DR03 - Black Cherry Blues

by James Lee Burke

  "I don't know."

  "Do you think you contributed to her death?"

  "I don't think so. But I'm not sure."

  "I think that something else is troubling you, something that we're not quite talking about."

  I told him about Annie, the shotgun blasts that leapt in the darkness of our bedroom, the sheet drenched with her blood, the coldness of her fingers when I put them in my mouth. I could hear him breathing next to me. When I looked up at him I saw him swallow.

  "I'm sorry," he said.

  "It won't go away, Father. I don't believe it ever will."

  He picked up another piece of hard dirt off the grass and started to flip it at the plant, then dropped it from his hand.

  "I feel inadequate in trying to advise you," he said.

  "But I think you're a good man and you're doing yourself an unnecessary injury. You were lonely when you met the Indian lady. You obviously cared for her. Sometimes maybe it's a vanity to judge ourselves. Did you ever think of it that way? You make your statement in front of God, then you let Him be the measure of right and wrong in your life. And I don't believe you caused your wife's death. Sometimes when that kind of evil comes into our lives, we can't explain it, so we blame it on God or ourselves. In both cases we're wrong. Maybe it's time you let yourself out of prison."

  I didn't answer him.

  "Do you want absolution?"

  "Yes."

  "What for?"

  "I don't know. For my inadequacies. My failures. For any grief or injury I've brought an innocent person. That's the best I can say. I can't describe it."

  His forearms were folded on his thighs. He looked down at his boots, but I could see a sad light in his eyes. He took a deep breath.

  "I wish I could be of more help to you," he said.

  "We're not always up to the situation. Our experience is limited."

  "You've been more than kind."

  "Give it time, Mr. Robicheaux." Then he smiled and said, "Not everybody gets to see a blinding light on the way to Damascus."

  When I left that sunny, green enclosure between the buildings, he was kneeling down in a flower bed, troweling out a hole for the pink-and-gray-striped caladium, his eyes already intent with his work, his day obviously ordered and serene and predictable in a way that I could not remember mine being since I walked off the plane into a diesel-laced layer of heat at Tan Son Nhut air base in 1964.

  I wanted to go into yesterday. And I don't think that's always bad. Sometimes you simply have to walk through a door in your mind and lose thirty or forty years in order to remember who you are. Maybe it's a self-deception, a mental opiate that I use to escape my problems, but I don't care. We are the sum total of what we have done and where we have been, and I sincerely believe that in many ways the world in which I grew up was better than the one in which we live today. I stuck a paperback copy of Ernest Gaines's Of Love and Dust in my pocket, and walked down to Bonner Park and sat on a bench under a maple tree and read. The fountain and concrete wading pool looked dry and white in the sun, and in the distance the mountains were a sharp blue against the clouds. The wind was cool blowing out of the shade, but I was already inside the novel, back on a hot sugarcane and sweet potato plantation in South Louisiana in the 1940s. No, that's not really true. I was back in New Iberia the summer after my second year in college, when my brother, Jimmie, and I worked on an offshore seismograph rig and bought a 'forty-six Ford convertible that we put dual Hollywood mufflers on, lowering blocks and fender skirts, painted canary yellow and lacquered and waxed until the metal seemed to have the soft, deep gleam of butter. It was the best summer of my life. I fell in love seriously for the first time, with a girl who lived on Spanish Lake, outside of town, and as is always the case with your first love, I remembered every detail of the season, as though I had never experienced summer before, sometimes with a poignancy that would almost break my heart. She was a Cajun like myself, and her hair was brown and bleached in streaks by the sun so that it looked like dark honey when the wind blew it. We danced at Voorhies Roof Garden in Lafayette and Slick's in St. Martinville, drank twenty-cent long-necked Jax beer under the oaks at Deer's Drive-in in New Iberia; we fished for white trout out on the salt, went to crab boils and fish fries at Cypremort Point and drove home in the lilac evening, down that long two-lane blacktop parish road between the cypress and the oaks, with the wind warm off the Gulf, the new cane green in the fields, the western sky streaked with fire, the cicadas deafening in the trees.

  She was one of those girls who love everything about the man they choose to be theirs. She never argued or contended, she was happy in any place or situation where we were together, and I only had to touch her cheek with my fingers to make her come close to me, to press herself against me, to kiss my throat and put her hand inside my shirt. It rained every afternoon, and sometimes after it cleared and the clouds were pink and maroon on the horizon, we'd drive down the levee to the dock where my father kept his boat, the cypress dripping into the dead water, and in the soft light her face would have the color and loveliness of a newly opened flower.

  Jimmy Clanton's "Just a Dream" was on every jukebox in southern Louisiana that summer, and car radios at the drive-in were always tuned to "Randy's Record Shop" in Memphis at midnight, when Randy kicked it off with "Sewannee River Boogie." Each morning was one of expectation, of smoky light in the pecan trees outside my bedroom window, of innocent desire and the confidence that within a few hours I would be with her again, and that absolutely nothing would ever come between us. But it ended over an unreasonable and youthful concern. I hurt her without meaning to, in a way that I could not explain to myself, much less to her, and my silence caused her an even greater injury that these many years later still troubles me on occasion.

  I'll never forget that summer, though. It's the cathedral I sometimes visit when everything else fails, when the heart seems poisoned, the earth stricken, and dead leaves blow across the soul's windows like bits of dried parchment.

  My experience has been that grief and loss do not necessarily become more acceptable with time, and commitment to them is of no value to either the living or the dead. The next morning I was back in the Lake County courthouse.

  The sheriff looked as hard and round as a wooden barrel. His dark blue suit was spotted with cigarette ash that he had tried to clean off with a wet paper towel; he wore his gray hair in a crew cut, his white shirt lapels ironed flat so that his chest hair stuck out like a tangle of wire. He was one of those elected law officers who have probably been diesel mechanics or log-truck drivers before someone had talked them into running for office. He sat at the corner of his desk when he talked, rather than behind it, and smoked a cigarette and looked out the window at the lake with such private concentration that I had the feeling that he already knew the outcome of our conversation, and that he was talking to me now only because of a public relations obligation that the office imposed upon him.

  "You were a homicide detective in New Orleans?" he said.

  "That's right."

  "Then a detective in the sheriff's department in ... what's the name of that place?"

  "New Iberia. Where they make Tabasco sauce." I smiled at him, but his eyes were looking through his cigarette smoke at the blue wink off the lake.

  "You know a DEA agent named Dan Nygurski?"

  "Yep."

  "He was here yesterday. He said I could count on you coming to see me."

  "I see."

  "He said I should tell you to go back to Louisiana. What do you think about that?"

  "Advice is cheap."

  "You're wondering about the coroner's report?"

  I let out my breath.

  "Yes, sir, I am," I said.

  "Because you think she was murdered?"

  "That's right."

  "What for? Who had reason to kill her?"

  "Check out Sally Dee's record. Check on a guy named Harry Mapes, too." I felt the heat start to rise in my voice, and I paused.
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  "I'd give some thought to Purcel, too."

  "From what I've been told, these are all people you've had trouble with at one time or another. You think you're being entirely objective here?"

  "The Dios are animals. So is Mapes. Purcel killed a guy for some paramilitary crazies in New Orleans. I wouldn't underestimate the potential of any of them."

  "Why would Purcel kill her?"

  He looked at me with interest for the first time. I dropped my eyes to my shoes. Then I looked back at him.

  "I was involved with Darlene," I said.

  "He knew about it."

  The sheriff nodded and didn't reply. He opened his desk drawer and took out a clipboard on which were attached Xeroxed copies of the kinds of forms that county medical examiners use in autopsies.

  "You were right about the bruises," he said.

  "She had them on her neck and her shoulders."

  I waited for him to continue.

  "She also had a bump on the back of her head," he said.

  "Yes?" .

  "But it's going down as a suicide."

  "What?"

  "You got it the first time."

  "What's the matter with you? You're discounting your own autopsy report?"

  "Listen, Robicheaux, I don't have any evidence that she didn't kill herself. On the other hand, I have every indication that she did. She could have hit her head on the tub. She could have gotten the bruises anywhere. Maybe you don't like to hear this, but Indians around here get into trouble. They get drunk, they fight in bars, families beat the shit out of each other. I'm not knocking them. I've got nothing against them. I think they get a lousy break. But that's the way it is. Look, if I suspected anybody, it'd have to be Purcel. But I don't believe he did it. The guy's really strung out on this."

  "What about Sally Dee?"

  "You give me the motive, you put him in the house, I'll cut the warrant."

  "You're making a big mistake, Sheriff."

  "Tell me how. Fill me in on that, please."

  "You're taking the easy choice, you're letting them slide. The Dios sense weakness in you, they'll eat you alive."

  He opened a deep drawer in the bottom of his desk and took out a baton. The layers of black paint were chipped, and the grip had been grooved in a lathe and drilled to hold a leather wrist loop. He dropped it loudly on the desktop.

  "The guy I replaced gave me this the day I took office," he said.

  "He told me, "Everybody doesn't have to go to jail." And there's days when maybe I got that kind of temptation. I see Dio in the supermarket and I shudder. This is good country. He doesn't belong here. But I don't bust heads, I don't let my deputies do it, either. If that don't sit right with somebody, that's their problem." He mashed out his cigarette without looking at me.

  "I guess I'll be on my way," I said, and stood up. Then, as an afterthought, I said, "Did the autopsy show anything else unusual?"

  "Not to me or the medical examiner."

  "What else?"

  "I think we've ended this discussion."

  "Come on, Sheriff, I'm almost out of your day."

  He glanced again at his clipboard.

  "What she had for supper, traces of semen in the vagina."

  I took a breath and looked out the window at the electric blueness of the lake in the sunlight and the low green hills and pine trees in the distance. Then I pinched my eyes and the bridge of my nose with my fingers and put on my sunglasses.

  "You were on the money about Cletus," I said.

  "What are you talking about?"

  "He didn't do it. He's impotent. She was raped before she was murdered." ( He sucked his teeth, smiled to himself, shook his head slightly, and opened his newspaper to the sports page.

  "You'll have to excuse me," he said.

  "It's the only chance I get to read it."

  I found out from the medical examiner's office that Darlene's family had picked up the body that morning and that the funeral was the next afternoon on the Blackfeet Reservation. The next day was Saturday, so Alafair drove across the mountains with me to Du-puyer, on the south end of the reservation. I found out from the local newspaper that the service was to be held at a Baptist church up on the Marias River at two o'clock. We had lunch in a clapboard cafe that was built onto the side of a grease-stained, cinder-block filling station. I had little appetite and couldn't finish my plate, and I stared out the window at the dusty street while Alafair ate her hamburger. The bars were doing a good business. Rusted pickup trucks and oversized jalopy gas burners were parked at an angle to the curb, and sometimes whole families sat listlessly in them while the old man was inside the juke joint. People who looked both devastated and broke from the night before sat on the curb, their attention fixed on nothing, their mouths open like those of silent, newly hatched birds.

  Then I saw Alafair watching them, her eyes squinting, as though a camera lens were opening momentarily in her mind.

  "What do you see, little guy?" I said.

  "Are those Indians?"

  "Sure."

  "They're like me?"

  "Well, not exactly, but maybe you're part Indian. An Indian Cajun from Bayou Teche," I said.

  "What language they talk, Dave?"

  "English, just like you and me."

  "They don't know no Spanish words?"

  "No, I'm afraid not."

  I saw a question mark, then a troubled look slip into her face.

  "What's on your mind, little guy?" I asked.

  "The people in my village. They sat in front of the clinic. Like those people there." Her eyes were looking at an elderly man and woman on the curb. The woman was fat and wore army shoes and dirty athletic socks, and her knees were splayed open so that you could see up her dress.

  "Dave, they ain't got soldiers here, have they?"

  "You get those thoughts out of your head," I said.

  "This is a good country, a safe place. You have to believe what I tell you, Alf. What happened in your village doesn't happen here."

  She put her hamburger on her plate and lowered her eyes. The corners of her mouth were turned downward. Her bangs hung in a straight line across her tan forehead.

  "It did to Annie," she said.

  I looked away from her face and felt myself swallow. The sky had clouded, the wind had come up and was blowing the dust in the street, and the sun looked like a thin yellow wafer in the south.

  The funeral was in a wood-frame church whose white paint had blistered and peeled into scales. All the people inside the church were Indians, people with braided hair, work-seamed faces, hands that handled lumber without gloves in zero weather, except for Clete and Dixie Lee, who sat in a front pew to the side of the casket. It was made of black metal, lined and cushioned with white silk, fitted with gleaming brass handles. Her hair was black against the silk, her face rouged, her mouth red as though she had just had a drink of cold water. She had been dressed in a doeskin shirt, and a beaded necklace with a purple glass bird on it, wings outstretched in flight, rested on her breast. Only the top portion of the casket was opened, so that her forearms were not visible.

  The skin of Clete's face was shiny and stretched tight on the bone. He looked like a boiled ham inside his blue suit. I could see his cigarettes tight against his shirt pocket; his big wrists stuck out of his coat sleeves; his collar had popped loose under the knot of his tie; the strap of his nylon shoulder holster made a hard line across his back. His eyes had the glare of a man staring at a match flame.

  I didn't hear, or rather listen to, much of what the preacher said. He was a gaunt and nervous man who read from the Old Testament and made consoling remarks in the best fashion he was probably capable of, but the rain that began clicking against the roof and windows, sweeping in a lighted sheet across the hardpan fields and river basin, was a more accurate statement of the feelings that were inside me.

  I made a peculiar prayer. It's a prayer that sometimes I say, one that is perhaps self-serving, but because I belie
ve that God is not limited by time and space as we are, I believe perhaps that He can influence the past even though it has already happened. So sometimes when I'm alone, especially at night, in the dark, and I begin to dwell on the unbearable suffering that people probably experienced before their deaths, I ask God to retroactively relieve their pain, to be with them in mind and body, to numb their senses, to cool whatever flame licked at their eyes in their final moments. I said that prayer now for Darlene. Then I said it again for my wife, Annie.