DR03 - Black Cherry Blues

by James Lee Burke

  The lined paper looked like the kind that comes in a Big Chief notebook. The words were printed large, in black ink.

  Dear Sir,

  The guy that took this picture is one fucked up dude. He liked it over there and didn't want to come back. He says he used this needle in a snuff flick out in Oakland. I don't know if I'd believe him or not. But your little pinto bean gets on the bus at 7:45.

  She arrives at school at 8:30. She's on the playground at 10 and back out there at noon. She waits on the south corner for the bus home at 3:05. Sometimes she gets off before her stop and walks down the road with a colored kid. It's hardball. Don't fuck with it. It's going to really mess up your day. Check the zipperhead in the pic. Now there's somebody who really had a hard time getting her C's down.

  "For what your face like that? What it is, Dave?"

  Batist was standing behind me, dressed in a pair of navy bell bottoms and an unbuttoned sleeveless khaki shirt. There were drops of sweat on his bald head, and the backs of his hands and wrists were spotted with blood from cleaning fish.

  I put the photograph, letter, and torn package back in the mailbox and walked hurriedly down to the dock. I called the elementary school, asked the principal to make sure that Alafair was in her classroom, then told her not to let Alafair board the school bus that afternoon, that I would be there to pick her up. When I walked back toward the house Batist was still at the mailbox. He was illiterate and so the letter inside meant nothing to him, but he had the photograph cupped in his big palm, an unlit cigar in the corner of his mouth, and there was an ugly glaze in his eyes.

  "Que qa veut dire, Dave? What that needle mean, too?" he said.

  "Somebody's threatening Alafair."

  "They say they gonna hurt that little girl?"

  "Yes." The word created a hollow feeling in my chest.

  "Who they are? Where they at, them people that do something like this?"

  "I believe it's a couple of guys in Lafayette. They're oil people. Have you seen any guys around here who look like they don't belong here?"

  "I ain't paid it no mind, Dave. I didn't have no reason, me."

  "It's all right."

  "What we gonna do?"

  "I'm going to pick up Alafair, then I'll talk to the sheriff." I picked the photograph out of his palm by the edges and set it back inside the mailbox.

  "I'm going to leave this stuff in there, then take it in later and see if we can find fingerprints on it. So we shouldn't handle it anymore."

  "No, I mean what we gonna do?" he said. His brown eyes looked intently into mine. There was no question about his meaning.

  "I'm going to pick up Alafair now. Watch the store and I'll be back soon."

  Batist's mouth closed on his dry cigar. His eyes went away from me, stared into the shade of the pecan trees and moved back and forth in his head with a private thought. His voice was quiet when he spoke.

  "Dave, in that picture, that's where you was at in the war?"

  "Yes."

  "They done them kind of things?"

  "Some did. Not many."

  "In that letter, it say that about Alafair?"

  I swallowed and couldn't answer him. The hollow feeling in my chest would not go away. It was like fear but not of a kind that I had ever experienced before. It was an obscene feeling, as though a man's hand had slipped lewdly inside my shirt and now rested sweatily on my breastbone. The sunlight shimmered on the bayou, and the trees and blooming hyacinths on the far side seemed to go in and out of focus. I saw a cottonmouth coiled fatly on a barkless, sun-bleached log, its triangular head the color of tarnished copper in the hard yellow light. Sweat ran out of my hair, and I felt my heart beating against my rib cage. I snicked the mailbox door shut, got into my truck, and headed down the dirt road toward New Iberia. When I bounced across the drawbridge over Bayou Teche, my knuckles were white and as round as quarters on the steering wheel.

  On the way back from the school the spotted patterns of light and shadow fell through the canopy of oaks overhead and raced over Alafair's tan face as she sat next to me in the truck. Her knees and white socks and patent leather shoes were dusty from play on the school ground. She kept looking curiously at the side of my face.

  "Something wrong, Dave?" she said.

  "No, not at all."

  "Something bad happen, ain't it?"

  "Don't say 'ain't.' "

  "Why you mad?"

  "Listen, little guy, I'm going to run some errands this afternoon and I want you to stay down at the dock with Batist. You stay in the store and help him run things, okay?"

  "What's going on, Dave?"

  "There's nothing to worry about. But I want you to stay away from people you don't know. Keep close around Batist and Clarise and me, okay? You see, there're a couple of men I've had some trouble with. If they come around here, Batist and I will chase them off. But I don't want them bothering you or Clarise or Tripod or any of our friends, see." I winked at her.

  "These bad men?" Her face looked up at me. Her eyes were round and unblinking.

  "Yes, they are."

  "What they do?"

  I took a breath and let it out.

  "I don't know for sure. But we just need to be a little careful. That's all, little guy. We don't worry about stuff like that. We're kind of like Tripod. What's he do when the dog chases him?"

  She looked into space, then I saw her eyes smile.

  "He gets up on the rabbit hutch," she said.

  "Then what's he do?"

  "He stick his claw in the dog's nose."

  "That's right. Because he's smart. And because he's smart and careful, he doesn't have to worry about that dog. And we're the same way and we don't worry about things, do we?"

  She smiled up at me, and I pulled her against my side and kissed the top of her head. I could smell the sun's heat in her hair.

  I parked the truck in the shade of the pecan trees, and she took her lunch kit into the kitchen, washed out her thermos, and changed into her play clothes We walked down to the dock, and I put her in charge of soda pop and worm sales. In the corner behind the beer cases I saw Batist's old automatic Winchester twelve-gauge propped against the wall.

  "I put some number sixes in it for that cottonmouth been eating fish off my stringer," he said.

  "Come see tonight. You gonna have to clean that snake off the tree."

  "I'll be back before dark. Take her up to the house for her supper," I said.

  "I'll close up when I get back."

  "You don't be worry, you," he said, dragged a kitchen match on a wood post, lit his cigar, and let the smoke drift out through his teeth.

  Alafair rang up a sale on the cash register and beamed when the drawer clanged open.

  I put everything from the mailbox in a large paper bag and drove to the Iberia Parish sheriff's office. I had worked a short while for the sheriff as a plainclothes detective the previous year, and I knew him to be a decent and trustworthy man. But when he ran for the office his only qualification was the fact that he had been president of the Lions Club and owned a successful dry cleaning business. He was slightly overweight, his face soft around the edges, and in his green uniform he looked like the manager of a garden-supply store. We talked in his office while a deputy processed the wrapping paper, box, note, and hypodermic needle for fingerprints in another room.

  Finally the deputy rapped on the sheriff's door glass with one knuckle and opened the door.

  "Two identifiable sets," he said.

  "One's Dave's, one's from that colored man, what's his name?"

  "Batist," I said.

  "Yeah, we have his set on file from the other time" His eyes flicked away from me and his face colored.

  "We had his prints from when we were out to Dave's place before. Then there's some smeared stuff on the outside of the wrapping paper."

  "The mailman?" the sheriff said.

  "That's what I figure," the deputy said.

  "I wish I could tell you something els
e, Dave."

  "It's all right."

  The deputy nodded and closed the door.

  "You want to take it to the FBI in Lafayette?" the sheriff said.

  "Maybe."

  "A threat in the mails is in a federal area. Why not make use of them?"

  I looked back at him without answering.

  "Why is it that I always feel you're not a man of great faith in our system?" he said.

  "Probably because I worked for it too long."

  "We can question these two guys, what's their names again?"

  "Vidrine and Mapes."

  "Vidrine and Mapes, we can let them know somebody's looking over their shoulder."

  "They're too far into it."

  "What do you want to do?"

  "I don't know."

  "Dave, back off of this one. Let other people handle it."

  "Are you going to keep a deputy out at my house? Will one watchf Alafair on the playground or while she waits for the bus?"

  He let out his breath, then looked out the window at a clump of oak trees in a bright, empty pasture.

  "Something else bothers me here," he said.

  "Wasn't your daddy killed on a Star rig?"

  "Yes."

  "You think there's a chance you want to twist these guys, no matter what happens?"

  "I don't know what I think. That box didn't mail itself to me, though, did it?"

  I saw the injury in his eyes, but I was past the point of caring about his feelings. Maybe you've been there. You go into a police or sheriff's station after a gang of black kids forced you to stop your car while they smashed out your windows with garbage cans; a strung-out addict made you kneel at gunpoint on the floor of a grocery store, and before you knew it the begging words rose uncontrollably in your throat; some bikers pulled you from the back of a bar and sat on your arms while one of them un zippered his blue jeans. Your body is still hot with shame, your voice full of thumbtacks and strange to your own ears, your eyes full of guilt and self-loathing while uniformed people walk casually by you with Styrofoam cups of coffee in their hands. Then somebody types your words on a report and you realize that this is all you will get. Investigators will not be out at your house, you will probably not be called to pull somebody out of a lineup, a sympathetic female attorney from the prosecutor's office will not take a large interest in your life.

  Then you will look around at the walls and cabinets and lockers in that police or sheriff's station, the gun belts worn by the officers with the Styrofoam coffee cups, perhaps the interior of the squad cars in the parking lot, and you will make an ironic realization. The racks of M-16 rifles, scoped Mausers, twelve-gauge pumps loaded with double-aught buckshot, .38 specials and .357 Magnums, stun guns, slap jacks batons, tear gas canisters, the drawers that contain cattle prods, handcuffs, Mace, wrist and leg chains, hundreds of rounds of ammunition, all have nothing to do with your safety or the outrage against your person. You're an increase in somebody's work load.

  "You've been on this side of the desk, Dave. We do what we can," the sheriff said "But it's not enough most of the time. Is it?"

  He stirred a paper clip on the desk blotter with his finger.

  "Have you got an alternative?" he said.

  "Thanks for your time, Sheriff. I'll think about the FBI."

  "I wish you'd do that."

  The sky had turned purple and red in the west and rain clouds were building on the southern horizon when I drove home. I bought some ice cream in town, then stopped at a fruit stand under an oak tree by the bayou and bought a lug of strawberries. The thunder-heads off the Gulf slid across the sun, and the cicadas were loud in the trees and the fireflies were lighting in the shadows along the road. A solitary raindrop splashed on my windshield as I turned into my dirt yard.

  It rained hard that night. It clattered on the shingles and the tin roof of the gallery, sluiced out of the gutters and ran in streams down to the coulee. The pecan trees in the yard beat in the wind and trembled whitely when lightning leapt across the black sky. I had the attic fan on, and the house was cool, and I dreamed all night. Annie came to me about four A.M." as she often did, when the night was about to give way to the softness of the false dawn. In my dream I could look through my bedroom window into the rain, past the shining trunks of the pecan trees, deep into the marsh and the clouds of steam that eventually bleed into the saw grass and the Gulf of Mexico, and see her and her companions inside a wobbling green bubble of air. She smiled at me.

  Hi, sailor, she said.

  How you doing, sweetheart? You know I don't like it when it rains. Bad memories and all that. So we found a dry place for a while.

  "Your buddies from your platoon don't like the rain, either. They say it used to give them jungle sores. Can you hear me with all that thunder? It sounds like cannon!"

  Sure.

  It's lightning up on top of the water. That night I couldn't tell the lightning from the gun flashes. I wish you hadn't left me alone. I tried to hide under the bed sheet. It was a silly thing to do. Don't talk about it.

  It was like electricity dancing off the walls, you're not drinking, are you?

  No, not really.

  Not really?

  Only in my dreams.

  But I bet you still get high on those dry drunks, don't you? You know, fantasies about kicking butt, 'fronting the lowlifes, all that stuff swinging dicks like to do.

  A guy has to do something for kicks. Annie?

  What is it, baby love?

  I want Tell me.

  I want to It's not your time. There's Alafair to take care of, too.

  It wasn't your time, either.

  She made a kiss against the air. Her mouth was red.

  So long, sailor. Don't sleep on your stomach. It'll make you hard in the morning. I miss you.

  Annie She winked at me through the rain, and in my dream I was sure I felt her fingers touch my lips.

  It continued to rain most of the next day. At three o'clock I picked up Alafair at the school and kept her with me in the bait shop. The sky and the marsh were gray; my rental boats were half full of water, the dock shiny and empty in the weak light. Alafair was restless and hard to keep occupied in the shop, and I let Batist take her with him on an errand in town. At five-thirty they were back, the rain slacked off, and the sun broke through the clouds in the west. It was the time of day when the bream and bass should have been feeding around the lily pads, but the bayou was high and the water remained smooth and brown and un dented along the banks and in the coves. A couple of fishermen came in and drank beer for a while, and I leaned on the window jamb and stared out at the mauve- and red-streaked sky, the trees dripping rain into the water, the wet moss trying to lift in the evening breeze.

  "Them men ain't gonna do nothing. They just blowing they horn," Batist said beside me. Alafair was watching a cartoon on the old black-and-white television set that I kept on the snack shelf. She held Tripod on her lap while she stared raptly up at the set.

  "Maybe so. But they'll let us wonder where they are and when they're coming," I said.

  "That's the way it works."

  "You call them FBI in Lafayette?"

  "No."

  "How come?"

  "It's a waste of time."

  "Sometime you gotta try, yeah."

  "There weren't any identifiable prints on the package except yours and mine."

  I could see in his face that he didn't understand.

  "There's nothing to tell the FBI," I said.

  "I would only create paperwork for them and irritate them. It wouldn't accomplish anything. There's nothing I can do."

  "So you want get mad at me?"

  "I'm not mad at you. Listen"

  "What?"

  "I want her to stay with you tonight. I'll pick her up in the morning and take her to school."

  "What you gonna do, you?"

  "I don't know."

  "I been knowing you a long time, Dave. Don't tell me that."

  "I'll
tell Clarise to pack her school clothes and her pajamas and toothbrush. There's still one boat out. Lock up as soon as it comes in."