Black Cherry Blues

  “Come over. Listen to me for five minutes. I ain’t got anybody else.”

  I stared out the screen at the shadows on the lawn, the sweep of night birds against the red sky.

  It was windy the next morning and the sky was light blue and filled with tumbling white clouds that caused pools of shadow to move across the cane fields and cow pastures as I drove along the old highway through Broussard into Lafayette. Dixie Lee’s room was on the second floor at Lourdes, and a uniformed sheriff’s deputy was playing checkers with him on the edge of the bed. Dixie Lee lay on his side, his head, chest, right shoulder, and right thigh wrapped in bandages. His face looked as though it were crimped inside a white helmet. There was mucus in his eyes, and a clear salve oozed from the edges of his bandages. An IV was hooked into his arm.

  He looked at me and said something to the deputy, who set the checkerboard on the nightstand and walked past me, working his cigarette pack out of his shirt pocket.

  “I’ll be right in the hall. The door stays open, too,” he said.

  I sat down next to the bed. There were oaks hung with moss outside the window. The pressure of Dixie’s head against the pillow made him squint one eye at me.

  “I knew you’d come. There’s some guys that can’t be any other way,” he said.

  “You sound better,” I said.

  “I’m on the edge of my high and about ready to slide down the other side of it. When the centipedes start crawling under these bandages, they’ll be back with the morphine. Dave, I got to get some help. The cops don’t believe me. My own lawyer don’t believe me. They’re going to send my butt to Angola. I can’t do no more time, man. I ain’t good at it. They tore me up over there in Texas. You get in thin cotton, you don’t pick your quota, the boss stands you up on an oil barrel with three other guys. Hot and dirty and hungry, and you stand there all night.”

  “They don’t believe what?”

  “This—” He tried to touch his fingers behind his head. “Reach around back and feel on them bandages.”

  “Dixie, what are—”

  “Do it.”

  I reached across him and touched my fingertips across the tape.

  “It feels like a roll of pennies under there, don’t it?” he said. “That’s because I woke up just before some guy with a tire iron or a jack handle came down on my head. He was going to bust me right across the lamps, but I twisted away from him just before he swung. The next thing I knew I was in the water. You ever wake up drowning and on fire at the same time? That’s what it was like. There was a gas tank for the outboards under the cabin, and it must have blown and dumped the whole thing in the bayou. Burning boards was hanging off the stilts, the water was full of hot ash, steam hissing all over the fucking place. I thought I’d gone to hell, man.”

  He stopped talking and his lips made a tight line. I saw water well up in his green eyes.

  “Then I seen something awful. It was the girl, you remember, that redheaded waitress from the café in West Baton Rouge. She was on fire, like a big candle burning all over, hung in all them boards and burning against the sky.

  “I can’t clean it out of my head, not even when they hit me with the joy juice. Maybe they hit her in the head like they done me. Maybe she was already dead. God, I hope so. I can’t stand thinking about it, man. She didn’t do nothing to anybody.”

  I wiped my palms on my slacks and blew out my breath. I wanted to walk back out into the sunshine, into the windy morning, into the oak trees that were hung with moss.

  “Who was the guy with the tire iron?” I said.

  “One of those fuckers I work with.”

  “You saw his face?”

  “I didn’t have to. They knew I was going to drop the dime on them. For all the damn good it would do.”

  “You told them that?”

  “Sure. I got fed up with both of them. No, wait a minute. I got fed up being afraid. I was a little swacked when I stuck it in their face, but I done it just the same. Dalton Vidrine and Harry Mapes. One’s a coonass and the other’s a stump-jumper from East Texas.”

  “I’m having one problem with all this. There’s some people who think you’re mixed up in dope. Up in Montana.”

  His green eyes closed and opened like a bird’s.

  “They’re wrong,” he said.

  “—that maybe you’re mixed up with a trafficker named Dio.”

  His mouth smiled slightly.

  “You been talking to the DEA,” he said. “But they’re sniffing up the wrong guy’s leg.”

  “You didn’t lease land for him in Montana?”

  “I leased and bought a bunch of land for him. But it don’t have anything to do with dope. Sally Dee was my cell partner. Some guys were going to cut me up in the shower. Till Sally Dee told them they treat me just like they treat him. Which means they light my cigarettes, they pick in my sack when we get in thin cotton. The cat’s half crazy, man, but he saved my butt.”

  “What was the land deal about, Dixie?”

  “I didn’t ask. He’s not the kind of guy you ask those things to. He’s got a lot of holdings. He hires people to act as his agents. He likes me for some reason. He paid me a lot of bread. What’s the big deal?”

  “As an old friend, Dixie, I’m going to ask you to save the Little Orphan Annie routine for the DEA.”

  “You believe what you want.”

  “What’s your bond?”

  “Fifteen thou.”

  “That’s not too bad.”

  “They know I ain’t going anywhere. Except maybe to Angola. Dave, I ain’t giving you a shuck. I can’t take another fall, and I don’t see no way out of it.”

  I looked out the window at the treetops, the way their leaves ruffled in the breeze, the whiteness of the clouds against the dome of blue sky.

  “I’ll come back and visit you later,” I said. “I think maybe you have too much faith in one guy.”

  “I’ll tell you a story I heard Minnie Pearl tell about Hank. This was right after he brought the whole auditorium down singing ‘I Saw the Light’ at the Opry. Backstage he turned to her and said, ‘But, Minnie, they ain’t no light. They just ain’t no light.’ That’s when your soul is hanging on a spider’s web right over the fire, son. That’s right where I’m at now.”

  That afternoon I stood on the levee and looked down at the collapsed and blackened remains of the fish camp that, according to Dixie Lee, had belonged to Star Drilling Company. Mattress springs, charred boards, a metal table, a scorched toilet seat, half the shingle roof lay in the shallows at the bottom of the stilt supports. A paste of gray ash floated among the cattails and lily pads.

  I walked down to the water’s edge. I found what was left of a Coleman stove and a pump twelve-gauge shotgun whose shells had exploded in the magazine. The gasoline drum that had been used to fuel outboard engines was ripped outward and twisted like a beer can.

  The fire had made a large black circle from the water to halfway up the levee. Extending out from the circle were trails of ash through the buttercups and new grass like the legs of a spider. One of them led up to the road at the top of the levee.

  I dug the soil loose from around the trail with my pocketknife and smelled it. It smelled like burnt grass and dirt.

  I knew little about arson investigation, but I saw nothing on the levee that would help Dixie Lee’s case.

  I drove to St. Martinville and parked across from the old church where Evangeline and her lover are buried under an enormous spreading oak. The wind blew the moss in the trees along Bayou Teche, and the four-o’clocks were opening in the shade along the banks. I was told by the dispatcher in the sheriff’s department that the sheriff was out for a few minutes but that a detective would talk to me.

  The detective was penciling in a form of some kind and smoking a cigarette when I walked into his office. He affected politeness but his eyes kept going to the clock on the wall while I talked. A side door opened onto the sheriff’s office, and I could see his desk an
d empty chair inside. I told the detective the story that Dixie had told me. I told him about the leasemen, Dalton Vidrine and Harry Mapes.

  “We know all about that,” he said. “That’s why the sheriff been talking to them. But I tell you right now, podna, he don’t believe that fella.”

  “What do you mean he’s been talking with them?”

  He smiled at me.

  “They in his office right now. He went down to the bat’room,” he said. Then he got up and closed the door to the sheriff’s office.

  I looked at him, stunned.

  “They’re sitting in there now?” My voice was incredulous.

  “He called them up and ax them to come in and make a statement.”

  I stood up, took a piece of paper off his desk, and wrote my name and telephone number on it.

  “Ask the sheriff to call me,” I said. “What’s your name again?”

  “Benoit.”

  “Get into another line of work.”

  I walked back outside to my pickup truck. The shadows were purple on the bayou and the church lawn. An elderly Negro was taking down the flag from the pole in front of the courthouse and a white man was closing and locking the side doors. Then two men came out the front entrance and walked hurriedly across the grass toward me, one slightly ahead of the other.

  The first was a tall, angular man, dressed in brown slacks, shined loafers, a yellow sport shirt with a purple fleur-de-lis on the pocket, a thin western belt with a silver buckle and tongue. I could hear the change in his pocket when he walked. On his bottom lip was a triangular scar that looked like wet plastic.

  The man behind him was shorter, dark, thick across the middle, the kind of man who wore his slacks below the navel to affect size and strength and disguise his advancing years. His eyebrows dipped down and met over his nose. Even though it was warm, he wore a long-sleeved white shirt, the pocket filled with a notebook and clip-on ballpoint pens.

  Both men had the agitated look of people who might have seen their bus pass them by at their stop.

  “Just a minute there, buddy,” the tall man said.

  I turned and looked at him with my hand on the open truck door.

  “You were using our names in there. Where the hell do you get off making those remarks?” he said. His eyes narrowed and he ran his tongue over the triangular scar on his lip.

  “I was just passing on some information. It didn’t originate with me, partner.”

  “I don’t give a goddamn where it came from. I won’t put up with it. Particularly from some guy I never saw before,” he said.

  “Then don’t listen to it.”

  “It’s called libel.”

  “It’s called filing a police report,” I said.

  “Who the fuck are you?” the other man said.

  “My name’s Dave Robicheaux.”

  “You’re an ex-cop or some kind of local bird dog?” he said.

  “I’m going to ask you guys to disengage,” I said.

  “You’re asking us! You’re unbelievable, man,” the tall man said.

  I started to get in my truck. He put his hand around the window jamb and held it.

  “You’re not running out of this,” he said. The accent was East Texas, all right, piney woods, red hills, and sawmills. “Pugh’s a pathetic man. He melted his brains a long time ago. The company gave him a break when nobody else would. Obviously it didn’t work out. He gets souped up with whiskey and dope and has delusions.” He took his hand from the window jamb and pointed his finger an inch from my chest. “Now, if you want to spend your time talking to somebody like that, that’s your damn business. But if you spread rumors about me and I hear about it, I’m going to look you up.”

  I got in my truck and closed the door. I breathed through my nose, looked out at the shadows on the church, the stone statue of Evangeline under the spreading oak. Then I clicked my key ring on the steering wheel. The faces of the two men were framed through my truck window.

  Then I yielded to the temptations of anger and pride, two serpentine heads of the Hydra of character defects that made up my alcoholism.

  “It was the Coleman fuel for the stove, wasn’t it?” I said. “You spread it around the inside of the cabin, then strung it down the steps and up the levee. As an added feature maybe you opened the drain on the gas drum, too. You didn’t expect the explosion to blow Dixie Lee out into the water, though, did you?”

  It was a guess, but the mouth of the short man parted in disbelief. I started the engine, turned out into the traffic, and drove past the old storefronts and wood colonnades toward the edge of town and the back road to New Iberia.

  In my dreams is a watery place where my wife and some of my friends live. I think it’s below the Mekong River or perhaps deep under the Gulf. The people who live there undulate in the tidal currents and are covered with a green-gold light. I can’t visit them there, but sometimes they call me up. In my mind’s eye I can see them clearly. The men from my platoon still wear their pots and their rent and salt-caked fatigues. Smoke rises in bubbles from their wounds.

  Annie hasn’t changed much. Her eyes are electric blue, her hair gold and curly. Her shoulders are still covered with sun freckles. She wears red flowers on the front of her nightgown where they shot her with deer slugs. On the top of her left breast is a strawberry birthmark that always turned crimson with blood when we made love.

  How you doing, baby love? she asks.

  Hello, sweetheart.

  Your father’s here.

  How is he?

  He says to tell you not to get sucked in. What’s he mean? You’re not in trouble again, are you, baby love? We talked a long time about that before.

  It’s just the way I am, I guess.

  It’s still rah-rah for the penis, huh? I’ve got to go, Dave. There’s a big line. Are you coming to see me?

  Sure.

  You promise?

  You bet. I won’t let you down, kiddo.

  “You really want me to tell you what it means?” the psychologist in Lafayette said.

  “Dreams are your province.”

  “You’re an intelligent man. You tell me.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  “Sometimes alcoholics go on dry drunks. Sometimes we have drunk dreams.”

  “It’s a death wish. I’d get a lot of distance between myself and those kinds of thoughts.”

  I stared silently at the whorls of purple and red in his carpet.

  The day after I visited the St. Martin Parish courthouse I talked with the sheriff there on the phone. I had met him several times when I was a detective with the Iberia Parish sheriff’s office, and I had always gotten along well with him. He said there was nothing in the coroner’s report that would indicate the girl had been struck with a tire iron or a jack handle before the fish camp burned.

  “So they did an autopsy?” I said.

  “Dave, there wasn’t hardly anything left of that poor girl to autopsy. From what Pugh says and what we found, she was right over the gas drum.”

  “What are you going to do with those two clowns you had in your office yesterday?”

  “Nothing. What can I do?”

  “Pugh says they killed some people up in Montana.”

  “I made some calls up there,” the sheriff said. “Nobody has anything on these guys. Not even a traffic citation. Their office in Lafayette says they’re good men. Look, it’s Pugh that’s got the record, that’s been in trouble since they ran him out of that shithole he comes from.”

  “I had an encounter with those two guys after I left your department yesterday. I think Pugh’s telling the truth. I think they did it.”

  “Then you ought to get a badge again, Dave. Is it about lunchtime over there?”

  “What?”

  “Because that’s what time it is here. Come on by and have coffee sometime. We’ll see you, podna.”

  I drove into New Iberia to buy some chickens and sausage links from my
wholesaler. It was raining when I got back home. I put “La Jolie Blonde” by Iry LeJeune on the record player, changed into my gym shorts, and pumped iron in the kitchen for a half hour. The wind was cool through the window and smelled of rain and damp earth and flowers and trees. My chest and arms were swollen with blood and exertion, and when the rain slacked off and the sun cracked through the mauve-colored sky, I ran three miles along the bayou, jumping across puddles, boxing with raindrops that dripped from the oak limbs overhead.

  Back at the house I showered, changed into a fresh denim shirt and khakis, and called Dan Nygurski collect in Great Falls, Montana. He couldn’t accept the collect call, but he took the number and called me back on his line.

  “You know about Dixie Lee?” I said.

  “Yep.”

  “Do you know about the waitress who died in the fire?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did y’all have a tail on him that night?”

  “Yeah, we did but he got off it. It’s too bad. Our people might have saved the girl’s life.”

  “He lost them?”

  “I don’t think it was deliberate. He took the girl to a colored place in Breaux Bridge, I guess it was, a zydeco place or something like that. What is that, anyway?”

  “It’s Negro-Cajun music. It means ‘vegetables,’ all mixed up.”

  “Anyway, our people had some trouble with a big buck who thought it was all right for Pugh to come in the club but not other white folks. In the meantime Pugh, who was thoroughly juiced, wandered out the side door with the girl and took off.”

  “Have you heard his story?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you believe it?”

  “What difference does it make? It’s between him and the locals now. I’ll be square with you, Robicheaux. I don’t give a damn about Pugh. I want that lunatic Sally Dio in a cage. I don’t care how I get him there, either. You can tell Dixie Lee for me I’ll always listen when he’s on the subject of Sally Dee. Otherwise, he’s not in a seller’s market.”

  “Why would he be buying and leasing land for this character Dio? Is it related to the oil business?”

  “Hey, that’s good, Robicheaux. The mob hooking up with the oil business.” He was laughing out loud now. “That’s like Frankenstein making it with the wife of Dracula. I’m not kidding you, that’s great. The guys in the office’ll love this. You got any other theories?”