"Black Cherry Blues" - читать интересную книгу автора (Burke James Lee)

CHAPTER 2

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.

"I'm closing up for the day and we're about to go to a crawfish boil in the park," I said.

"This won't take long. I talked with the sheriff in New Iberia and he said you could probably help me out. You used to be a deputy in his department, didn't you?"

"For a little while."

His face was seamed and coarse, the eyes slightly red around the rims. He flexed his mouth in a peculiar way when he talked, and it caused the muscles to jump in his neck, as though they were attached to a string. ' "Before that you were on the force in New Orleans a long time? A lieutenant in homicide?"

"That's right."

"I'll be," he said, and looked at the red sun through the cypress trees and the empty boats tied to the dock.

My experience with federal agents of any kind has always been the same. They take a long time to get to it.

"Could I rent a boat from you? Or maybe could you go with me and show me some of these canals that lead into Vermilion Bay?" he asked. His thinning dark hair was cut GI, and he brushed his fingers back through it and widened his eyes and looked around again.

"I'll rent you a boat in the morning. But you'll have to go out by yourself. What is it exactly I can help you with, Mr. Nygurski?"

"I'm just messing around, really." He flexed his mouth again.

"I heard some guys were off-loading some bales down around Vermilion Bay. I just like to check out the geography sometimes."

"Are you out of New Orleans?"

"No, no, this is my first trip down here. It's nice country. I've got to try some of this crawfish while I'm here."

"Wait a minute. I'm not following you. You're interested in some dope smugglers operating around Vermilion Bay but you're from somewhere else?"

"It's just an idle interest. I think they might be the same guys I was after a few years ago in Florida. They were unloading a cigarette boat at night outside of Fort Myers, and some neckers out in the dunes stumbled right into the middle of the operation. These guys killed all four of them. The girls were both nineteen. It's not my case anymore, though."

The twang, the high-pitched voice, just would not go with the subject matter nor the short, thick-bodied dark man who I now noticed was slew-footed and walked a bit sideways like a crab.

"So you're out of Florida?" I said.

"No, no, you got me all wrong. I'm out of Great Falls, Montana, now, and I wanted to talk with you about"

I shook my head.

"Dixie Lee Pugh," I said.

We walked up the dock, across the dirt road and through the shadows of the pecan trees in my front yard. When I asked him how he had connected me with Dixie Lee, he said that one of his people had written down my tag number the morning I had met Dixie in the cafe outside Baton Rouge. But I also guessed that the DEA had a tap on his motel phone. I went inside the house, brought out two cold cans of Dr. Pepper, and we sat on the porch steps. Through the trunks of the pecan trees I could see the shadows lengthening on the bayou.

"I don't mean any disrespect toward your investigation, Mr. Nygurski, but I don't think he's a major drug dealer. I think y'all are firing in the well."

"Why?"

"I believe he has a conscience. He might be a user, but that doesn't mean he's dealing."

"You want to tell me why he came out to see you?"

"He's in some trouble. But it doesn't have anything to do with drugs, and he'll have to be the one to tell you about it."

"Did he tell you he celled with Sal the Duck in Huntsville?"

"With who?"

"Sal the Duck. Also known as Sally Dio or Sally Dee. You think that's funny?"

"I'm sorry," I said. I wiped my mouth with my hand.

"But am I supposed to be impressed?"

"A lot of people would be. His family used to run Galveston. Slots, whores, every floating crap game, dope, you name it. Then they moved out to Vegas and Tahoe and about two years ago they showed up in Montana. Sal came back to visit his cousins in Galveston and got nailed with some hot credit cards. I hear he didn't like Huntsville at all."

"I bet he didn't. It's worse than Angola."

"But he still managed to turn a dollar or two. He was the connection for the whole joint, and I think he was piecing off part of his action to Pugh."

"Well, you have your opinion. But I think Dixie 's basically an alcoholic and a sick man."

Nygurski took a newspaper clipping out of his shirt pocket and handed it to me.

"Read this," he said.

"I guess the reporters thought this was funny."

The headline read "CURIOSITY KILLED THE BEAR." The dateline was Poison, Montana, and the lead paragraph described how a duffel bag containing forty packages of cocaine had been dropped by parachute into a heavily wooded area east of Flathead Lake and was then found by a black bear who strung powder and wrappers all over a hillside before he OD'd.

"That parachute came down on national forestland. But guess who has a hunting lease right next door?"

"I don't know."

"Sally Dio and his old man. Guess who acted as their leasing agent?"

" Dixie Lee."

"But maybe he's just a sick guy."

I looked away at the softness of the light on the bayou. Out of the corner of my eye I could see the knuckles on his hand as he clenched the soda can.

"Come on, what do you think?" he said.

"I think you're in overdrive."

"You're right. I don't like these cocksuckers"

"Nobody does. But I'm out of the business. You're tilting with the wrong windmill."

"I don't think killing bears is funny, either. I don't like to see these guys bring their dirt and greed into a beautiful country. Your friend Pugh is standing up to his bottom lip in a lake of shit and the motorboat is just about to pass."

"Then tell him that," I said, and looked at my watch. The breeze dented the leaves in the pecan trees.

"Believe me, I will. But right now I'm frig mo here."

"What?"

"It means "Fuck it, I got my orders." In three days I go back to Great Falls." He drained his soda can, crushed it in his palm, and set it gently on the porch step. He stood up and handed me his card.

"My motel number in Lafayette is on the back. Or later you can call me collect in Montana if you ever want to share any of your thoughts."

"I've got nothing worth sharing."

"It sounds depressing." His mouth made that peculiar jerking motion again.

"Tell me, do you find something strange about my face?"

"No, I wouldn't say that."

"Come on, I'm not sensitive."

"I meant you no offense," I said.

"Boy, you're a careful one. A woman once told me my face looked like soil erosion. I think it was my wife. Watch out for Dixie Pugh, Robicheaux. He'll sell you a bowl of rat turds and call it chocolate chip."

"I changed my mind. I'll share one thought with you, Mr. Nygurski. You didn't come all the way down here to follow a guy like Dixie Lee around. No matter how you cut it, he's not a long-ball hitter."

"Maybe he is, maybe he isn't."

"What's really going on up there?"

"Everything that's going on in the rest of the country, except accelerated. It's a real zoo story. All the big players are there, nosing up to the trough. Keep fooling around with that rock 'n' roller and you'll meet some of them."

He walked off through the trees, his feet loud on the dead leaves and dried pecan husks. si The moon was down that night, the sky black, and trees of lightning trembled on the southern horizon. At four in the morning I was awakened by the rumble of dry thunder and the flickering patterns of light on the wall. A tuning fork was vibrating in my chest, but I couldn't explain why, and my skin was hot and dry to the touch even though the breeze was cool through the window. I heard sounds that were not there: a car engine dying on the road, the footsteps of two men coming through the trees, a board squeaking on the porch, the scrape of a prizing bar being inserted between the front door and the jamb. They were the sounds of ghosts, because one man had been electrocuted in his bathtub with his radio in his lap and the other had died in an attic off St. Charles when five hollow-point rounds from my.45 had exploded up through the floor into the middle of his life.

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."

"They don't believe what?"

"This" He tried to touch his fingers behind his head.

"Reach around back and feel on them bandages."

" Dixie, what are"

"Don't."

I reached across him and touched my fingertips across the tape.

"It feels like a roll of pennies under there, don't it?" he said.

"That's because I woke up just before some guy with a tire iron or a jack handle came down on my head. He was going to bust me right across the lamps, but I twisted away from him just before he swung. The next thing I knew I was in the water. You ever wake up drowning and on fire at the same time? That's what it was like. There was a gas tank for the outboards under the cabin, and it must have blown and dumped the whole thing in the bayou. Burning boards was hanging off the stilts, the water was full of hot ash, steam hissing all over the fucking place. I thought I'd gone to hell, man."

He stopped talking and his lips made a tight line. I saw water well up in his green eyes.

"Then I seen something awful. It was the girl, you remember, that redheaded waitress from the cafe in West Baton Rouge. She was on fire, like a big candle burning all over, hung in all them boards and burning against the sky.

"I can't clean it out of my head, not even when they hit me with the joy juice. Maybe they hit her in the head like they done me. Maybe she was already dead. God, I hope so. I can't stand thinking about it, man. She didn't do nothing to anybody."

I wiped my palms on my slacks and blew out my breath. I wanted to walk back out into the sunshine, into the windy morning, into the oak trees that were hung with moss.

"Who was the guy with the tire iron?" I said.

"One of those fuckers I work with."

"You saw his face?"

"I didn't have to. They knew I was going to drop the dime on them. For all the damn good it would do."

"You told them that?"

"Sure. I got fed up with both of them. No, wait a minute. I got fed up being afraid. I was a little swacked when I stuck it in their face, but I done it just the same. Dalton Vidrine and Harry Mapes. One's a coon ass and the other's a stump-jumper from East Texas."

"I'm having one problem with all this. There's some people who think you're mixed up in dope. Up in Montana."

His green eyes closed and opened like a bird's.

"They're wrong," he said.

"-that maybe you're mixed up with a trafficker named Dio."

His mouth smiled slightly.

"You been talking to the DEA," he said.

"But they're sniffing up the wrong guy's leg."

"You didn't lease land for him in Montana?"

"I leased and bought a bunch of land for him. But it don't have anything to do with dope. Sally Dee was my cell partner. Some guys were going to cut me up in the shower. Till Sally Dee told them they treat me just like they treat him. Which means they light my cigarettes, they pick in my sack when we get in thin cotton. The cat's half crazy, man, but he saved my butt."

"What was the land deal about, Dixie?"

"I didn't ask. He's not the kind of guy you ask those things to. He's got a lot of holdings. He hires people to act as his agents. He likes me for some reason. He paid me a lot of bread. What's the big deal?"

"As an old friend, Dixie, I'm going to ask you to save the Little Orphan Annie routine for the DEA."

"You believe what you want."

"What's your bond?"

"Fifteen thou."

"That's not too bad."

"They know I ain't going anywhere. Except maybe to Angola. Dave, I ain't giving you a shuck. I can't take another fall, and I don't see no way out of it."

I looked out the window at the treetops, the way their leaves ruffled in the breeze, the whiteness of the clouds against the dome of blue sky.

"I'll come back and visit you later," I said.

"I think maybe you have too much faith in one guy."

"I'll tell you a story I heard Minnie Pearl tell about Hank. This was right after he brought the whole auditorium down singing 'I Saw the Light' at the Opry. Backstage he turned to her and said, "But, Minnie, they ain't no light. They just ain't no light." That's when your soul is hanging on a spider's web right over the fire, son. That's right where I'm at now."

That afternoon I stood on the levee and looked down at the collapsed and blackened remains of the fish camp that, according to Dixie Lee, had belonged to Star Drilling Company. Mattress springs, charred boards, a metal table, a scorched toilet seat, half the shingle roof lay in the shallows at the bottom of the stilt supports. A paste of gray ash floated among the cattails and lily pads.

I walked down to the water's edge. I found what was left of a Coleman stove and a pump twelve-gauge shotgun whose shells had exploded in the magazine. The gasoline drum that had been used to fuel outboard engines was ripped outward and twisted like a beer can.

The fire had made a large black circle from the water to halfway up the levee. Extending out from the circle were trails of ash through the buttercups and new grass like the legs of a spider. One of them led up to the road at the top of the levee.

I dug the soil loose from around the trail with my pocketknife and smelled it. It smelled like burnt grass and dirt.

I knew little about arson investigation, but I saw nothing on the levee that would help Dixie Lee's case.

I drove to St. Martinville and parked across from the old church where Evangeline and her lover are buried under an enormous spreading oak. The wind blew the moss in the trees along Bayou Teche, and the four-o'clocks were opening in the shade along the banks. I was told by the dispatcher in the sheriff's department that the sheriff was out for a few minutes but that a detective would talk to me.

The detective was penciling in a form of some kind and smoking a cigarette when I walked into his office. He affected politeness but his eyes kept going to the clock on the wall while I talked. A side door opened onto the sheriff's office, and I could see his desk and empty chair inside. I told the detective the story that Dixie had told me. I told him about the lea semen Dalton Vidrine and Harry Mapes.

"We know all about that," he said.

"That's why the sheriff been talking to them. But I tell you right now, podna, he don't believe that fella."

"What do you mean he's been talking with them?"

He smiled at me.

"They in his office right now. He went down to the bat' room he said. Then he got up and closed the door to the sheriff's office.

I looked at him, stunned.

"They're sitting in there now?" My voice was incredulous.

"He called them up and ax them to come in and make a statement."

I stood up, took a piece of paper off his desk, and wrote my name and telephone number on it.

"Ask the sheriff to call me," I said.

"What's your name again?"

"Benoit."

"Get into another line of work."

I walked back outside to my pickup truck. The shadows were purple on the bayou and the church lawn. An elderly Negro was taking down the flag from the pole in front of the courthouse and a white man was closing and locking the side doors. Then two men came out the front entrance and walked hurriedly across the grass toward me, one slightly ahead of the other.

The first was a tall, angular man, dressed in brown slacks, shined loafers, a yellow sport shirt with a purple fleur-delis on the pocket, a thin western belt with a silver buckle and tongue. I could hear the change in his pocket when he walked. On his bottom lip was a triangular scar that looked like wet plastic.

The man behind him was shorter, dark, thick across the middle, the kind of man who wore his slacks below the navel to affect size and strength and disguise his advancing years. His eyebrows dipped down and met over his nose. Even though it was warm, he wore a long-sleeved white shirt, the pocket filled with a notebook and clip-on ballpoint pens.

Both men had the agitated look of people who might have seen their bus pass them by at their stop.

"Just a minute there, buddy," the tall man said.

I turned and looked at him with my hand on the open truck door.

"You were using our names in there. Where the hell do you get off making those remarks?" he said. His eyes narrowed and he ran his tongue over the triangular scar on his lip.

"I was just passing on some information. It didn't originate with me, partner."

"I don't give a goddamn where it came from. I won't put up with it. Particularly from some guy I never saw before," he said.

"Then don't listen to it."

"It's called libel."

"It's called filing a police report," I said.

"Who the fuck are you?" the other man said.

"My name's Dave Robicheaux."

"You're an ex-cop or some kind of local bird dog?" he said.

"I'm going to ask you guys to disengage," I said.

"You're asking us! You're unbelievable, man," the tall man said.

I started to get in my truck. He put his hand around the window jamb and held it.

"You're not running out of this," he said. The accent was East Texas, all right, piney woods, red hills, and sawmills.

"Pugh's a pathetic man. He melted his brains a long time ago. The company gave him a break when nobody else would. Obviously it didn't work out. He gets souped up with whiskey and dope and has delusions." He took his hand from the window jamb and pointed his finger an inch from my chest.

"Now, if you want to spend your time talking to somebody like that, that's your damn business. But if you spread rumors about me and I hear about it, I'm going to look you up."

I got in my truck and closed the door. I breathed through my nose, looked out at the shadows on the church, the stone statue of Evangeline under the spreading oak. Then I clicked my key ring on the steering wheel. The faces of the two men were framed through my truck window.

Then I yielded to the temptations of anger and pride, two serpentine heads of the Hydra of character defects that made up my alcoholism.

"It was the Coleman fuel for the stove, wasn't it?" I said.

"You spread it around the inside of the cabin, then strung it down the steps and up the levee. As an added feature maybe you opened the drain on the gas drum, too. You didn't expect the explosion to blow Dixie Lee out into the water, though, did you?"

It was a guess, but the mouth of the short man parted in disbelief. I started the engine, turned out into the traffic, and drove past the old storefronts and wood colonnades toward the edge of town and the back road to New Iberia.

In my dreams is a watery place where my wife and some of my friends live. I think it's below the Mekong River or perhaps deep under the Gulf. The people who live there undulate in the tidal currents and are covered with a green-gold light. I can't visit them there, but sometimes they call me up. In my mind's eye I can see them clearly. The men from my platoon still wear their pots and their rent and salt-caked fatigues. Smoke rises in bubbles from their wounds.

Annie hasn't changed much. Her eyes are electric blue, her hair gold and curly. Her shoulders are still covered with sun freckles. She wears red flowers on the front of her nightgown where they shot her with deer slugs. On the top of her left breast is a strawberry birthmark that always turned crimson with blood when we made love.

How you doing, baby lovel she asks.

Hello, sweetheart.

Your father's here.

How is he?

He says to tell you not to get sucked in. What's he mean? You're not in trouble again, are you, baby love? We talked a long time about that before.

It's just the way I am, I guess.

It's still rah-rah for the penis, huh? I've got to go, Dave. There's a big line. Are you coming to see me?

Sure.

You promise?

You bet. I won't let you down, kiddo.

"You really want me to tell you what it means?" the psychologist in Lafayette said.

"Dreams are your province."

"You're an intelligent man. You tell me."

"I don't know."

"Yes, you do."

"Sometimes alcoholics go on dry drunks. Sometimes we have drunk dreams."

"It's a death wish. I'd get a lot of distance between myself and those kinds of thoughts."

I stared silently at the whorls of purple and red in his carpet.

The day after I visited the St. Martin Parish courthouse I talked with the sheriff there on the phone. I had met him several times when I was a detective with the Iberia Parish sheriff's office, and I had always gotten along well with him. He said there was nothing in the coroner's report that would indicate the girl had been struck with a tire iron or a jack handle before the fish camp burned.

"So they did an autopsy?" I said.

"Dave, there wasn't hardly anything left of that poor girl to autopsy. From what Pugh says and what we found, she was right over the gas drum."

"What are you going to do with those two clowns you had in your office yesterday?"

"Nothing. What can I do?"

"Pugh says they killed some people up in Montana."

"I made some calls up there," the sheriff said.

"Nobody has anything on these guys. Not even a traffic citation. Their office in Lafayette says they're good men. Look, it's Pugh that's got the record, that's been in trouble since they ran him out of that shithole he comes from."

"I had an encounter with those two guys after I left your department yesterday. I think Pugh's telling the truth. I think they did it."

"Then you ought to get a badge again, Dave. Is it about lunch-time over there?"

"What?"

"Because that's what time it is here. Come on by and have coffee sometime. We'll see you, podna."

I drove into New Iberia to buy some chickens and sausage links from my wholesaler. It was raining when I got back home. I put " La Jolie Blonde " by Iry Lejeune on the record player, changed into my gym shorts, and pumped iron in the kitchen for a half hour. The wind was cool through the window and smelled of rain and damp earth and flowers and trees. My chest and arms were swollen with blood and exertion, and when the rain slacked off and the sun cracked through the mauve-colored sky, I ran three miles along the bayou, jumping across puddles, boxing with raindrops that dripped from the oak limbs overhead.

Back at the house I showered, changed into a fresh denim shirt and khakis, and called Dan Nygurski collect, in Great Falls, Montana. He couldn't accept the collect call, but he took the number and called me back on his line.

"You know about Dixie Lee?" I said.

"Yep."

"Do you know about the waitress who died in the fire?"

"Yes."

"Did y'all have a tail on him that night?"

"Yeah, we did but he got off it. It's too bad. Our people might have saved the girl's life."

"He lost them?"

"I don't think it was deliberate. He took the girl to a colored place in Breaux Bridge, I guess it was, a zydeco place or something like that. What is that, anyway?"

"It's Negro-Cajun music. It means 'vegetables," all mixed up."

"Anyway, our people had some trouble with a big buck who thought it was all right for Pugh to come in the club but not other white folks. In the meantime Pugh, who was thoroughly juiced, wandered out the side door with the girl and took off."

"Have you heard his story?"

"Yeah."

"Do you believe it?"

"What difference does it make? It's between him and the locals now. I'll be square with you, Robicheaux. I don't give a damn about Pugh. I want that lunatic Sally Dio in a cage. I don't care how I get him there, either. You can tell Dixie Lee for me I'll always listen when he's on the subject of Sally Dee. Otherwise, he's not in a seller's market."

"Why would he be buying and leasing land for this character Dio? Is it related to the oil business?"

"Hey, that's good, Robicheaux. The mob hooking up with the oil business." He was laughing out loud now.

"That's like Frankenstein making it with the wife of Dracula. I'm not kidding you, that's great. The guys in the office'll love this. You got any other theories?"

Then he started laughing again.

I quietly replaced the telephone receiver in the cradle, then walked down to the dock in the wet afternoon sunlight to help Batist close up the bait shop.

That evening Alafair and I drove down to Cypremort Point for boiled crabs at the pavilion. We sat at one of the checker-cloth tables on the screened porch by the bay, a big bib with a red crawfish on it tied around Alafair's neck, and looked out at the sun setting across the miles of dead cypress, saw grass, the sandy inlets, the wetlands that stretched all the way to Texas. The tide was out, and the jetties were black and stark against the flat gray expanse of the bay and the strips of purple and crimson cloud that had flattened on the western horizon. Seagulls dipped and wheeled over the water's edge, and a solitary blue heron stood among the saw grass in an inlet pool, his long body and slender legs like a painting on the air.

Alafair always set about eating bluepoint crabs with a devastating clumsiness. She smashed them in the center with the wood mallet, snapped off the claws, and cracked back the shell hinge with slippery hands and an earnest innocence that sent juice and pulp flying all over the table. When we finished eating I had to take her into the washroom and wipe off her hair, face, and arms with wet paper towels.

On the way back home I stopped in New Iberia and rented a Walt Disney movie, then I called up Batist and asked him and his wife to watch it with us. Batist was always fascinated by the VCR and never could quite understand how it worked.

"Them people that make the movie, they put it in that box, huh, Dave?" he said.

"That's right."

"It just like at the show, huh?"

"That's right."

"Then how it get up to the antenna and in the set?"

"It doesn't go up to"

"And how come it don't go in nobody else's set?" he said.

"It don't go out the house," Alafair said.

"Not 'It don't.' Say 'It doesn't,' " I said.

"Why you telling her that? She talk English good as us," Batist said.

I decided to heat up some boudin and make some Kool-Aid.

I rented a lot of Disney and other films for children because I didn't like Alafair to watch ordinary television in the evening or at least when I was not there. Maybe I was overly protective and cautious. But the celluloid facsimile of violence and the news footage of wars in the Middle East and Central America would sometimes cause the light to go out of her face and leave her mouth parted and her eyes wide, as though she had been slapped.

Disney films, Kool-Aid, boudin, bluepoint crabs on a breezy porch by the side of the bay were probably poor compensation for the losses she had known. But you offer what you have, perhaps even bless it with a prayer, and maybe somewhere down the line affection grows into faith and replaces memory. I can't say. I'm not good at the mysteries, and I have few solutions even for my own problems. But I was determined that Alafair would never again be hurt unnecessarily, not while she was in my care, not while she was in this country.

"This is our turf, right, Batist?" I said as I gave him a paper plate with slices of boudin on it.

"What?" His and Alafair's attention was focused on the image of Donald Duck on the television screen. Outside, the fireflies were lighting in the pecan trees.

"This is our Cajun land, right, podna?" I said.

"We make the rules, we've got our own flag."

He gave me a quizzical look, then turned back to the television screen. Alafair, who was sitting on the floor, slapped her thighs and squealed uproariously while Donald Duck raged at his nephews.

The next day I visited Dixie Lee again at Lourdes and took him a couple of magazines. The sunlight was bright in his room, and someone had placed a green vase of roses in the window. The deputy left us alone, and Dixie lay on his side and looked at me from his pillow. His eyes were clear, and his cheeks were shaved and pink.

"You're looking better," I said.

"For the first time in years I'm not full of whiskey. It feels weird, I'm here to tell you. In fact, it feels so good I'd like to cut out the needle, too. But the centipedes start waking up for a snack."

I nodded at the roses in the window and smiled.

"You have an admirer," I said.

He didn't answer. He traced a design on the bed with his index finger, as though he were pushing a penny around on the sheet.

"You grew up Catholic, didn't you?" he said.

"Yes."

"You still go to church?"

"Sure."

"You think God punishes us right here, that it ain't just in the next world?"

"I think those are bad ideas."

"My little boy died in a fire. A bare electric cord under a rug started it. If I hadn't been careless, it wouldn't have happened. Then I killed that man's little boy over in Fort Worth, and now I been in a fire myself and a young girl's dead."

I looked at the confusion and pain in his face.

"I had preachers back home tell me where all that drinking and doping was going to lead me. I wouldn't pay them no mind," he said.

"Come on, don't try to see God's hand in what's bad. Look outside. It's a beautiful day, you're alive, you're feeling better, maybe you've got alternatives now that you didn't have before. Think about what's right with your life, Dixie."

"They're going to try and pop me."

"Who?"

"Vidrine and Mapes. Or some other butthole the company hires."

"These kinds of guys don't come up the middle."

He looked back at me silently, as if I were someone on the other side of a wire fence.

"There're too many people looking at them now," I said.

"You don't know how much money's involved. You couldn't guess. You don't have any idea what these bastards will do for money."

"You're in custody."

"Save the dog shit, Dave. Last night Willie out there said he was going for some smokes. It was eleven o'clock. He handcuffed my wrist to the bed rail and came back at one in the morning, chewing on a toothpick and smelling like hamburger and onions."

"I'll talk to the sheriff."

"The same guy that thinks I've got fried grits for brains? You think like a cop, Dave. You've probably locked a lot of guys up, but you don't know what it's like inside all that clanging iron. A couple of swinging dicks want a kid brought to their cell, that's where he gets delivered. A guy wants you whacked out because you owe for a couple of decks of cigarettes, you get a shank in your spleen somewhere between the mess hall and lockup. Guys like Willie out there are a. joke."

"What do you want me to do?"

"Nothing. You tried. Don't worry about it."

"I'm not going to leave you on your own. Give me a little credit."

"I ain't on my own. I called Sally Dee."

I looked again at the roses in the green vase.

"Floral telegram. He's a thoughtful guy, man," Dixie Lee said.

"It's your butt."

"Don't ever do time. You won't hack it inside."

"What you're doing is not only stupid, you're starting to piss me off, Dixie."

"I'm sorry."

"You want to be on these guys' leash the rest of your life? What's the matter with you?"

"Everything. My whole fucking life. You want to pour yourself some iced tea? I got to use the bedpan."

"I think I've been jerked around here, partner."

"Maybe you been jerking yourself around."

"What?"

"Ask yourself how much you're interested in me and how much you're interested in the drilling company that killed your old man."

I watched him work the stainless steel bedpan out from the rack under the mattress.

"I guess you have dimensions I haven't quite probed," I said.

"I flunked out my freshman year, remember? You're talking way above my league."

"No, I don't think so. We'll see you around, Dixie."

"I don't blame you for walking out mad. But you don't understand. You can't, man. It was big back then. The Paramount Theater in Brooklyn with Allan Freed, on stage with guys like Berry and Eddie Cochran. I wasn't no drunk, either. I had a wife and a kid, people thought I was decent. Look at me today. I'm a fucking ex-convict, the stink on shit. I killed a child, for God's sake. You come in here talking an AA shuck about the beautiful weather outside when maybe I'm looking at a five-spot on Angola farm. Get real, son. It's the dirty boogie out there. "and all the cats are humping to it in three-four time."

I stood up from my chair.

"I'll speak with the sheriff about the deputy. He won't leave you alone again. I'll see you, Dixie," I said.

I left him and walked outside into the sunlight. The breeze was cool and scented with flowers, and across the street in a grove of oak trees a Negro was selling rattlesnake watermelons off the back of a truck. He had lopped open one melon on the tailgate as an advertisement, and the meat was dark red in the shade. I looked back up at Dixie Lee's room on the corner of the second floor and saw a nun close the Venetian blinds on the sunlight.