Black Cherry Blues (Dave Robicheaux 3)

“Do you think maybe you used me a little bit?” I grinned at him and held up my thumb and forefinger slightly apart in the air. “Maybe just a little?”

His voice was languid, as though he were resting on the comfortable edge of sleep.

“Me use somebody else? Are you kidding?” he said. “You’re looking at the dildo of the planet.”

“See you around, Dixie.”

“Hell, yes. They’re kicking me out of here soon, anyway. It’s only second-degree stuff. I’ve had worse hangovers. We’re in tall cotton, son.”

And so I left him to his own menagerie of snapping dogs and hungry snakes.

That Saturday I woke Alafair early, told her nothing about the purpose of our trip, and drove in the cool, rose-stippled dawn to the Texas side of Sabine Pass, where the Sabine River empties into the Gulf. A friend of mine from the army owned a small, sandy, salt-flecked farm not far from the hard-packed gray strip of sandbar that tried to be a beach. It was a strange, isolated place, filled with the mismatched flora of two states: stagnant lakes dotted with dead cypress, solitary oaks in the middle of flat pasture, tangles of blackjack along the edges of coulees, an alluvial fan of sand dunes that were crested with salt grass and from which protruded tall palm trees silhouetted blackly against the sun. Glinting through the pines on the back of my friend’s farm were the long roll and pitch of the Gulf itself, and a cascade of waves that broke against the beach in an iridescent spray of foam.

It was a place of salt-poisoned grass, alligators, insects, magpies, turkey buzzards, drowned cows whose odor reached a half mile into the sky, tropical storms that could sand the paint off a water tower, and people like my friend who had decided to slip through a hole in the dimension and live on their own terms. He had a bad-conduct discharge from the army, had been locked up in a mental asylum in Galveston, had failed totally at AA, and as a farmer couldn’t grow thorns in a briar patch.

But he bred and raised some of the most beautiful Appaloosa horses I had ever seen. He and I had coffee in his kitchen while Alafair drank a Coke, then I picked up several sugar cubes in my palm and we walked out to his back lot.

“What we doing, Dave?” Alafair said. She looked up at me in the sunlight that shone through the pine trees. She wore a yellow T-shirt, baggy blue jeans, and pink tennis shoes. The wind off the water ruffled her bangs.

My friend winked and went inside the barn.

“You can’t ride Tripod, can you, little guy?” I said.

“What? Ride Tripod?” she said, her face confused, then suddenly lighting, breaking into an enormous grin as she looked past me and saw my friend leading a three-year-old gelding out of the barn.

The Appaloosa was steel gray, with white stockings and a spray of black and white spots across his rump. He snorted and pitched his head against the bridle, and Alafair’s brown eyes went back and forth between the horse and me, her face filled with delight.

“You think you can take care of him and Tripod and your rabbits, too?” I said.

“Me? He’s for me, Dave?”

“You bet he is. He called me up yesterday and said he wanted to come live with us.”

“What? Horse call up?”

I picked her up and set her on top of the fence rail, then let the Appaloosa take the sugar cubes out of my palm.

“He’s like you, he’s got a sweet tooth,” I said. “But when you feed him something, let him take it out of your palm so he doesn’t bite your fingers by mistake.”

Then I climbed over the fence, slipped bareback onto the horse, and lifted Alafair up in front of me. My friend had trimmed the horse’s mane, and Alafair ran her hand up and down it as though it were a giant shoe brush. I touched my right heel against the horse’s flank, and we turned in a slow circle around the lot.

“What his name?” Alafair said.

“How about Tex?”

“How come that?”

“Because he’s from Texas.”

“What?”

“This is Texas.”

“This where?”

“Never mind.”

I nodded for my friend to open the gate, and we rode out through the sandy stretch of pines onto the beach. The waves were slate green and full of kelp, and they made a loud smack against the sand and slid in a wet line up to a higher, dry area where the salt grass and the pine needles began. It was windy and cool and warm at the same time, and we rode a mile or so along the edge of the surf to a place where a sandbar and jetty had created a shallow lagoon, in the middle of which a wrecked shrimp boat lay gray and paintless on its side, a cacophony of seagulls thick in the air above it. Behind us the horse’s solitary tracks were scalloped deep in the wet sand.