Black Cherry Blues (Dave Robicheaux 3)

“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 thunderheads 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 undented 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.”