Black Cherry Blues (Dave Robicheaux 3)

Black cherry blues.”

I rubbed my forehead with my hand. I didn’t know what to say to him.

“You still there?” he said.

“Yes.”

“You gonna come over?”

“Maybe I’ll see you another time. Thanks for the invitation.”

“Fuck, yeah, I’m always around. Sorry I wasted your time.”

“You didn’t. We were good friends in college. Remember?”

“Everybody was good friends in college. It all died with Cochran and Holly. I got to motivate on over to another bar. This place bugs me. Dangle easy, Dave.”

He hung up. I stared listlessly out into the sunlight a moment, then walked outside and finished changing the oil in my truck.

She drove up in her red Toyota jeep a half hour later. I guess I knew that she was coming, and I knew that she would come when Alafair was at school. It was like the feeling you have when you look into the eyes of another and see a secret and shared knowledge there that makes you ashamed of your own thoughts. She wore a yellow sundress, and she had put on lipstick and eye shadow and hoop earrings. The sacks of groceries in the back of the jeep looked as though they were there only by accident.

Her lipstick was dark, and when she smiled her teeth were white.

“Your hat,” I said.

“Yes. You found it?”

“It’s in the living room. Come in. I have some South Louisiana coffee on the stove.”

She walked ahead of me, and I looked at the way her black hair sat thickly on her neck, the way the hem of her dress swung across her calves. When I opened the screen for her I could smell the perfume behind her ears and on her shoulders.

I went into the kitchen while she found her hat in the living room. I fooled with cups and saucers, spoons, a bowl of sugar, milk from the icebox, but my thoughts were as organized as a puzzle box that someone had shaken violently between his hands.

“I try to shop in Missoula. It’s cheaper than Polson,” she said.

“Yeah, food’s real cheap here.”

“Dixie Lee came along with me. He’s in a bar right now.”

“He called me. You might have to drag him out of the place on a chain.”

“He’ll be all right. He’s only bad when Sal lets him take cocaine.” She paused a moment. “I thought maybe you wouldn’t be home.”

“I got a late start today. A bunch of phone calls, stuff like that.”

She reached for the cups and saucers on the drainboard and her arm brushed against mine. She looked at my eyes and raised her mouth, and I slipped my arms around her shoulders and kissed her. She stepped close against me, so that her stomach touched lightly against my loins, and moved her palms over my back. She opened and closed her mouth while she held and kissed me, and then she put her tongue in my mouth and I felt her body flatten against me. I ran my hands over her bottom and her thighs and gently bit her shoulder as she wrapped one calf inside my leg and rubbed her hair on the side of my face.

We pulled the shades in the bedroom and undressed without speaking, as if words would lead both of us to an awareness about morality and betrayal that we did not care to examine in the heated touch of our skin, the dry swallow in the throat, the silent parting of our mouths.

There had been one woman in my life since my wife’s death, and I had lived celibate almost a year. She reached down and took me inside her and stretched out her legs along me and ran her hands along the small of my back and down my thighs. The breeze clattered the shades on the windows, the room was dark and cool, but my body was rigid and hot and my neck filmed with perspiration, and I felt like an inept and simian creature laboring above her. She stopped her motion, kissed me on the cheek and smiled, and I stared down at her, out of breath and with the surprise of a man whose education with women always proved inadequate.

“There’s no hurry,” she said quietly, almost in a whisper. “There’s nothing to worry about.”

Then she said, “Here,” and pressed on my arm for me to move off her. She brushed her hair out of her eyes, sat on top of me, kissed me on the mouth, then raised herself on her knees and put me inside her again. Her eyes closed and opened, she tightened her thighs against me, and propped herself up on her hands and looked quietly and lovingly into my face.

She came before I did, her face growing intense and small, her mouth suddenly opening like a flower. Then I felt all my nocturnal erotic dreams, my fear, my aching celibacy, rise and swell in my loins, and burst away outside of me like a wave receding without sound in a cave by the sea.

She lay close to me under the sheet, her fingers in the back of my hair. A willow tree in the backyard made shadows on the shade.