Black Cherry Blues (17 page)

It was early afternoon when I woke again, and the sun was out, the sky blue, the yard a deeper green. I felt weak all over, but whatever had invaded my metabolism had gone away like a bored visitor. I opened the front door in my bare feet, and the air was cool and full of sunlight, and in the south the ragged peaks of the Bitterroot Mountains were white with new snow. Out on the river the rooted end of an enormous tree bounced wet and shining through the current. I heard her in the kitchen behind me, then remembered my earlier behavior the way a shard of memory comes back from a drunken dream.

She saw it in my face, too.

“I called Clete. He knows where I am. He doesn’t mind,” she said.

“I want to thank you for your kindness.”

Her eyes softened and moved over my face. I felt uncomfortable.

“I have strange moments in my life. I can’t explain them,” I said.

“So I tell people it’s malaria. Maybe it’s true, but I don’t know that. Maybe it’s something else, too. Sometimes people at AA call it a dry drunk. It’s nothing to wear on your chest.”

I took a bottle of milk out of the icebox and sat down at the kitchen table. Through the back screen I could see an elderly woman hoeing in her vegetable garden. Next door somebody was cutting his grass with a hand mower. Darlene’s eyes had never left my face.

“Clete said you lost your wife,” she said.

“Yes.”

“He said two men murdered her.”

“That’s right.”

“How did it happen?” Her hand turned off the burner under a soup pot.

“I messed with some people I should have let alone.”

“I see.” She took two soup bowls out of the cabinet and set them on the table with spoons.

“It bothers you a lot?”

“Sometimes.”

“I blamed myself when my husband got killed. I’d locked him out of the house the night before. I’d found out he was cheating with a white girl who worked in the truck stop. He had to stay all night in the car in zero weather. He went to work like that in the morning and a bulldozer backed over him. He was like a little boy. Always in the wrong place. He always got caught. He spent a year in Deer Lodge for stealing game meat out of some rental lockers at a grocery. He used to lie about it and tell people he went to jail for armed robbery.”

“Why do you tell me this?”

“You shouldn’t hurt yourself because of what happened to your wife. You don’t realize what you did yesterday. Sally Dee’s crazy.”

“No, he’s not. He just likes people to think he is. His kind come by the box carload.”

She filled our bowls and sat down across from me.

“You don’t know Sal. Clete said you made Sal look bad in front of his friends. He came down to the house after you left and they went out on the veranda. I could hear Sal yelling through the glass. I didn’t think Clete would let anyone talk to him like that.”

“It’s expensive to work for a guy like Sally Dio.”

“He degraded him.”

“Listen, there’s an expression in the oil field “I was looking for a job when I found this one.” You tell Clete that.”

“Sal said something else, too. About you.”

“What?”

“Don’t bring him around here again, don’t let him be talking to Dixie Lee, either. He does, I’m gonna cut off his dick.”

“I looked out the door again at the woman hoeing in her garden across the alley. Her face was pink, her hair white, and her arms were as thick as a man’s.

“That’s what our man had to say?”

“Clete and Dixie Lee pretend he’s all right because they have to. But he’s cruel. He frightens me.”

“You should get away from him.”

She put her spoon in her soup and lowered her eyes.

“You’re an intelligent woman,” I said.

“You’re a good person, too. You don’t belong among those people.”

“I’m with Clete.”

“Clete’s going to take a big fall with that guy. Or he’ll take a fall for him, one or the other. Down inside, he knows it, too. Until he started screwing up his life, he was the best partner I ever had. He carried me down a fire escape once while a kid put two .22 rounds in his back. He used to put the fear of God in the wiseguys. They’d cross the street when they saw him on the sidewalk.”

“He’s been good to me. Inside he’s a good man. One day, he’ll see that.”

Her attitude toward him struck me as strange. It seemed more protective than affectionate. But maybe she was that kind of woman. Or maybe it was what I wanted to believe.

“I wonder if you can help me with something,” I said.

“What?”

“Did Clete tell you about some trouble I’ve had in Louisiana?”

“Yes.”

“Harry Mapes is my way out of it. I think he killed two people up here. Maybe they were Indians, members of AIM.”

She looked down at her food again, but I saw her eyes narrow, the light in them sharpen.

“Why do you think that? About the Indians?” she said.

“Mapes killed these people because they were in the way of his oil deals. Dixie Lee said these AIM guys can tie the oil companies up in court over a nineteenth-century treaty.”

“It’s a big fight over on the Rocky Mountain Front.”

“The what?”

“It’s the eastern face of the Continental Divide. The Blackfeet called it the backbone of the world. The oil companies want into the road less areas by Glacier Park. That was Blackfeet land. The government took it or got it for nothing.”

“Did you ever hear about any AIM people disappearing?”

“Why don’t you ask up at the reservation?”

“I plan to. Why are you angry?”

“It has nothing to do with you.”

“It seems to.”

“You don’t understand the reservation.”

She stopped, and it was obvious that she regretted her abruptness. She wet her lips and began again, but her voice had the quiet, tense quality of someone who had bought seriously into a private piece of discontent.

“Whites have always taken from the Blackfeet. They massacred them on the Marias River, then they starved them and gave them a rural slum to live in. Now they’ve given us their missile sites. The government admits that in a war everybody on the eastern slope will be killed. But what whites don’t understand is that Indians believe spirits live in the earth. That all the treaties and deeds that took our land don’t mean anything. Sometimes people hear the crying of children and women in the wind on the Marias. An Indian woman in a white doeskin dress appears at missile silos. Air Force people have seen her. You can talk to them.”

“You believe in these spirits?”

“I’ve been on the Marias at night. I’ve heard them. The sound comes right off the edge of the water, where the camp was. It happened in the winter of 1870. An army officer named Baker attacked an innocent band of Blackfeet under Heavy Runner. They killed a hundred and thirty people, then burned their robes and wickiups and left the survivors to freeze in the snow. You can hear people weeping.”

“I guess I don’t know about those things. Or the history of your people.”

She ate without answering.

“I think maybe it’s not a good idea to keep things like that alive in yourself, though,” I said.

She remained silent, her face pointed downward, and I gave it up.

“Look, will you give Clete a message for me?” I said.

“What is it?”

“That he doesn’t owe me, that he doesn’t need to feel bad about anything, that I don’t sweat a character like Sally Dio. You also tell him to take himself and a nice girl to New Orleans. That’s the place where good people go when they die.”

She smiled. I looked at her eyes and her mouth, then caught myself and glanced away.

“I have to go now,” she said.

“I hope you’re feeling better.”

“I am. You were a real friend, Darlene. Clete’s a lucky guy.”

“Thank you, but he’s not a lucky guy. Not at all.”

I didn’t want to talk about Clete’s problems anymore or carry any more of his load. I walked outside with her to her Toyota jeep and opened the door for her. The sidewalks were still drying in the sunlight, and the pines on the mountains were sharp and green against the sky.

“Maybe you all would like to come into town and have dinner one evening, or walk up one of those canyons in the Bitterroots and try for some cutthroat,” I said.

“Maybe. I’ll ask him,” she said, and smiled again.

I watched her drive past the school yard and turn toward the interstate. It was one of those moments when I did not care to reflect upon my own honesty or to know in reality what I was thinking about.

I washed the dishes, put on my running shoes, shorts, and a sweatshirt, and did two miles along the river, then circled back through a turn-of-the-century neighborhood of yellow- and orange-brick homes whose yards were dotted with blue spruce, fir, maple, birch, and willow trees. I was sweating heavily in the cool air, and I had to push hard to increase my speed across an intersection; but my wind was good, the muscles tight in my thighs and back, my mind clear, the rest of the day a bright expectation rather than an envelope of grayness and gloom and disembodied voices.

Ah, voices, I thought. She believes in them. Which any student of psychology will tell you is a mainline symptom of a schizophrenic personality. But I had never bought very heavily into the psychiatric definitions of singularity and eccentricity in people. In fact, as I reviewed the friendships I had had over the years, I had to conclude that the most interesting ones involved the seriously impaired the Moe Howard account, the drunken, the mind-smoked, those who began each day with a nervous breakdown, people who hung on to the sides of the planet with suction cups.

When I rounded the corner on my block by the river, I heard the bell ring at the elementary school and saw the children burst out of the doors onto the sidewalks. Alafair walked with her lunch box among three other children. I ran backward when I passed her.

“Meet you at the house, little guy,” I said.

I shaved and showered and took Alafair with me to an AA meeting three blocks from our house. She drank a can of pop and did her homework in the coffee room while I sat in the nonsmokers’ section of the meeting and listened. The members of the group were mostly mill workers, gyppo loggers, Indians, waitresses, tough blue-collar kids who talked as much about dope as they did about alcohol, and skid-row old-timers who had etched the lines fn their face a shot glass at a time. When it was my turn to talk, I gave my name and passed. I should have talked about my nightmares, the irrational depression that could leave me staring eviscerated and numb at a dying fire; but for most of them their most immediate problem was not psychological or in the nature of their addiction they were unemployed and on food stamps and my own basket of snakes seemed an unworthy subject for discussion.

Alafair and I ate an early supper, then we walked up on a switchback trail to the big white concrete M on the mountain overlooking the university. We could see out over the whole valley: the Clark Fork winding high and yellow through town, the white froth over the breakers, the tree-filled neighborhoods, the shafts of sunlight in the canyons west of town, the plume from the pulp mill flattening out on the river’s surface, the bicyclists and joggers like miniature figures on the campus far below. Then as the sun dimmed behind a peak and the air became more chill and the valley filled with a purple haze, house and street and neon lights came on all over town, and in the south we could see the sun’s afterglow on the dark stands of ponderosa high up in the Bitterroots.

Alafair sat beside me on the concrete M. She brushed dirt off her knees; I saw her frown.

“Dave, whose hat that is?” she said.

“What?”

“In the chair. By the fireplace. That black hat.”

“Oh,” I said.

“I think a lady must have left that there.”

“I sat on it. I forgot to tell you.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“She won’t be mad?”

“No, of course not. Don’t worry about things like that, little guy.”

The next day I made arrangements for Alafair to stay with the baby-sitter if I had to remain out of town that night, and I headed for the Blackfeet Reservation, on the other side of the Divide, east of Glacier Park. In the early morning light I drove up the Blackfoot River through canyons of pink rock and pine, with woodsmoke drifting through the trees from the cabins set back in the meadows. The runoff from the snowpack up in the mountains was still high, and the current boiled over the boulders in the center of the river. Then the country opened up into wider valleys and ranch-land with low green hills and more mountains in the distance. I started to climb into more heavily wooded country, with sheer rock cliffs and steep-sided mountains that ran right down to the edge of the road; the canyons and trees were dark with shadow, and by the time I hit the logging town of Lincoln the air had turned cold and my windows were wet with mist. I drove into clouds on the Divide at Rogers Pass, my ears popping now, and rivulets of melted snow ran out of the pines on the mountainside, bled across the highway, and washed off the dirt shoulder into a white stream far below. The pine trees looked almost black and glistened with a wet sheen.

Then I was out into sunlight again, out on the eastern slope, into rolling wheat and cattle country with no horizon except the Rocky Mountain Front in my rearview mirror. I made good time into Choteau and Dupuyer, and a short while later I was on the Black-feet Indian Reservation.

I had been on or through several Indian reservations, and none of them was a good place. This one was not an exception. Ernest Hemingway once wrote that there was no worse fate for a people than to lose a war. If any of his readers wanted to disagree with him, they would only have to visit one of the places in which the United States government placed its original inhabitants. We took everything they had and in turn gave them smallpox, whiskey, welfare, federal boarding schools, and penitentiaries.

At a run-down filling station I got directions to the tribal chairman’s office, then drove through several small settlements of clapboard shacks, the dirt yards littered with the rusted parts of junker cars, old washing machines on the porches, chicken yards, privies, and vegetable patches in back, with seed packages stuck up on sticks in the rows.