Black Cherry Blues

by James Lee Burke

“Vidrine and Mapes, we can let them know somebody’s looking over their shoulder.”

  “They’re too far into it.”

  “What do you want to do?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Dave, back off of this one. Let other people handle it.”

  “Are you going to keep a deputy out at my house? Will one watch Alafair on the playground or while she waits for the bus?”

  He let out his breath, then looked out the window at a clump of oak trees in a bright, empty pasture.

  “Something else bothers me here,” he said. “Wasn’t your daddy killed on a Star rig?”

  “Yes.”

  “You think there’s a chance you want to twist these guys, no matter what happens?”

  “I don’t know what I think. That box didn’t mail itself to me, though, did it?”

  I saw the injury in his eyes, but I was past the point of caring about his feelings. Maybe you’ve been there. You go into a police or sheriff’s station after a gang of black kids forced you to stop your car while they smashed out your windows with garbage cans; a strung-out addict made you kneel at gunpoint on the floor of a grocery store, and before you knew it the begging words rose uncontrollably in your throat; some bikers pulled you from the back of a bar and sat on your arms while one of them unzippered his blue jeans. Your body is still hot with shame, your voice full of thumbtacks and strange to your own ears, your eyes full of guilt and self-loathing while uniformed people walk casually by you with Styrofoam cups of coffee in their hands. Then somebody types your words on a report and you realize that this is all you will get. Investigators will not be out at your house, you will probably not be called to pull somebody out of a lineup, a sympathetic female attorney from the prosecutor’s office will not take a large interest in your life.

  Then you will look around at the walls and cabinets and lockers in that police or sheriff’s station, the gun belts worn by the officers with the Styrofoam coffee cups, perhaps the interior of the squad cars in the parking lot, and you will make an ironic realization. The racks of M-16 rifles, scoped Mausers, twelve-gauge pumps loaded with double-aught buckshot, .38 specials and .357 Magnums, stun guns, slapjacks, batons, tear gas canisters, the drawers that contain cattle prods, handcuffs, Mace, wrist and leg chains, hundreds of rounds of ammunition, all have nothing to do with your safety or the outrage against your person. You’re an increase in somebody’s work load.

  “You’ve been on this side of the desk, Dave. We do what we can,” the sheriff said.

  “But it’s not enough most of the time. Is it?”

  He stirred a paper clip on the desk blotter with his finger.

  “Have you got an alternative?” he said.

  “Thanks for your time, Sheriff. I’ll think about the FBI.”

  “I wish you’d do that.”

  The sky had turned purple and red in the west and rain clouds were building on the southern horizon when I drove home. I bought some ice cream in town, then stopped at a fruit stand under an oak tree by the bayou and bought a lug of strawberries. The thunderheads off the Gulf slid across the sun, and the cicadas were loud in the trees and the fireflies were lighting in the shadows along the road. A solitary raindrop splashed on my windshield as I turned into my dirt yard.

  It rained hard that night. It clattered on the shingles and the tin roof of the gallery, sluiced out of the gutters and ran in streams down to the coulee. The pecan trees in the yard beat in the wind and trembled whitely when lightning leapt across the black sky. I had the attic fan on, and the house was cool, and I dreamed all night. Annie came to me about four A.M., as she often did, when the night was about to give way to the softness of the false dawn. In my dream I could look through my bedroom window into the rain, past the shining trunks of the pecan trees, deep into the marsh and the clouds of steam that eventually bleed into the saw grass and the Gulf of Mexico, and see her and her companions inside a wobbling green bubble of air. She smiled at me.

  Hi, sailor, she said.

  How you doing, sweetheart?

  You know I don’t like it when it rains. Bad memories and all that. So we found a dry place for a while. Your buddies from your platoon don’t like the rain, either. They say it used to give them jungle sores. Can you hear me with all that thunder? It sounds like cannon.

  Sure.

  It’s lightning up on top of the water. That night I couldn’t tell the lightning from the gun flashes. I wish you hadn’t left me alone. I tried to hide under the bed sheet. It was a silly thing to do.

  Don’t talk about it.

  It was like electricity dancing off the walls. You’re not drinking, are you?

  No, not really.

  Not really?

  Only in my dreams.

  But I bet you still get high on those dry drunks, don’t you? You know, fantasies about kicking butt, ’fronting the lowlifes, all that stuff swinging dicks like to do.

  A guy has to do something for kicks. Annie?

  What is it, baby love?

  I want—

  Tell me.

  I want to—

  It’s not your time. There’s Alafair to take care of, too.

  It wasn’t your time, either.

  She made a kiss against the air. Her mouth was red.

  So long, sailor. Don’t sleep on your stomach. It’ll make you hard in the morning. I miss you.

  Annie—

  She winked at me through the rain, and in my dream I was sure I felt her fingers touch my lips.

  It continued to rain most of the next day. At three o’clock I picked up Alafair at the school and kept her with me in the bait shop. The sky and the marsh were gray; my rental boats were half full of water, the dock shiny and empty in the weak light. Alafair was restless and hard to keep occupied in the shop, and I let Batist take her with him on an errand in town. At five-thirty they were back, the rain slacked off, and the sun broke through the clouds in the west. It was the time of day when the bream and bass should have been feeding around the lily pads, but the bayou was high and the water remained smooth and brown and undented along the banks and in the coves. A couple of fishermen came in and drank beer for a while, and I leaned on the window jamb and stared out at the mauve-and red-streaked sky, the trees dripping rain into the water, the wet moss trying to lift in the evening breeze.

  “Them men ain’t gonna do nothing. They just blowing they horn,” Batist said beside me. Alafair was watching a cartoon on the old black-and-white television set that I kept on the snack shelf. She held Tripod on her lap while she stared raptly up at the set.

  “Maybe so. But they’ll let us wonder where they are and when they’re coming,” I said. “That’s the way it works.”

  “You call them FBI in Lafayette?”

  “No.”

  “How come?”

  “It’s a waste of time.”

  “Sometime you gotta try, yeah.”

  “There weren’t any identifiable prints on the package except yours and mine.”

  I could see in his face that he didn’t understand.

  “There’s nothing to tell the FBI,” I said. “I would only create paperwork for them and irritate them. It wouldn’t accomplish anything. There’s nothing I can do.”

  “So you want get mad at me?”

  “I’m not mad at you. Listen—”

  “What?”

  “I want her to stay with you tonight. I’ll pick her up in the morning and take her to school.”

  “What you gonna do, you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I been knowing you a long time, Dave. Don’t tell me that.”

  “I’ll tell Clarise to pack her school clothes and her pajamas and toothbrush. There’s still one boat out. Lock up as soon as it comes in.”

  “Dave—”

  But I was already walking up toward the house in the light, sun-spangled rain, in the purple shadows, in the breeze that smelled of wet moss and blooming four-o’clocks.

  It was cool and stil
l light when I stopped on the outskirts of Lafayette and called Dixie Lee at the hospital from a pay phone. I asked him where Vidrine and Mapes were staying.

  “What for?” he said.

  “It doesn’t matter what for. Where are they?”

  “It matters to me.”

  “Listen, Dixie, you brought me into this. It’s gotten real serious in the last two days. Don’t start being clever with me.”

  “All right, the Magnolia. It’s off Pinhook, down toward the river. Look, Dave, don’t mess with them. I’m about to go bond and get out of here. It’s time to ease off.”

  “You sound like you’ve found a new confidence.”

  “So I got friends. So I got alternatives. Fuck Vidrine and Mapes.”

  The sun was red and swollen on the western horizon. Far to the south I could see rain falling.

  “How far out are these guys willing to go?” I said.

  He was quiet a moment.

  “What are you talking about?” he said.

  “You heard me.”

  “Yeah, I did. They burn a girl to death and you ask me a question like that? These guys got no bottom, if that’s what you mean. They’ll go down where it’s so dark the lizards don’t have eyes.”

  I drove down Pinhook Road toward the Vermilion River and parked under a spreading oak tree by the motel, a rambling white stucco building with a blue tile roof. Rainwater dripped from the tree onto my truck cab, and the bamboo and palm trees planted along the walks bent in the wind off the river and the flagstones in the courtyard were wet and red in the sun’s last light. A white and blue neon sign in the shape of a flower glowed against the sky over the entrance of the motel, an electrical short in it buzzing as loud as the cicadas in the trees. I stared at the front of the motel a moment, clicking my keys on the steering wheel, then I opened the truck door and started inside.

  Just as I did the glass door of a motel room slid open and two men and women in bathing suits with drinks in their hands walked out on the flagstones and sat at a table by the pool. Vidrine and Mapes were both laughing at something one of the women had said. I stepped back in the shadows and watched Mapes signal a Negro waiter. A moment later the waiter brought them big silver shrimp-cocktail bowls and a platter of fried crawfish. Mapes wore sandals and a bikini swimming suit, and his body was as lean and tan as a long-distance runner’s. But Vidrine wasn’t as confident of his physique; he wore a Hawaiian shirt with his trunks, the top button undone to show his chest hair, but he kept crossing and recrossing his legs as though he could reshape the protruding contour of his stomach. The two women looked like hookers. One had a braying laugh; the other wore her hair pulled back on her head like copper wire, and she squeezed Mapes’s thigh under the table whenever she leaned forward to say something.

  I got back in the truck, took my World War II Japanese field glasses out of the glove box, and watched them out of the shadows for an hour. The underwater lights in the swimming pool were smoky green, and a thin slick of suntan oil floated on the surface. The waiter took away their dishes, brought them more rounds of tropical drinks, and their gaiety seemed unrelenting. They left the table periodically and went back through the sliding glass door into the motel room, and at first I thought they were simply using the bathroom, but then one of the women came back out touching one nostril with her knuckle, sniffing as though a grain of sand were caught in her breathing passage. At ten o’clock the waiter began dipping leaves out of the pool with a long-handled screen, and I saw Mapes signal for more drinks and the waiter look at his watch and shake his head negatively. They sat outside for another half hour, smoking cigarettes, laughing more quietly now, sucking on pieces of ice from the bottoms of their glasses, the women’s faces pleasant with a nocturnal lassitude.

  Then a sudden rain shower rattled across the motel’s tile roof, clattered on the bamboo and palm fronds, and danced in the swimming pool’s underwater lights. Vidrine, Mapes, and the women ran laughing for the sliding door of the room. I waited until midnight, and they still had not come back out.

  I put on my rain hat and went into the motel bar. It was almost deserted, and raindrops ran down the windows. Outside, I could see the white and blue neon flower against the dark sky. The bartender smiled at me. He wore black trousers, a white shirt that glowed almost purple in the bar light, and a black string tie sprinkled with sequins. He was a strange-looking man. His eyes were close-set and small as dimes, and he smoked a Pall Mall with three fingers along the barrel of the cigarette. I sat at the corner of the bar, where I could see the front door of Vidrine and Mapes’s rooms, and ordered a 7-Up.

  “It’s pretty empty tonight,” I said.

  “It sure is. You by yourself tonight?” he said.

  “Right now I am. I was sort of looking for some company.” I smiled at him.

  He nodded good-naturedly and began rinsing glasses in a tin sink. Finally he said, “You staying at the motel?”

  “Yeah, for a couple of days. Boy, I tell you I got one.” I blew out my breath and touched my forehead with my fingertips. “I met this lady last night, a schoolteacher, would you believe it, and she came up to my room and we started hitting the JD pretty hard. But I’m not kidding you, before we got serious about anything she drank me under the table and I woke up at noon like a ball of fire.” I laughed. “And with another problem, too. You know what I mean?”

  He ducked his head and grinned.

  “Yeah, that can be a tough problem,” he said. “You want another 7-Up?”

  “Sure.”

  He went back to his work in the sink, his small eyes masked, and a moment later he dried his hands absently on a towel, turned on a radio that was set among the liquor bottles on the counter, and walked into a back hallway, where he picked up a house phone. He spoke into the receiver with his back turned toward me so that I could not hear him above the music on the radio. Outside the window, the trees were black against the sky and the blue tile of the motel roof glistened in the rain.

  The girl came through the side door ten minutes later and sat one stool down from me. She wore spiked heels, Levi’s, a backless brown sweater, and hoop earrings. She shook her wet hair loose, lit a cigarette, ordered a drink, then had another, and didn’t pay for either of them. She talked as though she and I and the bartender were somehow old friends. In the neon glow she was pretty in a rough way. I wondered where she came from, what kind of trade-off was worth her present situation.

  I wasn’t making it easy for her, either. I hadn’t offered to pay for either of her drinks, and I had made no overture toward her. I saw her look at her watch, then glance directly into the bartender’s eyes. He lit a cigarette and stepped out the door as though he were getting a breath of fresh air.

  “I hate lounges, don’t you? They’re all dull,” she said.

  “It’s a pretty slow place, all right.”

  “I’d rather have drinks with a friend in my room.”

  “What if I buy a bottle?”

  “I think that would be just wonderful,” she said, and smiled as much to herself as to me. Then she bit down on her lip, leaned toward me, and touched my thigh. “I’ve got a little trouble with Don, though. Like a seventy-five-dollar bar tab. Could you lend it to me so they don’t eighty-six me out of this place?”

  “It’s time to take off, kiddo.”

  “What?”

  I took my sheriff’s deputy badge out of my back pocket and opened it in front of her. It was just an honorary one, and I kept it only because it got me free parking at Evangeline Downs and the Fairgrounds in New Orleans, but she didn’t know that.

  “Don’s in deep shit. Go home and watch television,” I said.

  “You bastard.”

  “I told you you’re not busted. You want to hang around and have some of his problems?”

  Her eyes went from my face to the bartender, who was coming back through the side door. Her decision didn’t take long. She took her car keys out of her purse, threw her cigarettes inside, snapped it
shut, and walked quickly on her spiked heels out the opposite door into the rain. I held up the badge in front of the bartender’s small, close-set eyes.

  “It’s Iberia Parish, but what do you care?” I said. “You’re going to do something for me, right? Because you don’t want Lafayette vice down here, do you? You’re a reasonable guy, Don.”

  He bit down on the corner of his lip and looked away from my face.

  “I got a number I can call,” he said.

  “Not tonight you don’t.”

  I could see his lip discolor where his tooth continued to chew on it. He blew air out his nose as though he had a cold.

  “I don’t want trouble.”

  “You shouldn’t pimp.”

  “How about lightening up a bit?” He looked at the two remaining customers in the bar. They were young and they sat at a table in the far corner. Behind them, through the opened blinds, headlights passed on the wet street.

  “Two of your girls are in room six. You need to get them out,” I said.

  “Wait a minute…”

  “Let’s get it done, Don. No more messing around.”

  “That’s Mr. Mapes. I can’t do that.”

  “Time’s running out, partner.”

  “Look, you got a beef here or something, that’s your business. I can’t get mixed up in this. Those broads don’t listen to me, anyway.”

  “Well, I guess you’re a stand-up guy. Your boss won’t mind you getting busted, will he? Or having heat all over the place? You think one of those girls might have some flake up her nose? Maybe it’s just sinus trouble.”

  “All right,” he said, and held his palms upward. “I got to tell these people I’m closing. Then I’ll call the room. Then I’m gone, out of it, right?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “Hey, I’m out of it, right?” he said.

  “I’m already having trouble remembering your face.”

  Five minutes after the bartender phoned Mapes’s room the two prostitutes came out the front door, a man’s angry voice resounding out of the room behind them, and got into a convertible and drove away. I opened the wooden toolbox in the bed of my pickup truck and took out a five-foot length of chain that I sometimes used to pull stumps. I folded it in half and wrapped the two loose ends around my hand. The links were rusted and made an orange smear across my palm. I walked across the gravel under the dripping trees toward the door of room 6. The chain clinked against my leg; the heat lightning jumped in white spiderwebs all over the black sky.