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

her face hot and bright with her work. She wore her yellow T-shirt with a smiling purple whale and the words “Baby Orca” embossed on it, but it was too small for her now and her arms looked fat and round in the sleeves.
    It was too good a day to dwell on Jimmie Lee Boggs and Gros Mama Goula and a lot a mojo claptrap, so Alafair and I took the jugboat and headed out Southwest Pass onto the salt. It was called a jugboat because it had been used by a marine seismograph company to lay out and recover the long rubber-coated cables and instruments, or “jugs,” that recorded the vibrations off the substrata after an explosion was detonated in the drill hole. It was narrow and long, built for speed, with a low draft, a big Chrysler engine, two screws, and the windowed pilot’s cab flush on the stern. I had outfitted it with gear boxes, ice bins, a small galley, a bait well, winches for my trawling nets, iron rod-and-reel sockets for trolling. In the middle of the deck I bolted down a telephone-company spool table, with a collapsible Cinzano umbrella set in the center hole.
    The day was warm, the ground swells long and gentle and rolling, so that when they crested the wave broke into a thin froth and blew in the wind. I kept the bow into the wind and idled through the swells while Alafair set the rods into the sockets, spun out the lines behind us so the lures bounced in our wake, clicked on the drags, and threw chum overboard as if she were flinging shot. High up against the blue dome of sky, brown pelicans drifted in formation on the wind stream. Then suddenly their wings would collapse, cock into their sides like fins, and they would plummet with the speed of an aerial bomb into the water and rise from the foam with a menhaden or flying fish dripping from their pouched beak.
    In the middle of a long green trough I saw a greasy slick on the water and smelled the fecund odor of speckled or white trout in a big school. I cut the engine, threw the anchor, and let the jugboat swing back against the tension in the rope. We reeled in our lines and rigged them with heavy teardrop weights, bait hooks, and big corks. Alafair’s two-handed cast sent a lead weight and hook singing past my ear.
    The clouds in the west looked like strips of flame above the green horizon when we headed back through the Pass into Vermilion Bay. The ice bin was loaded with gaff-top catfish and speckled trout, gutted and stiff and laid out in cold rows, their mouths hooked open, their eyes black and shiny as glass. Alafair sat on my lap and steered us between the buoys into the channel; when I touched her head with my chin I could feel the sun’s heat in her hair.
    “Let’s take some to Batist tonight,” she said.
    “That’s a good idea, little guy.”
    She twisted her head around and grinned up at me.
    “Then maybe rent a movie,” she said.
    “You got it, Alf.”
    “Buy some boudin and fix some Kool-Aid, too.”
    “That’s actually been on my mind all day.”
    “All right, big guy.”
    We were happy and tired when we drove down the dirt road under the oaks toward my house on the bayou. Our clothes were flecked with fish blood and membrane, our skin salty and dry from the wind and the sun. It had been a fine day. I was determined that it would remain so, even though I saw Minos Dautrieve’s car parked by my gallery and Minos sitting on my front step.
     
    Alafair rinsed the fish in the sink while Minos and I went out in the backyard and sat at my redwood picnic table under the mimosa tree. The moon was up, and I could see my neighbor’s sugarcane in the field.
    “I’ve got a proposal for you,” he said.
    “What’s that, Minos?”
    “You know I’m on that Presidential Task Force on Drugs?”
    “Yeah.”
    “It’s an election year, and everybody wants to stomp the shit out of the drug dealers. Never mind the fact that we’ve had our budgets cut for years. But that’s all right, it’s all rock ‘n’ roll, anyway. We’ll cripple up