Black Cherry Blues by James Lee Burke Page A

story?”

    “Yeah.”

    “Do you believe it?”

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

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

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

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

    Then he started laughing again.

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

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

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

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

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

    “That’s right.”

    “It just like at the show, huh?”

    “That’s right.”

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

    “It doesn’t go up to”

    “And how come it don’t go in nobody else’s set?” he said.

    “It don’t go out the house,” Alafair said.

    “Not ‘It don’t.’ Say ‘It doesn’t,’ ” I said.

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

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

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

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

    “This is our turf,