Black Cherry Blues

by James Lee Burke

  Then Clete held him erect by the throat, hit him again and again, until his knuckles were shiny and red and the man’s eyes were crossed and a bloody string of saliva hung from his mouth.

  “For God’s sakes, cut it out, Clete!” I said. “The guy’s all we’ve got. Use your head, man.”

  “Bullshit. Charlie’s no sissy. Our man here is a stand-up con.” And with that, he wrapped his hand around the back of the man’s neck, ran him across the room, and smashed his head down on the side of the stove. I saw the skin split above the eye; then Clete threw him to the floor. The man’s eyes had rolled, and his straw-colored hair was matted with sweat.

  Clete stuck his wrist down at my face.

  “Feel my pulse,” he said. “I’m calm, I’m copacetic, I’m fucking in control of my emotions. I don’t have a hard-on. I’m extremely tranquil. I saved your fucking ass this morning. How about a little gratitude for a change?”

  “You unlock me, Clete, or I’m going to square this. I swear it.”

  “You’ll never change, Streak. You’re unteachable.”

  Clete picked up the roll of pipe tape and the survival knife from the floor and knelt next to the unconscious man. He ripped off a ten-inch length of tape, sliced through it with the knife, and wrapped the man’s mouth. Then he pulled his arms behind him, wrapped each wrist individually, made a thick figure eight between both wrists, and sliced the tape again. The knife was honed as sharp as a barber’s razor. He wrapped the man’s ankles just as he had done the wrists.

  “I don’t know what your plan is, but I think it’s a bad one,” I said.

  “I’m not the one up on a murder charge in Louisiana. I’m not the guy cuffed to a drainpipe. I don’t have a knot on my head. Maybe I do something right once in a while. Try some humility along with the gratitude.”

  He went into the front of the house, and I heard him pushing furniture around, tumbling a chair or a table to the floor. A moment later he came back into the kitchen, dragging my living room rug behind him. His face was flushed, and sweat ran out of the band of his porkpie hat. He ripped off his windbreaker and used it to wipe the sweat out of his eyes. The powder-blue sleeves were flecked with blood.

  “Sorry to fuck up your house. See if you can write it off on the IRS as part of Neighborhood Watch,” he said.

  He kicked the rug out flat on the floor and began rolling the man up in it.

  “Clete, we can bring Dio down with this guy.”

  But he wasn’t listening. He breathed hard while he worked, and there was a mean bead in his eye.

  “You got out of that murder beef in New Orleans. You want them to stick you with another one?” I said.

  Again he didn’t answer. He went out the back door, then I heard his jeep grinding in reverse across the lawn to the steps. Clete came back into the kitchen, unhooked the spring from the screen door, lifted up the man inside the rolled rug, and dragged him outside to the jeep. When he came back inside his face was dusty from the rug and running with sweat and his big chest heaved up and down for air. He put a cigarette in his mouth, lit it from a book of matches, and flipped the burnt match out through the open screen into the sunlight.

  “You got a hacksaw?” he said.

  “In my toolbox. Behind the driver’s seat.”

  He went back outside, and I heard him clattering around in my truck. Then he walked back up the wood steps with the saw hanging from his hand.

  “You can cut through the chain in about fifteen minutes,” he said. “If you want to call the locals then, ask yourself how much of this they’ll believe. Also ask yourself how much trouble you want over a shitbag like that guy out there.”

  “What are you going to do with him?”

  “It’s up to him. Are you really worried about a guy who’d kill a fourteen-year-old girl? The guy’s a genetic accident.” He pulled up a chair, sat down, and leaned toward me while he puffed on his cigarette and tried to get his breath back at the same time. “Did you ever think about it this way, Streak? You know how the real world works, just like I do. But half the time you act like you don’t. But it lets you feel good around guys like me. What do your AA pals call it—‘drinking down’?”

  “That’s not the way it is, Cletus.”

  “Why’d you keep partnering with me at the First District after you saw me bend a couple of guys out of shape?” He grinned at me. “Maybe because I’d do the things you really wanted to. Just maybe. Think about it.”

  “Don’t kill this guy.”

  “Hey, I got to be on the road. You want anything before I split? A glass of water or something?” He put the hacksaw in my hand.

  “It’s never too late to turn it around.”

  “That’s solid gold, Dave. I wonder if ole Charlie out there thinks of something like that while he’s doing a job on somebody. Man, that’s fucking noble. I got to remember that.”

  He hooked the spring on the screen door again, worked it back and forth a couple of times, then looked at me and said, “After you cut through the chain, the cuff key’s there on the table. You want to take down Sal and that other fart that framed you in Louisiana, get real or buy yourself some Mouseketeer ears. In an hour I’ll have Charlie’s life story. You want in on it, call me at the Eastgate Lounge at six o’clock.”

  Then he was gone.

  CHAPTER

  9

  I filled a clean dish towel with ice cubes and cracked them into a fine, wet paste with a rolling pin on the edge of the sink, then lay down on the living room couch and held the towel to my head. What a sharp ex-cop I proved myself this morning, I thought. I had managed to roust, terrify, and infuriate an innocent telephone man, then invite a contract killer into my house, right after the cops had left, turn my back on him unarmed, when I had access to a .45, a double-barreled twelve-gauge, and a .38 revolver nailed in a holster under a cabinet shelf, and get sapped and manacled to a drainpipe. I didn’t want to think about the rest of it: the moist touch of his hand sliding across the quivering muscles of my stomach, the total absence of moral light in his eyes, the transfixed, almost opiated shine in his face while he let the knife hover over my heart cavity.

  I had seen the work of his kind before, in New Orleans. They created object lessons that no one in the criminal community ever forgot: a grand jury witness garroted with wire, a hooker drenched with gasoline and turned into a cone of flame, a mob member who had cuckolded a friend emasculated and his phallus stuffed in his mouth. The men who did the work made you shudder. I’ve heard all kinds of explanations for their behavior and their perverse nature. My personal feeling is that they’re simply evil. The hooker, the street dips, the check writers, the fences and hot-money passers at the track, that bumbling urban army of brain-fried misfits, are often people with families and other jobs who eventually disappear into the normalcy of American life without ever leaving more than a forgettable scratch on it. Charlie Dodds’s kind are a special bunch, however. I don’t think there are many of them around, but enough perhaps to remind us that not every human being can be fixed or explained and that the jailer who keeps them in maximum-security lockdown, chained ankle, waist, and wrist when they’re moved only a short distance in the prison, knows and appreciates something about them that the rest of us do not.

  I had decided not to call the heat about Charlie Dodds’s visit. As Clete had said, how much of it would they be willing to believe, particularly after I had rousted the telephone man? Also, I was tired of having to prove myself to cops. Sometimes it’s not good to interfere with the fates. Maybe Clete and Dodds had found each other.

  The ice melted in the towel. I got up from the couch, my forehead numb and tight from the cold and the swelling, and cleaned up the kitchen. I wiped Dodds’s blood off the wall, stove, and linoleum with wet paper towels, cleaned the same areas again with detergent and rubbing alcohol, then put the towels, his survival knife, his cloth cap, and the sawed handcuffs into his canvas handbill bag, wadded it up, and threw the whole mess down the baseme
nt stairs.

  Then I showered and took a nap in the bedroom. The breeze ruffled the bushes outside the window and blew coolly across the sheets. In my dream I saw Annie sitting on the rail of my father’s houseboat in the misty early morning light down in the Atchafalaya marsh. The houseboat was weathered and paintless, streaked with moisture, and clouds of vapor billowed out of the islands of willow and cypress trees and hung low on the motionless water. Her hair was gold, her skin tan, her mouth red in the mist, but she wouldn’t speak to me. She smiled and looked toward my father, who waited for me in the outboard, and I realized that I was only fifteen and that I had to help him run the crab line, dripping with catfish heads, that we had strung across the bay the night before. As the sun burned the mist off the water and back into the trees, we filled the bait well with bluepoint crabs, then began picking up the conical fishnets that we had weighted with bricks, marked with sealed, plastic Clorox containers, and dropped into deep current yesterday morning. We worked through lunch, shaking huge mud cat and gaspagoo, what Texans called buffalofish and Negroes goo-fish, into the bottom of the boat, our backs hot and striped with sweat under the white sun. My father’s hair was curly and wild, like black wire, his hands big as skillets, his teeth strong and white, his laugh genuine and full of fun, his shoulders and arms so powerful and corded with muscle that he could fight three men at one time in the middle of a dance floor and take blows from every direction without going down. On the pipeline and in the oil field they called him Big Al Robicheaux with the kind of respect and affection that working people have for a man who possesses their best qualities. I leaned over the gunnel, grabbed a floating Clorox container, and got the lip of the net almost to the surface. But it was as heavy as concrete, the wooden hoops fouled, the netting torn, and no matter how I strained I couldn’t lift the first hoop clear of the water.

  My father cut the engine, climbed to the bow so he wouldn’t capsize the boat, and jerked the net up with his massive arms, until he could see the outline of the trapped gar just below the yellow surface.

  “Fils p’tain,” he said. He hadn’t shaved in three days, and his hair and beard were dripping with sweat.

  The gar must have been five feet long. Its fins and tail and armorlike scales and long, teeth-filled snout were mired in the netting, and there was no way to get it back out through the series of hoops. My father pulled up the bricks that we used to anchor the net, cut them loose, and dropped them into the bottom of the boat; then we towed the net slowly behind us back to the willow island where the houseboat was moored in the shade.

  We shook the gar out of the ruined net on the bank and watched it flop and gasp for air and coat its gills with sand. Its teeth could cut a bass in half like a razor slicing through it. My father got behind it, hit it once on the head with a brick, then drove his skinning knife through a soft place between the head and the armored shell, pushing down with both hands until the knife point went through the throat into the sand and blood roared from the gar’s mouth and gills. But the gar continued to flop, to twist against the knife and flip sand into the air, until my father crushed its head and its eyes became as suddenly lifeless and cold as black glass. Then he brought the knife straight back along the dorsal fin, and the black-green armor cracked away from the rows of pink meat as cleanly as pecan shell breaking.

  It wasn’t a good day. The gar wasn’t a commercial fish, and we couldn’t afford the loss of a net, but my father always put the best light on a situation.

  “We cain’t sell him, no,” he said, “but he gonna be some good garfish balls. You mess with Aldous and Dave, you gonna get fry, you gonna get eat, you better believe, podna.”

  We cleaned and filleted fish in pans of bloody water until evening, when the mosquitoes started to boil out of the shadows and purple rain clouds gathered on the horizon and lightning flashed far out on the Gulf. We packed the fish in the ice bin, so tomorrow we could take them downriver to sell in Morgan City. I went to sleep in my bunk bed with the wind blowing cool through the window from across the bay, then I woke to a smell that shouldn’t have been there. It was thick and gray, as fetid as excrement and sweet at the same time. But we had thrown all the fish guts and heads and piles of stripped mud-cat skins into the current and had washed the deck and all the pans clean. I kept the pillow over my head and tried to push myself deeper into sleep, but I could feel the stench against my face like a rat’s breath.

  In the first blue light of dawn I went out on the deck, and Annie was leaning against the rail in the mist, dressed like a Cajun fisher girl in sun-faded jeans, tennis shoes without socks, a khaki shirt with the arms cut off. The smell was everywhere. She pointed toward my father, who waited for me on the sandbar, a shovel over his shoulder.

  Don’t be afraid, she said. Go with Al.

  I don’t want to this time.

  You mustn’t worry about those things. We both love you.

  You’re about to go away from me, aren’t you?

  Her face was kind, and her eyes moved over my face as though she were an older sister looking at her younger brother.

  I followed my father into the marsh, our tennis shoes splashing through the sloughs, the wet willow branches swinging back into our faces. The early sun was big and hot on the edge of the flooded woods, and the cypress trees looked black against the red light. The water was dead and covered with green algae; cottonmouth moccasins were coiled on the low branches of the trees. The smell became stronger, so that I had to hold my hand to my face and breathe through my mouth. We came up out of a slough onto a hard-packed sandbar, and lying stretched on the sand, huge divots cut out of its back by a boat propeller, was the rotting carcass of the biggest bull alligator I had ever seen. His tail drag and the sharp imprints of his feet trailed off the sandbar back through the trees. I could see the open water where he had probably been hit by a commercial boat of some kind, or the screw on a seismograph drill barge, and had beached himself and begun his crawl to this spot, where he had died on high ground and turkey buzzards and snakes had begun feeding on his wounds.

  “Mais, that stink,” my father said, and waved at the air in front of his face. “You start dig a hole.” He handed me the shovel, then he grinned as he sometimes did when he was about to play a joke on me. “Where you gonna dig a hole, you?”

  I didn’t understand him. I started to scrape in the dry sand with the shovel’s tip.

  “Que t’as près faire, cher? Tu veux travailler comme un neg?” he said, and laughed. (“What are you doing, dear one? You want to work like a Negro?”)

  I pressed down again into the hard sand, felt it grate and slide over the blade. He took the shovel out of my hand, walked to a dip in the sandbar where the water from two sloughs had washed a small channel, and dug deeply and easily into the wet sand and flung it out into the sunlight, his face grinning at me.

  “You do it where it soft,” he said. “Ain’t you learned nothing from your old man?”

  I woke to a clatter of birds in the trees outside the window, my head thick with afternoon sleep. I rinsed my face in the bathroom sink and looked at the tight purple lump that ran down through my hairline. The dream made no sense to me, other than the facts that I missed my father and Annie, that I feared death, and that I conducted a foolish quarrel with the irrevocable nature of time.

  Al, what are you trying to tell me? I thought, as the water streamed off my face in the mirror’s silent reflection.

  Shortly before three o’clock I walked down to the school and waited for Alafair by the side of the playground. A few minutes later the doors of the building were flung open, and she came running across the small softball diamond with a group of other children, her Donald Duck lunch box clanging against her thigh. Her elastic-waisted jeans were grimed at the knees, and there were dirt and sweat rings around her neck.

  “What did you guys do today at recess? Mud wrestling?” I said.

  “Miss Regan let us play dodgeball. It’s fun. I got hit in the seat. You ever play
it, Dave?”

  “Sure.”

  “What happened to your head?”

  “I hit it when I was working on the truck. Not too smart, huh?”

  Her eyes looked at me curiously, then she put her hand in mine and swung her weight on my arm.

  “I forgot,” she said. “Miss Regan said to give you this note. She said she’d call you anyway.”

  “About what?”

  “About the man.”

  “What man?”

  “The one at the school yard.”

  I unfolded the piece of paper she had taken from her lunch box. It read: Mr. Robicheaux, I want to have a serious talk with you. Call me at my home this afternoon—Tess Regan. Under her name she had written her phone number.

  “Who’s this man you’re talking about, Alafair?” I said.

  A bunch of children ran past us on the sidewalk. The sunlight through the maple trees made patterns on their bodies.

  “The other kids said he was in a car on the corner. I didn’t see him. They said he was looking through, what you call those things, Dave? You got some in the truck.”

  “Field glasses?”

  “They called them something else.”

  “Binoculars?”

  “Yeah.” She grinned up at me when she recognized the word.

  “Who was he looking at, Alafair?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why does Miss Regan want to talk to me about it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What time was this guy out there?”

  “At recess.”

  “What time is recess?”