DR03 - Black Cherry Blues

by James Lee Burke

  I had seen the work of his kind before, in New Orleans. They created object lessons that no one in the criminal community ever forgot: a grand jury witness garroted with wire, a hooker drenched with gasoline and turned into a cone of flame, a mob member who had cuckolded a friend emasculated and his phallus stuffed in his mouth. The men who did the work made you shudder. I've heard all kinds of explanations for their behavior and their perverse nature. My personal feeling is that they're simply evil. The hooker, the street dips, the check writers, the fences and hot-money passers at the track, that bumbling urban army of brain-fried misfits, are often people with families and other jobs who eventually disappear into the normalcy of American life without ever leaving more than a forgettable scratch on it. Charlie Dodds's kind are a special bunch, however. I don't think there are many of them around, but enough perhaps to remind us that not every human being can be fixed or explained and that the jailer who keeps them in maximum-security lockdown, chained ankle, waist, and wrist when they're moved only a short distance in the prison, knows and appreciates something about them that the rest of us do not.

  I had decided not to call the heat about Charlie Dodds's visit. As Clete had said, how much of it would they be willing to believe, particularly after I had rousted the telephone man? Also, I was tired of having to prove myself to cops. Sometimes it's not good to interfere with the fates. Maybe Clete and Dodds had found each other.

  The ice melted in the towel. I got up from the couch, my forehead numb and tight from the cold and the swelling, and cleaned up the kitchen. I wiped Dodds's blood off the wall, stove, and linoleum with wet paper towels, cleaned the same areas again with detergent and rubbing alcohol, then put the towels, his survival knife, his cloth cap, and the sawed handcuffs into his canvas handbill bag, wadded it up, and threw the whole mess down the basement stairs.

  Then I showered and took a nap in the bedroom. The breeze ruffled the bushes outside the window and blew coolly across the sheets. In my dream I saw Annie sitting on the rail of my father's houseboat in the misty early morning light down in the Atchafalaya marsh. The houseboat was weathered and paint less streaked with moisture, and clouds of vapor billowed out of the islands of willow and cypress trees and hung low on the motionless water. Her hair was gold, her skin tan, her mouth red in the mist, but she wouldn't speak to me. She smiled and looked toward my father, who waited for me in the outboard, and I realized that I was only fifteen and that I had to help him run the crab line, dripping with catfish heads, that we had strung across the bay the night before. As the sun burned the mist off the water and back into the trees, we filled the bait well with bluepoint crabs, then began picking up the conical fish nets that we had weighted with bricks, marked with sealed, plastic Clo-rox containers, and dropped into deep current yesterday morning. We worked through lunch, shaking huge mud cat and gaspagoo, what Texans called buffalo fish and Negroes goo-fish, into the bottom of the boat, our backs hot and striped with sweat under the white sun. My father's hair was curly and wild, like black wire, his hands big as skillets, his teeth strong and white, his laugh genuine and full of fun, his shoulders and arms so powerful and corded with muscle that he could fight three men at one time in the middle of a dance floor and take blows from every direction without going down. On the pipeline and in the oil field they called him Big Al Ro-bicheaux with the kind of respect and affection that working people have for a man who possesses their best qualities. I leaned over the gunnel, grabbed a floating Clorox container, and got the lip of the net almost to the surface. But it was as heavy as concrete, the wooden hoops fouled, the netting torn, and no matter how I strained I couldn't lift the first hoop clear of the water.

  My father cut the engine, climbed to the bow so he wouldn't capsize the boat, and jerked the net up with his massive arms, until he could see the outline of the trapped gar just below the yellow surface.

  "Fils p'tain" he said. He hadn't shaved in three days, and his hair and beard were dripping with sweat.

  The gar must have been five feet long. Its fins and tail and armor like scales and long, teeth-filled snout were mired in the netting, and there was no way to get it back out through the series of hoops. My father pulled up the bricks that we used to anchor the net, cut them loose, and dropped them into the bottom of the boat; then we towed the net slowly behind us back to the willow island where the houseboat was moored in the shade.

  We shook the gar out of the ruined net on the bank and watched it flop and gasp for air and coat its gills with sand. Its teeth could cut a bass in half like a razor slicing through it. My father got behind it, hit it once on the head with a brick, then drove his skinning knife through a soft place between the head and the armored shell, pushing down with both hands until the knife point went through the throat into the sand and blood roared from the gar's mouth and gills. But the gar continued to flop, to twist against the knife and flip sand into the air, until my father crushed its head and its eyes became as suddenly lifeless and cold as black glass. Then he brought the knife straight back along the dorsal fin, and the black-green armor cracked away from the rows of pink meat as cleanly as pecan shell breaking.

  It wasn't a good day. The gar wasn't a commercial fish, and we couldn't afford the loss of a net, but my father always put the best light on a situation.

  "We cain't sell him, no," he said, "but he gonna be some good garfish balls. You mess with Aldous and Dave, you gonna get fry, you gonna get eat, you better believe, podna."

  We cleaned and filleted fish in pans of bloody water until evening, when the mosquitoes started to boil out of the shadows and purple rain clouds gathered on the horizon and lightning flashed far out on the Gulf. We packed the fish in the ice bin, so tomorrow we could take them downriver to sell in Morgan City. I went to sleep in my bunk bed with the wind blowing cool through the window from across the bay, then I woke to a smell that shouldn't have been there. It was thick and gray, as fetid as excrement and sweet at the same time. But we had thrown all the fish guts and heads and piles of stripped mud-cat skins into the current and had washed the deck and all the pans clean. I kept the pillow over my head and tried to push myself deeper into sleep, but I could feel the stench against my face like a rat's breath.

  In the first blue light of dawn I went out on the deck, and Annie was leaning against the rail in the mist, dressed like a Cajun fisher girl in sun-faded jeans, tennis shoes without socks, a khaki shirt with the arms cut-off. The smell was everywhere. She pointed toward my father, who waited for me on the sandbar, a shovel over his shoulder.

  Don't be afraid, she said. Go with Al.

  I don't want to this time.

  You mustn't worry about those things. We both love you.

  You're about to go away from me, aren't you?

  Her face was kind, and her eyes moved over my face as though she were an older sister looking at her younger brother.

  I followed my father into the marsh, our tennis shoes splashing through the sloughs, the wet willow branches swinging back into our faces. The early sun was big and hot on the edge of the flooded woods, and the cypress trees looked black against the red light. The water was dead and covered with green algae; cottonmouth moccasins were coiled on the low branches of the trees. The smell became stronger, so that I had to hold my hand to my face and breathe through my mouth. We came up out of a slough onto a hard-packed sandbar, and lying stretched on the sand, huge divots cut out of its back by a boat propeller, was the rotting carcass of the biggest bull alligator I had ever seen. His tail drag and the sharp imprints of his feet trailed off the sandbar back through the trees. I could see the open water where he had probably been hit by a commercial boat of some kind, or the screw on a seismograph drill barge, and had beached himself and begun his crawl to this spot, where he had died on high ground and turkey buzzards and snakes had begun feeding on his wounds.

  "Mats, that stink," my father said, and waved at the air in front of his face.

  "You start dig a hole." He handed me the shove
l, then he grinned as he sometimes did when he was about to play a joke on me.

  "Where you gonna dig a hole, you?"

  I didn't understand him. I started to scrape in the dry sand with the shovel's tip.

  "Que t'as pres faire cher? Tu veux travailler comme un neg?" he said, and laughed. ("What are you doing, dear one? You want to work like a Negro?") I pressed down again into the hard sand, felt it grate and slide over the blade. He took the shovel out of my hand, walked to a dip in the sandbar where the water from two sloughs had washed a small channel, and dug deeply and easily into the wet sand and flung it out into the sunlight, his face grinning at me.

  "You do it where it soft," he said.

  "Ain't you learned nothing from your old man?"

  I woke to a clatter of birds in the trees outside the window, my head thick with afternoon sleep. I rinsed my face in the bathroom sink and looked at the tight purple lump that ran down through my hairline. The dream made no sense to me, other than the facts that I missed my father and Annie, that I feared death, and that I conducted a foolish quarrel with the irrevocable nature of time.

  Al, what are you trying to tell me? I thought, as the water streamed off my face in the mirror's silent reflection.

  Shortly before three o'clock I walked down to the school and waited for Alafair by the side of the playground. A few minutes later the doors of the building were flung open, and she came running across the small softball diamond with a group of other children, her Donald Duck lunch box clanging against her thigh. Her elastic-wasted jeans were grimed at the knees, and there were dirt and sweat rings around her neck.

  "What did you guys do today at recess? Mud wrestling?" I said.

  "Miss Regan let us play dodge ball It's fun. I got hit in the seat. You ever play it, Dave?"

  "Sure."

  "What happened to your head?"

  "I hit it when I was working on the truck. Not too smart, huh?"

  Her eyes looked at me curiously, then she put her hand in mine and swung her weight on my arm.

  "I forgot," she said.

  "Miss Regan said to give you this note. She said she'd call you anyway."

  "About what?"

  "About the man."

  "What man?"

  "The one at the school yard."

  I unfolded the piece of paper she had taken from her lunch box. It read: Mr. Robicheaux, I want to have a serious talk with you. Call me at my home this 'afternoon Tess Regan. Under her name she had written her phone number.

  "Who's this man you're talking about, Alafair?" I said.

  A bunch of children ran past us on the sidewalk. The sunlight through the maple trees made patterns on their bodies.

  "The other kids said he was in a car on the corner. I didn't see him. They said he was looking through, what you call those things, Dave? You got some in the truck."

  "Field glasses?"

  "They called them something else."

  "Binoculars?"

  "Yeah." She grinned up at me when she recognized the word.

  "Who was he looking at, Alafair?"

  "I don't know."

  "Why does Miss Regan want to talk to me about it?"

  "I don't know."

  "What time was this guy out there?"

  "At recess."

  "What time is recess?"

  "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 dodge ball 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 exp
erience 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."