James Burke: Black Cherry Blues

I brushed her fine black hair under my palm.

"How you doing, little guy?" I said.

"Where you went, Dave?"

"I got caught in the storm and had to stay in Baton Rouge."

"Oh."

Her hand went back to coloring. Then she stopped and grinned at me, full of glee.

"Tripod went ca-ca in Clarise basket," she said.

"I heard about it. Look, don't say 'ca-ca.' Say 'He went to the bathroom.' "

"No ca-ca?"

"That's right. 'He went to the bathroom.' " She repeated it after me, both of our heads nodding up and down.

She was in the first grade at the Catholic school in New Iberia, but she seemed to learn more English from Clarise and Batist and his wife than she did from me and the nuns. (A few lines you might hear from those three on any particular day: "What time it is?"

"For how come you burn them leafs under my window, you?"

"While I was driving your truck, me, somebody pass a nail under the wheel and give it a big flat." I hugged Alafair, kissed her on top of the head, and went into the bedroom to undress and take a shower. The breeze through the window smelled of wet earth and trees and the gentle hint of four-o'clocks that were still open in the shade. I should have been bursting with the spring morning, but I felt listless and spent, traveling on the outer edge of my envelope, and it wasn't simply because of bad dreams and insomnia the previous night. These moments would descend upon me at peculiar times, as though my heart's blood were fouled, and suddenly my mind would light with images and ring with sounds I wasn't ready to deal with.

It could happen anywhere. But right now it was happening in my bedroom. I had replaced several boards in the wall, or filled the twelve-gauge buckshot and deer-slug holes with liquid wood, and sanded them smooth. The gouged and splintered headboard, stained brown with my wife's blood as though it had been flung there by a paintbrush, lay in a corner of the old collapsed barn at the foot of my property. But when I closed my eyes I saw the streaks of shotgun fire in the darkness, heard the explosions that were as loud as the lightning outside, heard her screams as she cowered under a sheet and tried to shield herself with her hands while I ran frantically toward the house in the rain, my own screams lost in the thunder rolling across the land.

As always when these moments of dark reverie occurred in my waking day, there was no way I could think my way out of them.

Instead, I put on my gym trunks and running shoes and pumped iron in the backyard. I did dead lifts, curls, and military presses with a ninety-pound bar in sets of ten and repeated the sets six times. Then I ran four miles along the dirt road by the bayou, the sunlight spinning like smoke through the canopy of oak and cypress trees overhead. Bream were still feeding on insects among the cattails and lily pads, and sometimes in a shady cut between two cypress trees I would see the back of a largemouth bass roll just under the surface.

I turned around at the drawbridge, waved to the bridge tender and hit it hard all the way home. My wind was good, the blood sang in my chest, my stomach felt flat and hard, yet I wondered how long I would keep mortality and memory at bay.

Always the racetrack gambler, trying to intuit and control the future with only the morning line to operate on.

Three days later I was using a broomstick to push the rainwater out of the folds of the canvas awning over my dock when the telephone rang inside the bait shop. It was Dixie Lee Pugh.

"I'll take you to lunch," he said.

"Thanks but I'm working."

"I want to talk to you."

"Go ahead."

"I want to talk to you alone."

"Where are you?"

" Lafayette."

"Drive on over. Go out East Main, then take the bayou road south of town. You'll run right into my place."

"Give me an hour."

"You sound a little gray, podna."

"Yeah, I probably need to get married again or something. Dangle loose."

Every morning Batist and I grilled chickens and links on the barbecue pit that I had made by splitting an oil drum horizontally with an acetylene torch and welding hinges and metal legs on it. I sold paper-plate lunches of barbecue and dirty rice for three-fifty apiece, and I usually cleared thirty dollars or so from the fishermen who were either coming in for the day or about to go out. Then after we had cleaned the cable-spool tables, Batist and I would fix ourselves plates and open bottles of Dr. Pepper and eat under one of the umbrellas by the water's edge.

It was a warm, bright afternoon, and the wind was lifting the moss on the dead cypress trees in the marsh. The sky was as blue and perfect as the inside of a teacup.

"That man drive like he don't know the road got holes in it," Batist said. His sun-faded denim shirt was open on his chest. He wore a dime on a string around his neck to keep away the gris-gris, an evil spell, and his black chest looked like it was made of boilerplate.

The pink Cadillac convertible, with its top down, was streaked with mud and rippled and dented along the fenders. I watched the front end dip into a chuckhole and shower yellow water all over the windshield.

"Dixie Lee never did things in moderation," I said.

"You ain't renting him our boat?"

"He's just coming out to talk about something. He used to be a famous country and rock 'n' roll star."

Batist kept chewing and looked at me flatly, obviously unimpressed.

"I'm serious. He used to be big stuff up in Nashville," I said.

His eyes narrowed, as they always did when he heard words that he didn't recognize.

"It's in Tennessee. That's where they make a lot of country records."

No help.

"I'll get us another Dr. Pepper. Did you feed Tripod?" I said.

"You t'ink that coon don't know where the food at?"

I didn't understand.

"He ain't lost his nose, no."

"What are you saying, Batist?"

"He eat all your fried pies. Go look your fried pies."

Dixie Lee cut his engine, slammed the car door behind him, and lumbered down the dock into the bait shop, flipping one hand at us in recognition. His face was bloodless, the skin stretched tight on the bone, beaded with perspiration like drops of water on a pumpkin. His charcoal shirt, which was covered with roses, was damp along the buttons and under the armpits.

I followed him inside the bait shop. He dropped a five-dollar bill on the counter, opened a long-necked Jax on the side of the beer box, and upended it into his mouth. He kept swallowing until it was almost empty, then he took a breath of air and opened and closed his eyes.

"Boy, do I got one," he said.

"I mean wicked, son, like somebody screwed a brace and bit through both temples."

He tilted the bottle up again, one hand on his hip, and emptied it.

"A mellow start, but it don't keep the snakes in their basket very long, do it?"

"Nope."

"What we're talking about here is the need for more serious fluids. You got any JD or Beam lying around?"

"I'm afraid not, Dixie." I rang up his sale and put his change on the counter.

"These babies will have to do, then." He opened another Jax, took a long pull, and blew out his breath.

"A preacher once asked me, "Son, can you take two drinks and walk away from it?" I said, "I can't tell you the answer to that, sir, 'cause I never tried." That ought to be funny, but I guess it's downright pathetic, ain't it?"

"What's up, partner?"

He looked around the empty bait shop.

"How about taking me for a boat ride?" he said.

"I'm kind of tied up right now."

"I'll pay you for your time. It's important, man."

His green eyes looked directly into mine. I walked to the bait-shop door.

"I'll be back in a half hour," I called to Batist, who was still eating his lunch under the umbrella.