Black Cherry Blues (Dave Robicheaux 3)

But the pure lines of the dream wouldn’t hold, and suddenly I was pouring rum into a cracked coconut shell and drinking from it with both hands. Like the sun and the rain, it was cool and warm at the same time, and it lighted my desires the way you touch a match to old newspaper stored in a dry box. I traveled to low-life New Orleans and Saigon bars, felt a woman’s breath on my neck, her mouth on my ear, her hand brush my sex. Topless girls in G-strings danced barefooted on a purple-lit runway, the cigarette smoke drifting across their breasts and braceleted arms. I knocked back double shots of Beam with draft chasers, held on to the edge of the bar like a man in a gale, and looked at their brown bodies, the watery undulations of their stomachs, their eyes that were as inviting as the sweet odor of burning opium.

Then I was back on the beach, alone, trembling with a hangover. The back of Alafair’s horse was empty, and he was shaking the loose reins against his neck and snorting with his nose down by the edge of the surf.

Don’t lose it all, I heard Annie say.

Where is she?

She’ll be back. But you’ve got to get your shit together, sailor.

I’m afraid.

Of what?

They’re serious. They’re talking about life in Angola. That’s ten and a half years with good time. They’ve got the knife and the witnesses to pull it off, too. I don’t think I’m going to get out of this one.

Sure you will.

I’d be drunk now if I was out of jail.

Maybe. But you don’t know that. Easy does it and one day at a time. Right? But no more boozing and whoring in your dreams.

Annie, I didn’t do it, did I?

It’s not your style, baby love. The rain’s starting to slack and I have to go. Be good, darlin’.

I woke sweating in a bright shaft of sunlight through the window. I sat on the side of my bunk, my palms clenched on the iron edges, my mind a tangle of snakes. It was hot, the room was dripping with humidity, but I trembled all over as though a cold wind were blowing across my body. The water faucet in my rust-streaked sink ticked as loudly as a clock.

Two days later my loan was approved at a New Iberia bank, and fifteen minutes after I paid the bondsman’s fee I was sprung. It was raining hard when I ran from the courthouse to the pickup truck with my paper sack of soiled clothes and toilet articles under my arm. Alafair hugged me in the snug, dry enclosure of the truck, and Batist lit a cigar and blew the smoke out his teeth as though we all had a lock on the future.

I should have been happy. But I remembered a scene I had witnessed years ago when I was a young patrolman in New Orleans. A bunch of Black Panthers had just been brought back to a holding cell on a wrist chain from morning arraignment, and their public defender was trying to assure them that they would be treated fairly.

“Believe it or not, our system works,” he said to them through the bars.

An unshaved black man in shades, beret, and black leather jacket rolled a matchstick across his tongue and said, “You got it, motherfucker. And it work for somebody else.”

CHAPTER

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sp; 5

Once out of jail I felt like the soldier who returns to the war and discovers that the battlefield is empty, that everyone else has tired of the war except him and has gone home.

Dixie Lee had left a note at the house the day before:

Dave,

What I done to you grieves me. Thats the honest to God truth, son. I got no excuse except everything I touch turns to shit. Im leaving a box of milky ways for the little girl that lives with you. Big deal. Me and Clete and his lady friend are headed for the big sky today. Maybe later I might get a gig at one of Sals casinos. Like my daddy used to say, it dont matter if we’re colored or not, we all got to pick the white mans cotton. You might as well pick it in the shade next to the water barrel.

Dave, dont do time.

Dixie Lee

And what about Harry Mapes, the man whose testimony could send me to Angola? (I could still smell his odor from the motel room—a mixture of rut, perfume from the whores, chlorine, bourbon and tobacco and breath mints.) I called Star Drilling Company in Lafayette.

“Mr. Mapes is in Montana,” the receptionist said.

“Where in Montana?”