Black Cherry Blues

by James Lee Burke

  “This discussion is over. There’s the door.”

  “It looks like your company has made stonewalling an art form.”

  “What?”

  “Does the name Aldous Robicheaux mean anything to you?”

  “No. Who is he?”

  “He was my father. He was killed on one of your rigs.”

  “When?”

  “Twenty-two years ago. They didn’t have a blowout preventer on. Your company tried to deny it, since almost everybody on the rig went down with it. A shrimper pulled a floorman out of the water two days later. He cost you guys a lot of money.”

  “So you got a grudge that’s twenty-two years old? I don’t know what to tell you, Robicheaux, except I wasn’t with the company then and I probably feel sorry for you.”

  I took my rain hat off my knee and stood up.

  “Tell Mapes and Vidrine to stay away from Dixie Lee,” I said.

  “You come in here again, I’ll have you arrested.”

  I walked back outside into the rain, got in my truck, and drove out of the maze of flat, uniform brick buildings that composed the Oil Center. On Pinhook Road I passed the restaurant where I had seen Cletus an hour before. The spreading oak trees were dark green, the pink and blue neon like smoke in the blowing mist. The wind blew hard when I crossed the Vermilion River, ruffling the yellow current below and shuddering the sides of my truck.

  “I don’t buy that stuff about a death wish. I believe some guys in Vienna had too much time to think,” I said to the therapist.

  “You don’t have to be defensive about your feelings. Facile attitudes have their place in therapy, too. For example, I don’t think there’s anything complex about depression. It’s often a matter of anger turned inward. What do you have to say about that, Dave?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Yes, you do. How did you feel in Vietnam when the man next to you was hit?”

  “What do you think I felt?”

  “At some point you were glad it was him and not you. And then you felt guilty. And that was very dangerous, wasn’t it?”

  “All alcoholics feel guilt. Go to an open meeting sometime. Learn something about it.”

  “Cut loose from the past. She wouldn’t want you to carry a burden like this.”

  “I can’t. I don’t want to.”

  “Say it again.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  He was bald and his rimless glasses were full of light. He turned his palms up toward me and was silent.

  I visited Dixie Lee one more time and found him distant, taciturn, perhaps even casually indifferent to my presence in the room. I wasn’t pleased with his attitude. I didn’t know whether to ascribe it to the morphine-laced IV hooked into his arm, or possibly his own morose awareness of what it meant to throw in his lot with his old cell partner.

  “You want me to bring you anything else before I leave?” I asked.

  “I’m all right.”

  “I probably won’t be back, Dixie. I’m pretty tied up at the dock these days.”

  “Sure, I understand.”

  “Do you think maybe you used me a little bit?” I grinned at him and held up my thumb and forefinger slightly apart in the air. “Maybe just a little?”

  His voice was languid, as though he were resting on the comfortable edge of sleep.

  “Me use somebody else? Are you kidding?” he said. “You’re looking at the dildo of the planet.”

  “See you around, Dixie.”

  “Hell, yes. They’re kicking me out of here soon, anyway. It’s only second-degree stuff. I’ve had worse hangovers. We’re in tall cotton, son.”

  And so I left him to his own menagerie of snapping dogs and hungry snakes.

  That Saturday I woke Alafair early, told her nothing about the purpose of our trip, and drove in the cool, rose-stippled dawn to the Texas side of Sabine Pass, where the Sabine River empties into the Gulf. A friend of mine from the army owned a small, sandy, salt-flecked farm not far from the hard-packed gray strip of sandbar that tried to be a beach. It was a strange, isolated place, filled with the mismatched flora of two states: stagnant lakes dotted with dead cypress, solitary oaks in the middle of flat pasture, tangles of blackjack along the edges of coulees, an alluvial fan of sand dunes that were crested with salt grass and from which protruded tall palm trees silhouetted blackly against the sun. Glinting through the pines on the back of my friend’s farm were the long roll and pitch of the Gulf itself, and a cascade of waves that broke against the beach in an iridescent spray of foam.

  It was a place of salt-poisoned grass, alligators, insects, magpies, turkey buzzards, drowned cows whose odor reached a half mile into the sky, tropical storms that could sand the paint off a water tower, and people like my friend who had decided to slip through a hole in the dimension and live on their own terms. He had a bad-conduct discharge from the army, had been locked up in a mental asylum in Galveston, had failed totally at AA, and as a farmer couldn’t grow thorns in a briar patch.

  But he bred and raised some of the most beautiful Appaloosa horses I had ever seen. He and I had coffee in his kitchen while Alafair drank a Coke, then I picked up several sugar cubes in my palm and we walked out to his back lot.

  “What we doing, Dave?” Alafair said. She looked up at me in the sunlight that shone through the pine trees. She wore a yellow T-shirt, baggy blue jeans, and pink tennis shoes. The wind off the water ruffled her bangs.

  My friend winked and went inside the barn.

  “You can’t ride Tripod, can you, little guy?” I said.

  “What? Ride Tripod?” she said, her face confused, then suddenly lighting, breaking into an enormous grin as she looked past me and saw my friend leading a three-year-old gelding out of the barn.

  The Appaloosa was steel gray, with white stockings and a spray of black and white spots across his rump. He snorted and pitched his head against the bridle, and Alafair’s brown eyes went back and forth between the horse and me, her face filled with delight.

  “You think you can take care of him and Tripod and your rabbits, too?” I said.

  “Me? He’s for me, Dave?”

  “You bet he is. He called me up yesterday and said he wanted to come live with us.”

  “What? Horse call up?”

  I picked her up and set her on top of the fence rail, then let the Appaloosa take the sugar cubes out of my palm.

  “He’s like you, he’s got a sweet tooth,” I said. “But when you feed him something, let him take it out of your palm so he doesn’t bite your fingers by mistake.”

  Then I climbed over the fence, slipped bareback onto the horse, and lifted Alafair up in front of me. My friend had trimmed the horse’s mane, and Alafair ran her hand up and down it as though it were a giant shoe brush. I touched my right heel against the horse’s flank, and we turned in a slow circle around the lot.

  “What his name?” Alafair said.

  “How about Tex?”

  “How come that?”

  “Because he’s from Texas.”

  “What?”

  “This is Texas.”

  “This where?”

  “Never mind.”

  I nodded for my friend to open the gate, and we rode out through the sandy stretch of pines onto the beach. The waves were slate green and full of kelp, and they made a loud smack against the sand and slid in a wet line up to a higher, dry area where the salt grass and the pine needles began. It was windy and cool and warm at the same time, and we rode a mile or so along the edge of the surf to a place where a sandbar and jetty had created a shallow lagoon, in the middle of which a wrecked shrimp boat lay gray and paintless on its side, a cacophony of seagulls thick in the air above it. Behind us the horse’s solitary tracks were scalloped deep in the wet sand.

  I gave my friend four hundred for the Appaloosa, and for another three hundred he threw in the tack and a homemade trailer. Almost all the way home Alafair stayed propped on her knees on the front seat, either looking b
ackward through the cab glass or out the window at the horse trailer tracking behind us, her fine hair flattening in white lines against her scalp.

  On Monday I walked up to the house for lunch, then stopped at the mailbox on the road before I went back to the dock. The sun was warm, the oak trees along the road were full of mockingbirds and blue jays, and the mist from my neighbor’s water sprinkler drifted in a wet sheen over his hydrangea beds and rows of blooming azalea and myrtle bushes. In the back of the mailbox was a narrow package no more than ten inches long. It had been postmarked in New Orleans. I put my other mail in my back pocket, slipped the twine off the corners of the package, and cracked away the brown wrapping paper with my thumb.

  I lifted off the cardboard top. Inside on a strip of cotton was a hypodermic needle with a photograph and a sheet of lined paper wrapped around it. The inside of the syringe was clouded with a dried brown-red residue. The photograph was cracked across the surface, yellowed around the edges, but the obscene nature of the details had the violent clarity of a sliver of glass in the eye. A pajama-clad Vietcong woman lay in a clearing by the tread of a tank, her severed head resting on her stomach. Someone had stuffed a C-ration box in her mouth.

  The lined paper looked like the kind that comes in a Big Chief notebook. The words were printed large, in black ink.

  Dear Sir,

  The guy that took this picture is one fucked up dude. He liked it over there and didn’t want to come back. He says he used this needle in a snuff flick out in Oakland. I don’t know if I’d believe him or not. But your little pinto bean gets on the bus at 7:45. She arrives at school at 8:30. She’s on the playground at 10 and back out there at noon. She waits on the south corner for the bus home at 3:05. Sometimes she gets off before her stop and walks down the road with a colored kid. It’s hardball. Don’t fuck with it. It’s going to really mess up your day. Check the zipperhead in the pic. Now there’s somebody who really had a hard time getting her C’s down.

  “For what your face like that? What it is, Dave?”

  Batist was standing behind me, dressed in a pair of navy bellbottoms and an unbuttoned sleeveless khaki shirt. There were drops of sweat on his bald head, and the backs of his hands and wrists were spotted with blood from cleaning fish.

  I put the photograph, letter, and torn package back in the mailbox and walked hurriedly down to the dock. I called the elementary school, asked the principal to make sure that Alafair was in her classroom, then told her not to let Alafair board the school bus that afternoon, that I would be there to pick her up. When I walked back toward the house Batist was still at the mailbox. He was illiterate and so the letter inside meant nothing to him, but he had the photograph cupped in his big palm, an unlit cigar in the corner of his mouth, and there was an ugly glaze in his eyes.

  “Que ça veut dire, Dave? What that needle mean, too?” he said.

  “Somebody’s threatening Alafair.”

  “They say they gonna hurt that little girl?”

  “Yes.” The word created a hollow feeling in my chest.

  “Who they are? Where they at, them people that do something like this?”

  “I believe it’s a couple of guys in Lafayette. They’re oil people. Have you seen any guys around here who look like they don’t belong here?”

  “I ain’t paid it no mind, Dave. I didn’t have no reason, me.”

  “It’s all right.”

  “What we gonna do?”

  “I’m going to pick up Alafair, then I’ll talk to the sheriff.” I picked the photograph out of his palm by the edges and set it back inside the mailbox. “I’m going to leave this stuff in there, then take it in later and see if we can find fingerprints on it. So we shouldn’t handle it anymore.”

  “No, I mean what we gonna do?” he said. His brown eyes looked intently into mine. There was no question about his meaning.

  “I’m going to pick up Alafair now. Watch the store and I’ll be back soon.”

  Batist’s mouth closed on his dry cigar. His eyes went away from me, stared into the shade of the pecan trees and moved back and forth in his head with a private thought. His voice was quiet when he spoke.

  “Dave, in that picture, that’s where you was at in the war?”

  “Yes.”

  “They done them kind of things?”

  “Some did. Not many.”

  “In that letter, it say that about Alafair?”

  I swallowed and couldn’t answer him. The hollow feeling in my chest would not go away. It was like fear but not of a kind that I had ever experienced before. It was an obscene feeling, as though a man’s hand had slipped lewdly inside my shirt and now rested sweatily on my breastbone. The sunlight shimmered on the bayou, and the trees and blooming hyacinths on the far side seemed to go in and out of focus. I saw a cottonmouth coiled fatly on a barkless, sun-bleached log, its triangular head the color of tarnished copper in the hard yellow light. Sweat ran out of my hair, and I felt my heart beating against my rib cage. I snicked the mailbox door shut, got into my truck, and headed down the dirt road toward New Iberia. When I bounced across the drawbridge over Bayou Teche, my knuckles were white and as round as quarters on the steering wheel.

  On the way back from the school the spotted patterns of light and shadow fell through the canopy of oaks overhead and raced over Alafair’s tan face as she sat next to me in the truck. Her knees and white socks and patent leather shoes were dusty from play on the school ground. She kept looking curiously at the side of my face.

  “Something wrong, Dave?” she said.

  “No, not at all.”

  “Something bad happen, ain’t it?”

  “Don’t say ‘ain’t.’”

  “Why you mad?”

  “Listen, little guy, I’m going to run some errands this afternoon and I want you to stay down at the dock with Batist. You stay in the store and help him run things, okay?”

  “What’s going on, Dave?”

  “There’s nothing to worry about. But I want you to stay away from people you don’t know. Keep close around Batist and Clarise and me, okay? You see, there’re a couple of men I’ve had some trouble with. If they come around here, Batist and I will chase them off. But I don’t want them bothering you or Clarise or Tripod or any of our friends, see.” I winked at her.

  “These bad men?” Her face looked up at me. Her eyes were round and unblinking.

  “Yes, they are.”

  “What they do?”

  I took a breath and let it out.

  “I don’t know for sure. But we just need to be a little careful. That’s all, little guy. We don’t worry about stuff like that. We’re kind of like Tripod. What’s he do when the dog chases him?”

  She looked into space, then I saw her eyes smile.

  “He gets up on the rabbit hutch,” she said.

  “Then what’s he do?”

  “He stick his claw in the dog’s nose.”

  “That’s right. Because he’s smart. And because he’s smart and careful, he doesn’t have to worry about that dog. And we’re the same way and we don’t worry about things, do we?”

  She smiled up at me, and I pulled her against my side and kissed the top of her head. I could smell the sun’s heat in her hair.

  I parked the truck in the shade of the pecan trees, and she took her lunch kit into the kitchen, washed out her thermos, and changed into her playclothes. We walked down to the dock, and I put her in charge of soda pop and worm sales. In the corner behind the beer cases I saw Batist’s old automatic Winchester twelve-gauge propped against the wall.

  “I put some number sixes in it for that cottonmouth been eating fish off my stringer,” he said. “Come see tonight. You gonna have to clean that snake off the tree.”

  “I’ll be back before dark. Take her up to the house for her supper,” I said. “I’ll close up when I get back.”

  “You don’t be worry, you,” he said, dragged a kitchen match on a wood post, lit his cigar, and let the smoke drift out throu
gh his teeth.

  Alafair rang up a sale on the cash register and beamed when the drawer clanged open.

  I put everything from the mailbox in a large paper bag and drove to the Iberia Parish sheriff’s office. I had worked a short while for the sheriff as a plainclothes detective the previous year, and I knew him to be a decent and trustworthy man. But when he ran for the office his only qualification was the fact that he had been president of the Lions Club and owned a successful dry cleaning business. He was slightly overweight, his face soft around the edges, and in his green uniform he looked like the manager of a garden-supply store. We talked in his office while a deputy processed the wrapping paper, box, note, and hypodermic needle for fingerprints in another room.

  Finally the deputy rapped on the sheriff’s door glass with one knuckle and opened the door.

  “Two identifiable sets,” he said. “One’s Dave’s, one’s from that colored man, what’s his name?”

  “Batist,” I said.

  “Yeah, we have his set on file from the other time—” His eyes flicked away from me and his face colored. “We had his prints from when we were out to Dave’s place before. Then there’s some smeared stuff on the outside of the wrapping paper.”

  “The mailman?” the sheriff said.

  “That’s what I figure,” the deputy said. “I wish I could tell you something else, Dave.”

  “It’s all right.”

  The deputy nodded and closed the door.

  “You want to take it to the FBI in Lafayette?” the sheriff said.

  “Maybe.”

  “A threat in the mails is in a federal area. Why not make use of them?”

  I looked back at him without answering.

  “Why is it that I always feel you’re not a man of great faith in our system?” he said.

  “Probably because I worked for it too long.”

  “We can question these two guys, what’s their names again?”

  “Vidrine and Mapes.”