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

CHAPTER 6

It was still raining and cold in the morning. The logs in the fireplace had crumbled into dead ash, and the sky outside was gray. The trees in the yard looked wet and black in the weak light. I turned on the furnace, put fresh logs in the fireplace, lit the kindling and balls of wadded newspaper, and tried to fix French toast for me and Alafair while she dressed for school. I thought I could hear the drone of mosquitoes in my brain. I had on a long-sleeved flannel shirt, and I kept wiping the perspiration out of my eyes on my forearm.

"Why you shaking, Dave?" Alafair said.

"I have malaria. It comes back sometimes. It's not bad, though."

"What?"

"I got it in the army. In the Philippines. It comes from mosquito bites. It goes away soon."

"You ain't suppose to be up when you sick. I can fix my own breakfast. I can cook yours, too."

"Don't say 'ain't."

" She took the spatula and the handle of the frying pan out of my hands and began turning the toast. She wore fresh denims with an elastic waistband, and a purple sweater over her white shirt. Her black hair was shiny under the kitchen light.

I felt weak all over. I sat down at the kitchen table and wiped my face with a dry dish towel. I had to swallow before I could speak.

"Can you put on your raincoat and walk yourself to school this morning?" I said.

"Sure."

"Then if I don't pick you up this afternoon, you go to the babysitter's. Okay?"

"Okay."

I watched her pack her lunch box and put on her yellow raincoat and hood.

"Wait a minute. I'll drive you," I said.

"I can take myself. You sick, you."

"Alafair, try not to talk like Batist. He's a good man, but he never went to school."

"You still sick, Dave."

I rubbed the top of her head and hugged her briefly around the shoulders, then put on my raincoat and hat. The wind outside was cold and smelled of the pulp mill down the river. In the wet air the smell was almost like sewage. I drove Alafair to the school and let her off by the entrance to the playground. When I got back home I was trembling all over, and the heat from the fireplace and the furnace vents wouldn't penetrate my skin. Instead, the house seemed filled with a dry cold that made static electricity jump off my hand when I touched a metal doorknob. I boiled a big pot of water on the kitchen stove to humidify the air, then sat in front of the fireplace with a blanket around my shoulders, my teeth clicking, and watched the resin boil and snap in the pine logs and the flames twist up the chimney.

As the logs softened and sank on the andirons, I felt as though I had been sent to a dark and airless space on the earth where memory became selective and flayed the skin an inch at a time. I can't tell you why. I could never explain these moments, and neither could a psychologist. It happened first when I was ten years old, after my father had been locked up a second time in the parish jail for fighting in Provost's Pool Room. I was at home by myself, looking at a religious book that contained a plate depicting the souls in hell. Suddenly I felt myself drawn into the illustration, caught forever in their lake of remorse and despair. I was filled with terror and guilt, and no amount of assurance from the parish priest would relieve me of it.

When these moments occurred in my adult life, I drank. I did it full tilt, too, the way you stand back from a smoldering fire of wet leaves and fling a glass full of gasoline onto the flames. I did it with Beam and Jack Daniel's straight up, with a frosted Jax on the side; vodka in the morning to sweep the spiders into their nest; four inches of Wild Turkey at noon to lock Frankenstein in his closet until the afternoon world of sunlight on oak and palm trees and the salt wind blowing across Lake Pontchartrain reestablished itself in a predictable fashion.

But this morning was worse than any of those other moments that I could remember. Maybe it was malaria, or maybe my childlike psychological metabolism still screamed for a drink and was writing a script that would make the old alternatives viable once again. But in truth I think it was something else. Perhaps, as Annie had said, I had found the edge.

The place where you unstrap all your fastenings to the earth, to what you are and what you have been, where you flame out on the edge of the spheres, and the sun and moon become eclipsed and the world below is as dead and remote and without interest as if it were glazed with ice.

Is this the way it comes? I thought. With nothing dramatic, no three-day bender, no delirium tremens in a drunk tank, no cloth straps and Thorazine or a concerned psychiatrist to look anxiously into your face. You simply stare at the yellow handkerchief of flame in a fireplace and fear your own thoughts, as a disturbed child would. I shut my eyes and folded the blanket across my face. I could feel my whiskers against the wool, the sweat running down inside my shirt; could smell my own odor. The wind blew against the house, and a wet maple branch raked against the window.

Later, I heard a car stop outside in the rain and someone run up the walk onto the porch. I heard the knock on the door and saw a woman's face through the steamed glass, but I didn't get up from my chair. She wore a flat-brim black cowboy hat with a domed crown, and her hair and face were spotted with rain. She knocked more loudly, straining to see me through the glass, then she opened the door and put her head inside.

"Is something wrong?" she asked.

"Everything's copacetic. Excuse me for not getting up."

"Something's burning."

"I've got a fire. I built one this morning. Is Clete out there?"

"No. Something's burning in your house."

"That's what I was saying. Somebody left some firewood on the back porch. The furnace doesn't work right or something."

Her turquoise eyes looked at me strangely. She walked past me into the kitchen, and I heard metal rattle on the stove and' then ring in the sink. She turned on the faucet, and steam hissed off something hot. She walked back into the living room, her eyes still fixed on me in a strange way. She wore rubber boots, a man's wide belt through the loops of her Levi's, and an army field jacket with a First Cav patch over her red flannel shirt.

"The pot was burned through the center," she said.

"I put it in the sink so it wouldn't smell up the place."

"Thank you."

She took off her hat and sat down across from me. The three moles at the corner of her mouth looked dark in the firelight.

"Are you all right?" she said.

"Yes. I have malaria. It comes and goes. They just buzz around in the bloodstream for a little while. It's not so bad. Not anymore, anyway."

"I think you shouldn't be here alone."

"I'm not. A little girl lives with me. Where'd you get the First Cav jacket?"

"It was my brother's." She leaned out of her chair and put her hand on my forehead. Then she picked up one of my hands and held it momentarily.

"I can't tell. You're sitting too close to the fire. But you should be in bed. Get up."

"I appreciate what you're doing, but this is going to pass."

"Yeah, I can tell you're really on top of it. Do you know a pot holder was burning on your stove, too?"

She helped me up by one arm and walked me into the bedroom. I sat on the edge of the bed and looked numbly out the window at the wet trees and the rain on the river. When I closed my eyes my head spun and I could see gray worms swimming behind my lids. She took the blanket off my shoulders and pulled off my shirt, pushed my head down on the pillow and covered me with the sheet and bedspread. I heard her run water in the bathroom and open my dresser drawers, then she sat on the side of the mattress and wiped my face and chest and shoulders with a warm, damp towel and pulled a clean T-shirt over my head.

She felt my forehead again and looked down in my face.

"I don't think you take very good care of yourself," she said.

"I don't think you're a wise man, either."

"Why have you come here?"

"Leave Sally Dee and his father alone. It's bad for you, it's bad for Clete."

"Clete got in bed with that bunch on his own." I blew out my breath and opened and closed my eyes. I could feel the room spinning, the same way it used to spin when I would try to go to sleep drunk and I'd have to hang my head off the side of the mattress or couch to put the blood back in my brain.

"He's done some bad things, but he's not a bad man," she said.

"He looks up to you. He still wants you to be his friend."

"He betrayed me when I needed him."

"Maybe he's paid for it, too. You sleep. I'll stay here and fix lunch for you when you wake up."

She spread the blanket on top of me and pulled it up to my chin. Her hand touched mine, and involuntarily I cupped her palm in my fingers. Her hand was wide across the back and callused on the edges, and her knuckles were as hard as dimes under the skin. I could not remember when I had last touched a woman's hand. I closed her fingers in my palm, felt the grainy coarseness of her skin with my thumb, let both our hands rest on my chest as though the moment had given me a right that was in reality not mine. But she didn't take her hand away. Her face was kind, and she wiped the wetness out of my hair with the towel and remained on the edge of the bed while the rain swept across the yard and the roof and I felt myself slipping down to the bottom of my own vertigo, down inside a cool, clean, and safe place where no fires burned, where the gray morning was as harmless as the touch of my forehead against her thigh.

It was early afternoon when I woke again, and the sun was out, the sky blue, the yard a deeper green. I felt weak all over, but whatever had invaded my metabolism had gone away like a bored visitor. I opened the front door in my bare feet, and the air was cool and full of sunlight, and in the south the ragged peaks of the Bitterroot Mountains were white with new snow. Out on the river the rooted end of an enormous tree bounced wet and shining through the current. I heard her in the kitchen behind me, then remembered my earlier behavior the way a shard of memory comes back from a drunken dream.

She saw it in my face, too.

"I called Clete. He knows where I am. He doesn't mind," she said.

"I want to thank you for your kindness."

Her eyes softened and moved over my face. I felt uncomfortable.

"I have strange moments in my life. I can't explain them," I said.

"So I tell people it's malaria. Maybe it's true, but I don't know that. Maybe it's something else, too. Sometimes people at AA call it a dry drunk. It's nothing to wear on your chest."

I took a bottle of milk out of the icebox and sat down at the kitchen table. Through the back screen I could see an elderly woman hoeing in her vegetable garden. Next door somebody was cutting his grass with a hand mower. Darlene's eyes had never left my face.

"Clete said you lost your wife," she said.

"Yes."

"He said two men murdered her."

"That's right."

"How did it happen?" Her hand turned off the burner under a soup pot.

"I messed with some people I should have let alone."

"I see." She took two soup bowls out of the cabinet and set them on the table with spoons.

"It bothers you a lot?"

"Sometimes."

"I blamed myself when my husband got killed. I'd locked him out of the house the night before. I'd found out he was cheating with a white girl who worked in the truck stop. He had to stay all night in the car in zero weather. He went to work like that in the morning and a bulldozer backed over him. He was like a little boy. Always in the wrong place. He always got caught. He spent a year in Deer Lodge for stealing game meat out of some rental lockers at a grocery. He used to lie about it and tell people he went to jail for armed robbery."

"Why do you tell me this?"

"You shouldn't hurt yourself because of what happened to your wife. You don't realize what you did yesterday. Sally Dee's crazy."

"No, he's not. He just likes people to think he is. His kind come by the box carload."

She filled our bowls and sat down across from me.

"You don't know Sal. Clete said you made Sal look bad in front of his friends. He came down to the house after you left and they went out on the veranda. I could hear Sal yelling through the glass. I didn't think Clete would let anyone talk to him like that."

"It's expensive to work for a guy like Sally Dio."

"He degraded him."

"Listen, there's an expression in the oil field "I was looking for a job when I found this one." You tell Clete that."

"Sal said something else, too. About you."

"What?"

"Don't bring him around here again, don't let him be talking to Dixie Lee, either. He does, I'm gonna cut off his dick."

"I looked out the door again at the woman hoeing in her garden across the alley. Her face was pink, her hair white, and her arms were as thick as a man's.

"That's what our man had to say?"

"Clete and Dixie Lee pretend he's all right because they have to. But he's cruel. He frightens me."

"You should get away from him."

She put her spoon in her soup and lowered her eyes.

"You're an intelligent woman," I said.

"You're a good person, too. You don't belong among those people."

"I'm with Clete."

"Clete's going to take a big fall with that guy. Or he'll take a fall for him, one or the other. Down inside, he knows it, too. Until he started screwing up his life, he was the best partner I ever had. He carried me down a fire escape once while a kid put two.22 rounds in his back. He used to put the fear of God in the wiseguys. They'd cross the street when they saw him on the sidewalk."

"He's been good to me. Inside he's a good man. One day, he'll see that."

Her attitude toward him struck me as strange. It seemed more protective than affectionate. But maybe she was that kind of woman. Or maybe it was what I wanted to believe.

"I wonder if you can help me with something," I said.

"What?"

"Did Clete tell you about some trouble I've had in Louisiana?"

"Yes."

"Harry Mapes is my way out of it. I think he killed two people up here. Maybe they were Indians, members of AIM."

She looked down at her food again, but I saw her eyes narrow, the light in them sharpen.

"Why do you think that? About the Indians?" she said.

"Mapes killed these people because they were in the way of his oil deals. Dixie Lee said these AIM guys can tie the oil companies up in court over a nineteenth-century treaty."

"It's a big fight over on the Rocky Mountain Front."

"The what?"

"It's the eastern face of the Continental Divide. The Blackfeet called it the backbone of the world. The oil companies want into the road less areas by Glacier Park. That was Blackfeet land. The government took it or got it for nothing."

"Did you ever hear about any AIM people disappearing?"

"Why don't you ask up at the reservation?"

"I plan to. Why are you angry?"

"It has nothing to do with you."

"It seems to."

"You don't understand the reservation."

She stopped, and it was obvious that she regretted her abruptness. She wet her lips and began again, but her voice had the quiet, tense quality of someone who had bought seriously into a private piece of discontent.

"Whites have always taken from the Blackfeet. They massacred them on the Marias River, then they starved them and gave them a rural slum to live in. Now they've given us their missile sites. The government admits that in a war everybody on the eastern slope will be killed. But what whites don't understand is that Indians believe spirits live in the earth. That all the treaties and deeds that took our land don't mean anything. Sometimes people hear the crying of children and women in the wind on the Marias. An Indian woman in a white doeskin dress appears at missile silos. Air Force people have seen her. You can talk to them."

"You believe in these spirits?"

"I've been on the Marias at night. I've heard them. The sound comes right off the edge of the water, where the camp was. It happened in the winter of 1870. An army officer named Baker attacked an innocent band of Blackfeet under Heavy Runner. They killed a hundred and thirty people, then burned their robes and wickiups and left the survivors to freeze in the snow. You can hear people weeping."

"I guess I don't know about those things. Or the history of your people."

She ate without answering.

"I think maybe it's not a good idea to keep things like that alive in yourself, though," I said.

She remained silent, her face pointed downward, and I gave it up.

"Look, will you give Clete a message for me?" I said.

"What is it?"

"That he doesn't owe me, that he doesn't need to feel bad about anything, that I don't sweat a character like Sally Dio. You also tell him to take himself and a nice girl to New Orleans. That's the place where good people go when they die."

She smiled. I looked at her eyes and her mouth, then caught myself and glanced away.

"I have to go now," she said.

"I hope you're feeling better."

"I am. You were a real friend, Darlene. Clete's a lucky guy."

"Thank you, but he's not a lucky guy. Not at all."

I didn't want to talk about Clete's problems anymore or carry any more of his load. I walked outside with her to her Toyota jeep and opened the door for her. The sidewalks were still drying in the sunlight, and the pines on the mountains were sharp and green against the sky.

"Maybe you all would like to come into town and have dinner one evening, or walk up one of those canyons in the Bitterroots and try for some cutthroat," I said.

"Maybe. I'll ask him," she said, and smiled again.

I watched her drive past the school yard and turn toward the interstate. It was one of those moments when I did not care to reflect upon my own honesty or to know in reality what I was thinking about.

I washed the dishes, put on my running shoes, shorts, and a sweatshirt, and did two miles along the river, then circled back through a turn-of-the-century neighborhood of yellow- and orange-brick homes whose yards were dotted with blue spruce, fir, maple, birch, and willow trees. I was sweating heavily in the cool air, and I had to push hard to increase my speed across an intersection; but my wind was good, the muscles tight in my thighs and back, my mind clear, the rest of the day a bright expectation rather than an envelope of grayness and gloom and disembodied voices.

Ah, voices, I thought. She believes in them. Which any student of psychology will tell you is a mainline symptom of a schizophrenic personality. But I had never bought very heavily into the psychiatric definitions of singularity and eccentricity in people. In fact, as I reviewed the friendships I had had over the years, I had to conclude that the most interesting ones involved the seriously impaired the Moe Howard account, the drunken, the mind-smoked, those who began each day with a nervous breakdown, people who hung on to the sides of the planet with suction cups.

When I rounded the corner on my block by the river, I heard the bell ring at the elementary school and saw the children burst out of the doors onto the sidewalks. Alafair walked with her lunch box among three other children. I ran backward when I passed her.

"Meet you at the house, little guy," I said.

I shaved and showered and took Alafair with me to an AA meeting three blocks from our house. She drank a can of pop and did her homework in the coffee room while I sat in the nonsmokers' section of the meeting and listened. The members of the group were mostly mill workers, gyppo loggers, Indians, waitresses, tough blue-collar kids who talked as much about dope as they did about alcohol, and skid-row old-timers who had etched the lines fn their face a shot glass at a time. When it was my turn to talk, I gave my name and passed. I should have talked about my nightmares, the irrational depression that could leave me staring eviscerated and numb at a dying fire; but for most of them their most immediate problem was not psychological or in the nature of their addiction they were unemployed and on food stamps and my own basket of snakes seemed an unworthy subject for discussion.

Alafair and I ate an early supper, then we walked up on a switchback trail to the big white concrete M on the mountain overlooking the university. We could see out over the whole valley: the Clark Fork winding high and yellow through town, the white froth over the breakers, the tree-filled neighborhoods, the shafts of sunlight in the canyons west of town, the plume from the pulp mill flattening out on the river's surface, the bicyclists and joggers like miniature figures on the campus far below. Then as the sun dimmed behind a peak and the air became more chill and the valley filled with a purple haze, house and street and neon lights came on all over town, and in the south we could see the sun's afterglow on the dark stands of ponderosa high up in the Bitterroots.

Alafair sat beside me on the concrete M. She brushed dirt off her knees; I saw her frown.

"Dave, whose hat that is?" she said.

"What?"

"In the chair. By the fireplace. That black hat."

"Oh," I said.

"I think a lady must have left that there."

"I sat on it. I forgot to tell you."

"Don't worry about it."

"She won't be mad?"

"No, of course not. Don't worry about things like that, little guy."

The next day I made arrangements for Alafair to stay with the baby-sitter if I had to remain out of town that night, and I headed for the Blackfeet Reservation, on the other side of the Divide, east of Glacier Park. In the early morning light I drove up the Blackfoot River through canyons of pink rock and pine, with woodsmoke drifting through the trees from the cabins set back in the meadows. The runoff from the snowpack up in the mountains was still high, and the current boiled over the boulders in the center of the river. Then the country opened up into wider valleys and ranch-land with low green hills and more mountains in the distance. I started to climb into more heavily wooded country, with sheer rock cliffs and steep-sided mountains that ran right down to the edge of the road; the canyons and trees were dark with shadow, and by the time I hit the logging town of Lincoln the air had turned cold and my windows were wet with mist. I drove into clouds on the Divide at Rogers Pass, my ears popping now, and rivulets of melted snow ran out of the pines on the mountainside, bled across the highway, and washed off the dirt shoulder into a white stream far below. The pine trees looked almost black and glistened with a wet sheen.

Then I was out into sunlight again, out on the eastern slope, into rolling wheat and cattle country with no horizon except the Rocky Mountain Front in my rearview mirror. I made good time into Choteau and Dupuyer, and a short while later I was on the Black-feet Indian Reservation.

I had been on or through several Indian reservations, and none of them was a good place. This one was not an exception. Ernest Hemingway once wrote that there was no worse fate for a people than to lose a war. If any of his readers wanted to disagree with him, they would only have to visit one of the places in which the United States government placed its original inhabitants. We took everything they had and in turn gave them smallpox, whiskey, welfare, federal boarding schools, and penitentiaries.

At a run-down filling station I got directions to the tribal chairman's office, then drove through several small settlements of clapboard shacks, the dirt yards littered with the rusted parts of junker cars, old washing machines on the porches, chicken yards, privies, and vegetable patches in back, with seed packages stuck up on sticks in the rows.

The tribal chairman was a nice man who wore braids, jewelry, a. western vest, green-striped trousers, and yellow cowboy boots. On his office wall was an associate of arts degree from a community college. He was polite and listened well, his eyes staying focused attentively on my face while I spoke; but it was also obvious that he did not want to talk about AIM or the oil business with a white man whom he didn't know.

"Do you know Harry Mapes?" I said.

This time his gaze broke. He looked out the window onto the street, where three Indian men were talking in front of a poolroom. The neon sign above the door said only Pool.

"He's a lease man He's around here sometimes," he said.

"Most of the time he works on the edge of the reservation."

"What else do you know about him?"

He unwrapped the cellophane from an inexpensive cherry-blend cigar.

"I don't have any dealings with him. You'll have to ask somebody else."

"You think he's bad news?"

"I don't know what he is." He smiled to be pleasant and lit his cigar.

"He killed his partner, Dalton Vidrine, down in Louisiana."

"I don't know about that, Mr. Robicheaux."

"I think he killed two of your people, too."

"I don't know what to tell you, sir."

"Do you know of two guys from AIM who disappeared?"

"Not on the reservation. And that's what I'm elected to take care of- the reservation."

"What do you mean, 'not on the reservation'?"

"I'm not in AIM. I don't mix in their business."

"But you've heard about somebody disappearing?"

He gazed out the window again at the men in front of the poolroom and breathed cigar smoke out his nose and mouth.

"Just south of here, down in Teton County. Clayton Desmarteau and his cousin," he said.

"I don't remember the cousin's name."

"What happened?"

"I heard they didn't come home one night. But maybe they just went off somewhere. It happens. Talk to the sheriff's office in Teton. Talk to Clayton's mother. She lives just off the reservation. Here, I'll draw you directions."

A half hour later I was back off the reservation and driving down a narrow gray dirt road by the edge of a stream. Cottonwoods grew along the banks, then the ground sloped upward into thick stands of lodgepole pine. Ahead I could see the plains literally dead-end into the mountains. They rose abruptly, like an enormous fault, sheer-faced and jagged against the sky. The cliff walls were pink and streaked with shadow, and the ponderosa was so thick through the saddles that I doubted a bear could work his way through the trunks.

I found the home the tribal chairman had directed me to. It was built of logs and odd-sized pieces of lumber, up on a knoll, with a shingled roof and sagging gallery. Plastic sheets were nailed over the windows for insulation, and coffee cans filled with petunias were set along the gallery railing and the edges of the steps. The woman who lived there looked very old. Her hair was white, with dark streaks in it, and her leathery skin was deeply lined and webbed around the eyes and mouth.

I sat with her in her living room and tried to explain who I was, that I wanted to find out what happened to her son, Clayton Des-marteau, and his cousin. But her face was remote, uncertain, her eyes averted whenever I looked directly at them. On a table by the tiny fireplace was a framed photograph of a young Indian soldier. In front of the picture were two open felt boxes containing a Purple Heart and a Silver Star.

"The tribal chairman said maybe your son simply left the area for a while," I said.

"Maybe he went looking for other work."

This time she looked at me.

"Clayton didn't go off nowhere," she said.

"He had a job in the filling station in town. He came home every night. They found his car in the ditch, two miles from here. He wouldn't go off and leave his car in the ditch. They did something to him."

"Who?"

"People that want to hurt his organization."

"AIM?"

"He was beat up one time. They were always trying to hurt him."

"Who beat him up?"

"People that's no good."

"Mrs. Desmarteau, I want to help you find out what happened to Clayton. Did he ever mention someone's name, somebody who gave him trouble?"

"The FBI. They came around the filling station and called up people on the phone about him."

"How about Harry Mapes or Dalton Vidrine? Do you remember his using" those names?"

She didn't answer. She simply looked out into space, took a pinch of snuff out of a Copenhagen can, and put it between her lip and gum. Motes of dust spun in the light through the windows. I thanked her for her time and drove back down the road toward the county seat, the shadows of the cottonwoods clicking across my windshield.

The sheriff was out of town, and the deputy I spoke to at the courthouse soon made me feel that I was a well-meaning, obtuse outsider who had as much understanding of rural Montana and reservation life as a seasonal tourist.

"We investigated that case about four months ago," he said. He was a big, lean man in his khaki uniform, and he seemed to concentrate more on the smoking of his cigarette than on his conversation with me. His desk was littered with papers and manila folders.

"His mother and sister filed a missing-persons report. We found his car with a broken axle in the ditch. The keys were gone, the spare tire was gone, the radio was gone, somebody even tore the clock out of the dashboard. What's that tell you?"

"Somebody stripped it."

"Yeah, Clayton Desmarteau did. It was going to be repossessed. Him and his cousin were in the bar three miles up the road, they got juiced, they ran off the road. That's the way we see it."

"And he just didn't bother to come home after that?"

"Where are you from again?"

" New Iberia, Louisiana."

He blew smoke out into a shaft of sunlight shining through the window. His hair was thin across his pate.

"Believe it or not, that's not uncommon here," he said. Then his voice changed and assumed a resigned and tired note.

"We're talking about two guys in AIM. One of them, Clayton's cousin, was in the pen in South Dakota. There's also a warrant out on him for nonsupport. Clayton's had his share of trouble, too."

"What kind?"

"Fights, carrying a concealed weapon, bullshit like that."

"Has he ever just disappeared from his home and job before?"

"Look, here's the situation. There's one bar on that road. They were in there till midnight. It's five miles from that bar up to Clayton's house. Three miles up the road they wrecked the car. Maybe they walked up to Clayton's house without waking the old lady and took off before she got up. Maybe she doesn't remember what they did. Maybe they hitched a ride with somebody after they stripped the car. I don't know what they did. You think a bear ate them?"

"No, I think you're telling me Desmarteau was an irresponsible man. His mother says otherwise. The guy had the Silver Star. What do you make of that?"

"I don't guess I'm communicating with you very well. What you don't understand is the way some people live around here. Come back on a Saturday night and take your own tour. Look, when a white person hires Indians to work for him, he hires six so maybe three will show up in the morning. They cut up their own relatives at wedding parties, they hang themselves in jail cells, they get souped up and drive into the sides of trains. Last winter three kids climbed in a boxcar with a gallon of dago red and a tube of airplane glue. The train went on up into Canada and stopped on a siding in a blizzard. I went up with the families to bring their bodies back. The RCMP said they were frozen so hard you could break their parts off with a hammer."

I asked him to show me where Clayton Desmarteau's car had gone off the road. He was irritated, but he consented and drove me down the same dirt road I had been on earlier. We passed the bar where Desmarteau and his cousin had been last seen, a wide, flat log building with neon Grain Belt and Great Falls beer signs in the windows; then we curved up the road through bare, hardpan fields and finally picked up the creek, the cottonwoods, and the sloping stands of lodgepole pine that began on the far bank. The deputy stopped his car on the shoulder and pointed.

"Right over there in the ditch," he said.

"He hooked one wheel over the side and went in. Snapped the axle like a stick. No mystery, my friend. It's a way of life."

I got back to Missoula late but in time to pick up Alafair at the baby-sitter's before she went to sleep. The baby-sitter had run an errand, and a friend of hers, a third-grade teacher and assistant principal at the school named Miss Regan, had come over to stay with Alafair. The two of them were watching television and eating from a bowl of popcorn in the enclosed side porch. Miss Regan was a pretty girl in her late twenties, with auburn hair and green eyes, and although her skin was still pale from the winter months, I could see sun freckles on her shoulders and at the bottom of her neck.

"Come see, Dave," Alafair said.

"Miss Regan drew a picture of Tex and she ain't ever seen him."

"Don't say 'ain't," little guy," I said.

"Look," Alafair said, and held up a piece of art paper with a pastel drawing of an Appaloosa on it.

"That's very nice of Miss Regan," I said.

"My name's Tess," she said, and smiled.

"Well, thank you for watching Alafair. It was good meeting you."

"She's a sweet little girl. We had a lot of fun together," she said.

"Do you live in the neighborhood?"

"Yes, only two blocks from the school."

"Well, I hope to see you again. Thanks for your help. Good night."

"Good night," she said.

We walked home in the dark. The air was warm, and the maple trees looked black and full under the moon. The lights of the bridge reflected off the swirling brown surface of the river.

"Everybody says she's the best teacher in the school," Alafair said.

"I bet she is."

"I told her to come down to New Iberia and visit us."

"That's good."

"Because she don't have a husband."

"Say 'doesn't.' "

"She doesn't have a husband. How come that, Dave?"

"I don't know. Some people just don't like to get married."

"How come?"

"You got me."

We ate a piece of pie before we turned out the lights and went to bed. Our bedrooms adjoined, and the door was opened between them. Across the river I could hear the whistle of a Burlington Northern freight.

"Dave?"

"What?"

"Why don't you marry Miss Regan?"

"I'll give it some thought. See you tomorrow, little guy."

"Okay, big guy."

"Good night, little guy."

"Good night, big guy."

The next morning I made long-distance calls to Batist, the bondsman, and my lawyer. Batist was managing fine at the bait shop and the bondsman was tranquil about my returning to Louisiana by trial date, but the lawyer had not been able to get a continuance and he was worried.

"What have you come up with in Montana?" he said.

"Nothing definite. But I think Dixie Lee was telling the truth about Mapes, that he killed a couple of people here, maybe Indians."

"I tell you, Dave, that might be our only out. If you can get him locked up in Montana, he won't be a witness against us in Louisiana."

"It's not the ninth race yet."

"Maybe not, but so far we don't have a defense. It's that simple. I hired a PI to do a background on Mapes. He beat the shit out of another kid with a golf club in Marshall, Texas, when he was seventeen, but that's the only trouble he's been in. He graduated from the University of Texas and flew an army helicopter in Vietnam The rest of the guy's life is a blank. It's hard to make him out as Jack the Ripper."

"We'll see," I said. I didn't want to concede the truth in his words, but I could feel my heart tripping.

"The prosecutor's talking a deal," he said.

I remained silent and listened to the whir of long-distance sound in the earpiece. Through the window I could see the maple tree in my front yard ruffling with the breeze.

"Dave, we're reaching the point where we might have to listen to him."

"What deal?"

"Second-degree homicide. We'll show provocation, he won't contend with us, you'll get five years. With good time, you can be out in three or less."

"No deal."

"It may turn out to be the only crap game in town."

"It's bullshit."

"Maybe so, but there's something else I'm honor-bound to tell you. We're going up against Judge Mouton. He's sent six men I know of to the electric chair. I don't think he'd do that in this case. But he's a cranky, old sonofabitch, and you never know."

After I hung up the phone I tried to read the paper on the front porch with a cup of coffee, but my eyes couldn't concentrate on the words.

I washed the dishes, cleaned the kitchen, and started to change the oil in my truck. I didn't want to think about my conversation with my lawyer. One day at a time, easy does it, I told myself. Don't live in tomorrow's problems. Tomorrow has no more existence than yesterday, but you can always control now. We live in a series of nows. Think about now.

But that sick feeling around the heart would not go away. I worked my way under my truck, fitted a crescent wrench around the nut on the oil pan, and applied pressure with both hands while flakes of dried mud fell in my eyes. Then the wrench slipped and I raked my knuckles across the pan. I heard the telephone ring inside.

I crawled out from under the truck, went in the house, and picked up the receiver. The skin was gone on the tops of two of my knuckles.

"What's happening, Dave?"

" Dixie?"

"Yeah. What's happening?"

"Nothing important. What is it?"

"Are you always this happy in the morning?"

"What do you want, Dixie?"

"Nothing. I'm in the lounge over in that shopping center on Brooks. Come on over."

"What for?"

"Talk. Relax. Listen to a few sounds. They got a piano in here."

"You sound like your boat already left the dock."

"So?"

"It's nine o'clock in the morning."

"Big deal. It's twelve o'clock somewhere else. Come on over."

"No thanks."

"Darlene dumped me in here while she went running around town. I don't want to sit in here by myself. It's a drag, man. Get your butt over here."

"I've got a few other things on my mind."

"That's what I want to talk with you about. Dave, you think you're the only guy who understands your problem. Look, man, I pick cotton every day in that same patch."

"What are you talking about?"

"Some people are born different. That's just the way we are. You go against what you are, you're gonna have a mess of grief. Like Hank Junior says, some people are born to boogie, son. They just got to be willing to pay the price."

"I appreciate all this, but I'm going to sign off now."

"Oh no you don't. You listen to me, 'cause I been there in spades, right where you're at now. When I got to Huntsville from the county jail, I hadn't had a drink in six weeks. I felt like I had fire ants crawling on my brain. Except I learned you can get almost anything in the joint you can get outside. There was a Mexican cat who sold short-dogs of black cherry wine for five bucks a bottle. We'd mix it with syrup, water, and rubbing alcohol, and it'd fix you up just about like you stuck your head in a blast furnace.

"So one time we had a whole crock of this beautiful black cherry brew stashed in a tool shack, and one time while the boss man was working some guys farther on down the road, we set one guy out as a jigger and the rest of us crapped out in the shack and decided to cooler ate our minds a little bit. Except about an hour later, when we're juiced to the eyes, the guy outside comes running through the door, yelling, "Jigger, jigger."

"The boss man was this big redneck character from Lufkin named Buster Higgins. He could pick up a bale of hay and fling it from behind the truck all the way to the cab. When he took a leak he made sure everybody saw the size of his dick. That's no shit, man. The next thing I know, he's standing there in the door of the toolshed, sweat running out of his hat, his face big as a pumpkin. Except this guy was not funny. He thought rock 'n' roll was for niggers and Satan worshipers. He looks down at me and says, Tugh, didn't your parents have enough money?"

"I said, 'What d'you mean, Mr. Higgins?' He says, 'For a better quality rubbers.' Then he took his hat off and whipped the shit out of me with it. Next stop one month in isolation, son. I'm talking about down there with the crazoids, the screamers, the guys who stink so bad the hacks have to wash them down with hoses. And I had delirium tremens for two fucking days. Weird sounds snapping in my head, rockets going off when I closed my eyes, a big hard-on and all kinds of real sick sexual thoughts. You know what I'm talking about, man. It must have been ninety degrees in the hole, and I was shaking so bad I couldn't get a cup of water to my mouth.

"I got through two days and thought I was home free. But after a week I started to have all kinds of guilt feelings again. About the little boy in the accident in Fort Worth, about my own little boy dying in the fire. I couldn't stand it, man. Just that small isolation cell and the light through the food slit and all them memories. I would have drunk gasoline if somebody would have give it to me. So you know what I done? I didn't try to get the guilt out of my mind. I got high on it. I made myself so fucking miserable that I was drunk again. When I closed my eyes and swallowed, I could even taste that black cherry wine. I knew then it wasn't never gonna be any different. I was always gonna be drunk, whether I was dry or out there juicing.

"So in my head I wrote a song about it. I could hear all the notes, the riffs, a stand-up bass backing me up. I worked out the lyrics for it, too You can toke, you can drop, Drink or use. It don't matter, daddy, "Cause you never gonna lose Them mean ole jailhouse Black cherry blues."

I rubbed my forehead with my hand. I didn't know what to say to him.

"You still there?" he said.

"Yes."

"You gonna come over?"

"Maybe I'll see you another time. Thanks for the invitation."

"Fuck, yeah, I'm always around. Sorry I wasted your time."

"You didn't. We were good friends in college. Remember?"

"Everybody was good friends in college. It all died with Cochran and Holly. I got to motivate on over to another bar. This place bugs me. Dangle easy, Dave."

He hung up. I stared listlessly out into the sunlight a moment, then walked outside and finished changing the oil in my truck.

She drove up in her red Toyota jeep a half hour later. I guess I knew that she was coming, and I knew that she would come when Alafair was at school. It was like the feeling you have when you look into the eyes of another and see a secret and shared knowledge there that makes you ashamed of your own thoughts. She wore a yellow sundress, and she had put on lipstick and eye shadow and hoop earrings. The sacks of groceries in the back of the jeep looked as though they were there only by accident.

Her lipstick was dark, and when she smiled her teeth were white.

"Your hat," I said.

"Yes. You found it?"

"It's in the living room. Come in. I have some South Louisiana coffee on the stove."

She walked ahead of me, and I looked at the way her black hair sat thickly on her neck, the way the hem of her dress swung across her calves. When I opened the screen for her I could smell the perfume behind her ears and on her shoulders.

I went into the kitchen while she found her hat in the living room. I fooled with cups and saucers, spoons, a bowl of sugar, milk from the icebox, but my thoughts were as organized as a puzzle box that someone had shaken violently between his hands.

"I try to shop in Missoula. It's cheaper than Poison," she said.

"Yeah, food's real cheap here."

"Dixie Lee came along with me. He's in a bar right now."

"He called me. You might have to drag him out of the place on a chain."

"He'll be all right. He's only bad when Sal lets him take cocaine." She paused a moment.

"I thought maybe you wouldn't be home."

"I got a late start today. A bunch of phone calls, stuff like that."

She reached for the cups and saucers on the drain board and her arm brushed against mine. She looked at my eyes and raised her mouth, and I slipped my arms around her shoulders and kissed her. She stepped close against me, so that her stomach touched lightly against my loins, and moved her palms over my back. She opened and closed her mouth while she held and kissed me, and then she put her tongue in my mouth and I felt her body flatten against me. I ran my hands over her bottom and her thighs and gently bit her shoulder as she wrapped one calf inside my leg and rubbed her hair on the side of my face.

We pulled the shades in the bedroom and undressed without speaking, as if words would lead both of us to an awareness about morality and betrayal that we did not care to examine in the heated touch of our skin, the dry swallow in the throat, the silent parting of our mouths.

There had been one woman in my life since my wife's death, and I had lived celibate almost a year. She reached down and took me inside her and stretched out her legs along me and ran her hands along the small of my back and down my thighs. The breeze clattered the shades on the windows, the room was dark and cool, but my body was rigid and hot and my neck filmed with perspiration, and I felt like an inept and simian creature laboring above her. She stopped her motion, kissed me on the cheek and smiled, and I stared down at her, out of breath and with the surprise of a man whose education with women always proved inadequate.

"There's no hurry," she said quietly, almost in a whisper.

"There's nothing to worry about."

Then she said, "Here," and pressed on my arm for me to move off her. She brushed her hair out of her eyes, sat on top of me, kissed me on the mouth, then raised herself on her knees and put me inside her again. Her eyes closed and opened, she tightened her thighs against me, and propped herself up on her hands and looked quietly and lovingly into my face.

She came before I did, her face growing intense and small, her mouth suddenly opening like a flower. Then I felt all my nocturnal erotic dreams, my fear, my aching celibacy, rise and swell in my loins, and burst away outside of me like a wave receding without sound in a cave by the sea.

She lay close to me under the sheet, her fingers in the back of my hair. A willow tree in the backyard made shadows on the shade.

"You feel bad, don't you?" she said.

"No."

"You think what you've done is wrong, don't you?"

I didn't answer.

"Clete's impotent, Dave," she said.

"What?"

"He goes to a doctor, but it doesn't do any good."

"When did he become impotent?"

"I don't know. Before I met him. He says a fever did it to him in Guatemala. He says he'll be all right eventually. He pretends it's not a problem."

I raised up on my elbow and looked into her face.

"I don't understand," I said.

"You moved in with an impotent man?"

"He can't help what he is. He's good to me in other ways. He's generous, and he respects me. He takes me places where Indians don't go. Why do you have that look on your face?"

"I'm sorry. I don't mean to," I said.

"What are you thinking?"

"Nothing. I just don't quite understand."

"Understand what?"

"Your relationship. It doesn't make sense."

"Maybe it isn't your business."

"He was my partner, I'm in bed with his girl. You don't think I have some involvement here?"

"I don't like the way you're talking to me."

I knew that anything else that I said would be wrong. I sat on the edge of the bed with my back toward her. The wind fluttered the shade in the window, casting a brilliant crack of sunlight across the room. Finally I looked over my shoulder at her. She had pulled the sheet up over her breasts.

"I try not to be judgmental about other people. I apologize," I said.

"But he and I used to be good friends. You said he was impotent. You were suggesting I didn't have anything to feel bad about. There's something wrong in the equation here. Don't pretend there isn't."

"Look the other way, please," she said, gathered the sheet around her, picked up her clothes from the chair, and walked into the bathroom. A few minutes later she came back out in her yellow dress, pushing the top back on her lipstick, pressing her lips together.

"I like you just the same," I said.

"You don't know anything," she said.

And she left me there, with a wet spot in the center of my bed and a big question mark as to whether I had acquired any degree of caution or wisdom in the fiftieth year of my life.