Free Black Cherry Blues by James Lee Burke Page A

bad-conduct discharge from the army, had been locked up in a mental asylum in Galveston, had failed totally at AA, and as a farmer couldn’t grow thorns in a briar patch.

    But he bred and raised some of the most beautiful Appaloosa horses I had ever seen. He and I had coffee in his kitchen while Alafair drank a Coke, then I picked up several sugar cubes in my palm and we walked out to his back lot.

    “What we doing, Dave?” Alafair said. She looked up at me in the sunlight that shone through the pine trees. She wore a yellow T-shirt, baggy blue jeans, and pink tennis shoes. The wind off the water ruffled her bangs.

    My friend winked and went inside the barn. I “You can’t ride Tripod, can you, little guy?” I said.

    “What? Ride Tripod?” she said, her face confused, then suddenly lighting, breaking into an enormous grin as she looked past me and saw my friend leading a three-year-old gelding out of the barn.

    The Appaloosa was steel gray, with white stockings and a spray of black and white spots across his rump. He snorted and pitched his head against the bridle, and Alafair’s brown eyes went back and forth between the horse and me, her face filled with delight.

    “You think you can take care of him and Tripod and your rabbits, too?” I said.

    “Me? He’s for me, Dave?”

    “You bet he is. He called me up yesterday and said he wanted to come live with us.”

    “What? Horse call up?”

    I picked her up and set her on top of the fence rail, then let the Appaloosa take the sugar cubes out of my palm.

    “He’s like you, he’s got a sweet tooth,” I said.

    “But when you feed him something, let him take it out of your palm so he doesn’t bite your fingers by mistake.”

    Then I climbed over the fence, slipped bareback onto the horse; and lifted Alafair up in front of me. My friend had trimmed thef horse’s mane, and Alafair ran her hand up and down it as though it | were a giant shoe brush. I touched my right heel against the horse’s f flank, and we turned in a slow circle around the lot.

    “What his name?” Alafair said.

    “How about Tex?”

    “How come that?”

    “Because he’s from Texas.”

    “What?”

    “Texas.”

    “This where?”

    “Nevermind.”

    I nodded for my friend to open the gate, and we rode out through | the sandy stretch of pines onto the beach. The waves were slate green and full of kelp, and they made a loud smack against the sand and slid in a wet line up to a higher, dry area where the salt grass and the pine needles began. It was windy and cool and warm at the same time, and we rode a mile or so along the edge of the surf to a place where a sandbar and jetty had created a shallow lagoon, in the middle of which a wrecked shrimp boat lay gray and paint less on its side, a cacophony of seagulls thick in the air above it. Behind us the horse’s solitary tracks were scalloped deep in the wet sand.

    I gave my friend four hundred for the Appaloosa, and for another three hundred he threw in the tack and a homemade trailer. Almost all the way home Alafair stayed propped on her knees on the front seat, either looking backward through the cab glass or out the window at the horse trailer tracking behind us, her fine hair flattening in white lines against her scalp.

    On Monday I walked up to the house for lunch, then stopped at the mailbox on the road before I went back to the dock. The sun was warm, the oak trees along the road were full of mockingbirds and blue jays, and the mist from my neighbor’s water sprinkler drifted in a wet sheen over his hydrangea beds and rows of blooming azalea and myrtle bushes. In the back of the mailbox was a narrow package no more than ten inches long. It had been postmarked in New Orleans. I put my other mail in my back pocket, slipped the twine off the corners of the package, and cracked away the brown wrapping paper with my thumb.

    I lifted off the cardboard top. Inside on a strip of cotton was a hypodermic needle with a