A Morning for Flamingos

CHAPTER 1

We parked the car in front of the parish jail and listened to the rain beat on the roof. The sky was black, the windows fogged with humidity, and white veins of lightning pulsated in the bank of thunderheads out on the Gulf.

"Tante Lemon's going to be waiting for you," Lester Benoit, the driver, said. He was, like me, a plainclothes detective with the sheriff's department. He wore sideburns and a mustache, and had his hair curled and styled in Lafayette. Each year he arranged to take his vacation during the winter in Miami Beach so that he would have a year-round tan, and each year he bought whatever clothes people were wearing there. Even though he had spent his whole life in New Iberia, except for time in the service, he always looked as if he had just stepped off a plane from somewhere else.

"You don't want to see her, do you?" he said, and grinned.

"Nope."

"We can go in the side door and bring them down the back elevator. She won't even know we've been there."

"It's all right," I said.

"It's not me that's got the problem. If you don't feel good about it, you should have asked off the assignment. What's the big deal, anyway?"

"It's not a big deal."

"Then blow her off. She's an old nigger."

"She says Tee Beau didn't do it. She says he was at her house, helping her shell crawfish, the night that guy got killed."

"Come on, Dave. You think she's not going to lie to save her grandson?"

"Maybe."

"You damn straight, maybe." Then he looked off in the direction of the park on Bayou Teche. "It's too bad the fireworks got rained on. My ex was taking the kids to it. Happens every year. I got to get out of this place." His face looked wan in the glow of the streetlight through the rain-streaked window. His window was cracked at the top to let out his cigarette smoke.

"Let's do it," I said.

"Give it a minute. I don't want to drive in wet clothes all the way up there."

"It's not going to let up."

"I'll finish my cigarette and we'll see. I don't like being wet. Hey, tell me on the square, Dave, is it delivering Tee Beau that bothers you, or do we have some other kind of concerns here?" The streetlight made shadows like rivulets of rain on his face.

"Have you ever been to one?" I asked.

"I never had to."

"Would you go?"

"I figure the guy sitting in that chair knew the rules."

"Would you go?"

"Yeah, I would." He turned his head and looked boldly at my face.

"It can be an expensive experience."

"But they all knew the rules. Right? You snuff somebody in the state of Louisiana, you get treated to some serious electroshock therapy."

"Tell me the name of one rich man the state's burned. Or any state, for that matter."

"Sorry. I'm not broken up about these guys. You think Jimmie Lee Boggs should have gotten life? Would you like him back around here on parole after ten and a half?"

"No, I wouldn't."

"I didn't think so. I'll tell you another thing. If that guy tries anything on me, I'll park one in his mouth. Then I'll find his mother and describe it to her on her deathbed. How's that sound?"

"I'm going in now. You want to come?"

"She's going to be waiting," he said, and grinned again.

She was. In a drenched print-cotton dress, sunfaded and colorless from repeated washings, that clung to her bony frame like wet tissue paper. Her mulatto hair looked like a tangle of gray-gold wire, her high-yellow skin as though it were spotted with brown dimes. She sat alone on a wood bench next to a holding cell, next to the elevator from which her grandson, Tee Beau Latiolais, whom she had raised by herself, would emerge in a few minutes with Jimmie Lee Boggs, both of them manacled in waist and leg chains. Her blue-green eyes were covered with cataracts, but they never left the side of my face.

She had worked in one of Hattie Fontenot's cribs on Railroad Avenue in the 1940s; then she'd spent a year in the women's penitentiary for stabbing a white man through the shoulder after he beat her up. Later she worked in a laundry and did housework for twenty dollars a week, which was the standard full-time salary for any Negro in South Louisiana, wherever he or she worked, well into the 1960s. Tante Lemon's daughter gave birth prematurely to a baby that was so small it fitted into the shoes box she hid it in before she put it in the bottom of a trash barrel. Tante Lemon heard the child's cries when she went out to use the privy the next morning. She raised Tee Beau as her own, fed him cush-cush with a spoon to make him strong, and tied a dime around his neck with a string to keep illness from traveling down his throat. They lived in an unpainted shack whose gallery had totally collapsed, so that the steps looked as if they led into a gaping, broken mouth, in an area people called nigger town. Each spring my father, who was a commercial trapper and fisherman, hired her to shell crawfish for him, though he could scarcely afford her meager salary. Whenever he caught mullet or gar in his nets, he dressed it and dropped it by her house.

"I ain't eating that, me," he would say to me, as though he owed an explanation for being charitable.

I could hear the elevator coming down. A uniformed jailer at a small desk was finishing the paperwork on the transfer of the prisoners from the parish jail to Angola.

"Mr. Dave," Tante Lemon said.

"Tell them up there they already been fed," the jailer said. "There ain't anything wrong with them, either. The doctor checked out both of them."

"Mr. Dave," she said again. Her voice was low, as though she were speaking in church.

"I can't help, Tante Lemon," I said.

"He was at my little house. He didn't kill no redbone," she said.

"Somebody's going to take her home," the jailer said.

"I told all them people, Mr. Dave. They ain't listen to me. What for they gonna listen an old nigger woman worked Miz Hattie's crib? That's what they say. Old nigger putain lyin' for Tee Beau."

"His lawyer's going to appeal. There are a lot of things that can be done yet," I said. I kept waiting for the elevator doors to open.

"They gonna electrocute that boy," she said.

"Tante Lemon, I can't do anything about it," I said.

Her eyes wouldn't leave my face. They were small and wet and unblinking, like a bird's.

I saw Lester smiling to himself.

"A car's going to take you home," the jailer said to her.

"What for I goin' home, me? Be home by myself in my little house?" she answered.

"You fix something hot, you get out of them wet clothes," the jailer said. "Then tomorrow you talk to Tee Beau's lawyer, like Mr. Dave says."

"Mr. Dave know better," she said. "They gonna burn that little boy, and he ain't done nothing wrong. That redbone pick on him, make fun of him in front of people, work him so hard he couldn't eat when he got home. I fix chicken and rice, everything nice, just the way he like it. He sit down all dirty at the table and stare at it, put it in his mouth like it ain't nothing but a bunch of dry bean. I tell him go wash his face and arm, then he gonna eat. But he say, 'I tired, Gran'maman. I cain't eat when I tired.' I say, 'Tomorrow Sunday, you gonna sleep tomorrow, you, then you gonna eat.' He say, 'He comin' for me in the morning. We got them field to cut.'

"Where everybody when that little boy need he'p?" she said. "When that redbone roll up a newspaper and swat him like he's a cat? Where them police, them lawyer then?"

"I'll come over to your house tomorrow, Tante Lemon," I promised.

Lester lit a cigarette and smiled up into the smoke. I heard the elevator motor stop; then the door slid open and two uniformed sheriff's deputies walked Tee Beau Latiolais and Jimmie Lee Boggs out in chains. They were dressed in street clothes for the trip up to Angola. Tee Beau wore a shiny sports coat the color of tin, baggy purple pants, and a black shirt with the collar flattened out on the coat. He was twenty-five, but he looked like a child in adult clothes, like you could pick him up around the waist as you would a pillow slip full of sticks. Unlike his grandmother's, his skin was black, his eyes brown, too big for his small face, so that he looked frightened even when he wasn't. Someone in the jail had cut his hair but had not shaved the neck, leaving a black wiry line low on the back of his neck that looked like dirt.

But Jimmie Lee Boggs was the man who caught your eye. His hair was silver, long and thin, and it hung straight back off his head like thread that had been sewn to the scalp. He had jailhouse pallor, and his eyes were elongated and spearmint green. His lips looked unnaturally red, as though they had been rouged. The curve of his neck, the profile of his head, the pink-white scalp that showed through his threadlike hair, reminded me of a mannequin's. He wore a freshly laundered T-shirt, jeans, and ankle-high black tennis shoes without socks. A package of Lucky Strikes stuck up snugly from one of his pockets. Even though his hands were manacled to the waist chain and he had to shuffle because of the short length of chain between his ankles, you could see the lean tubes of muscle move in his stomach, roll in his arms, pulse over his collarbones when he twisted his neck to look at everyone in the room. The peculiar light in his eyes was not one you wanted to get lost in.

The jailer opened a file cabinet drawer and took out two large grocery bags that were folded and stapled neatly across the top. The name "Boggs" was written on one, "Latiolais" on the other.

"Here's their stuff," he said, and handed the bags to me. "If y'all want to stay up there tonight, you can get a per diem."

"Lookit what you send up there, you," Tante Lemon said. "Ain't you shamed? You put that little boy in chains, you pretend he like that other one, 'cause you conscience be bothering y'all at night."

"I had that boy in my jail eight months, Tante Lemon, long before he got in this trouble," the jailer said. "So don't be letting on like Tee Beau never done anything wrong."

"For taking from Mr. Dore junkyard. For giving his gran'maman an old window fan ain't nobody want. That's why y'all had him in y'all at jail."

"He stole Mr. Dore's car," the jailer said.

"That's what he say," Tante Lemon said.

"I hope I don't have to pay rent here tonight," Lester said, and brushed cigarette ashes off his slacks by flipping his nails against the cloth.

Then Tante Lemon started to cry. Her eyes closed, and tears squeezed out of the lids as though she were sightless; her mouth trembled and jerked without shame.

"Good God," said Lester.

"Gran'maman, I be writing," Tee Beau said. "I be sending letters like I right down the street."

"I got to go to the bathroom," said Jimmie Lee Boggs.

"Shut up," the jailer told him.

"That boy innocent, Mr. Dave," she said. "You know what they gonna do. T'connais, you. He goin' to the Red Hat."

"Y'all get out of here. I'll see she's all right," the jailer said.

"Fuck, yes," Lester said.

We went out into the dark, into the rain and the lightning that leapt across the southern sky, and locked Jimmie Lee Boggs and Tee Beau into the back of the car behind the wire-mesh screen. Then I unlocked the trunk and threw the two paper bags containing their belongings inside. At the back of the trunk, fastened to the floor with elastic rope, were a.30-06 scoped rifle in a zippered case and a twelve-gauge pump shotgun with a pistol stock. I got in the passenger's side, and we drove out of town on the back road that led through St. Martinville to Interstate 10, Baton Rouge, and Angola Pen.

The spreading oaks along the two-lane road were black and dripping with water. The rain had slackened, and when I rolled my window partly down I could smell the sugarcane and the wet earth in the fields. The ditches on both sides of the road were high with rainwater.

"I got to use the can," Jimmie Lee Boggs said.

Neither Lester nor I answered.

"I ain't kidding you, I gotta go," he repeated.

"You should have gone back there," I said.

"I asked. He told me to shut up."

"You'll have to hold it," I said.

"What'd you come back to this stuff for?" Lester said.

"I'm into some serious debt," I said.

"How bad?"

"Enough to lose my house and boat business."

"I'm going to get out one of these days. Buy me a place in Key Largo. Then somebody else can haul the freight. Hey, Boggs, didn't the mob have enough work for you in Florida?"

"What?" Boggs said. He was leaning forward on the seat, looking out the side window.

"You didn't like Florida? You had to come all the way over here to kill somebody?" Lester said. When he smiled, the edge of his mouth looked like putty.

"What do you care?" Boggs asked him.

"I was just curious."

Boggs was silent. His face looked strained, and he shifted his buttocks back and forth on the seat.

"How much did they pay you to do that bar owner?" Lester said.

"Nothing," Boggs said.

"Just doing somebody a favor?" Lester continued.

"I said 'nothing' because I didn't kill that guy. Look, I don't want to be rude, we got a long trip together, but I'm feeling a lot of discomfort back here."

"We'll get you some Pepto Bismol or something up on the Interstate," Lester said.

"I'd appreciate that, man," Boggs said.

We went around a curve through open pasture. Tee Beau was sleeping with his head on his chest. I could hear frogs croaking in the ditches.

"What a July Fourth," Lester said.

I stared out the window at the soaked fields. I didn't want to listen to any more of Lester's negative comments, nor tell him what was really on my mind, namely, that he was the most depressing person I had ever worked with.

"I tell you, Dave, I never thought I'd have an assignment with a cop who'd been up on a murder beef himself," he said, yawning and widening his eyes.

"Oh?"

"You don't like to talk about it?"

"I don't care one way or the other."

"If it's a sore spot, I'm sorry I brought it up."

"It's not a sore spot."

"You're kind of a touchy guy sometimes."

The rain struck my face, and I rolled the window up again. I could see cows clumped together among the trees, a solitary, dark farmhouse set back in a sugarcane field, and up ahead an old filling station that had been there since the 1930s. The outside bay was lighted, and the rain was blowing off the eaves into the light.

"I got something bad happening inside me," Boggs said. "Like glass turning around."

He was leaned forward on the seat in his chains, biting his lip, breathing rapidly through his nose. Lester looked at him, behind the mesh screen, in the rearview mirror. "We'll get you the Pepto. You'll feel a lot better."

"I can't wait. I'm going to mess my pants."

Lester looked over at me.

"I mean it, I can't hold it, you guys. It ain't my fault," Boggs said.

Lester craned his head around, and his foot went off the gas. Then he looked over at me again. I shook my head negatively.

"I don't want the guy smelling like shit all the way up to Angola," Lester said.

"When you transport a prisoner, you transport the prisoner," I said.

"They told me you were a hard-nose."

"Lester-"

"We're stopping," he said. "I'm not cleaning up some guy's diarrhea. That don't sit right with you, I'm sorry."

He pulled into the bay of the filling station. Inside the office a kid was reading a comic book behind an old desk. He put down the comic and walked outside. Lester got out of the car and opened his badge on him.

"We're with the sheriff's office," he said. "A prisoner needs to use your rest room."

"What?" the kid said.

"Can we use your rest room?"

"Yeah, sure. You want any gas?"

"No." Lester got back in the car, leaving the kid standing there, and backed the car around the side of the station, out of the light, to the men's room door.

Tee Beau was awake now, staring out into the darkness. In the headlights I could see a tree-lined coulee, with canebrakes along its banks, behind the station. Lester cut the engine, got out of the car again, unlocked the back door, and helped Boggs out into the light rain by one arm. Boggs kept breathing through his nose and letting the air out with a shudder.

"I'll unlock one hand and give you five minutes," Lester said. "You give me any more trouble, you can ride the rest of the way in the trunk."

"I ain't giving you no trouble. I told them all day I was sick."

Lester took his handcuff key out of his pocket.

"Check the rest room first," I said.

"I've been here before. There's no windows. Lay off me, Robicheaux."

I let out my breath, opened my door, and started to get out.

"All right, all right," Lester said. He walked Boggs to the rest room door, opened it, flipped on the light, and looked inside. "It's a box, like I said. You want to look?"

"Check it."

"Bullshit," he said. He unlocked Boggs's right hand from the manacle attached to the waist chain. As soon as Boggs's hand was free, he combed his hair back over his head with his fingers, looked back at the car, then walked inside the rest room with the short, mincing steps that the leg chain would allow him. He clicked the bolt behind him.

This time I got out of the car.

"What's the matter with you?" Lester said.

"You're doing too many things wrong." I came around the front of the car toward him. The headlights were still on.

"Look, I'm in charge of this assignment. You don't like the way I handle it, you write up a complaint when we get back."

"Boggs has killed three people. He killed the bar owner with a baseball bat. Does that tell you something?"

"Yeah, that maybe you're a little bit obsessive. You think that might be the problem here?"

I unsnapped the holster on my.45 and banged on the rest room door with my fist.

"Open it up, Boggs," I yelled.

"I'm on the toilet," he said.

"Open the door!"

"I can't reach it. I got the shits, man. What's going on?" Boggs said.

"You're fucking unbelievable," Lester said.

I hit the door again.

"Come on, Boggs," I said.

"I'm going to get some cigarettes. You can do what you want to," Lester said, and walked toward the front of the station.

I stepped back from the door, rested my palm on the butt of the.45, and kicked the door hard under the knob. It didn't give. I saw Lester turn and stare at me. I kicked it again, and this time the lock splintered out of the jamb and the door crashed back on its hinges.

My eyes saw the paper towel dispenser torn apart on the wall and the paper towels scattered all over the floor even before I saw Boggs, his knees squatted slightly in a shooting position, the links of chain crimped tightly into his body, one manacled hand frozen against his side like a bird's claw, his right arm outstretched with a nickel-plated revolver. His spearmint-green eyes were alive with excitement, and his mouth was smiling, as though we were in this joke together.

I got the.45 halfway out of my holster before he fired. The report was no louder than a firecracker, and I saw sparks from the barrel fly out into the darkness. In my mind's eye I was twisting sideways, raising my left arm in front of my face, and clearing my holster with the.45, but I do not think I was doing any of these things. Instead, I'm sure that my mouth opened wide in disbelief and fear as the round struck me high up in the chest like a fist that was wrapped in chain mail. My breath exploded out of my lungs, my knees caved, my chest burned as though someone had cored through sinew and bone with a machinist's drill. The.45 fell uselessly from my hand into the weeds, and I felt my left arm go limp, the muscles in my neck and shoulder collapsing as though all the linkage were severed. Then I was stumbling backward in the rain toward the coulee, my hand pressed over a wet hole in my shirt, my mouth opening and closing like a fish's.

Lester had a.38 strapped to his ankle. He had once told me that a cop he knew in Miami Beach carried his weapon in the same fashion. His knee came up in the air, his hand dropped toward his shoe, and in the light from the filling station front window his face looked absolutely white, frozen, beaded with raindrops, just before Jimmie Lee Boggs doubled him over with a round through the stomach.

But I wasn't thinking about Lester, nor in honesty can I say that I cared about him at that moment. Amid the pistol shots and the pop of lightning on the horizon, I heard a black medic from my outfit say, Sucking chest wound, motherfucker. Close it, close it, close it. Chuck got to breathe through his mouth. Then I crashed backward through a canebrake and tumbled down the slope of the coulee through the reeds and tangle of underbrush. I rolled on my back, my ears thundering with bugles and distant drums, and my breath came out of my mouth in a long sigh. The limbs of oak trees arched over the top of the coulee, and through the leaves I could see lightning flicker across the sky.

My legs were in the water, my back covered with mud, the side of my face matted with black leaves. I felt the warmness from the wound spread from under my palm into my shirt.

"Get in there, you sonofabitch," Boggs said up in the darkness.

"Mr. Boggs," I heard Tee Beau say.

"Get the car keys and open the trunk," Boggs said.

"Mr. Boggs, they ain't no need to do that. That boy too scared to hurt us."

"Shut up and get the guns out of the trunk."

"Mr. Boggs…"

I heard a sound like someone being shoved hard into a wall, then once again the report of the pistol, like a small, dry firecracker popping.

I swallowed and tried to roll on my side and crawl farther down the coulee. A bone-grinding, red-black pain ripped from my neck all the way down to my scrotum, and I rolled back into the ferns and the thick layer of black leaves and the mud that smelled as sour as sewage.

Then I heard the unmistakable roar of a shotgun.

"Try some Pepto Bismol for it," Boggs said, and laughed in a way that I had never heard a human being laugh before.

I slipped my palm away from my chest, put both of my hands behind me in the mud, dug the heels of my shoes into the silt bottom of the stream, and began to push myself toward a rotted log webbed with dried flotsam and morning glory vines. I could breathe all right now; my fears of a sucking chest wound had been groundless, but it seemed that all my life's energies had been siphoned out of me. I saw both Tee Beau and Boggs silhouetted on the rim of the coulee. Boggs held the pistol-grip twelve-gauge from the car trunk at port arms across his chest.

"Do it," he said, took the nickel-plated revolver from his blue jeans pocket, and handed it to Tee Beau.

"Suh, let's get out of here."

"You finish it."

"He dying down there. We ain't got to do no more."

"You don't get a free pass, boy. You're leaving here dirty as I am."

"I cain't do it, Mr. Boggs."

"Listen, you stupid nigger, you do what I tell you or you join the kid up in the can."

In his oversized clothes Tee Beau looked like a small stick figure next to Boggs. Boggs shoved him with one hand, and Tee Beau skidded down the incline through the wet brush, the branches whipping back across his coat and pants. The pistol was flat against his thigh. He splashed through the water toward me.

I ran my tongue across my lips and tried to speak, but the words became a tangle of rusty nails in my throat.

He knelt in front of me, his face spotted with mud, his eyes round and frightened in his small face.

"Tee Beau, don't do it," I whispered.

"He done killed that white boy in the bat'room," he said. "He put that shotgun up against Mr. Benoit face and blowed it off."

"Don't do it. Please," I said.

"Close your eyes, Mr. Dave. Don't be moving, neither."

"What?" I said, as weakly as a man would if he were slipping forever beneath the surface of a deep, warm lake.

He cocked the pistol, and his bulging eyes stared disjointedly into mine.

Some people say that you review your whole life in that final moment. I don't believe that's true. You see the folds in a blackened leaf, mushrooms growing thickly around the damp roots of an oak tree, a bullfrog glistening darkly on a log; you hear water coursing over rocks, dripping out of the trees, you smell it blowing in a mist. Fog can lie on your tongue as sweet and wet as cotton candy, the cattails and reeds turning a silver-green more beautiful than a painting in one flicker of lightning across the sky. You think of the texture of skin, the grainy pores, the nest of veins that are like the lines in a leaf. You think of your mother's powdered breasts, the smell of milk in her clothes, the heat in her body when she held you against her; then your eyes close and your mouth opens in that last strangled protest against the cosmic accident that suddenly and unfairly is about to end your life.

He was crouched on one knee when he pulled the trigger. The pistol went off ten inches from my face, and I felt the burnt powder scald my skin, the dirt explode next to my ear. My heart twisted in my chest.

I heard Tee Beau rise to his feet and brush his knees.

"I done it, Mr. Boggs," he said.

"Then get up here."

"Yes suh, I'm moving."

I remained motionless, my hands turned palm upward in the stream. The night was filled with sound: the crickets in the grass, the rumble of thunder out on the Gulf, the cry of a nutria farther up the coulee, Tee Beau laboring up through the wet brush.

Then I heard the car doors slam, the engine start, and the tires crunching over the gravel out onto the two-lane road.

It rained hard once more during the night. Just before dawn the sky cleared, and the stars were bright through the oak branches overhead. The sun came up red and hot above the tree line in the east, and the fog that clung to the bottom of the coulee was as pink as blood diffused in water. My mouth was dry, my breath foul in my own nostrils. I felt dead inside, disconnected from all the ordinary events in my life, my body trembling with spasmodic waves of shock and nausea, as though I lay once again on the side of a trail in Vietnam after a bouncing Betty had filled my head with the roar of freight trains and left me disbelieving and voiceless in the scorched grass. I heard early morning traffic on the road and car tires cutting into the gravel; then a car door opened and someone walked slowly along the side of the filling station.

"Oh Lawd God, what somebody done done," a Negro man said.

I tried to speak, but no sound would come out of my voice box.

A small Negro boy in tattered overalls, with the straps hanging by his sides, stared down at me from the lip of the coulee. I raised my fingers off my chest and fluttered them at him. I felt one side of my mouth try to smile and the web of dried mud crack across my cheek. He backed away from the coulee and clattered through the cane, his voice ringing in the hot morning air.