Black Cherry Blues (10 page)

“It’s pretty empty tonight,” I said.

“It sure is. You by yourself tonight?” he said.

“Right now I am. I was sort of looking for some company.” I smiled at him.

He nodded good-naturedly and began rinsing glasses in a tin sink. Finally he said, “You staying at the motel?”

“Yeah, for a couple of days. Boy, I tell you I got one.” I blew out my breath and touched my forehead with my fingertips.

“I met this lady last night, a schoolteacher, would you believe it, and she came up to my room and we started hitting the JD pretty hard. But I’m not kidding you, before we got serious about anything she drank me under the table and I woke up at noon like a ball of fire.” I laughed.

“And with another problem, too. You know what I mean?”

He ducked his head and grinned.

“Yeah, that can be a tough problem,” he said.

“You want another 7-Up?”

“Sure.”

He went back to his work in the sink, his small eyes masked, and a moment later he dried his hands absently on a towel, turned on a radio that was set among the liquor bottles on the counter, and walked into a back hallway, where he picked up a house phone. He spoke into the receiver with his back turned toward me so that I could not hear him above the music on the radio. Outside the window, the trees were black against the sky and the blue tile of the motel roof glistened in the rain.

The girl came through the side door ten minutes later and sat one stool down from me. She wore spiked heels, Levi’s, a backless brown sweater, and hoop earrings. She shook her wet hair loose, lit a cigarette, ordered a drink, then had another, and didn’t pay for either of them. She talked as though she and I and the bartender were somehow old friends. In the neon glow she was pretty in a rough way. I wondered where she came from, what kind of trade-off was worth her present situation.

I wasn’t making it easy for her, either. I hadn’t offered to pay for either of her drinks, and I had made no overture toward her. I saw her look at her watch, then glance directly into the bartender’s eyes. He lit a cigarette and stepped out the door as though he were getting a breath of fresh air.

“I hate lounges, don’t you? They’re all dull,” she said.

“It’s a pretty slow place, all right.”

“I’d rather have drinks with a friend in my room.”

“What if I buy a bottle?”

“I think that would be just wonderful,” she said, and smiled as much to herself as to me. Then she bit down on her lip, leaned toward me, and touched my thigh.

“I’ve got a little trouble with Don, though. Like a seventy-five-dollar bar tab. Could you lend it to me so they don’t eighty-six me out of this place?”

“It’s time to take off, kiddo.”

“What?”

I took my sheriff’s deputy badge out of my back pocket and opened it in front of her. It was just an honorary one, and I kept it only because it got me free parking at Evangeline Downs and the Fairgrounds in New Orleans, but she didn’t know that.

“Don’s in deep shit. Go home and watch television,” I said.

“You bastard.”

“I told you you’re not busted. You want to hang around and have some of his problems?”

Her eyes went from my face to the bartender, who was coming back through the side door. Her decision didn’t take long. She took her car keys out of her purse, threw her cigarettes inside, snapped it shut, and walked quickly on her spiked heels out the opposite door into the rain. I held up the badge in front of the bartender’s smalj, close-set eyes.

“It’s Iberia Parish, but what do you care?” I said.

“You’re going to do something for me, right? Because you don’t want Lafayette vice down here, do you? You’re a reasonable guy, Don.”

He bit down on the corner of his lip and looked away from my face.

“I got a. number I can call,” he said.. “Not tonight you don’t.”

I could see his lip discolor where his tooth continued to chew on it. He blew air out his nose as though he had a cold.

“I don’t want trouble.”

“You shouldn’t pimp.”

“How about lightening up a bit?” He looked at the two remaining customers in the bar. They were young and they sat at a table in the far corner. Behind them, through the opened blinds, headlights passed on the wet street.

“Two of your girls are in room six. You need to get them out,” I said.

“Wait a minute …”

“Let’s get it done, Don. No more messing around.”

“That’s Mr. Mapes. I can’t do that.”

“Time’s running out, partner.”

“Look, you got a beef here or something, that’s your business. I can’t get mixed up in this. Those broads don’t listen to me, anyway.”

“Well, I guess you’re a stand-up guy. Your boss won’t mind you getting busted, will he? Or having heat all over the place? You think one of those girls might have some flake up her nose? Maybe it’s just sinus trouble.”

“All right,” he said, and held his palms upward.

“I got to tell these people I’m closing. Then I’ll call the room. Then I’m gone, out of it, right?”

I didn’t answer.

“Hey, I’m out of it, right?” he said.

“I’m already having trouble remembering your face.”

Five minutes after the bartender phoned Mapes’s room the two prostitutes came out the front door, a man’s angry voice resounding out of the room behind them, and got into a convertible and drove away. I opened the wooden toolbox in the bed of my pickup truck and took out a five-foot length of chain that I sometimes used to pull stumps. I folded it in half and wrapped the two loose ends around my hand. The links were rusted and made an orange smear across my palm. I walked across the gravel under the dripping trees toward the door of room 6. The chain clinked against my leg; the heat lightning jumped in white spiderwebs all over the black sky.

Vidrine must have thought the women had come back because he was smiling when he opened the door in his boxer undershorts. Behind him Mapes was eating a sandwich in his robe at a wet bar. The linen and covers on the king-sized bed were in disarray, and the hallway that led into another bedroom was littered with towels, wet bathing suits, and beer cups.

Vidrine’s smile collapsed, and his face suddenly looked rigid and glazed. Mapes set his sandwich in his plate, wet the scar on his lower lip as though he were contemplating an abstract equation, and moved toward a suitcase that was opened on a folding luggage holder.

I heard the chain clink and sing through the air, felt it come back over my head again and again, felt their hands rake against the side of my face; my ears roared with sound a rumble deep under the Gulf, the drilling-rig floor trembling and clattering violently, the drill pipe exploding out of the wellhead in a red-black fireball. My hand was bitten and streaked with rust; it was the color of dried blood inside a hypodermic needle used to threaten a six-year-old child; it was like the patterns that I streaked across the walls, the bedclothes, the sliding glass doors that gave onto the courtyard where azalea (petals floated on the surface of a lighted turquoise pool.

CHAPTER 4

Alafair woke up with an upset stomach the next morning, and I kept her home from school. I fixed her soft-boiled eggs and weak tea, I then took her down to work with me in the bait shop. The sun had | come up in a clear sky that morning, and the trees along the dirt road were bright green from the rain. The myrtle bushes were filled with purple bloom in the sunlight.

“Why you keep looking down the road, Dave?” Alafair asked.

She sat on one of the phone-cable spools on the dock, watching me unscrew a fouled spark plug from an outboard engine. The canvas umbrella in the center of the spool was folded, and her Indian-black | hair was shiny in the bright light.

“I’m just admiring the day,” I said. I felt her looking at the side of my face.

“You don’t feel good?” she said.

“I’m fine, little guy. I tell you what, let’s take a ride down to the store and see if they have any kites. You think you can put a kite up f today?”

“There ain’t no wind.”

“Don’t say ‘ain’t.’ “

“Okay.”

“Let’s go get some apples for Tex. You want to feed him some apples?”

“Sure.” She looked at me curiously.

We walked up to the truck, which was parked under the pecan I trees, got in, and drove down the road toward the old store at the four-corners. Alafair looked at the floor.

“What’s that, Dave?”

“Don’t mess with that.”

Her eyes blinked at my tone.

“It’s just a chain. Kick it under the seat,” I said.

She leaned down toward the floor.

“Don’t touch it,” I said.

“It’s dirty.”

“What’s wrong, Dave?”

“Nothing. I just don’t want your hands dirty.”

I took a breath, stopped the truck, and went around to Alafair’s side. I opened her door and lifted the loops of chain off the floor. They felt as though they were coated with paint that had not quite dried.

“I’ll be right back,” I said.

I walked down on the bank of the bayou and sailed the chain out into the middle of the current. Then I stooped by the cattails in the shallows and scrubbed my palms with water and sand. Dragonflies hovered over the cattails, and I saw a cottonmouth slide off a log and swim into the lily pads. I pushed my hands into the sand, and water , clouded around my wrists. I walked back up onto the bank with my hands dripping at my sides and wiped them on the grass, then I took a cloth out of the toolbox and wiped them again.

The ramshackle general store at the four corners was dark and cool inside, the wood-bladed ceiling fan turning over the counter. I bought a sack of apples for Alafair’s horse, some sliced ham, cheese, and French bread for our lunch, and two soda pops to drink out on the gallery. The sun was brilliant on the white shale parking lot, and through the trees across the road I could see a Negro man cane fishing in a pirogue close in to the cypress roots.

We went back to the house, and Alafair helped me weed my hydrangea and rose beds. Our knees were wet and dirty, our arms covered with fine grains of black dirt. My flower beds were thick with night crawlers, all of them close to the surface after the rain, and when we ripped weeds from the soil, they writhed pale and fat in the hard light. I knew almost nothing of Alafair’s life before she came to Annie and me, but work must have been a natural part of it, because she treated almost any task that I gave her as a game and did it enthusiastically in a happy and innocent way. She worked her way through the rosebushes on all fours, pinging the weeds and Johnsongrass loudly in the bucket, a smear of dirt above one eye brow. The smell of the hydrangeas and the wet earth was so strong and fecund it was almost like a drug. Then the breeze came up and blew through the pecan trees in the front yard; out on the edge of the trees’ shade my neighbor’s water sprinkler spun in the sunlight and floated across my fence in a rainbow mist.

They came just before noon. The two Lafayette plainclothes detectives were in an unmarked car, followed by the Iberia Parish sheriff, who drove a patrol car. They parked next to my truck and walked across the dead pecan leaves toward me. Both of the plain-clothes were big men who left their coats in the car and wore their badges on their belts. Each carried a chrome-plated revolver in a clip-on holster. I rose to my feet, brushing the dirt off my knees. Alafair had stopped weeding and was staring at the men with her mouth parted.

“You’ve got a warrant?” I said.

One of the plainclothes had a matchstick in his mouth. He nodded without speaking.

“Okay, no problem. I’ll need a few minutes, all right?”

“You got somebody to take care of the little girl?” his partner said. A Marine Corps emblem was tattooed on one of his forearms and a dagger with a bleeding heart impaled upon it on the other.

“Yes. That’s why I need a minute or so,” I said. I took Alafair by the hand and turned toward the house.

“You want to come in with me?”

“Lean up against the porch rail,” the man with the matchstick said.

“Can’t you guys show some discretion here?” I said. I looked at my friend the sheriff, who stood in the background, saying nothing.

“What the fuck are you talking about?” the tattooed man said.

“Watch your language,” I said.

I felt Alafair’s hand close tightly in mine. The other detective took the matchstick out of his mouth.

“Put your hands on the porch rail, spread your feet,” he said, and took Alafair by her other hand and began to pull her away from me.

I pointed my finger at him.

“You’re mishandling this. Back off,” I said.

Then I felt the other man shove me hard in the back, pushing me off-balance through the hydrangeas into the steps. I heard his pistol come out of his leather holster, felt his hand clamp down on my neck as he stuck the barrel of the revolver behind my ear.

“You’re under arrest for murder. You think being an ex-cop lets you write trie rules?” he said.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw Alafair staring at us with the stunned, empty expression of a person wakened from a nightmare.

They booked me into the parish jail on top of the old courthouse in the middle of Lafayette’s original town square. The jail was an ancient one, the iron doors and bars and walls painted battleship gray. The words “Negro Male” were still faintly visible on the door of one of the tanks. During the ride from New Iberia I had sat handcuffed in the back of the car, asking the detectives who it was I had killed. They responded with the silence and indifference with which almost all cops treat a suspect after he’s in custody. Finally I gave up and sat back against the seat cushion, the cuffs biting into my wrists, and stared at the oak trees flicking past the window.

Now I had been fingerprinted and photographed, had turned over my wallet, pocket change, keys, belt, even my scapular chain, to a deputy who put them in a large manila envelope, realizing even then that something important was missing, something that would have a terrible bearing on my situation, yes, my Puma knife; and now the jailer and the detective who chewed on matchsticks were about to lock me in a six-cell area that was reserved for the violent and the insane. The jailer turned the key on the large, flat iron door that contained one narrow viewing sbt, pulled it open wide, and pushed lightly on my back with his fingers.