Black Cherry Blues (2 page)

Then his eyes adjusted to the light and he looked at me more carefully.

“Great God Almighty,” he said.

“Dave Robicheaux. You son of a buck.”

A voice and a face out of the past, not simply mine but from an era. Dixie Lee Pugh, my freshman roommate at Southwestern Louisiana Institute in 1956: a pecker wood kid from a river town north of Baton Rouge, with an accent more Mississippi than Louisiana, who flunked out his first semester, then went to Memphis and cut ajUk two records at the same studio where Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, and Elvis began their careers. The second record put him on New York television, and we watched in awe while he played his sunburst rhythm-and-blues guitar or hammered his fingers on the piano keyboard while an audience of thousands went insane and danced in the aisles.

He was one of the biggest in the early rock ‘n’ roll era. But he had something more going for him than many of the others did. He was the real article, an honest-to-God white blues singer. He learned his music in the Baptist church, but somebody in that little cotton and pecan-orchard town rubbed a lot of pain into him, too, because it was in everything he sang and it wasn’t manufactured for the moment, either.

Then we read and heard other stories about him: the four or five failed marriages, the death of one of his children in a fire, a hit-and-run accident and DWI in Texas that put him in Huntsville pen.

“Dave, I don’t believe it,” he said, grinning.

“I saw you ten or twelve years ago in New Orleans. You were a cop.”

I remembered it. It had been in a low-rent bar off Canal, the kind of place that featured yesterday’s celebrities, where the clientele made noise during the performances and insulted the entertainers.

He sat down next to me and shook hands, almost as an afterthought.

“We got to drink some mash and talk some trash,” he said, then told the waitress to bring me a beer or a highball.

“No, thanks, Dixie,” I said.

“You mean like it’s too late or too early in the day or like you’re off the jug?” he said.

“I go to meetings now. You know what I mean?”

“Heck yeah. That takes guts, man. I admire it.” His eyes were green and filled with an alcohol shine. He looked at me directly a moment, then his eyes blinked and he looked momentarily embarrassed.

“I read in the newspaper about your wife, man. I’m sorry.”

“Thank you.”

“They caught the guys that did it?”

“More or less.”

“Huh,” he said, and studied me for a moment. I could see that he was becoming uncomfortable with the knowledge that a chance meeting with an old friend is no guarantee that you can reclaim pleasant moments out of the past. Then he smiled again.

    “You still a cop?” he asked.

“I own a bait and boat-rental business south of New Iberia. I came up here last night to pick up some refrigeration equipment and got stuck in the storm.”

He nodded. We were both silent.

“Are you playing here, Dixie?” I said.

Mistake.

“No, I don’t do that anymore. I never really got back to it after that trouble in Texas.”

He cleared his throat and took a cigarette out of the pack in his shirt pocket.

“Say, hon, how about getting me my drink out of the bar?”

The waitress smiled, put down the rag she had been using to clean the counter, and went into the nightclub next door.

“You know about that stuff in Texas?” he asked.

“Yes, I think so.”

“I was DWI, all right, and I ran away from the accident. But the guy run that stop sign. There wasn’t no way I could have avoided it. But it killed his little boy, man. That’s some hard shit to live with. I got out in eighteen months with good time.” He made lines on a napkin with his thumbnail.

“A lot of people just don’t want to forget, though.”

I didn’t know what to say. I felt sorry for him. He seemed little different from the kid I used to know, except he was probably ninety-proof most of the time now. I remembered a quote in a Newsweek story about Dixie Lee that seemed to define him better than anything else I had ever seen written about him. The reporter had asked him if any of his band members could read music. He replied, “Yeah, some of them can, but it don’t hurt their playing any.”

So I asked him what he was doing now, because I had to say something.

“Leaseman,” he said.

“Like Hank Snow used to say, “From old Montana down to Alabama.” I cover it all. Anyplace there’s oil and coal. The money’s right, too, podna.”

The waitress put his bourbon and water down in front of him. He drank from it and winked at her over his glass.

“I’m glad you’re doing okay, Dixie,” I said.

“Yeah, it’s a good life. A Caddy convertible, a new address every week, it beats collard greens and grits.” He hit me on the arm.

“Heck, it’s all rock ‘n’ roll, anyway, man.”

I nodded good-naturedly and looked through the service window at the Negro woman who was scraping my hash browns and chicken-fried steak onto a plate. I was about to tell the waitress that I had meant the order to go.

“Well, I got some people waiting on me,” Dixie Lee said.

“Like, some of the sweet young things still come around, you know what I mean? Take it easy, buddy. You look good.”

I shook hands with him, ate my steak, bought a second cup of coffee for the road, and walked out into the rain.

The wind buffeted my truck all the way across the Atchafalaya basin. When the sun came up the light was gray and wet, and ducks and herons were flying low over the dead cypress in the marsh. The water in the bays was the color of lead and capping in the wind. A gas flare burned on a drilling rig set back in a flooded stand of willow trees. Each morning I began the day with a prayer, thanking my Higher Power for my sobriety of yesterday and asking Him to help me keep it today. This morning I included Dixie Lee in my prayer.

I drove back to New Iberia through St. Martinville. The sun was above the oaks on Bayou Teche now, but in the deep, early morning shadows the mist still hung like clouds of smoke among the cattails and damp tree trunks. It was only March, but spring was roaring into southern Louisiana, as it always does after the long gray rains of February. Along East Main in New Iberia the yards were filled with blooming azalea, roses, and yellow and red hibiscus, and the trellises and gazebos were covered with trumpet vine and clumps of purple wisteria. I rumbled over the drawbridge and followed the dirt road along the bayou south of town, where I operated a fish dock and lived with a six-year-old El Salvadoran refugee girl named Alafair in the old home my father had built out of cypress and oak during the Depression.

The wood had never been painted, was dark and hard as iron, and the beams had been notched and joined with pegs. The pecan trees in my front yard were thick with leaf and still dripping with rainwater, which tinked on the tin roof of the gallery. The yard always stayed in shadow and was covered with layers of blackened leaves. The elderly mulatto woman who baby-sat Alafair for me was in the side yard, pulling the vinyl storm covers off my rabbit hutches. She was the color of a copper penny and had turquoise eyes, like many South Louisiana Negroes who are part French. Her body looked put together out of sticks, and her skin was covered with serpentine lines. She dipped snuff and smoked hand-rolled cigarettes constantly, and bossed me around in my own home, but she could work harder than anyone I had ever known, and she had been fiercely loyal to my family since I was a child.

My boat dock was in full sunlight now, and I could see Batist, the other black person who worked for me, loading an ice chest for two white men in their outboard. He was shirtless and bald, and the weight of the ice chest made his wide back and shoulders ridge with muscle. He broke up kindling for my barbecue pit with his bare hands, and once I saw him jerk a six-foot alligator out of the water by its tail and throw it up on a sandbar.

I stepped around the puddles in the yard to the gallery.

“What you gonna do this coon?” Clarise, the mulatto woman, said.

She had put my three-legged raccoon, Tripod, on his chain, which was attached to a wire clothesline so he could run up and down in the side yard. She pulled him up in the air by the chain. His body danced and curled as though he were being garroted.

“Clarise, don’t do that.”

“Ax him what he done, him,” she said.

“Go look my wash basket. Go look your shirts. They blue yesterday. They brown now. Go smell, you.”

“I’ll take him down to the dock.”

“Tell Batist not to bring him back, no.” She dropped Tripod, half strangled, to the ground.

“He come in my house again, you gonna see him cooking with the sweet potato.”

I unsnapped his chain from the clothesline and walked him down to the bait shop and cafe on the dock. I was always amazed at the illusion of white supremacy in southern society, since more often than not our homes were dominated and run by people of color.

Batist and I bailed the rainwater from the previous night’s storm out of my rental boats, filled the cigarette and candy machines, seined dead shiners out of the live-bait tanks, drained the water out of the ice bins and put fresh ice on top of the soda pop and beer, and started the barbecue fire for the lunch that we prepared for midday fishermen. Then I opened up the beach umbrellas that were set in the holes of the huge wooden telephone spools that I used as tables, and went back up to the house.

It had turned out to be a beautiful morning. The sky was blue, the grass in the fields a deeper green from the rain; the wind was cool on the gallery, the backyard still deep in shadow under the mimosa tree, and my redwood flower boxes were streaked with water and thick with petunias and Indian paintbrush. Alafair was at the kitchen table in her pajama bottoms, coloring in the Mickey Mouse book I had bought her the day before. Her black hair was cut in bangs; her eyes were big and brown, her face as round as a pie plate, and her skin had already started to grow darker with tan. If there was any physical imperfection in her, it was her wide-set front teeth, which only made her smile look larger than it actually was. It was hard to believe that less than a year ago I had pulled her from a downed plane out at Southwest Pass just off the Gulf, a drowning little girl whose bones had felt hollow as a bird’s, whose gasping mouth had looked like a guppy’s in my wife’s lap.

I brushed her fine black hair under my palm.

“How you doing, little guy?” I said.

“Where you went, Dave?”

“I got caught in the storm and had to stay in Baton Rouge.”

“Oh.”

Her hand went back to coloring. Then she stopped and grinned at me, full of glee.

“Tripod went ca-ca in Clarise basket,” she said.

“I heard about it. Look, don’t say ‘ca-ca.’ Say ‘He went to the bathroom.’ ”

“No ca-ca?”

“That’s right. ‘He went to the bathroom.’ ” She repeated it after me, both of our heads nodding up and down.

She was in the first grade at the Catholic school in New Iberia, but she seemed to learn more English from Clarise and Batist and his wife than she did from me and the nuns. (A few lines you might hear from those three on any particular day: “What time it is?”

“For how come you burn them leafs under my window, you?”

“While I was driving your truck, me, somebody pass a nail under the wheel and give it a big flat.” I hugged Alafair, kissed her on top of the head, and went into the bedroom to undress and take a shower. The breeze through the window smelled of wet earth and trees and the gentle hint of four-o’clocks that were still open in the shade. I should have been bursting with the spring morning, but I felt listless and spent, traveling on the outer edge of my envelope, and it wasn’t simply because of bad dreams and insomnia the previous night. These moments would descend upon me at peculiar times, as though my heart’s blood were fouled, and suddenly my mind would light with images and ring with sounds I wasn’t ready to deal with.

It could happen anywhere. But right now it was happening in my bedroom. I had replaced several boards in the wall, or filled the twelve-gauge buckshot and deer-slug holes with liquid wood, and sanded them smooth. The gouged and splintered headboard, stained brown with my wife’s blood as though it had been flung there by a paintbrush, lay in a corner of the old collapsed barn at the foot of my property. But when I closed my eyes I saw the streaks of shotgun fire in the darkness, heard the explosions that were as loud as the lightning outside, heard her screams as she cowered under a sheet and tried to shield herself with her hands while I ran frantically toward the house in the rain, my own screams lost in the thunder rolling across the land.

As always when these moments of dark reverie occurred in my waking day, there was no way I could think my way out of them.

Instead, I put on my gym trunks and running shoes and pumped iron in the backyard. I did dead lifts, curls, and military presses with a ninety-pound bar in sets of ten and repeated the sets six times. Then I ran four miles along the dirt road by the bayou, the sunlight spinning like smoke through the canopy of oak and cypress trees overhead. Bream were still feeding on insects among the cattails and lily pads, and sometimes in a shady cut between two cypress trees I would see the back of a largemouth bass roll just under the surface.

I turned around at the drawbridge, waved to the bridge tender and hit it hard all the way home. My wind was good, the blood sang in my chest, my stomach felt flat and hard, yet I wondered how long I would keep mortality and memory at bay.

Always the racetrack gambler, trying to intuit and control the future with only the morning line to operate on.

Three days later I was using a broomstick to push the rainwater out of the folds of the canvas awning over my dock when the telephone rang inside the bait shop. It was Dixie Lee Pugh.

“I’ll take you to lunch,” he said.

“Thanks but I’m working.”

“I want to talk to you.”

“Go ahead.”

“I want to talk to you alone.”

“Where are you?”

“Lafayette.”

“Drive on over. Go out East Main, then take the bayou road south of town. You’ll run right into my place.”