Black Cherry Blues

by James Lee Burke

  So I drank coffee on the back steps and waited for someone to call. Dixie Lee went to work and came back in the early afternoon, and still no one had phoned.

  “Ease up, boy. Let them people handle it,” he said.

  We were in the kitchen, and I was shining my shoes over some newspapers that I had spread on the floor.

  “That’s what I’m doing,” I said.

  “You put me in mind of a man who spent his last cent on Ex-Lax and forgot the pay toilet cost a dime.”

  “Give me a break on the scatology.”

  “The what?”

  “It’s not a time for humor, Dixie.”

  “Go to a meet. Get your mind off it. They got his butt dead-bang. You’re out of it, boy.”

  “You have them dead-bang when you weld the door on them.”

  Finally I called Nygurski’s office. He wasn’t in, he had left no message for me, and when I called the Teton sheriff’s office a deputy there refused to talk with me. I had become a spectator.

  I sat down at the kitchen table and started buffing my loafers again.

  “While you were gone yesterday I put all Clete’s stuff in the basement,” Dixie Lee said. “Was that all right?”

  “Sure.”

  “He’ll probably get out in a couple more days. He’s got one rib that’s broke bad, though. The doc says he’s got ulcers, too.”

  “Maybe he’ll go back to New Orleans and get started over again.”

  “There was something funny in his jeep.”

  “What’s that?” But I really wasn’t listening.

  “A pillowcase. With sand in it.”

  “Huh.”

  “Why would he put sand in a pillowcase?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “He must have had a reason. Clete never does anything without a reason.”

  “Like I say, I don’t know.”

  “But it’s funny to do something like that. What d’you think?”

  “I don’t care, for God’s sakes. Dixie, cut me some slack, will you?”

  “Sorry.”

  “It’s all right.”

  “I just thought I’d get your mind off of things.”

  “Okay.”

  “I want to see you loosen up, smile a little bit, start thinking about Louisiana, let them people handle it.”

  “I’ll do all those things. I promise,” I said, and I went into the bathroom, washed my face, then waited out on the front porch until it was time for Alafair to get out of school.

  But he was right. I was wired, and I was thinking and acting foolishly. In finding the bodies of the Indians I had been far more successful than I had ever thought I would be. Even if the FBI or the locals didn’t find the Tokarev, Mapes would still remain the prime suspect in the murder because of motive and Dixie Lee’s testimony, and he could be discredited as a prosecution witness against me in Louisiana. No matter how it came out, it was time to pack our bags for New Iberia.

  And that’s what I started doing. Just as the phone rang.

  “Mr. Robicheaux?” a woman said.

  “Yes.”

  “This is the secretary at the DEA in Great Falls. Special Agent Nygurski called a message in from his car and asked me to relay it to you.”

  “Yes?”

  “He said, ‘They found the weapon. Mapes is in custody. Call in a couple of days if you want ballistic results. But he’s not going to fly on this one. Enjoy your trip back to Louisiana.’ Did you get that, sir?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you want to leave a message?”

  “Tell him Playgirl magazine wants him on a centerfold.”

  She laughed out loud.

  “I beg your pardon?” she said.

  “Tell him I said thank you.”

  Five minutes later Alafair came through the front door with her lunch box.

  “How’d you like to head home day after tomorrow?” I said.

  Her grin was enormous.

  We cooked out in the backyard that evening and had Tess Regan over, then Alafair and I climbed the switchback trail to the concrete M on the mountain behind the university. The whole valley was covered with a soft red glow. The wind was cold at that altitude, even though we were sweating inside our clothes, and rain and dust were blowing up through the Bitterroot Valley. Then the wind began to blow harder through the Hellgate, flattening the lupine and whipping grains of dirt against our skin. Overhead a U.S. Forest Service fire-retardant bomber came in low over the mountains and turned toward the smoke jumpers’ school west of town, its four propellers spinning with silver light in the sun’s afterglow.

  The thought that had kept bothering me all afternoon, that I had tried to push into a closed compartment in the back of my mind, came back like a grinning jester who was determined to extend the ball game into extra innings.

  When we got home I unlocked Clete’s jeep and picked up the soiled pillowcase that was on the floorboard. I turned it inside out and felt the residue of dry sand along the seams. Then I called Sally Dio’s number at the lake. It was disconnected. I had reserved the next day for packing, shutting off the utilities, greasing the truck, making sandwiches for our trip home, and having a talk with Tess Regan about geographic alternatives. But Sally Dee was to have one more turn in my life.

  “What time are you going in to work?” I said to Dixie Lee at breakfast the next morning.

  “I ain’t. The boss man said he don’t need me today. That’s something I want to talk with you about, Dave. With you cutting out, I don’t know what kind of future I got here. Part-time forklifting ain’t what you’d call a big career move.”

  “Will you watch Alafair while I go up to the lake?”

  “Why you going up there?”

  “I need to talk with Dio. If he’s not there, I’ll leave him a note. Then I’ll be back.”

  “You’re going to do what?” He set his coffee cup down on the table and stared at me.

  I drove to Polson, then headed up the east side of the lake through the cherry orchards. I could have called Dan Nygurski or the sheriff’s office, but that would have forced me to turn in Cletus, and I thought that a man with ulcers, a broken rib, a crushed hand, and stitches in his head had paid enough dues.

  It was cold and bright on the lake. The wind was puckering the electric-blue surface, and the waves were hitting hard against the rocks along the shore. I parked in front of the Dios’ redwood house on the cliff, took off my windbreaker and left it in the truck so they could see I wasn’t carrying a weapon, and used the brass knocker on the door. There was no answer. I walked around the side of the house, past the glassed-in porch that was filled with tropical plants, and saw the elder Dio in his wheelchair on the veranda, his body and head wrapped in a hooded, striped robe. In his hand was a splayed cigar, and inside the hood I could see the goiter in his throat, his purple lips, the liquid and venomous expression in his eyes. He said something to me, but it was lost in the wind, because I was looking down the tiers of redwood steps that led to the rocks below and the short dock where Sally Dee and his two hoods had just carried armloads of suitcases and cardboard boxes. Even Sal’s set of drums was stacked on the dock.

  The three of them watched me silently as I walked down the steps toward them. Then Sal knelt by a big cardboard box and began reinforcing a corner of it with adhesive tape as though I were not there. He wore a yellow jumpsuit, with the collar flipped up on his neck, and the wind had blown his long copper-colored hair in his face.

  “What d’you want us to do, Sal?” one of his men said.

  Sally Dee stood erect, picked up a glass of iced coffee from the dock railing, drank out of it, and looked at me with an almost amused expression.

  “Nothing,” he said. “He’s just one of those guys who get on the bottom of your shoe like chewing gum.”

  “I’ll just take a minute of your time, Sal,” I said. “I think somebody fucked your airplane.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

 
“My airplane?”

  “That’s right.”

  “How’d they fuck my airplane?”

  “I think maybe somebody put sand in your gas tank.”

  “Who’s this somebody you’re telling me about?”

  “That’s all you get. You can make use of it or forget I was here.”

  “Yeah? No shit? Fuck with my airplane.”

  “If I were you, I’d check it out.”

  “You see my airplane around here?”

  “Well, I told you what I had to say, Sal. I’ll be going now.”

  “Why you doing me these favors?” he said, and grinned at the two men, who were leaning against the dock rail.

  “Because I don’t want a guy like you on my conscience.”

  He winked at the two men, both of whom wore shades.

  “Keep looking at that spot between those two islands,” he said to me, and pointed. “That’s it, right over there. Keep watching. You hear that sound? It’s an airplane. You know whose plane that is? You see it now, coming past those pine trees? It sounds like there’s sand in the gas tank? It looks like it’s going to crash?”

  The milk-white amphibian came in low between the islands and touched down into the dark-blue surface of the water, the backwash of the propellers blowing clouds of spray in the air.

  “Number one, I got locks on those gas tanks,” Sal said. “Number two, I got a pilot who’s also a mechanic, and he checks out everything before we go anywhere.” Then he looked at the other two men again and laughed. “Hey, man, let me ask you an honest question. I look like I just got off the boat with a bone in my nose and a spear in my hand? Come on, I ain’t mad. Nothing’s going to happen to you. Give me an honest answer.”

  I turned to go.

  “Hey, hey, man, don’t run off yet. You’re too fucking much.” His mouth was grinning widely. “Tell me for real. You think we’re all that dumb? That we weren’t going to catch on to all these games? I mean, I look that dumb to you?”

  “What are you trying to say?”

  “It was a good scam. But you ought to quit when you’re ahead. Foo-Foo promised the florist a hundred bucks if he should see the guy who sent the flowers and the note. So he came out yesterday and told us he seen the guy. So we found the guy, and the guy told us all about it. Charlie Dodds hasn’t been anywhere around here.”

  “It looks like you’re on top of everything. I’m sorry I wasted your time.”

  He tried to hold his grin, but I saw it fading, and I also saw the hard brown glint in his eyes, like a click of light you see in broken beer glass.

  “I’ll tell you what’s going to happen a little ways down the road,” he said. “I’m going to be playing cards with some guys in Nevada. Not Carl or Foo-Foo here. Guys you never heard of or saw before. I’ll just mention your name and the name of that shithole you come from. I’ll mention Purcel’s name, too. And I might throw Dixie’s in as a Lucky Strike extra. That’s all. I won’t say nothing else. Then one day a guy’ll come to your door. Or he’ll be standing by your truck when you come out of a barbershop. Or maybe he’ll want to rent a boat from you. It’s going to be a big day in your life. When it happens, I want you to remember me.”

  His two men grinned from behind their shades. The sunlight was brilliant and cold on the lake, the wind as unrelenting as a headache.

  CHAPTER

  12

  The story was on the front page of the Missoulian the next morning. The amphibian went down on the Salish Indian Reservation, just south of the lake. Two Indians who saw it crash said they heard the engines coughing and misfiring as the plane went by overhead, then the engines seemed to stall altogether and the plane veered sideways between two hills, plowing a trench through a stand of pines, and exploded. A rancher found a smashed wheelchair hanging in a tree two hundred yards away.

  I wondered what Sal thought about in those last moments while the pilot jerked impotently against the yoke and Sal’s hired men wrenched about in their seats, their faces stretched with disbelief, expecting him to do something, and the horizon tilting at a violent angle and the trees and cliffs rushing up at him like a fist. I wondered if he thought of his father or his lover in Huntsville pen or the Mexican gambler whose ear he mutilated on a yacht. I wondered if perhaps he thought that he had stepped into history with Ritchie Valens, the Big Bopper, and Buddy Holly.

  But I doubted that he thought any of these things. I suspected that in his last moments Sal thought about Sal.

  I folded the paper and dropped it into the trash sack in the kitchen. Alafair was putting our Styrofoam cooler, with our sandwiches and soft drinks, on the front seat of the truck.

  “How would Clete get into Sally Dee’s house to steal those ashtrays?” I asked Dixie Lee.

  “He probably just let himself in. Sal didn’t know it, but Clete copied all his keys. He could get into everything Sal owned—house, boat, cars, airplane, meat locker in town. Clete ain’t nobody’s fool, son. Like the Wolfman used to say, ‘You got the curves, baby, I got the angles.’ I saw them in one of his boxes when I put his junk in the basement.”

  “Would you mind getting them for me?” I said.

  Dixie went down the basement stairs and came back with a fistful of keys that were tied together with a length of baling wire.

  I walked out on the front porch into the morning, across the lawn and the street and down the embankment to the river’s edge. The sun was not up over the mountains yet, trout were feeding in the current around the stanchions of the steel railway bridge, and the sawmill across the river was empty and quiet. I unfastened the looped baling wire and flung the keys out into the water like a shower of gold and silver coins.

  Dixie Lee was standing on the curb, watching me, when I walked back up the embankment.

  “Ain’t that called destroying evidence or something?” he said.

  “It’s all just rock ’n’ roll,” I said.

  “How come Dixie always says ‘ain’t’?” Alafair asked.

  “Try not to say ‘how come,’ little guy.”

  “Great God in heaven, leave that little girl’s grammar alone,” Dixie said.

  “I think maybe you’re right,” I said.

  “You better believe it, boy,” he said, then took a deep breath down in his chest and looked out at the ring of blue mountains around the valley as though he held title to them.

  “Ain’t this world a pure pleasure?” he said.

  EPILOGUE

  Harry Mapes was sentenced to two life terms in the Montana state penitentiary at Deer Lodge, and the charges against me in Louisiana were dropped. I’m up to my eyes in debt, but it’s late fall now, the heat has gone out of the days, and the sky has turned a hard, perfect blue, the way it does in South Louisiana after the summer exhausts itself in one final series of red dawns and burning afternoons. The water is now cool and still in the bays and coves, and the fishermen who go out of my dock bring back their ice chests loaded with sac-a-lait that are as thick as my hand across the back.

  I invited Tess Regan to visit us, made arrangements for her to stay with my cousin in town, but when the time drew near for her to catch the plane, I knew she wouldn’t be here. She said it was a sick grandparent in Bozeman. But we both knew better, and that’s all right. I believe every middle-aged man remembers the girl he thinks he should have married. She reappears to him in his lonely moments, or he sees her in the face of a young girl in the park, buying a snowball under an oak tree by the baseball diamond. But she belongs back there, to somebody else, and that thought sometimes rends your heart in a way that you never share with anyone else.

  Clete moved back to New Orleans and opened a bar right down from Joe Burda’s Golden Star on Decatur. I don’t know where he got the capital. Maybe he came away from Sally Dee’s house with more than two gold ashtrays. Dixie Lee worked with me in the bait shop for a month, played weekends at a Negro nightclub in St. Martinville, then moved to New Orleans and organized a trio. They play regularly at Clete’s pla
ce and one of my brother’s clubs. One night I was down on Decatur, and I passed Clete’s place when the door was open. I saw Dixie at the piano, way in back by the dance floor, his white rhinestone sport coat and pink shirt lighted by the floor lamps. I heard him singing:

  “When they lay me down to rest,

  Put a rose upon my breast.

  I don’t want no evergreens,

  All I want is a bowl of butter beans.”

  Three weeks ago I was deep in the marsh at first light. At that time of day you hear and see many strange things in the marsh: a bull gator calling for his mate, a frog dropping off a cypress knee into the water, the cry of a nutria that sounds like the scream of a hysterical woman. The fog hangs so thick on the dead water and between the tree trunks that you can lose your hand in it. But I know what I saw that morning, and I know what happened, too, and I feel no need to tell a psychologist about it. I was picking up the trotline that I had strung through the trees the night before, and just as it started to rain through the canopy overhead, Annie and my father walked through the mist and stood on a sandspit right by the bow of my pirogue.

  She was barefoot and wore a white evening gown, and she had strung together a necklace of purple four-o’clocks around her throat.

  “It’s good-bye for real this time, Dave. It’s been special,” she said, then waded into the water, her dress billowing around her. She kissed me on the eyes and mouth, as perhaps my mother would have.

  My father’s tin hat was at an angle on his head, and he grinned with a matchstick in the corner of his mouth and held up one of his thumbs and winked. Then they walked deeper into the marsh, and the fog became so white and thick and cold that I had to reach out with the paddle and knock against the hard wood of a cypress to know where I was.

  Neither sleep nor late-night thunderstorms bring them back now, and I rise each day into the sunlight that breaks through the pecan trees in my front yard. But sometimes at dusk, when the farmers burn the sugarcane stubble off their fields and the cinders and smoke lift in the wind and settle on the bayou, when red leaves float in piles past my dock and the air is cold and bittersweet with the smell of burnt sugar, I think of Indians and water people, of voices that can speak through the rain and tease us into yesterday, and in that moment I scoop Alafair up on my shoulders and we gallop down the road through the oaks like horse and rider toward my house, where Batist is barbecuing gaspagoo on the gallery and paper jack-o-lanterns are taped to the lighted windows, and the dragons become as stuffed toys, abandoned and ignored, like the shadows of the heart that one fine morning have gone with the season.