Black Cherry Blues (Dave Robicheaux 3)

“What you gonna do Alafair?” he said.

“My cousin will keep her in New Iberia.”

He made a pretense of wiping off the counter with a rag. His blue cotton work shirt was unbuttoned, and his stomach muscles ridged above his belt buckle. He put a gumdrop in the side of his mouth and looked out the window at the bayou as though I were not there.

“All right, what’s wrong?” I said.

“You got to ask me that?”

“I have to do it, Batist. They’re going to send me to prison. I’m looking at ten and a half years. That’s with good time.”

“That don’t make it right.”

“What am I supposed to do?”

“Her whole life people been leaving her, Dave. Her mama, Miz Annie, you in the jail. She don’t need no mo’ of it, no.”

I filled up the truck at the dock and waited on the gallery for the school bus. At four o’clock it stopped in the leafy shade by the mailbox, and Alafair walked through the pecan trees toward me, her tin lunch box clanging against her thigh. Her tan skin was dark in the shadows. As always, she could read a disturbed thought in my face no matter how well I concealed it.

I explained to her that I had to leave, that it wouldn’t be for long, that sometimes we simply had to do things that we didn’t like.

“Cousin Tutta is always nice to you, isn’t she?” I said.

“Yes.”

“She takes you to the show and out to the park, just like I do, doesn’t she?”

“Yes.”

“Batist will come get you to ride Tex, too. That’ll be all right, won’t it?”

This time she didn’t answer. Instead she sat quietly beside me on the step and looked woodenly at the rabbit hutches and Tripod eating out of his bowl under the pecan tree. Then pale spots formed in her cheeks, and the skin around her bottom lip and chin began to pucker. I put my arm around her shoulders and looked away from her face.

“Little guy, we just have to be brave about some things,” I said. “I’ve got some big problems to take care of. That’s just the way it is.”

Then I felt incredibly presumptuous, vain, and stupid in talking to her about bravery and acceptance. She had experienced a degree of loss and violence in her short life that most people can only appreciate in their nightmares.

I stared across the road at a blue heron rising from the bayou into the sunlight.

“Have you ever seen snow?” I said.

“No.”

“I bet there’s still snow on the ground in Montana. In the ponderosa and the spruce, high up on the mountain. I went out there once with a friend from the army. I think you and I had better go check that out, little guy.”

“See snow?”

“You better believe it.”

Her teeth were white and her eyes were squinted almost shut with her smile.

By that evening we were highballing through the red-clay piney woods of East Texas, the warm wind blowing through the open truck windows, the engine humming under the hood, the inside of the cab aglow with the purple twilight.

We rode into the black, rain-swept night until the sky began to clear out in the Panhandle and the moon broke through the clouds in a spoked wheel of silver over the high plains. The next day, outside of Raton, New Mexico, I bought a bucket of fried chicken and we ate in a grove of cottonwoods by a stream and slept four hours on a blanket in the grass. Then we climbed out of the mesa country into Trinidad, Colorado, and the tumbling blue-green roll of the Rocky Mountains, through Pueblo, Denver, and finally southern Wyoming, where the evening air turned cold and smelled of sage, and the arroyo-cut land and buttes were etched with fire in the sunset. That night we stayed in a motel run by Indians; in the morning it rained and you could smell bacon curing in a smokehouse.

We crossed into Montana south of Billings, and the land began to change. It was green and rolling, the rivers slow-moving and lined with cottonwood and willow trees, with sharp-toothed mountains in the distance. Then as we headed toward the Continental Divide the rivers became wider with the spring runoff, roiling in the center, flooding the trees along the banks, and the mountains in the distance tumbled higher and higher against the sky, their crests still packed with snow, the slopes covered with ponderosa pine and Douglas fir and blue spruce. Alafair slept on the seat beside me, her head on a comic book, while I topped the Divide outside of Butte and began the long grade down the western slope toward Missoula. White-tailed deer grazed near the road in the evening shadows, their heads flickering at me as I roared past them. Log ranch houses were set back against the base of the hills, their windows lighted, smoke flattening off their stone chimneys.

I followed the Clark Fork River through a cut in the mountains called Hellgate Canyon, and suddenly under a bowl of dark sky the city spilled out in a shower of light all the way across the valley floor. Missoula was a sawmill and university town, filled with trees and flowers, old brick homes, wooded parks, intersecting rivers glazed with neon light, the tinge of processed wood pulp, rows of bars where bikers hung in the doorways and the rock music thundered out into the street. My palms were thick and ringing with the pressure of the steering wheel, my ears almost deaf from the long hours of road wind. When I climbed the motel stairs with Alafair asleep on my shoulder, I looked out over the night sheen of the river, at the circle of mountains around the town and the way the timber climbed to the crests, and I wondered if I had any chance at all of having a normal life again, of being an ordinary person who lived in an ordered town like this and who did not wake up each morning with his fears sitting collectively on his chest like a grinning gargoyle.