DR03 - Black Cherry Blues

by James Lee Burke

"Yep."

  "They didn't have a blowout preventer on. It killed a couple of dozen guys when it blew."

  "You've got a good memory, Dixie." I twisted the throttle to open the gas feed and yanked the starter rope. It didn't catch.

  "It don't matter to you that I'm talking about Star Drilling Company?" he said.

  I kept yanking the rope while oil and gas bled away from the engine into the water. Then I put one knee on the plank seat, held the engine housing firm with my palm, and ripped the starter handle past my ear. The engine roared, the propeller churned a cloud of yellow mud and dead hyacinth vines out of the bottom, and I turned us back into the full sunlight, the slap of water under the bow, the wind that smelled of jasmine and wisteria. On the way back Dixie sat on the bow with his forearms lying loosely between his legs, his face listless and empty now, his rose-emblazoned shirt puffing with warm air.

  Late that afternoon the wind shifted out of the south and you could smell the wetlands and just a hint of salt in the air. Then a bank of thunderheads slid across the sky from the Gulf, tumbling across the sun like cannon smoke, and the light gathered in the oaks and cypress and willow trees and took on a strange green cast as though you were looking at the world through water. It rained hard, dancing on the bayou and the lily pads in the shallows, clattering on my gallery and rabbit hutches, lighting the freshly plowed fields with a black sheen.

  Then suddenly it was over, and the sky cleared and the western horizon was streaked with fire. Usually on a spring evening like this, when the breeze was cool and flecked with rain, Batist and I headed for Evangeline Downs in Lafayette. But the bottom had dropped out of the oil business in Louisiana, the state had the highest rate of unemployment in the country and the worst credit rating, and the racetrack had closed.

  I boiled crawfish for supper, and Alafair and I shelled and ate them on the redwood picnic table under the mimosa tree in the backyard. That night I dreamed of a bubble of fire burning under the Gulf's green surface. The water boiled and hissed, geysers of steam and dirty smoke rose into air, and an enormous blue-green oil slick floated all the way to the western horizon. Somewhere far down below among the twisted spars and drill pipe and cables and the flooded wreckage of the quarter boat were the bodies of my father and nineteen other men who went down with the rig when the drill bit punched into a pay sand and the wellhead blew.

  The company's public relations men said that they didn't have a blowout preventer on because they had never hit an oil sand at that depth in that part of the Gulf before. I wondered what my father thought in those last moments of his life. I never saw fear in him. No matter how badly he was hurt by circumstances or my mother's unfaithfulness, and eventually by drunken brawls in bars and the times he was locked up in the parish jail, he could always grin and wink at me and my brother and convincingly pretend to us that misfortune was not even worthy of mention.

  But what did he feel in those last moments, high up on the mon keyboard in the dark, when the rig started to shake and groan and he saw the roughnecks on the platform floor dropping tongs and chain and running from the eruption of sand, salt water, gas, oil, and cascading drill pipe that in seconds would explode into an orange and yellow flame that melted steel spars like licorice? Did he think of me and my brother, Jimmie?

  I bet he did. Even when he clipped his safety belt onto the Geronimo wire and jumped into the black, even as the rig caved with him on top of the quarter boat, I bet his thoughts were of us.

  They never found his body, but even now, almost twenty-two years later, he visited me in my sleep and sometimes I thought he spoke to me during my waking day. In my dream I saw him walking out of the surf, the green waves and foam sliding around the knees of his overalls, his powerful body strung with rust-colored seaweed. His wind-burned skin was as dark as a mulatto's, his teeth white, his thick, curly hair black as an Indian's. His tin hat was cocked at an angle on his head, and when he popped a wet kitchen match on his thumbnail and lit a cigar stub in the corner of his mouth and then crinkled his eyes at me, a shaft of morning sunlight struck his hat and flashed as bright as a heliograph. I could feel the salt water surge over my legs as I walked toward him.

  But it's the stuff of dreams. My father was dead. My wife was, too. The false dawn, with its illusions and mist-wrapped softness, can be as inadequate and fleeting as Morpheus' gifts.

  CHAPTER 2

  The days became warmer the first week in April, and on some mornings I went out on the salt at dawn and seined for shrimp in the red sunrise. In the afternoon I helped Batist in the bait shop, then worked in my flower beds, pruning the trellises of purple and yellow roses that I grew on the south side of the house. I pumped iron and did three miles along the dirt road by the bayou. At four o'clock I would hear the school bus stop, and five minutes later I would hear Alafair's lunch box clatter on the kitchen table, the icebox open; then she would come looking for me in the backyard.

  I sometimes wondered if perhaps she were simply fascinated with me as she would be by a strange and interesting animal that had come unexpectedly into her life. Her mother had drowned while holding her up in a wobbling bubble of air inside a crashed and sunken plane flown out of El Salvador by a Sanctuary priest. Her father had either been killed by the army in the mountains or he had been "disappeared" inside a military prison. Now through chance and accident she bed with me in my rural Cajun world on the edge of the Louisiana wetlands.

  One afternoon I had moved the picnic table out in the sunlight and had gone to sleep on top of it in my running shorts. I heard her bang the screen door, then when I didn't open my eyes she found a duck feather by the pond and began to touch peculiar places on my body with it: the white patch in my hair, my mustache, the curled Pungi-stick scar on my stomach. Then I felt her tickle the thick, raised welts on my thigh, which looked like small arrowheads embedded under the skin, where I still carried shrapnel from a mine and sometimes set off airport metal detectors.

  When I still refused to respond I heard her walk across the grass to the clothesline, unsnap Tripod from his chain, and suddenly he was sitting on my chest, his whiskers and wet nose and masked beady eyes pointed into my face. Alafair's giggles soared into the mimosa tree.

  That evening while I was closing the bait shop and folding up the umbrellas over the tables on the dock, a man parked a new Plymouth that looked like a rental or a company car by my shale boat ramp and walked down the dock toward me. Because of his erect, almost fierce posture, he looked taller than he actually was. In reality he probably wasn't over five and a half feet tall, but his neck was thick and corded with vein, his shoulders wide and sloping like a weight lifter's, his eyebrows one dark, uninterrupted line. His muscles seemed so tightly strung together that one muscular motion seemed to activate a half-dozen others, like pulling on the center of a cobweb with your finger. If anything, he reminded me of a pile of bricks.

  He wore his slacks high up on his hips, and the collar of his short-sleeved white shirt was unbuttoned and his tie pulled loose. He didn't smile. Instead, his eyes flicked over the bait shop and the empty tables, then he opened a badge on me.

  "I'm Special Agent Dan Nygurski, Mr. Robicheaux," he said.

  "Drug Enforcement Administration. Do you mind if I talk with you a little bit?"

  The accent didn't go with the name or the man. It was hillbilly, nasal, southern mountains, a bobby pin twanging in your ear.

  "I'm closing up for the day and we're about to go to a crawfish boil in the park," I said.

  "This won't take long. I talked with the sheriff in New Iberia and he said you could probably help me out. You used to be a deputy in his department, didn't you?"

  "For a little while."

  His face was seamed and coarse, the eyes slightly red around the rims. He flexed his mouth in a peculiar way when he talked, and it caused the muscles to jump in his neck, as though they were attached to a string. ' "Before that you were on the force in New Orleans a long time? A lieutenant in homicide?"

&nb
sp; "That's right."

  "I'll be," he said, and looked at the red sun through the cypress trees and the empty boats tied to the dock.

  My experience with federal agents of any kind has always been the same. They take a long time to get to it.

  "Could I rent a boat from you? Or maybe could you go with me and show me some of these canals that lead into Vermilion Bay?" he asked. His thinning dark hair was cut GI, and he brushed his fingers back through it and widened his eyes and looked around again.

  "I'll rent you a boat in the morning. But you'll have to go out by yourself. What is it exactly I can help you with, Mr. Nygurski?"

  "I'm just messing around, really." He flexed his mouth again.

  "I heard some guys were off-loading some bales down around Vermilion Bay. I just like to check out the geography sometimes."

  "Are you out of New Orleans?"

  "No, no, this is my first trip down here. It's nice country. I've got to try some of this crawfish while I'm here."

  "Wait a minute. I'm not following you. You're interested in some dope smugglers operating around Vermilion Bay but you're from somewhere else?"

  "It's just an idle interest. I think they might be the same guys I was after a few years ago in Florida. They were unloading a cigarette boat at night outside of Fort Myers, and some neckers out in the dunes stumbled right into the middle of the operation. These guys killed all four of them. The girls were both nineteen. It's not my case anymore, though."

  The twang, the high-pitched voice, just would not go with the subject matter nor the short, thick-bodied dark man who I now noticed was slew-footed and walked a bit sideways like a crab.

  "So you're out of Florida?" I said.

  "No, no, you got me all wrong. I'm out of Great Falls, Montana, now, and I wanted to talk with you about"

  I shook my head.

  "Dixie Lee Pugh," I said.

  We walked up the dock, across the dirt road and through the shadows of the pecan trees in my front yard. When I asked him how he had connected me with Dixie Lee, he said that one of his people had written down my tag number the morning I had met Dixie in the cafe outside Baton Rouge. But I also guessed that the DEA had a tap on his motel phone. I went inside the house, brought out two cold cans of Dr. Pepper, and we sat on the porch steps. Through the trunks of the pecan trees I could see the shadows lengthening on the bayou.

  "I don't mean any disrespect toward your investigation, Mr. Nygurski, but I don't think he's a major drug dealer. I think y'all are firing in the well."

  "Why?"

  "I believe he has a conscience. He might be a user, but that doesn't mean he's dealing."

  "You want to tell me why he came out to see you?"

  "He's in some trouble. But it doesn't have anything to do with drugs, and he'll have to be the one to tell you about it."

  "Did he tell you he celled with Sal the Duck in Huntsville?"

  "With who?"

  "Sal the Duck. Also known as Sally Dio or Sally Dee. You think that's funny?"

  "I'm sorry," I said. I wiped my mouth with my hand.

  "But am I supposed to be impressed?"

  "A lot of people would be. His family used to run Galveston. Slots, whores, every floating crap game, dope, you name it. Then they moved out to Vegas and Tahoe and about two years ago they showed up in Montana. Sal came back to visit his cousins in Galveston and got nailed with some hot credit cards. I hear he didn't like Huntsville at all."

  "I bet he didn't. It's worse than Angola."

  "But he still managed to turn a dollar or two. He was the connection for the whole joint, and I think he was piecing off part of his action to Pugh."

  "Well, you have your opinion. But I think Dixie's basically an alcoholic and a sick man."

  Nygurski took a newspaper clipping out of his shirt pocket and handed it to me.

  "Read this," he said.

  "I guess the reporters thought this was funny."

  The headline read "CURIOSITY KILLED THE BEAR." The dateline was Poison, Montana, and the lead paragraph described how a duffel bag containing forty packages of cocaine had been dropped by parachute into a heavily wooded area east of Flathead Lake and was then found by a black bear who strung powder and wrappers all over a hillside before he OD'd.

  "That parachute came down on national forestland. But guess who has a hunting lease right next door?"

  "I don't know."

  "Sally Dio and his old man. Guess who acted as their leasing agent?"

  "Dixie Lee."

  "But maybe he's just a sick guy."

  I looked away at the softness of the light on the bayou. Out of the corner of my eye I could see the knuckles on his hand as he clenched the soda can.

  "Come on, what do you think?" he said.

  "I think you're in overdrive."

  "You're right. I don't like these cocksuckers"

  "Nobody does. But I'm out of the business. You're tilting with the wrong windmill."

  "I don't think killing bears is funny, either. I don't like to see these guys bring their dirt and greed into a beautiful country. Your friend Pugh is standing up to his bottom lip in a lake of shit and the motorboat is just about to pass."

  "Then tell him that," I said, and looked at my watch. The breeze dented the leaves in the pecan trees.

  "Believe me, I will. But right now I'm frig mo here."

  "What?"

  "It means "Fuck it, I got my orders." In three days I go back to Great Falls." He drained his soda can, crushed it in his palm, and set it gently on the porch step. He stood up and handed me his card.

  "My motel number in Lafayette is on the back. Or later you can call me collect in Montana if you ever want to share any of your thoughts."

  "I've got nothing worth sharing."

  "It sounds depressing." His mouth made that peculiar jerking motion again.

  "Tell me, do you find something strange about my face?"

  "No, I wouldn't say that."

  "Come on, I'm not sensitive."

  "I meant you no offense," I said.

  "Boy, you're a careful one. A woman once told me my face looked like soil erosion. I think it was my wife. Watch out for Dixie Pugh, Robicheaux. He'll sell you a bowl of rat turds and call it chocolate chip."

  "I changed my mind. I'll share one thought with you, Mr. Nygurski. You didn't come all the way down here to follow a guy like Dixie Lee around. No matter how you cut it, he's not a long-ball hitter."

  "Maybe he is, maybe he isn't."

  "What's really going on up there?"

  "Everything that's going on in the rest of the country, except accelerated. It's a real zoo story. All the big players are there, nosing up to the trough. Keep fooling around with that rock 'n' roller and you'll meet some of them."

  He walked off through the trees, his feet loud on the dead leaves and dried pecan husks. si The moon was down that night, the sky black, and trees of lightning trembled on the southern horizon. At four in the morning I was awakened by the rumble of dry thunder and the flickering patterns of light on the wall. A tuning fork was vibrating in my chest, but I couldn't explain why, and my skin was hot and dry to the touch even though the breeze was cool through the window. I heard sounds that were not there: a car engine dying on the road, the footsteps of two men coming through the trees, a board squeaking on the porch, the scrape of a prizing bar being inserted between the front door and the jamb. They were the sounds of ghosts, because one man had been electrocuted in his bathtub with his radio in his lap and the other had died in an attic off St. Charles when five hollow-point rounds from my .45 had exploded up through the floor into the middle of his life.

  But fear is an irrational emotion that floats from object to object like a helium balloon that you touch with your fingertips. I opened my dresser drawer, took my .45 from under my work shirts, slipped the heavy clip into the magazine, and lay back down in the dark. The flat of the barrel felt hot against my thigh. I put my arm across my eyes and tried to fall asleep again. It wa
s no use.

  I put on my sandals and khakis and walked through the dark trunks of the pecan trees in the front yard, across the road and down to the dock and the bait shop. Then the moon rose from behind a cloud and turned the willow trees to silver and illuminated the black shape of a nutria swimming across the bayou toward the cattails. What was I doing here? I told myself that I would get a head start on the day. Yes, yes, certainly that was it.

  I opened the cooler in which I kept the soda pop and the long-necked bottles of Jax, Dixie, and Pearl beer. Yesterday's ice had melted, and some of the beer labels floated in the water. I propped my arms on the lip of the cooler and shut my eyes. In the marsh I heard a nutria cry out to its mate, which always sounds like the hysterical scream of a woman. I plunged my hands into the water, dipped it into my face, and breathed deeply with the shock of the cold. Then I wiped my face on a towel and flung it across the counter onto the duckboards.