Free Black Cherry Blues by James Lee Burke

said.

    “You come in here again, I’ll have you arrested.”

    I walked back outside into the rain, got in my truck, and drove out of the maze of flat, uniform brick buildings that composed the Oil Center. On Pinhook Road I passed the restaurant where I had seen Cletus an hour before. The spreading oak trees were dark green, the pink and blue neon like smoke in the blowing mist. The wind blew hard when I crossed the Vermilion River, ruffling the yellow current below and shuddering the sides of my truck.

    “I don’t buy that stuff about a death wish. I believe some guys in Vienna had too much time to think,” I said to the therapist.

    “You don’t have to be defensive about your feelings. Facile attitudes have their place in therapy, too. For example, I don’t think there’s anything complex about depression. It’s often a matter of anger turned inward. What do you have to say about that, Dave?”

    “I don’t know.”

    “Yes, you do. How did you feel in Vietnam when the man next to you was hit?”

    “What do you think I felt?”

    “At some point you were glad it was him and not you. And then you felt guilty. And that was very dangerous, wasn’t it?”

    “All alcoholics feel guilt. Go to an open meeting sometime. Learn something about it.”

    “Cut loose from the past. She wouldn’t want you to carry a burden like this.”, “I can’t. I don’t want to.”

    “Say it again.”

    “I don’t want to.”

    He was bald and his rimless glasses were full of light. He turned!; his palms up toward me and was silent.

    I visited Dixie Lee one more time and found him distant, taciturn perhaps even casually indifferent to my presence in the room. I wasn’t pleased with his attitude. I didn’t know whether to ascribe it to the morphine-laced IV hooked into his arm, or possibly his own morose awareness of what it meant to throw in his lot with his old cell partner.

    “You want me to bring you anything else before I leave?” I asked.

    “I’m all right.”

    “I probably won’t be back, Dixie. I’m pretty tied up at the dock these days.”

    “Sure, I understand.”

    “Do you think maybe you used me a little bit?” I grinned at him and held up my thumb and forefinger slightly apart in the air.

        “Maybe just a little?”

    His voice was languid, as though he were resting on the comfortable edge of sleep.

    “Me use somebody else? Are you kidding?” he said.

    “You’re looking at the dildo of the planet.”

    “See you around, Dixie.”

    “Hell, yes. They’re kicking me out of here soon, anyway. It’s only second-degree stuff. I’ve had worse hangovers. We’re in tall cotton, son.”

    And so I left him to his own menagerie of snapping dogs and hungry snakes.

    That Saturday I woke Alafair early, told her nothing about the purpose of our trip, and drove in the cool, rose-stippled dawn to the Texas side of Sabine Pass, where the Sabine River empties into the Gulf. A friend of mine from the army owned a small, sandy, salt-flecked farm not far from the hard-packed gray strip of sandbar that tried to be a beach. It was a strange, isolated place, filled with the mismatched flora of two states: stagnant lakes dotted with dead cypress, solitary oaks in the middle of flat pasture, tangles of blackjack along the edges of coulees, an alluvial fan of sand dunes that were crested with salt grass and from which protruded tall palm trees silhouetted blackly against the sun. Glinting through the pines on the back of my friend’s farm were the long roll and pitch of the Gulf itself, and a cascade of waves that broke against the beach in an iridescent spray of foam.

    It was a place of salt-poisoned grass, alligators, insects, magpies, turkey buzzards, drowned cows whose odor reached a half mile into the sky, tropical storms that could sand the paint off a water tower, and people like my friend who had decided to slip through a hole in the dimension and live on their own terms. He had a