Black Cherry Blues (Dave Robicheaux 3)

My mother leaned over me and pressed me against her body. Her voice was low, as though the two of us were under a glass bell.

“I ain’t bad, Davy,” she said. “If somebody tell you that, it ain’t true. I’ll come see you again. We’ll go somewheres together, just us two. Eat fried chicken, maybe. You gonna see, you.”

But a long time would pass before I would see her again. The Victory gardens, the picket-fenced donation centers of worn tires and bundled coat hangers, the small tasseled silk flags with blue and gold service stars that hung in house windows to signify the number of family members who were in uniform or killed in action, would all disappear within the year, an era would end, and the oil companies would arrive from Texas. I would hear that my mother worked in the back of a laundry with colored women in Baton Rouge, that Mack died of tuberculosis, that she married a man who operated carnival rides. Then when I was sixteen years old and I went for the first time to the Boundary Club on the Breaux Bridge highway, a rough, ramshackle roadhouse where they fought with knives and bottles in the shale parking lot, I saw her drawing draft beer behind the bar. Her body was thicker now, her hair blacker than it should have been, and she wore a black skirt that showed a thick scar above one knee. She brought a beer tray to a table full of oil-field workers, then sat down with them. They all knew her and lit her cigarettes, and when she danced with one of them she pressed her stomach against his loins. I stood by the jukebox and waved at her, and she smiled back at me over the man’s shoulder, but there was no recognition in her face.

I waited out in the car for my friends to come out of the club. I saw a drunk man pushed out the side door onto the shale. I saw some teenagers throw a Coke bottle at a car full of Negroes. I saw a man in a yellow cowboy shirt and tight blue jeans without a belt slap a woman against the side of a car. He hit her hard and made her cry and shoved her in the backseat and made her stay there by herself while he went back inside. It was hot and still in the parking lot, except for the sounds of the woman. The willow trees were motionless on the banks of the Vermilion River, and the moonlight looked like oil on the water’s surface. Dust drifted through the car window, and I could smell the stench of dead garfish out on the mudbank and hear the woman weeping quietly in the dark.

The opinion of certain people has always been important to me. Most of those people have been nuns, priests, Catholic brothers, and teachers. When I was a child the good ones among them told me I was all right. Some in that group were inept and unhappy with themselves and were cruel and enjoyed inculcating guilt in children. But the good ones told me that I was all right. As an adult, I st

ill believe that we become the reflection we see in the eyes of others, so it’s important that someone tell us we’re all right. That may seem childish, but only to those who have paid no dues and hence have no question mark about who they are, because their own experience or lack of it has never required them to define themselves. You can meet some of these at university cocktail parties; or sometimes they are journalists who fear and envy power and celebrity but who love to live in its ambience. There is always a sneer buried inside their laughter. They have never heard a shot fired in anger, done time, walked through a mortared ville, seen a nineteen-year-old door gunner go apeshit in a free-fire zone. They sleep without dreaming. They yawn at the disquietude of those whom they can’t understand. No one will ever need to tell them that they are all right.

I think for some the soul has the same protean shape as fire, or a collection of burning sticks that melts and hisses through the snow until only an ill-defined and soot-streaked hollow remains to indicate the nature of flame and its passage through ice.

Then somebody tells you that you are all right.

I had to go back on the other side of the Divide. It was a good time to take Alafair out of Missoula, too. I walked down to the school and found Tess Regan in her office. A vase of mock orange sat on her desk, and her corkboard was a litter of thumbtacked crayon drawings. Through a sunny window I could see the children on the playground, a solitary basketball hoop, and the brick wall of the church next door. She wore a cotton knit yellow dress, a gold neck chain, and gold earrings that were almost hidden by her auburn hair. Her nails were cut short and painted with clear polish, and her fingers were spread on her desk blotter while she listened to me talk. I liked her and respected her feelings, and I didn’t want her to be angry with me any longer or to be uncomfortable because of our conversation yesterday.

“People hang up on me all the time. I expect it,” I said. “A Treasury agent once told me I had the telephone charm of Quasimodo.”

“That purple lump on your head, that happened at your house yesterday?”

“I was careless. It’ll be gone soon.”

“You want to take Alafair out of school today and tomorrow?”

“That’s right. She’ll be back Thursday.”

“Where are you going, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“I have to take care of some business across the mountains.”

“I’m very concerned about all this. You give me bad feelings. These men you talk about are evil, aren’t they? But you seem almost cavalier.”

“You’re wrong about that, kiddo.”

“I wish you wouldn’t call me that.”

“All right.”

“Alafair is a wonderful little girl. I worry about her. I worry about your attitudes.”

“She thinks the world of you, too. I don’t want to be unpleasant or to upset you in any way, but I want you to understand something. Somebody sent me a used hypodermic needle and a letter and a photograph. I won’t tell you what was in the photograph, but the person who wrote the letter said the needle had been used in a snuff film. His threat was not aimed at me. It was directed at Alafair. I believe he was serious, too.

“Now, in the movies potential murder or assault victims are given twenty-four-hour protection by the cops. But it doesn’t happen that way. You’re on your own. If you don’t believe me, ask anybody who has been hunted down by a guy who they had locked up and who made bail by the next morning. They tell a great story. A lot of them tend to become NRA members.”

Her green eyes were steady and intelligent. She was a good soldier and obviously was trying to look beyond the abrasive quality of my words; but I had gone over a line, almost like an emotional bully, and she wasn’t up to handling it.

“I’ll get Alafair for you,” she said.

“Miss Regan… Tess, I’m at a real bad place in my life. I apologize for the way that I talk, but I’m really up against it. Don’t make me walk out of here feeling like a shit.”

But it was no use. She brushed past me, her hips creasing inside her knit dress, her eyes welling with tears.

Later that day Alafair and I drove into the clouds on the Divide. It rained hard and the trees looked thick and black in the wet light, and water sluiced off the road into the canyons far below. It was too late to get anything done at the Teton County courthouse, so we stayed the night at a motel in Choteau, the county seat.

The next day I found the connection between Sally Dee and the oil business. I found it all over the East Front, in Teton, Pondera, and Glacier counties. And I found out the service that Dixie Lee had been performing for him.

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