Black Cherry Blues (5 page)

I opened the cooler in which I kept the soda pop and the long-necked bottles of Jax, Dixie, and Pearl beer. Yesterday’s ice had melted, and some of the beer labels floated in the water. I propped my arms on the lip of the cooler and shut my eyes. In the marsh I heard a nutria cry out to its mate, which always sounds like the hysterical scream of a woman. I plunged my hands into the water, dipped it into my face, and breathed deeply with the shock of the cold. Then I wiped my face on a towel and flung it across the counter onto the duckboards.

I went back up to the house, sat at the kitchen table in the dark, and put my head on my forearms.

Annie, Annie.

I heard bare feet shuffle on the linoleum behind me. I raised my head and looked up at Alafair, who was standing in a square of moonlight, dressed in her pajamas that were covered with smiling clocks. Her face was filled with sleep and puzzlement. She kept blinking at me as though she were waking from a dream, then she walked to me, put her arms around my neck, and pressed her head against my chest. I could smell baby shampoo in her hair. Her hand touched my eyes.

“Why your face wet, Dave?” she said.

“I just washed it, little guy.”

“Oh.” Then, “Something ain’t wrong?”

“Not ‘ain’t.” Don’t say ‘ain’t.”

” She didn’t answer. She just held me more tightly. I stroked her hair and kissed her, then picked her up and carried her back into her bedroom. I laid her down on the bed and pulled the sheet over her feet. Her stuffed animals were scattered on the floor. The yard and the trees were turning gray, and I could hear Tripod running up and down on his clothesline.

She looked up at me from the pillow. Her face was round, and I could see the spaces between her teeth.

“Dave, is bad people coming back?”

“No. They’ll never be back. I promise.”

And I had to look away from her lest she see my eyes.

One week later I took Alafair for breakfast in New Iberia, and when I unfolded a discarded copy of the Daily Iberian I saw Dixie Lee’s picture on the front page. It was a file photo, many years old, and it showed him onstage in boat like suede shoes, pegged and pleated slacks, a sequined white sport coat, a sunburst guitar hanging from his neck.

He had been burned in a fire in a fish camp out in Henderson swamp. A twenty-two-year-old waitress, his “female companion,” as the story called her, had died in the flames. Dixie Lee had been pulled from the water when the cabin, built on stilts, had exploded in a fireball and crashed into the bayou. He was listed in serious condition at Our Lady of Lourdes in Lafayette.

He was also under arrest. The St. Martin Parish sheriffs department had found a dental floss container of cocaine under the front seat of his Cadillac convertible.

I am not going to get involved with his troubles, I told myself. When you use, you lose. A mean lesson, but when you become involved with an addict or a drunk, you simply become an actor in a script that they’ve written for you as well as themselves.

That afternoon Alafair and I made two bird feeders out of coffee cans and hung them in the mimosa tree in the backyard, then we restrung Tripod’s clothesline out in the pecan trees so he wouldn’t have access to Clarise’s wash. We moved his doghouse to the base of a tree, put bricks under it to keep it dry and free of mud, and set his food bowl and water pans in front of the door. Alafair always beamed with fascination while Tripod washed his food before eating, then washed his muzzle and paws afterward.

I fixed etouffee for our supper, and we had just started to eat on the picnic table in the backyard when the phone rang in the kitchen. It was a nun who worked on Dixie Lee’s floor at Lourdes. She said he wanted to see me.

“I can’t come, Sister. I’m sorry,” I said.

She paused.

“Is that all you want me to tell him?” she asked.

“He needs a lawyer. I can give you a couple of names in Lafayette or St. Martinville.”

She paused again. They must teach it in the convent, I thought. It’s an electric silence that makes you feel you’re sliding down the sides of the universe.

“I don’t think he has many friends, Mr. Robicheaux,” she said.

“No one has been to see him. And he asked for you, not an attorney.”

“I’m sorry.”

“To be frank, so am I,” she said, and hung up.

When Alafair and I were washing the dishes, and the plowed and empty sugarcane fields darkened in the twilight outside the window, the telephone rang again.

His voice was thick, coated with phlegm, a whisper into the receiver.

“Son, I really need to see you. They got me gauzed up, doped up, you name it, an enema tube stuck up my ring us He stopped and let out his breath into the phone.

“I need you to listen to me.”

“You need legal help, Dixie. I won’t be much help to you.”

“I got a lawyer. I can hire a bagful of his kind. It won’t do no good. They’re going to send me back to the joint, boy.”

I watched my hand open and close on top of the counter.

“I don’t like to tell you this, podna, but you were holding,” I said.

“That fact’s not going away. You’re going to have to deal with it.”

“It’s a lie, Dave.” I heard the saliva click in his throat.

“I don’t do flake, anymore. It already messed up my life way back there. Maybe sometimes a little reefer. But that’s all.”

I pinched my fingers on my brow.

“Dixie, I just don’t know what I can do for you.”

“Come over. Listen to me for five minutes. I ain’t got anybody else.”

I stared out the screen at the shadows on the lawn, the sweep of night birds against the red sky.

It was windy the next morning and the sky was light blue and filled with tumbling white clouds that caused pools of shadow to move across the cane fields and cow pastures as I drove along the old highway through Broussard into Lafayette. Dixie Lee’s room was on the second floor at Lourdes, and a uniformed sheriffs deputy was playing checkers with him on the edge of the bed. Dixie Lee lay on his side, his head, chest, right shoulder, and right thigh wrapped in bandages. His face looked as though it were crimped inside a white helmet. There was mucus in his eyes, and a clear salve oozed from the edges of his bandages. An IV was hooked into his arm.

He looked at me and said something to the deputy, who set the checkerboard on the nightstand and walked past me, working his cigarette pack out of his shirt pocket.

“I’ll be right in the hall. The door stays open, too,” he said.

I sat down next to the bed. There were oaks hung with moss outside the window. The pressure of Dixie’s head against the pillow made him squint one eye at me.

“I knew you’d come. There’s some guys that can’t be any other way,” he said.

“You sound better,” I said.

“I’m on the edge of my high and about ready to slide down the other side of it. When the centipedes start crawling under these bandages, they’ll be back with the morphine. Dave, I got to get some help. The cops don’t believe me. My own lawyer don’t believe me. They’re going to send my butt to Angola. I can’t do no more time, man. I ain’t good at it. They tore me up over there in Texas. You get in thin cotton, you don’t pick your quota, the boss stands you up on an oil barrel with three other guys. Hot and dirty and hungry, and you stand there all night.”

“They don’t believe what?”

“This” He tried to touch his fingers behind his head.

“Reach around back and feel on them bandages.”

“Dixie, what are”

“Don’t.”

I reached across him and touched my fingertips across the tape.

“It feels like a roll of pennies under there, don’t it?” he said.

“That’s because I woke up just before some guy with a tire iron or a jack handle came down on my head. He was going to bust me right across the lamps, but I twisted away from him just before he swung. The next thing I knew I was in the water. You ever wake up drowning and on fire at the same time? That’s what it was like. There was a gas tank for the outboards under the cabin, and it must have blown and dumped the whole thing in the bayou. Burning boards was hanging off the stilts, the water was full of hot ash, steam hissing all over the fucking place. I thought I’d gone to hell, man.”

He stopped talking and his lips made a tight line. I saw water well up in his green eyes.

“Then I seen something awful. It was the girl, you remember, that redheaded waitress from the cafe in West Baton Rouge. She was on fire, like a big candle burning all over, hung in all them boards and burning against the sky.

“I can’t clean it out of my head, not even when they hit me with the joy juice. Maybe they hit her in the head like they done me. Maybe she was already dead. God, I hope so. I can’t stand thinking about it, man. She didn’t do nothing to anybody.”

I wiped my palms on my slacks and blew out my breath. I wanted to walk back out into the sunshine, into the windy morning, into the oak trees that were hung with moss.

“Who was the guy with the tire iron?” I said.

“One of those fuckers I work with.”

“You saw his face?”

“I didn’t have to. They knew I was going to drop the dime on them. For all the damn good it would do.”

“You told them that?”

“Sure. I got fed up with both of them. No, wait a minute. I got fed up being afraid. I was a little swacked when I stuck it in their face, but I done it just the same. Dalton Vidrine and Harry Mapes. One’s a coon ass and the other’s a stump-jumper from East Texas.”

“I’m having one problem with all this. There’s some people who think you’re mixed up in dope. Up in Montana.”

His green eyes closed and opened like a bird’s.

“They’re wrong,” he said.

“-that maybe you’re mixed up with a trafficker named Dio.”

His mouth smiled slightly.

“You been talking to the DEA,” he said.

“But they’re sniffing up the wrong guy’s leg.”

“You didn’t lease land for him in Montana?”

“I leased and bought a bunch of land for him. But it don’t have anything to do with dope. Sally Dee was my cell partner. Some guys were going to cut me up in the shower. Till Sally Dee told them they treat me just like they treat him. Which means they light my cigarettes, they pick in my sack when we get in thin cotton. The cat’s half crazy, man, but he saved my butt.”

“What was the land deal about, Dixie?”

“I didn’t ask. He’s not the kind of guy you ask those things to. He’s got a lot of holdings. He hires people to act as his agents. He likes me for some reason. He paid me a lot of bread. What’s the big deal?”

“As an old friend, Dixie, I’m going to ask you to save the Little Orphan Annie routine for the DEA.”

“You believe what you want.”

“What’s your bond?”

“Fifteen thou.”

“That’s not too bad.”

“They know I ain’t going anywhere. Except maybe to Angola. Dave, I ain’t giving you a shuck. I can’t take another fall, and I don’t see no way out of it.”

I looked out the window at the treetops, the way their leaves ruffled in the breeze, the whiteness of the clouds against the dome of blue sky.

“I’ll come back and visit you later,” I said.

“I think maybe you have too much faith in one guy.”

“I’ll tell you a story I heard Minnie Pearl tell about Hank. This was right after he brought the whole auditorium down singing ‘I Saw the Light’ at the Opry. Backstage he turned to her and said, “But, Minnie, they ain’t no light. They just ain’t no light.” That’s when your soul is hanging on a spider’s web right over the fire, son. That’s right where I’m at now.”

That afternoon I stood on the levee and looked down at the collapsed and blackened remains of the fish camp that, according to Dixie Lee, had belonged to Star Drilling Company. Mattress springs, charred boards, a metal table, a scorched toilet seat, half the shingle roof lay in the shallows at the bottom of the stilt supports. A paste of gray ash floated among the cattails and lily pads.

I walked down to the water’s edge. I found what was left of a Coleman stove and a pump twelve-gauge shotgun whose shells had exploded in the magazine. The gasoline drum that had been used to fuel outboard engines was ripped outward and twisted like a beer can.

The fire had made a large black circle from the water to halfway up the levee. Extending out from the circle were trails of ash through the buttercups and new grass like the legs of a spider. One of them led up to the road at the top of the levee.

I dug the soil loose from around the trail with my pocketknife and smelled it. It smelled like burnt grass and dirt.

I knew little about arson investigation, but I saw nothing on the levee that would help Dixie Lee’s case.

I drove to St. Martinville and parked across from the old church where Evangeline and her lover are buried under an enormous spreading oak. The wind blew the moss in the trees along Bayou Teche, and the four-o’clocks were opening in the shade along the banks. I was told by the dispatcher in the sheriff’s department that the sheriff was out for a few minutes but that a detective would talk to me.

The detective was penciling in a form of some kind and smoking a cigarette when I walked into his office. He affected politeness but his eyes kept going to the clock on the wall while I talked. A side door opened onto the sheriff’s office, and I could see his desk and empty chair inside. I told the detective the story that Dixie had told me. I told him about the lea semen Dalton Vidrine and Harry Mapes.

“We know all about that,” he said.

“That’s why the sheriff been talking to them. But I tell you right now, podna, he don’t believe that fella.”

“What do you mean he’s been talking with them?”

He smiled at me.

“They in his office right now. He went down to the bat’ room he said. Then he got up and closed the door to the sheriff’s office.

I looked at him, stunned.

“They’re sitting in there now?” My voice was incredulous.

“He called them up and ax them to come in and make a statement.”

I stood up, took a piece of paper off his desk, and wrote my name and telephone number on it.

“Ask the sheriff to call me,” I said.