Black Cherry Blues (6 page)

“What’s your name again?”

“Benoit.”

“Get into another line of work.”

I walked back outside to my pickup truck. The shadows were purple on the bayou and the church lawn. An elderly Negro was taking down the flag from the pole in front of the courthouse and a white man was closing and locking the side doors. Then two men came out the front entrance and walked hurriedly across the grass toward me, one slightly ahead of the other.

The first was a tall, angular man, dressed in brown slacks, shined loafers, a yellow sport shirt with a purple fleur-delis on the pocket, a thin western belt with a silver buckle and tongue. I could hear the change in his pocket when he walked. On his bottom lip was a triangular scar that looked like wet plastic.

The man behind him was shorter, dark, thick across the middle, the kind of man who wore his slacks below the navel to affect size and strength and disguise his advancing years. His eyebrows dipped down and met over his nose. Even though it was warm, he wore a long-sleeved white shirt, the pocket filled with a notebook and clip-on ballpoint pens.

Both men had the agitated look of people who might have seen their bus pass them by at their stop.

“Just a minute there, buddy,” the tall man said.

I turned and looked at him with my hand on the open truck door.

“You were using our names in there. Where the hell do you get off making those remarks?” he said. His eyes narrowed and he ran his tongue over the triangular scar on his lip.

“I was just passing on some information. It didn’t originate with me, partner.”

“I don’t give a goddamn where it came from. I won’t put up with it. Particularly from some guy I never saw before,” he said.

“Then don’t listen to it.”

“It’s called libel.”

“It’s called filing a police report,” I said.

“Who the fuck are you?” the other man said.

“My name’s Dave Robicheaux.”

“You’re an ex-cop or some kind of local bird dog?” he said.

“I’m going to ask you guys to disengage,” I said.

“You’re asking us! You’re unbelievable, man,” the tall man said.

I started to get in my truck. He put his hand around the window jamb and held it.

“You’re not running out of this,” he said. The accent was East Texas, all right, piney woods, red hills, and sawmills.

“Pugh’s a pathetic man. He melted his brains a long time ago. The company gave him a break when nobody else would. Obviously it didn’t work out. He gets souped up with whiskey and dope and has delusions.” He took his hand from the window jamb and pointed his finger an inch from my chest.

“Now, if you want to spend your time talking to somebody like that, that’s your damn business. But if you spread rumors about me and I hear about it, I’m going to look you up.”

I got in my truck and closed the door. I breathed through my nose, looked out at the shadows on the church, the stone statue of Evangeline under the spreading oak. Then I clicked my key ring on the steering wheel. The faces of the two men were framed through my truck window.

Then I yielded to the temptations of anger and pride, two serpentine heads of the Hydra of character defects that made up my alcoholism.

“It was the Coleman fuel for the stove, wasn’t it?” I said.

“You spread it around the inside of the cabin, then strung it down the steps and up the levee. As an added feature maybe you opened the drain on the gas drum, too. You didn’t expect the explosion to blow Dixie Lee out into the water, though, did you?”

It was a guess, but the mouth of the short man parted in disbelief. I started the engine, turned out into the traffic, and drove past the old storefronts and wood colonnades toward the edge of town and the back road to New Iberia.

In my dreams is a watery place where my wife and some of my friends live. I think it’s below the Mekong River or perhaps deep under the Gulf. The people who live there undulate in the tidal currents and are covered with a green-gold light. I can’t visit them there, but sometimes they call me up. In my mind’s eye I can see them clearly. The men from my platoon still wear their pots and their rent and salt-caked fatigues. Smoke rises in bubbles from their wounds.

Annie hasn’t changed much. Her eyes are electric blue, her hair gold and curly. Her shoulders are still covered with sun freckles. She wears red flowers on the front of her nightgown where they shot her with deer slugs. On the top of her left breast is a strawberry birthmark that always turned crimson with blood when we made love.

How you doing, baby lovel she asks.

Hello, sweetheart.

Your father’s here.

How is he?

He says to tell you not to get sucked in. What’s he mean? You’re not in trouble again, are you, baby love? We talked a long time about that before.

It’s just the way I am, I guess.

It’s still rah-rah for the penis, huh? I’ve got to go, Dave. There’s a big line. Are you coming to see me?

Sure.

You promise?

You bet. I won’t let you down, kiddo.

“You really want me to tell you what it means?” the psychologist in Lafayette said.

“Dreams are your province.”

“You’re an intelligent man. You tell me.”

“I don’t know.”

“Yes, you do.”

“Sometimes alcoholics go on dry drunks. Sometimes we have drunk dreams.”

“It’s a death wish. I’d get a lot of distance between myself and those kinds of thoughts.”

I stared silently at the whorls of purple and red in his carpet.

The day after I visited the St. Martin Parish courthouse I talked with the sheriff there on the phone. I had met him several times when I was a detective with the Iberia Parish sheriff’s office, and I had always gotten along well with him. He said there was nothing in the coroner’s report that would indicate the girl had been struck with a tire iron or a jack handle before the fish camp burned.

“So they did an autopsy?” I said.

“Dave, there wasn’t hardly anything left of that poor girl to autopsy. From what Pugh says and what we found, she was right over the gas drum.”

“What are you going to do with those two clowns you had in your office yesterday?”

“Nothing. What can I do?”

“Pugh says they killed some people up in Montana.”

“I made some calls up there,” the sheriff said.

“Nobody has anything on these guys. Not even a traffic citation. Their office in Lafayette says they’re good men. Look, it’s Pugh that’s got the record, that’s been in trouble since they ran him out of that shithole he comes from.”

“I had an encounter with those two guys after I left your department yesterday. I think Pugh’s telling the truth. I think they did it.”

“Then you ought to get a badge again, Dave. Is it about lunch-time over there?”

“What?”

“Because that’s what time it is here. Come on by and have coffee sometime. We’ll see you, podna.”

I drove into New Iberia to buy some chickens and sausage links from my wholesaler. It was raining when I got back home. I put “La Jolie Blonde” by Iry Lejeune on the record player, changed into my gym shorts, and pumped iron in the kitchen for a half hour. The wind was cool through the window and smelled of rain and damp earth and flowers and trees. My chest and arms were swollen with blood and exertion, and when the rain slacked off and the sun cracked through the mauve-colored sky, I ran three miles along the bayou, jumping across puddles, boxing with raindrops that dripped from the oak limbs overhead.

Back at the house I showered, changed into a fresh denim shirt and khakis, and called Dan Nygurski collect, in Great Falls, Montana. He couldn’t accept the collect call, but he took the number and called me back on his line.

“You know about Dixie Lee?” I said.

“Yep.”

“Do you know about the waitress who died in the fire?”

“Yes.”

“Did y’all have a tail on him that night?”

“Yeah, we did but he got off it. It’s too bad. Our people might have saved the girl’s life.”

“He lost them?”

“I don’t think it was deliberate. He took the girl to a colored place in Breaux Bridge, I guess it was, a zydeco place or something like that. What is that, anyway?”

“It’s Negro-Cajun music. It means ‘vegetables,” all mixed up.”

“Anyway, our people had some trouble with a big buck who thought it was all right for Pugh to come in the club but not other white folks. In the meantime Pugh, who was thoroughly juiced, wandered out the side door with the girl and took off.”

“Have you heard his story?”

“Yeah.”

“Do you believe it?”

“What difference does it make? It’s between him and the locals now. I’ll be square with you, Robicheaux. I don’t give a damn about Pugh. I want that lunatic Sally Dio in a cage. I don’t care how I get him there, either. You can tell Dixie Lee for me I’ll always listen when he’s on the subject of Sally Dee. Otherwise, he’s not in a seller’s market.”

“Why would he be buying and leasing land for this character Dio? Is it related to the oil business?”

“Hey, that’s good, Robicheaux. The mob hooking up with the oil business.” He was laughing out loud now.

“That’s like Frankenstein making it with the wife of Dracula. I’m not kidding you, that’s great. The guys in the office’ll love this. You got any other theories?”

Then he started laughing again.

I quietly replaced the telephone receiver in the cradle, then walked down to the dock in the wet afternoon sunlight to help Batist close up the bait shop.

That evening Alafair and I drove down to Cypremort Point for boiled crabs at the pavilion. We sat at one of the checker-cloth tables on the screened porch by the bay, a big bib with a red crawfish on it tied around Alafair’s neck, and looked out at the sun setting across the miles of dead cypress, saw grass, the sandy inlets, the wetlands that stretched all the way to Texas. The tide was out, and the jetties were black and stark against the flat gray expanse of the bay and the strips of purple and crimson cloud that had flattened on the western horizon. Seagulls dipped and wheeled over the water’s edge, and a solitary blue heron stood among the saw grass in an inlet pool, his long body and slender legs like a painting on the air.

Alafair always set about eating bluepoint crabs with a devastating clumsiness. She smashed them in the center with the wood mallet, snapped off the claws, and cracked back the shell hinge with slippery hands and an earnest innocence that sent juice and pulp flying all over the table. When we finished eating I had to take her into the washroom and wipe off her hair, face, and arms with wet paper towels.

On the way back home I stopped in New Iberia and rented a Walt Disney movie, then I called up Batist and asked him and his wife to watch it with us. Batist was always fascinated by the VCR and never could quite understand how it worked.

“Them people that make the movie, they put it in that box, huh, Dave?” he said.

“That’s right.”

“It just like at the show, huh?”

“That’s right.”

“Then how it get up to the antenna and in the set?”

“It doesn’t go up to”

“And how come it don’t go in nobody else’s set?” he said.

“It don’t go out the house,” Alafair said.

“Not ‘It don’t.’ Say ‘It doesn’t,’ ” I said.

“Why you telling her that? She talk English good as us,” Batist said.

I decided to heat up some boudin and make some Kool-Aid.

I rented a lot of Disney and other films for children because I didn’t like Alafair to watch ordinary television in the evening or at least when I was not there. Maybe I was overly protective and cautious. But the celluloid facsimile of violence and the news footage of wars in the Middle East and Central America would sometimes cause the light to go out of her face and leave her mouth parted and her eyes wide, as though she had been slapped.

Disney films, Kool-Aid, boudin, bluepoint crabs on a breezy porch by the side of the bay were probably poor compensation for the losses she had known. But you offer what you have, perhaps even bless it with a prayer, and maybe somewhere down the line affection grows into faith and replaces memory. I can’t say. I’m not good at the mysteries, and I have few solutions even for my own problems. But I was determined that Alafair would never again be hurt unnecessarily, not while she was in my care, not while she was in this country.

“This is our turf, right, Batist?” I said as I gave him a paper plate with slices of boudin on it.

“What?” His and Alafair’s attention was focused on the image of Donald Duck on the television screen. Outside, the fireflies were lighting in the pecan trees.

“This is our Cajun land, right, podna?” I said.

“We make the rules, we’ve got our own flag.”

He gave me a quizzical look, then turned back to the television screen. Alafair, who was sitting on the floor, slapped her thighs and squealed uproariously while Donald Duck raged at his nephews.

The next day I visited Dixie Lee again at Lourdes and took him a couple of magazines. The sunlight was bright in his room, and someone had placed a green vase of roses in the window. The deputy left us alone, and Dixie lay on his side and looked at me from his pillow. His eyes were clear, and his cheeks were shaved and pink.

“You’re looking better,” I said.

“For the first time in years I’m not full of whiskey. It feels weird, I’m here to tell you. In fact, it feels so good I’d like to cut out the needle, too. But the centipedes start waking up for a snack.”

I nodded at the roses in the window and smiled.

“You have an admirer,” I said.

He didn’t answer. He traced a design on the bed with his index finger, as though he were pushing a penny around on the sheet.

“You grew up Catholic, didn’t you?” he said.

“Yes.”

“You still go to church?”

“Sure.”

“You think God punishes us right here, that it ain’t just in the next world?”

“I think those are bad ideas.”

“My little boy died in a fire. A bare electric cord under a rug started it. If I hadn’t been careless, it wouldn’t have happened. Then I killed that man’s little boy over in Fort Worth, and now I been in a fire myself and a young girl’s dead.”