Black Cherry Blues

by James Lee Burke

  Vidrine must have thought the women had come back because he was smiling when he opened the door in his boxer undershorts. Behind him Mapes was eating a sandwich in his robe at a wet bar. The linen and covers on the king-sized bed were in disarray, and the hallway that led into another bedroom was littered with towels, wet bathing suits, and beer cups.

  Vidrine’s smile collapsed, and his face suddenly looked rigid and glazed. Mapes set his sandwich in his plate, wet the scar on his lower lip as though he were contemplating an abstract equation, and moved toward a suitcase that was opened on a folding luggage holder.

  I heard the chain clink and sing through the air, felt it come back over my head again and again, felt their hands rake against the side of my face; my ears roared with sound—a rumble deep under the Gulf, the drilling-rig floor trembling and clattering violently, the drill pipe exploding out of the wellhead in a red-black fireball. My hand was bitten and streaked with rust; it was the color of dried blood inside a hypodermic needle used to threaten a six-year-old child; it was like the patterns that I streaked across the walls, the bedclothes, the sliding glass doors that gave onto the courtyard where azalea petals floated on the surface of a lighted turquoise pool.

  CHAPTER

  4

  Alafair woke up with an upset stomach the next morning, and I kept her home from school. I fixed her soft-boiled eggs and weak tea, then took her down to work with me in the bait shop. The sun had come up in a clear sky that morning, and the trees along the dirt road were bright green from the rain. The myrtle bushes were filled with purple bloom in the sunlight.

  “Why you keep looking down the road, Dave?” Alafair asked. She sat on one of the phone-cable spools on the dock, watching me unscrew a fouled spark plug from an outboard engine. The canvas umbrella in the center of the spool was folded, and her Indian-black hair was shiny in the bright light.

  “I’m just admiring the day,” I said.

  I felt her looking at the side of my face.

  “You don’t feel good?” she said.

  “I’m fine, little guy. I tell you what, let’s take a ride down to the store and see if they have any kites. You think you can put a kite up today?”

  “There ain’t no wind.”

  “Don’t say ‘ain’t.’”

  “Okay.”

  “Let’s go get some apples for Tex. You want to feed him some apples?”

  “Sure.” She looked at me curiously.

  We walked up to the truck, which was parked under the pecan trees, got in, and drove down the road toward the old store at the four-corners. Alafair looked at the floor.

  “What’s that, Dave?”

  “Don’t mess with that.”

  Her eyes blinked at my tone.

  “It’s just a chain. Kick it under the seat,” I said.

  She leaned down toward the floor.

  “Don’t touch it,” I said. “It’s dirty.”

  “What’s wrong, Dave?”

  “Nothing. I just don’t want your hands dirty.”

  I took a breath, stopped the truck, and went around to Alafair’s side. I opened her door and lifted the loops of chain off the floor. They felt as though they were coated with paint that had not quite dried.

  “I’ll be right back,” I said.

  I walked down on the bank of the bayou and sailed the chain out into the middle of the current. Then I stooped by the cattails in the shallows and scrubbed my palms with water and sand. Dragonflies hovered over the cattails, and I saw a cottonmouth slide off a log and swim into the lily pads. I pushed my hands into the sand, and water clouded around my wrists. I walked back up onto the bank with my hands dripping at my sides and wiped them on the grass, then I took a cloth out of the toolbox and wiped them again.

  The ramshackle general store at the four corners was dark and cool inside, the wood-bladed ceiling fan turning over the counter. I bought a sack of apples for Alafair’s horse, some sliced ham, cheese, and French bread for our lunch, and two soda pops to drink out on the gallery. The sun was brilliant on the white shale parking lot, and through the trees across the road I could see a Negro man cane fishing in a pirogue close in to the cypress roots.

  We went back to the house, and Alafair helped me weed my hydrangea and rose beds. Our knees were wet and dirty, our arms covered with fine grains of black dirt. My flower beds were thick with night crawlers, all of them close to the surface after the rain, and when we ripped weeds from the soil, they writhed pale and fat in the hard light. I knew almost nothing of Alafair’s life before she came to Annie and me, but work must have been a natural part of it, because she treated almost any task that I gave her as a game and did it enthusiastically in a happy and innocent way. She worked her way through the rosebushes on all fours, pinging the weeds and Johnsongrass loudly in the bucket, a smear of dirt above one eyebrow. The smell of the hydrangeas and the wet earth was so strong and fecund it was almost like a drug. Then the breeze came up and blew through the pecan trees in the front yard; out on the edge of the trees’ shade my neighbor’s water sprinkler spun in the sunlight and floated across my fence in a rainbow mist.

  They came just before noon. The two Lafayette plainclothes detectives were in an unmarked car, followed by the Iberia Parish sheriff, who drove a patrol car. They parked next to my truck and walked across the dead pecan leaves toward me. Both of the plainclothes were big men who left their coats in the car and wore their badges on their belts. Each carried a chrome-plated revolver in a clip-on holster. I rose to my feet, brushing the dirt off my knees. Alafair had stopped weeding and was staring at the men with her mouth parted.

  “You’ve got a warrant?” I said.

  One of the plainclothes had a matchstick in his mouth. He nodded without speaking.

  “Okay, no problem. I’ll need a few minutes, all right?”

  “You got somebody to take care of the little girl?” his partner said. A Marine Corps emblem was tattooed on one of his forearms and a dagger with a bleeding heart impaled upon it on the other.

  “Yes. That’s why I need a minute or so,” I said. I took Alafair by the hand and turned toward the house. “You want to come in with me?”

  “Lean up against the porch rail,” the man with the matchstick said.

  “Can’t you guys show some discretion here?” I said. I looked at my friend the sheriff, who stood in the background, saying nothing.

  “What the fuck are you talking about?” the tattooed man said.

  “Watch your language,” I said.

  I felt Alafair’s hand close tightly in mine. The other detective took the matchstick out of his mouth.

  “Put your hands on the porch rail, spread your feet,” he said, and took Alafair by her other hand and began to pull her away from me.

  I pointed my finger at him.

  “You’re mishandling this. Back off,” I said.

  Then I felt the other man shove me hard in the back, pushing me off-balance through the hydrangeas into the steps. I heard his pistol come out of his leather holster, felt his hand clamp down on my neck as he stuck the barrel of the revolver behind my ear.

  “You’re under arrest for murder. You think being an ex-cop lets you write the rules?” he said.

  Out of the corner of my eye I saw Alafair staring at us with the stunned, empty expression of a person wakened from a nightmare.

  They booked me into the parish jail on top of the old courthouse in the middle of Lafayette’s original town square. The jail was an ancient one, the iron doors and bars and walls painted battleship gray. The words “Negro Male” were still faintly visible on the door of one of the tanks. During the ride from New Iberia I had sat handcuffed in the back of the car, asking the detectives who it was I had killed. They responded with the silence and indifference with which almost all cops treat a suspect after he’s in custody. Finally I gave up and sat back against the seat cushion, the cuffs biting into my wrists, and stared at the oak trees flicking past the window.

  Now I had been fin
gerprinted and photographed, had turned over my wallet, pocket change, keys, belt, even my scapular chain, to a deputy who put them in a large manila envelope, realizing even then that something important was missing, something that would have a terrible bearing on my situation, yes, my Puma knife; and now the jailer and the detective who chewed on matchsticks were about to lock me in a six-cell area that was reserved for the violent and the insane. The jailer turned the key on the large, flat iron door that contained one narrow viewing slit, pulled it open wide, and pushed lightly on my back with his fingers.

  “Who the hell was it?” I said to the detective.

  “You must be a special kind of guy, Robicheaux,” he said. “You cut a guy from his scrot to sternum and don’t bother to get his name. Dalton Vidrine.”

  The jailer clanged the door behind me, turned the key, shot the steel lock bar, and I walked into my new home.

  It was little different from any other jail that I had seen or even been locked in during my drinking years. The toilets stank, the air smelled of stale sweat and cigarette smoke and mattresses that had turned black with body grease. The walls were scratched with names, peace signs, and drawings of male and female genitalia. More enterprising people had climbed on top of the cells and burned their names across the ceiling with cigarette lighters. On the floor area around the main door was a “deadline,” a white line painted in a rectangle, inside of which no one had better be standing when the door swung open or while the trusties were serving out of the food cart.

  But the people in that six-cell area were not the ordinary residents of a city or parish prison. One was an enormous demented Negro by the name of Jerome who had smothered his infant child. He told me later that a cop had worked him over with a baton; although he had been in jail two weeks, there were still purple gashes on his lips and lumps the size of birds’ eggs on his nappy head. I would come to know the others, too: a biker from New Orleans who had nailed a girl’s hands to a tree; a serial rapist and sodomist who was wanted in Alabama; a Vietnamese thug who, with another man, had garroted his business partner with jump cables for a car battery; and a four-time loser, a fat, grinning, absolutely vacant-eyed man who had murdered a whole family after escaping from Sugarland Farm in Texas.

  I was given one phone call and I telephoned the best firm in Lafayette. Like all people who get into serious trouble with the law, I became immediately aware of the incredible financial burden that had been dropped upon me. The lawyer’s retainer was $2,000, his ongoing fee $125 an hour. I felt as though my head were full of spiders as I tried to think in terms of raising that kind of money, particularly in view of the fact that my bail hadn’t been set and I had no idea how high it would be.

  I found out at my arraignment the next morning: $150,000. I felt the blood drain out of my face. The lawyer asked for bail reduction and argued that I was a local businessman, an ex–police officer, a property owner, a war veteran, and the judge propped his chin on one knuckle and looked back at him as impassively as a man waiting for an old filmstrip to run itself out.

  We all rose, the judge left the bench, and I sat dazed and light-headed in a chair next to the lawyer while a deputy prepared to cuff me for the trip back to the jail. The lawyer motioned to the deputy with two fingers.

  “Give us a minute, please,” he said. He was an older, heavyset man, with thinning cropped red hair, who wore seersucker suits and clip-on bow ties.

  The deputy nodded and stepped back by the side door to the courtroom.

  “It’s the pictures,” he said. “Vidrine’s entrails are hanging out in the bathtub. It’s mean stuff to look at, Mr. Robicheaux. And they’ve got your knife with your prints on it.”

  “It must have fallen out of my pocket. Both of those guys were all over me.”

  “That’s not what Mapes says. The bartender had some pretty bad things to say, too. What’d you do to him?”

  “Told him he was going to be busted for procuring.”

  “Well, I can discredit him on the stand. But Mapes—” He clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. “There’s the fellow we have to break down. A man with chain burns all over his face and back can make a hell of a witness. Tell me, what in God’s name did you have in mind when you went through that door?”

  My palms were damp. I swallowed and wiped them on my trousers.

  “Mapes knew Vidrine was a weak sister,” I said. “After I was gone, he picked up my knife and took him out. That’s what happened, Mr. Gautreaux.”

  He drummed his fingers on the arm of the chair, made a pocket of air in his jaw, cleared his throat and started to speak, then was silent. Finally, he stood up, patted me on the shoulder, and walked out the side door of the courtroom into the sunlight, into the wind ruffling the leaves of the oak trees, the noise of black kids roaring by on skateboards. The deputy lifted my arm and crimped one cuff around my wrist.

  Batist and his wife kept Alafair with them the day I was arrested, but the next day I arranged for her to stay with my cousin, a retired schoolteacher in New Iberia. She was taken care of temporarily, Batist was running the dock, and my main worry had become money. Besides needing a huge unknown sum for the lawyer, I had to raise $15,000 for the bondsman’s fee in order to make bail. I had $8,000 in savings.

  My half brother, Jimmie, who owned all or part of several restaurants in New Orleans, would have written a check for the whole amount, but he had gone to Europe for three months, and the last his partners heard from him he was traveling through France with a group of Basque jai alai players. I then discovered that bankers whom I had known for years were not anxious to lend money to a man who was charged with first-degree murder and whose current address was the parish jail. I had been locked up nine days, and Batist was still visiting banks and delivering loan papers to me.

  Our cells were unlocked at seven A.M. when a trusty and the night screw wheeled in the food cart, which every morning was stacked with aluminum containers of grits, coffee, and fried pork butts. Until lockup at five in the afternoon, we were free to move around in an area called the bull run, take showers, play cards with a deck whose missing members had been replaced with cards fashioned out of penciled cardboard, or stare listlessly out the window at the tops of the trees on the courthouse lawn. But most of the time I stayed in my cell, filling out loan applications or reading a stiffened, water-stained issue of Reader’s Digest.

  I was sitting on the side of my iron bunk, which hung from the wall on chains, printing across the top of an application, when a shadow moved across the page. Silhouetted in the open door of my cell was the biker who had nailed his girl’s hands to a tree. He was thick-bodied and shirtless, his breasts covered with tattooed birds, and his uncut hair and wild beard made his head look as though it were surrounded by a mane. I could feel his eyes move across the side of my face, peel away tissue, probe for the soft organ, the character weakness, the severed nerve.

  “You think you can cut it up there?” he said.

  I wet my pencil tip and kept on writing without looking up.

  “What place is that?” I said.

  “Angola. You think you can hack it?”

  “I’m not planning on being there.”

  “That’s what I said my first jolt. Next stop, three years up in the Block with the big stripes. They got some badass dudes there, man.”

  I turned to the next page and tried to concentrate on the printed words.

  “The night screw says you’re an ex-cop,” he said.

  I set my pencil down and looked at the opposite wall.

  “Does that make a problem for you?” I said.

  “Not me, man. But there’s some mean fuckers up on that farm. There’s guys that’ll run by your cell and throw a gasoline bomb in on you. Melt you into grease.”

  “I don’t want to be rude, but you’re standing in my light.”

  He grinned, and there was a malevolent light in his face. Then he stretched, yawned, laughed outright as though he were witnessing an absurdity of
some kind, and walked away to the window that gave onto the courthouse lawn.

  I did push-ups, I did curls by lifting the bunk with my fingertips, I took showers, and I slept as much as I could. At night I could hear the others breaking wind, talking to themselves, masturbating, snoring. The enormous Negro sometimes sang a song that began, “My soul is in a paper bag at the bottom of your garbage can.” Then one night he went crazy in his cell, gripping the bars with both hands and bashing his head against them until blood and sweat were flying out into the bull run and we heard the screw shoot the steel lock bar on the door.

  On the thirteenth day I received two visitors I wasn’t prepared for. A deputy escorted me down the spiral metal stairs to a windowless room that was used as a visiting area for those of us who were charged with violent crimes. Sitting at a wood table scarred with cigarette burns were Dixie Lee Pugh, one arm in a sling, his yellow hair crisscrossed with bandages, and my old homicide partner, Cletus Purcel. As always, Clete looked too big for his shirt, his sport coat, the tie that was pulled loose from his throat, the trousers that climbed above his socks. His cigarette looked tiny in his hand, the stitched scar through his eyebrow a cosmetic distraction from the physical confidence and humor in his face.

  Clete, old friend, why did you throw it in?

  They were both smiling so broadly they might have been at a party. I smelled beer on Dixie’s breath. I sat down at the table, and the deputy locked a barred door behind me and sat on a chair outside.

  “You made your bail all right, huh, Dixie?” I said.

  He wore a maroon shirt hanging outside his gray slacks, and one foot was bandaged and covered with two athletic socks. His stomach made a thick roll against the bottom of his shirt.