Feast Day of Fools

by James Lee Burke

  Her eyes left his face. She remained motionless inside the pattern of shadow and light created by the moon. “Whom do you work for?” she asked.

  “Myself.”

  “No, you don’t. You’re paid by others. They use you.”

  “Conejo, you are much woman.”

  “You will not speak to me like that.”

  “You didn’t let me finish. You are much woman, but you’ve lied to me. You’ve given Communion to the people who come here, just like a priest. But you turn me away.”

  “I think you’re a tormented man. But you won’t find peace until you give up your violent ways. You tortured and killed the man down south of us, didn’t you? You’re the one called Krill.”

  His eyes held hers. They were pale blue, the pupils like cinders. In silhouette, with his long knife-cut hair and torso shaped like an inverted pyramid, he resembled a creature from an earlier time, a warrior suckled in an outworn creed. “The man I killed in the south did very cruel things to my brother. He had a chance to redeem himself by being brave. But he was a coward to the end.”

  “Others are with you, aren’t they? Out there in the hills.”

  “Others follow me. They are not with me. They can come and go as they wish. Given the chance, some of them would eat me like dogs.”

  “When you were a coyote, you raped the women who paid you to take them across?”

  “A man has needs, china. But it wasn’t rape. I was invited to their beds.”

  “Because they had no water to drink or food to eat? Do not come here again, even if you’re badly hurt or starving.”

  The man watched the heat lightning, his hair lying as black as ink on his shoulders. “I can hear my children talking inside the trees,” he said. “You have to baptize them, señora. It doesn’t matter if you want to or not.”

  “Be gone.”

  He raised a cautionary finger in the air, the shadow of the windmill blades slicing across his face and body. “Do not treat me with contempt, Magdalena. Think about my request. I’ll be back.”

  THREE DAYS LATER, on Saturday, Hackberry rose at dawn and fixed coffee in a tin pot and made a sandwich out of two slices of sourdough bread and a deboned pork chop he took from the icebox. Then he carried the pot and sandwich and tin cup down to the barn and the railed pasture where he kept his two Missouri foxtrotters, a chestnut and a palomino named Missy’s Playboy and Love That Santa Fe. He spread their hay on the concrete pad that ran through the center of the barn, and then he sat down in a wood chair from the tack room and ate his sandwich and drank his coffee while he watched his horses eat. Then he walked out to their tank and filled it to the rim from a frost-proof spigot, using his bare hand to skim bugs and dust and bits of hay from the surface. The water had come from a deep well on his property and was like ice on his fingers and wrist, and he wondered if the coldness hidden under the baked hardpan wasn’t a reminder of the event waiting for him just beyond the edge of his vision—an unexpected softening of the light, an autumnal smell of gas pooled in the trees, a bugle echoing off stone in the hills.

  No, I will not think about that today, he told himself. The sunrise was pink in the east, the sky blue. His quarter horses were grazing in his south pasture, the irrigated grass riffling in the breeze, and he could see a doe with three yearlings among a grove of shade trees at the bottom of his property. The world was a grand place, a cathedral in its own right, he thought. How had Robert Frost put it? What place could be better suited for love? Hackberry couldn’t remember the line.

  He slipped a halter on each of the foxtrotters and wormed them by holding their head up with the lead while he worked the disposable syringe into the corner of their mouth and squirted the ivermectin over their tongue and down their throat. Both of them were still colts and liked to provoke him by mashing down on the syringe, holding on until he had to drop the lead and use both hands to pry the flattened plastic cylinder loose from their teeth.

  Just when he thought he was done, the chestnut, Missy’s Playboy, grabbed his straw hat and threw it on the branch of a tree, then thundered down the pasture, trailing the lead between his legs, kicking at the air with his hind feet. Hackberry did not hear the woman come up behind him. “I let myself in the gate. I hope you don’t mind,” she said.

  She was wearing khakis and sandals and a white shirt with flowers on it and a white baseball cap with a purple bill. When he didn’t answer, she looked around her, uncertain. “You have a beautiful place.”

  “What can I do for you, Miss Anton?”

  “Two nights ago a man came to my house. He said his name was Antonio. But I think he’s the man called Krill.”

  “What did this fellow want?”

  “He said he was a hunter. He said he was hunting a man for pay. I told him the man he was looking for had been at my house, but he had gone and wouldn’t be there again.”

  “Why did you wait to report this?”

  There was a beat. “I’m not sure.”

  “You thought you would be violating a confidence?”

  “This man is deeply troubled. In part, I think he came to me for help. Why are you shaking your head?”

  “Don’t be disingenuous about these guys. You know what the conversion rate is on death row? Try a hundred percent. Turn them loose and see what happens.”

  “You believe the state has the right to kill people?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Who cares?”

  “Sheriff, I came here as an act of conscience. This man probably won’t harm me, but eventually, he’ll kill others. So I had to come here.”

  “You don’t think he’ll hurt you? Why should you get an exemption?”

  “Three of his children were killed by a helicopter gunship. He believes their spirits will wander until they’re baptized. He thinks somehow I can baptize them retroactively. He says he can’t take his problem to a priest because he murdered a French Jesuit.”

  “I think you’re dealing with someone who’s morally insane, Miss Anton. I think it’s both naive and dangerous to pretend otherwise. Who’s he working for?”

  “I asked him that. He wouldn’t say.”

  “Who’s the guy you gave refuge to?”

  “A man of peace. A man who became involved in a military program that kills innocent people.”

  “Has the FBI interviewed you?”

  “No.”

  “When they do, I suggest you give them a better answer than the one you just gave me. You were in the employ of Air America in Indochina, Miss Anton. People who have a lot of guilt have a way of showing up under one flag or another.”

  She took a Ziploc bag from her pocket. In it was a dirty paper plate. “Antonio ate from this. I suspect it will be of some help to you.”

  “Why are both the FBI and Krill after the same man?”

  “Ask them. Before I go, I need to straighten out something. My work has nothing to do with guilt. We live in a country that has created a huge serving class of illegals who work for low pay at jobs Americans won’t do. We get along very well with these people during prosperous times. But as soon as the economy goes down, they’re treated like dirt. You’re obviously an intelligent and educated man. Why don’t you act like it?”

  She turned and began walking back toward the gate. Then she stopped and faced him again. For some reason, her baseball cap and her tight-fitting flowered shirt made her look younger and smaller than she was. “One other thing, sir,” she said. “Why do you look at me so strangely? It’s quite rude.”

  Because you remind me of my beloved wife, he thought.

  THE REVEREND CODY Daniels had carpentered his house to resemble the forecastle of a ship, up on a bluff that overlooked a wide arid bowl flanked by hills that contained layers of both red and chalk-colored stone, giving them in the sunset the striped appearance of a freshly sliced strawberry cake. A sandstone bluff rose straight into the air behind the house, and on it he had painted a huge American flag, one that wa
s of greater dimension than the roof itself. In the evening, Cody Daniels liked to walk back and forth on his front deck, surveying the valley below, sometimes gazing at the southern horizon through the telescope mounted on the deck rail, sometimes simply taking pleasure in the presence of his possessions—his canary-yellow pickup, his horse trailer, his cistern up on the hill, his silver propane tanks that ensured he would never be cold, the smell of the game he had shot or beef he had butchered dripping into the ash inside his smokehouse, the wood shell of a church that came with the property down on the hardpan, a building he had given a second life by putting pews inside it and a blue-white neon cross above the front door.

  Some evenings, after the last wash of gold light on the eastern side of the valley had risen into the sky and disappeared like smoke breaking apart in the wind, he would focus his telescope on a gingerbread house far to the south and watch the events that seemed to unfold there two or three times a week.

  When the evening star rose above the hills, Cody Daniels could see small groups of people moving out of the haze that constituted the Mexican border—like lice fleeing a flame, he thought, carrying their possessions in backpacks and knotted blankets, their children stringing behind them, not unlike nits.

  He had heard about the woman who lived in the gingerbread house. The wets coming across the border knelt before her altar and believed the glow of votive candles burning at the base of a statue somehow signaled they had reached a safe harbor. Not true, Cody Daniels thought. Not as long as he had the power to send them back where they came from. Not as long as there were still patriots willing to act independently of a government that had been taken over by mud people who were giving away American jobs to the beaners.

  Cody could have tapped just three digits into his phone console and brought the authorities down on the Asian woman’s head. The fact that he didn’t made him swell with a sense of power and control that was rare in his life. The Asian woman, without even knowing it, was in his debt. Sometimes she passed him on the sidewalk in town, or pushing a basket in the grocery store, her eyes aimed straight ahead, ignoring his tip of his hat. He wondered what she would say if she knew what he could do to her. He wondered how she would enjoy her first cavity search in a federal facility. He wondered if she would be so regal in a shower room full of bull dykes.

  On the deck this evening, with the wind cool on his face, he should have felt at peace. But the memory of his treatment by the deputy sheriff, the one named Tibbs, was like a thumbtack pressed into his scalp. His eyes had the cupped look of an owl’s from the Mace she had squirted into them. The baton stroke she had laid across the back of his calves flared to life each time he took a step. Then, for reasons he didn’t understand, the thought of her slamming him against the truck, of forcing him on his face and kneeing him in the spine and hooking him up, brought about a weakening in his throat, a stiffening in his loins, and fantasies in which he and the woman were in a soundproof room that had no windows.

  But Cody did not like to pursue fantasies of this kind, because they contained images and guilty sensations that made no sense to him. It was not unlike watching two or three frames of a film—an image of her hand flying out at his face, a fingernail cutting his cheek—and refusing to see what was on the rest of the spool.

  Unconsciously, he rubbed the dime-sized pieces of scar tissue on the back of his fingers. Long ago, when he was hardly more than a boy riding freight trains across the American West, he had learned lessons he would take to the grave: You didn’t sass a railroad bull; you didn’t sass a hack on a county penal farm; and you didn’t put tattoos on your body that told people you were nobody and deserving of whatever they did to you. You rinsed their abuse off your skin and out of your soul; you became somebody else, and once you did, you no longer had to feel shame about the person who somehow had brought degradation upon himself.

  Then you did to others what had been done to you, freeing yourself forever of the role of victim. Or at least that was what some people did. But he hadn’t done that, he told himself. He was a minister. He had an associate of arts degree. Truckers talked about him on their CBs. He handed out pocket Bibles to rodeo cowboys behind the bucking chutes. Attractive waitresses warmed up his coffee for free and called him Reverend. He wrote letters of recommendation for parolees. He had baptized drunkards and meth addicts by submersion in a sandy pool by the river that was as red as the blood of Christ. How many men with his background could say the same? And he had done it all without therapists or psychiatrists or titty-baby twelve-step groups.

  But his self-manufactured accolades brought him no solace. He had been bested by Sheriff Holland’s chief deputy and, in a perverse way, had enjoyed it. He had been threatened with bodily harm by the sheriff, as though he were white trash. And while all this was happening, an Oriental woman was openly aiding the wets and getting christened for her efforts as La Magdalena. Anything wrong with this picture?

  Maybe it was time to let Miss Chop Suey 1969 know who her neighbors were.

  In the fading twilight he drove in his pickup down the long, tire-worn dirt track that traversed the valley from his house to the county road that eventually led to the southern end of the Asian woman’s property. He passed two abandoned oil storage tanks that had turned to rust, a burned-out shack where a deranged tramp sometimes stayed, and a private airstrip blown with tumbleweed, the air sock bleached of color. He turned onto the Asian woman’s property and passed a paint-skinned gas-guzzler driven by two men who were sitting on a hillside, staring north at the Asian woman’s compound. They were smoking hand-rolled cigarettes and wore new straw hats and boots that were curled up at the toes. One of them pulled on a bottle that had no label, and gargled with whatever was inside before he swallowed. The other man, the taller of the two, had a pair of binoculars hanging from his neck. His shirt was open on his chest, and his skin looked as brown and smooth as clay from a riverbank. Cody Daniels nodded at him but didn’t know why. The man either ignored or took no notice of Cody’s gesture.

  If you want to live in this country, why don’t you show some manners? Cody thought.

  He drove between the gateless walls of the Asian woman’s compound and was surprised by what he saw. Mexicans were eating from paper plates on the gallery and the front steps and at a picnic table under a willow in the middle of the yard. Obviously, no effort was being made to conceal their presence. He got down from his truck and immediately saw the Asian woman staring at him from the gallery. She was the only person among all the people there who looked directly at him. She stepped into the yard and walked toward him, her eyes never losing contact with his. He felt himself clear his throat involuntarily.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked.

  “Introducing myself. I live up yonder, in the bluffs. I’m Reverend Cody Daniels, pastor of the Cowboy Chapel.”

  “I know who you are. You’re a nativist and not here on a good errand.”

  “A what?”

  “State your business.”

  “Who are all these people?”

  “Friends of mine.”

  “Got their papers, do they?”

  “Why don’t you ask them?”

  “I don’t speak Spanish.”

  “You have a cell phone?”

  “Yeah, I do, but the service isn’t real good here. Want to borrow it?” He felt the open door of his truck hit him in the back.

  “Either call 911 or leave.”

  “I didn’t come here to cause trouble.”

  “I think you did.”

  “I try to save souls, just like you. I saw y’all from my deck up there, that’s all. I got a telescope. I’m an amateur astronomer.”

  She stepped closer to him. “Let me see your hands.”

  “Ma’am?”

  “I won’t hurt you.”

  “I know that,” he said, half laughing.

  “Then let me see your hands.”

  He held them out, palms up, in front of her. But then she turned
them over and moved her thumbs across the scar tissue on the back of his fingers. “You were in prison, weren’t you?” she said.

  “I don’t know if I’d call it prison.” He paused. “I was on a county farm in New Mexico when I was a boy.”

  “You had your tattoos removed when you came out?”

  “I did it myself. Burned them off with acid and took out the leftover flesh with nail clippers.” He started to pull his hands away from her, but she held on to them. He grinned. “I know what you’re gonna say. You’re gonna tell me I had ‘love’ and ‘hate’ on my fingers, aren’t you? Well, I didn’t. I guess that shows how much you know.”

  “No, you had the letters B-O-R-N tattooed on your left hand, the letter T on your left thumb, the letter O on your right thumb, and L-O-S-E on your right hand. Who taught you such a terrible concept about yourself?”

  “I had no such thing on there.”

  “Why do you feel guilty over things that weren’t your fault? You were just a boy. People hurt you and tried to rob you of your innocence. You don’t have to be ashamed of what happened to you. You don’t have to be afraid of people who look different or speak a different language.”

  He felt himself swallowing. Through the wetness in his eyes, he saw the people in the yard and on the steps and gallery shimmer and go in and out of focus. “I’m not afraid of anything. If I ever catch up with the sonsofbitches who did what they did, you’ll see how afraid I am.”

  She squeezed both of his hands tightly in hers. “You have to forgive them.”

  He tried to pull away from her again, but she held on. He said, “I hope those men go to hell. I hope they burn from the top down and the bottom up. I hope Satan himself pours liquid fire down their throats.”

  “Would you drink poison in order to get even with others?”

  “Sell that Dr. Phil douche rinse to somebody else. They draped me across a sawhorse. I was seventeen. You ever been raped? You wouldn’t be so damn quick to advise if you had.”

  “Stay and eat with us.”

  “Are you out of your mind, woman? Let go of me.”