A Morning for Flamingos (37 page)

The ignition of the propane tanks, the fertilizers, the air itself, was like a bolt of lightning striking inside the building. Through the hangar door I saw the rain falling outside, the sodden fields, the wind ruffling the tree line, then Tony hit me hard on the back and knocked me through the door just as the whole building exploded.

His body was framed against the flash, like a tin effigy silhouetted against a forge. He tumbled across the ground, his clothes smoking, his hair singed and stinking like a burnt cat’s. The heat was so intense I couldn’t feel the rain on my skin. We stumbled forward, past my pickup, into the field, as Jimmie Lee Boggs floored his van down the two-track road. Behind us, for only a moment, I heard screams inside the fire.

But Tony was not finished yet. He sat down in a puddle of water, his knees pulled up before him, aimed the .45 with both hands, and let off two quick founds. One tore through the van’s back panel, but the second spiderwebbed the window in the driver’s door and blew out the front windshield. It hung down like a crumpled glass apron, and the van careered off the road, whipping the grass under its bumper, spinning divots of mud from under the tires.

“Suck on that one, Jimmie Lee,” Tony said.

The van seemed to slow as it made a wide arc through the field; then it lurched on its back springs as the driver shifted down, righted the wheel, and hit the gas again. The tin sides of the building were white with heat, as though phosphorus were burning inside; then they folded softly in upon themselves, like cellophane being consumed, and the roof crashed onto the cement slab. Boggs’s van hit the main dirt road and disappeared into the corridor of trees.

Tony tried to get to his feet, but gave it up and sat back down in the water. His face was drawn and empty and dotted with mud.

“I’m going to leave you and come back for you, Tony. I’m borrowing your piece, too.” I took the .45 gingerly from his hand and eased the hammer back down.

He wiped his eyes clear with the back of his wrist and looked up and down my trouser legs. Then his hand felt inside my thigh, almost as though he were molesting me. His mouth shaped itself into a small butterfly, and his eyes roved casually over my face.

“Where’s your backup people?” he said.

“I don’t know. My guess is, though, they’ve got the road sealed on each end.”

“Yeah, that’d make sense.”

“Will you wait for me here?”

“I’m going to start walking back.”

“I don’t think it’d be good for you to meet the guys in the limo.”

“My limo’s in the bottom of a pond by now, and those guys are halfway across Lake Pontchartrain.” Then he said, “Was Kim in on it?”

“No. I never saw her before I got involved with your people.”

“That’s good. She’s a good kid. Do me a favor, will you?”

“What?”

“Get the fuck away from me.”

I didn’t answer him. I got in my pickup and followed Jimmie Lee Boggs’s sharply etched tire tracks down the dirt road bordered on each side by pine and hackberry trees, and cows that poked through the underbrush and lowed fearfully each time lightning snapped across the sky.

I didn’t have to go far. His van was in a ditch opposite the old seismograph drill barge that was sunk at an angle on the other side of the river. I stopped my truck, stuck Tony’s .45 inside my belt, and walked up on the driver’s side of the van. The light was gray through the trees, and the air had the cold smell of a refrigerator that has been closed up too long with produce inside. The driver’s door was partly open, and the dashboard and steering column were littered with chips of broken glass, and painted with blood.

I pulled the door wide open and pointed the .45 inside, but the van was empty. Twelve-gauge shotgun shells, their yellow casings red with bloody finger smears, were scattered on the passenger’s seat and on the floor. A paintless, narrow, wooden footbridge, with a broken handrail and boards hanging out the bottom, spanned the river just downstream from the drill barge. Deep foot tracks led from the opposite side of the bridge along the mudbank through the morning glory vines and cypress roots to the starboard side of the barge, which rested at an upward angle against the incline.

The slats on the bridge were soft with rot, and three of them burst under my weight as loud as rifle shots. The river’s surface was dented with water dripping from the trees, and the incoming tide on the coast had raised the river’s level, so that the line of dried flotsam along the bank waved on the edge of the current like gray cobweb.

I walked along the bank through the underbrush to the bow of the barge, where the drill tower sat. The hull was rusted out at the waterline, and there were tears in the cast-iron plates like broken teeth. I grabbed hold of the forward handrail and stepped over it onto the deck. The deck was slippery with moldy leaves and pine needles, and somebody’s boots had bruised a gray path from the gunwale to the door of the pilothouse.

I put my .45 in my left hand, slipped Tony’s out of my belt with my right, and pulled the hammer back on full cock with my thumb. The inside of the pilothouse was strewn with leaves and empty wood crates that once held canned dynamite, primers, and spools of cap wire. In one corner were the shriveled remains of a used condom, and somebody had spray-painted on the bulkhead the initials KKK and the words JOE BOB AND CLAUDINE inside a big heart. At the rear of the pilothouse were the door and the steel steps that led down into the engine room.

I put my back against the bulkhead and looked around the corner and down the steps into the half-flooded room below. The water was black and stagnant and streaked with oil, and somebody had tried to retrieve the huge engine on a hoist, then abandoned his task and left it suspended on chains and pulleys inches above the water.

Then I heard something move in the water, something scrape against the hull.

“You’re under arrest, Boggs,” I said. “Throw your shotgun out where I can see it, then come up the steps with your hands on your head.”

It was silent down below now.

“If you’re hurt and can’t move, tell me so,” I said. “We’ll have you in a hospital in Slidell in a half hour. But first you’ve got to throw out the shotgun.”

The only sounds were the rain dripping in the water and the tree limbs creaking overhead. Sweat ran out of my hair, and the wind blowing through the windows was cold on my face.

“Look, Boggs, you’re in an iron box. It all ends right here. If I open up on you, there’s no place you can hide. Use your head. You don’t have to die here.”

Then I heard him moving fast through the water, from out of a corner that was tilted at an upward angle against the bank, into full view at the bottom of the steps, his neck and shoulder scarlet with blood, his face and threadlike hair and drenched T-shirt strung with algae and spiderwebs. But he was hurt badly, and the tip of the shotgun barrel caught on the handrail of the steps just as I began firing down into the hold with both pistols.

The bullets ricocheted off the steps and the hull, sparking and whanging from one surface to the next. He dropped the shotgun into the water and tried to cover his face and head with his arms. But he lost his balance on the sloping floor and toppled forward into the machinist’s hoist and suspended engine block. The chains roared loose from the pulleys, and Jimmie Lee Boggs crashed against the flooded bottom of the hull with the engine block and the tangle of chains squarely on top of his loins and lower chest. The blood drained from his face, and he reared back his head and opened his mouth in an enormous O like a man who couldn’t find words for his pain.

I set both pistols on the floor of the pilothouse and walked down the steps into the water. The water was cold inside my socks and against my shins, and from one corner I smelled the sweet, fetid odor of a dead nutria whose webbed feet bobbed against the hull. The waterline was up to Boggs’s neck, his grease-streaked hands rested on top of the block like claws, and he breathed as though his lungs were filled with some terrible obstruction.

I reached down under the water and caught the end of the crankshaft with both hands and tried to lift it. I strained until my shirt split along my back, and I slipped on the layer of moss and algae that covered the floor and stumbled sideways against the hull. My knee hit the side of his head.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

He cleared his throat and rubbed one eye hard with his palm, but he did not speak.

“Can you move at all?” I said.

He shook his head.

“I’ve got a jack in the truck,” I said. “I’ll go get it and come back. But you’re going to have to do something for me, Jimmie Lee.”

His elongated spearmint-green eyes looked up into mine. The pupils were like tiny burnt cinders.

“Can you talk to me?” I said.

“Yeah, I can talk.” His voice was thick with phlegm.

“When I come back I want you to tell me what happened to Hipolyte Broussard. I want you to tell me who stuffed that oil rag down his mouth. Are we agreed on that?”

“Why do you give a fuck?”

“Because Tee Beau Latiolais is a friend of mine. Because I’m a police officer.”

His eyes looked away at the rust-eaten line of holes in the hull. Where there had been light from the outside, the river current was now eddying inside the barge. His face was bright with sweat.

“Get me out of here, man. The tide’s coming in,” he said.

I climbed hurriedly up the steps, got the jack and a three-battery flashlight out of the equipment box in the bed of my truck, made my way back across the footbridge, and climbed back down into the engine room. I clicked on the flashlight and balanced it on a step so that the beam struck the hull above where Boggs was pinned. His skin looked bone-white against the blackness of the water.

I wedged the base of the jack between the tilted floor and the side of the hull and fitted the handle into the ratchet socket. I snugged the top of the jack against the engine block and started pumping the handle.

“Come on, Boggs, talk to me. It’s not a time to hold back,” I said.

He strained his chin upward to keep it out of the water.

“The colored kid didn’t kill the redbone. Fuck, man, get the sonofabitch off me,” he said.

“Who did?”

“The woman did.”

“Which woman?”

“Mama Goula. Who do you think, man?”

“How do you know this, Jimmie Lee?”

“I was out there. The redbone was under the bus, banging on the brake drums, yelling at the kid. The bus fell on him and the kid took off running. Come on, man, I’m busted up inside.”

“Keep talking to me, Jimmie Lee.”

“Mama Goula had brought some chippies out to the camp. She found the redbone and poked the rag down his throat with her thumb.”

I felt the engine block move slightly; then the jack handle slipped out of the socket and my knuckles raked against the hull. Boggs pushed with both hands against the block, his neck cording with the strain.

“Hang on,” I said, and reset the jack flush against the hull with the other end inserted against the engine’s crankshaft. I jacked the handle slowly with both hands, a notch at a time, to try to move the engine’s weight back on Boggs’s legs so he could sit up higher out of the water.

“Why did she want to kill Hipolyte?” I said.

“She didn’t want to split the action. It was a perfect chance to clip the redbone. She knew everybody would blame the kid. Fuck, hurry up, man.”

“Why would they blame Tee Beau?”

“The redbone was queer for him. He wanted to make the kid his punk.”

I eased the jack up another notch, saw it shift the block perhaps a half inch, and then I clicked it up another notch. It popped loose from the crankshaft with such force that it broke through the water’s surface like a spring. Boggs’s mouth opened breathlessly.

“You sonofabitch, you’re gonna tear my insides out,” he said.

“Listen, I’ve got to find a piece of hose or some pipe.”

“What?” His eyes were filled with fright.

“I’ve got to get you something to breathe through.”

“No! You get that jack under the block.”

I held it up in my hand.

“It’s stripped, Boggs,” I said.

“Oh man, don’t tell me that.”

“Come on, we’re not finished yet. I’ll be right back.”

I hunted through the pilothouse and fore and aft on the deck, but anything of value that could be removed from the barge had long ago been taken by scavengers. Then I recrossed the bridge and tore the radiator hose out of my truck. When I climbed back down into the engine room, Boggs’s head was tilted all the way back, so that his ears were underwater and only his face was clear of the surface.

I knelt by him and put my hand under the back of his head.

“Take a breath and lift up your head so you can hear me,” I said.

Then I said it again and nudged the back of his head. He straightened his neck and looked at me wide-eyed, his mouth crimped tight, his nostrils shuddering at the waterline.

“We’re going to hold his hose as tight as we can around your mouth,” I said. “I’ll stay with you until the tide goes out. Then I’ll get help and we’ll pull this block off you. You’ve got my word, Jimmie Lee. I’m not going anywhere. But we’ve got to keep the hose sealed against your mouth. Do you understand that?”

He blinked his eyes, then laid his head back in the water again, and I pressed the hard rubber edges of the radiator hose around his mouth.

We held it there together for fifteen minutes while the water climbed higher and covered his face entirely. His hair floated in a dirty aura about his head, and his eyes stared up at me like watery green marbles. Then I felt the rubber slip against his skin, heard him choke down inside the hose, and saw a fine bead of air bubbles rise from the side of his mouth.

I tried to screw the hose tighter into his mouth, but he had swallowed water and was fighting now. At first his hands locked on my wrists, as though I were the source of his suffering; then his fists burst through the surface and flailed the air, and finally caught my shirt and tore it down the front of my chest. I pushed the hose down at him again, but there was no way now he could blow the water out of it and regain his breath.