Feast Day of Fools

by James Lee Burke

  “What are you thinking, jefe?” Negrito asked.

  Krill started to correct him for calling him jefe again, but what was the use? Negrito was unteachable. “Where is the Texan’s money?” he asked.

  “He must have spent it all.”

  Krill nodded and thought, Yes, that’s why it now resides in your pocket. He stared at the Texan in the trunk and at the dust rising off the hills into the sky and at the chicken heads lying in the dirt. He could hear a sound inside his head like someone grinding a piece of iron unrelentingly against an emery wheel. He squeezed his temples and stared at Negrito. “You know the dirt road that goes into the desert?”

  “Of course.”

  “You have been there and can drive it in the dark, through the washouts and past the mountains where it becomes flat and no one lives?”

  “I’ve done all these things many times, on horseback and in cars and trucks. But why are you talking about the desert? We don’t need no desert. You know the place I use for certain activities. I’m telling you, this is a valuable man. Don’t throw good fortune away. Make good things come out of bad.”

  “Do not speak for a while, Negrito. Practice discipline and be silent and listen to the wind blowing and the sounds the cottonwoods make when their limbs knock against each other. If you listen in a reverent and quiet fashion, dead people will speak to you, and you will not be so quick to dismiss them. But you must stop speaking. Do not speak unless you can improve the silence. ¿Entiendes? Do not speak for a very long time.”

  “If you hear dead people talking to you, it’s ‘cause you’re dead, too,” Negrito said, his mouth gaping broadly at his own humor.

  Krill gathered up the contents of the Texan’s wallet and began sticking them back in the compartments and plastic windows. He closed the wallet in his palm and walked to the trunk of the car and tossed it inside. While he did these things, he could feel the eyes of Negrito boring into his neck. He stared into the sweating face of the Texan. He could see the indentation in the tape where it covered the Texan’s mouth. He thought he heard the Texan try to cry out when he slammed the trunk shut.

  “This is what you need to do, Negrito,” Krill said. “First, you—”

  “You don’t got to tell me. I’ll get the shovel and take care of it. But it’s a big waste of opportunity, man. And going out in the desert is a double waste of time and gas and effort. The others ain’t gonna like this. We ain’t been making no money, Krill. Everything we do is about your dead kids and getting even with the Americans ’cause their helicopter killed them. But how about us, man? We have needs and families, too.”

  Krill waited for Negrito to finish before he spoke, his face neutral, his white cotton shirt filling with air in the wind. “See, what you don’t understand, my brother in arms, is that the Texan hasn’t done anything to us. You fill the big wood canteen with water and put it in the car, and you put a sack of food with it. Then you drive the Tejano at least fifty kilometers into the desert and turn him loose. Later, you meet us in La Babia. With luck, all this will pass. If you hurt or sell the Texan, we will have no peace. Do you understand that now, my brother?”

  “If that’s what you say,” Negrito replied.

  “Good.”

  “And after La Babia?”

  “Who knows? The Quaker belongs to us. We have to get him back. If you want to get paid, that’s how we will all get paid. Then you can entertain all the chicas in Durango and Piedras Negras and Chihuahua. You will be famous among them for your generosity.”

  “You’ll sell the Quaker to the Arabs but not the Texan to our own people?”

  “The man Barnum has made machines that kill from the air, no matter what kind of conversion he claims to have gone through. All the gringos are makers of war and the killers of our people. Let them lie together in their own waste and eat it, too.”

  “I ain’t never gonna understand you.”

  Krill watched Negrito enter the back of the farmhouse, the rowels on his spurs tinkling, the pad of orange hair on his arms and shoulders glowing against the light that fell from the kitchen. Unconsciously, Krill rested his palm against the car trunk and felt the exhaust heat in the metal soak into his skin and leave his hand feeling scorched and dirty.

  THE BROTHEL WHERE two SUVs with Texas plates were parked did not look like a brothel. Or at least it did not resemble the adobe houses or clusters of cribs on the far end of town where the street bled into the darkness of the desert and drunks sometimes wandered away from their copulations to bust beer bottles with their firearms out on the hardpan. The brothel frequented by the Texans was located at the end of a gravel lane and was actually an enclave of buildings that had once made up a ranch. The main house was built of stone quarried out of the mountains and had a wide terrazzo porch with large glazed ceramic urns that were planted with Spanish daggers and flowers that opened only at night. The colonnade over the porch was supported by cedar posts and covered with Spanish tile and tilted downward to direct rainwater during the monsoon season away from the house.

  There was no lighting outside the building, which helped preserve the anonymity of the patrons. The night air smelled of flowers and warm sand and water that had pooled and gone stagnant and was auraed by clouds of gnats. Pam Tibbs pulled the Cherokee to a stop and cut the ignition. “How do you want to play it?” she said.

  “We wear our badges and carry our weapons in full view,” Hackberry replied.

  “I’ve seen that purple SUV before.”

  “Where?”

  “When I broke both of its taillights in front of the café.”

  “That’s Temple Dowling’s vehicle?” he said.

  “It was when I broke his taillights. You’re surprised Dowling would be here?”

  “Nothing about Dowling surprises me. But I thought the man with the hole in his face might have been working for the Russian, this guy Sholokoff.”

  “Let’s find out.”

  “You feel comfortable going in there?” he asked.

  She rested her hands on top of the steering wheel. Even in the starlight, he could see the shine on her upper arms and the sunburned tips of her hair. He could also see the pity in her eyes. “It’s not me who’s uncomfortable,” she said. “When are you going to accept your own goodness and the fact that you’ve paid for what you might have done wrong when you were young?”

  “When the mermaids come back to Texas,” he said.

  “Pardon?”

  “It was a private joke between my father and me. Ready to make life interesting for the shitbags?”

  “Always,” she replied.

  They got out on either side of the Cherokee and went inside the brothel. The living room was furnished with a red velvet settee and deep leather chairs and a cloth sofa and a coffee table set with wineglasses and dark bottles of burgundy and a bottle of Scotch and a bucket of ice. There was also a bowl of guacamole and a bowl of tortilla chips on the table. The only light came from two floor lamps with shades that were hung with pink tassels. Two mustached men Hackberry had seen before sat on the sofa, dipping chips into the guacamole and drinking Scotch on the rocks. A Mexican girl not over fifteen, in a spangled blue dress, was sitting on the settee. She wore white moccasins on her feet and purple glass beads around her neck. Her skin was dusky, her nose beaked, her Indian eyes as elongated as an Asian’s. Her lipstick and rouge could not disguise the melancholy in her face.

  “How are you gentlemen tonight?” Hackberry said.

  “Pretty good, Sheriff. I didn’t think you’d remember us,” one of them said.

  “You came to my office with Mr. Dowling,” Hackberry said.

  “Yes, sir, that’s us. What might you be doing here?” the man said.

  “Not a lot. Just driving around the countryside trying to find a deputy of mine who got himself kidnapped. Do you boys know anything about a kidnapped deputy sheriff by the name of R. C. Bevins?”

  The two men looked at each other, then back at Hackberry. “No, sir,”
the first man said.

  Hackberry could hear the clatter of pool balls in a side room. “Is that more of your crowd in there?”

  “Yes, sir, they’re with us. We’d help you if we could, Sheriff, but I think you’ve come to the wrong place.”

  “This is the wrong place, all right, but for reasons you evidently haven’t thought about,” Hackberry said.

  “Sir?”

  “How old do you reckon that girl is?”

  “We don’t make the rules down here. Nobody does,” the second man said.

  Both men were wearing skintight jeans and snap-button shirts and belts with big silver-and-gold-plated buckles, and they both had the styled haircuts and carefully maintained unshaved look of male models in a liquor ad or on a calendar aimed at homosexuals rather than at women. The second man had a deeper and more regional voice than the first, and a formless blue tattoo, like a smear, inside the whiskers that grew on his throat.

  “Were any of y’all in a cantina earlier?” Hackberry said.

  “Not us,” the second man said.

  “We’re looking for a guy with a hole in his face. You know anybody like that?”

  “No, sir,” the first man said.

  “I see,” Hackberry said. “Is Mr. Dowling in back?”

  Neither of the men spoke. The second man glanced at Pam Tibbs, then filled a taco chip with guacamole and stuck it in his mouth and chewed it while he took her inventory.

  “What’s in back?” Hackberry said.

  “The whole menu,” the first man said.

  “You two guys go outside,” Hackberry said.

  “You’ve got no jurisdiction down here, Sheriff,” the second man said.

  “Who cares? I’m bigger than you are. You guys want trouble? I’ll give it to you in spades.”

  The two men looked at each other again, then got up from the settee. “We’ll honor your request, Sheriff Holland. We do that out of respect for you and our employer,” the first man said.

  “No, you’ll do it because if I catch one of y’all putting your hands on this little girl, I’m going to kick your sorry asses all the way to Mexico City. And if I find out you’re involved with the kidnapping of my deputy, I’m going to blow your fucking heads off.”

  Hackberry did not wait for their reaction. He walked into the side room, where two men were shooting pool inside a cone of light created by a tin-shaded bulb that hung from the ceiling. The pool table was covered with red velvet, the pockets hung with netted black leather, the mahogany trim polished to a soft glow. “You!” he said, pointing at the man about to break the rack. “Yeah, you! Put your cue down and look at me.”

  “¿Hay algún problema?”

  “Yeah, you. Remember me?”

  “Yes, sir, you’re the sheriff.”

  “You were shooting pool at a cantina tonight.”

  “Maybe I was. Maybe not. So what?” There was a deep indentation below the pool shooter’s left eye, as though a piece of the cheekbone had been removed and the skin under the eye had collapsed and formed a hole a person could insert his thumb in. But the injury was an old one. It was the same wound that Hackberry had seen in the face of one of Temple Dowling’s employees when they came to his office.

  “There’s no maybe in this,” Hackberry said. “You were in the Cantina del Cazador. You were shooting pool there. My deputy saw you in there and described you to me. In very few words, you need to tell me what happened to my deputy.”

  The pool shooter’s shirt was open on his chest, exposing his chest hair and nipples and a gold chain he wore around his neck. “¿Quién sabe, hombre?”

  “You sabes, bud. Or you’d better.”

  “I was in the cantina. I didn’t see anybody who looked like a deputy sheriff. What else can I say?”

  “Why’d your friends out front say you weren’t there?”

  “Maybe I didn’t tell them.”

  “I can see you’re a man who likes to keep it simple. So how about this?” Hackberry said. He pulled his white-handled blue-black .45 revolver from his holster and swung it backhanded across the pool shooter’s mouth. The blow made a clacking sound when the heavy cylinder and frame and the barrel broke the man’s lips against his teeth. The pool shooter dropped his cue and cupped both of his hands to his mouth, his face trembling with shock behind his fingers. He removed his hands and looked at the blood on them, then spat a tooth into his palm.

  “Chingado, what the fuck, man!” he said.

  “You sabes now?”

  “What’s going on here?” said a voice behind Hackberry.

  Temple Dowling had come out of a bedroom down the hall. He wore slippers and a towel robe cinched around his waist. Lipstick was smeared on his robe, and his exposed chest looked pink and blubbery and his breasts effeminate. Two young girls were leaning out of the doorway behind him, trying to see what was happening at the front of the house. Hackberry could see a large man in a long-sleeve white cotton shirt and bradded jeans coming out of an office in back, a wood baton gripped in one hand.

  Hackberry put his revolver in the holster and raised his left hand, palm out, at the man with the baton. “My business is with Mr. Dowling and his associates. Mix in it and you’ll take their weight,” he said.

  “¿Qué dice?” the man with the baton asked one of the girls who had stepped out of the bedroom.

  “No sé,” she replied.

  “Está bien. It’s all right, Hector,” Dowling said to the Mexican with the baton.

  “One of my deputies was kidnapped out of a cantina where your hired piece of shit with the bloody mouth was shooting pool,” Hackberry said. “He denies seeing my deputy, even though my deputy described your man to me over his cell phone.”

  “Why would one of my employees have any interest in your deputy, Sheriff Holland?” Dowling said. “Are you down here about Jack Collins?”

  “No.”

  “You’re not?” Dowling said, looking confused.

  “Why would I be looking for Collins on a street full of Mexican cathouses?”

  “He’s everywhere,” Dowling replied.

  “You’ve become a believer?”

  “I haven’t done anything to this man. I didn’t say anything about him.”

  The register in Dowling’s voice had changed, the vowels and consonants not quite holding together. The skin twitched under one eye as though a fly had settled on his skin. Hackberry wondered how many young girls had paid the price for the fear that Dowling had probably spent a lifetime trying to hide from others.

  “Have you had an encounter with Collins?” Hackberry asked.

  “I thought you knew.”

  “Knew what?”

  “I put a reward on him. He killed two of my men. That’s why I put the reward on him.”

  “You put a reward on Jack Collins?”

  “For arrest and conviction. That’s all the statement says. I didn’t tell people to go out and kill him. It’s what any employer or family member would do if their employees or family members were murdered.”

  “Have you seen him?”

  “Last night there was a man outside my motel. My men tried to catch him, but he disappeared. He was wearing a dirty hat of some kind. He was in the shadows on the other side of the parking lot, under a sodium lamp. What do you call that kind of hat? A panama? It’s made of straw and has a brim that dips down over the eyes.”

  Dowling seemed to wait, hoping that Hackberry would dispel his fears and tell him that the shadowy figure, for whatever reason, could not have been Collins.

  “That sounds like Jack, all right,” Hackberry said. “Congratulations, you’ve brought down perhaps the most dangerous man in America on your head. Jack’s a real cutup. I’ve been trying to punch his ticket for over a year. Maybe you’ll be more successful. You guys have any armored vests in your vehicles?”

  “You’re enjoying this.”

  “I guess it beats hanging in an upscale cathouse that provides services for pedophiles.”


  “Don’t you dare talk to me like that.”

  “I was a whoremonger, Mr. Dowling. When I see a man like you, I want to shoot myself. I don’t know if some of the girls I slept with were under the legal age or not. Most of the times I went across the river, I was too drunk to know what universe I was in.”

  Dowling was not listening. “Did you see anyone down here who looked like him?”

  “Like Jack?”

  “Who do you think I’m talking about, you idiot?” Dowling said.

  “He paid a visit to my ranch just yesterday. He put a laser sight on me, but he didn’t pull the trigger. That tells me he has something else planned for me. In your case, I doubt you’ll see that red dot crawl across your skin. You’ll see his Thompson for a few seconds, then you won’t see anything at all.”

  A hulking Mexican woman appeared out of the back office and placed a highball in Temple Dowling’s hand. Dowling looked at the drink as though he couldn’t understand how it had gotten there. The two girls he had been in bed with were whispering under their breath, one translating to the other the conversation of the gringos, both of them trying not to giggle. “Señor, este es muy malo para los negocios,” the Mexican woman said.

  Her words of concern about her business realities had no effect on Temple Dowling. Instead, his eyes remained fixed on Hackberry’s, a lump of fear sliding down his throat so audibly that his lips parted and his mouth involuntarily made a clicking sound.

  “I don’t have any authority down here, Mr. Dowling,” Hackberry said. “But when I get back to Texas, I’ll make sure the appropriate agencies hear about your sexual inclinations.”