A Morning for Flamingos (28 page)

“I ain’t got to. Talked to her last night. She didn’t say nothing about seeing Jimmie Lee. But she tole me what Gros Mama Goula say about you, Mr. Dave.”

“Oh?”

“You got the
gris-gris
. She say you been messin’ where you ain’t suppose to be messin’. You ain’t listen to nobody.”

“Listen, Tee Beau, Gros Mama is a big black gasbag. She jerks your people around with a lot of superstition that goes back to the islands, back to the slave days.”

But my words meant nothing to him.

“I made you this, Mr. Dave. I was gonna come find you.”

“I appreciate it but—”

“You put it on your ankle, you.”

I made no offer to take the perforated dime and the piece of red string looped through it from his hand. He dropped them in my shirt pocket.

“You white, you been to colletch, you don’t believe,” he said. “But I seen things. A man that had snakes crawl all over his grave. They was fat as my wrist. Couldn’t keep them off the grave with poison or a shotgun. You stick a hayfork in them, shake them off in a fire, they be back the next morning, smelling like they been lying in hot ash.

“A woman name Miz Gold, ‘cause her skin was gold, she taken a man away from Gros Mama, then come in Gros Mama’s juke with him, wearing a pink silk dress, carrying a pink umbrella, laughing about Gros Mama’s tattoos saying she ain’t nothing but a nigger
putain
that does what white mens tells her. The next day Miz Gold woke up with hair all over her face. Just like a monkey. She do everything to get rid of it, Mr. Dave, pull it out of her skin with pliers till blood run down her neck. But it didn’t do no good. That woman so ugly nobody go near her, no white peoples hire her. She use to go up and down the alley, picking rags out of my
gran ‘ma-man’s
trash can.”

“Okay, Tee Beau, I’ll keep it all in mind.”

“No, you ain’t. In one way you like most white folks, Mr. Dave. You don’t hear what a black man saying to you.”

He upended his bottle of Falstaff and looked at me over the top of his glasses.

The evening air was cool and moist, purple with shadow, when I walked back to my truck. I saw a car parked overtime at a meter. I broke the red string off the perforated dime that Tee Beau had given me, slipped the dime into the meter, and twisted the handle. In front of the liquor store two Negro men in bright print shirts and lacquered porkpie hats were snapping their fingers to the music on a boom box. One of them smiled at me for no reason, his teeth a brilliant flash of gold.

I didn’t go back to Tony’s right away. Instead, I parked by Jackson Square and sat on a stone bench in front of St. Louis Cathedral and watched people leaving Saturday evening Mass. My head was filled with confused thoughts, like a clatter of birds’ wings inside a cage. I used a pay phone on the corner to call Bootsie, but she wasn’t home. The square was dark now, the myrtle and banana trees etched in the light from the  du Monde, and there was a chill in the wind off the river. After the cathedral had emptied, I went inside and knelt in a back pew. A tiny red light, like a drop of electrified blood, glowed at the top of a confessional box, which meant that a priest was inside.

Many people are currently enamored with Cajun culture, but they know little of its darker side: organized dogfights and cockfights, the casual attitude toward the sexual exploitation of Negro women, the environmental ignorance that has allowed the draining and industrial poisoning of the wetlands. Also, few outsiders understand the violent feelings that Cajun people have about the nature of fidelity and human possession.

When I was twenty I worked as a welder’s helper with my father on a pipeline outside of a little town north of the Atchafalaya Basin. Someone discovered that a married woman in the town was having an affair with the priest. A mob came for her at night, in a caravan of cars, and took her from her home and drove her to an empty field next to the church. They formed a circle around her, and while she cried and begged they beat her black and blue with hairbrushes. Simultaneously someone phoned her husband at his job in Baton Rouge and told him of his wife’s infidelity. He was killed driving home that night in a rainstorm.

Some might simply explain it as redneck bigotry, but I think it is much more complex than that. In the minds of rural Acadian people the priest is the representative of God, and they will not share him or Him.

Their violence seldom has to do with money. Instead, it can reach a murderous intensity within minutes over a betrayed trust, a lie, a wrong against a family member. Their sense of loyalty is atavistic and irrational, their sense of loss at its compromise as painful and unexpected, no matter how many times it happens, as a lesion across the heart.

I went inside the confessional. The priest slid back the small wooden door behind the screen, and I could see the gray outline of his head. His voice was that of an elderly man, and I also discovered that he was hard of hearing. I tried to explain to him the nature of my problem, but he only became more confused.

“I’m an undercover police officer, Father. My work requires that I betray some people. These are bad people, I suppose, or what they do is bad, but I don’t feel good about it.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I’m lying to people. I pretend to be something I’m not. I feel I’m making an enormous deception out of my life.”

“Because you want to arrest these people?”

“I’m a drunk. I belong to AA. Honesty is supposed to be everything in our program.”

“You’re drunk? Now?”

I tried again.

“I’ve become romantically involved with a woman. She’s an old friend from my hometown. I hurt her many years ago. I think I’m going to hurt her again.”

He was quiet. He had a cold and he sniffed into a handkerchief.

“I don’t understand what you’re telling me,” he said.

“I was shot last summer, Father. I almost died. As a result I developed great fears about myself. To overcome them I became involved in an undercover sting. Now I think maybe other people might have to pay the price for my problem—the woman from my hometown, a man with a crippled child, a young woman I was with today, one I feel an attraction to when I shouldn’t.”

His head was bent forward. His handkerchief was crumpled in his hand.

“Can you just tell me the number of the commandments you’ve broken and the number of times?” he asked. “That’s all we really need to do right now.”

He waited, and it was obvious that his need for understanding, at least in that moment, was as great as mine.

Sunday morning Tony and I took Paul horseback riding on the farm of one of Tony’s mobster friends down in Plaquemines Parish. Tony had dressed Paul in a brown corduroy coat and trousers, with a tan suede bill cap, and he balanced Paul in front of him on the saddle while we walked our horses along the edge of a barbed-wire-fenced hardpan field a hundred yards from the Gulf. The grass in the field was pale green, and white egrets picked in the dry cow flop. The few palm trees along the narrow stretch of beach were yellowed with blight, and they clattered and straightened in the wind that was blowing hard off the water. Behind us, parked by a tight grove of oak trees, were the Lincoln and the white Cadillac limousine. Jess and Tony’s other bodyguards and gunmen were drinking canned beer and eating fried chicken out of paper buckets in the sunshine and entertaining themselves by popping their pistols at sea gulls out on a sandspit. Tony wore a white cashmere jacket, a safari hat, and riding breeches tucked inside his knee-high leather boots.

He kept wetting his lips in the wind. His skin was stretched tight around his eyes.

“How do I look?” he said.

“Good.”

“I mean how do
I
look?” He turned his face toward me and looked into my eyes.

“You look fine, Tony.”

“It’s been two days since I put anything in the tank. It’s got butterflies fluttering around in my head.”

“What tank, Daddy?” Paul said.

“I’m trying to get on a diet and get my blood pressure down. That’s all, son,” Tony said.

“What butterflies?” Paul said.

“When I don’t eat what I want, the butterflies start flitting around me. Big purple and yellow ones. Boy, do I got ‘em today. Listen to those guys shooting back there. You go out to a quiet spot in the country, they turn it into a war zone.”

“Who’s trying to hurt us, Daddy?” Paul asked.

“Nobody. Who told you that?”

“Jess. He said some bad man wants to hurt us.”

“Jess isn’t too bright sometimes, son. He imagines things. Don’t pay attention to him.” Tony looked back over his shoulder at the grove of oak trees, where his hired men lounged around the automobile fenders in sport clothes and shoulder holsters. His eyes were dark, and he rubbed his tongue hard against the back of his teeth. Then he took a deep breath through his nose.

“Paul and me have got a place down in Mexico, don’t we, Paul?” he said. “It’s not much, thirty acres outside of Guadalajara, but it’s got a fishing pond, a bunch of goats and chickens and stuff like that, doesn’t it, Paul? It’s quiet, too. Nobody bothers us there, either.”

“My mother says it’s full of snakes. She won’t go there anymore.”

“Which means there’s no shopping mall where she can spend three or four hundred bucks a day. You ever been down there, Dave?”

“No.”

“If I could ever get some things straightened out here in the right way, I might want to move down there. If you’re a gringo, you’ve got to pay off a few of the local greasers, but after that, they treat you okay.”

“Can we go eat now, Dad?”

“Sure,” Tony said. “You want to eat, Dave?”

“That’s a good idea.”

We could hear the flat popping sound of the pistols in the wind. We would see the smoke first, men hear the report carried to us across the flattened grass.

“Those guys and their guns. What a pain in the ass,” Tony said.

“You said not to use bad words, Daddy,” Paul said.

Tony smiled and popped up the bill of his little boy’s cap.

“You got me there. But what do you do with a bunch like that? Not one of them could rub two thoughts together on his best day.” Then Tony twisted in the saddle and lifted his finger at me. In the chill sunlight his face looked as though it had been boiled empty of all heat and coherence. “I’ve got to talk with you, man,” he said.

We tethered our horses in the oak grove, and Tony put Paul in his wheelchair and fixed him a paper plate of fried chicken and potato salad. Then he picked up a half-filled bucket of chicken, tossed it at me, and climbed over the barbed-wire fence out onto the beach. I followed him out onto the damp gray sand.

“I got something bugging the fuck out of me,” he said. “I got to get rid of it, or I’m gonna shoot up again. I get back on the spike, I’m gonna end. I’ve got no illusions about that.”

“Maybe it’s time to unload, Tony.”

“I already did. It didn’t do any good. It just made it worse.”

“Then you’re holding on to it for some reason.”

“That’s what you think, huh?” He had a half-eaten drumstick in his hand. He flung it hard at a sea gull that was hovering above the waves. The water was dark green and full of kelp. “Try this. I went to a psychiatrist, a ninety-buck-an-hour Tulane fruit, in a peppermint-stripe shirt with one of these round white collars. You dig the type I’m talking about? A guy about six and a half feet long, except he’s made out of marshmallows. So I told him finally about some stuff back there in Vietnam, and he starts to make fun of me. With this simpering voice, like psychiatrists use when they got no answers for the problem. He says, ‘Ah, I see, you’re the big brave warrior who can’t have weaknesses like everybody else. Tony’s the superstud, the macho man from Mother Green’s killing machine. Tony’s not going to let anyone know he’s human, too. Why, that’d be a disappointment to the whole human race.’

“Then he stretches his legs out and looks me in the eye like he’s just taken my soul out of my chest with a pair of tweezers. So I say, ‘Doc, you’re one clever guy. But there’re certain things you don’t say to certain guys unless you’ve gotten your own ticket punched a couple of times. I’ve got the feeling you’re short on dues. And when you’re short on dues and you run off at the mouth with the wrong people, you ought to expect certain consequences. What that means is you get the shit stomped out of you.’”

Tony sat down on a beached cypress tree that was white with rot. The sand was littered with jellyfish that had been left behind by the tide. Their air sacs were pink and blue and translucent, their stingers coated with grit.

“So he stops smiling,” Tony said. “In fact, his mouth is looking a little rubbery, like he just stopped sucking on a doorknob. I say, ‘But don’t sweat it, Doc, because I don’t beat up on fruits. But if you ever talk to me like that again, or you talk to other shrinks about me, or you put any of this dog shit in your files, somebody’s gonna pull you out of Lake Pontchartrain with some of your parts missing.’”

Tony breathed the salt wind through his nose, then popped the air sac of a jellyfish with the tip of his boot.

“Yeah, I guess that really solved your problem,” I said.

“You cracking wise with me, Dave?”

“I just don’t know what I can tell you. Or what you want from me.”

“Tell me how come I don’t get any relief.”

“I never figured out all my own problems. I’m probably the wrong guy to talk to, Tony.”

“You’re the right guy.”

“I think you want forgiveness. From somebody who counts. The psychiatrist didn’t count because he hadn’t paid any dues.”

“Who’s gonna hand out this forgiveness?”

“It’ll have to come from somebody who’s important to you. God, a priest, somebody whose experience you respect. Finally yourself, Tony. A psychiatrist with any brains would have told you that.”

“A guy like me is going to a priest?” He grinned and scraped out long divots in the sand with his boot heel. In the quiet I could hear the hiss of the waves as they receded from the beach. Then he cocked his eye and looked up at me from under the brim of his safari hat. “Hey, don’t be offended. You know stuff. You know more than any shrink.”