DR03 - Black Cherry Blues

by James Lee Burke

  But there was still one cafe on Pinhook left over from my college days at Southwestern in the 1950s. The parking lot was oyster shell the now-defunct speakers from the jukebox were still ensconced in the forks of the spreading oak trees, the pink and blue and green neon tubing around the windows still looked like a wet kiss in the rain.

  The owner served fried chicken and dirty rice that could break your heart. I finished eating lunch and drinking coffee and looked out at the rain blowing through the oaks, at the sheen it made on the bamboo that grew by the edge of the parking lot. The owner propped open the front door with a board, and the mist and cool air and the smell of the trees blew inside. Then a Honda stopped in a rain puddle out front, the windshield wipers slapping, and an Indian girl with olive skin and thick black hair jumped out and ran inside. She wore designer jeans, which people had stopped wearing, a yellow shirt tied across her middle, and yellow tennis shoes. She touched the raindrops out of her eyes with her fingers and glanced around the restaurant until she saw the sign over the women's room. She walked right past my table, her damp wrist almost brushing my shoulder, and I tried not to look at her back, her thighs, the way her hips creased and her posterior moved when she walked; but that kind of resolution and dignity seemed to be more and more wanting in my life.

  I paid my check, put on my rain hat, draped my seersucker coat over my arm, and ran past the idling Honda to my truck. Just as I started the engine the girl ran from the restaurant and got into the Honda with a package of cigarettes in her hand. The driver backed around so that he was only ten feet from my cab and rolled his window down.

  I felt my mouth drop open. I stared dumbfounded at the boiled pigskin face, the stitched scar that ran from the bridge of his nose up through one eyebrow, the sandy hair and intelligent green eyes, the big shoulders that made his shirt look as though it were about to rip.

  Cletus Purcel.

  He grinned and winked at me.

  "What's happening, Streak?" he said into the rain, then rolled up the window, and splashed out onto Pinhook Road.

  My old homicide partner from the First District in the French Quarter. Bust 'em or smoke 'em, he used to say. Bury your fist in their stomachs, leave them puking on their knees, click off their light switch with a slapjack if they still want to play.

  He had hated the pimps, the Nicaraguan and Colombian dealers, the outlaw bikers, the dirty-movie operators, the contract killers jl the mob brought in from Miami, and if left alone with him, they would gladly cut any deal they could get from the prosecutor's office.

  But with time he became everything that he despised. He took freebies from whores, borrowed money from shylocks, fought the shakes every morning with cigarettes, aspirin, and speed, and finally took ten thousand dollars to blow away a potential government witness in a hog lot.

  Then he had cleaned out his and his wife's bank account, roared the wrong way down a one-way street into the New Orleans airport, bounced over a concrete island, and abandoned his car with both doors open in front of the main entrance. He just made the flight to Guatemala.

  A month later I received a card from him that had been postmarked in Honduras.

  Dear Streak,

  Greetings from Bongo-Bongo Land. I'd like to tell you I'm off the sauce and working for the Maryknolls. I'm not. Guess what skill is in big demand down here? A guy that can run through the manual of arms is an automatic captain. They're all kids. Somebody with a case of Clearasil could take the whole country.

  See you in the next incarnation,

  C.

  P.S. If you run into Lois, tell her I'm sorry for ripping her off. I left my toothbrush in the bathroom. I want her to have it.

  I watched his taillights glimmer and fade in the rain. As far as I knew, there was still a warrant on him. What was Cletus doing back in the States? And in Lafayette?

  But he was somebody else's charge now, not mine. So good luck, partner, I thought. Whatever you're operating on, I hope it's as pure and clean as white gas and bears you aloft over the places where the carrion bircis clatter.

  I drove across the street and parked in front of the Star Drilling Company's regional office. Confronting them probably seems a foolish thing to do, particularly in the capacity of a citizen rather than that of a law officer. But my experience as a policeman investigating white-collar criminals always led me to the same conclusion about them: they might envision a time when they'll have to deal with the law, but in their minds the problem will be handled by attorneys, in a court proceeding that becomes almost a gentlemen's abstraction. They tremble with both outrage and fear when a plainclothes cop, perhaps with an IQ of ninety-five, a .357 showing under his coat, a braided blackjack in his pocket, steps into the middle of their lives as unexpectedly as an iron door slamming shut and indicates that he thinks habeas corpus is a Latin term for a disease.

  I put on my coat and ran through the rain and into the building. The outer offices of Star Drilling, which were separated by half-glass partitions, were occupied by draftsmen and men who looked like geologists or lease people. The indirect lighting glowed on the pine paneling, and the air-conditioning was turned so high that I felt my skin constrict inside my damp seersucker. The geologists, or whatever they were, walked from desk to desk, rattling topography maps between their outstretched hands, their faces totally absorbed in their own frame of reference or a finger moving back and forth on the numbers of a township and range.

  The only person who looked at me was the receptionist. I told her I wanted to see the supervisor about a mineral lease in Montana.

  His desk was big, made of oak, his chair covered with maroon leather, the pine walls hung with deer's heads, a marlin, two flintlock rifles. On a side table was a stuffed lynx, mounted on a platform, the teeth bared, the yellow glass eyes filled with anger.

  His name was Hollister. He was a big man, his thick, graying hair cut military, his pale blue eyes unblinking. Like those of most managerial people in the Oil Center, his accent was Texas or Oklahoma and his dress eccentric. His gray Oshman coat hung on a rack, his cuff links were the size of quarters and embossed with oil derricks. His bolo tie was fastened with a brown and silver brooch.

  He listened to me talk a moment, his square hands motionless on the desk, his face like that of a man staring into an ice storm.

  "Wait a minute. You came to my office to question me about my employees? About a murder?" ( I could see tiny stretched white lines in the skin around the corners of his eyes."

  "It's more than one, Mr. Hollister. The girl in the fire and maybe some people in Montana."

  "Tell me, who do you think you are?"

  "I already did."

  "No, you didn't. You lied to my receptionist to get in here."

  "You've got a problem with your lea semen It won't go away because I walk out the door."

  His pale eyes looked steadily at me. He lifted one finger off his desk and aimed it at me.

  "You're not here about Dixie Pugh," he said.

  "You've got something else bugging you. I don't know what it is, but you're not a truthful man."

  I touched the ball of my thumb to the corner of my mouth, looked away from him a moment, and tapped my fingers on the leather arm of my chair.

  "You evidently thought well enough of Dixie Lee to give him a job," I said.

  "Do you think he made all this up and then set himself on fire?"

  "I think you're on your way out of here."

  "Let me tell you a couple of things about the law. Foreknowledge of a crime can make you a coconspirator. Knowledge after the fact can put you into an area known as aiding and abetting. These guys aren't worth it, Mr. Hollister."

  "This discussion is over. There's the door."

  "It looks like your company has made stonewalling an art form."

  "What?"

  "Does the name Aldous Robicheaux mean anything to you?"

  "No. Who is he?"

  "He was my father. He was killed on one of your rigs."


  "When?"

  "Twenty-two years ago. They didn't have a blowout preventer on. Your company tried to deny it, since almost everybody on the rig went down with it. A shrimper pulled a floor man out of the water two days later. He cost you guys a lot of money."

  "So you got a grudge that's twenty-two years old? I don't know what to tell you, Robicheaux, except I wasn't with the company then and I probably feel sorry for you."

  I took my rain hat off my knee and stood up.

  "Tell Mapes and Vidrine to stay away from Dixie Lee," I said.

  "You come in here again, I'll have you arrested."

  I walked back outside into the rain, got in my truck, and drove out of the maze of flat, uniform brick buildings that composed the Oil Center. On Pinhook Road I passed the restaurant where I had seen Cletus an hour before. The spreading oak trees were dark green, the pink and blue neon like smoke in the blowing mist. The wind blew hard when I crossed the Vermilion River, ruffling the yellow current below and shuddering the sides of my truck.

  "I don't buy that stuff about a death wish. I believe some guys in Vienna had too much time to think," I said to the therapist.

  "You don't have to be defensive about your feelings. Facile attitudes have their place in therapy, too. For example, I don't think there's anything complex about depression. It's often a matter of anger turned inward. What do you have to say about that, Dave?"

  "I don't know."

  "Yes, you do. How did you feel in Vietnam when the man next to you was hit?"

  "What do you think I felt?"

  "At some point you were glad it was him and not you. And then you felt guilty. And that was very dangerous, wasn't it?"

  "All alcoholics feel guilt. Go to an open meeting sometime. Learn something about it."

  "Cut loose from the past. She wouldn't want you to carry a burden like this.", "I can't. I don't want to."

  "Say it again."

  "I don't want to."

  He was bald and his rimless glasses were full of light. He turned!; his palms up toward me and was silent.

  I visited Dixie Lee one more time and found him distant, taciturn perhaps even casually indifferent to my presence in the room. I wasn't pleased with his attitude. I didn't know whether to ascribe it to the morphine-laced IV hooked into his arm, or possibly his own morose awareness of what it meant to throw in his lot with his old cell partner.

  "You want me to bring you anything else before I leave?" I asked.

  "I'm all right."

  "I probably won't be back, Dixie. I'm pretty tied up at the dock these days."

  "Sure, I understand."

  "Do you think maybe you used me a little bit?" I grinned at him and held up my thumb and forefinger slightly apart in the air.

  "Maybe just a little?"

  His voice was languid, as though he were resting on the comfortable edge of sleep.

  "Me use somebody else? Are you kidding?" he said.

  "You're looking at the dildo of the planet."

  "See you around, Dixie."

  "Hell, yes. They're kicking me out of here soon, anyway. It's only second-degree stuff. I've had worse hangovers. We're in tall cotton, son."

  And so I left him to his own menagerie of snapping dogs and hungry snakes.

  That Saturday I woke Alafair early, told her nothing about the purpose of our trip, and drove in the cool, rose-stippled dawn to the Texas side of Sabine Pass, where the Sabine River empties into the Gulf. A friend of mine from the army owned a small, sandy, salt-flecked farm not far from the hard-packed gray strip of sandbar that tried to be a beach. It was a strange, isolated place, filled with the mismatched flora of two states: stagnant lakes dotted with dead cypress, solitary oaks in the middle of flat pasture, tangles of blackjack along the edges of coulees, an alluvial fan of sand dunes that were crested with salt grass and from which protruded tall palm trees silhouetted blackly against the sun. Glinting through the pines on the back of my friend's farm were the long roll and pitch of the Gulf itself, and a cascade of waves that broke against the beach in an iridescent spray of foam.

  It was a place of salt-poisoned grass, alligators, insects, magpies, turkey buzzards, drowned cows whose odor reached a half mile into the sky, tropical storms that could sand the paint off a water tower, and people like my friend who had decided to slip through a hole in the dimension and live on their own terms. He had a bad-conduct discharge from the army, had been locked up in a mental asylum in Galveston, had failed totally at AA, and as a farmer couldn't grow thorns in a briar patch.

  But he bred and raised some of the most beautiful Appaloosa horses I had ever seen. He and I had coffee in his kitchen while Alafair drank a Coke, then I picked up several sugar cubes in my palm and we walked out to his back lot.

  "What we doing, Dave?" Alafair said. She looked up at me in the sunlight that shone through the pine trees. She wore a yellow T-shirt, baggy blue jeans, and pink tennis shoes. The wind off the water ruffled her bangs.

  My friend winked and went inside the barn. I "You can't ride Tripod, can you, little guy?" I said.

  "What? Ride Tripod?" she said, her face confused, then suddenly lighting, breaking into an enormous grin as she looked past me and saw my friend leading a three-year-old gelding out of the barn.

  The Appaloosa was steel gray, with white stockings and a spray of black and white spots across his rump. He snorted and pitched his head against the bridle, and Alafair's brown eyes went back and forth between the horse and me, her face filled with delight.

  "You think you can take care of him and Tripod and your rabbits, too?" I said.

  "Me? He's for me, Dave?"

  "You bet he is. He called me up yesterday and said he wanted to come live with us."

  "What? Horse call up?"

  I picked her up and set her on top of the fence rail, then let the Appaloosa take the sugar cubes out of my palm.

  "He's like you, he's got a sweet tooth," I said.

  "But when you feed him something, let him take it out of your palm so he doesn't bite your fingers by mistake."

  Then I climbed over the fence, slipped bareback onto the horse; and lifted Alafair up in front of me. My friend had trimmed thef horse's mane, and Alafair ran her hand up and down it as though it | were a giant shoe brush. I touched my right heel against the horse's f flank, and we turned in a slow circle around the lot.

  "What his name?" Alafair said.

  "How about Tex?"

  "How come that?"

  "Because he's from Texas."

  "What?"

  "Texas."

  "This where?"

  "Nevermind."

  I nodded for my friend to open the gate, and we rode out through | the sandy stretch of pines onto the beach. The waves were slate green and full of kelp, and they made a loud smack against the sand and slid in a wet line up to a higher, dry area where the salt grass and the pine needles began. It was windy and cool and warm at the same time, and we rode a mile or so along the edge of the surf to a place where a sandbar and jetty had created a shallow lagoon, in the middle of which a wrecked shrimp boat lay gray and paint less on its side, a cacophony of seagulls thick in the air above it. Behind us the horse's solitary tracks were scalloped deep in the wet sand.

  I gave my friend four hundred for the Appaloosa, and for another three hundred he threw in the tack and a homemade trailer. Almost all the way home Alafair stayed propped on her knees on the front seat, either looking backward through the cab glass or out the window at the horse trailer tracking behind us, her fine hair flattening in white lines against her scalp.

  On Monday I walked up to the house for lunch, then stopped at the mailbox on the road before I went back to the dock. The sun was warm, the oak trees along the road were full of mockingbirds and blue jays, and the mist from my neighbor's water sprinkler drifted in a wet sheen over his hydrangea beds and rows of blooming azalea and myrtle bushes. In the back of the mailbox was a narrow package no more than ten inches long. It had been postmarked in New
Orleans. I put my other mail in my back pocket, slipped the twine off the corners of the package, and cracked away the brown wrapping paper with my thumb.

  I lifted off the cardboard top. Inside on a strip of cotton was a hypodermic needle with a photograph and a sheet of lined paper wrapped around it. The inside of the syringe was clouded with a dried brown-red residue. The photograph was cracked across the surface, yellowed around the edges, but the obscene nature of the details had the violent clarity of a sliver of glass in the eye. A pajama-clad Vietcong woman lay in a clearing by the tread of a tank, her severed head resting on her stomach. Someone had stuffed a C-ration box in her mouth.