James Burke: Black Cherry Blues

But fear is an irrational emotion that floats from object to object like a helium balloon that you touch with your fingertips. I opened my dresser drawer, took my.45 from under my work shirts, slipped the heavy clip into the magazine, and lay back down in the dark. The flat of the barrel felt hot against my thigh. I put my arm across my eyes and tried to fall asleep again. It was no use.

I put on my sandals and khakis and walked through the dark trunks of the pecan trees in the front yard, across the road and down to the dock and the bait shop. Then the moon rose from behind a cloud and turned the willow trees to silver and illuminated the black shape of a nutria swimming across the bayou toward the cattails. What was I doing here? I told myself that I would get a head start on the day. Yes, yes, certainly that was it.

I opened the cooler in which I kept the soda pop and the long-necked bottles of Jax, Dixie, and Pearl beer. Yesterday's ice had melted, and some of the beer labels floated in the water. I propped my arms on the lip of the cooler and shut my eyes. In the marsh I heard a nutria cry out to its mate, which always sounds like the hysterical scream of a woman. I plunged my hands into the water, dipped it into my face, and breathed deeply with the shock of the cold. Then I wiped my face on a towel and flung it across the counter onto the duckboards.

I went back up to the house, sat at the kitchen table in the dark, and put my head on my forearms.

Annie, Annie.

I heard bare feet shuffle on the linoleum behind me. I raised my head and looked up at Alafair, who was standing in a square of moonlight, dressed in her pajamas that were covered with smiling clocks. Her face was filled with sleep and puzzlement. She kept blinking at me as though she were waking from a dream, then she walked to me, put her arms around my neck, and pressed her head against my chest. I could smell baby shampoo in her hair. Her hand touched my eyes.

"Why your face wet, Dave?" she said.

"I just washed it, little guy."

"Oh." Then, "Something ain't wrong?"

"Not 'ain't." Don't say 'ain't."

" She didn't answer. She just held me more tightly. I stroked her hair and kissed her, then picked her up and carried her back into her bedroom. I laid her down on the bed and pulled the sheet over her feet. Her stuffed animals were scattered on the floor. The yard and the trees were turning gray, and I could hear Tripod running up and down on his clothesline.

She looked up at me from the pillow. Her face was round, and I could see the spaces between her teeth.

"Dave, is bad people coming back?"

"No. They'll never be back. I promise."

And I had to look away from her lest she see my eyes.

One week later I took Alafair for breakfast in New Iberia, and when I unfolded a discarded copy of the Daily Iberian I saw Dixie Lee's picture on the front page. It was a file photo, many years old, and it showed him onstage in boat like suede shoes, pegged and pleated slacks, a sequined white sport coat, a sunburst guitar hanging from his neck.

He had been burned in a fire in a fish camp out in Henderson swamp. A twenty-two-year-old waitress, his "female companion," as the story called her, had died in the flames. Dixie Lee had been pulled from the water when the cabin, built on stilts, had exploded in a fireball and crashed into the bayou. He was listed in serious condition at Our Lady of Lourdes in Lafayette.

He was also under arrest. The St. Martin Parish sheriffs department had found a dental floss container of cocaine under the front seat of his Cadillac convertible.

I am not going to get involved with his troubles, I told myself. When you use, you lose. A mean lesson, but when you become involved with an addict or a drunk, you simply become an actor in a script that they've written for you as well as themselves.

That afternoon Alafair and I made two bird feeders out of coffee cans and hung them in the mimosa tree in the backyard, then we restrung Tripod's clothesline out in the pecan trees so he wouldn't have access to Clarise's wash. We moved his doghouse to the base of a tree, put bricks under it to keep it dry and free of mud, and set his food bowl and water pans in front of the door. Alafair always beamed with fascination while Tripod washed his food before eating, then washed his muzzle and paws afterward.

I fixed etouffee for our supper, and we had just started to eat on the picnic table in the backyard when the phone rang in the kitchen. It was a nun who worked on Dixie Lee's floor at Lourdes. She said he wanted to see me.

"I can't come, Sister. I'm sorry," I said.

She paused.

"Is that all you want me to tell him?" she asked.

"He needs a lawyer. I can give you a couple of names in Lafayette or St. Martinville."

She paused again. They must teach it in the convent, I thought. It's an electric silence that makes you feel you're sliding down the sides of the universe.

"I don't think he has many friends, Mr. Robicheaux," she said.

"No one has been to see him. And he asked for you, not an attorney."

"I'm sorry."

"To be frank, so am I," she said, and hung up.

When Alafair and I were washing the dishes, and the plowed and empty sugarcane fields darkened in the twilight outside the window, the telephone rang again.

His voice was thick, coated with phlegm, a whisper into the receiver.

"Son, I really need to see you. They got me gauzed up, doped up, you name it, an enema tube stuck up my ring us He stopped and let out his breath into the phone.

"I need you to listen to me."

"You need legal help, Dixie. I won't be much help to you."

"I got a lawyer. I can hire a bagful of his kind. It won't do no good. They're going to send me back to the joint, boy."

I watched my hand open and close on top of the counter.

"I don't like to tell you this, podna, but you were holding," I said.

"That fact's not going away. You're going to have to deal with it."

"It's a lie, Dave." I heard the saliva click in his throat.

"I don't do flake, anymore. It already messed up my life way back there. Maybe sometimes a little reefer. But that's all."

I pinched my fingers on my brow.

" Dixie, I just don't know what I can do for you."

"Come over. Listen to me for five minutes. I ain't got anybody else."

I stared out the screen at the shadows on the lawn, the sweep of night birds against the red sky.

It was windy the next morning and the sky was light blue and filled with tumbling white clouds that caused pools of shadow to move across the cane fields and cow pastures as I drove along the old highway through Broussard into Lafayette. Dixie Lee's room was on the second floor at Lourdes, and a uniformed sheriffs deputy was playing checkers with him on the edge of the bed. Dixie Lee lay on his side, his head, chest, right shoulder, and right thigh wrapped in bandages. His face looked as though it were crimped inside a white helmet. There was mucus in his eyes, and a clear salve oozed from the edges of his bandages. An IV was hooked into his arm.

He looked at me and said something to the deputy, who set the checkerboard on the nightstand and walked past me, working his cigarette pack out of his shirt pocket.

"I'll be right in the hall. The door stays open, too," he said.

I sat down next to the bed. There were oaks hung with moss outside the window. The pressure of Dixie 's head against the pillow made him squint one eye at me.

"I knew you'd come. There's some guys that can't be any other way," he said.

"You sound better," I said.

"I'm on the edge of my high and about ready to slide down the other side of it. When the centipedes start crawling under these bandages, they'll be back with the morphine. Dave, I got to get some help. The cops don't believe me. My own lawyer don't believe me. They're going to send my butt to Angola. I can't do no more time, man. I ain't good at it. They tore me up over there in Texas. You get in thin cotton, you don't pick your quota, the boss stands you up on an oil barrel with three other guys. Hot and dirty and hungry, and you stand there all night."