A Morning for Flamingos (Dave Robicheaux 4)

Her eyes were blinking, and I touched her face with my hand.

"Hey, you remember what my father used to do when he had a problem?" I asked. "He'd grin right in its face, then give the old thumbs-up sign. He'd say, 'You mess with us coonass, we gonna spit right in yo' mouth.'"

She looked up at me and smiled faintly. My cousin held the screen for her.

"Dave?" Alafair said.

"Yes?"

"When you come back, it's gonna be like it was?"

"What do you mean?"

"Playing and joking, like we always did. You always coming home full of fun."

"You bet. I just have to clear up some problems, that's all."

"I can go with you. I can cook meals, I can wash clothes in the machine."

"Not this time, Alf."

Tutta took Alafair's hand in her own.

"Dave, those bad people, they're not gonna hurt you again, are they?" Alafair said.

"You remember what Batist did when that gator got inside his fishnet and tore it up?" I said.

She thought, then grinned broa

dly.

"That's right," I said. "He grabbed the gator by its tail, swung it around in the air, and threw it all the way over the levee. Well, that's the way we handle the bad guys when they give us trouble."

I hugged her again and kissed her forehead.

"Good-bye, little guy," I said.

"'Bye, Dave."

Her eyes were starting to film, and I walked down to the picket gate before I turned and glanced back at her. She stood in the open screen door, one of her hands in Tutta's, her ball cap low on her ears. She looked back at me from under the bill of her cap and raised her thumb in the air.

I left Batist to manage the bait shop and boat dock, and on Halloween I moved into my apartment on Ursulines in the Quarter. Most people identify the Quarter with the antique stores on Royal, the sidewalk artists around Jackson Square, and the strip joints and T-shirt shops on Bourbon Street, but it has a residential and community life of its own: a Catholic elementary school, a city park, small grocery stores with screen doors, wood floors, ceiling fans, display coolers loaded with cheeses, sausages, and skinned catfish, and bins of plums and bananas set out on the sidewalk under the colonnade.

My apartment was inside a walled courtyard that you entered through an iron gate and a domed brick walkway. The flower beds were thick with blooming azalea and camellia and untrimmed banana trees, and the people who lived in the second-story apartments had placed coffee cans of begonias and hung baskets of impatiens along the balcony.

My place was on the first floor, and it had a bed-room, a small kitchen, a bath with a shower, and a living room. Like those of most residences in the Quarter, its walls were marked with all the historical attempts of its owners to adapt to technological change. The gas lamps had been removed and plastered over at the turn of the century; bricks had been torn out of the walls to replumb and rewire the kitchen and the bath; big hand-twist electric switches stuck out of the plaster but turned on no light.

I opened the windows and began to hang my clothes in the closet. Maybe I should have felt good to be back in New Orleans, where I had been a policeman for fourteen years in the First District, but it felt strange to be alone in a rented apartment, with the late-afternoon light cold and yellow on the banana trees outside. Or maybe it was simply a matter of age. Solitude and the years did not go well with me, and even though I had lived over a half century, I had concluded that I was one of those people who would never know with any certainty who they were, that my thoughts about myself would always be question marks; my only identity would remain the reflection that I saw in the eyes of others.

I could feel myself slipping inside that dark alcoholic envelope of depression and regret that for long periods had been characteristic of my adult life. I finished putting my shirts, underwear, and socks in the dresser drawers, stripped down to my skivvies, and did ten one-arm chins on an iron pipe in the kitchen, forty leg lifts, and fifty stomach crunches, and got into the shower and turned water on so hot that my skin turned red and grainy through my suntan.

I dried off and combed my hair in the mirror. I had lost fifteen pounds since Boggs had shot me; my stomach was flat, the love handles around my waist had almost disappeared, the scar tissue where a bouncing Betty had gotten me in Vietnam looked like a spray of small gray arrow points that had been slipped under the skin on my right thigh and side. I still had my father's thick black hair and mustache, except for the white patch above my ear, and if I didn't pay attention to the lines in my neck and around my eyes and the black-peppery flecks of skin cancer on my arms, I could still pretend it was only the bottom of the fifth.

Question: Where do you score a few grams of coke in New Orleans?

Answer: Almost anywhere you want to.

But where do you score a thousand grams, a kilo? The question becomes more complicated. Minos had accused me of being simplistic. Later I would wonder when he had last been on the street with his own clientele.