You said around New Iberia you have to knock the bass back into the water with a tennis racket. That’s pretty good. But you ought to try this place. The reefs are so crowded with kingfish there’s not room for them all. Just yesterday I saw a couple of them walking down the highway carrying their own canteens. We’re living on warm breezes and bananas fried in coconut oil. I’m clean and free, Dave. The tiger went away. Maybe you ought to get yourself a Roman collar, or at least by now I hope you’ve lost the badge and your dipshit colleagues. Face it, you dug being in the life. Even Jess thought you were one of us. That’d worry me.
Stay solid,
Pancho Gonzales
Tee Beau Latiolais was given a new trial, but before trial date Gros Mama Goula cut a subpoena server’s face with a razor and fled New Iberia and the zydeco bar and hot-pillow joint she had operated for thirty years, and the prosecutor’s office dropped the murder charge against Tee Beau. But some black people out in the parish said Gros Mama had the powers of a loup-garou, and had changed herself into ball lightning. They said when the fog was white among the cypress trunks, people would see a tangle of pink light roll across the lily pads and dead water and explode against the levee. The grass on the bank would be scorched black, and snakes would writhe on the baked dirt.
But Tee Beau was not one to stay locked in a bunch of mojo fear, or even worry any longer about the months of sexual humiliation and shame that Hipolyte Broussard had inflicted on him. He and Dorothea were married, and today she works as a waitress in a seafood restaurant out on the St. Martinville road. Tee Beau owns his own taxicab. On Sundays he drives Tante Lemon and Dorothea to church in it, and for some reason they look like triplets inside, all three of their heads barely above the bottom level of the windows. Sometimes they make a special trip past my house and leave me a fat jar of cracklins, what we call graton, made with ground-up Tabasco peppers, and the first bite is such a shock to my mouth that sweat runs out of my hair. But every time Tante Lemon gives me another quart, she pats my hand confidently and says, “You eat that, you, and I gonna give you mo’. Just like your daddy give me fish when I didn’t have no food, me, I be comin’ out and give you mo’.”
Saint Augustine once said we should never use the truth to injure. So the edge of my coulee is lined with spaded-in holes that contain dozens of mason jars which one day an archaeologist will probably dig up and identify as artifacts used by an ancient cult in a corn-god burial.
This started out as a story about my own fear, or rather about a time in my life when, because of an injury, I was not sure who I was, when I had to wait each night for a protean figure of my own creation to define me as something weak and loathsome and undeserving of breath. Instead, it became a story of others, people I discovered to be far more brave in their way than I am. And I suppose that what I have learned is a lesson that the years, or self-concern, had begun to hide from me, namely, that the bravest and most loyal and loving people in the world seldom have heroic physical characteristics or the auras of saints. In fact, their faces are like those of people whom you might randomly pull out of a supermarket line, their physical makeup so nondescript and unremarkable that it’s hard to remember what they look like ten minutes after they walk out of a room.
Kim Dollinger is the manager of Clete’s Club on Decatur now, and Clete has a private investigator’s license and an office two blocks from the First District headquarters. He’s made enough money running down bail jumpers to pay off all his debts to Tony’s old shylocks. He still tries to fight his weight problem by clanking iron up and down in the back of his office and jogging through Louis Armstrong Park in his Budweiser shorts and LSU football jersey, which the black kids from the Iberville welfare project treat like the appearance of a dancing hippo in the middle of their day. People in the Quarter say he and Kim have become an item, but probably not as Clete had expected. When we go out for dinner together she mashes out his cigarettes in the ashtray, cancels his drink order from the bar, and orders low-cholesterol food from the menu for him. But he doesn’t complain, and his eyes are gentle when he looks at her.
Bootsie cut her losses and sold out her vending machine business to one of her former in-laws, and that December she and I were married in St. Peter’s Church in New Iberia. We took Alafair with us to Key West, where the water is warm year-round, and the late-afternoon sun boils into the Gulf like a molten red planet. At night light-fish swim among the coral like electrified wisps of green smoke. In screened-in restaurants by the water’s edge we ate big dinners of oysters on the half shell, fried shrimp, and conch fritters, and we trolled for bonefish in the flats and dove Seven-Mile Reef south of the island. At fifty feet the water was as clear and green as Jell-O, shimmering with sunlight, the sand as white as ground diamond, and I watched Bootsie swim deep into the canyons of fire coral, indifferent to the spiked nests of sea urchins and the dark, triangular shapes of stingrays. Her tanned body would be beset with bluefish; then she would kick her flippers, clouding the water below her with sand, and dispel them like a sudden shuddering of thin metal blades.
Minos persuaded the DEA to replace the boat I lost south of Cocodrie, and he said that actually the DEA was happy with the work that I had done for them, because Tony was gone and the man who had moved in on his action, one of the Houston crowd, had evidently been having an affair with Tony’s wife. They spent a lot of their time quarreling, even throwing drinks at one another on one occasion, in public places.
But my financial debts are paid off, and I’ve given up law enforcement, at least for the time being. Bootsie and I run our boat-rental and bait business on the bayou. We barbecue chickens and links of sausage for midday fishermen, and we seine for shrimp out on the long green roll of the Gulf. It’s still winter, but we treat winter in South Louisiana as a transitory accident. Even when the skies are black with ducks, the oak and cypress limbs along the bayou teeming with robins, the eye focuses on the tightly wrapped pink buds inside the dark green leaves of the camellia bush, the azaleas and the flaming hibiscus that have bloomed right through the season. South Louisiana is a party, and I’ve grown old enough to put away vain and foolish concerns about mortality, and to stop imposing the false measures of calendars and clocks upon my life, or, for that matter, upon eternity.
Sometimes in the evening, when I’m closing up the bait shop and my shoulder twinges from picking up crates of Jax and Pearl beer, when the wind lifts the moss on the dead cypress in the marsh and blows red embers from a burnt cane field into the darkening sky, I think of juju magic and gris-gris charms, I think of Tony and Paul, Kim and Clete, Dorothea, Tee Beau, and Tante Lemon, even ole Jess Ornella, and I have to pause, almost fearfully, at the beating of my heart. Then I see Bootsie and Alafair walk down from the lighted gallery to get me for supper, hand in hand through the pecan trees, and I turn keys in locks and Bootsie and I go back up the path, with Alafair swinging from our arms, our mismatched shadows fused into a single playful shape under the rising moon.
About the Author
James Lee Burke was born in Houston, Texas, in 1936 and grew up on the Texas-Louisiana Gulf Coast. He is the author of thirty novels, including eighteen featuring the Cajun detective Dave Robicheaux, and two collections of short fiction. Many of Burke’s book have been New York Times bestsellers and he has twice been awarded an Edgar for Best Crime Novel of the Year. In 2009 the Mystery Writers of America named him a Grand Master. He has also been the recipient of Bread Loaf and Guggenheim fellowships and an NEA grant. Three of his novels—Heaven’s Prisoners, Two for Texas, and In the Electric Mist with the Confederate Dead—have been made into motion pictures. Burke lives with his wife, Pearl, in Missoula, Montana.
Look for James Lee Burke’s award-winning
Black Cherry Blues
Following is an excerpt from the novel’s opening pages.
Her hair is curly and gold on the pillow, her skin white in the heat lightning that trembles beyond the pecan trees outside the bedroom window. The night is hot
and breathless, the clouds painted like horsetails against the sky; a peal of thunder rumbles out on the Gulf like an apple rolling around in the bottom of a wood barrel, and the first raindrops ping against the window fan. She sleeps on her side, and the sheet molds her thigh, the curve of her hip, her breast. In the flicker of the heat lightning the sun freckles on her bare shoulder look like brown flaws in sculpted marble.
Then a prizing bar splinters the front door out of the jamb, and two men burst inside the house in heavy shoes, their pump shotguns at port arms. One is a tall Haitian, the other a Latin whose hair hangs off his head in oiled ringlets. They stand at the foot of the double bed in which she sleeps alone, and do not speak. She awakes with her mouth open, her eyes wide and empty of meaning. Her face is still warm from a dream, and she cannot separate sleep from the two men who stare at her without speaking. Then she sees them looking at each other and aim their shotguns point-blank at her chest. Her eyes film and she calls out my name like a wet bubble bursting in her throat. The sheet is twisted in her hands; she holds it against her breasts as though it could protect her from twelve-gauge deer slugs and double-aught buckshot.
They begin shooting, and the room seems to explode with smoke and flame from their shotgun barrels, with shell wadding, mattress stuffing, splinters gouged out of the bedstead, torn lampshades, flying glass. The two killers are methodical. They have taken out the sportsman’s plug in their shotguns so they can load five rounds in the magazine, and they keep firing and ejecting the smoking hulls on the floor until their firing pins snap empty. Then they reload with the calmness of men who might have just stood up in a blind and fired at a formation of ducks overhead.
The sheet is torn, drenched with her blood, embedded in her wounds. The men have gone now, and I sink to my knees by my wife and kiss her sightless eyes, run my hands over her hair and wan face, put her fingers in my mouth. A solitary drop of her blood runs down the shattered headboard and pools on my skin. A bolt of lightning explodes in an empty field behind the house. The inside of my head is filled with a wet, sulphurous smell, and again I hear my name rise like muffled, trapped air released from the sandy bottom of a pond.
It was four in the morning on a Saturday and raining hard when I awoke from the dream in a West Baton Rouge motel. I sat on the side of the bed in my underwear and tried to rub the dream out of my face, then I used the bathroom and came back and sat on the side of the bed again in the dark.
First light was still two hours away, but I knew I would not sleep again. I put on my raincoat and hat and drove in my pickup truck to an all-night café that occupied one side of a clapboard roadhouse. The rain clattered on my truck cab, and the wind was blowing strong out of the southwest, across the Atchafalaya swamp, whipping the palm and oak trees by the highway. West Baton Rouge, which begins at the Mississippi River, has always been a seedy area of truck stops, marginal gambling joints, Negro and blue-collar bars. To the east you can see the lighted girders of the Earl K. Long Bridge, plumes of smoke rising from the oil refineries, the state capitol building silhouetted in the rain. Baton Rouge is a green town full of oak trees, parks, and lakes, and the thousands of lights on the refineries and chemical plants are regarded as a testimony to financial security rather than a sign of industrial blight. But once you drive west across the metal grid of the bridge and thump down on the old cracked four-lane, you’re in a world that caters to the people of the Atchafalaya basin—Cajuns, redbones, roustabouts, pipeliners, rednecks whose shrinking piece of American geography is identified only by a battered pickup, a tape deck playing Waylon, and a twelve-pack of Jax.
The rain spun in the yellow arc lights over the café parking lot. It was empty inside, except for a fat Negro woman whom I could see through the service window in the kitchen, and a pretty, redheaded waitress in her early twenties, dressed in a pink uniform with her hair tied up on her freckled neck. She was obviously tired, but she was polite and smiled at me when she took my order, and I felt a sense of guilt, almost shame, at my susceptibility and easy fondness for a young woman’s smile. Because if you’re forty-nine and unmarried or a widower or if you’ve simply chosen to live alone, you’re easily flattered by a young woman’s seeming attention to you, and you forget that it is often simply a deference to your age.
I ordered a chicken-fried steak and a cup of coffee and listened to Jimmy Clanton’s recording of “Just a Dream” that came from the jukebox next door. Through the open doorway that gave onto the empty dance floor, I could see a half-dozen people at the bar against the far wall. I watched a man my age, with waved blond hair, drink his whiskey down to the ice, point to the glass for the bartender to refill it, then rise from his stool and walk across the dance floor into the café.
He wore gray slacks, a green sport shirt with blue flowers on it, shined loafers, white socks, a gold watch, and gold clip-on ballpoint pens in his shirt pocket. He wore his shirt outside his slacks to hide his paunch and love handles.
“Hey, hon, let me have a cheeseburger and bring it up to the bar, will you?” he said.
Then his eyes adjusted to the light and he looked at me more carefully.
“Great God Almighty,” he said. “Dave Robicheaux. You son of a buck.”
A voice and a face out of the past, not simply mine but from an era. Dixie Lee Pugh, my freshman roommate at Southwestern Louisiana Institute in 1956: a peckerwood kid from a river town north of Baton Rouge, with an accent more Mississippi than Louisiana, who flunked out his first semester, then went to Memphis and cut two records at the same studio where Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, and Elvis began their careers. The second record put him on New York television, and we watched in awe while he played his sunburst rhythm-and-blues guitar or hammered his fingers on the piano keyboard while an audience of thousands went insane and danced in the aisles.
He was one of the biggest in the early rock ’n’ roll era. But he had something more going for him than many of the others did. He was the real article, an honest-to-God white blues singer. He learned his music in the Baptist church, but somebody in that little cotton and pecan-orchard town rubbed a lot of pain into him, too, because it was in everything he sang and it wasn’t manufactured for the moment, either.
Then we read and heard other stories about him: the four or five failed marriages, the death of one of his children in a fire, a hit-and-run accident and DWI in Texas that put him in Huntsville pen.
“Dave, I don’t believe it,” he said, grinning. “I saw you ten or twelve years ago in New Orleans. You were a cop.”
I remembered it. It had been in a low-rent bar off Canal, the kind of place that featured yesterday’s celebrities, where the clientele made noise during the performances and insulted the entertainers.
He sat down next to me and shook hands, almost as an afterthought.
“We got to drink some mash and talk some trash,” he said, then told the waitress to bring me a beer or a highball.
“No, thanks, Dixie,” I said.
“You mean like it’s too late or too early in the day or like you’re off the jug?” he said.
“I go to meetings now. You know what I mean?”
“Heck yeah. That takes guts, man. I admire it.” His eyes were green and filled with an alcohol shine. He looked at me directly a moment, then his eyes blinked and he looked momentarily embarrassed.
“I read in the newspaper about your wife, man. I’m sorry.”
“Thank you.”
“They caught the guys that did it?”
“More or less.”
“Huh,” he said, and studied me for a moment. I could see that he was becoming uncomfortable with the knowledge that a chance meeting with an old friend is no guarantee that you can reclaim pleasant moments out of the past. Then he smiled again.
“You still a cop?” he asked.
“I own a bait and boat-rental business south of New Iberia. I came up here last night to pick up some refrigeration equipment and got stuck in the storm.”
He nodded. We
were both silent.
“Are you playing here, Dixie?” I said.
Mistake.
“No, I don’t do that anymore. I never really got back to it after that trouble in Texas.”
He cleared his throat and took a cigarette out of the pack in his shirt pocket.
“Say, hon, how about getting me my drink out of the bar?”
The waitress smiled, put down the rag she had been using to clean the counter, and went into the nightclub next door.
“You know about that stuff in Texas?” he asked.
“Yes, I think so.”
“I was DWI, all right, and I ran away from the accident. But the guy run that stop sign. There wasn’t no way I could have avoided it. But it killed his little boy, man. That’s some hard shit to live with. I got out in eighteen months with good time.” He made lines on a napkin with his thumbnail. “A lot of people just don’t want to forget, though.”
I didn’t know what to say. I felt sorry for him. He seemed little different from the kid I used to know, except he was probably ninety-proof most of the time now. I remembered a quote in a Newsweek story about Dixie Lee that seemed to define him better than anything else I had ever seen written about him. The reporter had asked him if any of his band members could read music. He replied, “Yeah, some of them can, but it don’t hurt their playing any.”
So I asked him what he was doing now, because I had to say something.
“Leaseman,” he said. “Like Hank Snow used to say, ‘From old Montana down to Alabam.’ I cover it all. Anyplace there’s oil and coal. The money’s right, too, podna.”
The waitress put his bourbon and water down in front of him. He drank from it and winked at her over his glass.
“I’m glad you’re doing okay, Dixie,” I said.
“Yeah, it’s a good life. A Caddy convertible, a new address every week, it beats collard greens and grits.” He hit me on the arm. “Heck, it’s all rock ’n’ roll, anyway, man.”