Black Cherry Blues (9 page)

“I’ll close up when I get back.”

“You don’t be worry, you,” he said, dragged a kitchen match on a wood post, lit his cigar, and let the smoke drift out through his teeth.

Alafair rang up a sale on the cash register and beamed when the drawer clanged open.

I put everything from the mailbox in a large paper bag and drove to the Iberia Parish sheriff’s office. I had worked a short while for the sheriff as a plainclothes detective the previous year, and I knew him to be a decent and trustworthy man. But when he ran for the office his only qualification was the fact that he had been president of the Lions Club and owned a successful dry cleaning business. He was slightly overweight, his face soft around the edges, and in his green uniform he looked like the manager of a garden-supply store. We talked in his office while a deputy processed the wrapping paper, box, note, and hypodermic needle for fingerprints in another room.

Finally the deputy rapped on the sheriff’s door glass with one knuckle and opened the door.

“Two identifiable sets,” he said.

 “One’s Dave’s, one’s from that colored man, what’s his name?”

“Batist,” I said.

“Yeah, we have his set on file from the other time” His eyes flicked away from me and his face colored.

“We had his prints from when we were out to Dave’s place before. Then there’s some smeared stuff on the outside of the wrapping paper.”

“The mailman?” the sheriff said.

“That’s what I figure,” the deputy said.

“I wish I could tell you something else, Dave.”

“It’s all right.”

The deputy nodded and closed the door.

“You want to take it to the FBI in Lafayette?” the sheriff said.

“Maybe.”

“A threat in the mails is in a federal area. Why not make use of them?”

I looked back at him without answering.

“Why is it that I always feel you’re not a man of great faith in our system?” he said.

“Probably because I worked for it too long.”

“We can question these two guys, what’s their names again?”

“Vidrine and Mapes.”

“Vidrine and Mapes, we can let them know somebody’s looking over their shoulder.”

“They’re too far into it.”

“What do you want to do?”

“I don’t know.”

“Dave, back off of this one. Let other people handle it.”

“Are you going to keep a deputy out at my house? Will one watchf Alafair on the playground or while she waits for the bus?”

He let out his breath, then looked out the window at a clump of oak trees in a bright, empty pasture.

“Something else bothers me here,” he said.

“Wasn’t your daddy killed on a Star rig?”

“Yes.”

“You think there’s a chance you want to twist these guys, no matter what happens?”

“I don’t know what I think. That box didn’t mail itself to me, though, did it?”

I saw the injury in his eyes, but I was past the point of caring about his feelings. Maybe you’ve been there. You go into a police or sheriff’s station after a gang of black kids forced you to stop your car while they smashed out your windows with garbage cans; a strung-out addict made you kneel at gunpoint on the floor of a grocery store, and before you knew it the begging words rose uncontrollably in your throat; some bikers pulled you from the back of a bar and sat on your arms while one of them un zippered his blue jeans. Your body is still hot with shame, your voice full of thumbtacks and strange to your own ears, your eyes full of guilt and self-loathing while uniformed people walk casually by you with Styrofoam cups of coffee in their hands. Then somebody types your words on a report and you realize that this is all you will get. Investigators will not be out at your house, you will probably not be called to pull somebody out of a lineup, a sympathetic female attorney from the prosecutor’s office will not take a large interest in your life.

Then you will look around at the walls and cabinets and lockers in that police or sheriff’s station, the gun belts worn by the officers with the Styrofoam coffee cups, perhaps the interior of the squad cars in the parking lot, and you will make an ironic realization. The racks of M-16 rifles, scoped Mausers, twelve-gauge pumps loaded with double-aught buckshot, .38 specials and .357 Magnums, stun guns, slap jacks batons, tear gas canisters, the drawers that contain cattle prods, handcuffs, Mace, wrist and leg chains, hundreds of rounds of ammunition, all have nothing to do with your safety or the outrage against your person. You’re an increase in somebody’s work load.

“You’ve been on this side of the desk, Dave. We do what we can,” the sheriff said “But it’s not enough most of the time. Is it?”

He stirred a paper clip on the desk blotter with his finger.

“Have you got an alternative?” he said.

“Thanks for your time, Sheriff. I’ll think about the FBI.”

“I wish you’d do that.”

The sky had turned purple and red in the west and rain clouds were building on the southern horizon when I drove home. I bought some ice cream in town, then stopped at a fruit stand under an oak tree by the bayou and bought a lug of strawberries. The thunder-heads off the Gulf slid across the sun, and the cicadas were loud in the trees and the fireflies were lighting in the shadows along the road. A solitary raindrop splashed on my windshield as I turned into my dirt yard.

It rained hard that night. It clattered on the shingles and the tin roof of the gallery, sluiced out of the gutters and ran in streams down to the coulee. The pecan trees in the yard beat in the wind and trembled whitely when lightning leapt across the black sky. I had the attic fan on, and the house was cool, and I dreamed all night. Annie came to me about four A.M.” as she often did, when the night was about to give way to the softness of the false dawn. In my dream I could look through my bedroom window into the rain, past the shining trunks of the pecan trees, deep into the marsh and the clouds of steam that eventually bleed into the saw grass and the Gulf of Mexico, and see her and her companions inside a wobbling green bubble of air. She smiled at me.

Hi, sailor, she said.

How you doing, sweetheart? You know I don’t like it when it rains. Bad memories and all that. So we found a dry place for a while.

“Your buddies from your platoon don’t like the rain, either. They say it used to give them jungle sores. Can you hear me with all that thunder? It sounds like cannon!”

Sure.

It’s lightning up on top of the water. That night I couldn’t tell the lightning from the gun flashes. I wish you hadn’t left me alone. I tried to hide under the bed sheet. It was a silly thing to do. Don’t talk about it.

It was like electricity dancing off the walls, you’re not drinking, are you?

No, not really.

Not really?

Only in my dreams.

But I bet you still get high on those dry drunks, don’t you? You know, fantasies about kicking butt, ‘fronting the lowlifes, all that stuff swinging dicks like to do.

A guy has to do something for kicks. Annie?

What is it, baby love?

I want Tell me.

I want to It’s not your time. There’s Alafair to take care of, too.

It wasn’t your time, either.

She made a kiss against the air. Her mouth was red.

So long, sailor. Don’t sleep on your stomach. It’ll make you hard in the morning. I miss you.

Annie She winked at me through the rain, and in my dream I was sure I felt her fingers touch my lips.

It continued to rain most of the next day. At three o’clock I picked up Alafair at the school and kept her with me in the bait shop. The sky and the marsh were gray; my rental boats were half full of water, the dock shiny and empty in the weak light. Alafair was restless and hard to keep occupied in the shop, and I let Batist take her with him on an errand in town. At five-thirty they were back, the rain slacked off, and the sun broke through the clouds in the west. It was the time of day when the bream and bass should have been feeding around the lily pads, but the bayou was high and the water remained smooth and brown and un dented along the banks and in the coves. A couple of fishermen came in and drank beer for a while, and I leaned on the window jamb and stared out at the mauve- and red-streaked sky, the trees dripping rain into the water, the wet moss trying to lift in the evening breeze.

“Them men ain’t gonna do nothing. They just blowing they horn,” Batist said beside me. Alafair was watching a cartoon on the old black-and-white television set that I kept on the snack shelf. She held Tripod on her lap while she stared raptly up at the set.

“Maybe so. But they’ll let us wonder where they are and when they’re coming,” I said.

“That’s the way it works.”

“You call them FBI in Lafayette?”

“No.”

“How come?”

“It’s a waste of time.”

“Sometime you gotta try, yeah.”

“There weren’t any identifiable prints on the package except yours and mine.”

I could see in his face that he didn’t understand.

“There’s nothing to tell the FBI,” I said.

“I would only create paperwork for them and irritate them. It wouldn’t accomplish anything. There’s nothing I can do.”

“So you want get mad at me?”

“I’m not mad at you. Listen”

“What?”

“I want her to stay with you tonight. I’ll pick her up in the morning and take her to school.”

“What you gonna do, you?”

“I don’t know.”

“I been knowing you a long time, Dave. Don’t tell me that.”

“I’ll tell Clarise to pack her school clothes and her pajamas and toothbrush. There’s still one boat out. Lock up as soon as it comes in.”

“Dave-” But I was already walking up toward the house in the light, sun-spangled rain, in the purple shadows, in the breeze that smelled . of wet moss and blooming four-o’clocks.

It was cool and still light when I stopped on the outskirts of Lafayette and called Dixie Lee at the hospital from a pay phone. I asked him where Vidrine and Mapes were staying.

“What for?” he said.

“It doesn’t matter what for. Where are they?”

“It matters to me.”

“Listen, Dixie, you brought me into this. It’s gotten real serious in the last two days. Don’t start being clever with me.”

“All right, the Magnolia. It’s off Pinhook, down toward the river. Look, Dave, don’t mess with them. I’m about to go bond and get out of here. It’s time to ease off.”

“You sound like you’ve found a new confidence.”

“So I got friends. So I got alternatives. Fuck Vidrine and Mapes.”

The sun was red and swollen on the western horizon. Far to the south I could see rain falling.

“How far out are these guys willing to go?” I said.

He was quiet a moment.

“What are you talking about?” he said.

“You heard me.”

“Yeah, I did. They burn a girl to death and you ask me a question like that? These guys got no bottom, if that’s what you mean. They’ll go down where it’s so dark the lizards don’t have eyes.”

I drove down Pinhook Road toward the Vermilion River and parked under a spreading oak tree by the motel, a rambling white stucco building with a blue tile roof. Rainwater dripped from the tree onto my truck cab, and the bamboo and palm trees planted along the walks bent in the wind off the river and the flagstones in the courtyard were wet and red in the sun’s last light. A white and blue neon sign in the shape of a flower glowed against the sky over the entrance of the motel, an electrical short in it buzzing as loud as the cicadas in the trees. I stared at the front of the motel a moment, clicking my keys on the steering wheel, then I opened the truck door and started inside.

Just as I did the glass door of a motel room slid open and two men and women in bathing suits with drinks in their hands walked out on the flagstones and sat at a table by the pool. Vidrine and Mapes were both laughing at something one of the women had said. I stepped back in the shadows and watched Mapes signal a Negro waiter. A moment later the waiter brought them big silver shrimp-cocktail bowls and a platter of fried crawfish. Mapes wore sandals and a bikini swimming suit, and his body was as lean and tan as a long-distance runner’s. But Vidrine wasn’t as confident of his physique; he wore a Hawaiian shirt with his trunks, the top button undone to show his chest hair, but he kept crossing and recrossing his legs as though he could reshape the protruding contour of his stomach. The two women looked like hookers. One had a braying laugh; the other wore her hair pulled back on her head like copper wire, and she squeezed Mapes’s thigh under the table whenever she leaned forward to say something.

I got back in the truck, took my World War II Japanese field glasses out of the glove box, and watched them out of the shadows for an hour. The underwater lights in the swimming pool were smoky green, and a thin slick of suntan oil floated on the surface. The waiter took away their dishes, brought them more rounds of tropical drinks, and their gaiety seemed unrelenting. They left the table periodically and went back through the sliding glass door into the motel room, and at first I thought they were simply using the bathroom, but then one of the women came back out touching one nostril with her knuckle, sniffing as though a grain of sand were caught in her breathing passage. At ten o’clock the waiter began dipping leaves out of the pool with a long-handled screen, and I saw Mapes signal for more drinks and the waiter look at his watch and shake his head negatively. They sat outside for another half hour, smoking cigarettes, laughing more quietly now, sucking on pieces of ice from the bottoms of their glasses, the women’s faces pleasant with a nocturnal lassitude.

Then a sudden rain shower rattled across the motel’s tile roof, clattered on the bamboo and palm fronds, and danced in the swimming pool’s underwater lights. Vidrine, Mapes, and the women ran laughing for the sliding door of the room. I waited until midnight, and they still had not come back out.

I put on my rain hat and went into the motel bar. It was almost deserted, and raindrops ran down the windows. Outside, I could see the white and blue neon flower against the dark sky. The bartertder smiled at me. He wore black trousers, a white shirt that glowed almost purple in the bar light, and a black string tie sprinkled with sequins. He was a strange-looking man. His eyes were close-set and small as dimes, and he smoked a Pall Mall with three fingers along the barrel of the cigarette. I sat at the corner of the bar, where I could see the front door of Vidrine and Mapes’s rooms, and ordered a 7-Up.