Black Cherry Blues

by James Lee Burke

  “I said, ‘What d’you mean, Mr. Higgins?’”

  “He says, ‘For a better quality rubbers.’ Then he took his hat off and whipped the shit out of me with it. Next stop—one month in isolation, son. I’m talking about down there with the crazoids, the screamers, the guys who stink so bad the hacks have to wash them down with hoses. And I had delirium tremens for two fucking days. Weird sounds snapping in my head, rockets going off when I closed my eyes, a big hard-on and all kinds of real sick sexual thoughts. You know what I’m talking about, man. It must have been ninety degrees in the hole, and I was shaking so bad I couldn’t get a cup of water to my mouth.

  “I got through two days and thought I was home free. But after a week I started to have all kinds of guilt feelings again. About the little boy in the accident in Fort Worth, about my own little boy dying in the fire. I couldn’t stand it, man. Just that small isolation cell and the light through the food slit and all them memories. I would have drunk gasoline if somebody would have give it to me. So you know what I done? I didn’t try to get the guilt out of my mind. I got high on it. I made myself so fucking miserable that I was drunk again. When I closed my eyes and swallowed, I could even taste that black cherry wine. I knew then it wasn’t never gonna be any different. I was always gonna be drunk, whether I was dry or out there juicing.

  “So in my head I wrote a song about it. I could hear all the notes, the riffs, a stand-up bass backing me up. I worked out the lyrics for it, too—

  You can toke, you can drop,

  Drink or use.

  It don’t matter, daddy,

  ’Cause you never gonna lose

  Them mean ole jailhouse

  Black cherry blues.”

  I rubbed my forehead with my hand. I didn’t know what to say to him.

  “You still there?” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “You gonna come over?”

  “Maybe I’ll see you another time. Thanks for the invitation.”

  “Fuck, yeah, I’m always around. Sorry I wasted your time.”

  “You didn’t. We were good friends in college. Remember?”

  “Everybody was good friends in college. It all died with Cochran and Holly. I got to motivate on over to another bar. This place bugs me. Dangle easy, Dave.”

  He hung up. I stared listlessly out into the sunlight a moment, then walked outside and finished changing the oil in my truck.

  She drove up in her red Toyota jeep a half hour later. I guess I knew that she was coming, and I knew that she would come when Alafair was at school. It was like the feeling you have when you look into the eyes of another and see a secret and shared knowledge there that makes you ashamed of your own thoughts. She wore a yellow sundress, and she had put on lipstick and eye shadow and hoop earrings. The sacks of groceries in the back of the jeep looked as though they were there only by accident.

  Her lipstick was dark, and when she smiled her teeth were white.

  “Your hat,” I said.

  “Yes. You found it?”

  “It’s in the living room. Come in. I have some South Louisiana coffee on the stove.”

  She walked ahead of me, and I looked at the way her black hair sat thickly on her neck, the way the hem of her dress swung across her calves. When I opened the screen for her I could smell the perfume behind her ears and on her shoulders.

  I went into the kitchen while she found her hat in the living room. I fooled with cups and saucers, spoons, a bowl of sugar, milk from the icebox, but my thoughts were as organized as a puzzle box that someone had shaken violently between his hands.

  “I try to shop in Missoula. It’s cheaper than Polson,” she said.

  “Yeah, food’s real cheap here.”

  “Dixie Lee came along with me. He’s in a bar right now.”

  “He called me. You might have to drag him out of the place on a chain.”

  “He’ll be all right. He’s only bad when Sal lets him take cocaine.” She paused a moment. “I thought maybe you wouldn’t be home.”

  “I got a late start today. A bunch of phone calls, stuff like that.”

  She reached for the cups and saucers on the drainboard and her arm brushed against mine. She looked at my eyes and raised her mouth, and I slipped my arms around her shoulders and kissed her. She stepped close against me, so that her stomach touched lightly against my loins, and moved her palms over my back. She opened and closed her mouth while she held and kissed me, and then she put her tongue in my mouth and I felt her body flatten against me. I ran my hands over her bottom and her thighs and gently bit her shoulder as she wrapped one calf inside my leg and rubbed her hair on the side of my face.

  We pulled the shades in the bedroom and undressed without speaking, as if words would lead both of us to an awareness about morality and betrayal that we did not care to examine in the heated touch of our skin, the dry swallow in the throat, the silent parting of our mouths.

  There had been one woman in my life since my wife’s death, and I had lived celibate almost a year. She reached down and took me inside her and stretched out her legs along me and ran her hands along the small of my back and down my thighs. The breeze clattered the shades on the windows, the room was dark and cool, but my body was rigid and hot and my neck filmed with perspiration, and I felt like an inept and simian creature laboring above her. She stopped her motion, kissed me on the cheek and smiled, and I stared down at her, out of breath and with the surprise of a man whose education with women always proved inadequate.

  “There’s no hurry,” she said quietly, almost in a whisper. “There’s nothing to worry about.”

  Then she said, “Here,” and pressed on my arm for me to move off her. She brushed her hair out of her eyes, sat on top of me, kissed me on the mouth, then raised herself on her knees and put me inside her again. Her eyes closed and opened, she tightened her thighs against me, and propped herself up on her hands and looked quietly and lovingly into my face.

  She came before I did, her face growing intense and small, her mouth suddenly opening like a flower. Then I felt all my nocturnal erotic dreams, my fear, my aching celibacy, rise and swell in my loins, and burst away outside of me like a wave receding without sound in a cave by the sea.

  She lay close to me under the sheet, her fingers in the back of my hair. A willow tree in the backyard made shadows on the shade.

  “You feel bad, don’t you?” she said.

  “No.”

  “You think what you’ve done is wrong, don’t you?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “Clete’s impotent, Dave,” she said.

  “What?”

  “He goes to a doctor, but it doesn’t do any good.”

  “When did he become impotent?”

  “I don’t know. Before I met him. He says a fever did it to him in Guatemala. He says he’ll be all right eventually. He pretends it’s not a problem.”

  I raised up on my elbow and looked into her face.

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “You moved in with an impotent man?”

  “He can’t help what he is. He’s good to me in other ways. He’s generous, and he respects me. He takes me places where Indians don’t go. Why do you have that look on your face?”

  “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to,” I said.

  “What are you thinking?”

  “Nothing. I just don’t quite understand.”

  “Understand what?”

  “Your relationship. It doesn’t make sense.”

  “Maybe it isn’t your business.”

  “He was my partner, I’m in bed with his girl. You don’t think I have some involvement here?”

  “I don’t like the way you’re talking to me.”

  I knew that anything else that I said would be wrong. I sat on the edge of the bed with my back toward her. The wind fluttered the shade in the window, casting a brilliant crack of sunlight across the room. Finally I looked over my shoulder at her. She had pulled the sheet up over her breasts.
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br />   “I try not to be judgmental about other people. I apologize,” I said. “But he and I used to be good friends. You said he was impotent. You were suggesting I didn’t have anything to feel bad about. There’s something wrong in the equation here. Don’t pretend there isn’t.”

  “Look the other way, please,” she said, gathered the sheet around her, picked up her clothes from the chair, and walked into the bathroom. A few minutes later she came back out in her yellow dress, pushing the top back on her lipstick, pressing her lips together.

  “I like you just the same,” I said.

  “You don’t know anything,” she said.

  And she left me there, with a wet spot in the center of my bed and a big question mark as to whether I had acquired any degree of caution or wisdom in the fiftieth year of my life.

  CHAPTER

  7

  I needed to go back east of the Divide and talk to more people about the disappearance of Clayton Desmarteau and his cousin. But I had gotten too late a start that day, and instead I drove up to Flathead Lake and spent two hours searching through property records in the county clerk’s office. I was still convinced that there was some tie between Sally Dio, Dixie Lee, Harry Mapes, and Star Drilling Company. I didn’t buy the story that Sally Dio kept Dixie Lee around to effect innocuous real estate deals or because he simply liked over-the-hill rockabilly musicians. I had known too many like him in New Orleans. They liked women but didn’t consider them important; they liked power but would share it out of necessity; they were cruel or violent upon occasion but usually in a pragmatic way. However, they loved money. It was the ultimate measure of success in their lives, the only subject of interest in their conversations. They paid with cash in restaurants, not with credit cards, and their elaborate tipping was as much a part of their predictable grandiosity as their lavender Cadillacs and eight-hundred-dollar tropical suits.

  But all I found in the courthouse with Dixie Lee’s or Dio’s name on them were deeds or leases to house lots, corner business property, and a couple of marinas, nothing that surprised me, nothing that suggested anything more than investments in local real estate.

  I drove up the east shore of the lake, through the orchards of cherry trees, past the restaurant built out over the water and the blue lagoon with the rim of white beach and the pines growing thickly up the incline back toward the road, and finally to the entrance of Sally Dio’s split-level redwood home built up on a cliff that overlooked the dazzling silklike sheen of the lake. I drove around the next curve, parked my truck off the shoulder, and walked back through a stand of pine trees that ended abruptly at the lip of a cliff that fell away to the lake’s edge. Green, moss-covered rocks showed dully in the sunlight just below the water’s surface.

  Across the lagoon I could see Dio’s house and the cottage below where Clete and Darlene lived. I knelt on one knee among the pine needles and steadied my World War II Japanese field glasses against a tree trunk. An American flag popped in the breeze on Dio’s veranda, his flower boxes were brilliant with pink and blue and crimson petunias, and a cream-colored Mercury and black Porsche with Nevada plates were parked in the gravel at the edge of his lawn. I wrote the tag numbers down in a notebook, buttoned it in my shirt pocket, then watched a big van with bubble side windows, followed by a Toyota jeep, drive out on the beach. The side door, which was painted with a tropical sunset, slid open and a group of swimmers jumped out on the sand and began inflating a huge yellow raft with a foot-operated air pump.

  I refocused the glasses on their faces. It was Dio and what Clete called the Tahoe crowd. Dio wore an open shirt, flop sandals, and a luminescent purple bikini that fitted tightly against his loins and outlined his phallus. He was in a good mood, directing the outing of his entourage, pointing at a milk-white two-engine amphibian plane that came in low over the hills on the far side of the lake, unlocking his father’s wheelchair from the mechanical platform that extended from the van’s open door and lowered to the sand. Clete walked from the Toyota, wheeled Dio’s father by a barbecue pit, lighted a bag of charcoal, and began forking a box of steaks onto the grill. He wore his crushed porkpie fishing hat, and I could see his nylon shoulder holster and revolver under his sweater.

  The amphibian made one pass over the beach, gunned its engines and banked into the cloudless sky over my head, then made a wide turn and came in over the top of a cherry orchard and a sailboat dock, flattening out and touching its belly and wing pontoons down on the water in a spray of white foam and mist from the back draft of the propellers.

  While Clete cooked and attended to the elder Dio, who sat sullen and wrapped in a shawl with a glass of red wine in his hand, the others took rides on the plane. I was amazed at the carelessness of the pilot and the faith of those who flew with him. They lifted off the water and into the wind and cleared the pines by no more than thirty feet, then climbed high into the sun, banked at a sharp angle, and came back between a cut in the hills, dipping down over beachfront houses in a roar of noise that made fishermen in outboards pull their anchors and turn in to shore.

  I watched them for two hours. They smoked dope in the lee of the van, drank wine and canned beer out of a washtub filled with crushed ice, ate bleeding steaks and tossed salads off paper plates, swam out breathlessly into the lake and climbed laughing into their yellow raft, their bodies hard and prickled with cold. The girls were pretty and tan and good to look at. Everyone was happy, except maybe Clete and the elder Dio. The Tahoe crowd were the kind of people who knew that they would never die.

  The sun had moved into the western sky, which was absolutely blue above the green hills, and the light must have glinted on my field glasses because I saw Sally Dio look up suddenly and squint at the pine trees in which I knelt. I stepped back into the shadows and refocused through the branches. Dio stood by Clete and his father and was pointing in my direction. Clete stopped cleaning up paper plates from a picnic table, glanced up briefly at the cliff, then resumed his work. But Sally Dio and his father looked as if they were staring at an angry dog that was running against its chain. The elder Dio’s mouth was wide when he spoke to Clete again, and Clete flung a handful of picnic trash into a garbage can, walked down to the water’s edge where the swimmers had left the raft, dragged it up on the sand, and began pulling out the air plugs. Then he loaded the hampers, the washtub of beer and wine coolers, and the elder Dio back into the van.

  I could have gotten out of there, I suppose, without being seen. But sometimes self-respect requires that you float one down the middle, letter high, big as a balloon, and let the batter have his way. I walked through the trees back to the road. The air was cool in the shade and heavy with the smell of the pine needles on the ground. Bluebirds with yellow wings flew in and out of the smoky light at the tops of the trees. I walked up the shoulder of the road, got in my truck, put my field glasses inside their case, put the case inside the glove box, and started the engine just as Dio’s van and Clete’s jeep turned out of the entrance to the public beach and headed toward me.

  I saw Sally Dio’s face through the wide front window of the van, saw the recognition and anger grow in it as he looked back at me and took his foot off the accelerator. Clete was slowing behind him at the same time.

  Dio stopped opposite my cab and stared at me.

  “What the fuck you think you’re doing, man?” he said.

  Through the bubble side window of the van I could see people sitting in leather swivel chairs. Their faces gathered at the window as though they were looking out of a fishbowl.

  “Wonderful day,” I said.

  “What the fuck you doing up in that woods?”

  “What do you care? You’re not shy. Come on, Dio. That air show was first-rate.”

  I saw his nostrils whiten around the edges.

  “We told you the other day you don’t come around,” he said. “You’re not a cop. You seem to have confusion about that.”

  I turned off my engine and clicked my nails on the window jamb. He t
urned off his engine, too. It was silent on the road, except for the wind blowing through the pines. The western sun over the lake made his waxed black van almost glow with an aura.

  “I heard you like to take off parts of people,” I said.

  “You heard what?”

  “The Sal the Duck story. It’s the kind of stuff they enjoy at the DEA. It brightens up a guy’s file.”

  He opened the door and started to step out on the road. I saw his father lean forward from the back and try to hold his shoulder. The father’s lips looked purple against his gray skin; his goiter worked in his throat and his eyes were intense and black when he spoke. But Sally Dio was not listening to his father’s caution, and he slid off the seat and stepped out on the road.

  I set my sunglasses on the dashboard and got out of the truck. Out of the corner of my eye I could see Clete standing by his jeep. Dio had put on a pair of Levi’s over his bathing suit. His denim shirt was open, and his stomach was flat and ridged with muscle. I heard the van door slide open on the far side, and a sun-bleached boy and girl walked around the back and stared at me, but it was obvious they intended to remain spectators. Through the trees I could see the sun click on the deep-blue rippling sheen of the lake.

  “You’ve got a serious problem,” Sally Dio said.

  “How’s that?” I said, and I smiled.

  “You hear an Italian name, you think you can piss on it. A guy’s been up the road, you think he’s anybody’s fuck.”

  “You’re not a convincing victim, Dio.”

  “So you keep coming around, provoking a guy, bothering his family, bothering his friends.” He touched me lightly on the chest with three stiff fingers. There were small saliva bubbles in the corner of his mouth. His ducktailed hair was the color of burnt copper in the slanting light.

  “It’s time to back off, partner,” I said, and smiled again.

  “And it don’t matter you been warned. You get in people’s face, you got no respect for an old man, you got no respect for people’s privacy. You’re a jitterbird, man.” His three stiffened fingers tapped against my chest again, this time harder. “You get off hanging around swinging dicks, ’cause you got nothing going on your own.”