Black Cherry Blues (21 page)

“You don’t know that.”

“I know the way people are when they’re lonely. It’s like the way you feel at night about somebody. Then in the daylight it’s not the same.”

“What would you lose by trying?”

She slowed the jeep on the gravel shoulder a few feet behind my parked pickup truck and cut the engine. It was dark in the heavy shadow of the pines. Out over the lake the sky was bursting with constellations.

“You’re a nice man. One day you’ll find the right woman,” she said.

“That’s not the way you felt this morning. Don’t put me off, Darlene.”

I put my arm around her shoulders and turned her face with my hand. Her eyes looked up quietly at me in the dark. I kissed her on the mouth. Her eyes were still open when I took my mouth away from hers. Then I kissed her again, and this time her mouth parted and I felt her lips become wet against mine and her fingers go into my hair. I kissed her eyes and the moles at the corner of her mouth, then I placed my hand on her breast and kissed her throat and tried to pull aside her shirt with my clumsy hand and kiss the tops of her breasts.

Then I felt her catch her breath, tear it out of the air, stiffen, push against me and turn her face out into the dark.

“No more,” she said.

    “What-”

“It was a mistake. It ends here, Dave.”

“People’s feelings don’t work like that.”

“We’re from different worlds. You knew that this morning. I led you into it. It’s my fault. But it’s over.”

“Are you going to tell me Clete’s from your world?”

“It doesn’t matter. It’s not going anywhere. Maybe at another time”

“I’m just not going to listen to that stuff, Darlene.”

“You have to accept what I tell you. I’m sorry about all of it. I’m sorry I’m hurting you. I’m sorry about Clete. But you go back home or you’re going to be killed.”

“Not by the likes of Sally Dee, I’m not.”

I put my arm around her shoulders again and tried to brush back her hair with my hand.

“I’m sorry,” she said, but this time calmly, with her eyes straight ahead. Then she got out of the jeep and stood in the dark with her arms folded and her face turned toward the lake. The water’s surface was black and flecked with foam in the wind. I walked up next to her and put my fingers lightly on her neck.

“It’s no good,” she said softly.

I could not see her face in the shadows. I walked away from her toward my truck. The gravel crunched loudly under my feet, and the wind was cold through the pines.

The next morning was Friday. I was headed back to the other side of the Divide when my water pump went out at Bonner, on the Blackfoot River, ten miles east of Missoula. I had my truck towed to a garage in town and was told by the mechanic that he would not have the repairs done until Monday at noon. So I had to mark off two days that I could sorely afford to lose.

The air was cool and smelled of woodsmoke when I woke Monday morning, and the sun was bright on the lip of Hellgate Canyon and the valley was filled with blue shadows. I made cush-cush for Alafair and me, walked her to school in the spreading sunlight, then sat on the front porch in a long-sleeved flannel shirt and drank another cup of coffee and read the paper. A few minutes later a Landrover with a fly rod case in the gun rack pulled to a stop in front. Dan Nygurski got out, dressed in a pair of belt less jeans, an army sweater, and a floppy hat covered with trout flies.

“I’ve got a day off. Take a drive with me up the Blackfoot,” he said.

“I have to pick up my truck in the shop later.”

“I’ll take you there. Come on. You got a fishing rod?”

His seamed, coarse face smiled at me. He looked like he could bench three hundred pounds or break a baseball bat across his knee. I invited him in and gave him a cup of coffee in the kitchen while I got my Fenwick rod out of the closet and tied on my tennis shoes.

“What have you got in the way of flies?” he asked.

“Nothing really, popping bugs.”

“I’ve got what you need, brother. A number-fourteen renegade. It drives them crazy.”

“What’s this about?”

His mouth twitched, and the muscles in the side of his face and throat jumped.

“I thought I’d pick up some tips from you on how to handle Sally Dee,” he said.

“I think you’ve got a first there. I don’t believe anybody’s ever cleaned Sal’s clock before.”

“How’d you hear about it?”

“The sheriff’s office reports to us whenever Sal comes to their attention. A deputy told me you tried to use Sal’s face to repaint the side of his van. I always knew he had some worthwhile potential.”

“He’s got skag and coke in that house.”

“How do you know?”

“A friend told me.”

“Purcel?”

“No.”

“Ah, the Indian girl.”

“What do you know about her?”

“Nothing. She’s just some gal Purcel picked up. They come and go at Sally Dee’s. What’s your point about the coke and the skag?”

“Get a warrant and bust the place.”

“When I put Sal away, it’s going to be for the rest of his worthless life, not on a chickenshit possessions charge. He’d have one of those lamebrain beach boys doing his time, anyway.”

“I spent some time up at the Flathead courthouse. Why’s he buying and leasing up property around the lake?”

Nygurski set his cup in the saucer and looked out the window at the backyard. The grass was wet and green in the shade, and the sunlight was bright on the tops of the trees across the alley.

“He thinks casino gambling’s going through the legislature,” he said.

“The time’s right for it. People are out of work, they’ve used up all their compo, agriculture’s in the toilet. Casino gambling could turn Flathead Lake into another Tahoe. Sal would be in on the ground floor.”

“It’s that simple?”

    “Yeah, more or less. I don’t think it’s going to happen, though. People here don’t like outsiders, anyway. Particularly greasers and Californians.”

“What did you come over here to tell me?”

“Don’t worry about it. Come on, I’ve got an appointment with an eighteen-inch rainbow.”

We drove up through the Blackfoot River canyon, which was still dark and cool with shadows and smelled of woodsmoke blowing up from the mill at Bonner. Then we broke out into meadowland and ranch country and sunshine again, turned off the highway and crossed the river on a planked log bridge, and began climbing on a dirt road through hills and lodgepole pine and scrub brush, where white-tailed deer sprang in a flick of the eye back into the dense cover of the woods. Then we came back into the canyon again, into the most beautiful stretch of river that I had ever seen. The rock cliffs were red and sheer and rose straight up three hundred feet. The crests were thick with ponderosa, and the water, blue and green, turned in deep pools where the current had eaten under the cliffs. The rocks along the shore were bone white and etched with dried insects, and out beyond the canyon’s shadows, the great boulders in the middle of the river were steaming in the sun and flies were hatching out in a gray mist above the riffle.

I tied a renegade fly on the tippet of my nylon leader and followed Nygurski into the shallows. The water was so cold inside my tennis shoes and khakis that my bones felt as though they had been beaten with an ice mallet. I false-cast in a figure eight above my head, laid out the line upstream on the riffle, and watched the fly swirl through the eddies and around the boulders toward me. I picked it up, false-cast again, drying it in the air with a whistling sound inches from my ear, and dropped it just beyond a barkless, sun-bleached cottonwood that beavers had toppled into the stream. The riffle made a lip of dirty foam around the end of the log, and just as my leader swung around it and coursed across the top of a deep pool, I saw a rainbow rise from the bottom like an iridescent bubble released from the pebble-and-silt bed and snap my renegade down in a spray of silvery light.

I raised my rod high and stripped off-line with my left hand and let him run. He headed out into the current, into deep water, and my Fenwick arched and vibrated in my palm, drops of water glistening and trembling on the line. Then he broke the surface, and the sun struck the red and pink and green band on his side. I had to go deeper into the current with him, up to my chest now, and strip off my line to keep from breaking the tippet. I kept walking with him downstream while he pumped against the rod and tried to wrap the line around a submerged boulder, until I was back in the deep shade of the canyon, with the wind cold on my neck and the air heavy with the smell of ferns and wet stone.

Then I was around a bend, up into shallow water again, the gravel firm under my tennis shoes. It was all over for him. I worked him up into a small lagoon, watched him gin impotently over the clouded bottom with his dorsal fin out of the water; then I wet my hand and knelt in the shallows and picked him up under the stomach. He felt cold and thick in my hand, and his mouth and gills pumped hard for oxygen. I slipped the fly loose from the corner of his mouth and placed him back in the water. He hovered momentarily over the gravel, his tail moving for balance in the light current, before he dropped away over a ledge and was gone in the current.

While Nygurski fished farther upstream, I kicked together a pile of driftwood out in the sunlight, started a fire on the stones, and fixed a pot of cowboy coffee from his rucksack. It was warm in the sun. I sat on a dead cottonwood and drank the coffee black from one of his tin cups and watched him fish. There was a ranch farther upstream, and curious Angus wandered out of the unfenced pasture and nosed through the willows and clattered across the stones on the beach into the shallows. I saw Nygurski break his leader on a snag, then look back at me in frustration. I pointed to my watch.

He walked up the beach with his fly rod over his shoulder. His jeans were wet up to his thighs. He slipped his straw creel off his shoulder, slit open the stomachs of three rainbow, scooped out the guts and threw them back into the willows. Then he stooped by the edge of the stream and dug the blood and membrane out of the vertebrae with his thumbnail.

“I saw you turn that big one loose,” he said.

“I don’t keep them much anymore. I don’t have a Montana license, anyway.”

“You hunt?”

“I used to. I don’t much anymore.”

“You give it up in the army?”

“Something like that.”

He poured himself a cup of coffee, took two wax-paper-wrapped pork chop sandwiches out of his rucksack and gave me one, then sat down on the log next to me. The veins in his thick neck stuck out like webs of cord when he chewed.

“What kind of gun do you have?” he said.

“An army .45 automatic.”

“You have a permit for it?”

“In Louisiana I do. Not here.”

“They’re not real big on gun permits in Montana, but let’s get you one, anyway.”

“What are we talking about?”

“We have a tap on Sally Dio’s telephone. He knows it.”

“So?”

“He doesn’t know that we have a tap on a pay phone down the shore from his house. The one that he uses for some of his longdistance calls.”

I picked up a small, flat, gray stone and skipped it out on the water.

“He called a bar in Vegas,” Nygurski said.

“He said to the guy who answered, Tell Charlie I’ve got a yard job for him up here.” You know what that is?”

“No, that’s a new one.”

“I’ve heard a couple of Quentin graduates use it. It’s when they do somebody out on the yard. The last time we heard Sal say something like that on a tap, a witness against him got a .22 magnum round behind the ear. But we don’t know who Charlie is.”

I tossed another small stone in a gentle arc out on the water. It made a circle like a trout rising, then the circle floated on down the riffle into white water.

“Maybe it doesn’t have anything to do with you,” he said.

“The Dios have lots of enemies.”

I brushed the gravel off my palms and I didn’t say anything for a while. The sun was hot now, and flies were hatching out of the cattails and rainbows popping at them in a shaded pool under the cliff.

“What do you think I ought to do?” I said finally.

“Maybe it’s time to go back to New Iberia.”

“You think he’d bring in a mechanic, risk his whole operation, because of pride?”

“Look, he’s got a little clout in the mob because he’s Frank Dio’s son. But basically Sal’s a loser. He’s a lousy musician, he did time for stolen credit cards, his wife dumped him after he broke her nose, his friends are bought-and-paid-for rummies and coke heads Then you come along and remodel his face while everybody gets to watch. What do you think a guy like that is feeling for you right now?”

“It won’t matter, then, if I go back to Louisiana or not.”

“Maybe not.”

I looked at my watch. Across the stream I saw a hawk drop suddenly into a meadow and hook a field mouse in its talons.

“Thanks for the fishing trip. I need to pick up my truck now,” I said.

“I’m sorry to be the one to drop this on you.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“Why in God’s name did you do it, Robicheaux?”

I didn’t sleep that night. As we say in AA, the executive committee held a session in my head. I thought about sending Alafair back to Louisiana, to stay with my cousin or Batist and his wife, but then I would lose all control over her situation. I doubted that Harry Mapes would make a move against either of us as long as my trial was pending and it looked like I was going to take the fall for Dalton Vidrine’s murder; but then again you can’t second-guess a psychopath, and I believed that’s what he was.

I still wasn’t convinced by Dan Nygurski about Sally Dio’s calling Vegas to bring in a contract killer. The mob, or at least its members I had known in New Orleans, did not operate like that. They whacked out witnesses, Colombian competitors, and each other, but they didn’t hit ordinary people because of a personal grudge. Their own leadership didn’t allow it; it brought down too much heat on their operation and compromised their hard-bought relationships with politicians, police officials, and judges. Sally Dee was a vicious punk, but his father was smart and cautious, a survivor of gang wars and Mafia power struggles. I just didn’t believe they would be willing to blow it all over a broken tooth.