Black Cherry Blues (Dave Robicheaux 3)

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 café 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 bridgetender, 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.”