Black Cherry Blues Read online

  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 it 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 gu
ess 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.

  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.

  But there was still one café on Pinhook left over from my college days at Southwestern in the 1950s. The parking lot was oystershell, 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 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 birds 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 leasemen. 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.”