Black Cherry Blues (Dave Robicheaux 3)

“In the chair. By the fireplace. That black hat.”

“Oh,” I said. “I think a lady must have left that there.”

“I sat on it. I forgot to tell you.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“She won’t be mad?”

“No, of course not. Don’t worry about things like that, little guy.”

The next day I made arrangements for Alafair to stay with the baby-sitter if I had to remain out of town that night, and I headed for the Blackfeet Reservation, on the other side of the Divide, east of Glacier Park. In the early morning light I drove up the Blackfoot River through canyons of pink rock and pine, with woodsmoke drifting through the trees from the cabins set back in the meadows. The runoff from the snowpack up in the mountains was still high, and the current boiled over the boulders in the center of the river. Then the country opened up into wider valleys and ranchland with low green hills and more mountains in the distance. I started to climb into more heavily wooded country, with sheer rock cliffs and steep-sided mountains that ran right down to the edge of the road; the canyons and trees were dark with shadow, and by the time I hit the logging town of Lincoln the air had turned cold and my windows were wet with mist. I drove into clouds on the Divide at Rogers Pass, my ears popping now, and rivulets of melted snow ran out of the pines on the mountainside, bled across the highway, and washed off the dirt shoulder into a white stream far below. The pine trees looked almost black and glistened with a wet sheen.

Then I was out into sunlight again, out on the eastern slope, into rolling wheat and cattle country with no horizon except the Rocky Mountain Front in my rearview mirror. I made good time into Choteau and Dupuyer, and a short while later I was on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation.

I had been on or through several Indian reservations, and none of them was a good place. This one was not an exception. Ernest Hemingway once wrote that there was no worse fate for a people than to lose a war. If any of his readers wanted to disagree with him, they would only have to visit one of the places in which the United States government placed its original inhabitants. We took everything they had and in turn gave them smallpox, whiskey, welfare, federal boarding schools, and penitentiaries.

At a run-down filling station I got directions to the tribal chairman’s office, then drove through several small settlements of clapboard shacks, the dirt yards littered with the rusted parts of junker cars, old washing machines on the porches, chicken yards, privies, and vegetable patches in back, with seed packages stuck up on sticks in the rows.

The tribal chairman was a nice man who wore braids, jewelry, a western vest, green-striped trousers, and yellow cowboy boots. On his office wall was an associate of arts degree from a community college. He was polite and listened well, his eyes staying focused attentively on my face while I spoke; but it was also obvious that he did not want to talk about AIM or the oil business with a white man whom he didn’t know.

“Do you know Harry Mapes?” I said.

This time his gaze broke. He looked out the window onto the street, where three Indian men were talking in front of a poolroom. The neon sign above the door said only Pool.

“He’s a leaseman. He’s around here sometimes,” he said. “Most of the time he works on the edge of the reservation.”

“What else do you know about him?”

He unwrapped the cellophane from an inexpensive cherry-blend cigar.

“I don’t have any dealings with him. You’ll have to ask somebody else.”

“You think he’s bad news?”

“I don’t know what he is.” He smiled to be pleasant and lit his cigar.

“He killed his partner, Dalton Vidrine, down in Louisiana.”

“I don’t know about that, Mr. Robicheaux.”

“I think he killed two of your people, too.”

“I don’t know what to tell you, sir.”

“Do you know of two guys from AIM who disappeared?”

“Not on the reservation. And that’s what I’m elected to take care of—the reservation.”

“What do you mean, ‘not on the reservation’?”

“I’m not in AIM. I don’t mix in their business.”

“But you’ve heard about somebody disappearing?”

He gazed out the window again at the men in front of the poolroom and breathed cigar smoke out his nose and mouth.

“Just south of here, down in Teton County. Clayton Desmarteau and his cousin,” he said. “I don’t remember the cousin’s name.”