Black Cherry Blues (Dave Robicheaux 3)

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 ringus.” 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 sheriff’s 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—”

“Do it.”