Black Cherry Blues

by James Lee Burke

  He walked up the beach with his fly rod over his shoulder. His jeans were wet up to his thighs. He slipped his straw creel off his shoulder, slit open the stomachs of three rainbow, scooped out the guts and threw them back into the willows. Then he stooped by the edge of the stream and dug the blood and membrane out of the vertebrae with his thumbnail.

  “I saw you turn that big one loose,” he said.

  “I don’t keep them much anymore. I don’t have a Montana license, anyway.”

  “You hunt?”

  “I used to. I don’t much anymore.”

  “You give it up in the army?”

  “Something like that.”

  He poured himself a cup of coffee, took two wax-paper-wrapped pork chop sandwiches out of his rucksack and gave me one, then sat down on the log next to me. The veins in his thick neck stuck out like webs of cord when he chewed.

  “What kind of gun do you have?” he said.

  “An army .45 automatic.”

  “You have a permit for it?”

  “In Louisiana I do. Not here.”

  “They’re not real big on gun permits in Montana, but let’s get you one, anyway.”

  “What are we talking about?”

  “We have a tap on Sally Dio’s telephone. He knows it.”

  “So?”

  “He doesn’t know that we have a tap on a pay phone down the shore from his house. The one that he uses for some of his long-distance calls.”

  I picked up a small, flat, gray stone and skipped it out on the water.

  “He called a bar in Vegas,” Nygurski said. “He said to the guy who answered, ‘Tell Charlie I’ve got a yard job for him up here.’ You know what that is?”

  “No, that’s a new one.”

  “I’ve heard a couple of Quentin graduates use it. It’s when they do somebody out on the yard. The last time we heard Sal say something like that on a tap, a witness against him got a .22 magnum round behind the ear. But we don’t know who Charlie is.”

  I tossed another small stone in a gentle arc out on the water. It made a circle like a trout rising, then the circle floated on down the riffle into white water.

  “Maybe it doesn’t have anything to do with you,” he said. “The Dios have lots of enemies.”

  I brushed the gravel off my palms and I didn’t say anything for a while. The sun was hot now, and flies were hatching out of the cattails and rainbows popping at them in a shaded pool under the cliff.

  “What do you think I ought to do?” I said finally.

  “Maybe it’s time to go back to New Iberia.”

  “You think he’d bring in a mechanic, risk his whole operation, because of pride?”

  “Look, he’s got a little clout in the mob because he’s Frank Dio’s son. But basically Sal’s a loser. He’s a lousy musician, he did time for stolen credit cards, his wife dumped him after he broke her nose, his friends are bought-and-paid-for rummies and cokeheads. Then you come along and remodel his face while everybody gets to watch. What do you think a guy like that is feeling for you right now?”

  “It won’t matter, then, if I go back to Louisiana or not.”

  “Maybe not.”

  I looked at my watch. Across the stream I saw a hawk drop suddenly into a meadow and hook a field mouse in its talons.

  “Thanks for the fishing trip. I need to pick up my truck now,” I said.

  “I’m sorry to be the one to drop this on you.”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  “Why in God’s name did you do it, Robicheaux?”

  I didn’t sleep that night. As we say in AA, the executive committee held a session in my head. I thought about sending Alafair back to Louisiana, to stay with my cousin or Batist and his wife, but then I would lose all control over her situation. I doubted that Harry Mapes would make a move against either of us as long as my trial was pending and it looked like I was going to take the fall for Dalton Vidrine’s murder; but then again, you can’t second-guess a psychopath, and I believed that’s what he was.

  I still wasn’t convinced by Dan Nygurski about Sally Dio’s calling Vegas to bring in a contract killer. The mob, or at least its members I had known in New Orleans, did not operate like that. They whacked out witnesses, Colombian competitors, and each other, but they didn’t hit ordinary people because of a personal grudge. Their own leadership didn’t allow it; it brought down too much heat on their operation and compromised their hard-bought relationships with politicians, police officials, and judges. Sally Dee was a vicious punk, but his father was smart and cautious, a survivor of gang wars and Mafia power struggles. I just didn’t believe they would be willing to blow it all over a broken tooth.

  So the executive committee stayed in session until the false dawn and then adjourned with little resolved. As always when I was weak and drained and absolutely burnt-out with my own failed attempts at reasoning through a problem, I turned it over to my Higher Power; then I cooked sausage and eggs for our breakfast, walked Alafair to school, made arrangements for her to stay with the baby-sitter, put my .45 and an extra clip under the truck seat, and headed over the Divide for the Blackfeet Reservation.

  My fan belt broke ten miles south of the reservation, and I hitched a ride with an Indian feed grower to a filling station at a four-corners four miles up the road. I bought a new fan belt, then started walking on the shoulder of the road back toward my truck. It was a mistake. Rain clouds drifted down over the low green hills to the east, shadowing the fields and sloughs and clumps of willows and cottonwoods; suddenly the sky burst open and a hard, driving rain stung my skin and drenched my clothes in minutes. I took cover against the rock face of a small hill that the road cut through, and watched the storm shower work its way across the land. Then a paintless and battered school bus, with adhesive tape plastered on its cracked windows, with bicycles, collapsed tents, shovels, and two canoes roped to its sides and roof, came highballing around the corner like a highway-borne ghost out of the 1960s.

  When the driver stopped for me I could hear screws scouring into brake shoes, the twisted exhaust pipe hammering against the frame, the engine firing as if all the spark plug leads had been deliberately crossed. The driver threw open the folding door with a long lever, and I stepped inside of what could have been a time capsule. The seats had all been torn out and replaced with hammocks, bunks, sleeping bags, a butane stove, a bathtub, cardboard boxes bursting with clothes. A woman nursed a child at her breast; a white man with Indian braids sat on the floor, carving an animal out of a soap bar; another woman was changing an infant’s diapers on the backseat; a bearded man in a ponytail slept facedown in a hammock, so that his body looked like a netted fish’s suspended from the ceiling. I could smell sour milk, reefer, and burnt food.

  The driver had dilated blue eyes and a wild red beard, and he wore leather wristbands and a fatigue jacket open on his bare chest, which was deeply tanned and scrolled with dark blue jailhouse tattoos. He told me to sit down in a wood chair that was located next to him at the head of the aisle. Then he slammed the door shut with the lever, crunched the transmission into gear, and we careened down the road in the blowing rain. I told him where I was going, and held on to a metal rail to keep from bouncing out of the chair.

  “That’s a bad place to stand, man,” he said. “There’s fuckers come around that curve seventy miles an hour, crazy sonsobitches in log trucks think they own the fucking road. What one of them needs is somebody to wind up a brick on a string and put it through his window. You live around here?”

  “No, I’m just a visitor.”

  “That’s a weird accent. I thought maybe you was a Canuck.”

  “No, I’m from Louisiana.”

  His eyes were curious, and they moved over my face. The bus drifted toward the shoulder.

  “Say, there’s a café up on the right. I think I’ll get off and get something to eat,” I said.

  “I said we’d take you to your truck. You’ll get there, man. Don’t worry about it.”<
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  The woman who was breast-feeding the child wiped his chin with her shirt, then put his mouth on the nipple again and looked impassively out the window. Her face was without makeup, her hair dull brown, long, and stuck together on the tips.

  “You keep looking in the back of the bus. Something bothering you?” the driver said.

  “Not at all.”

  “You think we’re spikers or something?”

  “What?”

  “Spikers. You think we go around driving railroad spikes in trees?”

  “No, I don’t think that.”

  “’Cause we don’t, man. A tree is a living thing, and we don’t wound living things. Does that make sense to you?”

  “Sure.”

  “We live up on the reservation. We’re a family. We lead a natural way of life. We don’t get in nobody’s face. All we ask is nobody fuck with us. That ain’t a lot to ask, is it?”

  I looked out the streaked windowpanes of the folding door. The countryside was green and wet and covered with a gray mist.

  “Is it?” he said.

  “No, it’s not.”

  “’Cause a lot of people won’t let you alone. They’re at war with the earth, man. That’s their fucking problem. You don’t do it their way, they try to kick a two-by-four up your ass.”

  The ride was becoming increasingly more uncomfortable. I figured it was three more miles to my truck.

  “Do you know a girl named Darlene American Horse on the reservation?” I said.

  “I don’t know her.”

  “She’s from there.”

  “That might be, man, but I don’t know her. Check with my old lady.” He nodded backward toward the woman with the child at her breast.

  I asked her about Darlene. She wore large wire-rimmed glasses, and she looked at me quietly with no expression in her face.

  “I don’t know her,” she said.

  “You’ve lived there long?”

  “A year.”

  “I see.”

  “It’s a Blackfeet reservation,” she said. Her speech had that flat quality of quasi-omniscience that you hear in women who have reached a certain gray plateau in their lives from which they know they’ll never escape.

  “Yes?” I said.

  “They’re all Blackfeet. The Sioux live over in South Dakota.”

  “I don’t understand what you mean.”

  “American Horse is a Sioux name,” she said. “He fought with Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse against the whites.”

  It’s her married name, I thought.

  “You know how they bought it, too?” the driver said. “Dealing with the Man under a flag of truce. They went into the fort and got their asses shot. That’s what happens when you trust those fuckers.”

  My God, why didn’t I see it, I thought.

  “Hey, you’re looking a little gray,” the driver said.

  “What?”

  “You want some food? We got extra,” he said.

  “No. Thank you. Did y’all know a guy by the name of Clayton Desmarteau?”

  “You better believe it. Same outfit as me. First Cav.”

  “Did he have a sister?”

  “What d’you mean ‘did’?”

  “You haven’t seen him around in a while, have you?”

  He thought for a moment.

  “I guess not,” he said.

  “Do you know if he had a sister?”

  “I don’t know nothing about his family. He don’t live on the reservation. He used to come on it to organize for AIM against them oil and gas companies. They’re gonna mess up the East Front, try to build pipelines and refineries and all kinds of shit.”

  “What color were his eyes?”

  “His eyes?” He turned and grinned at me through his red beard. His teeth were missing in back. “I look like I go around looking at guys’ eyes?”

  “Come on, were they turquoise?”

  “What the fuck I know about a guy’s eyes? What kind of stuff are you into, man?”

  “He’s a policeman,” the woman with the child said.

  “Is that for real?” the driver said.

  “No.”

  “Then why you asking all these questions? You trying to give some shit to Clayton’s people?” The hair on his forearms grew like red metal wires on the edges of his leather wristbands.

  “No.”

  “’Cause the Indians don’t need no more hassle. These are native people, man, I mean it was their place, and whites been taking a dump on them for two hundred years.”

  “I’ll get off here,” I said.

  “You bothered by something I said?”

  “Not in the least, partner. The rain’s stopping now, and I need to walk. My truck’s just over the rise.”

  “’Cause we got no beef with nobody. We thought we were helping you out. You gotta watch out for a lot of people in this state. I ain’t blowing gas, Jack. It’s the times,” he said.

  I stood on the side of the road in the damp, sunlit air, a green pasture behind me, and watched the bus disappear over the rise. My truck was still a mile down the road.

  The old woman was hoeing in a rocky vegetable patch behind her house. She wore laced boots, a man’s oversized wool trousers, and a khaki shirt, and a shawl was wrapped around her head. In the distance the wet land sloped toward the Divide, where the mountains thrust up violently against the sky, their sheer cliffs now purple with shadow. Up high it had snowed, and the ponderosa was white on the crests and through the saddles. The old woman glanced sideways at me when I opened her wood gate and walked into the yard, then continued chopping weeds in the rows as though I were not there.

  “Darlene American Horse is your daughter, isn’t she?” I asked.

  She didn’t answer. Her white hair bunched out under her shawl, and the corners of her eyes were creased with concentration on her work.

  “Mrs. Desmarteau, believe me, I’m a friend,” I said. “I want to find out what happened to your son. I want to help Darlene, if I can.”

  She thudded and raked the hoe in the dirt and stones and notched out weeds between the cabbages without ever touching a leaf.

  “I think Darlene lives among some bad people. I want to get her away from them,” I said.

  She pulled back the door of an abandoned, dilapidated privy, put away the hoe and took out a shovel. In the back of the privy a calico cat was nursing her litter on top of a pile of gunnysacks. Mrs. Desmarteau laid the shovel across a wheelbarrow loaded with manure and began pushing it toward the edge of the vegetable patch. I took the handles out of her hands and wheeled it across the dirt yard, then began spreading the manure at the end of each row. The clouds were purple on top of the mountains, and snow was blowing off the edges of the canyons. Behind me I heard the plastic sheets of insulation rattling on her windows.

  “She’s your daughter, isn’t she?” I said again.

  “Are you one of the FBI?” she said.

  “No, I’m not. But I used to be a policeman. I’m not any longer. I’m just a man who’s in some trouble.”

  For the first time her eyes looked directly at mine.

  “If you know Darlene, why are you asking me if she’s my daughter?” she said. “Why are you here and asking that question? You don’t make sense.”

  Then I realized that perhaps I had underestimated this elderly lady. And like most people who consider themselves educated, I had perhaps presumed that an elderly person—like someone who is foreign-speaking or unschooled—could not understand the complexities of my life and intellect.

  “I didn’t relate the name to yours,” I said. “But I should have. She wears her brother’s First Cav army jacket, doesn’t she? She also has turquoise eyes. Your family name is French-Canadian, not Indian. Darlene and Clayton’s father was part white, wasn’t he?”

  “Why do you say she lives among bad people?”

  “The man she stays with isn’t bad, but the people he works for are. I believe she should come back home and not sta
y with these people on the lake.”

  “You’ve been there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are they criminals?”

  “Some of them are.”

  Her hand slipped down over mine and took the shovel. Her palm was rough and edged with callus. She was motionless, the shovel propped against her wool trousers, her eyes fixed on the jagged outline of the mountains against the sky. The clouds on the high peaks looked full of snow.

  “Are they the ones that killed my boy?” she said.

  “Maybe they were involved in some way. I don’t know.”

  “Why is she with them?”

  “She thinks she can find out what happened to Clayton and his cousin. She worked in a bar. Where is it?”

  “Five miles down the road. You passed it when you came here.”

  “Do you know a man named Dixie Lee Pugh?”

  “No.”

  “Do you see Darlene?”

  “She comes one day a week and brings groceries.”

  “Talk to her, Mrs. Desmarteau. She’s a good girl. Between the two of us we’ll get her back home.”

  I saw her breathe through her mouth. Her lips moved without sound.

  “What?” I said.

  “Clayton never did no harm to anybody. They said he carried a gun. If he did, they made him. They wouldn’t let him alone. They were afraid of him because he was brave.”

  It was turning cold. I helped her finish spreading manure in her vegetable patch, then said good-bye and latched the wooden gate behind me. The sky was overcast and gray now. She looked small and alone with her hoe, in her dirt yard, in the wind that blew down off the backbone of the world.

  I drove back down the dirt road and stopped at the place where Clayton Desmarteau and his cousin had put their car in the ditch. Did Mapes and Vidrine kidnap and drive them someplace, or did it all happen here? I asked myself. I jumped across the stream that bordered the far side of the road and walked up the slope into the lodgepole pine. The ground was thick with pine needles. Chipmunks played in the rocks, and red squirrels chased each other around the tree trunks. I walked about a quarter of a mile through the pines, then intersected a trace of a road that somebody had used at one time to dump garbage. The road dead-ended in a pile of rusted box springs, tin cans, mattresses, beer and wine bottles, and plastic soap containers. I went on another four hundred yards or so through the pines, then the trunks thinned and I came out on a tea-colored stream coursing over gray rocks. The stream cut along the edge of a low, rock-faced hill that rose abruptly into box elder, wild rosebushes, and thick scrub brush. I walked up and down the stream bank, crossed the sculpted tracks of deer, the delicate impressions of turkey and grouse in the wet sand, found the rotted, soft logs of an old cabin, tripped over the half-buried remains of a wood stove, and flushed a white-tailed buck that must have had ten points on his rack; but I saw nothing that was out of the ordinary or that could be helpful in discovering the fate of Clayton Desmarteau and his cousin.