Black Cherry Blues (Dave Robicheaux 3)

“She comes one day a week and brings groceries.”

“Talk to her, Mrs. Desmarteau. She’s a good girl. Between the two of us we’ll get her back home.”

I saw her breathe through her mouth. Her lips moved without sound.

“What?” I said.

“Clayton never did no harm to anybody. They said he carried a gun. If he did, they made him. They wouldn’t let him alone. They were afraid of him because he was brave.”

It was turning cold. I helped her finish spreading manure in her vegetable patch, then said good-bye and latched the wooden gate behind me. The sky was overcast and gray now. She looked small and alone with her hoe, in her dirt yard, in the wind that blew down off the backbone of the world.

I drove back down the dirt road and stopped at the place where Clayton Desmarteau and his cousin had put their car in the ditch. Did Mapes and Vidrine kidnap and drive them someplace, or did it all happen here? I asked myself. I jumped across the stream that bordered the far side of the road and walked up the slope into the lodgepole pine. The ground was thick with pine needles. Chipmunks played in the rocks, and red squirrels chased each other around the tree trunks. I walked about a quarter of a mile through the pines, then intersected a trace of a road that somebody had used at one time to dump garbage. The road dead-ended in a pile of rusted box springs, tin cans, mattresses, beer and wine bottles, and plastic soap containers. I went on another four hundred yards or so through the pines, then the trunks thinned and I came out on a tea-colored stream coursing over gray rocks. The stream cut along the edge of a low, rock-faced hill that rose abruptly into box elder, wild rosebushes, and thick scrub brush. I walked up and down the stream bank, crossed the sculpted tracks of deer, the delicate impressions of turkey and grouse in the wet sand, found the rotted, soft logs of an old cabin, tripped over the half-buried remains of a wood stove, and flushed a white-tailed buck that must have had ten points on his rack; but I saw nothing that was out of the ordinary or that could be helpful in discovering the fate of Clayton Desmarteau and his cousin.

Finally I came to a spring that flowed out of the hillside on the far bank of the stream. The spring dripped over rocks, and had eroded away the dirt and exposed the gnarled roots of small pines on the hillside. The water drained over a wide area of wet pine needles and black leaves, and the ground there was spongy and bursting with mushrooms and dark fern. I could smell the water, the coolness of the stone, the dank humus, the exposed tree roots that trailed like brown cobweb in the current. It smelled like the coulee on my property back in Louisiana. I wondered when I would be going back there, or if in fact I would be able to. Because I had decided that if I did not develop a better defense than the one I presently had, I was not going to deliver myself up for trial and a sure jolt in Angola pen.

I was tired. After hiking back to my truck, I drove up the road in the gray light between the wet fields, then I glanced in the side mirror at a black Willys Jeepster, a remake of the classic model manufactured right after World War II. Because the road was wet and there was no dust, I could see the driver’s tall outline behind the steering wheel. Then he accelerated and closed on my rear bumper, as though he wanted to see my reflection in the side mirror or some detail of my pickup—the dealer’s name, a bumper sticker that read Mulate’s, Breaux Bridge, Louisiana.

Up ahead was the wide, squat log tavern where Clayton Desmarteau and his cousin had probably spent the last night of their lives, where Darlene had waited tables, and where she had probably met Dixie Lee Pugh while he was in a drunken stupor, saved him from getting his head kicked in, and driven him over the mountains to Sally Dio’s on Flathead Lake. It was starting to mist, and a purple and orange neon war bonnet was lighted on the roof against the gray sky.

I pulled onto the gravel parking lot and waited to see what the driver in the Jeepster would do. He slowed abreast of me, his long hands on the top of the steering wheel, and stared intently out the passenger’s window. His face, forehead, and neck were streaked with thin scabs, as though he had walked through a nest of rust-colored spiderweb.

I wanted him to stop, to open his door, to confront me with his injury and his anger. I wanted to see a weapon in his hand and feel that adrenaline surge, that violent sanction, that lights and clarifies the mind and resolves all the complexities.

But Harry Mapes was holding all the good cards. Harry Mapes had been a helicopter pilot in Vietnam, and he knew that you don’t change the terms of your situation when your Gatling guns are locked in on a solitary pajama-clad target in the middle of a glassy rice field.

He turned into the parking lot and parked by the front door, where three Indians in work clothes were drinking canned beer next to a truck. He lit a cigarette with a gold lighter before he got out of his Jeepster, then went inside without looking back at me.

By the time I got back to Missoula that night Alafair had already had her supper at the baby-sitter’s, but I took her for a late snack at a pizza place called Red Pies Over Montana. She wore her soft denim jeans with the elastic waistband, patent leather shoes with white socks that were now gray with dust from the playground, and her yellow T-shirt printed with a smiling purple whale and the words “Baby Orca” on it. Her cheeks were spotted with red pizza sauce. Through the restaurant window I could see the stars over the mountains.

“Dave?” she said.

“What is it, little guy?”

“When we going back home?”

“Don’t you like it here?”

“I want to see Tex. Maybe Batist needs us at the shop. He can’t read.”

“You don’t have to read to sell worms and shiners.”

“Nothing here is like it is at home.”

“It has a lot of good things, though, doesn’t it?”

“I miss Tripod. I miss Clarise. It’s cold at night.”

I brushed her shiny black hair with my hand.

“It won’t be long. You’ll see,” I said.

But my assurance was an emotional lie. I didn’t know when we could go back. I wasn’t sure if I ever could. That night in the dark, with the door open between our bedrooms, I heard her saying her prayers by the side of the bed, then climbing in under the covers.

“Dave?”

“What?”

“Are people trying to hurt us? Is that why we had to move?”