Black Cherry Blues

by James Lee Burke

  “Better than that, Dave. They cut me loose.”

  “They did what?”

  “I’m out of it. Free and clear. They dropped the possessions charge.” He was looking at the expression on my face.

  “They lost interest,” Clete said.

  “Oh? How’s that?”

  “Come on, Dave. Lighten up. You know how it works,” Clete said.

  “No, I think my education is ongoing here.”

  “We already have a firm on retainer in New Orleans, and I hired the best in Lafayette. You know these local guys aren’t going to get tied up in court for months over a chickenshit holding bust.”

  “Who’s this ‘we’ you’re talking about? What the hell are you doing with Dixie Lee?” I said.

  “He’s got a friend. I work for the friend. The friend doesn’t like to see Dixie Lee suffering a lot of bullshit he doesn’t deserve. You don’t deserve it, either, Dave.”

  “You work for this character Dio?”

  “He’s not such a bad guy. Look, there’s not a lot of jobs around for a cop who had to blow the country, uh, with a few loose ends lying around.”

  “How’d you get out of it? I thought there was still a warrant on you.”

  “You’ve never learned, partner. First, they didn’t have dog-doo to go on. Second, and this is what you don’t understand, nobody cares about a guy like that. The best part of that guy ran down his daddy’s leg. He met a bad fate. He should have met it earlier. The world goes on.”

  “Do you know what he’s talking about?” I said to Dixie Lee.

  “It’s his business,” he said quietly, and took a cigarette out of his pocket so that his eyes avoided mine.

  “Forget the past, Dave. It’s a decaying memory. That’s what you used to tell me, right? Great fucking line. Let’s look at the problem we got now, namely, getting your butt out of here. I hear they’ve got you in a special place with the lovelies.”

  I didn’t answer. Both of them looked at my face, then Dixie’s eyes wandered around the room.

  “Come on, Streak, be my mellow man for a few minutes,” Clete said.

  When Dixie Lee’s eyes lighted on mine again, I said, “To tell you the truth, Dixie, I feel like killing you.”

  “So he feels bad. What the fuck’s he supposed to do? Go to prison?” Clete said. “Look, I was coming here on my own, anyway, but as soon as I got him kicked loose he told me we got to get your ass out, too. That’s a fact.”

  “You got the right to be mad,” Dixie Lee said to me. “I got a way of pissing in the soup, and then everybody’s got to drink out of it. I just didn’t know you were going to—”

  “What?” I said.

  “Hell, I don’t know. Whatever it was you did in that motel room. Lord, Dave, I heard a cop say they stuck Vidrine’s guts back in his stomach with a trowel.”

  “That was Mapes’s work, not mine.”

  I could see the amusement in Clete’s face.

  “Sorry,” he said. Then he laughed. “But let’s face it. I remember a couple of occasions when you really decorated the walls.”

  “This wasn’t one of them.”

  “Whatever you say. Who cares anyway? The guy was a bucket of shit,” Clete said. “Let’s talk about getting you out of the zoo.”

  “Wait a minute. You knew Vidrine?”

  “Montana’s a small community in a lot of ways. You’d like it there. I rent a place from Sally Dee right on Flathead Lake.”

  “You used to hate those guys, Clete.”

  “Yeah… well,” he said, and sucked his teeth. “The CIA deals dope, guys in the White House run guns. You used to say it yourself—we keep the lowlifes around so we can have a dartboard we can hit.”

  “Where’d you hook up with this guy?”

  “Sal?” He scraped a piece of paint on the table with his fingernail. “I’ve got a brother-in-law who’s connected in Galveston. He got me a job dealing blackjack in one of Sal’s places in Vegas. After a month they moved me up into house security. Most of the rent-a-cops in Vegas have chewing gum for brains. It’s like running for president against Harpo Marx. In six months I was in charge of security for the whole casino. Now I do whatever needs doing—Vegas, Tahoe, Flathead.” He looked up at me. “It beats cleaning up puke in a john, which is what I was doing in a dump over in Algiers. Look, you want out of here?”

  “Hell, no, Clete. The ambience really grows on you.”

  “I can do it in twenty minutes.”

  “You’re going to put up fifteen thousand?”

  “I don’t have to. There’s a couple of bondsmen here who’d love to do a favor for Sally Dee. Why not? It doesn’t cost them anything. Unless you jump the bond.”

  “Let him do it for you, Dave,” Dixie Lee said.

  “I think I’m going to have to sweat this one out.”

  “Why? You got to prove you’re an honest man?” Clete said.

  “Thanks just the same, Cletus.”

  “You’re pissing me off. You think I’m trying to sign you up for the Mafia or something?”

  “I don’t know what you’re trying to do. In fact, I don’t understand anything you’ve done.”

  “Maybe it’s because you’re not listening too well.”

  “Maybe so.”

  He lit a cigarette and flipped the burnt match against the wall. He blew smoke out his nose.

  “There’s no strings,” he said.

  “Come on.”

  “You got my word.”

  “They’ll boil you down to glue, Clete. Bartend in Algiers, sell debit insurance. Just get away from them.”

  “I thought maybe I could make up for some bad things I did to you, partner.”

  “I don’t hold a grudge.”

  “You never forget anything, Dave. You store it up in you and feed it and stoke it until it’s a furnace.”

  “I’m changing.”

  “Yeah, that’s why they got you locked up with the shitbags.”

  “What can I say?”

  “Nothing,” Clete said. “Here’s my cigarettes. Trade them to the geeks for their food.”

  “Dave, I’d go your bond if I had the money,” Dixie Lee said. “But if I stepped on a dime right now, I could tell you if it was heads or tails.”

  “But the man’s not hearing us,” Clete said. “Right, Dave? You’re up on the high road, and the rest of us sweaty bastards have to toil our way through the flies.”

  He went to the door and banged the side of his fist against one of the bars.

  “Open up,” he said.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah. Write me a postcard. Polson, Montana. In fact, if you get out of this dog shit, come see me. The beer’s cold, you got to knock the trout back in the lake with an oar. A reasonable person might even say it’s better than taking showers with queers and child molesters. But what do I know?”

  He mashed his cigarette out on the concrete floor while the deputy unlocked the door. The deputy took him and Dixie Lee downstairs in the elevator, and I sat alone in the room, waiting for the deputy to return, my back bent over, my forearms propped loosely on my thighs, my eyes staring at the tiny webbed cracks in the floor.

  The next day two deputies brought Jerome back from the jail ward at the charity hospital. The stitches on his forehead looked like small black butterflies laced in his skin. He stared out the windows, talked to himself, urinated on the floor of his cell. The biker and the rapist from Alabama told him the jailer had left the key to the main door in the toilet. He knelt by the bowl, staring into the water, while the other two encouraged him.

  “You can’t see it. It’s way down in the pipe,” the biker said, and grabbed himself and grinned at the other man.

  Jerome’s arm went into the bowl, and he worked his hand down deep in the drain, splashing water up on his shirt and face.

  I put my hands on his shoulders. He looked up at me with his mouth open, his tongue pink and thick on his bottom teeth.


  “Don’t do that, Jerome. There’s no key in there,” I said.

  “What?” he said. He talked like a man who was drugged.

  “Take off your shirt and wash yourself in the shower,” I said. “Come on, walk over here with me.”

  “We’re just giving the cat a little hope,” the biker said.

  “Your comedy act is over,” I said.

  The biker wore black sunglasses. He looked at me silently and worked his tongue around his gums. The hair on his face and head looked like brown springs.

  “Wrong place to be telling people shit,” he said.

  I released Jerome’s arm and turned back toward the biker.

  “Go ahead,” I said.

  “Go ahead, what?”

  “Say something else clever.”

  “What are you talking about, man?”

  “I want you to get in my face one more time.”

  I couldn’t see his eyes behind the sunglasses, but his mouth was as still as though it had been painted on his skin.

  Then he said, because the others were watching him, “We’re a family here, man. That’s how you hack it inside. You don’t know that, you ain’t gonna make it.”

  I turned on the shower for Jerome, helped him pull off his shirt, and gave him a bar of soap from my cell. Then I picked up my tin plate and banged it loudly on the main door. It didn’t take long for the jailer to open up. I was standing inside the deadline when he did.

  His lean face was electric with outrage.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing, Robicheaux?” he said.

  “You’ve got a retarded man here who’s being abused by other inmates. Either put him in isolation or send him to Mandeville.”

  “Get your ass back across that line.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “That’s it. You’re going into lockdown,” he said, and slammed the iron door.

  I turned around and stared into the grinning face of the four-time loser who had murdered a family after breaking out of Sugarland. He was completely naked, and the huge rolls of fat on his thighs and stomach hung off his frame almost like curtains. His eyes were pale, empty of all emotion, but his mouth was as red as a clown’s. He took a puff off his cigarette and said, “Sounds like you’re getting pretty ripe, buddy.”

  Then he laughed so hard, his eyes squinted shut with glee, that tears ran down his round cheeks.

  Fifteen minutes later they moved me into a small room that contained a two-bunk iron cage, perforated with small squares and covered with thick layers of white paint that had been chipped and scratched with graffiti and prisoners’ names. Years ago the cage had been used to hold men awaiting execution in the days when the electric chair, with two huge generators, traveled from parish to parish under tarpaulins on the back of a semi truck. Now it was used to house troublemakers and the uncontrollable. I was told that I would spend the next five days there, would have no visitors other than my lawyer, would take no showers, and would receive one meal a day at a time of my choosing.

  That afternoon Batist tried to visit me and was turned away, but a Negro trusty brought me an envelope that contained a half-dozen crayon-filled pages from Alafair’s coloring book, along with a note that she had printed out on lined paper. The colored-in pages showed palm trees and blue water, a lake full of fish, a brown horse by whose head she had written the word “Tex.” Her note read: I can spell. I can spell ant in the can. I can spell cat in the hat. I love Dave. I don’t say aint no more. Love. Alafair.

  I hung the coloring-book pages on the inside of the cage by pressing their edges under the iron seams at the tops of the walls. It started to rain, and mist blew through the window and glistened on the bars. I unrolled the thin striped mattress on the bottom bunk and tried to sleep. I was unbelievably tired, but I couldn’t tell you from what. Maybe it was because you never really sleep in a jail. Iron doors slam all day and night; drunks shake doors against the jambs, and irritated street cops retaliate by raking their batons across the bars; people are gang-banged and sodomized in the shower, their cries lost in the clouds of steam dancing off the tiles; the crazies howl their apocalyptic insight from the windows like dogs baying under a yellow moon.

  But it was an even deeper fatigue, one that went deep into the bone, that left the muscles as flaccid as if they had been traversed by worms. It was a mood that I knew well, and it always descended upon me immediately before I began a two-day bender. I felt a sense of failure, moral lassitude, defeat, and fear that craved only one release. In my troubled dream I tried to will myself into one of the pages from Alafair’s coloring book—onto a stretch of beach dotted with palm trees, the sun hot on my bare shoulders while flecks of rain struck coldly on my skin. The water was blue and green, and red clouds of kelp were floating in the ground swell. Alafair rode her horse bareback along the edge of the surf, her mouth wide with a smile, her hair black and shiny in the sunlight.

  But the pure lines of the dream wouldn’t hold, and suddenly I was pouring rum into a cracked coconut shell and drinking from it with both hands. Like the sun and the rain, it was cool and warm at the same time, and it lighted my desires the way you touch a match to old newspaper stored in a dry box. I traveled to low-life New Orleans and Saigon bars, felt a woman’s breath on my neck, her mouth on my ear, her hand brush my sex. Topless girls in G-strings danced barefooted on a purple-lit runway, the cigarette smoke drifting across their breasts and braceleted arms. I knocked back double shots of Beam with draft chasers, held on to the edge of the bar like a man in a gale, and looked at their brown bodies, the watery undulations of their stomachs, their eyes that were as inviting as the sweet odor of burning opium.

  Then I was back on the beach, alone, trembling with a hangover. The back of Alafair’s horse was empty, and he was shaking the loose reins against his neck and snorting with his nose down by the edge of the surf.

  Don’t lose it all, I heard Annie say.

  Where is she?

  She’ll be back. But you’ve got to get your shit together, sailor.

  I’m afraid.

  Of what?

  They’re serious. They’re talking about life in Angola. That’s ten and a half years with good time. They’ve got the knife and the witnesses to pull it off, too. I don’t think I’m going to get out of this one.

  Sure you will.

  I’d be drunk now if I was out of jail.

  Maybe. But you don’t know that. Easy does it and one day at a time. Right? But no more boozing and whoring in your dreams.

  Annie, I didn’t do it, did I?

  It’s not your style, baby love. The rain’s starting to slack and I have to go. Be good, darlin’.

  I woke sweating in a bright shaft of sunlight through the window. I sat on the side of my bunk, my palms clenched on the iron edges, my mind a tangle of snakes. It was hot, the room was dripping with humidity, but I trembled all over as though a cold wind were blowing across my body. The water faucet in my rust-streaked sink ticked as loudly as a clock.

  Two days later my loan was approved at a New Iberia bank, and fifteen minutes after I paid the bondsman’s fee I was sprung. It was raining hard when I ran from the courthouse to the pickup truck with my paper sack of soiled clothes and toilet articles under my arm. Alafair hugged me in the snug, dry enclosure of the truck, and Batist lit a cigar and blew the smoke out his teeth as though we all had a lock on the future.

  I should have been happy. But I remembered a scene I had witnessed years ago when I was a young patrolman in New Orleans. A bunch of Black Panthers had just been brought back to a holding cell on a wrist chain from morning arraignment, and their public defender was trying to assure them that they would be treated fairly.

  “Believe it or not, our system works,” he said to them through the bars.

  An unshaved black man in shades, beret, and black leather jacket rolled a matchstick across his tongue and said, “You got it, motherfucker. And it work for somebody else.”

  CHAPTER

&nb
sp; 5

  Once out of jail I felt like the soldier who returns to the war and discovers that the battlefield is empty, that everyone else has tired of the war except him and has gone home.

  Dixie Lee had left a note at the house the day before:

  Dave,

  What I done to you grieves me. Thats the honest to God truth, son. I got no excuse except everything I touch turns to shit. Im leaving a box of milky ways for the little girl that lives with you. Big deal. Me and Clete and his lady friend are headed for the big sky today. Maybe later I might get a gig at one of Sals casinos. Like my daddy used to say, it dont matter if we’re colored or not, we all got to pick the white mans cotton. You might as well pick it in the shade next to the water barrel.

  Dave, dont do time.

  Dixie Lee

  And what about Harry Mapes, the man whose testimony could send me to Angola? (I could still smell his odor from the motel room—a mixture of rut, perfume from the whores, chlorine, bourbon and tobacco and breath mints.) I called Star Drilling Company in Lafayette.

  “Mr. Mapes is in Montana,” the receptionist said.

  “Where in Montana?”

  “Who is this, please?”

  “An acquaintance who would like to talk with him.”

  “You’ll have to speak to Mr. Hollister. Just a moment, please.”

  Before I could stop her he was on the line.

  “I need to know where Mapes is. Deposition time and all that,” I said.

  “What?”

  “You heard me.”

  There was a pause.

  “Is this Robicheaux?” he asked.

  “If we don’t get it from you, we’ll get it from the prosecutor’s office.”

  “The only thing I’ll tell you is that I think you’re a sick and dangerous man. I don’t know how they let you out of jail, but you stay away from my people.”

  “You have Academy Award potential, Hollister,” I said. But he hung up.

  I worked in the bait shop, shoed Alafair’s horse, weeded the vegetable garden, cleaned the leaves out of the rain gutters and the coulee, tore down the old windmill and hauled it to the scrapyard. I tried to concentrate on getting through the day in an orderly fashion and not think about the sick feeling that hung like a vapor around my heart. But my trial was six weeks away and the clock was ticking.