DR03 - Black Cherry Blues

  "I look like I go around looking at guys' eyes?"

  "Come on, were they turquoise?"

  "What the fuck I know about a guy's eyes? What kind of stuff are you into, man?"

  "He's a policeman," the woman with the child said.

  "Is that for real?" the driver said.

  "No."

  "Then why you asking all these questions? You trying to give some shit to Clay ton's people?" The hair on his forearms grew like red metal wires on the edges of his leather wristbands.

  "No."

  "Cause the Indians don't need no more hassle. These are native people, man, I mean it was their place, and whites been taking a dump on them for two hundred years."

  "I'll get off here," I said.

  "You bothered by something I said?"

  "Not in the least, partner. The rain's stopping now, and I need to walk. My truck's just over the rise."

  "Cause we got no beef with nobody. We thought we were helping you out. You gotta watch out for a lot of people in this state. I ain't blowing gas, Jack. It's the times," he said.

  I stood on the side of the road in the damp, sunlit air, a green pasture behind me, and watched the bus disappear over the rise. My truck was still a mile down the road.

  The old woman was hoeing in a rocky vegetable patch behind her house. She wore laced boots, a man's oversized wool trousers, and a khaki shirt, and a shawl was wrapped around her head. In the distance the wet land sloped toward the Divide, where the mountains thrust up violently against the sky, their sheer cliffs now purple with shadow. Up high it had snowed, and the ponderosa was white on the crests and through the saddles. The old woman glanced sideways at me when I opened her wood gate and walked into the yard, then continued chopping weeds in the rows as though I were not there.

  "Darlene American Horse is your daughter, isn't she?" I asked.

  She didn't answer. Her white hair bunched out under her shawl, and the corners of her eyes were creased with concentration on her work.

  "Mrs. Desmarteau, believe me, I'm a friend," I said.

  "I want to find out what happened to your son. I want to help Darlene, if I can."

  She thudded and raked the hoe in the dirt and stones and notched out weeds between the cabbages without ever touching a leaf.

  "I think Darlene lives among some bad people. I want to get her away from them," I said.

  She pulled back the door of an abandoned, dilapidated privy, put away the hoe and took out a shovel. In the back of the privy a calico cat was nursing her Utter on top of a pile of gunnysacks. Mrs. Desmarteau laid the shovel across a wheelbarrow loaded with manure and began pushing it toward the edge of the vegetable patch. I took the handles out of her hands and wheeled it across the dirt yard, then began spreading the manure at the end of each row. The clouds were purple on top of the mountains, and snow was blowing off the edges of the canyons. Behind me I heard the plastic sheets of insulation rattling on her windows.

  "She's your daughter, isn't she?" I said again.

  "Are you one of the FBI?" she said.

  "No, I'm not. But I used to be a policeman. I'm not any longer. I'm just a man who's in some trouble."

  For the first time her eyes looked directly at mine.

  "If you know Darlene, why are you asking me if she's my daughter?" she said.

  "Why are you here and asking that question? You don't make sense."

  Then I realized that perhaps I had underestimated this elderly lady. And like most people who consider themselves educated, I had perhaps presumed that an elderly person like someone who is foreign-speaking or unschooled could not understand the complexities of my life and intellect.

  "I didn't relate the name to yours," I said.

  "But I should have. She wears her brother's First Cav army jacket, doesn't she? She also has turquoise eyes. Your family name is French-Canadian, not Indian. Darlene and Clayton's father was part white, wasn't he?"

  "Why do you say she lives among bad people?"

  "The man she stays with isn't bad, but the people he works for are. I believe she should come back home and not stay with these people on the lake."

  "You've been there?"

  "Yes."

  "Are they criminals?"

  "Some of them are."

  Her hand slipped down over mine and took the shovel. Her palm was rough and edged with callus. She was motionless, the shovel propped against her wool trousers, her eyes fixed on the jagged outline of the mountains against the sky. The clouds on the high peaks looked full of snow.

  "Are they the ones that killed my boy?" she said.

  "Maybe they were involved in some way. I don't know."

  "Why is she with them?"

  "She thinks she can find out what happened to Clayton and his cousin. She worked in a bar. Where is it?"

  "Five miles down the road. You passed it when you came here."

  "Do you know a man named Dixie Lee Pugh?"

  "No."

  "Do you see Darlene?"

  "She comes one day a week and brings groceries."

  "Talk to her, Mrs. Desmarteau. She's a good girl. Between the two of us we'll get her back home."

  I saw her breathe through her mouth. Her lips moved without sound.

  "What?" I said.

  "Clayton never did no harm to anybody. They said he carried a gun. If he did, they made him. They wouldn't let him alone. They were afraid of him because he was brave."

  It was turning cold. I helped her finish spreading manure in her vegetable patch, then said good-bye and latched the wooden gate behind me. The sky was overcast and gray now. She looked small and alone with her hoe, in her dirt yard, in the wind that blew down off the backbone of the world.

  I drove back down the dirt road and stopped at the place where Clayton Desmarteau and his cousin had put their car in the ditch. Did Mapes and Vidrine kidnap and drive them someplace, or did it all happen here? I asked myself. I jumped across the stream that bordered the far side of the road and walked up the slope into the lodgepole pine. The ground was thick with pine needles. Chipmunks played in the rocks, and red squirrels chased each other around the tree trunks. I walked about a quarter of a mile through the pines, then intersected a trace of a road that somebody had used at one time to dump garbage. The road dead-ended in a pile of rusted box springs, tin cans, mattresses, beer and wine bottles, and plastic soap containers. I went on another four hundred yards or so through the pines, then the trunks thinned and I came out on a tea-colored stream coursing over gray rocks. The stream cut along the edge of a low, rock-faced hill that rose abruptly into box elder, wild rosebushes, and thick scrub brush. I walked up and down the stream bank, crossed the sculpted tracks of deer, the delicate impressions of turkey and grouse in the wet sand, found the rotted, soft logs of an old cabin, tripped over the half-buried remains of a wood stove, and flushed a white-tailed buck that must have had ten points on his rack; but I saw nothing that was out of the ordinary or that could be helpful in discovering the fate of Clayton Desmarteau and his cousin.

  Finally I came to a spring that flowed out of the hillside on the far bank of the stream. The spring dripped over rocks, and had eroded away the dirt and exposed the gnarled roots of small pines on the hillside. The water drained over a wide area of wet pine needles and black leaves, and the ground there was spongy and bursting with mushrooms and dark fern. I could smell the water, the coolness of the stone, the dank humus, the exposed tree roots that trailed like brown cobweb in the current. It smelled like the coulee on my property back in Louisiana. I wondered when I would be going back there, or if in fact I would be able to. Because I had decided that if I did not develop a better defense than the one I presently had, I was not going to deliver myself up for trial and a sure jolt in Angola pen.

  I was tired. After hiking back to my truck, I drove up the road in the gray light between the wet fields, then I glanced in the side mirror at a black Willys Jeepster, a remake of the classic model manufactured right after World War II. Becau
se the road was wet and there was no dust, I could see the driver's tall outline behind the steering wheel. Then he accelerated and closed on my rear bumper, as though he wanted to see my reflection in the side mirror or some detail of my pickup the dealer's name, a bumper sticker that read Mulate's, Breaux Bridge, Louisiana.

  Up ahead was the wide, squat log tavern where Clayton Des marteau and his cousin had probably spent the last night of their lives, where Darlene had waited tables, and where she had probably met Dixie Lee Pugh while he was in a drunken stupor, saved him from getting his head kicked in, and driven him over the mountains to Sally Dio's on Flathead Lake. It was starting to mist, and a purple and orange neon war bonnet was lighted on the roof against the gray sky.

  I pulled onto the gravel parking lot and waited to see what the driver in the Jeepster would do. He slowed abreast of me, his long hands on the top of the steering wheel, and stared intently out the passenger's window. His face, forehead, and neck were streaked with thin scabs, as though he had walked through a nest of rust-colored spiderweb.

  I wanted him to stop, to open his door, to confront me with his injury and his anger. I wanted to see a weapon in his hand and feel that adrenaline surge, that violent sanction, that lights and clarifies the mind and resolves all the complexities.

  But Harry Mapes was holding all the good cards. Harry Mapes had been a helicopter pilot in Vietnam, and he knew that you don't change the terms of your situation when your Gatling guns are locked in on a solitary pajama-clad target in the middle of a glassy rice field.

  He turned into the parking lot and parked by the front door, where three Indians in work clothes were drinking canned beer next to a truck. He lit a cigarette with a gold lighter before he got out of his Jeepster, then went inside without looking back at me.

  By the time I got back to Missoula that night Alafair had already had her supper at the baby-sitter's, but I took her for a late snack at a pizza place called Red Pies Over Montana. She wore her soft denim jeans with the elastic waistband, patent leather shoes with white socks that were now gray with dust from the playground, and her yellow T-shirt printed with a smiling purple whale and the words "Baby Orca" on it. Her cheeks were spotted with red pizza sauce. Through the restaurant window I could see the stars over the mountains.

  "Dave?" she said.

  "What is it, little guy?"

  "When we going back home?"

  "Don't you like it here?"

  "I want to see Tex. Maybe Batist needs us at the shop. He can't read."

  "You don't have to read to sell worms and shiners."

  "Nothing here is like it is at home."

  "It has a lot of good things, though, doesn't it?"

  "I miss Tripod. I miss Clarise. It's cold at night."

  I brushed her shiny black hair with my hand.

  "It won't be long. You'll see," I said.

  But my assurance was an emotional lie. I didn't know when we could go back. I wasn't sure if I ever could. That night in the dark, with the door open between our bedrooms, I heard her saying her prayers by the side of the bed, then climbing in under the covers.

  "Dave?"

  "What?"

  "Are people trying to hurt us? Is that why we had to move?"

  I got up and walked barefoot into her room and sat on the edge of the bed. Her face looked round and tan in the moonlight through the window. Her blanket was pulled up to her chin.

  "Don't think like that, Alf. Nobody wants to hurt guys like us. We're good guys," I said.

  "Think of all the people who love you. Batist and Clarise and your friends and teachers at school. They all love you, Alfie. And I love you most of all."

  I could see her wide-spaced teeth and the brightness of her eyes when she smiled up from the pillow.

  But her thoughts were not far from my own. That night I dreamed of South Louisiana, of blue herons standing among flooded cypress trees, fields of sugarcane beaten with purple and gold light in the fall, the smell of smoldering hickory and pork dripping into the ash in our smokehouse, the way billows of fog rolled out of the swamp in the morning, so thick and white that sound a bass flopping, a bullfrog falling off a log into the water came to you inside a wet bubble, pelicans sailing out of the sun over the breakers out on the Gulf, the palm trees ragged and green and clacking in the salt breeze, and the crab and crawfish boils and fish fries that went on year-round, as though there were no end to a season and death had no sway in our lives, and finally the song that always broke my heart, "La Jolie Blonde," which in a moment made the year 1945. Our yard was abloom with hibiscus and blue and pink hydrangeas and the neighbors came on horseback to the fais-dodo under our oaks.

  The next morning I got a call from Tess Regan, the third-grade teacher and assistant principal at Alafair's school. She said she had a one-hour break at eleven o'clock, and she asked if she could walk down to the house and talk with me.

  "Is there something wrong?" I said.

  "Maybe it's nothing. I'd rather talk to you about it at your house."

  "Sure. Come on down."

  A few minutes later she knocked on the screen door. She wore a pale green cotton dress, and her auburn hair was tied back with a green kerchief. I could see baby powder on her freckled shoulders.

  "I hope I'm not bothering you," she said.

  "No, not at all. I have some iced tea made. It's a beautiful day. Let's have some on the porch."

  "All right," she said. The corners of her eyes wrinkled good-naturedly at the deference to her situation as a layperson in a Catholic elementary school.

  I brought the tea out on the porch, and we sat on two old metal chairs. The light was bright on the lawn and the trees, and bumblebees hummed over the clover in the grass.

  "A man called earlier," she said.

  "He said he was a friend of yours from Louisiana. He wanted to know where you and Alafair lived."

  "What was his name?"

  "He wouldn't give it."

  "Did you tell him?"

  "No, of course not. We don't give out people's addresses. I told him to call information. He said he tried, but your number was unlisted."

  "It isn't, but my address isn't in the phone book, and information usually won't give out addresses. Why did the call bother you?" I leaned slightly forward.

  "He was rude. No, it was more than that. His voice was ugly."

  "What else did he say?"

  "He kept saying he was an old friend, that it was important he talk with you, that I should understand that."

  "I see."

  "Alafair said you used to be a police officer. Does this have something to do with that?"

  "Maybe. Could you tell if it was long-distance?"

  "It didn't sound like it."

  I tried to think. Who knew that Alafair went to a parochial school in Missoula? Darlene, perhaps. Or maybe I said something to Clete. Or maybe the person called New Iberia and got something out of Batist or Clarise. Then he could have phoned every Catholic elementary school in town until he hit the right combination.

  "What was the first thing this guy said?" I asked.

  Her mouth was wet and red when it came away from her glass. Her green eyes looked thoughtfully out into the sunlight.

  "He said, 'I'm calling for Dave Robicheaux,' " she said.

  "I told him I didn't understand. Then he said it again, 'I'm calling for Dave.' So I said, 'You mean you're delivering a message for him?' "

  "Then he knew he'd found the right school."

  "What?"

  "He's a slick guy."

  "I'm sorry if I handled it wrong," she said.

  "Don't worry about it. He's probably a bill collector. They follow me around the country." I smiled at her, but she didn't buy it.

  She set her iced tea on the porch railing and sat with her knees close together and her hands folded in her lap. She dropped her eyes, then looked up at me again.

  "I'm probably being intrusive, but you're in some trouble, aren't you?"

  "Yes."
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  "Who is this man?"

  "I'm not sure. If he calls again, though, I'd appreciate your letting me know."

  "Is he a criminal?"

  I looked at her face and eyes. I wondered how much of the truth she was able to take. I decided not to find out.

  "Maybe," I said.

  She pinched her fingers together in her lap.

  "Mr. Robicheaux, if he's a threat to Alafair, we need to know that," she said.