James Burke: Black Cherry Blues

He sat down next to me and shook hands, almost as an afterthought.

"We got to drink some mash and talk some trash," he said, then told the waitress to bring me a beer or a highball.

"No, thanks, Dixie," I said.

"You mean like it's too late or too early in the day or like you're off the jug?" he said.

"I go to meetings now. You know what I mean?"

"Heck yeah. That takes guts, man. I admire it." His eyes were green and filled with an alcohol shine. He looked at me directly a moment, then his eyes blinked and he looked momentarily embarrassed.

"I read in the newspaper about your wife, man. I'm sorry."

"Thank you."

"They caught the guys that did it?"

"More or less."

"Huh," he said, and studied me for a moment. I could see that he was becoming uncomfortable with the knowledge that a chance meeting with an old friend is no guarantee that you can reclaim pleasant moments out of the past. Then he smiled again.

"You still a cop?" he asked.

"I own a bait and boat-rental business south of New Iberia. I came up here last night to pick up some refrigeration equipment and got stuck in the storm."

He nodded. We were both silent.

"Are you playing here, Dixie?" I said.

Mistake.

"No, I don't do that anymore. I never really got back to it after that trouble in Texas."

He cleared his throat and took a cigarette out of the pack in his shirt pocket.

"Say, hon, how about getting me my drink out of the bar?"

The waitress smiled, put down the rag she had been using to clean the counter, and went into the nightclub next door.

"You know about that stuff in Texas?" he asked.

"Yes, I think so."

"I was DWI, all right, and I ran away from the accident. But the guy run that stop sign. There wasn't no way I could have avoided it. But it killed his little boy, man. That's some hard shit to live with. I got out in eighteen months with good time." He made lines on a napkin with his thumbnail.

"A lot of people just don't want to forget, though."

I didn't know what to say. I felt sorry for him. He seemed little different from the kid I used to know, except he was probably ninety-proof most of the time now. I remembered a quote in a Newsweek story about Dixie Lee that seemed to define him better than anything else I had ever seen written about him. The reporter had asked him if any of his band members could read music. He replied, "Yeah, some of them can, but it don't hurt their playing any."

So I asked him what he was doing now, because I had to say something.

"Leaseman," he said.

"Like Hank Snow used to say, "From old Montana down to Alabama." I cover it all. Anyplace there's oil and coal. The money's right, too, podna."

The waitress put his bourbon and water down in front of him. He drank from it and winked at her over his glass.

"I'm glad you're doing okay, Dixie," I said.

"Yeah, it's a good life. A Caddy convertible, a new address every week, it beats collard greens and grits." He hit me on the arm.

"Heck, it's all rock 'n' roll, anyway, man."

I nodded good-naturedly and looked through the service window at the Negro woman who was scraping my hash browns and chicken-fried steak onto a plate. I was about to tell the waitress that I had meant the order to go.

"Well, I got some people waiting on me," Dixie Lee said.

"Like, some of the sweet young things still come around, you know what I mean? Take it easy, buddy. You look good."

I shook hands with him, ate my steak, bought a second cup of coffee for the road, and walked out into the rain.

The wind buffeted my truck all the way across the Atchafalaya basin. When the sun came up the light was gray and wet, and ducks and herons were flying low over the dead cypress in the marsh. The water in the bays was the color of lead and capping in the wind. A gas flare burned on a drilling rig set back in a flooded stand of willow trees. Each morning I began the day with a prayer, thanking my Higher Power for my sobriety of yesterday and asking Him to help me keep it today. This morning I included Dixie Lee in my prayer.

I drove back to New Iberia through St. Martinville. The sun was above the oaks on Bayou Teche now, but in the deep, early morning shadows the mist still hung like clouds of smoke among the cattails and damp tree trunks. It was only March, but spring was roaring into southern Louisiana, as it always does after the long gray rains of February. Along East Main in New Iberia the yards were filled with blooming azalea, roses, and yellow and red hibiscus, and the trellises and gazebos were covered with trumpet vine and clumps of purple wisteria. I rumbled over the drawbridge and followed the dirt road along the bayou south of town, where I operated a fish dock and lived with a six-year-old El Salvadoran refugee girl named Alafair in the old home my father had built out of cypress and oak during the Depression.

The wood had never been painted, was dark and hard as iron, and the beams had been notched and joined with pegs. The pecan trees in my front yard were thick with leaf and still dripping with rainwater, which tinked on the tin roof of the gallery. The yard always stayed in shadow and was covered with layers of blackened leaves. The elderly mulatto woman who baby-sat Alafair for me was in the side yard, pulling the vinyl storm covers off my rabbit hutches. She was the color of a copper penny and had turquoise eyes, like many South Louisiana Negroes who are part French. Her body looked put together out of sticks, and her skin was covered with serpentine lines. She dipped snuff and smoked hand-rolled cigarettes constantly, and bossed me around in my own home, but she could work harder than anyone I had ever known, and she had been fiercely loyal to my family since I was a child.

My boat dock was in full sunlight now, and I could see Batist, the other black person who worked for me, loading an ice chest for two white men in their outboard. He was shirtless and bald, and the weight of the ice chest made his wide back and shoulders ridge with muscle. He broke up kindling for my barbecue pit with his bare hands, and once I saw him jerk a six-foot alligator out of the water by its tail and throw it up on a sandbar.

I stepped around the puddles in the yard to the gallery.

"What you gonna do this coon?" Clarise, the mulatto woman, said.

She had put my three-legged raccoon, Tripod, on his chain, which was attached to a wire clothesline so he could run up and down in the side yard. She pulled him up in the air by the chain. His body danced and curled as though he were being garroted.

"Clarise, don't do that."

"Ax him what he done, him," she said.

"Go look my wash basket. Go look your shirts. They blue yesterday. They brown now. Go smell, you."

"I'll take him down to the dock."

"Tell Batist not to bring him back, no." She dropped Tripod, half strangled, to the ground.

"He come in my house again, you gonna see him cooking with the sweet potato."

I unsnapped his chain from the clothesline and walked him down to the bait shop and cafe on the dock. I was always amazed at the illusion of white supremacy in southern society, since more often than not our homes were dominated and run by people of color.

Batist and I bailed the rainwater from the previous night's storm out of my rental boats, filled the cigarette and candy machines, seined dead shiners out of the live-bait tanks, drained the water out of the ice bins and put fresh ice on top of the soda pop and beer, and started the barbecue fire for the lunch that we prepared for midday fishermen. Then I opened up the beach umbrellas that were set in the holes of the huge wooden telephone spools that I used as tables, and went back up to the house.

It had turned out to be a beautiful morning. The sky was blue, the grass in the fields a deeper green from the rain; the wind was cool on the gallery, the backyard still deep in shadow under the mimosa tree, and my redwood flower boxes were streaked with water and thick with petunias and Indian paintbrush. Alafair was at the kitchen table in her pajama bottoms, coloring in the Mickey Mouse book I had bought her the day before. Her black hair was cut in bangs; her eyes were big and brown, her face as round as a pie plate, and her skin had already started to grow darker with tan. If there was any physical imperfection in her, it was her wide-set front teeth, which only made her smile look larger than it actually was. It was hard to believe that less than a year ago I had pulled her from a downed plane out at Southwest Pass just off the Gulf, a drowning little girl whose bones had felt hollow as a bird's, whose gasping mouth had looked like a guppy's in my wife's lap.