Black Cherry Blues

CHAPTER 12

The story was on the front page of the Missoulian the next morning. The amphibian went down on the Salish Indian Reservation, just south of the lake. Two Indians who saw it crash said they heard the engines coughing and misfiring as the plane went by overhead, then the engines seemed to stall altogether and the plane veered sideways between two hills, plowing a trench through a stand of pines, and exploded. A rancher found a smashed wheelchair hanging in a tree two hundred yards away.

I wondered what Sal thought about in those last moments while the pilot jerked impotently against the yoke and Sal's hired men wrenched about in their seats, their faces stretched with disbelief, expecting him to do something, and the horizon tilting at a violent angle and the trees and cliffs rushing up at him like a fist. I wondered if he thought of his father or his lover in Huntsville pen or the Mexican gambler whose ear he mutilated on a yacht. I wondered if perhaps he thought that he had stepped into history with Ritchie Valens, the Big Bopper, and Buddy Holly.

But I doubted that he thought any of these things. I suspected that in his last moments Sal thought about Sal.

I folded the paper and dropped it into the trash sack in the kitchen. Alafair was putting our Styrofoam cooler, with our sandwiches and soft drinks, on the front seat of the truck.

"How would Clete get into Sally Dee's house to steal those ashtrays?" I asked Dixie Lee.

"He probably just let himself in. Sal didn't know it, but Clete copied all his keys. He could get into everything Sal owned house, boat, cars, airplane, meat locker in town. Clete ain't nobody's fool, son. Like the Wolfman used to say, "You got the curves, baby, I got the angles." I saw them in one of his boxes when I put his junk in the basement."

"Would you mind getting them for me?" I said.

Dixie went down the basement stairs and came back with a fistful of keys that were tied together with a length of baling wire.

I walked out on the front porch into the morning, across the lawn and the street and down the embankment to the river's edge. The sun was not up over the mountains yet, trout were feeding in the current around the stanchions of the steel railway bridge, and the sawmill across the river was empty and quiet. I unfastened the looped baling wire and flung the keys out into the water like a shower of gold and silver coins.

Dixie Lee was standing on the curb, watching me, when I walked back up the embankment.

"Ain't that called destroying evidence or something?" he said.

"It's all just rock 'n' roll," I said.

"How come Dixie always says 'ain't'? " Alafair asked.

"Try not to say 'how come,' little guy."

"Great God in heaven, leave that little girl's grammar alone," Dixie said.

"I think maybe you're right," I said.

"You better believe it, boy," he said, then took a deep breath down in his chest and looked out at the ring of blue mountains around the valley as though he held title to them.

"Ain't this world a pure pleasure?" he said.