Feast Day of Fools

by James Lee Burke

  Don’t say it. Don’t think about it, he heard a voice say inside him. But he didn’t know if the voice was directed at Pam or him. “What?” he asked.

  “It’s pretty here in the evening, isn’t it?”

  “Sure.”

  “I didn’t mean to embarrass you in front of Riser.”

  “You didn’t.”

  She looked out the window again. “We’re off the clock now. Can I ask you a question?”

  No, that’s not a good idea, he thought.

  “Hack?” she said, waiting for his response.

  “Go ahead.” In his mind’s eye, he saw the motel room in the crossroads settlement north of the Big Bend; he even felt the primal need that had caused him to break all his resolutions about involvement with a woman who was far too young for him and perhaps interested only because he had become a paternal figure in her life.

  “Do you think about it?” she asked. “At all?”

  “Of course.”

  “With regret?”

  He took his hat off the rack, glancing into the outer offices. “No, but I have to remind myself that an old man is an old man. A young woman deserves better, no matter how good her heart is.”

  “Why is it that I don’t get to make the decision, that you have to make it for me?” she asked.

  Because you’re looking for your father, he thought.

  “Answer me,” she said.

  “I’m still your administrative supervisor. You have to remember that. It’s not up for debate. This conversation is over.”

  “I’ve seen your wife’s picture.”

  He felt a tic close to his eye. “What are you trying to tell me?”

  “The Asian woman. She looks like her, that’s all.”

  “I think I’d better head for the house.”

  He started to put on his hat, although he never did so unless he was going out a door. She stepped close to him, her thumbs hooked in the sides of her belt. He could smell her hair, a hint of her perfume, the heat in her skin. There was a glaze on her eyes. “What’s wrong, Pam?” he asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Nothing. Like you say, you’d better go to your house. It’s the kind of evening when most people want to celebrate the sunset, have dinner, dance, hear music. But you’d better go to your house.”

  “That’s just the way it is,” he replied. Then he remembered those were the words Ethan Riser had used to defend behavior that Hackberry considered morally indefensible. As he walked away, he heard her draw in a deep breath. He kept his eyes straight ahead so he did not have to look at her face and feel the hole in his heart.

  HACKBERRY SELDOM SLEPT well and never liked the coming of darkness, although he spent many hours sitting alone inside of it. Sometimes he fell asleep in his den, his head on his chest, and awoke at two or three in the morning, feeling he had achieved a victory by getting half the night behind him. Sometimes he believed he saw the red digital face on his desk clock through his eyelids. But quickly, the haze inside his head became the dust on a road north of Pyongyang and a molten sun that hung above hills that resembled women’s breasts.

  Sometimes as he dozed in the black leather swivel chair at his desk, he heard an airplane or a helicopter fly low overhead, the reverberations of the motors shaking his roof. But he did not identify the sound of the aircraft with a law enforcement agency patrolling the border or a local rancher approaching a private airstrip. Instead, Hackberry saw a lone American F-80 chasing a MiG across the Yalu River, then turning in a wide arc just as the MiG streaked into the safety of Chinese airspace. The American pilot did an aileron roll over the POW camp, signaling the GIs inside the wire that they were not forgotten.

  When Hackberry slept in his bed, he kept his holstered blue-black white-handled custom-made .45 revolver on his nightstand. When he dozed in his office, he kept the revolver on top of his desk, the handles sometimes glowing in the moonlight like white fire. It was a foolish way to be, he used to tell himself, the mark of either a paranoid or someone who had never addressed his fears. Then he read that Audie Murphy, for the last two decades of his life, had slept every night with a .45 auto under his pillow, in a bed he had to move into the garage because his wife could not sleep with him.

  Sometimes Hackberry heard the wind in the trees or the clattering of rocks when deer came down the arroyo on their way to his horse tanks. Sometimes he thought he heard a messianic homeless man by the name of Preacher Jack Collins knocking through the underbrush and the deadfalls, a mass killer who had eluded capture by both Hackberry and the FBI.

  Hackberry tried to convince himself that Collins was dead, his body long ago eaten by coyotes or lost inside the bowels of the earth. Regardless, Hackberry told himself, Collins belonged in the past or the place in the collective unconscious where most demons had their origins. If evil was actually a separate and self-sustaining entity, he thought, its manifestation was in the nationalistic wars that not only produced the greatest suffering but always became lionized as patriotic events.

  At 2:41 Saturday morning, his head jerked up from his chest. Outside, he heard a heavy rock bounce down the arroyo, the breaking of a branch, a whisper of voices, then the sound of feet moving along the base of the hill. He unsnapped the strap on his revolver and got up from his desk and went to the back door.

  A dozen or more people were following his fence line toward his north pasture. One woman was carrying a suitcase and clutching an infant against her shoulder. The men were all short and wore baseball caps and multiple shirts and, in the moonlight, had the snubbed profiles of figures on Mayan sculptures. So these were the people who had been made into the new enemy, Hackberry thought. Campesinos who sometimes had to drink one another’s urine to survive the desert. They were hungry, frightened, in total thrall to the coyotes who led them across, their only immediate goal a place where they could light a fire and cook their food without being seen. But as John Steinbeck had said long ago, we had come to fear a man with a hole in his shoe.

  Hackberry stepped outside with his hat on his head and walked into the grass in his sock feet. In the quiet, he could hear the wind blowing through the trees on the hillside, scattering leaves that had been there since winter. “No tengan miedo. Hay enlatados en la granja,” he called out. “Llenen sus cantimploras de la llave de agua. No dejen la reja abierta. No quiero que me dañen la cerca, por favor.”

  There was no response. The people he had seen with enough clarity to count individually now seemed as transitory and without dimension as the shadows in which they hid. “My Spanish is not very good,” he called. “Take the canned goods out of the barn and fill your containers with water from the faucet by the horse tank. Just don’t break my fences or leave the gates open.”

  There was still no response or movement at the base of the hill. But what did he expect? Gratitude, an expression of trust from people sometimes hunted like animals by nativist militia? He sat down on the steps and rested his back against a wood post and closed his eyes. Minutes later, he heard feet moving down the fence line, a squeak of wire against a fence clip, then a rush of water from the faucet by the horse tank. No one had opened a gate to access or exit the lot; otherwise, he would have heard a latch chain clank against the metal. He waited a few more minutes before he walked down to the barn. The boxed canned goods were still in the tack room. His two foxtrotters stood three feet from the tank, staring at him curiously. “How you doin’, boys? Make any new friends tonight?” he asked.

  No reply.

  Hackberry went back inside the house. He dropped his hat on the bedpost and laid his pistol on the nightstand. Still wearing his clothes, he lay down on top of the covers, one arm across his eyes, and fell asleep, his thoughts about war and the irreparable loss of his wife temporarily sealed inside a cave at the bottom of a wine-dark sea.

  HACKBERRY KNEW WHAT he was going to do that morning even before he got up. Saturday had always been the day he and his wife attended afternoon Mass
at a church where the homily was in Spanish, then later, ate fish sandwiches at Burger King and went to see a movie, no matter what was playing. After her death, he had an excuse to drink, but he didn’t. Instead, he lived inside his loneliness and his silent house from Friday night to Monday morning, his only companion a form of celibacy that he had come to think of as the iron maiden.

  Today was going to be different, he told himself with a tug at his heart and perhaps a touch of self-deception. He fed his animals and drank one cup of coffee and shaved and showered and shined his boots and put on a new pair of western-cut gray trousers and a wide belt and a navy blue shirt. He strapped on his revolver and removed his dove-colored Stetson from the bedpost and went out to his pickup truck. The sun was below the hills, the north and south pastures damp and streaked with shadow, the stars and the moon just starting to fade back into the sky. You’re too old to act like this, a voice told him.

  “Who cares?” he said.

  Don’t use your legal office for your personal agenda or to make a fool of yourself.

  “I’m not,” he said.

  If there was any reply in his debate with himself, he refused to acknowledge it.

  When he cut his engine in front of the Asian woman’s house, he could hear metallic scraping sounds in back. He walked around the side of the house and saw her scrubbing out the corrugated tank by the windmill with a long-handled brush. She wore oversize jeans that were rolled up in big cuffs, and a long-sleeve denim shirt spotted with water. She pushed a strand of hair out of her eye with the back of her wrist and looked at him.

  “I need to ask you a question or two about the fellow who got loose from our man Krill,” Hackberry said.

  “I can’t help you,” she said.

  “You gave assistance to this fellow when he was hurt. I saw the bloody bandages and the mattress in the bunkhouse. You didn’t trust me enough to tell me that. Then you told Krill something to the effect that this fellow wouldn’t be at your house again. Not at your house, right? But he might be somewhere in the vicinity. I think you don’t want to tell a lie, Miss Anton, but for various reasons, you’re not telling the truth, either.”

  She held his gaze for a moment and seemed about to speak, but instead, she bent to her work again. He took the brush from her hand. “You’re doing it the hard way,” he said. He lifted the tank on its rim and dumped out all the water lying below the level of the drain plug. Then he righted the tank, released the chain that locked the windmill blades, and began filling the tank again while scrubbing a viscous red layer of sediment from the sides and bottom. “This stuff forms from a mixture of water and leaves or dust or both, I’ve never figured it out. It’s like most things around here. Little of what happens is reasonable. It’s the kind of place people move to after they’ve been eighty-sixed from Needles, California.”

  “What do you expect me to tell you?” she asked.

  “You don’t need to, Miss Anton. I think I know the truth.”

  With a spot of dirt on one cheek and the wind dividing her hair on her scalp, she waited for him to go on. When he didn’t speak, she placed her hands on her hips and stared at the horse tank. “Sheriff Holland, don’t play games with me.”

  “The federal employee who was taken hostage by Krill is probably a single man with no family; otherwise, they would be down here looking for him or making lots of noise in the media. The fact that he sought sanctuary with you indicates he’s either on his own or he thinks you can provide him with a network of pacifists like himself. It also means he’s probably somewhere close by, up in those hills or in a cave. From what little you’ve said, and from what the FBI hasn’t said, this fellow was probably working in a defense program of some kind, one that presented him with problems of conscience. Maybe I can sympathize with his beliefs and also with yours. But Krill tortured a man to death in my county. Your friend the federal employee probably has information that can help me find Krill. Also, I think your friend is in grave jeopardy. I need your cooperation, Miss Anton. You’ve seen war in the most personal way. Don’t let your silence contribute to this man’s death.”

  “You’ll turn him over to the FBI,” she said.

  “What would be the harm in that?”

  “He has information the government doesn’t want people to hear.”

  “The government doesn’t operate that way. Politicians might, but politicians and the government are separate entities,” Hackberry said.

  “I heard you were once an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union. You hide your credentials well.”

  He didn’t reply and used his palm to deflect the water jetting from the well pipe in order to clean the scrub brush. He could feel her eyes peeling the skin off his face.

  “I make you smile? There’s something amusing about my speech?” she said.

  “Somebody else once told me the same thing. Sometimes she’d tell me that every day.”

  She looked at him for a long time. “Are you a widower?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Very long?”

  “Eleven years.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “She was a great woman. She was never afraid, not of anything, not in her whole life. She never wanted people to feel sorry for her, either, no matter how much she suffered.”

  “I see,” she said, obviously trying to conceal her awkwardness.

  He flicked the drops off the end of the brush onto the ground. He glanced up at the salmon-colored tint in the sky and looked at the hills and could almost smell the greening of the countryside and the feral odor that hung in its pockets and cracked riverbeds. He wondered how a land so vast and stark and self-defining could be marked simultaneously by both dust storms and acreage that was probably as verdant as the fields in ancient Mesopotamia. He wondered if the writer in the Bible had been describing this very place when he said the sun was made to shine and the rain to fall upon both the wicked and the just. He wondered if the beginnings of creation lay just beyond the tips of his fingers. “Have breakfast with me,” Hackberry said.

  “Sir?”

  “You heard me.”

  “I don’t know if that would be appropriate.”

  “Who’s to say it’s not?”

  “You think I’m hiding a fugitive from the FBI. You virtually accused me of it.”

  “No, you’re not hiding him, but you’re probably feeding him and treating his wounds.”

  “And you want to take me to breakfast?”

  “Look at me, Miss Anton. You think I’d try to trick you in some way? Ferret out information from you under the guise of friendship? Look me in the eye and tell me that.”

  “No, you’re not that kind of man.”

  He let the water tank fill to the halfway mark, then notched the windmill chain and shut off the inflow valve. “I know this spot on the four-lane that serves huevos rancheros and frijoles that can break your heart,” he said.

  CODY DANIELS FELT he was not only the captain of a ship but the captain of his soul as he peered through the telescope mounted on the deck rail of his house. The valley was spread before him, the American flag painted on the cliff wall behind him, the wind blowing inside his shirt. As he watched the arrival of the sheriff at the Oriental woman’s compound, his loins tingled with a surge of power and a sense of control that was so intense it made him wet his bottom lip; it even made him forget, if only briefly, his humiliation at the hands of the Hispanics named Krill and Negrito. He was fascinated by the body language of the sheriff and the woman, she with her demure posturing, he pretending he was John Wayne, scrubbing red glop off the sides of the horse tank like nobody else knew how to do it. Maybe the sheriff was not only pumping his deputy, the woman who’d stuck a .357 in Cody’s face, but also trying to scarf some egg roll on the side. Yeah, look at her, Cody told himself, she was eating it up. These were the people who’d treated him like butt crust, a guy who had founded the Cowboy Chapel? They were the elite, and he was a member of the herd? What a joke.
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  With one eye squinted and the other glued to the telescope, Cody was so enamored with his ability to dissect fraudulence and self-serving behavior in others that he didn’t notice the two dark Town Cars coming up the dirt track on the hardpan. The cars rumbled across Cody’s cattle guard and parked by his church house, their dust floating up in a cinnamon-colored cloud that broke apart on his deck. Seven men wearing either suits or expensive casual clothes and shades and jewelry and shined shoes or boots got out and walked up the wood stairs. Their faces had no expression. When they neared the top step, they looked at him with the nonchalance of people entering a public restroom.

  One man in the middle of the group was obviously not cut out of the same cloth as the others. He removed his shades and pinched the bridge of his nose. Then he extended his hand and smiled good-naturedly, with the authority of a man who was comfortable in any environment. “It’s Temple Dowling, Reverend. I’m pleased we could meet,” he said. “You have a fine place here. You’re not afraid to display the flag, either.”

  The other men walked past Cody as though he were not there. “Where are they going?” he asked.

  “Don’t worry. They’re professionals,” Temple Dowling said.

  “They’re going into my house.”

  “Concentrate on me, Reverend. We’re on the same side. This country is in danger. You agree with that, don’t you?”

  “What’s that got to do with those guys creeping my house?”

  “’Creeping’ your house?”

  “Yeah, breaking into it. That’s what it’s called. Like burglary.”

  “I could tell you I’m CIA. I could tell you I’m NSA. I could tell you I’m with the FBI.” Temple Dowling’s hair was silver and black, thick and freshly clipped, the part as straight as a taut piece of twine. His face wore the fixed expression of a happy cartoon, the skin pink and creamy, his lips too large for his mouth. He reached out and took Cody’s hand again, except this time he squeezed hard, his gaze locked on Cody’s. Cody felt a ribbon of pain slide up his wrist to his armpit. “What are you doing?” he said.