lurched on its back springs as the driver shifted down, righted the wheel, and hit the gas again. The tin sides of the building were white with heat, as though phosphorus were burning inside; then they folded softly in upon themselves, like cellophane being consumed, and the roof crashed onto the cement slab. Boggs's van hit the main dirt road and disappeared into the corridor of trees.

Tony tried to get to his feet, but gave it up and sat back down in the water. His face was drawn and empty and dotted with mud.

"I'm going to leave you and come back for you, Tony. I'm borrowing your piece, too." I took the.45 gingerly from his hand and eased the hammer back down.

He wiped his eyes clear with the back of his wrist and looked up and down my trouser legs. Then his hand felt inside my thigh, almost as though he were molesting me. His mouth shaped itself into a small butterfly, and his eyes roved casually over my face.

"Where's your backup people?" he said.

"I don't know. My guess is, though, they've got the road sealed on each end."

"Yeah, that'd make sense."

"Will you wait for me here?"

"I'm going to start walking back."

"I don't think it'd be good for you to meet the guys in the limo."

"My limo's in the bottom of a pond by now, and those guys are halfway across Lake Pontchartrain." Then he said, "Was Kim in on it?"

"No. I never saw her before I got involved with your people."

"That's good. She's a good kid. Do me a favor, will you?"

"What?"

"Get the fuck away from me."

I didn't answer him. I got in my pickup and followed Jimmie Lee Boggs's sharply etched tire tracks down the dirt road bordered on each side by pine and hackberry trees, and cows that poked through the underbrush and lowed fearfully each time lightning snapped across the sky.

I didn't have to go far. His van was in a ditch opposite the old seismograph drill barge that was sunk at an angle on the other side of the river. I stopped my truck, stuck Tony's.45 inside my belt, and walked up on the driver's side of the van. The light was gray through the trees, and the air had the cold smell of a refrigerator that has been closed up too long with produce inside. The driver's door was partly open, and the dashboard and steering column were littered with chips of broken glass, and painted with blood.

I pulled the door wide open and pointed the.45 inside, but the van was empty. Twelve-gauge shotgun shells, their yellow casings red with bloody finger smears, were scattered on the passenger's seat and on the floor. A paintless, narrow, wooden footbridge, with a broken handrail and boards hanging out the bottom, spanned the river just downstream from the drill barge. Deep foot tracks led from the opposite side of the bridge along the mudbank through the morning glory vines and cypress roots to the starboard side of the barge, which rested at an upward angle against the incline.

The slats on the bridge were soft with rot, and three of them burst under my weight as loud as rifle shots. The river's surface was dented with water dripping from the trees, and the incoming tide on the coast had raised the river's level, so that the line of dried flotsam along the bank waved on the edge of the current like gray cobweb.

I walked along the bank through the underbrush to the bow of the barge, where the drill tower sat. The hull was rusted out at the waterline, and there were tears in the cast-iron plates like broken teeth. I grabbed hold of the forward handrail and stepped over it onto the deck. The deck was slippery with moldy leaves and pine needles, and somebody's boots had bruised a gray path from the gunwale to the door of the pilothouse.

I put my.45 in my left hand, slipped Tony's out of my belt with my right, and pulled the hammer back on full cock with my thumb. The inside of the pilothouse was strewn with leaves and empty wood crates that once held canned dynamite, primers, and spools of cap wire. In one corner were the shriveled remains of a used condom, and somebody had spray-painted on the bulkhead the initials KKK and the words Joe Bob and Claudine inside a big heart. At the rear of the pilothouse were the door and the steel steps that led down into the engine room.

I put my back against the bulkhead and looked around the corner and down the steps into the half-flooded room below. The water was black and stagnant and streaked with oil, and somebody had tried to retrieve the huge engine on a hoist, then abandoned his task and left it suspended on chains and pulleys inches above the water.

Then I heard something move in the water, something scrape against the hull.

"You're under arrest, Boggs," I said. "Throw your shotgun out where I can see it, then come up the steps with your hands on your head."

It was silent down below now.

"If you're hurt and can't move, tell me so," I said. "We'll have you in a hospital in Slidell in a half hour. But first you've got to throw out the shotgun."

The only sounds were the rain dripping in the water and the tree limbs creaking overhead. Sweat ran out of my hair, and the wind blowing through the windows was cold on my face.

"Look, Boggs, you're in an iron box. It all ends right here. If I open up on you, there's no place you can hide. Use your head. You don't have to die here."

Then I heard him moving fast through the water, from out of a corner that was tilted at an upward angle against the bank, into full view at the bottom of the steps, his neck and shoulder scarlet with blood, his face and threadlike hair and drenched T-shirt strung with algae and spiderwebs. But he was hurt badly, and the tip of the shotgun barrel caught on the handrail of the steps just as I began firing down into the hold with both pistols.

The bullets ricocheted off the steps and the hull, sparking and whanging from one surface to the next. He dropped the shotgun into the water and tried to cover his face and head with his arms. But he lost his balance on the sloping floor and toppled forward into the machinist's hoist and suspended engine block. The chains roared loose from the pulleys, and Jimmie Lee Boggs crashed against the flooded bottom of the hull with the engine block and the tangle of chains squarely on top of his loins and lower chest. The blood drained from his face, and he reared back his head and opened his mouth in an enormous O like a man who couldn't find words for his pain.

I set both pistols on the floor of the pilothouse and walked down the steps into the water. The water was cold inside my socks and against my shins, and from one corner I smelled the sweet, fetid odor of a dead nutria whose webbed feet bobbed against the hull. The waterline was up to Boggs's neck, his grease-streaked hands rested on top of the block like claws, and he breathed as though his lungs were filled with some terrible obstruction.

I reached down under the water and caught the end of the crankshaft with both hands and tried to lift it. I strained until my shirt split along my back, and I slipped on the layer of moss and algae that covered the floor and stumbled sideways against the hull. My knee hit the side of his head.

"I'm sorry," I said.

He cleared his throat and rubbed one eye hard with his palm, but he did not speak.

"Can you move at all?" I said.

He shook his head.

"I've got a jack in the truck," I said. "I'll go get it and come back. But you're going to have to do something for me, Jimmie Lee."

His elongated spearmint-green eyes looked up into mine. The pupils were like tiny burnt cinders.

"Can you talk to me?" I said.

"Yeah, I can talk." His voice was thick with phlegm.

"When I come back I want you to tell me what happened to Hipolyte Broussard. I want you to tell me who stuffed that oil rag down his mouth. Are we agreed on that?"

"Why do you give a fuck?"

"Because Tee Beau Latiolais is a friend of mine. Because I'm a police officer."

His eyes looked away at the rust-eaten line of holes in the hull. Where there had been light from the outside, the river current was now eddying inside the barge. His face was bright with sweat.

"Get me out of here, man. The tide's coming in," he said.

I climbed hurriedly up the steps, got the jack and a three-battery flashlight out of the equipment box in the bed of my truck, made my way back across the footbridge, and climbed back down into the engine room. I clicked on the flashlight and balanced it on a step so that the beam struck the hull above where Boggs was pinned. His skin looked bone-white against the blackness of the water.

I wedged the base of the jack between the tilted floor and the side of the hull and fitted the handle into the ratchet socket. I snugged the top of the jack against the engine block and started pumping the handle.

"Come on, Boggs, talk to me. It's not a time to hold back," I said.

He strained his chin upward to keep it out of the water.

"The colored kid didn't kill the redbone. Fuck, man, get the sonofabitch off me," he said.

"Who did?"

"The woman did."

"Which woman?"

"Mama Goula. Who do you think, man?"

"How do you know this, Jimmie Lee?"

"I was out there. The redbone was under the bus, banging on the brake drums, yelling at the kid. The bus fell on him and the kid took off running. Come on, man, I'm busted up inside."

"Keep talking to me, Jimmie Lee."

"Mama Goula had brought some chippies out to the camp. She found the redbone and poked the rag down his throat with her thumb."

I felt the engine block move slightly; then the jack handle slipped out of the socket and my knuckles raked against the hull. Boggs pushed with both hands against the block, his neck cording with the strain.

"Hang on," I said, and reset the jack flush against the hull with the other end inserted against the engine's crankshaft. I jacked the handle slowly with both hands, a notch at a time, to try to move the engine's weight back on Boggs's legs so he could sit up higher out of the water.

"Why did she want to kill Hipolyte?" I said.

"She didn't want to split the action. It was a perfect chance to clip the redbone. She knew everybody would blame the kid. Fuck, hurry up, man."

"Why would they blame Tee Beau?"

"The redbone was queer for him. He wanted to make the kid his punk."

I eased the jack up another notch, saw it shift the block perhaps a half inch, and then I clicked it up another notch. It popped loose from the crankshaft with such force that it broke through the water's surface like a spring. Boggs's mouth opened breathlessly.

"You sonofabitch, you're gonna tear my insides out," he said.

"Listen, I've got to find a piece of hose or some pipe."

"What?" His eyes were filled with fright.

"I've got to get you something to breathe through."

"No! You get that jack under the block."

I held it up in my hand.

"It's stripped, Boggs," I said.

"Oh man, don't tell me that."

"Come on, we're not finished yet. I'll be right back."

I hunted through the pilothouse and fore and aft on the deck, but anything of value that could be removed from the barge had long ago been taken by scavengers. Then I recrossed the bridge and tore the radiator hose out of my truck. When I climbed back down into the engine room, Boggs's head was tilted all the way back, so that his ears were underwater and only his face was clear of the surface.

I knelt by him and put my hand under the back of his head.

"Take a breath and lift up your head so you can hear me," I said.

Then I said it again and nudged the back of his head. He straightened his neck and looked at me wide-eyed, his mouth crimped tight, his nostrils shuddering at the waterline.

"We're going to hold his hose as tight as we can around your mouth," I said. "I'll stay with you until the tide goes out. Then I'll get help and we'll pull this block off you. You've got my word, Jimmie Lee. I'm not going anywhere. But we've got to keep the hose sealed against your mouth. Do you understand that?"

He blinked his eyes, then laid his head back in the water again, and I pressed the hard rubber edges of the radiator hose around his mouth.

We held it there together for fifteen minutes while the water climbed higher and covered his face entirely. His hair floated in a dirty aura about his head, and his eyes stared up at me like watery green marbles. Then I felt the rubber slip against his skin, heard him choke down inside the hose, and saw a fine bead of air bubbles rise from the side of his mouth.

I tried to screw the hose tighter into his mouth, but he had swallowed water and was fighting now. At first his hands locked on my wrists, as though I were the source of his suffering; then his fists burst through the surface and flailed the air, and finally caught my shirt and tore it down the front of my chest. I pushed the hose down at him again, but there was no way now he could blow the water out of it and regain his breath.

Then one hand came up from my shirt, and felt my face like a blind man reaching out to discover some fragile and tender human mystery, and a last solitary air bubble floated from his throat to the surface and popped in the dead air.