Black Cherry Blues (Dave Robicheaux 3)

I made a peculiar prayer. It’s a prayer that sometimes I say, one that is perhaps self-serving, but because I believe that God is not limited by time and space as we are, I believe perhaps that He can influence the past even though it has already happened. So sometimes when I’m alone, especially at night, in the dark, and I begin to dwell on the unbearable suffering that people probably experienced before their deaths, I ask God to retroactively relieve their pain, to be with them in mind and body, to numb their senses, to cool whatever flame licked at their eyes in their final moments. I said that prayer now for Darlene. Then I said it again for my wife, Annie.

The cemetery, a windswept and weed-grown square of land enclosed by wire strung between concrete posts, was located a short distance from the edge of the river bottoms. The Marias basin was strange country; the bluffs and the gradated channelings of the river looked as if they had been formed with a putty knife, the clay and silt layered and smoothed in ascending plateaus. Even the colors were strange. The eroded bluffs on the far side of the basin were gray and yellow and streaked with a burnt orange that looked like rust. The water in the main channel was high and brown, and leafless cottonwood limbs floated in it. The sky was sealed with gray clouds from horizon to horizon; in the thin rain the countryside looked as if it were poisoned by the infusion of toxic waste. This was the place Darlene had told me about, the site of what was called the Baker massacre of 1870. On this afternoon, except for a solitary purple dogwood blooming by the cemetery fence, it looked as though the spring had never touched the land here, as though this place had been predestined as moonscape, a geographical monument to what was worst in us.

I watched the pallbearers lower Darlene’s casket into the freshly dug hole in the cemetery. The piled orange-and-gray dirt next to the grave was slick with rainwater. The graves around hers were littered with jelly glasses and dime-store vases filled with dead wildflowers. A small American flag lay sideways on a soldier’s grave, spotted with mud. A picture of a little girl, not more than five or six, was wrapped in plastic and tied to a small stone marker with baling wire. On the incline to one side of the cemetery a long length of black plastic pipe ran from a house trailer down to the lip of the river basin. The pipe had cracked at a joint, and a stream of yellow-black effluent had leaked its way in rivulets into one side of the cemetery.

I walked over to the pickup truck, where Alafair slept on the seat with the door open; I stared out over the wet land. In the distance I could see rain falling heavily on some low gray-green hills dotted with a few pine trees. After a while I heard cars and pickups driving away over the dirt road, rocks knocking up under their fenders; then it became quiet again, except for the sound of the two gravediggers spading the mound of dirt on Darlene’s casket. Then a strange thing happened: the wind began to blow across the fields, flattening the grass, wrinkling the pools of rainwater in the road. It blew stronger and stronger, so unexpectedly hard, in fact, that I opened my mouth to clear my ears and looked at the sky for the presence of new storm clouds or even a funnel. A cloud shifted temporarily away from the sun and a curtain of light moved suddenly across the bluffs and the gradated layers of the river basin. As it did, the wind stripped away the purple flowers of the dogwood blooming by the cemetery fence and blew them in a pocket of air out over the river’s surface like a fragmented bird.

Then it was all over. The sky was gray again, the wind dropped, the weeds stood up stiffly in the fields.

I heard someone standing behind me.

“It looks like the end of the earth, don’t it?” Dixie Lee said. He wore a gray western suit with a maroon shirt that had pearl snap buttons on it. “Or what the earth’ll look like the day Jesus ends it.”

I saw Clete behind the wheel of Dixie’s pink Cadillac convertible, waiting for him.

“Who paid for the casket?” I said.

“Clete.”

“Who did it, Dixie?”

“I don’t know.”

“Sally Dio?”

“I can’t believe something like that.”

“Don’t tell me that.”

“Fuck, I don’t know.” He looked at Alafair, who was sleeping with her rump in the air. “I’m sorry… but I don’t know. I ain’t sure about anything anymore.”

I continued to look out over the river flats, the swirl of dark current in the middle of the river, and the orange-streaked bluffs beyond.

“It ain’t any good to stand out here studying on things,” he said. “Convoy on back with us and we’ll stop in Lincoln for something to eat.”

“I’ll be along after a while.”

I heard him light a cigarette, click his lighter shut and put it in his pocket. I could smell his cigarette smoke drifting from behind me.

“Walk over here with me. I don’t want to wake up that little girl,” he said.

“What is it, Dixie?” I said irritably.

“Some people say life’s a bitch and you die. I don’t know if that’s right or not. But it’s what you’re starting to think right now, and it ain’t your way. You get yourself a lot of distance between you and them kind of thoughts, son. Look, you got involved with her. Everything ain’t lost on me. I know what you’re feeling.”

“You’re sober.”

“So I eased up a couple of days. I got my own program. You guys stay sober a day at a time. I get drunk a day at a time. Convoy on back with us. Give me a break from Clete. Sonofabitch is driving me crazy. It’s like being next to a balloon that’s fixing to float down on a hot cigarette. I tell you, he catches the guy that did this, it ain’t ever getting to the jailhouse.”

I followed them back toward the Divide, across the greening plains and into the mountains, up the glistening black highway into thick stands of ponderosa pine, blue shadow in the canyons, white water breaking over the boulders in the streambeds far below, long strips of cloud hanging wetly in the trees. It was misting heavily in the town of Lincoln; the air was cool and purple in the twilight and smelled of cut logs and woodsmoke and food cooking and the diesel exhaust from the eighteen-wheel log trucks idling in café parking lots. I saw Clete and Dixie pull off the road next to a café and look back at me. I shifted into second, accelerated through the traffic light, and kept going through town. Alafair looked at me in the light from the dashboard. Her window was half down, and there were drops of water in her hair and on her tan face.

“We ain’t going to stop?” she said.

“How about I buy you a buffalo burger on the other side of the mountain?”

“They wanted you to stop with them, didn’t they?”

“Those guys want lots of things. But like somebody once told me, I just don’t want to be there when they find it.”