A Morning for Flamingos (Dave Robicheaux 4)

"What's new about that?"

"I think he's a complex man. You didn't tell me about his son."

"Yeah, that's a sad case."

"Evidently he really looks after him."

The phone was silent a moment.

"Cardo's a drug dealer, and his hired shitheads kill people. Anything else is irrelevant. It's important to understand that, Dave."

"I'm just saying you can't dismiss the guy as a geek."

"Right. He hires them instead. Like Jimmie Lee Boggs. Get your head on straight. I'll be back with you later. Carry your piece out there on the salt. I want your ass back home safe on this one."

He hung up the phone.

That night I wanted to take Bootsie out for supper, but she had to work late at her office, and when she finally finished it was after ten o'clock. So I read a book in bed and went to sleep sometime after midnight with the light on and a pillow over my head.

The twilight is purple and the willow trees along the banks of the Mississippi are filled with fireflies when they take the black kid out of the van and walk him inside the Red Hat House in a waist chain. His hair has been shaved down to the scalp and his ears look abnormally large on the sides of his head. The wind is blowing off the river, ruffling the corn and stalks of sugarcane in the fields, but his face is dripping with sweat as though he's been locked inside an iron box. He smokes an unfiltered cigarette without being able to take it from his lips, because his hands are manacled at his sides. Before they go inside the squat, off-white concrete building, a gun-bull takes the cigarette out of the boy's mouth and flips it into a pool of rainwater, where it is suddenly extinguished.

Inside, I sit on one of the wood benches with the other witnesses—television and newspaper reporters, a medical examiner, a Negro preacher, and the parents of the girl the convict shot to death in a filling station robbery. They're Cajuns from New Iberia. They sit rigidly and without expression, their eyes never quite focusing on the boy while he is being strapped arm and leg to the electric chair. The woman keeps twisting a handkerchief in her fingers; finally, her husband wipes his hand across his mouth and puts a cigarette between his lips, but he looks at the gun-bull and doesn't light it. Through the barred window the tip of the setting sun is crimson above the green line of willow trees on the river.

Then suddenly the boy begins fighting. It's the moment that no one wants, that embarrasses and shames. His terror has eaten through the Thorazine he's been fed all day, and he gets afoot loose and kicks wildly at a guard. But the guard is a professional and knows how to grab the ankle and calf and use his weight to press the leg firmly back against the oak chair and buckle the leather strap quickly across the shinbone.

The heat and humidity inside the room are almost unbearable. I can smell my own odor and the sweat in the clothes of the people around me. The mother of the murdered girl is looking at the floor now with one white knuckle pressed against her teeth. No one speaks, and I hear the boy's breath sucking in and out of his throat. His eyes are bloodshot and wide, his mouth quivering, and his neck so swollen with fear and blood that it looks as rigid as afire hydrant. Before the cloth hood and metal skullcap go down over his head he stares straight into my face. An unanswered expectation bulges from his eyes.

I nailed him in New Orleans, busted him in a Negro hot-pillow joint off Magazine, took a .32 automatic and a straight razor off him and dropped them in a toilet bowl while a half dozen of his friends watched, threatened, and finally did nothing. Later I escorted him back to Iberia Parish for trial. For some reason he has asked me to be here in the Red Hat House. I think he is a borderline psychotic or retarded, or perhaps he has simply melted down his head with cocaine. But I'm convinced that in these last few moments he believes I can wave a wand over his circle of torment, pop the straps and buckles loose from his body, and lead him back outside into the wind, the ruffling sugarcane, the smell of distant rain.

When the voltage hits him his body leaps against the straps, stiffens, trembles violently with a life of its own, like that of a man having a seizure. A curl of smoke rises from under the facecloth. They hit him again, and we can hear the leather straining against the oak arms and legs of the chair. The smell is like the electric scorch of a streetcar, like the smell of hair burning in a barbershop trash barrel. A newsman next to me puts his handkerchief in his mouth and begins gagging.

Later I'm in a bar one mile down the road from Angola Penitentiary. The bar is in a remote and thickly wooded area, and the few people who drink in there either work at the penitentiary or in a piney-woods sawmill nearby. It's a joyless place where personal and economic failure and institutional cruelty are not made embarrassing by comparisons with the outside world. The light in the bar is hard and yellow, the wood floor scorched with cigarette and cigar burns.

Dry lightning leaps outside the window and turns the oak trees white. I order a schooner of Jax and a shot of Jim Beam. I lower the jigger into the schooner, release it, and watch it slide down the side of the glass to the bottom. The sour mash rises in a cloud and turns the beer from gold to amber, and I cup the schooner with my fingers and drink it empty with one long swallow.

"You were up at the Red Hat tonight?" the bartender asks. He's a barrel-chested man, with gray hair curling over his shirt lapels. A blue chain is tattooed around his thick neck.

"Yes."

"What's a guy think in those last few seconds?"

"He begs."

"I wouldn't do that. Would you?"

I don't answer.

"Would you?" he says again.

I tell him to hit me again. He refills my schooner and pours another shot of Beam on the side.

I empty the jigger into the beer and raise the schooner to my mouth. In the bar mirror the cloud of whiskey floating in beer is the color of blood that has dried in the sun, that has been burned with an electric arc. I can feel the glass begin to boil in my hands. Lightning explodes in the shell parking lot outside, illuminating the battered cars and pickup trucks and racist bumper stickers. The air is filled with a wet sulfurous smell; my ears ring with a sound that is like a scream muffled under a black cloth.

It was two in the morning when I awoke from the dream and sat listlessly on the side of the bed. What did the dream mean? Was it simply a replay of the electrocution that I had in fact witnessed when I was a newly promoted detective with the New Orleans Police Department? Old timers at AA would probably say it had to do with fear, which they believe is the cause of all the problems of alcoholics. Fear of mortality, fear that we'll drink again, fear of the self's dark potential. And for an alcoholic, fear is the acronym for Fuck Everything And Run. Clete had had his hand on it. I had loved bars and bust-head whiskey with the adoration and simple trust of a man kneeling before a votive shrine. That kind of emotional faith and addiction dies no less easily than one's religion.

The phone rang at one the next afternoon. It was Kim Dollinger.

"I want to talk to you," she said.