Black Cherry Blues

by James Lee Burke

  Then one bright morning I was stacking cartons of red wigglers on a shelf in the bait shop and one spilled out of my hand and burst open on the countertop. The worms were thin and bright red in the dark mixture of loam and coffee grounds, and I was picking them up individually with my fingertips and dropping them back in the carton when I felt that sickness around my heart again and heard the words in my head: They’re going to do it. In five and a half weeks.

  I had no defense except my own word, that of an alcoholic ex-cop with a history of violence who was currently undergoing psychotherapy. My trial wouldn’t last more than three days, then I would be locked on a wrist chain in the back of a prison van and on my way to Angola.

  “What’s wrong your face, Dave?” Batist said.

  I swallowed and looked at my palms. They were bright with a thin sheen of sweat.

  I went up to the house, packed two suitcases, took my .45 automatic out of the dresser drawer, folded a towel around it, snapped it inside a suitcase pouch with two loaded clips and a box of hollow-points, and called the bondsman in Lafayette. I had known him for twenty-five years. His name was Butter Bean Verret; he wasn’t much taller than a fire hydrant, wore tropical suits, neckties with palm trees painted on them, rings all over his fingers, and ate butter beans and ham hocks with a spoon in the same café every day of his life.

  “What’s happening, Butter Bean? I need to get off the leash,” I said.

  “Where you going?”

  “Montana.”

  “What they got up there we ain’t got here?”

  “How about it, partner?”

  He was quiet a moment.

  “You’re not going to let me get lonely down here, are you? You’re gonna call me, right? Every four, five days you gone, maybe.”

  “You got it.”

  “Dave?”

  “What?”

  “You done got yourself in a mess here in Lou’sana. Don’t make no mo’ mess up there, no.”

  I told Batist that I was leaving him and Clarise in charge of the dock, my house and animals, that I would call him every few days.

  “What you gonna do Alafair?” he said.

  “My cousin will keep her in New Iberia.”

  He made a pretense of wiping off the counter with a rag. His blue cotton work shirt was unbuttoned, and his stomach muscles ridged above his belt buckle. He put a gumdrop in the side of his mouth and looked out the window at the bayou as though I were not there.

  “All right, what’s wrong?” I said.

  “You got to ask me that?”

  “I have to do it, Batist. They’re going to send me to prison. I’m looking at ten and a half years. That’s with good time.”

  “That don’t make it right.”

  “What am I supposed to do?”

  “Her whole life people been leaving her, Dave. Her mama, Miz Annie, you in the jail. She don’t need no mo’ of it, no.”

  I filled up the truck at the dock and waited on the gallery for the school bus. At four o’clock it stopped in the leafy shade by the mailbox, and Alafair walked through the pecan trees toward me, her tin lunch box clanging against her thigh. Her tan skin was dark in the shadows. As always, she could read a disturbed thought in my face no matter how well I concealed it.

  I explained to her that I had to leave, that it wouldn’t be for long, that sometimes we simply had to do things that we didn’t like.

  “Cousin Tutta is always nice to you, isn’t she?” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “She takes you to the show and out to the park, just like I do, doesn’t she?”

  “Yes.”

  “Batist will come get you to ride Tex, too. That’ll be all right, won’t it?”

  This time she didn’t answer. Instead she sat quietly beside me on the step and looked woodenly at the rabbit hutches and Tripod eating out of his bowl under the pecan tree. Then pale spots formed in her cheeks, and the skin around her bottom lip and chin began to pucker. I put my arm around her shoulders and looked away from her face.

  “Little guy, we just have to be brave about some things,” I said. “I’ve got some big problems to take care of. That’s just the way it is.”

  Then I felt incredibly presumptuous, vain, and stupid in talking to her about bravery and acceptance. She had experienced a degree of loss and violence in her short life that most people can only appreciate in their nightmares.

  I stared across the road at a blue heron rising from the bayou into the sunlight.

  “Have you ever seen snow?” I said.

  “No.”

  “I bet there’s still snow on the ground in Montana. In the ponderosa and the spruce, high up on the mountain. I went out there once with a friend from the army. I think you and I had better go check that out, little guy.”

  “See snow?”

  “You better believe it.”

  Her teeth were white and her eyes were squinted almost shut with her smile.

  By that evening we were highballing through the red-clay piney woods of East Texas, the warm wind blowing through the open truck windows, the engine humming under the hood, the inside of the cab aglow with the purple twilight.

  We rode into the black, rain-swept night until the sky began to clear out in the Panhandle and the moon broke through the clouds in a spoked wheel of silver over the high plains. The next day, outside of Raton, New Mexico, I bought a bucket of fried chicken and we ate in a grove of cottonwoods by a stream and slept four hours on a blanket in the grass. Then we climbed out of the mesa country into Trinidad, Colorado, and the tumbling blue-green roll of the Rocky Mountains, through Pueblo, Denver, and finally southern Wyoming, where the evening air turned cold and smelled of sage, and the arroyo-cut land and buttes were etched with fire in the sunset. That night we stayed in a motel run by Indians; in the morning it rained and you could smell bacon curing in a smokehouse.

  We crossed into Montana south of Billings, and the land began to change. It was green and rolling, the rivers slow-moving and lined with cottonwood and willow trees, with sharp-toothed mountains in the distance. Then as we headed toward the Continental Divide the rivers became wider with the spring runoff, roiling in the center, flooding the trees along the banks, and the mountains in the distance tumbled higher and higher against the sky, their crests still packed with snow, the slopes covered with ponderosa pine and Douglas fir and blue spruce. Alafair slept on the seat beside me, her head on a comic book, while I topped the Divide outside of Butte and began the long grade down the western slope toward Missoula. White-tailed deer grazed near the road in the evening shadows, their heads flickering at me as I roared past them. Log ranch houses were set back against the base of the hills, their windows lighted, smoke flattening off their stone chimneys.

  I followed the Clark Fork River through a cut in the mountains called Hellgate Canyon, and suddenly under a bowl of dark sky the city spilled out in a shower of light all the way across the valley floor. Missoula was a sawmill and university town, filled with trees and flowers, old brick homes, wooded parks, intersecting rivers glazed with neon light, the tinge of processed wood pulp, rows of bars where bikers hung in the doorways and the rock music thundered out into the street. My palms were thick and ringing with the pressure of the steering wheel, my ears almost deaf from the long hours of road wind. When I climbed the motel stairs with Alafair asleep on my shoulder, I looked out over the night sheen of the river, at the circle of mountains around the town and the way the timber climbed to the crests, and I wondered if I had any chance at all of having a normal life again, of being an ordinary person who lived in an ordered town like this and who did not wake up each morning with his fears sitting collectively on his chest like a grinning gargoyle.

  All of my present troubles had begun with Dixie Lee Pugh, and I felt that their solution would have to begin with him, too. But first I had to make living arrangements for Alafair and me. One of the advantages of being Catholic is that you belong to the western world’s largest private club.
Not all of its members are the best or most likable people, but many of them are. I rented a small yellow-brick house, with maple and birch trees in the yard, in a working-class neighborhood by the river, only two blocks away from a Catholic church and elementary school. The pastor called the principal at Alafair’s school in New Iberia, asked to have her records sent to the rectory, then admitted her to the first-grade class. Then he recommended his housekeeper’s widowed sister, who lived next door to the rectory, as a baby-sitter. She was a red-complected, bovine, and good-natured Finnish woman, and she said she could take care of Alafair almost any afternoon or evening, and in case I had to go out of town overnight Alafair could stay at her house.

  I bought Alafair a new lunch box, crayons, pencils, and a notebook, and on our third morning in town, I walked her down the tree-lined street to the school yard and watched her form in ranks with the other children while a lay teacher waited to lead them in the Pledge of Allegiance. Drinking a cup of coffee on the front steps of my new home, I watched the high, brown current of the river froth around the concrete pilings of a railway bridge and the sun break above Hellgate Canyon and fall across the valley, lighting the maples as though their leaves were waxed. Then I chewed on a matchstick and studied the backs of my hands. Finally, when I could delay it no longer, in the way you finally accept major surgery or embark on a long journey that requires much more energy than you possess, I got in my truck and headed for the town of Polson and Flathead Lake and the home of Sally Dio.

  The Jocko Valley was ranch and feed-grower country, covered with large areas of sun and shadow; the river ran along the side of the highway and was tea-colored with a pebbled bottom and bordered with willows and cottonwoods. In the distance the Mission Mountains rose up blue and snowcapped and thunderous against the sky. The rural towns were full of Indians in work denims, curled-brim straw hats, heel-worn cowboy boots, and pickup trucks, and when I stopped for gas they looked through me as though I were made of smoky glass. There were lakes surrounded by cattails set back against the mountain range, and high up on the cliffs long stretches of waterfall were frozen solid in the sunlight like enormous white teeth.

  I passed a Job Corps camp and an old Jesuit mission, and followed the highway over a pine-covered hill. Suddenly I saw Flathead Lake open up before me, so blue and immense and dancing with sunlight that it looked like the Pacific Ocean. Young pines grew on the slopes of the hills above the beaches, and the eastern shore was covered with cherry orchards. Out in the lake were islands with gray cliffs and trees rooted among the rocks, and a red sailboat was tacking between two islands, clouds of spray bursting off its bow.

  I stopped in Polson, which was at the south end of the lake, and asked a filling station operator for directions to Sal Dio’s house. He took a cigar out of his mouth, looked at me, looked at my license plate, and nodded up the road.

  “It’s about two miles,” he said.

  “Which side of the road?”

  “Somebody up there can tell you.”

  I drove up the road between the cherry orchards and the lake, then passed a blue inlet, a restaurant built out over the water, a strip of white beach enclosed by pine trees, until I saw a mailbox with the name Dio on it and a sign that said Private Road. I turned into the dirt lane and started up an incline toward a split-level redwood home that was built on a triangular piece of land jutting out above the lake. But up ahead was an electronically operated iron gate that was locked shut, and between the gate and the lake was a small redwood house whose veranda was extended on pilings over the edge of the cliff. It was obvious that the small and the large houses had been designed by the same architect.

  I stopped the truck at the gate, turned off the engine, and got out. I saw a dark-skinned girl with black hair looking at me from the veranda of the small house; then she went inside through sliding glass doors and Clete walked out in a pair of Bermuda shorts, a T-shirt that exposed his bulging stomach, a crushed porkpie fishing hat, and a powder-blue windbreaker that didn’t conceal his revolver and nylon shoulder holster.

  He walked across the lawn and down the hill to the road.

  “Man, I don’t believe it. Did they cut you loose?” he said.

  “I’m out on bond.”

  “Out on bond and out of the state? That doesn’t sound right, Streak.” He was grinning at me in the sunlight.

  “I know the bondsman.”

  “You want to go fishing?”

  “I need to talk to Dixie Lee.”

  “You came to the right place. He’s up there with Sally.”

  “I need to talk to you, too.”

  “Sounds like our First District days.”

  “It becomes that way when you’re about to do a jolt in Angola.”

  “Come on, it’s not going to happen. You had provocation to go after those guys. Then it was two against one, and finally it’s your word against Mapes’s about the shank. Besides, check out Mapes’s record. He’s a sick motherfucker if you ask me. Wait till your lawyer cross-examines him on the stand. The guy’s as likable as shit on melba toast.”

  “That’s another thing that bothers me, Cletus—how you know about these guys.”

  “It’s no mystery, partner,” he said, and took a package of Lucky Strikes out of his windbreaker pocket. The outline of his revolver was blue and hard against the nylon holster. “Dixie Lee brought them around a couple of times. They liked to cop a few free lines off Sal and hang around some of these rock people he’s always flying in. Sal collects rock people. Vidrine was a fat dimwit, but Mapes should have been eased off the planet a long time ago.”

  The skin of Clete’s face was tight as he lit his cigarette and looked off at the lake.

  “It sounds personal,” I said.

  “He got coked to the eyes one night and started talking about blowing up a VC nurse in a spider hole. Then he tried to take Darlene into the bedroom. Right there in the living room, like she was anybody’s punch.”

  “Who?”

  “She’s the girl who lives with me. Anyway, Sal told me to walk him down the road until he was sober. When I got him outside he tried to swing on me. I got him right on the mouth. With a roll of quarters in my hand. Dixie had to take him to the hospital in Polson.”

  “I think you ought to have an early change of life.”

  “Yeah, you were always big on advice, Dave. You see this .38 I have on? I have a permit to carry it in three states. That’s because I work for Sally Dee. But I can’t work as a cop anywhere. So the same people who won’t let me work as a crossing guard license me to carry a piece for Sal. Does that tell you something? Anyway, I’m using the shortened version of your AA serenity prayer these days—‘Fuck it.’”

  “Do I get through the gate?”

  He blew cigarette smoke out into the wind. His green eyes were squinted, as though the sun hurt them, as though a rusted piece of wire were buried deeply in the soft tissue of his brain.

  “Yeah, come on up to the house. I have to call up to Sal’s,” he said. “Meet Darlene. Eat lunch with us if you like. Believe it or not, I’m glad to see you.”

  I didn’t want to have lunch with them, and I surely didn’t want to meet Sally Dio. I only wanted for Dixie Lee to walk down to Clete’s and talk with me, and then I would be on my way. But it wasn’t going to work out that way.

  “They’re just getting up. Sal said to bring you up in about an hour,” Clete said, hanging up the phone in his living room. “They had a big gig last night. Have you ever met the Tahoe crowd? For some reason they make me think of people cornholing each other.”

  His girlfriend, whose full name was Darlene American Horse, was making sandwiches for us in the kitchen. Clete sat in a swaybacked canvas chair with a vodka Collins in his hand, one sandaled foot crossed on his knee, the other on a blond bearskin rug. Outside the sliding glass doors the lake was a deep blue, and the pines on an island of gray boulders were bending in the wind.

  “The thing you won’t forget,” he said, “the g
uy who got whacked out back there in Louisiana—all right, the guy I whacked out—that psychotic sonofabitch Starkweather, I had to kill him. They said they’d give me ten grand, and I said that’s cool, but I was going to run him out of town, take their bread, and tell them to fuck off if they complained about it later. Except he was feeding his pigs out of a bucket with his back to me, telling me how he didn’t rattle, how he wouldn’t piss on a cop on the pad if he was on fire, then he put his hand down in his jeans and I saw something bright in the sun and heard a click, and when he turned around with it I put a big one in his forehead. It was his Zippo lighter, man. Can you dig that?”

  Maybe the story was true, maybe not. I just wasn’t interested in his explanation or his obvious obsession, one that left his eyes searching for that next sentence, hanging unformed out there in the air, which would finally set the whole matter straight.

  “Why do they call him ‘the Duck’?” I said.

  “What?”

  “Why do they call Sally Dio ‘the Duck’?”

  “He wears ducktails.” He took a long drink out of his Collins. His mouth looked red and hard. He shrugged as though dismissing a private, troubling thought. “There’s another story. About a card game and drawing a deuce or something. The deuce is the duck, right? But it’s all guinea stuff. They like titles. Those stories are usually bullshit.”

  “I tell you, Clete, I’d really appreciate it if you could just bring Dixie Lee down here. I really don’t need to meet the whole crowd.”

  “You’re still the same guy, your meter always on overtime.” Then he smiled. “Do you think I’m going to call up the man I work for and say, ‘Sorry, Sal, my old partner here doesn’t want to be caught dead in the home of a greaseball’?” He laughed, chewing ice and candied cherries in his jaws. “But it’s a thought, though, isn’t it? Dave, you’re something else.” He kept smiling at me, the ice cracking between his molars. “You remember when we cooled out Julio Segura and his bodyguard? We really made the avocado salad fly.”