A Morning for Flamingos Read Online Free PDF Page A

up his shit. How’d he get the gun in the can, anyway?”
    “He had a girlfriend in Lafayette, a dancer. She blew town the same day he escaped, but she left her fingerprints all over the towel dispenser.”
    “Where do y’all think he is now?”
    “Who knows? He left the car in Algiers. Maybe he went back to Florida.”
    “How about the black kid?”
    “Disappeared. I thought he’d show up by now. He’s never been anywhere, and he’s always lived with his grandmother.”
    “Catch him and he might give you a lead on Boggs.”
    “He might be dead, too.”
    Minos opened the bottle of Jax with his pocketknife, put the cap inside the paper bag, and drank out of the bottle, staring out at the long, flat expanse of gray water and dead cypress. The sun was red and low on the western horizon.
    “I think it’s time to put your transmission into gear and start hunting these guys down,” he said. “The rules of the game are kick ass and take names.”
    I didn’t say anything.
    “It’s pretty damn boring to be a spectator in your own life. What do you think?” he said.
    “Nothing.”
    “Bullshit. What do you think?” He hit me in the arm with his elbow.
    I let out my breath.
    “I’ll give it some thought,” I said.
    “You want any help from our office, you’ve got it.”
    “All right, Minos.”
    “If the black kid’s alive, I bet you nail him in a week.”
    “Okay.”
    “You know Boggs’ll show up, too. A guy like that can’t get through a day without smearing shit on the furniture somewhere.”
    “I think I’m getting your drift.”
    “All right, I’m crowding the plate a little bit. But I don’t want to see you sitting on your hands anymore. The lowlifes are the losers. They get up every morning knowing that fact. Let’s don’t ever let them think they’re wrong, partner.”
    He smiled and handed me a poor-boy sandwich. It felt thick and soft in my hand. Across the channel I could see the ridged and knobby head of an alligator, like a wet, brown rock, among the lily pads.
     
    The next day I read all the paperwork on Tee Beau Latiolais and talked to the prosecutor’s office and the detective who did the investigation and made the arrest. Nobody seemed to have any doubt about Tee Beau’s guilt. He had worked for a redbone named Hipolyte Broussard, a migrant-labor contractor who had ferried his crews on rickety buses from northern Arizona to Dade County, Florida. I remembered him. He was a strange-looking man who had moved about in that nether society of people of color in southern Louisiana—blacks, quadroons, octoroons, and redbones. You would see him unloading his workers at dawn in the fields during the sugarcane harvest, and at night he would be in a Negro bar or poolroom on the south side of town or out in the parish, where he paid off the laborers or lent them money at high interest rates at a table in back. Like all redbones, people who are a mixture of Negro, white, and Indian blood, he had skin the color of burnt brick, and his eyes were turquoise. His arms and long legs were as thin as pipe cleaners, and he wore sideburns, a rust-colored pencil mustache, and a lacquered straw hat at a jaunty angle on his head. He worked his crews hard, and he had as many contracts with corporate farms as he wanted. I had heard stories that workers, or even a whole family, who gave him trouble might be put off the bus at night in the middle of nowhere.
    Nobody doubted why Tee Beau had done it, either. In fact, people were sympathetic with his apparent motivation. For one reason or another, Hipolyte Broussard had made Tee Beau’s life as miserable as he could. It was the way in which Tee Beau had killed him that had caused the judge to sentence Tee Beau to the electric chair.
    It was misting slightly when I drove down the dirt road into the community of Negro shacks out in the parish where Tante Lemon now lived. The shacks were gray and paintless, the galleries sagging, the privies knocked together