Black Cherry Blues (16 page)

“Leasing or buying land for him?”

“Maybe. But don’t concern yourself. Go back to Louisiana.”

“You know anything about some AIM members who might have disappeared from the Blackfeet Reservation?”

“I’m really wondering about the soundness of your mind at this point.”

“It’s a simple question.”

“If you really want to step into a pile of shit, you’ve found a good way to do it.”

“Look, Mr. Nygurski, I’m all on my own. Maybe I’m going to Angola pen. That’s not hyperbole, I’m just about wiped out financially, my own testimony is my only defense, and my personal history is one that’ll probably make a jury shudder. Tell me what you’d do in my circumstances. I’d really appreciate that.”

He paused, and I heard him take a breath.

“I never heard anything about any AIM guys disappearing,” he said.

“You’ll have to talk with the tribal council or the sheriff’s department. Maybe the FBI, although they don’t have any love lost for those guys. Look, the reservation is a world unto itself. It’s like a big rural slum. Kids cook their heads huffing glue, women cut each other up in bars. The Browning jail is a horror show on Saturday night. They’re a deeply fucked-up people.”

“I may be over to see you in Great Falls.”

“Why?”

“Because I think Dio is mixed up in this. Harry Mapes has been around his place, and I don’t think it’s simply because he knows Dixie Lee.”

“Dio is mixed up with narcotics, whores, and gambling. Let me set you straight about this guy. He’s not Bugsy Siegel. Comparatively speaking, he’s a small-time player in Vegas and Tahoe. Anything he owns, he’s allowed to own. But he’s an ambitious guy who wants to be a swinging dick. So he’s come up here to Lum ‘n’ Abner land to make the big score. Now, that’s all you get, Robicheaux. Stay away from him. You won’t help your case, and in the meantime you might get hurt. If I hear anything about missing Indians, I’ll let you know.”

“Is it possible you feel you have the franchise on Sally Dio?”

“That could be, my friend. I grew up in West Virginia. I don’t like what shitheads can do to good country. But I’m also a federal agent. I get paid for doing certain things, which doesn’t include acting as an information center. I think I’m already overextended in this conversation. So long, Mr. Robicheaux.”

That evening I walked Alafair downtown in the twilight, and we ate fried chicken in a restaurant by the river. Then we walked over the Higgins Street Bridge, where old men fished off the railing in the dark swirls of current far below. The mountains in the west were purple and softly outlined against the red sun, and the wind was cold blowing across the bridge. I could smell chimney smoke and wood pulp in the air, diesel and oil from a passing Burlington Northern. We walked all the way to the park, where a group of boys was trying to hurry summer with a night baseball game. But in the hard glare of the lights the wind grew colder and the dust swirled in the air and finally drops of rain clicked across the tin roof of the dugout. The sky over the valley was absolutely black when we made it home.

Firewood was stacked on the back porch of our house, and I broke up kindling from an orange crate in the fireplace, placed it and balls of newspaper under three pine logs on the andirons, and watched the bright red cone of flame rise up into the brick chimney. It was raining hard outside now, clattering against the roof and windows, and I could see a sawmill lighted across the river in the rain.

During the night lightning flickered whitely on the far wall of my bedroom. It created a window in the soft green plaster, and through it I saw Annie sitting on a rock by a stream’s edge. Cylindrical stone formations rose against the cobalt sky behind her. Her hair and denim shirt were wet, and I could see her breasts through the cloth.

I’m worried, Dave, she said.

Why’s that?

You haven’t been going to AA meetings. You think maybe you’re setting yourself up for a slip?

I haven’t had time.

She pulled her wet shirtfront loose from her skin with her fingers.

Will you promise me to look in the yellow pages today and find a meeting? she said.

I promise.

Because I think you’re flying on the outer edges now. Maybe looking at something worse than a slip.

I wouldn’t do that.

What?

I’m Catholic.

I’m talking about something else, baby love. You blow out your doors and they put you in a place like Mandeville.

I’ve still got it between the ditches. I’m sober.

But you keep calling on me. I’m tired, sweetheart. I have to come a long way so we can talk.

I’m sorry.

She put a finger to her lips.

I’ll come again. For a while. But you have to keep your promise.

Annie.

When I woke I was sleepwalking, and my palms were pressed against the cold green plaster of the bedroom wall.

CHAPTER 6

It was still raining and cold in the morning. The logs in the fireplace had crumbled into dead ash, and the sky outside was gray. The trees in the yard looked wet and black in the weak light. I turned on the furnace, put fresh logs in the fireplace, lit the kindling and balls of wadded newspaper, and tried to fix French toast for me and Alafair while she dressed for school. I thought I could hear the drone of mosquitoes in my brain. I had on a long-sleeved flannel shirt, and I kept wiping the perspiration out of my eyes on my forearm.

“Why you shaking, Dave?” Alafair said.

“I have malaria. It comes back sometimes. It’s not bad, though.”

“What?”

“I got it in the army. In the Philippines. It comes from mosquito bites. It goes away soon.”

“You ain’t suppose to be up when you sick. I can fix my own breakfast. I can cook yours, too.”

“Don’t say ‘ain’t.”

” She took the spatula and the handle of the frying pan out of my hands and began turning the toast. She wore fresh denims with an elastic waistband, and a purple sweater over her white shirt. Her black hair was shiny under the kitchen light.

I felt weak all over. I sat down at the kitchen table and wiped my face with a dry dish towel. I had to swallow before I could speak.

“Can you put on your raincoat and walk yourself to school this morning?” I said.

“Sure.”

“Then if I don’t pick you up this afternoon, you go to the babysitter’s. Okay?”

“Okay.”

I watched her pack her lunch box and put on her yellow raincoat and hood.

“Wait a minute. I’ll drive you,” I said.

“I can take myself. You sick, you.”

“Alafair, try not to talk like Batist. He’s a good man, but he never went to school.”

“You still sick, Dave.”

I rubbed the top of her head and hugged her briefly around the shoulders, then put on my raincoat and hat. The wind outside was cold and smelled of the pulp mill down the river. In the wet air the smell was almost like sewage. I drove Alafair to the school and let her off by the entrance to the playground. When I got back home I was trembling all over, and the heat from the fireplace and the furnace vents wouldn’t penetrate my skin. Instead, the house seemed filled with a dry cold that made static electricity jump off my hand when I touched a metal doorknob. I boiled a big pot of water on the kitchen stove to humidify the air, then sat in front of the fireplace with a blanket around my shoulders, my teeth clicking, and watched the resin boil and snap in the pine logs and the flames twist up the chimney.

As the logs softened and sank on the andirons, I felt as though I had been sent to a dark and airless space on the earth where memory became selective and flayed the skin an inch at a time. I can’t tell you why. I could never explain these moments, and neither could a psychologist. It happened first when I was ten years old, after my father had been locked up a second time in the parish jail for fighting in Provost’s Pool Room. I was at home by myself, looking at a religious book that contained a plate depicting the souls in hell. Suddenly I felt myself drawn into the illustration, caught forever in their lake of remorse and despair. I was filled with terror and guilt, and no amount of assurance from the parish priest would relieve me of it.

When these moments occurred in my adult life, I drank. I did it full tilt, too, the way you stand back from a smoldering fire of wet leaves and fling a glass full of gasoline onto the flames. I did it with Beam and Jack Daniel’s straight up, with a frosted Jax on the side; vodka in the morning to sweep the spiders into their nest; four inches of Wild Turkey at noon to lock Frankenstein in his closet until the afternoon world of sunlight on oak and palm trees and the salt wind blowing across Lake Pontchartrain reestablished itself in a predictable fashion.

But this morning was worse than any of those other moments that I could remember. Maybe it was malaria, or maybe my childlike psychological metabolism still screamed for a drink and was writing a script that would make the old alternatives viable once again. But in truth I think it was something else. Perhaps, as Annie had said, I had found the edge.

The place where you unstrap all your fastenings to the earth, to what you are and what you have been, where you flame out on the edge of the spheres, and the sun and moon become eclipsed and the world below is as dead and remote and without interest as if it were glazed with ice.

Is this the way it comes? I thought. With nothing dramatic, no three-day bender, no delirium tremens in a drunk tank, no cloth straps and Thorazine or a concerned psychiatrist to look anxiously into your face. You simply stare at the yellow handkerchief of flame in a fireplace and fear your own thoughts, as a disturbed child would. I shut my eyes and folded the blanket across my face. I could feel my whiskers against the wool, the sweat running down inside my shirt; could smell my own odor. The wind blew against the house, and a wet maple branch raked against the window.

Later, I heard a car stop outside in the rain and someone run up the walk onto the porch. I heard the knock on the door and saw a woman’s face through the steamed glass, but I didn’t get up from my chair. She wore a flat-brim black cowboy hat with a domed crown, and her hair and face were spotted with rain. She knocked more loudly, straining to see me through the glass, then she opened the door and put her head inside.

“Is something wrong?” she asked.

“Everything’s copacetic. Excuse me for not getting up.”

“Something’s burning.”

“I’ve got a fire. I built one this morning. Is Clete out there?”

“No. Something’s burning in your house.”

“That’s what I was saying. Somebody left some firewood on the back porch. The furnace doesn’t work right or something.”

Her turquoise eyes looked at me strangely. She walked past me into the kitchen, and I heard metal rattle on the stove and’ then ring in the sink. She turned on the faucet, and steam hissed off something hot. She walked back into the living room, her eyes still fixed on me in a strange way. She wore rubber boots, a man’s wide belt through the loops of her Levi’s, and an army field jacket with a First Cav patch over her red flannel shirt.

“The pot was burned through the center,” she said.

“I put it in the sink so it wouldn’t smell up the place.”

“Thank you.”

She took off her hat and sat down across from me. The three moles at the corner of her mouth looked dark in the firelight.

“Are you all right?” she said.

“Yes. I have malaria. It comes and goes. They just buzz around in the bloodstream for a little while. It’s not so bad. Not anymore, anyway.”

“I think you shouldn’t be here alone.”

“I’m not. A little girl lives with me. Where’d you get the First Cav jacket?”

“It was my brother’s.” She leaned out of her chair and put her hand on my forehead. Then she picked up one of my hands and held it momentarily.

“I can’t tell. You’re sitting too close to the fire. But you should be in bed. Get up.”

“I appreciate what you’re doing, but this is going to pass.”

“Yeah, I can tell you’re really on top of it. Do you know a pot holder was burning on your stove, too?”

She helped me up by one arm and walked me into the bedroom. I sat on the edge of the bed and looked numbly out the window at the wet trees and the rain on the river. When I closed my eyes my head spun and I could see gray worms swimming behind my lids. She took the blanket off my shoulders and pulled off my shirt, pushed my head down on the pillow and covered me with the sheet and bedspread. I heard her run water in the bathroom and open my dresser drawers, then she sat on the side of the mattress and wiped my face and chest and shoulders with a warm, damp towel and pulled a clean T-shirt over my head.

She felt my forehead again and looked down in my face.

“I don’t think you take very good care of yourself,” she said.

“I don’t think you’re a wise man, either.”

“Why have you come here?”

“Leave Sally Dee and his father alone. It’s bad for you, it’s bad for Clete.”

“Clete got in bed with that bunch on his own.” I blew out my breath and opened and closed my eyes. I could feel the room spinning, the same way it used to spin when I would try to go to sleep drunk and I’d have to hang my head off the side of the mattress or couch to put the blood back in my brain.

“He’s done some bad things, but he’s not a bad man,” she said.

“He looks up to you. He still wants you to be his friend.”

“He betrayed me when I needed him.”

“Maybe he’s paid for it, too. You sleep. I’ll stay here and fix lunch for you when you wake up.”

She spread the blanket on top of me and pulled it up to my chin. Her hand touched mine, and involuntarily I cupped her palm in my fingers. Her hand was wide across the back and callused on the edges, and her knuckles were as hard as dimes under the skin. I could not remember when I had last touched a woman’s hand. I closed her fingers in my palm, felt the grainy coarseness of her skin with my thumb, let both our hands rest on my chest as though the moment had given me a right that was in reality not mine. But she didn’t take her hand away. Her face was kind, and she wiped the wetness out of my hair with the towel and remained on the edge of the bed while the rain swept across the yard and the roof and I felt myself slipping down to the bottom of my own vertigo, down inside a cool, clean, and safe place where no fires burned, where the gray morning was as harmless as the touch of my forehead against her thigh.