James Burke - Black Cherry Blues

"Hey, that's good, Robicheaux. The mob hooking up with the oil business." He was laughing out loud now.

"That's like Frankenstein making it with the wife of Dracula. I'm not kidding you, that's great. The guys in the office'll love this. You got any other theories?"

Then he started laughing again.

I quietly replaced the telephone receiver in the cradle, then walked down to the dock in the wet afternoon sunlight to help Batist close up the bait shop.

That evening Alafair and I drove down to Cypremort Point for boiled crabs at the pavilion. We sat at one of the checker-cloth tables on the screened porch by the bay, a big bib with a red crawfish on it tied around Alafair's neck, and looked out at the sun setting across the miles of dead cypress, saw grass, the sandy inlets, the wetlands that stretched all the way to Texas. The tide was out, and the jetties were black and stark against the flat gray expanse of the bay and the strips of purple and crimson cloud that had flattened on the western horizon. Seagulls dipped and wheeled over the water's edge, and a solitary blue heron stood among the saw grass in an inlet pool, his long body and slender legs like a painting on the air.

Alafair always set about eating bluepoint crabs with a devastating clumsiness. She smashed them in the center with the wood mallet, snapped off the claws, and cracked back the shell hinge with slippery hands and an earnest innocence that sent juice and pulp flying all over the table. When we finished eating I had to take her into the washroom and wipe off her hair, face, and arms with wet paper towels.

On the way back home I stopped in New Iberia and rented a Walt Disney movie, then I called up Batist and asked him and his wife to watch it with us. Batist was always fascinated by the VCR and never could quite understand how it worked.

"Them people that make the movie, they put it in that box, huh, Dave?" he said.

"That's right."

"It just like at the show, huh?"

"That's right."

"Then how it get up to the antenna and in the set?"

"It doesn't go up to"

"And how come it don't go in nobody else's set?" he said.

"It don't go out the house," Alafair said.

"Not 'It don't.' Say 'It doesn't,' " I said.

"Why you telling her that? She talk English good as us," Batist said.

I decided to heat up some boudin and make some Kool-Aid.

I rented a lot of Disney and other films for children because I didn't like Alafair to watch ordinary television in the evening or at least when I was not there. Maybe I was overly protective and cautious. But the celluloid facsimile of violence and the news footage of wars in the Middle East and Central America would sometimes cause the light to go out of her face and leave her mouth parted and her eyes wide, as though she had been slapped.

Disney films, Kool-Aid, boudin, bluepoint crabs on a breezy porch by the side of the bay were probably poor compensation for the losses she had known. But you offer what you have, perhaps even bless it with a prayer, and maybe somewhere down the line affection grows into faith and replaces memory. I can't say. I'm not good at the mysteries, and I have few solutions even for my own problems. But I was determined that Alafair would never again be hurt unnecessarily, not while she was in my care, not while she was in this country.

"This is our turf, right, Batist?" I said as I gave him a paper plate with slices of boudin on it.

"What?" His and Alafair's attention was focused on the image of Donald Duck on the television screen. Outside, the fireflies were lighting in the pecan trees.

"This is our Cajun land, right, podna?" I said.

"We make the rules, we've got our own flag."

He gave me a quizzical look, then turned back to the television screen. Alafair, who was sitting on the floor, slapped her thighs and squealed uproariously while Donald Duck raged at his nephews.

The next day I visited Dixie Lee again at Lourdes and took him a couple of magazines. The sunlight was bright in his room, and someone had placed a green vase of roses in the window. The deputy left us alone, and Dixie lay on his side and looked at me from his pillow. His eyes were clear, and his cheeks were shaved and pink.

"You're looking better," I said.

"For the first time in years I'm not full of whiskey. It feels weird, I'm here to tell you. In fact, it feels so good I'd like to cut out the needle, too. But the centipedes start waking up for a snack."

I nodded at the roses in the window and smiled.

"You have an admirer," I said.

He didn't answer. He traced a design on the bed with his index finger, as though he were pushing a penny around on the sheet.

"You grew up Catholic, didn't you?" he said.

"Yes."

"You still go to church?"

"Sure."

"You think God punishes us right here, that it ain't just in the next world?"

"I think those are bad ideas."

"My little boy died in a fire. A bare electric cord under a rug started it. If I hadn't been careless, it wouldn't have happened. Then I killed that man's little boy over in Fort Worth, and now I been in a fire myself and a young girl's dead."

I looked at the confusion and pain in his face.

"I had preachers back home tell me where all that drinking and doping was going to lead me. I wouldn't pay them no mind," he said.

"Come on, don't try to see God's hand in what's bad. Look outside. It's a beautiful day, you're alive, you're feeling better, maybe you've got alternatives now that you didn't have before. Think about what's right with your life, Dixie."

"They're going to try and pop me."

"Who?"

"Vidrine and Mapes. Or some other butthole the company hires."

"These kinds of guys don't come up the middle."

He looked back at me silently, as if I were someone on the other side of a wire fence.

"There're too many people looking at them now," I said.

"You don't know how much money's involved. You couldn't guess. You don't have any idea what these bastards will do for money."

"You're in custody."

"Save the dog shit, Dave. Last night Willie out there said he was going for some smokes. It was eleven o'clock. He handcuffed my wrist to the bed rail and came back at one in the morning, chewing on a toothpick and smelling like hamburger and onions."

"I'll talk to the sheriff."

"The same guy that thinks I've got fried grits for brains? You think like a cop, Dave. You've probably locked a lot of guys up, but you don't know what it's like inside all that clanging iron. A couple of swinging dicks want a kid brought to their cell, that's where he gets delivered. A guy wants you whacked out because you owe for a couple of decks of cigarettes, you get a shank in your spleen somewhere between the mess hall and lockup. Guys like Willie out there are a. joke."

"What do you want me to do?"

"Nothing. You tried. Don't worry about it."

"I'm not going to leave you on your own. Give me a little credit."

"I ain't on my own. I called Sally Dee."

I looked again at the roses in the green vase.

"Floral telegram. He's a thoughtful guy, man," Dixie Lee said.

"It's your butt."

"Don't ever do time. You won't hack it inside."

"What you're doing is not only stupid, you're starting to piss me off, Dixie."

"I'm sorry."

"You want to be on these guys' leash the rest of your life? What's the matter with you?"

"Everything. My whole fucking life. You want to pour yourself some iced tea? I got to use the bedpan."

"I think I've been jerked around here, partner."

"Maybe you been jerking yourself around."

"What?"

"Ask yourself how much you're interested in me and how much you're interested in the drilling company that killed your old man."

I watched him work the stainless steel bedpan out from the rack under the mattress.