Black Cherry Blues читать онлайн

ntal business south of New Iberia. I came up here last night to pick up some refrigeration equipment and got stuck in the storm."He nodded. We were both silent."Are you playing here, Dixie?" I said.Mistake."No, I don't do that anymore. I never really got back to it after that trouble in Texas."He cleared his throat and took a cigarette out of the pack in his shirt pocket."Say, hon, how about getting me my drink out of the bar?"The waitress smiled, put down the rag she had been using to clean the counter, and went into the nightclub next door."You know about that stuff in Texas?" he asked."Yes, I think so.""I was DWI, all right, and I ran away from the accident. But the guy run that stop sign. There wasn't no way I could have avoided it. But it killed his little boy, man. That's some hard shit to live with. I got out in eighteen months with good time." He made lines on a napkin with his thumbnail."A lot of people just don't want to forget, though."I didn't know what to say. I felt sorry for him. He seemed little different from the kid I used to know, except he was probably ninety-proof most of the time now. I remembered a quote in a Newsweek story about Dixie Lee that seemed to define him better than anything else I had ever seen written about him. The reporter had asked him if any of his band members could read music. He replied, "Yeah, some of them can, but it don't hurt their playing any."So I asked him what he was doing now, because I had to say something."Leaseman," he said."Like Hank Snow used to say, "From old Montana down to Alabama." I cover it all. Anyplace there's oil and coal. The money's right, too, podna."The waitress put his bourbon and water down in front of him. He drank from it and winked at her over his