Black Cherry Blues

by James Lee Burke

  As always when these moments of dark reverie occurred in my waking day, there was no way I could think my way out of them. Instead, I put on my gym trunks and running shoes and pumped iron in the backyard. I did dead lifts, curls, and military presses with a ninety-pound bar in sets of ten and repeated the sets six times. Then I ran four miles along the dirt road by the bayou, the sunlight spinning like smoke through the canopy of oak and cypress trees overhead. Bream were still feeding on insects among the cattails and lily pads, and sometimes in a shady cut between two cypress trees I would see the back of a largemouth bass roll just under the surface.

  I turned around at the drawbridge, waved to the bridgetender, and hit it hard all the way home. My wind was good, the blood sang in my chest, my stomach felt flat and hard, yet I wondered how long I would keep mortality and memory at bay.

  Always the racetrack gambler, trying to intuit and control the future with only the morning line to operate on.

  Three days later I was using a broomstick to push the rainwater out of the folds of the canvas awning over my dock when the telephone rang inside the bait shop. It was Dixie Lee Pugh.

  “I’ll take you to lunch,” he said.

  “Thanks but I’m working.”

  “I want to talk to you.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “I want to talk to you alone.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Lafayette.”

  “Drive on over. Go out East Main, then take the bayou road south of town. You’ll run right into my place.”

  “Give me an hour.”

  “You sound a little gray, podna.”

  “Yeah, I probably need to get married again or something. Dangle loose.”

  Every morning Batist and I grilled chickens and links on the barbecue pit that I had made by splitting an oil drum horizontally with an acetylene torch and welding hinges and metal legs on it. I sold paper-plate lunches of barbecue and dirty rice for three-fifty apiece, and I usually cleared thirty dollars or so from the fishermen who were either coming in for the day or about to go out. Then after we had cleaned the cable-spool tables, Batist and I would fix ourselves plates and open bottles of Dr Pepper and eat under one of the umbrellas by the water’s edge.

  It was a warm, bright afternoon, and the wind was lifting the moss on the dead cypress trees in the marsh. The sky was as blue and perfect as the inside of a teacup.

  “That man drive like he don’t know the road got holes in it,” Batist said. His sun-faded denim shirt was open on his chest. He wore a dime on a string around his neck to keep away the gris-gris, an evil spell, and his black chest looked like it was made of boilerplate.

  The pink Cadillac convertible, with its top down, was streaked with mud and rippled and dented along the fenders. I watched the front end dip into a chuckhole and shower yellow water all over the windshield.

  “Dixie Lee never did things in moderation,” I said.

  “You ain’t renting him our boat?”

  “He’s just coming out to talk about something. He used to be a famous country and rock ’n’ roll star.”

  Batist kept chewing and looked at me flatly, obviously unimpressed.

  “I’m serious. He used to be big stuff up in Nashville,” I said.

  His eyes narrowed, as they always did when he heard words that he didn’t recognize.

  “It’s in Tennessee. That’s where they make a lot of country records.”

  No help.

  “I’ll get us another Dr Pepper. Did you feed Tripod?” I said.

  “You t’ink that coon don’t know where the food at?”

  I didn’t understand.

  “He ain’t lost his nose, no.”

  “What are you saying, Batist?”

  “He eat all your fried pies. Go look your fried pies.”

  Dixie Lee cut his engine, slammed the car door behind him, and lumbered down the dock into the bait shop, flipping one hand at us in recognition. His face was bloodless, the skin stretched tight on the bone, beaded with perspiration like drops of water on a pumpkin. His charcoal shirt, which was covered with roses, was damp along the buttons and under the armpits.

  I followed him inside the bait shop. He dropped a five-dollar bill on the counter, opened a long-necked Jax on the side of the beer box, and upended it into his mouth. He kept swallowing until it was almost empty, then he took a breath of air and opened and closed his eyes.

  “Boy, do I got one,” he said. “I mean wicked, son, like somebody screwed a brace and bit through both temples.”

  He tilted the bottle up again, one hand on his hip, and emptied it.

  “A mellow start, but it don’t keep the snakes in their basket very long, do it?”

  “Nope.”

  “What we’re talking about here is the need for more serious fluids. You got any JD or Beam lying around?”

  “I’m afraid not, Dixie.” I rang up his sale and put his change on the counter.

  “These babies will have to do, then.” He opened another Jax, took a long pull, and blew out his breath. “A preacher once asked me, ‘Son, can you take two drinks and walk away from it?’ I said, ‘I can’t tell you the answer to that, sir, ’cause I never tried.’ That ought to be funny, but I guess it’s downright pathetic, ain’t it?”

  “What’s up, partner?”

  He looked around the empty bait shop.

  “How about taking me for a boat ride?” he said.

  “I’m kind of tied up right now.”

  “I’ll pay you for your time. It’s important, man.”

  His green eyes looked directly into mine. I walked to the bait-shop door.

  “I’ll be back in a half hour,” I called to Batist, who was still eating his lunch under the umbrella.

  “I appreciate it, Dave. You’re righteous people.” Dixie Lee popped open a paper bag and put four bottles of Jax inside.

  I took him in an outboard down the bayou, past the four-corners, where the old flaking general store with its wide gallery sat in the shade of an enormous oak tree. Some old men and several Negroes from a road-maintenance crew were drinking soda pop on the gallery.

  The wake from the outboard swelled up through the lily pads and cattails and slapped against the cypress roots along the bank. Dixie Lee lay back against the bow, the beer bottle in his hand filled with amber sunlight, his eyes narrowing wistfully in the sun’s refraction off the brown water. I cut the engine and let us float on our own wake into an overhang of willow trees. In the sudden quiet we could hear a car radio playing an old Hank Williams song in the shell parking lot of the general store.

  “Good God Almighty, is that inside my head or outside it?” he asked.

  “It’s from the four-corners,” I said, and smiled at him. I took out my Puma pocketknife and shaved the bark off a wet willow stick.

  “Boy, it takes me back, though. When I started out, they said if you don’t play it like Hank or Lefty, it ain’t worth diddly-squat on a rock. They were right, too. Hey, you know the biggest moment I ever had in my career? It wasn’t them two gold records, and it sure wasn’t marrying some movie actress with douche water for brains. It was when I got to cut a live album with the Fat Man down in New Orleans. I was the only white artist he ever recorded with. Man, he was beautiful. He looked like a little fat baby pig up on that piano bench, with a silver shirt on and rhinestone coat and rings all over his fingers. He was grinning and rocking and pounding the keys with those little sausage fingers, sweat flying off his face, and the whole auditorium going apeshit. I mean with white broads trying to climb on the stage and people doing the dirty boogie in front of the cops. I mean it was his show, he owned them, man, but each time he finished a ride he’d point at me so the spotlight would swing over on my guitar and I’d get half of all that yelling out there. That cat had a generous heart, man.”

  Dixie Lee shook his head and opened another Jax with his pocketknife. I looked at my watch.

  “Yeah, I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s a problem
I got, getting wrapped up in yesterday’s scrapbook. Look, I got something bad on my mind. In fact, it’s crazy. I don’t even know how to explain it. Maybe there’s nothing to it. Hell, I don’t know.”

  “How about just telling me?”

  “Star Drilling sent me and a couple of other leasemen up to Montana. On the eastern slope of the Rockies, what they call the East Front up there. Big gas domes, son. Virgin country. We’re talking hundreds of millions of dollars. Except there’s a problem with some wilderness areas and the Blackfeet Indian Reservation.

  “But that don’t concern me. I’m just a leaseman, right? Fooling around with the Forest Service or Indians or these crazy bastards spiking trees—”

  “Doing what?”

  “A bunch of cult people or something don’t want anybody cutting down trees, so they hammer nails and railroad spikes way down in the trunk. Then some lumberjack comes along with a McCullough and almost rips his face off. But I don’t have any beef with these people. Everybody’s got their own scene, right? Let Star Drilling take care of the PR and the politics, and Dixie Lee will get through the day with a little JD and God’s good grace.

  “But we came back for six weeks of deals and meetings at the Oil Center in Lafayette. So I’m staying at the motel with these two other lease guys. The company picks up all the bills, the bar’s always open, and a black guy serves us Bloody Marys and chilled shrimp by the pool every morning. It should have been a nice vacation before I go back to wheeling and dealing among the Indians and the crazies.

  “Except two nights ago one of the other lease guys has a party in his rooms. Actually it’s more like a geek show. Broads ripping off their bras, people spitting ice and tonic on each other. Then I guess I got romantic and went into the bedroom with this big blond gal that looked like she could throw a hog over a fence.”

  His eyes shifted away from me, and his cheeks colored slightly. He drank again from the Jax without looking back at me.

  “But I was deep into the jug that night, definitely not up to her level of bumping uglies,” he said. “I must have passed out and rolled off the side of the bed between the bed and the wall, because that’s where I woke up about five in the morning. The snakes were starting to clatter around in their basket, then I heard the two other lease guys talking by themselves in the other room.

  “One guy—I ain’t using his name—says, ‘Don’t worry about it. We did what we had to do.’ Then the other guy says, ‘Yeah, but we should have taken more time. We should have put rocks on top of them or something. Animals are always digging up stuff in the woods, then a hunter comes along.’

  “Then the first guy says, ‘Nobody’s going to find them. Nobody cares about them. They were both troublemakers. Right or wrong?’

  “Then the second guy says, ‘I guess you’re right.’

  “And the first guy says, ‘It’s like a war. You make up the rules when it’s over.’

  “I stayed quiet in the bedroom till I heard them call room service for breakfast and a couple of bottles of Champale, then I walked into the living room in my skivvies, looking like I’d just popped out of my momma’s womb. I thought both of them was going to brown their britches right there.”

  “You think they killed some people?”

  He touched his fingers nervously to his forehead.

  “Good God, man, I don’t know,” he said. “What’s it sound like to you?”

  “It sounds bad.”

  “What d’you think I ought to do?”

  I rubbed my palm on the knee of my khaki work trousers, then clicked my nails on the metal housing of the outboard engine. The dappled sunlight fell through the willows on Dixie’s flushed face.

  “I can introduce you to the Iberia sheriff or a pretty good DEA agent over in Lafayette,” I said.

  “Are you kidding, man? I need a drug agent in my life like a henhouse needs an egg-sucking dog.”

  “Well, there’s still the sheriff.”

  He drank the foam out of the Jax bottle and looked at me with one eye squinted shut against the light.

  “I’m getting the impression you think I’d just be playing with my swizzle stick,” he said.

  I raised my eyebrows and didn’t answer.

  “Come on, Dave. I need some help. I can’t handle worry. It eats my lunch.”

  “Where do you think this happened?”

  “Up in Montana, I guess. That’s where we been the last three months.”

  “We can talk to the FBI, but I don’t think it’s going anywhere. You just don’t have enough information, Dixie.” I paused for a moment. “There’s another bump in the road, too.”

  He looked at me as a child might if he was about to be brought to task.

  “When I was on the grog, I had a hard time convincing people about some things I heard and saw,” I said. “It’s unfair, but it goes with the territory.”

  He stared at the water and pinched his eyes with his fingers.

  “My advice is to get away from these guys,” I said.

  “I work with them.”

  “There’re other companies.”

  “Be serious. I was in Huntsville. The Texas parole office don’t give you the best letters of recommendation.”

  “I don’t know what to tell you, then.”

  “It’s a mess of grief, huh?”

  I began pulling in the anchor rope.

  “You’re gonna turn to stone on me?” he said.

  “I wish I could help. I don’t think I can. That’s the way it is.”

  “Before you crank that engine, let me ask you a question. Your father was killed on a rig out in the Gulf, wasn’t he?”

  “That’s right.”

  “It was a Star rig, wasn’t it?”

  “Yep.”

  “They didn’t have a blowout preventer on. It killed a couple of dozen guys when it blew.”

  “You’ve got a good memory, Dixie.” I twisted the throttle to open the gas feed and yanked the starter rope. It didn’t catch.

  “It don’t matter to you that I’m talking about Star Drilling Company?” he said.

  I kept yanking the rope while oil and gas bled away from the engine into the water. Then I put one knee on the plank seat, held the engine housing firm with my palm, and ripped the starter handle past my ear. The engine roared, the propeller churned a cloud of yellow mud and dead hyacinth vines out of the bottom, and I turned us back into the full sunlight, the slap of water under the bow, the wind that smelled of jasmine and wisteria. On the way back Dixie sat on the bow with his forearms lying loosely between his legs, his face listless and empty now, his rose-emblazoned shirt puffing with warm air.

  Late that afternoon the wind shifted out of the south and you could smell the wetlands and just a hint of salt in the air. Then a bank of thunderheads slid across the sky from the Gulf, tumbling across the sun like cannon smoke, and the light gathered in the oaks and cypress and willow trees and took on a strange green cast as though you were looking at the world through water. It rained hard, dancing on the bayou and the lily pads in the shallows, clattering on my gallery and rabbit hutches, lighting the freshly plowed fields with a black sheen.

  Then suddenly it was over, and the sky cleared and the western horizon was streaked with fire. Usually on a spring evening like this, when the breeze was cool and flecked with rain, Batist and I headed for Evangeline Downs in Lafayette. But the bottom had dropped out of the oil business in Louisiana, the state had the highest rate of unemployment in the country and the worst credit rating, and the racetrack had closed.

  I boiled crawfish for supper, and Alafair and I shelled and ate them on the redwood picnic table under the mimosa tree in the backyard. That night I dreamed of a bubble of fire burning under the Gulf’s green surface. The water boiled and hissed, geysers of steam and dirty smoke rose into air, and an enormous blue-green oil slick floated all the way to the western horizon. Somewhere far down below among the twisted spars and drill pipe and cables and the flooded wreckage of th
e quarter boat were the bodies of my father and nineteen other men who went down with the rig when the drill bit punched into a pay sand and the wellhead blew.

  The company’s public relations men said that they didn’t have a blowout preventer on because they had never hit an oil sand at that depth in that part of the Gulf before. I wondered what my father thought in those last moments of his life. I never saw fear in him. No matter how badly he was hurt by circumstances or my mother’s unfaithfulness, and eventually by drunken brawls in bars and the times he was locked up in the parish jail, he could always grin and wink at me and my brother and convincingly pretend to us that misfortune was not even worthy of mention.

  But what did he feel in those last moments, high up on the monkeyboard in the dark, when the rig started to shake and groan and he saw the roughnecks on the platform floor dropping tongs and chain and running from the eruption of sand, salt water, gas, oil, and cascading drill pipe that in seconds would explode into an orange and yellow flame that melted steel spars like licorice? Did he think of me and my brother, Jimmie?

  I bet he did. Even when he clipped his safety belt onto the Geronimo wire and jumped into the black, even as the rig caved with him on top of the quarter boat, I bet his thoughts were of us.

  They never found his body, but even now, almost twenty-two years later, he visited me in my sleep and sometimes I thought he spoke to me during my waking day. In my dream I saw him walking out of the surf, the green waves and foam sliding around the knees of his overalls, his powerful body strung with rust-colored seaweed. His wind-burned skin was as dark as a mulatto’s, his teeth white, his thick, curly hair black as an Indian’s. His tin hat was cocked at an angle on his head, and when he popped a wet kitchen match on his thumbnail and lit a cigar stub in the corner of his mouth and then crinkled his eyes at me, a shaft of morning sunlight struck his hat and flashed as bright as a heliograph. I could feel the salt water surge over my legs as I walked toward him.