A Morning for Flamingos (16 page)

“You cut right to it, don’t you?”

“You’re a serious man, you have a serious reputation.”

“You’re talking a big score.”

“That’s why I’m dealing with you. The word is that the Houston people are undependable.”

“The problem I got sometimes is access, Dave. Or what you might call transportation. The product’s out there, but there’re a lot of nautical factors involved here, you know what I mean? Something happens to the product out on the salt, a lot of people lose money, a lot of people get real mad.”

“That’s the other thing I want to talk to you about. I grew up in the wetlands. I know every bayou and channel from Sabine Pass over to Barataria. I can get it through for you, and on a regular basis.”

“I bet you can,” he said.

But his attention was no longer on me. His arms were folded on top of the trough, and he was looking across the blue-green expanse of lawn and trees at the front porch of his house, where a blond woman in a red dress and a hat was counting the suitcases the houseman was bringing outside. A moment later one of the gatemen walked up the drive and backed a restored 1940s Lincoln Continental convertible out of the garage. It had wire wheels, a deep maroon finish, and an immaculate white top. The gateman and the Negro put the woman’s luggage in the trunk. She never glanced in our direction.

“What do you think of my car?” he said finally.

“It looks great.”

“Yeah. That’s what I think.” But his eyes were still concentrated on the woman. “You married?”

“Not now.”

He continued to stare as she got into the Lincoln and the gateman drove her down the long driveway toward the street. Then his eyes clicked back onto mine.

“Hey, let me ask you something else. Because I like you. I like the way you talk,” he said. “What’s your attitude about dealing in the product?”

“I don’t understand.”

“You’re an educated man. I want to know what an educated man thinks about dealing in the product.”

“I never saw anybody chop up lines because somebody forced him to.”

“I think that’s an intelligent attitude. But I want you to understand something else, Dave. I got lots of businesses. Vending and video machines, a restaurant, nightclubs, half of a trucking company, real estate development out by Chalmette, some investments in Miami. This other stuff comes and goes. Five years from now the in thing might be huffing used cat litter. There’s always a bunch of bozos around with money. Why fight the fashion?”

His eyes looked at the empty drive and the front gate that was closed once again.

“Excuse me,” he said, and raised himself out of the pool, walked dripping to the redwood table, and punched one button on the phone. He put his little finger in one of his tiny ears and shook water out of it. At the end of the drive I saw the other gateman walk to a box that was inset in the stucco wall.

“Tommy, get some people over here, call up the catering service,” he said. “I got some guests here, I want to entertain them right… Don’t ask me who, I don’t give a shit, get them over here.”

He hung up the phone and looked at me.

“I live in a place that costs a million bucks, and half the time it’s like being the only guy in the fucking Superdome,” he said.

“Before your friends get here, can we agree on a deal of some kind, Tony?” I said.

“There’s some people I bring out here like I order lawn furniture. There’s other people I invite because I respect their experience and what’s in their heads. Don’t hurt my feelings,” he said.

His guests arrived like actors who played only one role, their smiles welded in place, their eyes aglitter with the moment. They were people without accents or origins, as though they had lived on the edge of a party all their lives. But besides their good looks and their late-season suntans, their most singular common denominator was their carefree trust in the walled-in tropical opulence that surrounded them. They smoked dope by the pool, snorted lines off a mirror in the guest cottage, ate chicken and mayonnaise sandwiches from the caterer’s tray, with never a sideways glance at gatemen who wore shoulder holsters or a thick-bodied, silent man in cutoffs who waxed an Oldsmobile in the driveway with such a mean energy that his jailhouse tattoos danced like snakes on his naked back.

Even Clete quickly fell into the ambience, his arms spread out on the tile trough in the deep end, his pale blue canvas hat low on his brow, a twenty-year-old girl hovering within the crook of his arm. Her mouth was red and cold from the whiskey sour she sipped from a glass in one hand, and she laughed at everything he said and balanced herself by cupping his shoulder whenever she started to float away from the pool’s edge. I could see her knee rake against his thigh.

The air was becoming cooler now, and I treaded water to stay warm. It was impossible to get Cardo alone. He sat at the redwood table in a white terry cloth robe, one leg crossed on his knee, smoking a Pall Mall in a gold cigarette holder, while four of his guests sat around him and smiled brightly into his words. I hung from the diving board by one arm and began to think it was better to mark the day off.

“How do you like being in the life?” a voice said behind me.

She sat on the diving board that in a light green dress covered with tiny pink flowers. She had tucked her red hair up into a green beret, but one side of it had fallen down on her neck. Her lipstick was bright red, and she wore too much of it, but when she parted her mouth and looked directly at me, she disturbed me and made me keenly aware that there is no safety for the male in either age or pride.

“What’s happening, Kim?” I said.

“What’s happening with you, hotshot?”

“Like you say, enjoying the life. You don’t want to swim?”

“I think I’ll pass. Two nights ago they were screwing in here.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“You heard me. On a rubber raft, with the lights on. What a bunch.”

I lifted myself out of the pool and walked to the guest cottage to shower and dress. I heard her laugh behind me. When I came back out she was sitting on a cushioned, scrolled iron chair with her legs crossed. I sat down on the dry mat on the back edge of the diving board.

“You’re a case,” she said.

“How’s that?” I said, looking toward the shallow end, where Tony was tapping a beach ball back and forth with two girls.

“You make me think of a cat that’s trying to like sitting on a hot stove,” she said.

“Where did you say you’re from?”

“I didn’t.”

“I need to talk to Tony alone. It’s hard to do.”

“You’re still out for the big score, huh, hotshot?”

“How about cutting me a little slack?”

“All you want, babe.”

“Are you his girl?”

She looked away from me at the trees in the yard, her face cool and sculpted, her hair thick and dark red where it was pinned up on the back of her neck. She touched at an area between her teeth with her little fingernail, then glanced back into my face. Her eyes looked directly into mine, but they were impossible to read.

“What?” I asked her.

Still she didn’t answer, and instead continued to stare into my face. I took a breath.

“I think I need to get something to eat,” I said.

“If you want to see Tony alone, he’ll be going up to the house soon to check on his little boy. He always does.”

“His little boy?”

“It’s the reason his wife’s always taking off. She can’t handle it.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Do yourself a favor and go home, Robicheaux.”

She stood up, tucked her hair under her beret, and walked off alone toward the tennis court. A moment later I saw her leaning on her arms against the wire mesh, looking at nothing, her face wan and empty in the shadow of the myrtle bushes.

She was right about Tony Cardo, though. Ten minutes later, when I was about to signal Clete that it was time to hang it up, Cardo excused himself from his guests and walked across his lawn to a glassed-in sun porch at the back of his house. I went to the side door of the house and knocked. The Negro houseman answered, a polishing cloth in his hand.

“I’d like to see Mr. Cardo,” I said.

“He be out directly.”

“I’d like to see him inside, please.”

“Just a moment, suh,” he said, and walked into the back of the house. Then he returned and unlatched the screen. “Mr. Cardo want you to wait in the library.”

I followed the houseman through a huge, gleaming kitchen, a living room furnished with French antiques and hung with a chandelier the size of a beach umbrella, into a pine-paneled study whose shelves were filled with encyclopedias, sets of science and popular history books, novels from book clubs, and plastic-bound collections of classics, the kind that are printed on low-grade paper and advertised on cable TV stations. The chairs and couch were red leather, the big glass-topped mahogany desk one that would perhaps befit Leo Tolstoy.

Tony slid open the far door and stepped inside in his terry cloth robe and sandals. Before he closed the door again, I looked out on the sun porch and saw the back of a wheelchair framed against a lighted television screen. The floor around the chair was strewn with toys and stuffed animals.

“I didn’t give you your magazine,” I said, and took the copy of the
Atlantic
out of my pocket and handed it to him.

“Hey, thanks, Dave. I appreciate it.”

“I have to go, too. I just wanted to tell you I’d like to do business with you, but I have to have something firm. Like this afternoon, Tony.”

“I want you to understand something, and I don’t want you to take offense. The house is a family place, I don’t do business in it. Call Ray Fontenot tomorrow. We’ll work something out. You got my word on it.”

“All right.”

“Your face looks a little cloudy.”

“I don’t trust Fontenot. I don’t know that you should, either.”

“Serious charge. What’d he do?”

“He’s an addict and he looks after his own butt.”

“They all do.”

“Thanks for having us out.”

“Wait a minute, don’t run off. I heard you were in ‘Nam.”

“Ten months, before it got real hot.”

“Those scars on your thigh, you got hit?”

“A bouncing Betty on a trail. It was a dumb place to be at night.”

“Sit down a second. Come on, you’re not in that big a hurry. Then you got to go back to the States?”

“Sure. A million-dollar wound.”

“In the corps, unless you get the big one, you got to earn two Hearts before you skate.”

“You were hit?”

“Right in the butt. A zip up in a tree, maybe three hundred yards out.”

I looked at my watch. I didn’t want to talk more about the war, but it was obvious that he did. His eyes wandered over my face, as though he were searching for a piece of knowledge there that had eluded him in his own life. Then because I had to say something, I asked him a question that produced a strange consequence.

“What was your outfit?”

“Third Battalion, Seventh Regiment, First Marine Division,” he said, and smiled.

“Oh yeah, you guys were around Chu Lai.”

The skin of his face tightened.

“How do you know that?” he said.

“I was there,” I said, confused.

“You were in Chu Lai?” The skin around his eyes and nostrils was white.

“No, I mean I was in Vietnam. I knew some Marines who were around Chu Lai, that’s all.”

“Who were these guys?”

“I don’t even remember their names, Tony.”

“I just wondered.”

“Are you all right, partner?”

He widened his eyes and breathed air up through his nose.

“It was a fucking meat grinder, man,” he said.

“Maybe it’s time to give it the deep six.”

“What?”

“We didn’t ask to get sent over there. A time comes when we stop dragging the monsters around.”

“You saying I did something over there?”

“If you didn’t, you saw it done.”

He looked at me a long moment, his mouth a tight line.

“You’re an unusual man,” he said.

“I don’t think so.”

“One day just kick the door shut on Shitsville?”

“You already lived it. Why watch the replay the rest of your life?”

“Some guys say the war’s never over.”

“It is for me.”

“No dreams?”

I didn’t answer.

“That’s what I thought,” he said. His body was deep in a leather chair. He smiled crookedly at me.

But my strange afternoon at Tony C.‘s was not over. When Clete and I walked out to my truck, I noticed that my wallet was gone. I looked in the guest cottage and out by the pool, then realized that it had probably fallen out of my pocket when I was sitting in the library. The black man let me in the side of the house again. This time the sliding door of the library that gave onto the sun porch was open, and I saw Tony dressing a little boy in the wheelchair surrounded by a litter of toys. He did not see me, not at first. The little boy might have been seven or eight. His face was handsome and bright, but his head rested on his shoulders as though he had no neck, his legs were too short for his truncated body, and his back was deformed terribly. His hair was brown and wet, and Tony Cardo parted and combed it and leaned over and kissed him on the brow. Then his eyes glanced up into my face.

“I’m sorry. I dropped my wallet in the chair,” I said.

He walked to the door and slid it shut.

That night it rained. It ran off the roof, the gutters, the balconies, clattered on the palm fronds and banana trees, spun like a vortex of wet light inside the courtyard. Lightning cracked across the sky and rattled the windows, and I slept with a pillow crimped across my head. I did not hear the lock pick in the door nor the handle turn when the bolt clicked free of the jamb. Instead, I felt a drop in the room’s temperature, and smelled leaves and rain. I raised up on one elbow and looked into the face of Tony Cardo, who leaned forward on a straight-backed chair by the side of my bed. One of his gatemen stood behind him, dripping water on the floor.

“How scared you ever been?” he said. His narrow, elongated face looked white in the glow of the electric light that shone through the window from the courtyard.