Black Cherry Blues (24 page)

When I turned into my block my body was running with sweat, and I could feel the sun’s heat deep in my skin. I did fifty push-ups off the back steps, fifty stomach crunches, one hundred leg lifts, and twenty-five chin-ups on the iron stanchion that supported the clothesline, while my neighbor’s orange cat watched me from the garage roof. Then I sat quietly in the grass, my forearms on my knees, breathing the sweet smell of the clover, my heartbeat as regular and strong and temporarily as confident as it had been twenty years before.

The moon was down that night, somewhere beyond the black outline of the Bitterroots, and dry lightning leapt whitely between the clouds over the mountains. I could smell electricity and impending rain through the screen door, and the trees along the street were dark and shaking in the wind. At nine o’clock the phone rang.

“Hello,” I said.

“Can you come up here, Dave?” The line was heavy with static.

“Clete?”

“I need you up here, man. Real bad.”

“What is it?”

“Darlene… Fuck, man. She’s dead.”

CHAPTER 8

The regular baby-sitter wasn’t home. I found Tess Regan’s number in the telephone book, called her, then took Alafair over to her house.

An hour and a half later I drove up the dirt lane to Clete’s small redwood house on Flathead Lake. All the lights were on. It was raining, and the lake was black in the background, and I could see the rain blowing in the light from the windows. Farther up the dirt lane, past the electronic gate, the Dio house was dark. I knocked on Clete’s front door; when no one answered, I went inside.

I heard a toilet flush somewhere in back, then he walked out of the bedroom with a wet towel held to his mouth. His face looked bloodless, the skin as tight as a lampshade. His tie was pulled loose, and his white shirt was wet down the front. He sat down at the table by the sliding glass doors and drank noisily out of a coffee cup, his whole hand wrapped around the cup to keep it from shaking. On the table were a carton of milk and a fifth of Cutty Sark. He drew in deeply on a Camel and held the smoke down as though he were taking a hit off a reefer. His breath jerked in his chest when he let the smoke out. Out on the lake a lighted, anchored sailboat pitched in the troughs.

He rubbed the towel on his mouth again, then on the back of his thick neck.

“I can’t keep anything down. I think I got a peptic ulcer,” he said.

“Where is she?”

“In the main bathroom.” He looked up at me with his poached face and swallowed.

“Get yourself together.”

“I came back from Missoula, she was like that. I can’t take this shit.”

But I wasn’t listening to him. I walked down the hall to the bathroom. When I looked inside I had to clasp one hand on the door-jamb. The safety razor lay on the tile floor, glued thickly to the surface with her blood. She was nude and had slipped down in the tub on her side so that only half her face floated above the soapy red water. There was a deep incision across the inside of both forearms.

Oh Lord God, I thought, and had to take a deep breath and look away.

She had bled until she was almost white. I sat on the edge of the tub and touched her soft, wet hair with my fingertips. It felt like wet feathers.

Written in lipstick on the bathroom mirror were the words:

C,

Checking out, Bye-bye, love,

I ran my hand through my hair and stared numbly at her. Then I saw the tiny scratches and the red discolorations, like pale strawberry bruises, like love bites, on her neck and shoulder. I took a sheet out of the bedroom and draped it over her, then went back into the living room.

Clete was pouring another scotch and milk at the table. The smoke from his Camel curled up over the nicotine stains on his fingers. The skin around his eyes flexed abruptly when he saw my expression.

“Hey, you get that look out of your face, man,” he said.

“What were you doing in Missoula?” I said.

“I pick up cigars for Sal’s old man. There’s only one store in Missoula that carries his brand.”

“Why tonight?”

“He told me to.”

“Why haven’t you called the locals?”

“They’re going to bust me for it.”

“For a suicide?” I watched his face carefully.

“It’s no suicide. You know it’s not.”

“Clete, if you did this”

“Are you crazy? I was going to ask her to marry me. I’m seeing a therapist now because I’m fucked up, but when I was straightened out I was going to see about taking us back to New Orleans, living a regular life, opening up a bar maybe, getting away from the grease balls.”

I looked steadily into his eyes. They stared back at me, hard as green marbles, as though they had no lids. The stitched scar that ran from the bridge of his nose through one eyebrow looked as red as a bicycle patch. Then his eyes broke, and he took a hit of the scotch and milk.

“I don’t care what you believe,” he said.

“If you think I got jealous over you and her, you’re right. But I didn’t blame her for it. I got a condition I can’t do anything about right now. The therapist says it’s because of all that stuff back in New Orleans and because I’m working for grease balls and pretending I like it when actually I wouldn’t spit on these guys. But I didn’t blame her. You got that?”

“She told you?”

“What’s to tell? There’s ways a guy knows. Butt out of my personal affairs, Streak.”

“I put a sheet over her. Don’t go back in there till the cops get here.” I picked up the telephone. The moon had broken through a crack in the clouds over the mountains on the far side of the lake, and I could see the froth on the waves blowing in the wind.

“You saw the bruises?” Clete said.

“Yes.”

“Most of the locals aren’t real bright. But when the coroner does the autopsy, they’re going to pick me up.”

“Maybe. What’s the point?”

He drank out of the cup again, then drew in on the cigarette. His breath was ragged coming out.

“You’re not big on sympathy tonight, are you?” he said.

“To be honest, I don’t know what I feel toward you, Clete.”

“It’s Sal. It’s gotta be. I’m going to be on ice, he’s going to be playing rock ‘n’ roll with Dixie Lee and the Tahoe corn holers I’m going to nail that fucker, man. I’m going to blow up his shit. I’m going to do it in pieces, too.”

“What’s his motive?” I set the receiver back down.

    “He doesn’t need one. He’s psychotic.”

“I don’t buy that.”

“She was on to something. It’s got to do with oil, with Dixie Lee, maybe with dope. I don’t know. She believed in spirits. She thought they told her things. Then yesterday she saw Sal chopping up lines for Dixie Lee and a couple of the Tahoe broads, and she told him he was a fucking cancer, that one day his kind were going to be driven into holes in the earth. Can you dig that? Holes in the earth.”

“Where are the Dios now?”

“They said they were going to a play up in Bigfork.”

“Have you heard Sally Dio say anything about a guy named Charlie?”

“Charlie? No. Who is he?”

“A hit man out of Vegas.”

“Wait a minute, they picked up a guy at the airport in Missoula last night. I thought he was just another one of Sal’s butt wipes I offered to drive in and get him, but Sal said I needed a night off.”

“What did he look like?”

“I don’t know, I didn’t see him.”

The clouds over the lake were silver where the moon had broken through, and the water below was black and glazed with light.

“I’m going to call the cops now, then I’m taking off,” I said.

“I don’t want my name in it, all right?”

“Whatever you say.” Then he said, “You’re pretty cool. A cool operator. You always were. Nobody shakes ole Streak’s cookie bag. They could strike matches on your soul and not make you flinch.”

I didn’t answer him. I walked out into the misting rain and the broken moonlight and drove my pickup truck back down the lake-front road toward Poison. The cherry trees in the orchards were dripping with rainwater in my headlights. The wooded hills were dark, and down on the beach I could see a white line of foam sliding up on the sand. With the windows up I was sweating inside the cab. I passed a neon-lit bar, a boat dock strung with light bulbs, a wind-sheltered cove where the pines grew right down to the water’s edge, a clapboard cottage where people were having a party and somebody was still barbecuing in the darkness of the porch. Then I turned east of Poison, at the foot of the lake, and headed for the Jocko Valley, and I knew that I would be all right. But suddenly the clouds closed over the moon again, the sky became as black as scorched metal, and a hard wind blew out of the ice-capped Missions. A curtain of driving rain swept across meadow, irrigation canal, slough, poplar windbreak, and willow-lined stream. Lightning leapt from the crest of the Missions to the black vault of sky overhead, thunder rolled out of the canyons, and hailstones the size of dimes clattered on my truck like tack hammers.

I pulled to the side of the road, sweat boiling off my face, my windows thick with steam. The truck shook violently in the wind. My knuckles were round and white on the steering wheel. I felt my teeth grinding, felt the truck’s metal joints creak and strain, the tailgate tremble and reverberate against the hooked chain; then a shudder went through me that made my mouth drop open, as though someone had clapped me on both ears with the flats of his hands. When I closed my eyes I thought I saw a copper-colored stream beaten with raindrops, and in it a brown trout with a torn mouth and blood roaring in clouds from its gills.

The next morning I walked down to the old brick church next to Alafair’s school. The sun was brilliant in the bowl of blue sky above the valley. High up on one of the mountains above Hellgate Canyon, I could see horses grazing in the new grass and lupine below the timber, and the trees along the river were dark green from the rain. The current looked deep and cold between the sunbaked boulders that protruded from the water’s surface. Someone had planted a garden by the side door of the church, and yellow roses and spearmint bloomed against the red-brick wall. I went inside, crossed myself at the holy water fount, and knelt in a pew close to the altar. Like almost all Catholic churches, this one smelled like stone and water, incense, and burning wax. I think that fact is no accident inside a Catholic church. I think perhaps the catacombs, where the early Christians celebrated mass, smelled the same way.

I prayed for Darlene, for Alafair, my father and brother, and finally for myself. A muscular, blond-headed priest in black trousers, scuffed cowboy boots, and a T-shirt came out of the sacristy and began removing the flower vases from the altar. I walked to the communion rail, introduced myself, and asked if he would hear my confession.

“Let’s go out into the garden,” he said.

Between the church and the rectory was a sunny enclosure of lawn and flower beds, stone benches, bird feeders, and a small greenhouse. The priest and I sat next to one another on a bench, and I told him about my relationship with Darlene and finally about her death. While I talked he flipped small pieces of dirt at the leaves of a potted caladium. When I finished he was silent a moment; then he said, “I’m not quite sure what you’re confessing to. Do you feel that you used this woman?”

“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.