A Morning for Flamingos by James Lee Burke Read Free Book Online Page A

a pint bottle of rum, poured herself three fingers, sat down at a small breakfast table, and lit a cigarette. She drank down the rum, inhaled from the cigarette, blew smoke out over her hand, and studied her knuckles as though I were not there.
    “What you want?” she said.
    “For openers take a break on the traiteur routine.”
    “What you mean?”
    “You talked with Dorothea. You knew I was looking for Boggs. You’d seen my picture in the newspaper, or you figured out I was one of the men he shot.”
    “Think what you want. I ain’t got the problem.”
    “What I think is you’re operating a place of prostitution.”
    She smoked and flicked her ashes and waited for me to go on.
    “I don’t bother you?” I said.
    “You want to carry me up to the jail, that’s your bidness. They’s people pay my bond make sure I stay open.”
    “Was Jimmie Lee Boggs cutting into Hipolyte’s and your action?”
    “Darlin’, they ain’t nobody cutting into my action.”
    “I don’t believe you, Gros Mama. There’s not a hot-pillow house in South Louisiana that doesn’t have to piece off its action to New Orleans.”
    She poured rum into her glass again, then as an afterthought looked at me and pointed her finger at the bottle.
    “No thanks,” I said.
    She screwed the top slowly onto the bottle.
    “Lookie here,” she said. “You don’t care ‘bout them dagos in New Orleans, ‘bout what some niggers be doing down here on Saturday night. You want that man ‘cause he hurt you, ‘cause he walking round in your sleep at night. You wake up tired in the morning, cain’t open and close your hands on the side the bed. You dragging a big chain all day long. Food don’t taste no good, women’s just something for other mens. You can tell the whole round world I lying, but me and you knows better.”
    I stared at her woodenly. She continued to smoke idly.
    “I ain’t seen him since they ‘rested him for killing that man with the ball bat,” she said. “He in New Orleans, though.”
    “How do you know?”
    “He gonna die over there. In a black room, with lightning jumping all over it. Don’t mess with it, darlin’. Come down see Gros Mama when you wake up with that bad feeling. She make you right,” she said, and squared her shoulders so that the tattoos on her breasts stretched like a spiderweb.
     
    CHAPTER 3
    The next morning Alafair and I raked and burned leaves under the pecan trees in my front yard. It was a perfect blue-gold autumn day, and the smoke from the fire hung in the spangled sunlight and drifted out across the bayou into the cypress trees. A little over two years earlier my wife, Annie, and I had been seining for shrimp just the other side of Marsh Island when we saw a twin-engine plane trailing a column of thick black smoke across the sky. It pancaked into a trough, dipped one wing into a wave, and cartwheeled like a child’s stick toy across the water. While Annie called the Coast Guard on the emergency channel, I went over the side with an air tank and weight belt and swam down into the greenish-yellow light to the plane, which had come to rest upside down in a trench. Through the window, among the drowned bodies undulating in their seats, I saw Alafair kicking her legs and fighting to keep her head afloat inside a wobbling envelope of trapped air. Her small mouth looked like a guppy’s above the waterline.
    Later, Annie and I would find the bruise marks on her legs where her mother had held her up in the air pocket while she herself lost her life.
    I gave Alafair my mother’s name, and after Annie’s death I legally adopted her. But even now I still knew little of the Central American world which she had fled, except that memories of it had given her nightmares for a long time and she thought of manual labor almost as play. She loved to work in the yard with me. She held the rake handle midway down and scoured the ground bare with the tines, her elastic-waisted jeans grimed at the knees,