Black Cherry Blues (Dave Robicheaux 3)

“You still sick, Dave.”

I rubbed the top of her head and hugged her briefly around the shoulders, then put on my raincoat and hat. The wind outside was cold and smelled of the pulp mill down the river. In the wet air the smell was almost like sewage. I drove Alafair to the school and let her off by the entrance to the playground. When I got back home I was trembling all over, and the heat from the fireplace and the furnace vents wouldn’t penetrate my skin. Instead, the house seemed filled with a dry cold that made static electricity jump off my hand when I touched a metal doorknob. I boiled a big pot of water on the kitchen stove to humidify the air, then sat in front of the fireplace with a blanket around my shoulders, my teeth clicking, and watched the resin boil and snap in the pine logs and the flames twist up the chimney.

As the logs softened and sank on the andirons, I felt as though I

had been sent to a dark and airless space on the earth where memory became selective and flayed the skin an inch at a time. I can’t tell you why. I could never explain these moments, and neither could a psychologist. It happened first when I was ten years old, after my father had been locked up a second time in the parish jail for fighting in Provost’s Pool Room. I was at home by myself, looking at a religious book that contained a plate depicting the souls in hell. Suddenly I felt myself drawn into the illustration, caught forever in their lake of remorse and despair. I was filled with terror and guilt, and no amount of assurance from the parish priest would relieve me of it.

When these moments occurred in my adult life, I drank. I did it full tilt, too, the way you stand back from a smoldering fire of wet leaves and fling a glass full of gasoline onto the flames. I did it with Beam and Jack Daniel’s straight up, with a frosted Jax on the side; vodka in the morning to sweep the spiders into their nest; four inches of Wild Turkey at noon to lock Frankenstein in his closet until the afternoon world of sunlight on oak and palm trees and the salt wind blowing across Lake Pontchartrain reestablished itself in a predictable fashion.

But this morning was worse than any of those other moments that I could remember. Maybe it was malaria, or maybe my childlike psychological metabolism still screamed for a drink and was writing a script that would make the old alternatives viable once again. But in truth I think it was something else. Perhaps, as Annie had said, I had found the edge.

The place where you unstrap all your fastenings to the earth, to what you are and what you have been, where you flame out on the edge of the spheres, and the sun and moon become eclipsed and the world below is as dead and remote and without interest as if it were glazed with ice.

Is this the way it comes? I thought. With nothing dramatic, no three-day bender, no delirium tremens in a drunk tank, no cloth straps and Thorazine or a concerned psychiatrist to look anxiously into your face. You simply stare at the yellow handkerchief of flame in a fireplace and fear your own thoughts, as a disturbed child would. I shut my eyes and folded the blanket across my face. I could feel my whiskers against the wool, the sweat running down inside my shirt; I could smell my own odor. The wind blew against the house, and a wet maple branch raked against the window.

Later, I heard a car stop outside in the rain and someone run up the walk onto the porch. I heard the knock on the door and saw a woman’s face through the steamed glass, but I didn’t get up from my chair. She wore a flat-brim black cowboy hat with a domed crown, and her hair and face were spotted with rain. She knocked more loudly, straining to see me through the glass, then she opened the door and put her head inside.

“Is something wrong?” she asked.

“Everything’s copacetic. Excuse me for not getting up.”

“Something’s burning.”

“I’ve got a fire. I built one this morning. Is Clete out there?”

“No. Something’s burning in your house.”

“That’s what I was saying. Somebody left some firewood on the back porch. The furnace doesn’t work right or something.”

Her turquoise eyes looked at me strangely. She walked past me into the kitchen, and I heard metal rattle on the stove and then ring in the sink. She turned on the faucet, and steam hissed off something hot. She walked back into the living room, her eyes still fixed on me in a strange way. She wore rubber boots, a man’s wide belt through the loops of her Levi’s, and an army field jacket with a First Cav patch over her red flannel shirt.

“The pot was burned through the center,” she said. “I put it in the sink so it wouldn’t smell up the place.”

“Thank you.”

She took off her hat and sat down across from me. The three moles at the corner of her mouth looked dark in the firelight.

“Are you all right?” she said.

“Yes. I have malaria. It comes and goes. They just buzz around in the bloodstream for a little while. It’s not so bad. Not anymore, anyway.”

“I think you shouldn’t be here alone.”

“I’m not. A little girl lives with me. Where’d you get the First Cav jacket?”

“It was my brother’s.” She leaned out of her chair and put her hand on my forehead. Then she picked up one of my hands and held it momentarily. “I can’t tell. You’re sitting too close to the fire. But you should be in bed. Get up.”

“I appreciate what you’re doing, but this is going to pass.”

“Yeah, I can tell you’re really on top of it. Do you know a pot holder was burning on your stove, too?”

She helped me up by one arm and walked me into the bedroom. I sat on the edge of the bed and looked numbly out the window at the wet trees and the rain on the river. When I closed my eyes my head spun and I could see gray worms swimming behind my lids. She took the blanket off my shoulders and pulled off my shirt, pushed my head down on the pillow and covered me with the sheet and bedspread. I heard her run water in the bathroom and open my dresser drawers, then she sat on the side of the mattress and wiped my face and chest and shoulders with a warm, damp towel and pulled a clean T-shirt over my head.

She felt my forehead again and looked down in my face.

“I don’t think you take very good care of yourself,” she said. “I don’t think you’re a wise man, either.”

“Why have you come here?”