Black Cherry Blues (Dave Robicheaux 3)

“This discussion is over. There’s the door.”

“It looks like your company has made stonewalling an art form.”

“What?”

“Does the name Aldous Robicheaux mean anything to you?”

“No. Who is he?”

“He was my father. He was killed on one of your rigs.”

“When?”

“Twenty-two years ago. They didn’t have a blowout preventer on. Your company tried to deny it, since almost everybody on the rig went down with it. A shrimper pulled a floorman out of the water two days later. He cost you guys a lot of money.”

“So you got a grudge that’s twenty-two years old? I don’t know what to tell you, Robicheaux, except I wasn’t with the company then and I probably feel sorry for you.”

I took my rain hat off my knee and stood up.

“Tell Mapes and Vidrine to stay away from Dixie Lee,” I said.

“You come in here again, I’ll have you arrested.”

I walked back outside into the rain, got in my truck, and drove out of the maze of flat, uniform brick buildings that composed the Oil Center. On Pinhook Road I passed the restaurant where I had seen Cletus an hour before. The spreading oak trees were dark green, the pink and blue neon like smoke in the blowing mist. The wind blew hard when I crossed the Vermilion River, ruffling the yellow current below and shuddering the sides of my truck.

“I don’t buy that stuff about a death wish. I believe some guys in Vienna had too much time to think,” I said to the therapist.

“You don’t have to be defensive about your feelings. Facile attitudes have their place in therapy, too. For example, I don’t think there’s anything complex about depression. It’s often a matter of anger turned inward. What do you have to say about that, Dave?”

“I don’t know.”

“Yes, you do. How did you feel in Vietnam when the man next to you was hit?”

“What do you think I felt?”

“At some point you were glad it was him and not you. And then you felt guilty. And that was very dangerous, wasn’t it?”

“All alcoholics feel guilt. Go to an open meeting sometime. Learn something about it.”

“Cut loose from the past. She wouldn’t want you to carry a burden like this.”

“I can’t. I don’t want to.”

“Say it again.”

“I don’t want to.”

He was bald and his rimless glasses were full of light. He turned his palms up toward me and was silent.

I visited Dixie Lee one more time and found him distant, taciturn, perhaps even casually indifferent to my presence in the room. I wasn’t pleased with his attitude. I didn’t know whether to ascribe it to the morphine-laced IV hooked into his arm, or possibly his own morose awareness of what it meant to throw in his lot with his old cell partner.

“You want me to bring you anything else before I leave?” I asked.

“I’m all right.”

“I probably won’t be back, Dixie. I’m pretty tied up at the dock these days.”

“Sure, I understand.”