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

CHAPTER 5

Once out of jail I felt like the soldier who returns to the war and discovers that the battlefield is empty, that everyone else has tired of the war except him and has gone home.

Dixie Lee had left a note at the house the day before:

Dave, What I done to you grieves me. That's the honest to God truth, son. I got no excuse except everything I touch turns to shit. I'm leaving a box of milky ways for the little girl that lives with you. Big deal. Me and Clete and his lady friend are headed for the big sky today. Maybe later I might get a gig at one of Sals casinos. Like my daddy used to say, it don't matter if we're colored or not, we all got to pick the white mans cotton. You might as well pick it in the shade next to the water barrel. Dave, don't do time.

Dixie Lee And what about Harry Mapes, the man whose testimony could send me to Angola? (I could still smell his odor from the motel room a mixture of rut, perfume from the whores, chlorine, bourbon and tobacco and breath mints.) I called Star Drilling Company in Lafayette.

"Mr. Mapes is in Montana," the receptionist said.

"Where in Montana?"

"Who is this, please?"

"An acquaintance who would like to talk with him."

"You'll have to speak to Mr. Hollister. Just a moment, please."

Before I could stop her he was on the line.

"I need to know where Mapes is. Deposition time and all that," I said.

"What?"

"You heard me."

There was a pause.

"Is this Robicheaux?" he asked.

"If we don't get it from you, we'll get it from the prosecutor's office."

"The only thing I'll tell you is that I think you're a sick and dangerous man. I don't know how they let you out of jail, but you stay away from my people."

"You have Academy Award potential, Hollister," I said. But he hung up.

I worked in the bait shop, shoed Alafair's horse, weeded the vegetable garden, cleaned the leaves out of the rain gutters and the coulee, tore down the old windmill and hauled it to the scrap yard I tried to concentrate on getting through the day in an orderly fashion and not think about the sick feeling that hung like a vapor around my heart. But my trial was six weeks away and the clock was ticking.

Then one bright morning I was stacking cartons of red wigglers on a shelf in the bait shop and one spilled out of my hand and burst open on the countertop. The worms were thin and bright red in the dark mixture of loam and coffee grounds, and I was picking them up individually with my fingertips and dropping them back in the carton when I felt that sickness around my heart again and heard the words in my head: They're going to do it. In five and a half weeks.

I had no defense except my own word, that of an alcoholic ex-cop with a history of violence who was currently undergoing psychotherapy. My trial wouldn't last more than three days, then I would be locked on a wrist chain in the back of a prison van and on my way to Angola.

"What's wrong your face, Dave?" Batist said.

I swallowed and looked at my palms. They were bright with a thin sheen of sweat.

I went up to the house, packed two suitcases, took my.45 automatic out of the dresser drawer, folded a towel around it, snapped it inside a suitcase pouch with two loaded clips and a box of hollow-points, and called the bondsman in Lafayette. I had known him for twenty-five years. His name was Butter Bean Verret; he wasn't much taller than a fire hydrant, wore tropical suits, neckties with palm trees painted on them, rings all over his fingers, and ate butter beans and ham hocks with a spoon in the same cafe every day of his life.

"What's happening, Butter Bean? I need to get off the leash," I said.

"Where you going?"

" Montana."

"What they got up there we ain't got here?"

"How about it, partner?"

He was quiet a moment.

"You're not going to let me get lonely down here, are you? You're gonna call me, right? Every four, five days you gone, maybe."

"You got it."

"Dave?"

"What?"

"You done got yourself in a mess here in Lou'sana. Don't make no mo' mess up there, no."

I told Batist that I was leaving him and Clarise in charge of the dock, my house and animals, that I would call him every few days.

"What you gonna do Alafair?" he said.

"My cousin will keep her in New Iberia."

He made a pretense of wiping off the counter with a rag. His blue cotton work shirt was unbuttoned, and his stomach muscles ridged above his belt buckle. He put a gumdrop in the side of his mouth and looked out the window at the bayou as though I were not there.

"All right, what's wrong?" I said.

"You got to ask me that?"

"I have to do it, Batist. They're going to send me to prison. I'm looking at ten and a half years. That's with good time."

"That don't make it right."

"What am I supposed to do?"

"Her whole life people been leaving her, Dave. Her mama, Miz Annie, you in the jail. She don't need no mo' of it, no."

I filled up the truck at the dock and waited on the gallery for the school bus. At four o'clock it stopped in the leafy shade by the mailbox, and Alafair walked through the pecan trees toward me, her tin lunch box clanging against her thigh. Her tan skin was dark in the shadows. As always, she could read a disturbed thought in my face no matter how well I concealed it.

I explained to her that I had to leave, that it wouldn't be for long, that sometimes we simply had to do things that we didn't like.

"Cousin Tutta is always nice to you, isn't she?" I said.

"Yes."

"She takes you to the show and out to the park, just like I do, doesn't she?"

"Yes."

"Batist will come get you to ride Tex, too. That'll be all right, won't it?"

This time she didn't answer. Instead she sat quietly beside me on the step and looked woodenly at the rabbit hutches and Tripod eating out of his bowl under the pecan tree. Then pale spots formed in her cheeks, and the skin around her bottom lip and chin began to pucker. I put my arm around her shoulders and looked away from her face.

"Little guy, we just have to be brave about some things," I said.

"I've got some big problems to take care of. That's just the way it is."

Then I felt incredibly presumptuous, vain, and stupid in talking to her about bravery and acceptance. She had experienced a degree of loss and violence in her short life that most people can only appreciate in their nightmares.

I stared across the road at a blue heron rising from the bayou into the sunlight.

"Have you ever seen snow?" I said.

"No."

"I bet there's still snow on the ground in Montana. In the ponderosa and the spruce, high up on the mountain. I went out there once with a friend from the army. I think you and I had better go check that out, little guy."

"See snow?"

"You better believe it."

Her teeth were white and her eyes were squinted almost shut with her smile.

By that evening we were high balling through the red-clay piney woods of East Texas, the warm wind blowing through the open truck windows, the engine humming under the hood, the inside of the cab aglow with the purple twilight.

We rode into the black, rain-swept night until the sky began to clear out in the Panhandle and the moon broke through the clouds in a spoked wheel of silver over the high plains. The next day, outside of Raton, New Mexico, I bought a bucket of fried chicken and we ate in a grove of cottonwoods by a stream and slept four hours on a blanket in the grass. Then we climbed out of the mesa country into Trinidad, Colorado, and the tumbling blue-green roll of the Rocky Mountains, through Pueblo, Denver, and finally southern Wyoming, where the evening air turned cold and smelled of sage, and the arroyo-cut land and buttes were etched with fire in the sunset. That night we stayed in a motel run by Indians; in the morning it rained and you could smell bacon curing in a smokehouse.

We crossed into Montana south of Billings, and the land began to change. It was green and rolling, the rivers slow-moving and lined with cottonwood and willow trees, with sharp-toothed mountains in the distance. Then as we headed toward the Continental Divide the rivers became wider with the spring runoff, roiling in the center, flooding the trees along the banks, and the mountains in the distance tumbled higher and higher against the sky, their crests still packed with snow, the slopes covered with ponderosa pine and Douglas fir and blue spruce. Alafair slept on the seat beside me, her head on a comic book, while I topped the Divide outside of Butte and began the long grade down the western slope toward Missoula. White-tailed deer grazed near the road in the evening shadows, their heads flickering at me as I roared past them. Log ranch houses were set back against the base of the hills, their windows lighted, smoke flattening off their stone chimneys.

I followed the Clark Fork River through a cut in the mountains called Hellgate Canyon, and suddenly under a bowl of dark sky the city spilled out in a shower of light all the way across the valley floor. Missoula was a sawmill and university town, filled with trees and flowers, old brick homes, wooded parks, intersecting rivers glazed with neon light, the tinge of processed wood pulp, rows of bars where bikers hung in the doorways and the rock music thundered out into the street. My palms were thick and ringing with the pressure of the steering wheel, my ears almost deaf from the long hours of road wind. When I climbed the motel stairs with Alafair asleep on my shoulder, I looked out over the night sheen of the river, at the circle of mountains around the town and the way the timber climbed to the crests, and I wondered if I had any chance at all of having a normal life again, of being an ordinary person who lived in an ordered town like this and who did not wake up each morning with his fears sitting collectively on his chest like a grinning gargoyle.

All of my present troubles had begun with Dixie Lee Pugh, and I felt that their solution would have to begin with him, too. But first I had to make living arrangements for Alafair and me. One of the advantages of being Catholic is that you belong to the western world's largest private club. Not all of its members are the best or most likable people, but many of them are. I rented a small yellow-brick house, with maple and birch trees in the yard, in a working-class neighborhood by the river, only two blocks away from a Catholic church and elementary school. The pastor called the principal at Alafair's school in New Iberia, asked to have her records sent to the rectory, then admitted her to the first-grade class. Then he recommended his housekeeper's widowed sister, who lived next door to the rectory, as a baby-sitter. She was a red-complected, bovine, and good-natured Finnish woman, and she said she could take care of Alafair almost any afternoon or evening, and in case I had to go out of town overnight Alafair could stay at her house.

I bought Alafair a new lunch box, crayons, pencils, and a notebook, and on our third morning in town, I walked her down the tree-lined street to the school yard and watched her form in ranks with the other children while a lay teacher waited to lead them in the Pledge of Allegiance. Drinking a cup of coffee on the front steps of my new home, I watched the high, brown current of the river froth around the concrete pilings of a railway bridge and the sun break above Hellgate Canyon and fall across the valley, lighting the maples as though their leaves were waxed. Then I chewed on a matchstick and studied the backs of my hands. Finally, when I could delay it no longer, in the way you finally accept major surgery or embark on a long journey that requires much more energy than you possess, I got in my truck and headed for the town of Poison and Flathead Lake and the home of Sally Dio.

The Jocko Valley was ranch and feed-grower country, covered with large areas of sun and shadow; the river ran along the side of the highway and was tea-colored with a pebbled bottom and bordered with willows and cottonwoods. In the distance the Mission Mountains rose up blue and snowcapped and thunderous against the sky. The rural towns were full of Indians in work denims, curled-brim straw hats, heel-worn cowboy boots, and pickup trucks, and when I stopped for gas they looked through me as though I were made of smoky glass. There were lakes surrounded by cattails set back against the mountain range, and high up on the cliffs long stretches of waterfall were frozen solid in the sunlight like enormous white teeth.

I passed a Job Corps camp and an old Jesuit mission, and followed the highway over a pine-covered hill. Suddenly I saw Flathead Lake open up before me, so blue and immense and dancing with sunlight that it looked like the Pacific Ocean. Young pines grew on the slopes of the hills above the beaches, and the eastern shore was covered with cherry orchards. Out in the lake were islands with gray cliffs and trees rooted among the rocks, and a red sailboat was tacking between two islands, clouds of spray bursting off its bow. ' I stopped in Poison, which was at the south end of the lake, and asked a filling station operator for directions to Sal Dio's house. He took a cigar out of his mouth, looked at me, looked at my license plate, and nodded up the road.

"It's about two miles," he said.

"Which side of the road?"

"Somebody up there can tell you."

I drove up the road between the cherry orchards and the lake, then passed a blue inlet, a restaurant built out over the water, a strip of white beach enclosed by pine trees, until I saw a mailbox with the name Dio on it and a sign that said Private Road. I turned into the dirt lane and started up an incline toward a split-level redwood home that was built on a triangular piece of land jutting out above the lake. But up ahead was an electronically operated iron gate that was locked shut, and between the gate and the lake was a small redwood house whose veranda was extended on pilings over the edge of the cliff. It was obvious that the small and the large houses had been designed by the same architect.

I stopped the truck at the gate, turned off the engine, and got out. I saw a dark-skinned girl with black hair looking at me from the veranda of the small house; then she went inside through sliding glass doors and Clete walked out in a pair of Bermuda shorts, a T-shirt that exposed his bulging stomach, a crushed porkpie fishing hat, and a powder-blue windbreaker that didn't conceal his revolver and nylon shoulder holster.

He walked across the lawn and down the hill to the road.

"Man, I don't believe it. Did they cut you loose?" he said.

"I'm out on bond."

"Out on bond and out of the state? That doesn't sound right, Streak." He was grinning at me in the sunlight.

"I know the bondsman."

"You want to go fishing?"

"I need to talk to Dixie Lee."

"You came to the right place. He's up there with Sally."

"I need to talk to you, too."

"Sounds like our First District days."

"It becomes that way when you're about to do a jolt in Angola."

"Come on, it's not going to happen. You had provocation to go after those guys. Then it was two against one, and finally it's your word against Mapes's about the shank. Besides, check out Mapes's record. He's a sick motherfucker if you ask me. Wait till your lawyer cross-examines him on the stand. The guy's as likable as shit on melba toast."

"That's another thing that bothers me, Cletus how you know about these guys."

"It's no mystery, partner," he said, and took a package of Lucky Strikes out of his windbreaker pocket. The outline of his revolver was blue and hard against the nylon holster.

"Dixie Lee brought them around a couple of times. They liked to cop a few free lines off Sal and hang around some of these rock people he's always flying in. Sal collects rock people. Vidrine was a fat dimwit, but Mapes should have been eased off the planet a long time ago."

The skin of Clete's face was tight as he lit his cigarette and looked off at the lake.

"It sounds personal," I said.

"He got coked to the eyes one night and started talking about blowing up a VC nurse in a spider hole. Then he tried to take Darlene into the bedroom. Right there in the living room, like she was anybody's punch."

"Who?"

"She's the girl who lives with me. Anyway, Sal told me to walk him down the road until he was sober. When I got him outside he tried to swing on me. I got him right on the mouth. With a roll of quarters in my hand. Dixie had to take him to the hospital in Poison."

"I think you ought to have an early change of life."

"Yeah, you were always big on advice, Dave. You see this.38 I have on? I have a permit to carry it in three states. That's because I work for Sally Dee. But I can't work as a cop anywhere. So the same people who won't let me work as a crossing guard license me to carry a piece for Sal. Does that tell you something? Anyway, I'm using the shortened version of your AA serenity prayer these days Tuck it."

"Do I get through the gate?"

He blew cigarette smoke out into the wind. His green eyes were squinted, as though the sun hurt them, as though a rusted piece of wire were buried deeply in the soft tissue of his brain.

"Yeah, come on up to the house. I have to call up to Sal's," he said.

"Meet Darlene. Eat lunch with us if you like. Believe it or not, I'm glad to see you."

I didn't want to have lunch with them, and I surely didn't want to meet Sally Dio. I only wanted for Dixie Lee to walk down to Clete's and talk with me, and then I would be on my way. But it wasn't going to work out that way.

"They're just getting up. Sal said to bring you up in about an hour," Clete said, hanging up the phone in his living room.

"They had a big gig last night. Have you ever met the Tahoe crowd? For some reason they make me think of people corn holing each other."

His girlfriend, whose full name was Darlene American Horse, was making sandwiches for us in the kitchen. Clete sat in a sway-backed canvas chair with a vodka Collins in his hand, one sandaled foot crossed on his knee, the other on a blond bearskin rug. Outside the sliding glass doors the lake was a deep blue, and the pines on an island of gray boulders were bending in the wind.

"The thing you won't forget," he said, "the guy who got whacked out back there in Louisiana all right, the guy I whacked out that psychotic sonofabitch Starkweather, I had to kill him. They said they'd give me ten grand, and I said that's cool, but I was going to run him out of town, take their bread, and tell them to fuck off if they complained about it later. Except he was feeding his pigs out of a bucket with his back to me, telling me how he didn't rattle, how he wouldn't piss on a cop on the pad if he was on fire, then he put his hand down in his jeans and I saw something bright in the sun and heard a click, and when he turned around with it I put a big one in his forehead. It was his Zippo lighter, man. Can you dig that?"

Maybe the story was true, maybe not. I just wasn't interested in his explanation or his obvious obsession, one that left his eyes searching for that next sentence, hanging unformed out there in the air, which would finally set the whole matter straight.

"Why do they call him 'the Duck'?" I said.

"What?"

"Why do they call Sally Dio 'the Duck'?"

"He wears duck tails He took a long drink out of his Collins. His mouth looked red and hard. He shrugged as though dismissing a private, troubling thought.

"There's another story. About a card game and drawing a. deuce or something. The deuce is the duck, right? But it's all guinea stuff. They like titles. Those stories are usually bullshit."

"I tell you, Clete, I'd really appreciate it if you could just bring Dixie Lee down here. I really don't need to meet the whole crowd."

"You're still the same guy, your meter always on overtime." Then he smiled.

"Do you think I'm going to call up the man I work for and say, "Sorry, Sal, my old partner here doesn't want to be caught dead in the home of a grease balT He laughed, chewing ice and candied cherries in his jaws.

"But it's a thought, though, isn't it? Dave, you're something else." He kept smiling at me, the ice cracking between his molars.

"You remember when we cooled out Julio Segura and his bodyguard? We really made the avocado salad fly."

"Last season's box score."

"Yeah, it is." He looked idly out the sliding doors at the lake a moment, then slapped his knee and said, "Man, let's eat."

He walked up behind his girlfriend in the kitchen, picked her up around the ribs, and buried his face in her hair. He half walked and carried her back into the living room with his arms still locked around her waist. She turned her face back toward him to hide her embarrassment.

"This is my mainline mama, her reg'lar daddy's sweet little papoose," he said, and bit the back of her neck.

That's really cool, Cletus, I thought.

She wore a denim skirt with black stockings and a sleeveless tan sweater. There were three moles by the edge of her mouth, and her eyes were turquoise green, like a Creole's. Her hands were big, the backs nicked with gray scars, the nails cut back to the quick. The gold watch she wore on one wrist and the bracelet of tiny gold chains on the other looked like misplaced accidents above her work-worn hands.

"She's the best thing in my life, that's what she is," he said, still pushing his mouth into her hair.

"I owe Dixie Lee for this one. She got his drunk butt off of a beer joint floor on the reservation and drove him all the way back to Flathead. If she hadn't, a few bucks there would have scrubbed out the toilet with his head. Dixie 's got a special way about him. He can say good morning and sling the shit through the fan."

She eased Clete's arms from around her waist.

"Do you want to eat out on the porch?" she said.

"No, it's still cool. Spring has a hard time catching on here," he said.

"What's it in New Orleans now? Ninety or so?"

"Yeah, I guess."

"Hotter than hell. I don't miss it," he said.

His girlfriend set the table for us by the sliding doors, then went back in to the kitchen for the food. A wind was blowing across the lake, and each time it gusted, the dark blue surface rippled with light.

"I don't know why she hooked up with me, but why question the fates?" he said.

"She looks like a nice girl."

"You better believe she is. Her husband got killed falling trees over by Lincoln. A Caterpillar backed over him, ground him all over a rock. She spent five years opening oysters in a restaurant in Portland. Did you see her hands?"

I nodded.

"Then she was waiting tables in that Indian beer joint. You ought to check out a reservation bar. Those guys would make great pilots in the Japanese air force."

"They're going to send me up the road unless I nail Mapes."

He pushed at the thick scar on his eyebrow with his finger.

"You're really sweating this, aren't you?" he said.

"What do you think?"

"I can't blame you. An ex-cop doing time. Bad scene, mon. But I got off the hook, zipped right out of it, and if anybody should have gone up the road, it was me. Tell your lawyer to get a couple of continuances. Witnesses go off somewhere, people forget what they saw, the prosecutor loses interest. There's always a way out, Streak."

His girl brought out a tray filled with ham sandwiches, glasses of iced tea, a beet and onion salad, and a fresh apple pie. She sat down with us and ate without talking. The three moles by the corner of her mouth were the size of BBs.

"You actually think Dixie can help you?" Clete said.

"He has to."

"Good luck. He told me once his life's goal is to live to a hundred and get lynched for rape. He's an all-right guy, but I think he has a wet cork for a brain."

"He said Mapes and Vidrine killed a couple of guys and buried them back in a woods. Can you connect that to anything?"

His big face looked vague.

"No, not really," he said.

I saw his girl, Darlene, look directly into her plate, her head turned down, as though she wanted to hide her expression. But I noticed the color of her eyes darken in the corners.

"I'm sorry for the way I talk," I said.

"I think Clete and I were cops too long. Sometimes we don't think about what we say in front of other people." I tried to smile at her.

"I don't mind," she said.

"I appreciate you having me for lunch. It's very good."

"Thank you."

"I came out here fishing with a friend of mine years ago," I said.

" Montana 's a beautiful place to live, isn't it?"

"Some of it is. When you have a job. It's a hard place to find work in," she said.

"Everything's down here," Clete said.

"Oil, farming, cattle, mining. Even lumber. It's cheaper to grow trees down south. These dumb bastards voted for Reagan, then got their butts reamed."

"Then why is your buddy up here? And these lease people?"

His green eyes moved over my face, then he grinned.

"You never could resist mashing on a guy's oysters," he said.

"He's not my buddy. I work for him. I get along with him. It's a professional relationship."

"All right, what's he doing here?"

"It's a free country. Maybe he likes the trout."

"I met a DEA man who had some other theories."

"When it comes to Sal's business dealings, I turn into a potted plant. I'm also good at taking a smoke in the yard."

"Tell it to somebody else. You were the best investigative cop I ever knew."

"At one time," he said, and winked. Then he looked out at the lake and the inland sea gulls that were wheeling over the shoreline.

He pushed a piece of food out from behind his teeth with his tongue.

"You've read a lot more books than I have. You remember that guy Rhett Butler in Gone With the Wind?" He's a blockade runner for the Confederates or something. He tells Scarlett that fortunes are made during a country's beginning and during its collapse. Pretty good line. I think Sal read that book in the Hunts-ville library. He wheels and deals, mon."

I didn't say anything. I finished the rest of my sandwich and glanced casually at my watch.

"All right, for God's sake," Clete said.

"I'll take you up there. But do me a favor. That's my meal ticket up there. Don't look at these people like they're zoo creatures. Particularly Sal's father. He's a bloated old degenerate, but he's also a vicious sonofabitch who never liked me to begin with. I mean it, Dave. Your face doesn't hide your feelings too well. It gets that glaze on it like an elephant broke wind in the room. Okay? We got a deal, right, partner?"

"Sure," I said.

"Oh boy."

Sally Dio had brought Galveston, Texas, with him. His glassed-in sun porch, which gave onto the lake, was filled with potted banana, umbrella, orange, and Hong Kong orchid trees, and in the center of the house was a heavily chlorinated, lime-green swimming pool with steam rising off the water. A half-dozen tanned people sat on the edge of the tiles or drifted about lazily on inflated rubber rafts. The living room was paneled with white pine, the carpet was a deep red, and the waxed black piano, with the top propped open, gleamed in the indirect lighting. Dixie Lee, dressed only in a pair of Hawaiian beach shorts and an open bathrobe, sat at the piano bench and ran his fingers back and forth over the keys, his shoulders hunched, then suddenly his arms outspread, his florid face confident with his own sound. He sang, "I was standing on the corner Corner of Beale and Main, When a big policeman said, "Big boy, you'll have to tell me your name."

I said, "You'll find my name On the tail of my shirt. I'm a Tennessee hustler And I don't have to work." Sally Dio sat behind a set of drums and cymbals in a pair of pleated gray slacks, bare-chested, his red suspenders hooked over his shoulders. He was a lean, hard-bodied man, his face filled with flat and sharp surfaces like a person whose bone is too close to the skin so that the eyes look overly large for the face. Under his right eye was a looped scar that made his stare even more pronounced, and when he turned his head toward Dixie Lee and fluttered the wire brushes across the snare drum, the ridge of his duck tails glistened against the refracted sunlight off the lake.

Out on the redwood veranda I could see the back of a wheelchair and a man sitting in it. Sally Dio and Dixie finished their song. No one asked me to sit down.

" Dixie says you used to be a police officer. In New Orleans," Sally Dio said. His voice was flat, his eyes casually interested in my face.

"That's right."

"What do you do now?"

"I'm a small-business man."

"Probably pays better, doesn't it?"

"Sometimes."

He made a circular pattern on the drumhead with the wire brushes.

"You like Louisiana?" he asked.

"Yes."

"Why are you up here, then?"

Clete walked to the wet bar by the pool's edge and started fixing a drink., "I have some things to take care of. I wanted a few words with Dixie," I said.

"He says you're in a lot of trouble down there. What's he got to do with your trouble?"

"A lot."

He looked me evenly in the eyes. Then he fluttered and ticked the brushes lightly on the drum skin.

" Dixie never hurt anybody. Not intentionally, anyway," he said.

"I mean him no harm, Mr. Dio."

"I'm glad of that."

A dripping blond girl in a silver swimsuit that was as tight as tin on her body, with a terry cloth robe over her shoulder, walked toward us, drying her hair with a towel.

"You want me to take Papa Frank in, Sal?" she said.

"Ask Papa Frank."

"He gets cold if he stays out there too long."

"Then go ask him, hon."

She walked to the glass doors, then stopped and hooked up the strap on her sandal, pausing motionlessly against the light as though she were caught in a photographer's lens. Sally Dio winked at her.

I looked at Dixie Lee. I had to talk to him alone, outside. He refused to see any meaning in my face. A moment later the blond girl pushed the man in the wheelchair into the living room.

He wore a checkered golf cap, a knitted sweater over his protruding stomach, a muffler that almost hid the purple goiter that was the size of an egg in his neck. His skin was gray, his eyes black and fierce, his face unevenly shaved. Even from several feet away his clothes smelled of cigar smoke and Vick's VapoRub. With his wasted legs and swollen stomach, he reminded me of a distended frog strapped to a chair.

But there was nothing comical about him. His name had been an infamous one back in the forties and fifties. He had run all the gambling on Galveston Island and all the prostitution and white slavery on Post Office and Church streets. And I remembered another story, too, about a snitch on Sugarland Farm who tried to cut a deal by dropping the dime on Frank Dio. Somebody caught him alone in the shower and poured a can of liquid Drano down his mouth.

He fixed one watery black eye on me.

"Who's he?" he said to his son.

"Somebody Clete used to know," Sally Dio said.

"What's he want?"

"He thinks Dixie Lee can get him out of some trouble," Sally Dio said.

"Yeah? What kind of trouble you in?" the father said to me.

"He's up on a murder charge, Pop. Mr. Robicheaux used to be a police officer," Sally Dio said. He smiled.

"Yeah?" His voice raised a level.

"Why you bring this to our house?"

"I didn't bring anything to your house," I said.

"I was invited here. By Clete over there. Because the man I wanted to talk with couldn't simply walk down the hill and spend five minutes with me."

"I invite. Sal invites. You don't get invited by somebody that works for me," the father said.

"Where you used to be a cop?"

" New Orleans."

"You know-?" He used the name of an old-time Mafia don in Jefferson Parish.

"Yes, I helped give him a six-year jolt in Angola. I heard he complained a lot about the room service."

"You a wise guy huh?"

"You want me to fix you a drink, Mr. Frank?" Clete said.

The old man flipped his hand at Clete, his eyes still fixed on me, as though he were brushing away bad air.

"That's my cousin you're talking about," he said.

I didn't reply. I looked again at Dixie Lee, who sat hunched forward on the piano bench, his hands in his lap, his gaze averted from us.

"Tell him to get the fuck out of here," the father said.

"Tell that other one he don't bring smartass guys up to our house, either." Again, he didn't bother to look in Clete's direction.

Then he motioned with his hand again, and the girl in the silver bathing suit wheeled him through a far door into a bedroom. The bed was piled with pink pillows that had purple ruffles around them. I watched the girl close the door.

"Got to do what Pop says. See you around, Mr. Robicheaux," Sally Dio said. He tapped one wire brush across the drumhead.

" Dixie, I want you to walk down to my car with me," I said.

"Conversation time's over, Mr. Robicheaux."

"The man can speak for himself, can't he?" I said.

But before all my words were out, Sally Dio did a rat-a-tat-tat on the drum with the brushes.

"Are you coming, Dixie?"

Again he slapped the brushes rapidly on the drum, looking me steadily in the eyes with a grin at the corner of his mouth.

"A footnote about your relative in Angola," I said.

"I not only helped put him away, I maced him in the face after he spit on a bailiff."

"Clete, help our man find his car," he said.

Clete took his drink away from his mouth. His face reddened. Behind him, the people in the pool were in various attitudes of embrace among the rubber cushions and wisps of steam.

"Sal, he's a good guy. We got off to a bad start this morning," he said.

"Mr. Robicheaux's late for somewhere else, Clete."

Clete looked as though he had swallowed a thumbtack.

"No problem. I'm on my way. Take it easy, Clete," I said.

"Sal, no kidding, he's a solid guy. Sometimes things just go wrong. It's nobody's fault," Clete said.

"Hey, Robicheaux something to take with you," Sally Dio said.

"You came in here on somebody's shirttail. Then you talked rude to an old man. But you're in my house and you get to leave on a free pass. You been treated generous. Don't have any confusion about that."

I walked outside into the sunlight, the wind riffling the lake, the hazy blue-green roll of the hills in the distance. The flagstone steps that led down the hill to Clete's place and my truck were lined with rosebushes and purple clematis.

"Wait a minute, Dave," I heard Clete say behind me.

He had on his crushed porkpie hat, and as he descended the flagstone steps in his Bermuda shorts his legs looked awkward, the scars on his knees stretched and whitened across the bone.

"Hey, I'm sorry," he said.

"Forget it."

"No, that was bad in there. I'm sorry about it."

"You weren't a part of it. Don't worry about it."

"Everybody was saying the wrong things, that's all."

"Maybe so."

"I didn't want it to go like that. You know that."

"I believe you, Cletus."

"But why do you have to scratch a match on their sc rots man?"

"I thought I was pretty well behaved."

"Oh fuck yeah. Absolutely. Dave, a half dozen like you could have this whole state in flames."

"What's Dio's gig here?"

He snuffed inside his nose.

"I take his money. I don't care what he does. End of subject," he said.

"See you around. Thanks again for the lunch. Say good-bye to Darlene for me."

"Yeah, anytime. It's always a kick. Like having a car drive through your house."

I smiled and started toward my pickup.

"Stay in your truck a few minutes. Dixie 'll be down," he said, walking up a gravel path toward his house.

"How do you know?"

"Because even though he acts like a drunk butthole, he wants to help. Also because I told him I'd beat the shit out of him if he didn't."

I sat in my pickup for ten minutes and was about to give it up when I saw Dixie Lee walk down from Sally Dio's. He had put on a yellow windbreaker and a pair of brown slacks, and the wind blew strands of his blond hair on his forehead. He opened the door on the passenger's side and got in.

"How about we go down to the restaurant on the water for a brew?" he said.

"I'm so dry right now I'm a fire hazard."

"All right, but I want you to understand something first, Dixie. I don't want you to talk to me because of something Clete said to you."

"Clete didn't say anything."

"He didn't?"

"Well, he's a little emotional sometimes. I don't pay him any mind. He don't like to see you in trouble."

"But this is what's going to happen if I don't hear what I need from you. I'm going to take down Mapes one way or another. If that means getting you locked up as a material witness, that's what's going to happen. I can't promise I'll pull it off, but I'll use all the juice I can to turn the key on you, Dixie."

"Oh man, don't tell me stuff like that. Not this morning, anyway. My nerve endings are fried as it is."

"That's another item. I don't want to hear any more about your drinking problems, your theological concerns, or any of the other bullshit you spoon out to people when you're in a corner. Are we clear on this?"

"You come down with both feet, son."

"You dealt me into this mess. You'd better be aware of that, partner."

"All right. Are we going for a brew or are you going to sit here and saw me apart?"

I started the truck and drove up the dirt lane through the pines to the main road, which was bordered on the far side by a short span of cherry orchards and then the steep rock face of the mountain. We drove along the lake toward the restaurant that was built on pilings out over the water. Dixie Lee had his face turned into the breeze and was looking wistfully at the sandy beaches, the dense stands of pine, the sailboats that tacked against the deep blue brilliance of the lake.

"Why don't you let me get you some real estate here?" he said.

"To tell you the truth, Dixie, I mortgaged my house and business to make bail."

"Oh."

"Why is the Dio family buying up land around here?"

"The state is recessed. Property values are way down. The Dios are going to make a lot of money later on."

I pulled into the parking lot of the restaurant. A narrow dock protruded out from behind the building, and skiffs and sailboats were moored to it. There was a glaze of gasoline and oil on the water, and sea gulls dipped and turned over an open bait well in one of the boats. I turned off the ignition.

"I don't think you've been hearing me very well, Dixie," I said.

"What?"

"I'm really tired of you trying to pull strings on me. We're operating on the outer edges of my patience here."

"What'd I say?"

"The mob doesn't make money out of real estate speculation. You stop lying to me."

"You hurt me, man. Maybe I'm a lush, but that don't mean I'm a liar."

"Then tell me why they're buying up property."

"Dave, if you go to prison, and, Lord, I hope you don't, you'll learn two things in there. You stay out of the boss man's eye, and you never try to find out the other side of a cat like Sal. You go along and you get along. When you were a cop, did you want to know everything that was going on in your department? How many guys were on a pad? How many of them copped some skag or flake at a bust and sold it off later? Look, in another three or four weeks I'm going to start playing a gig at one of Sal's places in Tahoe. It's not a big deal a piano bar, a stand-up bass, maybe a guitar. But it's Tahoe, man. It's rhythm and blues and back in the lights. I just got to ease up on the fluids, get it under control."

"Why not get it the hell out of your Me?"

"Everybody don't chop cotton the same way. I'm going inside for a brew. You want to come?"

I watched him walk across a board ramp into the bar side of the restaurant. I had wasted most of the morning, part of the afternoon, had accomplished nothing, and I felt a great weariness both with Dixie Lee and my situation. I followed him inside. He sat at the far end of the bar, by the windows, silhouetted against the sunlight on the lake. The walls of the bar were decorated with life preservers and nautical ropes and fish nets Dixie was drinking from a bottle of Great Falls with a shot of whiskey on the side.

The bartender walked toward me, but I motioned him away.

"You don't want anything?" Dixie said.

"Who would Mapes and Vidrine have reason to kill?" I said.

"Not Vidrine. Mapes."

"All right."

He looked out the window.

"I don't know," he said.

"It was somebody who was in his way, somebody who would cost him money."

"Yeah, I guess so."

"So who would cause Mapes trouble?"

"Maybe the crazoids. The tree spikers. Star Drilling wants to get into a wilderness area on the eastern slope. The tree spikers want everybody out."

"But they don't represent anybody. You said they were cultists or something."

"I don't know what they are. They're fucking wild men."

"What could they do to keep Star out of a wilderness area?"

"Nothing, really. People up here don't like them. Them gyppo loggers will rip their ass if they get the chance."

"Who's that leave?"

He sipped off his whiskey, chased it with beer, and looked out at the lake. His face was composed and his green eyes were distant with either thought or perhaps no thought at all.

"Come on, partner, who could really mess up Mapes's plans?"

"The Indians," he said finally.

"Star wants to drill on the Black-feet Reservation. It shouldn't be a problem, because in 1896 the Indians sold all their mineral rights to the government. But there're some young guys, AIM guys, that are smart, that are talking about a suit."

"The American Indian Movement?"

"Yeah, that's them. They can tie everything up in court, say the treaty was a rip-off or the reservation is a religious area or some other bullshit. It can cost everybody a lot of money."

"You know some of these guys?"

"No, I always stayed away from them. Some of them been in federal pens. You ever know a con with a political message up his butt? I celled with a black guy like that. Sonofabitch couldn't read and was always talking about Karl Marx."

"Give me one name, Dixie."

"I don't know any. I'm telling you the truth. They don't like white people, at least white oil people. Who needs the grief?"

I left him at the bar and drove back toward Missoula. In the Jocko Valley I watched a rain shower move out from between two tall white peaks in the Mission Mountains, then spread across the sky, darken the sun, and march across the meadows, the clumped herds of Angus, the red barns and log ranch houses and clapboard cottages, the poplar windbreaks, the willow-lined river itself, and finally the smooth green hills that rose into another mountain range on the opposite side of the valley. Splinters of lightning danced on the ridges, and the sky above the timberline roiled with torn black clouds. Then I drove over the tip of the valley and out of the rain and into the sunshine on the Clark Fork as though I had slipped from one piece of geographical climate into another.

I picked up Alafair at the baby-sitter's, next door to the rectory, then took her to an ice cream parlor by the river for a cone. There was a big white M on the mountain behind the university, and we could see figures climbing up to it on a zigzag trail. The side of the mountain was green with new grass, and above the M ponderosa pine grew through the saddle on the mountain and over the crest into the next valley. Alafair looked small at the marble-topped table, licking her cone, her feet not touching the floor. Her red tennis shoes and the knees of her jeans were spotted with grass stains.

"Were they nice to you at school?" I said.

"Sure." Then she thought for a moment.

"Dave?"

"Yes."

"The teacher says I talk like a Cajun. How come she say that?"

"I can't imagine," I said.

We drove back to the house, and I used my new phone to call Dan Nygurski at the DEA in Great Falls. At first he didn't know where I was calling from, then I heard his interest sharpen when I told him I was in Montana.

"What do you think you're doing here?" he said.

"I'm in some trouble."

"I know about your trouble. I don't think you're going to make it any better by messing around up here in Montana."

"What do you mean, you know about it?", "I got feedback from our office in Lafayette. Vidrine and Mapes worked with Dixie Pugh, and Pugh lives with Sally Dio. It's like keeping track of a daisy chain of moral imbeciles. You shouldn't have gotten involved, Robicheaux."

I couldn't resist it.

"I was at Sally Dio's today," I said.

"I think that's dumb, if you're asking my opinion."

"You know who Cletus Purcel is?"

"Yeah, he was your old homicide partner. I heard he blew away a witness. It looks like he found his own level."

"He told me Dio is called the Duck because he wears duck tails but I think he left something out of the story."

"I bet he did. Dio was playing poker with one of the Mexico City crowd on a yacht out in the Gulf. They were playing deuces wild, and the grease ball had taken six or seven grand off our friend. Except Dio caught him with a deuce hidden under his thigh. Sal's old man used to be known as Frankie "Pliers." I won't tell you why. But I guess Sal wanted to keep up the tradition. He had another guy hold the grease ball down on the deck and he cut off most of his ear with a pair of tin snips. Then he told him, Tell everybody a duck ate your ear." That's the guy you were visiting today. That's the guy who takes care of your buddy Dixie Lee."

"Why does he care about Dixie Lee?"

"He gets something out of it. Sal doesn't do anything unless there's a blow job in it for him somewhere."

"Leasing or buying land for him?"

"Maybe. But don't concern yourself. Go back to Louisiana."

"You know anything about some AIM members who might have disappeared from the Blackfeet Reservation?"

"I'm really wondering about the soundness of your mind at this point."

"It's a simple question."

"If you really want to step into a pile of shit, you've found a good way to do it."

"Look, Mr. Nygurski, I'm all on my own. Maybe I'm going to Angola pen. That's not hyperbole, I'm just about wiped out financially, my own testimony is my only defense, and my personal history is one that'll probably make a jury shudder. Tell me what you'd do in my circumstances. I'd really appreciate that."

He paused, and I heard him take a breath.

"I never heard anything about any AIM guys disappearing," he said.

"You'll have to talk with the tribal council or the sheriff's department. Maybe the FBI, although they don't have any love lost for those guys. Look, the reservation is a world unto itself. It's like a big rural slum. Kids cook their heads huffing glue, women cut each other up in bars. The Browning jail is a horror show on Saturday night. They're a deeply fucked-up people."

"I may be over to see you in Great Falls."

"Why?"

"Because I think Dio is mixed up in this. Harry Mapes has been around his place, and I don't think it's simply because he knows Dixie Lee."

"Dio is mixed up with narcotics, whores, and gambling. Let me set you straight about this guy. He's not Bugsy Siegel. Comparatively speaking, he's a small-time player in Vegas and Tahoe. Anything he owns, he's allowed to own. But he's an ambitious guy who wants to be a swinging dick. So he's come up here to Lum 'n' Abner land to make the big score. Now, that's all you get, Robicheaux. Stay away from him. You won't help your case, and in the meantime you might get hurt. If I hear anything about missing Indians, I'll let you know."

"Is it possible you feel you have the franchise on Sally Dio?"

"That could be, my friend. I grew up in West Virginia. I don't like what shitheads can do to good country. But I'm also a federal agent. I get paid for doing certain things, which doesn't include acting as an information center. I think I'm already overextended in this conversation. So long, Mr. Robicheaux."

That evening I walked Alafair downtown in the twilight, and we ate fried chicken in a restaurant by the river. Then we walked over the Higgins Street Bridge, where old men fished off the railing in the dark swirls of current far below. The mountains in the west were purple and softly outlined against the red sun, and the wind was cold blowing across the bridge. I could smell chimney smoke and wood pulp in the air, diesel and oil from a passing Burlington Northern. We walked all the way to the park, where a group of boys was trying to hurry summer with a night baseball game. But in the hard glare of the lights the wind grew colder and the dust swirled in the air and finally drops of rain clicked across the tin roof of the dugout. The sky over the valley was absolutely black when we made it home.

Firewood was stacked on the back porch of our house, and I broke up kindling from an orange crate in the fireplace, placed it and balls of newspaper under three pine logs on the andirons, and watched the bright red cone of flame rise up into the brick chimney. It was raining hard outside now, clattering against the roof and windows, and I could see a sawmill lighted across the river in the rain.

During the night lightning flickered whitely on the far wall of my bedroom. It created a window in the soft green plaster, and through it I saw Annie sitting on a rock by a stream's edge. Cylindrical stone formations rose against the cobalt sky behind her. Her hair and denim shirt were wet, and I could see her breasts through the cloth.

I'm worried, Dave, she said.

Why's that?

You haven't been going to AA meetings. You think maybe you're setting yourself up for a slip?

I haven't had time.

She pulled her wet shirtfront loose from her skin with her fingers.

Will you promise me to look in the yellow pages today and find a meeting? she said.

I promise.

Because I think you're flying on the outer edges now. Maybe looking at something worse than a slip.

I wouldn't do that.

What?

I'm Catholic.

I'm talking about something else, baby love. You blow out your doors and they put you in a place like Mandeville.

I've still got it between the ditches. I'm sober.

But you keep calling on me. I'm tired, sweetheart. I have to come a long way so we can talk.

I'm sorry.

She put a finger to her lips.

I'll come again. For a while. But you have to keep your promise.

Annie.

When I woke I was sleepwalking, and my palms were pressed against the cold green plaster of the bedroom wall.