James Burke: Black Cherry Blues

"Yep."

"They didn't have a blowout preventer on. It killed a couple of dozen guys when it blew."

"You've got a good memory, Dixie." I twisted the throttle to open the gas feed and yanked the starter rope. It didn't catch.

"It don't matter to you that I'm talking about Star Drilling Company?" he said.

I kept yanking the rope while oil and gas bled away from the engine into the water. Then I put one knee on the plank seat, held the engine housing firm with my palm, and ripped the starter handle past my ear. The engine roared, the propeller churned a cloud of yellow mud and dead hyacinth vines out of the bottom, and I turned us back into the full sunlight, the slap of water under the bow, the wind that smelled of jasmine and wisteria. On the way back Dixie sat on the bow with his forearms lying loosely between his legs, his face listless and empty now, his rose-emblazoned shirt puffing with warm air.

Late that afternoon the wind shifted out of the south and you could smell the wetlands and just a hint of salt in the air. Then a bank of thunderheads slid across the sky from the Gulf, tumbling across the sun like cannon smoke, and the light gathered in the oaks and cypress and willow trees and took on a strange green cast as though you were looking at the world through water. It rained hard, dancing on the bayou and the lily pads in the shallows, clattering on my gallery and rabbit hutches, lighting the freshly plowed fields with a black sheen.

Then suddenly it was over, and the sky cleared and the western horizon was streaked with fire. Usually on a spring evening like this, when the breeze was cool and flecked with rain, Batist and I headed for Evangeline Downs in Lafayette. But the bottom had dropped out of the oil business in Louisiana, the state had the highest rate of unemployment in the country and the worst credit rating, and the racetrack had closed.

I boiled crawfish for supper, and Alafair and I shelled and ate them on the redwood picnic table under the mimosa tree in the backyard. That night I dreamed of a bubble of fire burning under the Gulf's green surface. The water boiled and hissed, geysers of steam and dirty smoke rose into air, and an enormous blue-green oil slick floated all the way to the western horizon. Somewhere far down below among the twisted spars and drill pipe and cables and the flooded wreckage of the quarter boat were the bodies of my father and nineteen other men who went down with the rig when the drill bit punched into a pay sand and the wellhead blew.

The company's public relations men said that they didn't have a blowout preventer on because they had never hit an oil sand at that depth in that part of the Gulf before. I wondered what my father thought in those last moments of his life. I never saw fear in him. No matter how badly he was hurt by circumstances or my mother's unfaithfulness, and eventually by drunken brawls in bars and the times he was locked up in the parish jail, he could always grin and wink at me and my brother and convincingly pretend to us that misfortune was not even worthy of mention.

But what did he feel in those last moments, high up on the mon keyboard in the dark, when the rig started to shake and groan and he saw the roughnecks on the platform floor dropping tongs and chain and running from the eruption of sand, salt water, gas, oil, and cascading drill pipe that in seconds would explode into an orange and yellow flame that melted steel spars like licorice? Did he think of me and my brother, Jimmie?

I bet he did. Even when he clipped his safety belt onto the Geronimo wire and jumped into the black, even as the rig caved with him on top of the quarter boat, I bet his thoughts were of us.

They never found his body, but even now, almost twenty-two years later, he visited me in my sleep and sometimes I thought he spoke to me during my waking day. In my dream I saw him walking out of the surf, the green waves and foam sliding around the knees of his overalls, his powerful body strung with rust-colored seaweed. His wind-burned skin was as dark as a mulatto's, his teeth white, his thick, curly hair black as an Indian's. His tin hat was cocked at an angle on his head, and when he popped a wet kitchen match on his thumbnail and lit a cigar stub in the corner of his mouth and then crinkled his eyes at me, a shaft of morning sunlight struck his hat and flashed as bright as a heliograph. I could feel the salt water surge over my legs as I walked toward him.

But it's the stuff of dreams. My father was dead. My wife was, too. The false dawn, with its illusions and mist-wrapped softness, can be as inadequate and fleeting as Morpheus' gifts.

The days became warmer the first week in April, and on some mornings I went out on the salt at dawn and seined for shrimp in the red sunrise. In the afternoon I helped Batist in the bait shop, then worked in my flower beds, pruning the trellises of purple and yellow roses that I grew on the south side of the house. I pumped iron and did three miles along the dirt road by the bayou. At four o'clock I would hear the school bus stop, and five minutes later I would hear Alafair's lunch box clatter on the kitchen table, the icebox open; then she would come looking for me in the backyard.

I sometimes wondered if perhaps she were simply fascinated with me as she would be by a strange and interesting animal that had come unexpectedly into her life. Her mother had drowned while holding her up in a wobbling bubble of air inside a crashed and sunken plane flown out of El Salvador by a Sanctuary priest. Her father had either been killed by the army in the mountains or he had been "disappeared" inside a military prison. Now through chance and accident she bed with me in my rural Cajun world on the edge of the Louisiana wetlands.

One afternoon I had moved the picnic table out in the sunlight and had gone to sleep on top of it in my running shorts. I heard her bang the screen door, then when I didn't open my eyes she found a duck feather by the pond and began to touch peculiar places on my body with it: the white patch in my hair, my mustache, the curled Pungi-stick scar on my stomach. Then I felt her tickle the thick, raised welts on my thigh, which looked like small arrowheads embedded under the skin, where I still carried shrapnel from a mine and sometimes set off airport metal detectors.

When I still refused to respond I heard her walk across the grass to the clothesline, unsnap Tripod from his chain, and suddenly he was sitting on my chest, his whiskers and wet nose and masked beady eyes pointed into my face. Alafair's giggles soared into the mimosa tree.

That evening while I was closing the bait shop and folding up the umbrellas over the tables on the dock, a man parked a new Plymouth that looked like a rental or a company car by my shale boat ramp and walked down the dock toward me. Because of his erect, almost fierce posture, he looked taller than he actually was. In reality he probably wasn't over five and a half feet tall, but his neck was thick and corded with vein, his shoulders wide and sloping like a weight lifter's, his eyebrows one dark, uninterrupted line. His muscles seemed so tightly strung together that one muscular motion seemed to activate a half-dozen others, like pulling on the center of a cobweb with your finger. If anything, he reminded me of a pile of bricks.

He wore his slacks high up on his hips, and the collar of his short-sleeved white shirt was unbuttoned and his tie pulled loose. He didn't smile. Instead, his eyes flicked over the bait shop and the empty tables, then he opened a badge on me.

"I'm Special Agent Dan Nygurski, Mr. Robicheaux," he said.

"Drug Enforcement Administration. Do you mind if I talk with you a little bit?"

The accent didn't go with the name or the man. It was hillbilly, nasal, southern mountains, a bobby pin twanging in your ear.