Feast Day of Fools

by James Lee Burke

  “So what?”

  “If you ask me, not everything he’s done is all bad.”

  “Say that again.”

  “Nits make lice.”

  “Excuse me, sir, but you’re disgusting.”

  “Those Thai women didn’t have any business in this country. Just like those Mexicans you’re bringing in. Every one of them is a breeder, wanting to have their babies here so they can be U.S. citizens.”

  Anton Ling’s eyes were burning, her jaw clenched. She held her gaze on him as though watching a zoo creature behind a pane of glass. He stepped back, a twitch in his face. “Why you staring at me like that?”

  “It had to do with a woman, didn’t it?” she said.

  “What?”

  “You hurt a woman very badly. Maybe even killed her. That’s it, isn’t it?”

  “You spread lies about me, I’ll come down there and—”

  “You’ll what?”

  His face was contorted, his eyes hot and small and unfocused. “I just wanted to be your friend,” he said. “You’re putting Krill and that man Negrito on me while you’re walking around with your nose in the air like you’re some kind of female pope. La Magdalena, my cotton-picking ass.”

  She got in the cab of her pickup and started the engine. “Don’t come around my home again. Don’t presume about whom you’re dealing with, either.”

  “Presume? What’s that supposed to mean?” he asked. “You gonna call the Chinese army down on me?”

  She drove away without replying, her truck rattling and leaking smoke at every rusted seam.

  “Presume what?” he shouted after her.

  HACKBERRY WORKED LATE that evening, and at dusk he removed his hat from the peg on his office wall and put it on and hung his gun belt and holstered white-handled revolver from his shoulder and drove out to the site where Jack Collins had machine-gunned the two PIs. The crime-scene tape that had been wrapped around the mesquite and yucca had been broken by wild animals, the brass cartridges from Collins’s gun picked up from the ground, the blood splatter washed from the rocks by the previous night’s rain, even the sandwich crumbs eaten by ants and the ants in all probability eaten by armadillos. Other than the broken yellow tape, impaled and fluttering among the creosote bush and agaves and prickly pear, there was little to indicate in the reddish-blue melt of the sunset that two men had pleaded for their lives on this spot less than thirty-six hours ago, their sphincters failing them, their courage draining through the soles of their feet, all their assumptions about their time on earth leached from their hearts, their last glimpse of the earth dissolving in a bloody mist.

  What good purpose could lie in his visit to the site of an execution? he asked himself. Perhaps none. In reality, he knew why he was there, and the reason had little to do with the two gunshot victims. Hackberry had come to learn that wars did not end with a soldier’s discharge. The ordeal, if that was not too strong a word, was open-ended, an alpha without an omega, a surreal landscape lit by trip flares that could burst unexpectedly to life in the time it took to shut one’s eyes.

  Hackberry had many memories left over from the war: the human-wave assaults; the .30-caliber machine-gun barrels that had to be changed out with bare hands; the Chinese dead frozen in the snow as far as the eye could see; the constant blowing of bugles in the hills and the wind furrowing across the ice fields under a sky in which the sun was never more than a gaseous smudge. But none of these memories compared to a strip of film that he could not rip from his unconscious, or kill with alcohol or drugs or sex or born-again religion or psychotherapy or good works or sackcloth and ashes. He did not see the filmstrip every night, but he knew it was always on the projector, waiting to play whenever it wished, and when that happened, he would be forced to watch every inch of it, as though his eyelids were stitched to his forehead.

  In the filmstrip, Sergeant Kwong would finish urinating through a sewer grate on Hackberry’s head, then extract him from the hole where, for six weeks, Hackberry had learned how to defecate in a GI helmet and survive on a diet of fish heads and weevil-infested rice. In the next few frames of the strip, Hackberry would stand woodenly in the cold, his body trembling, his eyelashes crusted with snow, while Kwong lifted his burp gun on its strap and fired point-blank into the faces of two prisoners from Hackberry’s shack, their bodies jackknifing backward into an open latrine.

  They died and Hackberry lived. The other prisoners in his shack were also spared. But all of them were made to believe their comrades’ deaths were caused by them and their willingness to confess to imaginary conspiracies in order to free themselves from the holes in the ground where they shivered nightly.

  If Hackberry had to face Sergeant Kwong’s burp gun again, would he be less fearful than the morning he had watched his fellow POWs executed, their hands lifting helplessly in front of their faces? If he met Kwong on a street, would he let the past remain in the past? Or would he call him out, as would his grandfather Old Hack, pistol-whipping Kwong to his knees?

  Hackberry would never know the answer to those questions. Kwong had probably gone back home after the war and repaired bicycles or worked on a communal rice farm. With regularity, he had probably battered and impregnated a peasant girl he bought from a neighbor. He had probably treated his children with both fondness and cruelty while he watched them grow into imitations of himself. If he ever thought at all about the crimes he had committed in the Bean Camp, it was probably only to ask himself if he had been too lenient on the foreigners who had caused him to leave his home and serve in the frozen wastes of North Korea. He would probably be amazed that a lawman on the South Texas border did not go through one day or night in his life without thinking of him.

  Hackberry walked to the top of the incline where the two PIs had died, his binoculars hanging from his neck. He gazed through the lenses at Anton Ling’s house and at the lightning rods on the peaked roof and at the gables and the wide gallery and the paintless weathered severity of the wood in the walls. The house reminded him of Old Hack’s place, a displaced piece of Victorian design dropped by happenstance on the Texas Plains, as though its picket fence and latticework and baroque cornices could end tornadoes and prairie fires and ice storms that froze a man to the saddle, or stop rogue Indians from rope-dragging white families through cactus or hanging them upside down over a slow flame.

  He moved the lenses across Anton Ling’s gallery and the hanging baskets of impatiens and coffee cans planted with violets and petunias. Children were sitting on the wood steps, playing with a whirligig. A meat fire was smoking in the backyard, the windmill’s blades ginning, and Mexican families were sitting at the plank tables under the fruit trees by the barn. Then he saw her emerge from the back door, a straw basket on her arm, and begin setting the table with plastic forks and knives and paper plates and jelly glasses. She wore cowboy boots and a navy blue dress with a long brocaded hem and silver trim at the neck, one like his dead wife, Rie, would wear, adding to the effect of her dark features and the highlights in her hair. Then he saw the Mexicans bringing colored glass vessels from the chapel to the tables, candles flickering. The Mexicans were singing songs, the words rising and falling in the wind, their work-seamed faces exactly like those of the people who had always surrounded Rie. He had to take the binoculars from his eyes and sit down on a rock, a pang not unlike a sharp stone piercing his heart.

  Was he so foolish that he would try to re-create his wife inside the skin of the Asian woman? Would he never learn to accept the world for what it was, a place where the sunlight blinded us to the figures beckoning to us from the shade?

  In that moment he wished Preacher Jack Collins would once again appear in the middle of his life, his cheeks unshaved, his fingernails half-mooned with dirt, his rumpled suit coat and sweat-stained dress shirt like those of a drunkard out to spoil a party, the Thompson pointed dead center at Hackberry’s chest. You feared whiskey in your dreams or in a store window or behind a bar, not when you drank it, Hackberry
thought. You feared death only as long as you held on to life. Mr. Death lost his dominion as soon as you faced and engaged him and dared him to do his worst.

  None of these thoughts brought comfort to Hackberry Holland. The unalterable reality that governed every moment of his waking day was simple: The love of his life was dead, and he would never see her again.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  DANNY BOY LORCA’S home was not so much a house as a collection of buildings and shacks and pole sheds in or under which he cooked his food or ate or slept or worked or got drunk. He smoked his own meat and grew his own vegetables, did his own repairs on his army-surplus flatbed truck, and washed his clothes in an outdoor bathtub and dried them on a smooth-wire fence. He seldom locked his doors, except on a shed whose walls were layered like armor plate from the roof to the ground with chrome hubcaps. The interior of the shed had nothing to do with mechanized vehicles. It was there that he kept the cases of Corona and the gallon bottles of Bacardi and Oso Negro he bought in Mexico and brought back into the States through a ravine where seventeenth-century Spaniards had carved Christian crosses on the rocks to commemorate a battle in which they had slain dozens of Indians.

  When Danny Boy drank, he did it methodically and with dedication, his time frame open-ended, his progress from the first drink to the last as steady and unrelenting and disciplined as anyone’s can be while he is systematically sawing himself apart. His benders lasted from a few days to a few weeks, and they always commenced when a clock inside him would go off without warning and a voice would whisper, It’s time. Danny Boy never argued with the voice. He would fill a bucket with crushed ice he bought from a filling station down the road, unlock the shed where he kept his beer and liquor, and stuff a dozen bottles of Corona into the ice. Then he would sit down at a plank table that overlooked the miles of ancient topography to the south, pour three inches of Bacardi into a jelly glass, and snap the cap off a Corona, the foam sliding down the bottle neck and wrapping around his wrist like a white snake.

  The first drink produced the second, then the third, and eventually he would lose count of his consumption and slip into a blackout in which his motor control still functioned but his soul went somewhere else. When his supply in the shed was gone, he would panhandle on the streets or swamp out bars in exchange for alcohol, sleeping in alleys or on the floor of a jail cell. The pattern never changed. The first two days of his bender were memorable. The rest of it was a void that he learned about later from police officers and bailiffs.

  It was four A.M. when he began his current bender at the plank table behind his house. The sky was spangled with stars, the desert floor silvery and pale green and rustling with forms of life that no one saw in the daytime. The visions he had of the land and its great alluvial vastness were always a puzzle to him. Sometimes he thought he saw dinosaurs rearing their long necks out of a marshy bog, great tendrils of vegetation and root systems hanging from their mouths, while people wearing animal skins squatted by campfires up in the rocks. Someone had told him that his visions were nonsense, that dinosaurs were extinct long before man appeared on the planet. Danny Boy did not argue with his detractors. How could he? Even though he had once claimed the powers of a shaman, he had hidden, as a coward would, while a defenseless man was tortured to death. Any powers he had possessed had been taken from him and surely given to someone else. Danny Boy did not contend with his fate. He had failed. A shaman did not fear either this world or the next. But if his power was gone, why was he experiencing another vision, in this instance a figure walking up the long alluvial plain toward him, a man who seemed made of sticks? The figure was wearing a pale wide-brimmed hat and a shapeless business suit, the cuffs of his trousers stuffed inside the tops of his cowboy boots, an old-style holster slung at an angle on his hip, brass cartridges inserted in the leather ammunition loops.

  Danny Boy watched the figure draw nearer, the toes of his boots cracking through the shell of baked clay along the streambed, the sky behind him a royal purple, the mesquite and piñon trees on the hillsides alive with birds that only minutes ago had been sleeping. Danny Boy drank the rum from his jelly glass and lifted the Corona bottle and swallowed until he could no longer taste the rum in his mouth, until his tongue was dead and his chest was warm and empty of fear. He rubbed at his eyes with the back of his wrist, hoping that when he stared back down the slope, the figure would be gone, just another gargoyle that took up temporary residence in Danny Boy’s dreams and went away.

  “Some people say insomnia is a disorder. I say it’s not,” the man said, the wind ruffling the brim of his hat and fanning open his coat over his flat stomach. “I say it’s a mark of somebody who sees things as they are.”

  Danny Boy remained silent, his face as square and expressionless as a stone carving, his shoulders slumped, his hands resting palms down on the table, like animal paws.

  “You know who I am?” the man asked.

  Danny Boy seemed to think about the question. “Maybe,” he replied. “But probably not. I get things mixed up in my head sometimes.”

  “It doesn’t make any difference. I’m here. That’s all that counts. It’s a fine spot to stand on, too. What a vista.”

  “Where’d you come from?”

  “Out yonder.” The man looked over his shoulder and pointed at a distant spot on the horizon.

  “Where you’re pointing at is Mexico.”

  “I get around.”

  “Why you carrying a pistol?”

  “For snakes and such. You getting a jump on the morning or tapering off from last night? You look like you got rode hard and put away wet.”

  Danny Boy thought about what the man had said. “I reckon some people’s ways ain’t the best,” he replied. He looked without focus at the tops of his hands and at the grain in the table’s planks. He kept waiting for the visitor to speak, but he didn’t. “You want a drink?”

  “I’m not keen on alcohol. Can I sit down?”

  This time it was Danny who didn’t speak. He felt the visitor’s eyes roving over his face in the silence. “You spend some time in the prize ring?” the visitor asked.

  “I was a club fighter.”

  “You took some hits.”

  “Not from fighting other pugs. We traveled from town to town, like wrestlers do. The owner wheeled the fights any way he wanted. We all knew each other and slept at the same motel.”

  “So what happened to your face?”

  “For a hundred bucks, locals could go three rounds with me. I got half of the hundred to let them go the full three. I got sixty-five if I let them work me over.” He tried to smile when he spoke, the scar tissue in his eyebrows stretching his eyes into the shape of a Chinaman’s. “They’d knock my mouthpiece into the seats. All the time I was holding them up, and they’d be hitting me with everything they had. Their gloves would be shiny with my blood, and all the time they’d be thinking how they busted up a pro.”

  “What you did back then isn’t important. You’re not an ordinary guy.” The visitor turned and looked behind him, down the slope, his gaze lifting into the stars. Then he looked at Danny Boy again. “What do you see out yonder?”

  “Rocks and sand. A desert. Sometimes bad people bringing dope through the ravines.”

  “I’m not an ordinary fellow, either, so don’t talk down to me. I came a long way to see you. I’m going to sit down now. But don’t you disrespect me again.”

  “I don’t know why you’re talking to me like this,” Danny Boy said.

  “Because you just lied to me.”

  Danny Boy watched his visitor raise one foot over the plank seat and sit down at the table, his body all angles, like coat hangers, his holstered pistol binding against his belt and thigh, the leather creaking. “I see an ocean sometimes,” Danny Boy said. “I can hear the waves in the wind. Or maybe it’s just the sound the wind makes in the trees. It sounds like water rushing through a canyon.”

  When the visitor made no reply, Danny Boy lifted his arm
and pointed. “The turtle eggs used to hatch in the sand, right at the base of those cliffs. If they hatched in the sunlight, the baby turtles would try to run to the surf before the birds got them. Sometimes I hear the sounds the turtles make when the birds have got them in their beaks. Or maybe it’s the birds squeaking.”

  “Is that what you see now?”

  “Not no more. I see sand and cactus. I ain’t got no power now. You’re him, ain’t you?”

  “Depends on who you mean.”

  “Him.”

  “You lost me. Some folks get around, but I get around a lot. Is that what you mean, a guy who gets around?”

  “There ain’t anything here you want.”

  “I’ll decide that.”

  Danny Boy watched his visitor’s eyes and hands in the starlight. “I’m gonna put my jacket on. It’s cold. At least for this time of year,” he said.

  “Why should I care what you do?”

  “I just thought I’d say.”

  “Your name was in the newspaper. You saw a man tortured to death. He was a corrupt Mexican cop. The man who killed him was named Krill. I aim to find him.”

  Danny Boy lowered his eyes. “Did you hear me?”

  “I don’t know where he’s at.”

  “Are you afraid of him?”

  Danny Boy felt his fingers curl up and touch the heels of his hands. His mouth and throat went dry, and he could feel a stone drop in his chest and settle in the bottom of his stomach.

  “Cat got your tongue?” the visitor said.

  “I hid in a ravine while he killed that fellow.”

  Danny Boy pulled the sleeve of his denim jacket up on one arm, then forgot what he was doing and stared emptily at his visitor. There were lumps on the visitor’s face, as though insects had fed on it.

  “Is that why you’re a drunk, or were you a drunk before you hid in the ravine?”

  “I don’t make no claims about myself. I am what I am.”