Black Cherry Blues

by James Lee Burke

“First- through third-graders go at ten-thirty.”

  “Is that when he was out there?”

  “I don’t know, Dave. Why you look so worried?”

  I took a breath, released her hand, and brushed my palm on the top of her head.

  “Sometimes strange men, men who are not good people, try to bother little children around schools or at playgrounds. There’re not many people like this, but you have to be careful about them. Don’t talk with them, don’t let them give you anything, don’t let them buy you anything. And no matter what they say, never go anywhere with them, never get in a car with them. Do you understand that, little guy?”

  “Sure, Dave.”

  “That kind of man will tell you that he’s a friend of your father’s. That your father sent him to pick you up, maybe. But if he was a friend, you’d recognize him, right?”

  “They hurt children?”

  “Some of them do. Some of them are very bad people.”

  I saw doubt and fear working into her face like a shadow. Her throat swallowed. I picked up her hand in mine again.

  “Don’t be scared, little guy,” I said. “It’s the same thing I’ve told you before. We just have to be cautious sometimes. Miss Regan tells all the children that, doesn’t she? It’s no big deal.”

  But it wasn’t working. Her eyes were locked on images in her memory that I could not touch or eradicate.

  “Look, when I tell you not to stick your hand in the window fan, that doesn’t mean you should be afraid of the fan, does it?” I said.

  “No.”

  “If I tell you not to put your finger in Tripod’s mouth, that doesn’t mean you should be afraid of Tripod, does it?”

  “No.” Her eyes crinkled slightly at the corners.

  “If Clarise won’t let Tex eat at the breakfast table, that doesn’t mean she’s afraid of horses, does it?”

  She grinned up at me, her face squinting in the sunlight. I swung her on my arm under the maple trees, but there was a feeling in my chest like a chunk of angle iron.

  At the house she poured a glass of milk and cut a piece of pie at the kitchen table for her afternoon snack, then washed out her lunch box and thermos and began straightening her room. I took the telephone into the bathroom so she could not hear me talking to Tess Regan.

  “What’s the deal with this guy at the school ground?” I said.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “You sent a note home. Then Alafair told me about the guy with binoculars.”

  “I was referring to your tone. Are you always this cross with people over the telephone?”

  “It’s been an unusual day. Look, Miss Regan—Tess—what’s the deal?”

  “At recess we use some of the eighth-graders as monitors for the lower grades. Jason, one of the monitors, said a man was parked in his car under the trees across the street. He said the man walked over to the fence and asked where Alafair Robicheaux was. He said he was a friend of her father’s, and he had a message for her. We teach all the children not to talk to people off the street, to direct all visitors to the principal’s office. Jason told him he should see Sister Louise inside the building. Then the man pointed to where the little ones were playing dodgeball and said, ‘Oh, there she is.’ Jason said, ‘Yeah, but you have to see Sister Louise.’ The man said he didn’t have time but he’d be back later. When he got back in the car, the children said, he looked at the school ground through a pair of binoculars.”

  “What time was he there?”

  “It must have been about eleven o’clock.”

  Then it wasn’t Charlie Dodds, I thought. He was already inside my house by then.

  “What kind of car?”

  “The kids said it was yellow.”

  “What did the guy look like? Did he have an accent?”

  “Jason just said he was tall. I didn’t ask about an accent.”

  “That’s all right. Was there anything unusual about him? A scar on his lip?”

  “Children usually don’t remember those kinds of details about adults. In their world adults are simply ‘big people’ whom they either trust or dislike.”

  “I’d like to talk to Jason.”

  “Then you’ll need to make an appointment with Sister Louise, and maybe she’ll ask the parents to bring Jason in. But I doubt it. Not unless you want to tell us what this is about and also call the police. Because that’s what we’re going to do.”

  “That’s good. But you need to listen to me now and not be afraid of what I’m going to tell you. This guy is not a child molester. He wants to get at me through Alafair. He may work for the mob out of Vegas or Reno. I had one like that in my house this morning. That’s why it’s been an unusual day. Or he may be somebody connected with an oil company, a guy named Mapes or somebody who works for him. Either way, the local cops don’t have much experience with this kind of guy.”

  “The mob?” she said.

  “That’s right.”

  “You mean like in The Godfather? The honest-to-God Mafia?”

  “The real article.”

  “And you didn’t tell me this before?”

  “It wouldn’t have changed anything. Except maybe to alarm you.”

  “I think I’m very angry right now.”

  “Look, I don’t want to be the guy to mess up your day. You asked for the truth, I gave it to you. There’s no big revelation in what I told you, either. There’s some Reno transplants right up there at Flathead Lake. The mob’s anyplace there’s money to be made in gambling or dope or any kind of vice.”

  She didn’t answer.

  “Listen,” I said, “if that guy comes back, you try to get his license number, then you call the heat, then you call me. Okay?”

  “What do you plan to do?” she said. Her voice was dry, the way heat is when it lifts off a metal surface.

  “I’m going to seriously impair his interest in children on school yards.”

  “I’ll give your words some thought. In the meantime you might reflect a bit on the need for a little more candor in your relationships with other people. Maybe they don’t like to feel that they’re not to be trusted with this great body of private information that you have.”

  The line went dead in my hand.

  I couldn’t blame her. How would any ordinary person deal with the knowledge that an emissary of the mob could stroll into a world as innocent and predictable as a children’s playground? But was the man indeed one of Dio’s people, a partner of or a backup for Charlie Dodds? Why would Dodds need a backup? It was a simple hit, probably a five-thou whack that a guy like Dodds considered a cakewalk. Unless Dio’s outraged pride was so great that he wanted a child’s death as well as my own.

  It didn’t compute, though. If Dodds had been paid to hurt Alafair also, he would have waited until after three o’clock, when we were both home, or he would have come on the weekend.

  So that left Harry Mapes. He had been driving a black Jeepster when I had seen him just south of the Blackfeet Reservation, but maybe the man in the yellow car with the binoculars worked with Mapes or had been hired by him. Why would he want to turn the screws on me now? Did he think I was close to finding something or turning it around on him? If he did, he had a lot more confidence in me than I did in myself.

  I called Sister Louise, the principal, at the school and caught her just before she left the office. She had already talked with Tess Regan, and she was no more happy with me than Tess Regan had been. She sounded like some of the nuns I had known as a child, the ones who wore black habits that were probably like portable stoves and who whacked your knuckles with tricorner rulers and who could hit you on the run with their fifteen-decade rosaries. She told me that she had just made a police report, that I should do the same, and that a patrol car would be parked by the school tomorrow morning.

  “I’d still like to talk with the little boy, what’s his name, Jason,” I said.

  “He’s told me everything he knows. He’s a shy boy. He’s not one to stu
dy detail in adults.”

  “Does he remember if the man had an accent?”

  “He’s fourteen years old. He’s not a linguist.”

  “Sister, it’s good that you’ll have a patrol car out there tomorrow. But our man won’t be back while the cops are around.”

  “That’s the point, isn’t it?”

  “But he may well be when they’re gone. That’s when we can nail him.”

  “There’s no ‘we’ involved in this, Mr. Robicheaux.”

  “I see.”

  “I’m glad you do. Good-bye.”

  For the second time in ten minutes someone had hung up on me.

  I took Alafair to the park to play, then we went back home and fixed supper. Clete had told me I could call him at the Eastgate Lounge at six o’clock. I wasn’t sure that I should. Whatever he had done with Charlie Dodds, it wasn’t good. But at that point my legal problems as well as the threat to Alafair’s and my safety were so involved and seemingly without solution that I wondered why I should be troubled over some marginal involvement with the fate of a depraved and psychotic character like Dodds, whom nobody cared about except perhaps Sally Dio because he had probably paid him half the hit money up front. It was five-thirty, and we were five minutes into our meal when I heard a car park in front and somebody walk up on the porch.

  Even before I could make out his silhouette against the screen door, I saw Dixie Lee’s battered pink Cadillac convertible parked with two wheels on the edge of my grass. The top was up, but I could see that the backseat was loaded with suitcases, boxes of clothing and cowboy boots, hangered western suits racked on a wire.

  His sudden change of fortune, his plans for himself, his rehearsed entreaty, were altogether too obvious and predictable. I didn’t open the door. I was even a bit ashamed at my lack of sympathy. But it had been a bad day, and I really didn’t need Dixie Lee in it. He was eloquent in his desperation, though. He had marshaled all the raw energies of a drunk who knew that he was operating on the last fuel in his tank.

  “Things are coming apart up there at the lake,” he said. “You were right, Sal’s a shit. No, that ain’t right. He’s a crazy person. He wants your ass cooked in a pot. I couldn’t abide it. I had to get out.”

  “Watch your language. My daughter’s here.”

  “I’m sorry. But you don’t know what Sal’s like when lights start going off in his head. He’s got this twisted-up look on his face. Nobody can say anything around him unless you want your head snapped off. One of the broads is eating her dessert at the dinner table, and Sal keeps smoking his cigarette and looking at her like she crawled up out of a drain hole. Her eyes are blinking and she’s trying to smile and be pretty and cute and get off the hook, then he says, ‘You eat too much,’ and puts out his cigarette in her food.

  “He hates you, Dave. You really got to him. You bend up the wheels inside a guy like Sally Dee, and smoke starts to come out of the box. I don’t want to be around it. That’s where it stands. You tell me to get out of your life, I can relate to it. But I picked myself into some thin cotton, son, and I got nowhere to turn. I’ll be straight with you on something else, too. I’m in to Sal for fifteen thou. That’s how much flake I put up my nose on the tab. So I got that old Caddy out there, thirty-seven dollars in my pocket, and a quarter tank of gas. I’m trying to keep it all in E major, but I blew out my amps on this one.”

  “Save the rock ’n’ roll corn pone for somebody else,” I said. “I had Charlie Dodds in my house this morning.”

  “Dodds? I thought he went back to Vegas last night. What was he doing here?”

  “You don’t know?”

  “You mean he’s a mechanic? I didn’t know. I swear in front of God I didn’t. I thought he was one of Sal’s mules. Is that how you got that purple knot on your head?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Man, I’m sorry. I didn’t have any idea. The guy didn’t say three words when he was around me. I thought he was retarded. All those mules got that meltdown look in their eyes. They swallow balloons full of skag, fly in and out of canyons, land on dirt roads at night. We’re talking about the dumbest white people you ever met.”

  “I think he might have a backup man still after me. Is there some other new guy hanging around Sal’s place?”

  “No.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Anyway, I can’t help you, Dixie.”

  He looked at me blankly through the screen. He swallowed, glanced up the street as though something of significance were waiting for him there, then started to speak again.

  “I’ve got too many problems of my own. That’s about it, partner,” I said.

  “No way, huh?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  He blew his breath up into his face.

  “I can’t blame you,” he said. “I just ain’t got many selections right now.”

  “Start over.”

  “Yeah, why not? It ain’t my first time washing dishes or living in a hallelujah mission. Hey, I want you to remember one thing, though, Dave. I ain’t all bad. I never set out to harm anybody. It just worked out that way.”

  “Whatever you do, good luck with it, Dixie,” I said, and closed the inside door on him and went back to the kitchen table, where Alafair had already started in on her dessert.

  I looked at my watch—it was a quarter to six now—and tried to finish supper. The food seemed tasteless, and I couldn’t concentrate on something Alafair was telling me about the neighbor’s cat chasing grasshoppers in the flower bed.

  “What’s wrong?” she said.

  “Nothing. It’s just a little headache. It’ll pass.”

  “That man made you mad or something?”

  “No, he’s just one of those guys who’ll always have his elevator stuck between floors.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing, little guy. Don’t worry about it.”

  I chewed my food and looked silently out the window at the shadows and the cool gold light on the backyard. I heard Alafair wash her dishes in the sink, then walk toward the front of the house. A moment later she was back in the kitchen.

  “That man’s still out there. Just sitting in his car. What’s he doing, Dave?” she said.

  “Probably figuring out ways to sell the Rocky Mountains to Arab strip miners.”

  “What?”

  “Just ignore him.”

  But I couldn’t. Or at least I couldn’t ignore the twelfth-step AA principle that requires us to help those who are afflicted in the same way we are. Or maybe I knew that I had asked for all my own troubles, and it wasn’t right any longer to blame it on Dixie Lee. I set my knife and fork down on my plate and walked outside to his car. He was deep in thought, a cigarette burned almost down to his fingers, which rested on top of the steering wheel. His face jerked around with surprise when he heard me behind him.

  “Lord God, you liked to give me a heart attack,” he said.

  “You can’t drink while you stay with us,” I said. “If you do or if you come home with it on your breath, you’re eighty-sixed. No discussion, no second chance. I don’t want any profanity in front of my daughter, and you go outside if you want to smoke. You share the cooking and the cleaning, you go to bed when we do. The AA group down the street has a job service. If they find you some work, you take it, whatever it is, and you pay one third of the groceries and the rent. That’s the deal, Dixie. If there are any rules here you can’t live with, now’s the time to tell me.”

  “Son, you say ‘Frog’ and I’ll say ‘How high?’”

  He began unloading the backseat of his car. His face wore the expression of a man who might have been plucked unexpectedly from the roof of a burning building. As he piled his boxes and suitcases and clothes on the sidewalk, he talked without stop about the 1950s, Tommy Sands, Ruth Brown, the Big Bopper, the mob, cons in Huntsville, the actress wife who paid goons to beat him up behind Cook’s Hoe Down in Houston. I looked at my wa
tch. It was five minutes to six.

  He was still talking while I looked up the number of the Eastgate Lounge.

  “—called him ‘the hippy-dippy from Mississippi, yes indeed, Mister Jimmy Reed,’” he said. “When that cat went into ‘Big Boss Man,’ you knew he’d been on Parchman Farm, son. You don’t fake them kind of feelings. You don’t grow it in New York City, either. You don’t put no mojo in your sounds unless you picked cotton four cents a pound and ate a mess of them good ole butter beans. My daddy said he give up on me, that somebody snuck me into the crib, that I must have been a nigra turned inside out.”

  Alafair sat delighted and amazed as she listened to Dixie Lee’s marathon storytelling. I dialed the Eastgate Lounge, then listened to the hum and clatter of noise in the background while a woman called Clete to the phone. I heard him scrape the receiver off a hard surface and place it to his ear.

  “Streak?”

  “Yep.”

  “Did I surprise you? Did you think maybe your old partner had headed for Taco Greaso Land again?”

  “I wasn’t sure.”

  “I don’t rattle, mon. At least not over the shitbags.”

  “Maybe you should be careful what you tell me.”

  “Do I sound like I’m sweating it? When are you going to stop pretending you still got your cherry?”

  “You’re starting to get to me, Clete.”

  “What else is new? All I did was save your life today.”

  “Is there something you want to say?”

  “Yeah. Get your butt over here. You know where the Eastgate is?”

  “Yeah, but I’m bringing Alafair with me. I’ll meet you in the park across the river from the shopping center. You walk across an old railway trestle that’s been made into a footbridge.”

  “And you’ll be eating ice cream cones at a picnic table. Man, how do I get in on the good life?” he said, and hung up.

  I told Dixie Lee there was a cold roast, bread, and mayonnaise in the icebox, and he could fix himself sandwiches if he hadn’t eaten yet. Then Alafair and I drove across town to the ice cream place on the north bank of the Clark Fork, bought cones, and walked across the river on the footbridge to the park on the opposite side. In the past, there had been a bad fire up the sides of Hellgate Canyon, and the pines that grew down from the crest had been scorched black and then the ash and the burnt needles had been washed away by rain and the spring snowmelt so that the steep gray-pink cliffs of the canyon were exposed high above the river. The wind was up, and the leaves of the cottonwoods along the river’s edge clicked and flickered in the soft light; because the spring runoff had ended and the water was dropping each day, more and more white, moss-scaled stones were exposed in the riverbed and the main channel was turning from copper-colored to a dark green. The white water had formed into long, narrow trout riffles that fanned out behind big rocks into deep pools.