James Burke - Black Cherry Blues

"Them people make me nervous, son," he said.

"I feel like a turd floating around in somebody's soup bowl."

"It's the one place where maybe people can understand guys like us, Dixie."

"Yeah, well, I've been to them meets before, and it didn't take. I think that's just the way it is with some guys. Jesus pointed his finger at the people he wanted. I ain't seen nobody point his finger at me. Hey, you remember those jokes we used to tell in the fifties? Like, what'd the bathtub say to the toilet?"

"I get the same amount of ass you do, but I don't have to take all that shit."

"Come on, partner, what's really bothering you?"

"I don't relate to that fourth- and fifth-step stuff. Where you got to go over all you done wrong and confess everything to somebody. I really don't dig that at all. I got enough damn guilt without poking at it with a stick."

"Take it a step at a time. You don't have to do that now. Besides, haven't you owned up to a lot of things already? You told me some pretty honest stuff when you were in the hospital in Lafayette."

"I got all kinds of things that make me ashamed. Hell, I knew Sal was no good when I met him in the pen. He was a geek. But he had bread, a lot of dope, and he liked me. So I didn't have to sweat the wolves and the swinging dicks and the guys who'd blow out your candle if they ever thought you snitched for the boss man. So I pretended not to see what went on in our cell. I wrote it off. A lot of guys turn homosexual inside the joint. I didn't go for it myself, but I didn't knock the guys who did. So Sal had a punk. Big deal, I thought. The fucking system does it to guys. That's what I said to myself. So I'd take a walk when this Mexican kid would come to our cell. It wasn't my business, right? Except something very weird started happening."

We sat down on the front steps of my porch. Birds flew in and out of the shade. There was no wind, and the maple trees looked green and bright and stiff against the sky.

"You see, in that kind of relationship, in the pen, I mean, the punk is disposable," Dixie Lee said.

"A pair of pork chops. All right, it's sickening stuff, but that's the way it is. But this kid was a real lover for Sal. He'd bring lipstick and women's underwear to the cell, and he'd wash and comb Sal's hair and then they'd hang a blanket down off the top bunk and really go at it. Except the kid turned out to be a lot more than Sal's punk. Sal really fell for him. The kid always had' cigarettes candy bars, ludes, magazines, an easy job in the infirmary, safe-conduct pass with the bad asses Then the kid started acting like a celebrity, walking around with a little pout on his face, making cow eyes at some very dangerous guys in the v shower. A couple of guys told Sal he'd better straighten out his punk, but it wasn't too long before everybody knew that this kid could jerk Sal around any way he wanted to.

"The problem was some black guys wanted to take over Sal's drug action. But he had too many mean guys working for him, and they knew he was connected on the outside, too, so they always walked around him. Then the kid started making him look like a douche bag, and they decided it was time for them to get into some serious pharmaceutical sales. Sal had been bringing in about four or five hundred bucks a week, which is a lot of money in the joint, and in three weeks' time the blacks cut that in half. His mules came around the cell like scared mice and asked him what he was going to do about it, since the blacks were telling them they were out of the business for good, and Sal tried to blow it off and tell them everything was cool and that he was bringing in a load of Afghan skunk that would cook brains all over the joint.

"But everybody was laughing at him behind his back. The kid treated Sal like he was the punk instead of the other way around, and in the meantime he was hanging with a couple of other yard bitches who were anybody's punch, and the three of them would go swishing around the place while the kid talked in a loud voice about Sal like he was some Dagwood Bumstead the kid put up with.

"But somebody called up Sal's old man in Galveston, and the shit hit the fan. The old man came up to Huntsville, and I don't know what he said to Sal in the visiting room, but whatever it was it put the fear of God in him. His face was white when he came back to our cell. He sat up all night smoking cigarettes on the side of his bunk, and in the morning he puked his breakfast out on the work detail. I asked him what was wrong, and he said, "I got to do something." I said, "What?" He said, "Something I don't want to do."

"So I said, "Don't do it." Then he said, "I'm a made guy. When you're a made guy, you do what they tell you."

"See, that's that dago stuff. They got some kind of ritual with knives and blood and magical bullshit, and they get to be made guys, which means they can smoke cigars at front tables in Vegas and pretend they're not a bunch of ignorant fish peddlers anymore.

"Two days later, right before lockup, Sal went to the kid's cell, where the kid was reading a comic book on his bunk with another fairy. He told the other kid to take off, then he took a piece of pipe out of his pants and beat that Mexican boy almost to death. He broke his nose, busted out his teeth, cauliflowered his ears, hurt that boy so bad his mother wouldn't know him.

"When he come back to the cell he had his shirt wadded up in his hand to hide the blood. After lights-out he tore it up in strips and flushed it down the toilet. In the morning he was all smiles, like he'd just made his first jump in the airborne or something. That kid was in the hospital three weeks. They shaved his head bald and put a hundred stitches in it. He looked like a lumpy white basketball with barbed wire wrapped all over it.

"Then Sal put out the word the kid was anybody's bar of soap. You know what that means in the joint for a kid like that? They're some cruel, sick sonsofbitches in there, son. That kid had an awful time of it. I don't like remembering it."

"Why are you telling me this, Dixie?"

"Because most of them people at the meet are just drunks. Liquor's only part of my problem. I lived off a guy like Sal. The reason I done it was because it was easy. You can't beat lobster and steak every day, plus the sweet young things were always ready to kick off their panties. If I didn't cut it with the oil business, life was still a pure pleasure around Sal's swimming pool. It didn't have nothing to do with liquor or dope. It has to do with a lack of character."

"It's part of the illness. You'll learn that if you keep going to meetings," I said.

He pulled a long-bladed weed from the edge of the step and bounced it up and down between his feet.

"You'll see," I said.

"You want me to talk to the DEA, don't you?"

"Why do you think that?"

"I heard you on the phone last night."

"You want to?"

"No." He bounced the weed on the toe of his loafer, then picked up a small red bug with the weed's tip and watched it climb toward his hand.

"You wouldn't use me, would you, Dave?" he said.

"No, I wouldn't do that."

"Because I'd be sorely hurt. I mean it, son. I don't need it. I surely don't."

I stood up and brushed off the seat of my pants.

"I don't know how you do it," I said.

"What's that?" He squinted up at me in the sunlight. His hair was gold and wavy and shiny with oil.

"No matter what I talk to you about, somehow I always lose."

"It's your imagination. They don't come much more simple than me."

I remember one of the last times I saw my mother. It was 1945, just before the war ended, and she came to our house on the bayou with the gambler she had run away with. I was out front on the dirt road, trying to catch my dog, who was chasing chickens in the ditch, when he stopped his coupe, one with a rumble seat and a hand-cranked front window with gas-ration stamps on it, thirty yards down from the house. She walked fast up the lane into the shade of our oaks and around to the side yard, where my father was nailing together a chicken coop. She worked in a drive-in and beer garden in Morgan City. Her pink waitress uniform had white trim on the collar and sleeves, and because her body was thick and muscular it looked too small on her when she walked. Her back was turned to me while she talked to my father, but his face was dark as he listened and his eyes went up the road to where the coupe was parked.