DR03 - Black Cherry Blues

  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 lovel 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 lunch-time 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?"

  Then he started laughing again.

  I quietly replaced the telephone receiver in the cradle, then walked down to the dock in the wet afternoon sunlight to help Batist close up the bait shop.

  That evening Alafair and I drove down to Cypremort Point for boiled crabs at the pavilion. We sat at one of the checker-cloth tables on the screened porch by the bay, a big bib with a red crawfish on it tied around Alafair's neck, and looked out at the sun setting across the miles of dead cypress, saw grass, the sandy inlets, the wetlands that stretched all the way to Texas. The tide was out, and the jetties were black and stark against the flat gray expanse of the bay and the strips of purple and crimson cloud that had flattened on the western horizon. Seagulls dipped and wheeled over the water's edge, and a solitary blue heron stood among the saw grass in an inlet pool, his long body and slender legs like a painting on the air.

  Alafair always set about eating bluepoint crabs with a devastating clumsiness. She smashed them in the center with the wood mallet, snapped off the claws, and cracked back the shell hinge with slippery hands and an earnest innocence that sent juice and pulp flying all over the table. When we finished eating I had to take her into the washroom and wipe off her hair, face, and arms with wet paper towels.

  On the way back home I stopped in New Iberia and rented a Walt Disney movie, then I called up Batist and asked him and his wife to watch it with us. Batist was always fascinated by the VCR and never could quite understand how i
t worked.

  "Them people that make the movie, they put it in that box, huh, Dave?" he said.

  "That's right."

  "It just like at the show, huh?"

  "That's right."

  "Then how it get up to the antenna and in the set?"

  "It doesn't go up to"

  "And how come it don't go in nobody else's set?" he said.

  "It don't go out the house," Alafair said.

  "Not 'It don't.' Say 'It doesn't,' " I said.

  "Why you telling her that? She talk English good as us," Batist said.

  I decided to heat up some boudin and make some Kool-Aid.

  I rented a lot of Disney and other films for children because I didn't like Alafair to watch ordinary television in the evening or at least when I was not there. Maybe I was overly protective and cautious. But the celluloid facsimile of violence and the news footage of wars in the Middle East and Central America would sometimes cause the light to go out of her face and leave her mouth parted and her eyes wide, as though she had been slapped.

  Disney films, Kool-Aid, boudin, bluepoint crabs on a breezy porch by the side of the bay were probably poor compensation for the losses she had known. But you offer what you have, perhaps even bless it with a prayer, and maybe somewhere down the line affection grows into faith and replaces memory. I can't say. I'm not good at the mysteries, and I have few solutions even for my own problems. But I was determined that Alafair would never again be hurt unnecessarily, not while she was in my care, not while she was in this country.

  "This is our turf, right, Batist?" I said as I gave him a paper plate with slices of boudin on it.

  "What?" His and Alafair's attention was focused on the image of Donald Duck on the television screen. Outside, the fireflies were lighting in the pecan trees.

  "This is our Cajun land, right, podna?" I said.

  "We make the rules, we've got our own flag."

  He gave me a quizzical look, then turned back to the television screen. Alafair, who was sitting on the floor, slapped her thighs and squealed uproariously while Donald Duck raged at his nephews.

  The next day I visited Dixie Lee again at Lourdes and took him a couple of magazines. The sunlight was bright in his room, and someone had placed a green vase of roses in the window. The deputy left us alone, and Dixie lay on his side and looked at me from his pillow. His eyes were clear, and his cheeks were shaved and pink.

  "You're looking better," I said.

  "For the first time in years I'm not full of whiskey. It feels weird, I'm here to tell you. In fact, it feels so good I'd like to cut out the needle, too. But the centipedes start waking up for a snack."

  I nodded at the roses in the window and smiled.

  "You have an admirer," I said.

  He didn't answer. He traced a design on the bed with his index finger, as though he were pushing a penny around on the sheet.

  "You grew up Catholic, didn't you?" he said.

  "Yes."

  "You still go to church?"

  "Sure."

  "You think God punishes us right here, that it ain't just in the next world?"

  "I think those are bad ideas."

  "My little boy died in a fire. A bare electric cord under a rug started it. If I hadn't been careless, it wouldn't have happened. Then I killed that man's little boy over in Fort Worth, and now I been in a fire myself and a young girl's dead."

  I looked at the confusion and pain in his face.

  "I had preachers back home tell me where all that drinking and doping was going to lead me. I wouldn't pay them no mind," he said.

  "Come on, don't try to see God's hand in what's bad. Look outside. It's a beautiful day, you're alive, you're feeling better, maybe you've got alternatives now that you didn't have before. Think about what's right with your life, Dixie."

  "They're going to try and pop me."

  "Who?"

  "Vidrine and Mapes. Or some other butthole the company hires."

  "These kinds of guys don't come up the middle."

  He looked back at me silently, as if I were someone on the other side of a wire fence.

  "There're too many people looking at them now," I said.

  "You don't know how much money's involved. You couldn't guess. You don't have any idea what these bastards will do for money."

  "You're in custody."

  "Save the dog shit, Dave. Last night Willie out there said he was going for some smokes. It was eleven o'clock. He handcuffed my wrist to the bed rail and came back at one in the morning, chewing on a toothpick and smelling like hamburger and onions."

  "I'll talk to the sheriff."

  "The same guy that thinks I've got fried grits for brains? You think like a cop, Dave. You've probably locked a lot of guys up, but you don't know what it's like inside all that clanging iron. A couple of swinging dicks want a kid brought to their cell, that's where he gets delivered. A guy wants you whacked out because you owe for a couple of decks of cigarettes, you get a shank in your spleen somewhere between the mess hall and lockup. Guys like Willie out there are a. joke."

  "What do you want me to do?"

  "Nothing. You tried. Don't worry about it."

  "I'm not going to leave you on your own. Give me a little credit."

  "I ain't on my own. I called Sally Dee."

  I looked again at the roses in the green vase.

  "Floral telegram. He's a thoughtful guy, man," Dixie Lee said.

  "It's your butt."

  "Don't ever do time. You won't hack it inside."

  "What you're doing is not only stupid, you're starting to piss me off, Dixie."

  "I'm sorry."

  "You want to be on these guys' leash the rest of your life? What's the matter with you?"

  "Everything. My whole fucking life. You want to pour yourself some iced tea? I got to use the bedpan."

  "I think I've been jerked around here, partner."

  "Maybe you been jerking yourself around."

  "What?"

  "Ask yourself how much you're interested in me and how much you're interested in the drilling company that killed your old man."

  I watched him work the stainless steel bedpan out from the rack under the mattress.

  "I guess you have dimensions I haven't quite probed," I said.

  "I flunked out my freshman year, remember? You're talking way above my league."

  "No, I don't think so. We'll see you around, Dixie."

  "I don't blame you for walking out mad. But you don't understand. You can't, man. It was big back then. The Paramount Theater in Brooklyn with Allan Freed, on stage with guys like Berry and Eddie Cochran. I wasn't no drunk, either. I had a wife and a kid, people thought I was decent. Look at me today. I'm a fucking ex-convict, the stink on shit. I killed a child, for God's sake. You come in here talking an AA shuck about the beautiful weather outside when maybe I'm looking at a five-spot on Angola farm. Get real, son. It's the dirty boogie out there. "and all the cats are humping to it in three-four time."

  I stood up from my chair.

  "I'll speak with the sheriff about the deputy. He won't leave you alone again. I'll see you, Dixie," I said.

  I left him and walked outside into the sunlight. The breeze was cool and scented with flowers, and across the street in a grove of oak trees a Negro was selling rattlesnake watermelons off the back of a truck. He had lopped open one melon on the tailgate as an advertisement, and the meat was dark red in the shade. I looked back up at Dixie Lee's room on the corner of the second floor and saw a nun close the Venetian blinds on the sunlight.

  CHAPTER 3

  I had never liked the Lafayette Oil Center. My attitude was probably romantic and unreasonable. As chambers of commerce everywhere are fond of saying, it provided jobs and an expanded economy, it meant progress. It was also ugly. It was low and squat and sprawling, treeless, utilitarian, built with glazed brick and flat roofs, tinted and mirrored windows that gave onto parking lots that in summer radiated the heat like a stove.
r />   And to accommodate the Oil Center traffic the city had widened Pinhook Road, which ran down to the Vermilion River and became the highway to New Iberia. The oak and pecan trees along the road had been cut down, the rural acreage subdivided and filled with businesses and fast-food restaurants, the banks around the Vermilion Bridge paved with asphalt parking lots and dotted with more oil-related businesses whose cinder-block architecture had all the aesthetic design of a sewage-treatment works.