Black Cherry Blues (Dave Robicheaux 3)

“Look, here’s the situation. There’s one bar on that road. They were in there till midnight. It’s five miles from that bar up to Clayton’s house. Three miles up the road they wrecked the car. Maybe they walked up to Clayton’s house without waking the old lady and took off before she got up. Maybe she doesn’t remember what they did. Maybe th

ey hitched a ride with somebody after they stripped the car. I don’t know what they did. You think a bear ate them?”

“No, I think you’re telling me Desmarteau was an irresponsible man. His mother says otherwise. The guy had the Silver Star. What do you make of that?”

“I don’t guess I’m communicating with you very well. What you don’t understand is the way some people live around here. Come back on a Saturday night and take your own tour. Look, when a white person hires Indians to work for him, he hires six so maybe three will show up in the morning. They cut up their own relatives at wedding parties, they hang themselves in jail cells, they get souped up and drive into the sides of trains. Last winter three kids climbed in a boxcar with a gallon of dago red and a tube of airplane glue. The train went on up into Canada and stopped on a siding in a blizzard. I went up with the families to bring their bodies back. The RCMP said they were frozen so hard you could break their parts off with a hammer.”

I asked him to show me where Clayton Desmarteau’s car had gone off the road. He was irritated, but he consented and drove me down the same dirt road I had been on earlier. We passed the bar where Desmarteau and his cousin had been last seen, a wide, flat log building with neon Grain Belt and Great Falls beer signs in the windows; then we curved up the road through bare, hardpan fields and finally picked up the creek, the cottonwoods, and the sloping stands of lodgepole pine that began on the far bank. The deputy stopped his car on the shoulder and pointed.

“Right over there in the ditch,” he said. “He hooked one wheel over the side and went in. Snapped the axle like a stick. No mystery, my friend. It’s a way of life.”

I got back to Missoula late but in time to pick up Alafair at the baby-sitter’s before she went to sleep. The baby-sitter had run an errand, and a friend of hers, a third-grade teacher and assistant principal at the school named Miss Regan, had come over to stay with Alafair. The two of them were watching television and eating from a bowl of popcorn in the enclosed side porch. Miss Regan was a pretty girl in her late twenties, with auburn hair and green eyes, and although her skin was still pale from the winter months, I could see sun freckles on her shoulders and at the bottom of her neck.

“Come see, Dave,” Alafair said. “Miss Regan drew a picture of Tex and she ain’t ever seen him.”

“Don’t say ‘ain’t,’ little guy,” I said.

“Look,” Alafair said, and held up a piece of art paper with a pastel drawing of an Appaloosa on it.

“That’s very nice of Miss Regan,” I said.

“My name’s Tess,” she said, and smiled.

“Well, thank you for watching Alafair. It was good meeting you.”

“She’s a sweet little girl. We had a lot of fun together,” she said.

“Do you live in the neighborhood?”

“Yes, only two blocks from the school.”

“Well, I hope to see you again. Thanks for your help. Good night.”

“Good night,” she said.

We walked home in the dark. The air was warm, and the maple trees looked black and full under the moon. The lights of the bridge reflected off the swirling brown surface of the river.

“Everybody says she’s the best teacher in the school,” Alafair said.

“I bet she is.”

“I told her to come down to New Iberia and visit us.”

“That’s good.”

“Because she don’t have a husband.”

“Say ‘doesn’t.’”

“She doesn’t have a husband. How come that, Dave?”

“I don’t know. Some people just don’t like to get married.”

“How come?”

“You got me.”

We ate a piece of pie before we turned out the lights and went to bed. Our bedrooms adjoined, and the door was opened between them. Across the river I could hear the whistle of a Burlington Northern freight.