James Burke - Black Cherry Blues

"You don't recognize my voice, huh? Maybe it's because a guy put a wrench across my windpipe, a guy that gutless kooze sent me to see. I didn't catch a plane back to Vegas, either. I'm one hour away. I better not find out you're hitting on my broad, either."

He was quiet a moment, then he said, "Charlie?"

I didn't answer.

"Charlie?" he said.

"Hey, man…"

"What?"

"I didn't know. Hey, man, I'm sorry. You should have told me. It's late, and I been asleep, and I didn't know it was you."

"Get him on the phone."

"Man, he's out. I mean, like him and Sandy must have smoked a whole shoe box of shit before they crashed. How about he calls you in the morning?"

"You got some kind of skin growth over your ears?"

"Look, man, I go in there, he'll tear my dick off. He's been crawling the walls all day, anyway. Look, I don't know what's going on between you guys, but I don't want to get caught in it. Okay? I'm not putting you on, man, he can't talk to you. He really smoked his brains tonight."

I waited five seconds and listened to him breathe.

"Tell him I'm coming," I said, and hung up.

I overslept the next morning and was awakened by the sound of Alafair fixing breakfast in the kitchen. She was too short to function well around the stove, and she clattered the pans loudly on the burners.

"I can walk myself today, Dave," she said.

"No, that's out. We do everything together, little guy. We're a team, right?"

She stood in front of the stove, her face quiet, her head even with the top of the stove, looking at the skillet full of French toast.

"It makes me feel funny in front of the other kids," she said.

"I'll drive you, then. It'll be like I'm dropping you off on the way to work. That'll be okay, won't it?"

"Clarise don't know how to take care of Tripod. She's always mad at him."

I turned off the stove, picked up the skillet with a dish towel, and set it in the sink to cool. The French toast was burned around the edges.

"We're just going to have to accept some things now. That's the way it is, Alf," I said.

She packed her lunch box silently, then ate only half of her French toast, and went outside and waited for me on the front step. The wind was blowing off the river, and the sunlight through the maple tree made shifting patterns of leaves on her face.

Later, Dixie and I went to an early AA meeting. Afterward, one of the members who worked in the job-placement service told Dixie that he had found him a part-time job operating a forklift at the pulp mill out on the river. We walked home, and it was obvious that Dixie was not happy at the news. He sulked around the house, then took his sunburst guitar out on the back steps and began playing with a thumb pick and singing a song that I had heard only once before, | many years ago. The words went to the tune of "Just a Closer Walk With Thee."

"Now, bread and gravy is all right, And a turnip sandwich is a delight, But my kids always scream For more of them good ole butter beans.

Well, just a little piece of country ham, Just pass the butter and the jam, Just pass the biscuits if you please, And some more of them good ole butter beans.

Just see that woman over there, The one with both her hands in the air. She's not pregnant as she seems. She's just full of good ole butter beans."

I opened the screen and sat down on the steps beside him. It was warm, and the clover in the grass was alive with bees.

"You're supposed to report to the plant at noon, aren't you?" I said.

"That's what he said."

"You going out there in slacks and a Hawaiian shirt?"

"Look, that job ain't exactly what I had in mind."

"Oh?"

"Ain't that place a toilet paper factory or something? Besides, I don't have experience running heavy equipment."

"A forklift isn't heavy equipment. And I thought you told me you operated one in Huntsville."

"For about two days, till I dropped the prongs on a guy's foot."

"We had a deal, podna. We don't renegotiate the terms."

He made a sliding blues chord high up on the guitar's neck, then ran it all the way down to the nut.

"I learned that from Sam Hopkins," he said.

"I went out to his house in the Fifth Ward in Houston. People said them nigras'll leave you bleeding in the street for the garbageman to find. They treated me like royalty, man."

"I spent some time Wednesday in some courthouses east of the Divide."

His face went blank.

"I found some of the deals you made over there."

He continued to look out at the lawn and the bees lifting off the clover.

"I'm not an expert on the oil business, but I saw some peculiar stuff in those lease files," I said.

"They're public records. A person can look all they want to." He began fishing in his shirt pocket for a cigarette.

"Every time you leased up a big block of land for Star Drilling, there was a hole or two left in it."

" He lit his cigarette and smoked it with his elbow propped on the belly of his guitar.

"Those holes were leased or bought up by one of Sal's businesses in Vegas," I said.

"The same company name is on some of the deals you made for him around Flathead Lake."

"I'm not proud of it."

"So he does want into the oil and gas business."

"He wants to cover his action every way he can. He's shooting for the big score in gambling and lake property development, he wants in on the gas domes on the East Front. In the drilling business, it don't matter if they tap in on top of your property or not. As long as you're in the pool, part of the dome, you're going to get royalties. That ain't all he's got on his mind, either. They make a big strike over there, it could be like that pipeline deal up in Alaska. All them sonsofbitches are horny, and they got plenty of money for dope, too. Them conservation people are hollering because the gas is full of hydrogen sulfide, it stinks like rotten eggs, but they ought to hear what Sal's got planned for the place."

"So you took Star over the hurdles?"

"That's about it."

"And you helped Sal start out in a brand-new enterprise."

"You want me on the cross? I told you I done it. I ain't lied about it."

"But that's not all of it."

"What?"

"Dalton Vidrine and Harry Mapes had to know what you were doing."

"At first they didn't, but Vidrine heard about it from another guy who was working the same township and range as me. He told Mapes, and they stuck it to me at the motel one night. I thought they were going to drop the dime on me with the home office, but they just wanted me to piece off the action. Sal said no problem. It cost him a little coke. Everybody was happy."

"You've got to give me something I can use against Mapes."

"I got nothing to offer. I told you all of it. They're like piranha in a goldfish bowl. You stick your finger in it, you take back a polished bone."

I left him thumbing the bass string on his guitar and staring out at the lawn, as though the blue and green shades in the grass held a secret for him. A few minutes later he came into the house and changed into an old shirt and a pair of ripped and faded pink slacks and drove off toward the smoking stacks of the pulp mill west of town.

After he was gone, I sat alone in the silence of the house with the realization that there was nothing I could do today to help my case. I knew of nothing I could do tomorrow or the next day either. I had run out of options. The time has come, I thought, to think not in terms of what to do but instead of where to go. Any jail or prison is a bad place. The person who thinks otherwise has never been in one. Angola is worse than most. The man who would willingly submit to do time unjustly in a place like that would take pleasure in his own crucifixion, I thought. It was a big country, and there were lots of places to get lost in it.