Black Cherry Blues (Dave Robicheaux 3)

He glanced again at his clipboard.

“What she had for supper, traces of semen in the vagina.”

I took a breath and looked out the window at the electric blueness of the lake in the sunlight and the low green hills and pine trees in the distance. Then I pinched my eyes and the bridge of my nose with my fingers and put on my sunglasses.

“You were on the money about Cletus,” I said.

“What are you talking about?”

“He didn’t do it. He’s impotent. She was raped before she was murdered.”

He sucked his teeth, smiled to himself, shook his head slightly, and opened his newspaper to the sports page.

“You’ll have to excuse me,” he said. “It’s the only chance I get to read it.”

I found out from the medical examiner’s office that Darlene’s family had picked up the body that morning and that the funeral was the next afternoon on the Blackfeet Reservation. The next day was Saturday, so Alafair drove across the mountains with me to Dupuyer, on the south end of the reservation. I found out from the local newspaper that the service was to be held at a Baptist church up on the Marias River at two o’clock. We had lunch in a clapboard café that was built onto the side of a grease-stained, cinder-block filling station. I had little appetite and couldn’t finish my plate, and I stared out the window at the dusty street while Alafair ate her hamburger. The bars were doing a good business. Rusted pickup trucks and oversized jalopy gas burners were parked at an angle to the curb, and sometimes whole families sat listlessly in them while the old man was inside the juke joint. People who looked both devastated and broke from the night before sat on the curb, their attention fixed on nothing, their mouths open like those of silent, newly hatched birds.

Then I saw Alafair watching them, her eyes squinting, as though a camera lens were opening momentarily in her mind.

“What do you see, little guy?” I said.

“Are those Indians?”

“Sure.”

“They’re like me?”

“Well, not exactly, but maybe you’re part Indian. An Indian Cajun from Bayou Teche,” I said.

“What language they talk, Dave?”

“English, just like you and me.”

“They don’t know no Spanish words?”

“No, I’m afraid not.”

I saw a question mark, then a troubled look slip into her face.

“What’s on your mind, little guy?” I asked.

“The people in my village. They sat in front of the clinic. Like those people there.” Her eyes were looking at an elderly man and woman on the curb. The woman was fat and wore army shoes and dirty athletic socks, and her knees were splayed open so that you could see up her dress. “Dave, they ain’t got soldiers here, have they?”

“You get those thoughts out of your head,” I said. “This is a good country, a safe place. You have to believe what I tell you, Alf. What happened in your village doesn’t happen here.”

She put her hamburger on her plate and lowered her eyes. The corners of her mouth were turned downward. Her bangs hung in a straight line across her tan forehead.

“It did to Annie,” she said.

I looked away from her face and felt myself swallow. The sky had clouded, the wind had come up and was blowing the dust in the street, and the sun looked like a thin yellow wafer in the south.

The funeral was in a wood-frame church whose white paint had blistered and peeled into scales. All the people inside the church were Indians, people with braided hair, work-seamed faces, hands that handled lumber without gloves in zero weather, except for Clete and Dixie Lee, who sat in a front pew to the side of the casket. It was made of black metal, lined and cushioned with white silk, fitted with gleaming brass handles. Her hair was black against the silk, her face rouged, her mouth red as though she had just had a drink of cold water. She had been dressed in a doeskin shirt, and a beaded necklace with a purple glass bird on it, wings outstretched in flight, rested on her breast. Only the top portion of the casket was opened, so that her forearms were not visible.

The skin of Clete’s face was shiny and stretched tight on the bone. He looked like a boiled ham inside his blue suit. I could see his cigarettes tight against his shirt pocket; his big wrists stuck out of his coat sleeves; his collar had popped loose under the knot of his tie; the strap of his nylon shoulder holster made a hard line across his back. His eyes had the glare of a man staring at a match flame.

I didn’t hear, or rather listen to, much of what the preacher said. He was a gaunt and nervous man who read from the Old Testament and made consoling remarks in the best fashion he was probably capable of, but the rain that began clicking against the roof and windows, sweeping in a lighted sheet across the hardpan fields and river basin, was a more accurate statement of the feelings that were insi

de me.