Black Cherry Blues (23 page)

I was tired. After hiking back to my truck, I drove up the road in the gray light between the wet fields, then I glanced in the side mirror at a black Willys Jeepster, a remake of the classic model manufactured right after World War II. Because the road was wet and there was no dust, I could see the driver’s tall outline behind the steering wheel. Then he accelerated and closed on my rear bumper, as though he wanted to see my reflection in the side mirror or some detail of my pickup the dealer’s name, a bumper sticker that read Mulate’s, Breaux Bridge, Louisiana.

Up ahead was the wide, squat log tavern where Clayton Des marteau and his cousin had probably spent the last night of their lives, where Darlene had waited tables, and where she had probably met Dixie Lee Pugh while he was in a drunken stupor, saved him from getting his head kicked in, and driven him over the mountains to Sally Dio’s on Flathead Lake. It was starting to mist, and a purple and orange neon war bonnet was lighted on the roof against the gray sky.

I pulled onto the gravel parking lot and waited to see what the driver in the Jeepster would do. He slowed abreast of me, his long hands on the top of the steering wheel, and stared intently out the passenger’s window. His face, forehead, and neck were streaked with thin scabs, as though he had walked through a nest of rust-colored spiderweb.

I wanted him to stop, to open his door, to confront me with his injury and his anger. I wanted to see a weapon in his hand and feel that adrenaline surge, that violent sanction, that lights and clarifies the mind and resolves all the complexities.

But Harry Mapes was holding all the good cards. Harry Mapes had been a helicopter pilot in Vietnam, and he knew that you don’t change the terms of your situation when your Gatling guns are locked in on a solitary pajama-clad target in the middle of a glassy rice field.

He turned into the parking lot and parked by the front door, where three Indians in work clothes were drinking canned beer next to a truck. He lit a cigarette with a gold lighter before he got out of his Jeepster, then went inside without looking back at me.

By the time I got back to Missoula that night Alafair had already had her supper at the baby-sitter’s, but I took her for a late snack at a pizza place called Red Pies Over Montana. She wore her soft denim jeans with the elastic waistband, patent leather shoes with white socks that were now gray with dust from the playground, and her yellow T-shirt printed with a smiling purple whale and the words “Baby Orca” on it. Her cheeks were spotted with red pizza sauce. Through the restaurant window I could see the stars over the mountains.

“Dave?” she said.

“What is it, little guy?”

“When we going back home?”

“Don’t you like it here?”

“I want to see Tex. Maybe Batist needs us at the shop. He can’t read.”

“You don’t have to read to sell worms and shiners.”

“Nothing here is like it is at home.”

“It has a lot of good things, though, doesn’t it?”

“I miss Tripod. I miss Clarise. It’s cold at night.”

I brushed her shiny black hair with my hand.

“It won’t be long. You’ll see,” I said.

But my assurance was an emotional lie. I didn’t know when we could go back. I wasn’t sure if I ever could. That night in the dark, with the door open between our bedrooms, I heard her saying her prayers by the side of the bed, then climbing in under the covers.

“Dave?”

“What?”

“Are people trying to hurt us? Is that why we had to move?”

I got up and walked barefoot into her room and sat on the edge of the bed. Her face looked round and tan in the moonlight through the window. Her blanket was pulled up to her chin.

“Don’t think like that, Alf. Nobody wants to hurt guys like us. We’re good guys,” I said.

“Think of all the people who love you. Batist and Clarise and your friends and teachers at school. They all love you, Alfie. And I love you most of all.”

I could see her wide-spaced teeth and the brightness of her eyes when she smiled up from the pillow.

But her thoughts were not far from my own. That night I dreamed of South Louisiana, of blue herons standing among flooded cypress trees, fields of sugarcane beaten with purple and gold light in the fall, the smell of smoldering hickory and pork dripping into the ash in our smokehouse, the way billows of fog rolled out of the swamp in the morning, so thick and white that sound a bass flopping, a bullfrog falling off a log into the water came to you inside a wet bubble, pelicans sailing out of the sun over the breakers out on the Gulf, the palm trees ragged and green and clacking in the salt breeze, and the crab and crawfish boils and fish fries that went on year-round, as though there were no end to a season and death had no sway in our lives, and finally the song that always broke my heart, “La Jolie Blonde,” which in a moment made the year 1945. Our yard was abloom with hibiscus and blue and pink hydrangeas and the neighbors came on horseback to the fais-dodo under our oaks.

The next morning I got a call from Tess Regan, the third-grade teacher and assistant principal at Alafair’s school. She said she had a one-hour break at eleven o’clock, and she asked if she could walk down to the house and talk with me.

“Is there something wrong?” I said.

“Maybe it’s nothing. I’d rather talk to you about it at your house.”

“Sure. Come on down.”

A few minutes later she knocked on the screen door. She wore a pale green cotton dress, and her auburn hair was tied back with a green kerchief. I could see baby powder on her freckled shoulders.

“I hope I’m not bothering you,” she said.

“No, not at all. I have some iced tea made. It’s a beautiful day. Let’s have some on the porch.”

“All right,” she said. The corners of her eyes wrinkled good-naturedly at the deference to her situation as a layperson in a Catholic elementary school.

I brought the tea out on the porch, and we sat on two old metal chairs. The light was bright on the lawn and the trees, and bumblebees hummed over the clover in the grass.

“A man called earlier,” she said.

“He said he was a friend of yours from Louisiana. He wanted to know where you and Alafair lived.”

“What was his name?”

“He wouldn’t give it.”

“Did you tell him?”

“No, of course not. We don’t give out people’s addresses. I told him to call information. He said he tried, but your number was unlisted.”

“It isn’t, but my address isn’t in the phone book, and information usually won’t give out addresses. Why did the call bother you?” I leaned slightly forward.

“He was rude. No, it was more than that. His voice was ugly.”

“What else did he say?”

“He kept saying he was an old friend, that it was important he talk with you, that I should understand that.”

“I see.”

“Alafair said you used to be a police officer. Does this have something to do with that?”

“Maybe. Could you tell if it was long-distance?”

“It didn’t sound like it.”

I tried to think. Who knew that Alafair went to a parochial school in Missoula? Darlene, perhaps. Or maybe I said something to Clete. Or maybe the person called New Iberia and got something out of Batist or Clarise. Then he could have phoned every Catholic elementary school in town until he hit the right combination.

“What was the first thing this guy said?” I asked.

Her mouth was wet and red when it came away from her glass. Her green eyes looked thoughtfully out into the sunlight.

“He said, ‘I’m calling for Dave Robicheaux,’ ” she said.

“I told him I didn’t understand. Then he said it again, ‘I’m calling for Dave.’ So I said, ‘You mean you’re delivering a message for him?’ “

“Then he knew he’d found the right school.”

“What?”

“He’s a slick guy.”

“I’m sorry if I handled it wrong,” she said.

“Don’t worry about it. He’s probably a bill collector. They follow me around the country.” I smiled at her, but she didn’t buy it.

She set her iced tea on the porch railing and sat with her knees close together and her hands folded in her lap. She dropped her eyes, then looked up at me again.

“I’m probably being intrusive, but you’re in some trouble, aren’t you?”

 “Yes.”

“Who is this man?”

“I’m not sure. If he calls again, though, I’d appreciate your letting me know.”

“Is he a criminal?”

I looked at her face and eyes. I wondered how much of the truth she was able to take. I decided not to find out.

“Maybe,” I said.

She pinched her fingers together in her lap.

“Mr. Robicheaux, if he’s a threat to Alafair, we need to know that,” she said.

“You have an obligation to tell us that, I think.”

“This guy didn’t have a Texas accent, did he?”

“No. He didn’t have an accent.”

“A couple of guys have a beef with me. Maybe he works for one of them. But their beef is with me. It’s not going to affect anything at your school.”

“I see,” she said, and her eyes went away into the sunlight on the yard.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to sound sharp,” I said.

“You weren’t. I’m sorry you’re having this trouble.” She stood up to go.

“I think you should consider calling the police. Your daughter is a beautiful little girl.”

“There’s no law against a guy asking for somebody’s address.”

“You probably understand these things better than I, then. Thank you for the tea.”

“Wait a minute. I appreciate your help. I really do. And Alafair thinks the world of you. But I could start explaining my situation to you now and we’d still be talking tomorrow morning. It’s a mess, and it involves a bunch of bad people. I don’t have any answers for it, either. Sometimes cops can’t do you any good. That’s why as I get older I believe more and more in prayer. At least I feel like I’m dealing with somebody who’s got some real authority.” I smiled again, and this time it took.

“I’ll bet you handle it all right,” she said, and her eyes crinkled. She squeezed my hand and walked down the steps onto the sidewalk, out of the porch’s shadow, into the sunshine, her calves clicking with light in the bright air.

I went into the kitchen and fixed a bowl of Grape-Nuts for lunch. While I ate I stared out the window at the neighbor’s orange cat climbing up the roof of the garage out by the alley. Overhead, two doves sat on the telephone wires. Who had been the man on the telephone? I thought. Sally Dio’s mechanic out of Vegas? Or maybe somebody who worked with Harry Mapes. Why not? It would be a safe way for Mapes to keep me agitated and off-balance. He was a mailer of hypodermic needles and threats against a child. A telephone call to the school would be consistent with his past behavior. At least that’s what a police department psychologist would say.

Except for the fact that I was the defendant in an upcoming murder trial and Mapes was the prosecution witness. The apparatus of the law was on his side; he was the friend of the court, the chain-whipped victim of an alcoholic, burnt-out cop. Mapes didn’t need to shave the dice.

Which brought me back to my original speculation and Dan Nygurski’s warning, one I truly did not want to confront. A faceless button man whose only name was Charlie.

Call the police, she had said. Suffering God, I thought, why is it that in problematic situations almost everyone resorts to axioms and societal remedies that in actuality nobody believes in? Tess Regan was a good girl, and obviously I was being too hard on her in my frustration, but ask yourself, have you ever known anyone whose marriage was saved by a marriage counselor, whose drinking was cured by a psychiatrist, whose son was kept out of reform school by a social worker? In a badass, beer-glass brawl, would you rather have an academic liberal covering your back or a hobnailed redneck?

I drove to Bob Ward’s Sporting Goods, a mountaineering and tackle-and-gun store I had heard about even in Louisiana, and used my MasterCard to buy a .38 revolver, a box of rounds and a cutaway holster for it, a secondhand twelve-gauge shotgun, and a box of double-aught buckshot. Back home I carried the tool chest from my truck into the kitchen, slipped the top shelf out of the cupboard, and tacked the .38 holster to its bottom. I replaced the shelf, loaded five rounds into the revolver, set the hammer on the empty chamber, slipped the revolver into the holster, and snapped the leather strap across the base of the hammer.

Then I took a hacksaw from the tool chest, lay the shotgun on the back-porch step, placed my knee hard against the stock, and sawed through the ventilated rib sight and both barrels ten inches above the chambers. I broke open the breech, looked through the barrels at the clean, oily whorls of light, plopped two double-aughts in the chambers, snapped the breech shut, set the safety, and put the shotgun on the top shelf of the closet in the front hallway.

With the .45 in the bedroom, there would now be no place in the house where I would not have almost immediate access to a weapon. It wasn’t a panacea, but it was all I had. I could have spent time regretting that I had bounced Sally Dio’s head off his van in front of his friends, but if he was involved with Harry Mapes or Star Drilling Company, and I believed he was, it would have been only a matter of time before I had trouble with the Dio family, anyway.

I was still tired from yesterday’s drive over the Divide. No, it went deeper than that. I was tired of pursuing a course that seemed to have no resolution, of walking about in what seemed to be a waking nightmare, of feeling that I deserved all this, that somehow I had asked for it, that it was inevitable that I ride in a wood cart like a condemned seventeenth-century criminal, creaking over the cobbled street through the mob toward the elevated platform where a hooded man waited with wheel and iron bar.

I put on my gym shorts, running shoes, and a cutoff sweatshirt, and ran four miles along the river. It was a cloudless day, the sky hard and blue, and the pines high up on the mountains seemed to tremble with light. In the south the Bitterroots were as sharp and etched against the sky as if they had been cut out with a razor blade. The spring runoff of melted snow was starting to abate in the river, and great round boulders that had been covered by the current only two days ago were now exposed and hot-looking in the sun, the skeletal remains of hellgrammites welded to their sides. I ran all the way to the university district, thumped across the river on an abandoned railroad bridge, and looked down below at a fisherman horsing a rainbow out of the current onto the gravel. The riverbank was lined with cottonwoods and willows, and the wind blew out of Hellgate Canyon and flattened the new leaves so that the trees looked like they had changed, in a flick of the eye, to a pale green against the brown rush of water.