James Burke - Black Cherry Blues

It was cold and bright on the lake. The wind was puckering the electric-blue surface, and the waves were hitting hard against the rocks along the shore. I parked in front of the Dies' redwood house on the cliff, took off my windbreaker and left it in the truck so they could see I wasn't carrying a weapon, and used the brass knocker on the door. There was no answer. I walked around the side of the house, past the glassed-in porch that was filled with tropical plants, and saw the elder Dio in his wheelchair on the veranda, his body and head wrapped in a hooded, striped robe. In his hand was a splayed cigar, and inside the hood I could see the goiter in his throat, his purple lips, the liquid and venomous expression in his eyes. He said something to me, but it was lost in the wind, because I was looking down the tiers of redwood steps that led to the rocks below and the short dock where Sally Dee and his two hoods had just carried armloads of suitcases and cardboard boxes. Even Sal's set of drums was stacked on the dock.

The three of them watched me silently as I walked down the steps toward them. Then Sal knelt by a big cardboard box and began reinforcing a corner of it with adhesive tape as though I were not there. He wore a yellow jumpsuit, with the collar flipped up on his neck, and the wind had blown his long copper-colored hair in his face.

"What d'you want us to do, Sal?" one of his men said.

Sally Dee stood erect, picked up a glass of iced coffee from the dock railing, drank out of it, and looked at me with an almost amused expression.

"Nothing," he said.

"He's just one of those guys who get on the bottom of your shoe like chewing gum."

"I'll just take a minute of your time, Sal," I said.

"I think somebody fucked your airplane."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah."

"My airplane?"

"That's right."

"How'd they fuck my airplane?"

"I think maybe somebody put sand in your gas tank."

"Who's this somebody you're telling me about?"

"That's all yoji get. You can make use of it or forget I was here."

"Yeah? No shit? Fuck with my airplane."

"If I were you, I'd check it out."

"You see my airplane around here?"

"Well, I told you what I had to say, Sal. I'll be going now."

"Why you doing me these favors?" he said, and grinned at the two men, who were leaning against the dock rail.

"Because I don't want a guy like you on my conscience."

He winked at the two men, both of whom wore shades.

"Keep looking at that spot between those two islands," he said to me, and pointed.

"That's it, right over there. Keep watching. You hear that sound? It's an airplane. You know whose plane that is? You see it now, coming past those pine trees? It sounds like there's sand in the gas tank? It looks like it's going to crash?"

The milk-white amphibian came in low between the islands and touched down into the dark-blue surface of the water, the backwash of the propellers blowing clouds of spray in the air.

"Number one, I got locks on those gas tanks," Sal said.

"Number two, I got a pilot who's also a mechanic, and he checks out everything before we go anywhere." Then he looked at the other two men again and laughed.

"Hey, man, let me ask you an honest question. I look like I just got off the boat with a bone in my nose and a spear in my hand? Come on, I ain't mad. Nothing's going to happen to you. Give me an honest answer."

I turned to go.

"Hey, hey, man, don't run off yet. You're too fucking much." His mouth wAs grinning widely.

"Tell me for real. You think we're all that dumb? That we weren't going to catch on to all these games? I mean, I look that dumb to you?"

"What are you trying to say?"

"It was a good scam. But you ought to quit when you're ahead. Foo-Foo promised the florist a hundred bucks if he should see the guy who sent the flowers and the note. So he came out yesterday and told us he seen the guy. So we found the guy, and the guy told us all about it. Charlie Dodds hasn't been anywhere around here."

"It looks like you're on top of every thing. I'm sorry I wasted your time."

He tried to hold his grin, but I saw it fading, and I also saw the hard brown glint in his eyes, like a click of light you see in broken beer glass.

"I'll tell you what's going to happen a little ways down the road," he said.

"I'm going to be playing cards with some guys in Nevada. Not Carl or Foo-Foo here. Guys you never heard of or saw before. I'll just mention your name and the name of that shithole you come from. I'll mention Purcel's name, too. And I might throw Dixie's in as a. Lucky Strike extra. That's all. I won't say nothing else. Then one day a guy'll come to your door. Or he'll be standing by your truck when you come out of a barbershop. Or maybe he'll want to rent a boat from you. It's going to be a big day in your life. When it happens, I want you to remember me."

His two men grinned from behind their shades. The sunlight was brilliant and cold on the lake, the wind as unrelenting as a headache.

The story was on the front page of the Missoulian the next morning. The amphibian went down on the Salish Indian Reservation, just south of the lake. Two Indians who saw it crash said they heard the engines coughing and misfiring as the plane went by overhead, then the engines seemed to stall altogether and the plane veered sideways between two hills, plowing a trench through a stand of pines, and exploded. A rancher found a smashed wheelchair hanging in a tree two hundred yards away.

I wondered what Sal thought about in those last moments while the pilot jerked impotently against the yoke and Sal's hired men wrenched about in their seats, their faces stretched with disbelief, expecting him to do something, and the horizon tilting at a violent angle and the trees and cliffs rushing up at him like a fist. I wondered if he thought of his father or his lover in Huntsville pen or the Mexican gambler whose ear he mutilated on a yacht. I wondered if perhaps he thought that he had stepped into history with Ritchie Valens, the Big Bopper, and Buddy Holly.

But I doubted that he thought any of these things. I suspected that in his last moments Sal thought about Sal.

I folded the paper and dropped it into the trash sack in the kitchen. Alafair was putting our Styrofoam cooler, with our sandwiches and soft drinks, on the front seat of the truck.

"How would Clete get into Sally Dee's house to steal those ashtrays?" I asked Dixie Lee.

"He probably just let himself in. Sal didn't know it, but Clete copied all his keys. He could get into everything Sal owned house, boat, cars, airplane, meat locker in town. Clete ain't nobody's fool, son. Like the Wolfman used to say, "You got the curves, baby, I got the angles." I saw them in one of his boxes when I put his junk in the basement."

"Would you mind getting them for me?" I said.

Dixie went down the basement stairs and came back with a fistful of keys that were tied together with a length of baling wire.

I walked out on the front porch into the morning, across the lawn and the street and down the embankment to the river's edge. The sun was not up over the mountains yet, trout were feeding in the current around the stanchions of the steel railway bridge, and the sawmill across the river was empty and quiet. I unfastened the looped baling wire and flung the keys out into the water like a shower of gold and silver coins.

Dixie Lee was standing on the curb, watching me, when I walked back up the embankment.

"Ain't that called destroying evidence or something?" he said.

"It's all just rock 'n' roll," I said.

"How come Dixie always says 'ain't'? " Alafair asked.

"Try not to say 'how come,' little guy."

"Great God in heaven, leave that little girl's grammar alone," Dixie said.