Black Cherry Blues

by James Lee Burke

  “And he was the one Mapes worked over with the golf club.”

  “You got it, brother. Case closed. On top of it, that other kid got zapped in Vietnam two years later.”

  I rubbed my hands up and down on my trousers.

  “I’ve got to nail him, Dan. I’m all out of leads, and I keep coming up with a handful of air.”

  “Let’s eat some dinner.”

  “I don’t think I’m up to it. I’m sorry. I’ve got less than one and a half weeks to trial. I’m being straight with you. I’m just not going to do time.”

  “You’re a good man, and you’re going to be all right,” he said, and put his big hand on the corner of my shoulder. It felt hard and cupped, like a starfish that had dried on hot sand.

  It was time to turn things around on Sally Dee, to plant some dark thoughts in his head about his own vulnerability, so I could concentrate on Harry Mapes. I knew that Charlie Dodds had probably become bear food at the bottom of a canyon, but Sally Dee didn’t. However, he was well aware of Charlie Dodds’s potential, and I doubted if he would enjoy being in an adversarial relationship with him. Snapping dogs don’t like having their collars chained together.

  After Alafair and I got back to Missoula, I rented an hour’s typewriter time at the University of Montana library and composed the following letter. I worked hard on it. Chaucer and Dickens created wonderful rogues. I wondered what they would have thought of my attempt. But the more I read over my final draft, the more I was certain that they just might have winked at me with approval.

  Dear Sal,

  The flowers that go with this you can stick up your butt. When you called Vegas, you said it was a simple yard job. You didn’t say anything about pictures and this before and after bullshit. That little stunt almost got me killed. In fact, maybe I think you set me up. You go around telling everybody you’re a made guy but made guys don’t get their nose bent out of joint by some ex-cop that nobody cares about. I think you’re not only a dago shitbag and a welsher but a yellow cunt, too. I heard about you from some guys that were in Huntsville. They say your punk had the whole joint laughing at you behind your back. The only reason you got straight is because you were more afraid of your old man than you were of your punk. But you’re not getting out of this one. You owe me the rest of the money, and you know where to deliver it. I don’t get it, and I mean right away, I’m coming after you. Nobody back in Vegas is going to make a beef about it, either. They all think you’re a prick that should have been clipped a long time ago.

  C.D.

  I drove up to Polson, found a florist, then called them from a pay phone across the street and got the price of a small floral delivery to Sally Dio’s house. Then I found the state employment office, parked by the curb, and watched the men who went in and out of the entrance or who sat against the wall in the shade and smoked cigarettes and passed a bottle back and forth in a paper sack. Finally a middle-aged man in work clothes with uncut dull blond hair came out the door and sat down on the curb with his friends.

  I got out of my truck and walked up to him.

  “Say, I’ll pay you five bucks to go into a florist and put in an order for me,” I said. “I’m playing a joke on a guy, and I don’t want him to know where the flowers came from. How about it?”

  He took a hand-rolled cigarette out of his mouth and looked at me quizzically. He shrugged his shoulders.

  “I don’t give a shit,” he said.

  I drove him back over to the street where the florist was located, parked three stores down, and gave him the money for the order and a sealed envelope with the letter inside. I didn’t know Dio’s address, but I had printed his name on the envelope and drawn the approximate location of his house on Flathead Lake.

  “Don’t tell them you’re doing this for anybody else,” I said. “Just give them the money and the order and the envelope. Okay?”

  “Can you make it ten? If I don’t buy them other guys a can of beer or something, they might cut me out of a job they get.”

  He went into the store and was back out in five minutes. I drove him back to the state employment office.

  “You didn’t tell them anything, did you?” I asked.

  “What’s to talk about in a flower place? I give them the money, I give them the envelope. You got any more jobs like this one you want done?”

  That night Dixie Lee and I took Alafair to a movie. Before I went to bed I got Dixie to give me Sally Dee’s unlisted telephone number.

  “What for? You don’t want no more truck with that man,” he said. He sat in his undershirt, candy-striped undershorts, and black shoes at the kitchen table, eating a piece of pie.

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  “Are you kidding? He’s got mental diseases they haven’t named yet. I ain’t putting you on, son. He’s got a hard-on for you you couldn’t knock down with a hammer.”

  “Don’t use that language in the house.”

  “Sorry, it’s a speech defect or something. His head reminds me of a flowerpot somebody dropped on the concrete. It’s full of cracks and the dirt’s starting to leak out, but he don’t know it yet. Dig this. Sal built an elevator platform for the piano at his club, one of these deals that rises up into the spotlight while the guy’s playing. Except after the club closed this two-hundred-and-eighty-pound bouncer got on top of the piano with this topless dancer for some serious rumba boogie, and somehow the machinery got cranked up and the elevator went right up to the ceiling and mashed them both against a beam. It broke the guy’s neck, and the broad was trapped up there with him all night. So Sal says it’s a real big tragedy, and he holds the funeral on a Sunday afternoon at the club, with the casket covered with flowers out in the middle of the dance floor. But the undertaker messed up the job, and the guy’s neck was bent and his head was out of round, like a car tire had run over it, and the dagos were slobbering and wailing all over the place while Sal’s singing on the mike in a white suit like he’s Tony Bennett. It was so disgusting the waiters went back to the union and threatened to quit. Later Sal says to me, ‘It was a class send-off, don’t you think? Jo-Jo would have liked it.’ Except I found out he only rented the casket, and he had Jo-Jo planted in a cloth-covered box in a desert cemetery outside of town that lizards wouldn’t crawl across.”

  “Good night, Dixie.”

  He shook his head and forked another piece of pie in his mouth.

  “You worry about my bad language, and you’re fixing to squeeze Sal in the peaches. You’re a wonder to behold, son.”

  I set the alarm on my Seiko watch for two A.M. and went to sleep. It was raining lightly when I was awakened by the tiny dinging sound on my wrist. I dialed Sal’s number, then hung up when a man with sleep in his voice answered. I waited fifteen minutes, then hung up again as soon as the same man said “Hello” irritably into the receiver. I drank a glass of milk and watched the rain fall in the yard and run down the window, then at two-thirty I called again. I put a pencil crossways in my teeth and covered the mouthpiece with my handkerchief.

  “Who the fuck is this?” the same man said.

  “Where’s Sal?” I kept my voice in the back of my throat and let it come out in a measured rasp.

  “Asleep. Who is this?”

  “Go wake him up.”

  “Are you crazy? It’s two-thirty in the morning. What’s with you, man?”

  “Listen, you get that dago welsher out of bed.”

  “I think you’re loaded, man, and you’d better stop playing on the phone and forget you ever called here.”

  “You don’t recognize my voice, huh? Maybe it’s because a guy put a wrench across my windpipe, a guy that gutless kooze sent me to see. I didn’t catch a plane back to Vegas, either. I’m one hour away. I better not find out you’re hitting on my broad, either.”

  He was quiet a moment, then he said, “Charlie?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “Charlie?” he said. “Hey, man…”

  “What?”
/>   “I didn’t know. Hey, man, I’m sorry. You should have told me. It’s late, and I been asleep, and I didn’t know it was you.”

  “Get him on the phone.”

  “Man, he’s out. I mean, like him and Sandy must have smoked a whole shoe box of shit before they crashed. How about he calls you in the morning?”

  “You got some kind of skin growth over your ears?”

  “Look, man, I go in there, he’ll tear my dick off. He’s been crawling the walls all day, anyway. Look, I don’t know what’s going on between you guys, but I don’t want to get caught in it. Okay? I’m not putting you on, man, he can’t talk to you. He really smoked his brains tonight.”

  I waited five seconds and listened to him breathe.

  “Tell him I’m coming,” I said, and hung up.

  I overslept the next morning and was awakened by the sound of Alafair fixing breakfast in the kitchen. She was too short to function well around the stove, and she clattered the pans loudly on the burners.

  “I can walk myself today, Dave,” she said.

  “No, that’s out. We do everything together, little guy. We’re a team, right?”

  She stood in front of the stove, her face quiet, her head even with the top of the stove, looking at the skillet full of French toast.

  “It makes me feel funny in front of the other kids,” she said.

  “I’ll drive you, then. It’ll be like I’m dropping you off on the way to work. That’ll be okay, won’t it?”

  “Clarise don’t know how to take care of Tripod. She’s always mad at him.”

  I turned off the stove, picked up the skillet with a dish towel, and set it in the sink to cool. The French toast was burned around the edges.

  “We’re just going to have to accept some things now. That’s the way it is, Alf,” I said.

  She packed her lunch box silently, then ate only half of her French toast, and went outside and waited for me on the front step. The wind was blowing off the river, and the sunlight through the maple tree made shifting patterns of leaves on her face.

  Later, Dixie and I went to an early AA meeting. Afterward, one of the members who worked in the job-placement service told Dixie that he had found him a part-time job operating a forklift at the pulp mill out on the river. We walked home, and it was obvious that Dixie was not happy at the news. He sulked around the house, then took his sunburst guitar out on the back steps and began playing with a thumb pick and singing a song that I had heard only once before, many years ago. The words went to the tune of “Just a Closer Walk with Thee.”

  “Now, bread and gravy is all right,

  And a turnip sandwich is a delight,

  But my kids always scream

  For more of them good ole butter beans.

  Well, just a little piece of country ham,

  Just pass the butter and the jam,

  Just pass the biscuits if you please,

  And some more of them good ole butter beans.

  Just see that woman over there,

  The one with both her hands in the air.

  She’s not pregnant as she seems.

  She’s just full of good ole butter beans.”

  I opened the screen and sat down on the steps beside him. It was warm, and the clover in the grass was alive with bees.

  “You’re supposed to report to the plant at noon, aren’t you?” I said.

  “That’s what he said.”

  “You going out there in slacks and a Hawaiian shirt?”

  “Look, that job ain’t exactly what I had in mind.”

  “Oh?”

  “Ain’t that place a toilet paper factory or something? Besides, I don’t have experience running heavy equipment.”

  “A forklift isn’t heavy equipment. And I thought you told me you operated one in Huntsville.”

  “For about two days, till I dropped the prongs on a guy’s foot.”

  “We had a deal, podna. We don’t renegotiate the terms.”

  He made a sliding blues chord high up on the guitar’s neck, then ran it all the way down to the nut.

  “I learned that from Sam Hopkins,” he said. “I went out to his house in the Fifth Ward in Houston. People said them nigras’ll leave you bleeding in the street for the garbageman to find. They treated me like royalty, man.”

  “I spent some time Wednesday in some courthouses east of the Divide.”

  His face went blank.

  “I found some of the deals you made over there.”

  He continued to look out at the lawn and the bees lifting off the clover.

  “I’m not an expert on the oil business, but I saw some peculiar stuff in those lease files,” I said.

  “They’re public records. A person can look all they want to.” He began fishing in his shirt pocket for a cigarette.

  “Every time you leased up a big block of land for Star Drilling, there was a hole or two left in it.”

  He lit his cigarette and smoked it with his elbow propped on the belly of his guitar.

  “Those holes were leased or bought up by one of Sal’s businesses in Vegas,” I said. “The same company name is on some of the deals you made for him around Flathead Lake.”

  “I’m not proud of it.”

  “So he does want into the oil and gas business.”

  “He wants to cover his action every way he can. He’s shooting for the big score in gambling and lake property development, he wants in on the gas domes on the East Front. In the drilling business, it don’t matter if they tap in on top of your property or not. As long as you’re in the pool, part of the dome, you’re going to get royalties. That ain’t all he’s got on his mind, either. They make a big strike over there, it could be like that pipeline deal up in Alaska. All them sonsofbitches are horny, and they got plenty of money for dope, too. Them conservation people are hollering because the gas is full of hydrogen sulfide, it stinks like rotten eggs, but they ought to hear what Sal’s got planned for the place.”

  “So you took Star over the hurdles?”

  “That’s about it.”

  “And you helped Sal start out in a brand-new enterprise.”

  “You want me on the cross? I told you I done it. I ain’t lied about it.”

  “But that’s not all of it.”

  “What?”

  “Dalton Vidrine and Harry Mapes had to know what you were doing.”

  “At first they didn’t, but Vidrine heard about it from another guy who was working the same township and range as me. He told Mapes, and they stuck it to me at the motel one night. I thought they were going to drop the dime on me with the home office, but they just wanted me to piece off the action. Sal said no problem. It cost him a little coke. Everybody was happy.”

  “You’ve got to give me something I can use against Mapes.”

  “I got nothing to offer. I told you all of it. They’re like piranha in a goldfish bowl. You stick your finger in it, you take back a polished bone.”

  I left him thumbing the bass string on his guitar and staring out at the lawn, as though the blue and green shades in the grass held a secret for him. A few minutes later he came into the house and changed into an old shirt and a pair of ripped and faded pink slacks and drove off toward the smoking stacks of the pulp mill west of town.

  After he was gone, I sat alone in the silence of the house with the realization that there was nothing I could do today to help my case. I knew of nothing I could do tomorrow or the next day either. I had run out of options. The time has come, I thought, to think not in terms of what to do but instead of where to go. Any jail or prison is a bad place. The person who thinks otherwise has never been in one. Angola is worse than most. The man who would willingly submit to do time unjustly in a place like that would take pleasure in his own crucifixion, I thought. It was a big country, and there were lots of places to get lost in it.

  But the idea of being a permanent fugitive from the law was so strange and removed from any concept I had ever had about my fate in this world
that thinking about it left me numb and staring at phantasms in the air.

  Annie, I thought.

  But she came to me only in the darkness, and her visits had become less frequent and her voice had grown weaker across the water and in the din of the rain. I had only myself to depend on now, and my Higher Power and the AA program that I followed. Maybe, as I had told Dixie Lee in the hospital, it was time to look at the things that I had rather than at the problems that seemed to beset me without a solution. I was sober, even though I had set myself up for a fall by not attending meetings. When I had wanted to join Annie in that watery place more than anything in the world, I had gone into therapy rather than let that morning arrive when I would awaken in the blue-gray light, sit quietly on the side of my bed in my underwear, and fit the iron sight of my .45 against the roof of my mouth. And, last, I had Alafair, who was given to me inside a green bubble of air from below the Gulf’s surface.

  Maybe it’s like the seventh-inning stretch, I thought, when they’ve shelled your fastball past your ears and blown your hanging curve through the boards. Afternoon shadows are growing on the field, your arm aches, the movement and sound of the fans are like an indistinct hum in the stands. Then a breeze springs up and dries the sweat on your face and neck, you wipe your eyes clear on your sleeve, scrub the ball against your thigh, fork your fingers tightly into the stitches, and realize that the score is irrelevant now, that your failure is complete, that it wasn’t so bad after all because now you’re free and alone in a peculiar way that has put you beyond the obligations of victory and defeat. The batter expects you to float another balloon past his letters, and instead you take a full windup, your face dry and cool in the breeze, your arm now weightless, and you swing your leg and whole butt into the delivery, your arm snaps like a snake, and the ball whizzes past him in a white blur. And that’s the way you pitch the rest of the game, in the lengthening shadows, in the dust blowing off the base paths, in the sound of a flag popping on a metal pole against the blue sky; you do it without numbers in your head, right into the third out in the bottom of the ninth.