Feast Day of Fools

by James Lee Burke

  “No, I do not understand these things. Your words are mysterious and confusing. Why are you doing this to me?” the bartender said, blood glistening on his upper lip.

  “Because you’re an evil man.”

  “No, hombre, I am not evil. I’m a worker. I am part of the revolution.”

  Hackberry placed his knee against the bartender’s chest and leaned forward and forced the shattered end of the pool cue over his teeth and into his mouth. “In five seconds I’m going to push this down your windpipe and out the side of your neck. Look into my face and tell me I won’t do it.”

  He could feel Pam Tibbs’s hand clasp the top of his shoulder and squeeze. “Hack,” she said softly.

  He paid no attention.

  R.C. MASSAGED HIS wrists, then picked up the shovel by his foot, as the man named Negrito had told him to do. The sky was black and hazed with dust, and the shooting stars above the hills looked like chips of dry ice that were melting into nothingness. R.C thought he heard a train whistle in the distance and the sound of boxcars with their brakes on sliding down an incline, the wheels shrieking against the rails.

  “What are you waiting for, Tejano boy? Start digging,” Negrito said.

  R.C.’s hands were propped on the shaft of the shovel, the worn, rounded, silvery tip an inch into the dirt. Strips of severed duct tape hung from his boots. He could feel his heart beating against his ribs and a line of sweat starting to run from each of his armpits. Negrito was squatted on a rise fifteen feet away, his 1911-model United States Army .45 gripped casually on one knee, his fingers loose around the trigger guard, completely confident about the situation he had created. His leather hat hung on the back of his neck, the chin cord taut against his throat. He picked up a dirt clod and threw it at R.C.’s head.

  “I’ve been kind to you,” he said. “Don’t abuse my charity. I’m not a nice man when I’m provoked.”

  “I cain’t do it,” R.C. said.

  “Sí, puedes.”

  “I ain’t. That’s what I meant to say.” Even to himself, R.C.’s voice seemed full of broken glass, his words thick, the worst fate he could imagine about to be realized only a few inches from where he stood.

  “Meant to say what, Tejano boy?”

  “I meant to say I ain’t gonna dig my own grave,” R.C. replied. “And I ain’t no boy.”

  “It don’t matter what I call you, man. You’re gonna dig.”

  “No matter how it plays out, I ain’t gonna he’p you. No, sir, I won’t do it.”

  “That’s what they all say. They buy a little time that way, and it makes them feel less bad about themselves. They want to believe their friends are gonna come over the rise and kill Negrito and take them home to their mothers and fathers and wives and husbands, but finally, they dig. You don’t got to feel bad about it.”

  R.C. raised one foot and rested it on the top of the shovel blade, still gripping the shaft with both hands, his eyes stinging with sweat, a vinegary stench rising from his armpits. His heart felt as though it had been invaded by threadworms and was slowly being reduced to the point where it could no longer pump his blood.

  “I make twenty-six thousand dollars a year. I break up domestic fights and run in drunks and wets and nickel-and-dime meth mules.”

  “So?”

  “Your friends won’t pay money for me.”

  “You want me to shoot you, man?” Negrito raised the .45 and pointed it at R.C. and playfully sighted down the barrel. “Ever see one of these hit a kneecap? Or a guy’s foot? I use hollow-points.”

  R.C. swallowed. Each time the gun’s muzzle swung across his person, his colon constricted and his entrails turned to water.

  “I’m gonna shoot you in a place that hurts like a son of a bitch, man,” Negrito said. “Then you’re going in the ground with all that pain while you try to breathe through the gas mask. Why you want to do that to yourself?”

  R.C.’s head was spinning, bile rising from his stomach, his fear so great and his anger at himself and his despair so intense that he could feel himself walking through a door into a place where nothing mattered anymore. “I just remembered what you look like. I couldn’t think of it. But it’s real clear in my head now,” he said, breathing hard through his mouth.

  “Why you always got to talk, man? You are like a woman, always talking, filling the air with sounds that grate on the ear.”

  “I couldn’t remember what you remind me of. At the cantina I was thinking about it, but I couldn’t get it straight in my head because I drank too much.”

  “What I remind you of?”

  “An orange Brillo pad. Those steel-wool pads women use to clean grease and fish skins and fried crud out of skillets. After a while, the pads turn orange and blue with soap and rust and all the glop that’s glommed up inside them.”

  “That’s what I look like?”

  “Yes, sir, I’d call it a match.”

  “Be quiet,” Negrito said, rising to his feet.

  “Like my mother says, looks is only skin deep.”

  “Silencio, foolish boy who does not hear or listen.”

  R.C. realized his tormentor was not interested in deflecting insults and that he had heard something out in the darkness. Negrito walked up the incline, away from the dry wash and the row of graves and the greasewood and the stunted willows along the bank and the tortoise-shaped sandstone boulders that were weathered through with holes the length of a man’s arm. “Is that you out there, Mr. Crazy Man?” he said. “You want to fight Negrito? Come down and fight. I don’t fear you.”

  R.C. watched, stupefied.

  “The gringos fear you! But I don’t! ¡Me cago en la puta de tu madre! I take a shit in your mother’s womb. How you like that?” Negrito said.

  “Who you talking to?”

  Negrito said nothing in answer to R.C. He was standing on a slab of stone that was tilted upward on the slope, one pointy cowboy boot stationed in front of the other, his shoulders humped, his .45 hanging from his right hand. In profile, his right eye seemed to watch both the hillside and R.C. simultaneously, the way a shark’s eye views everything in its ken, both enemy and prey, revealing no more emotionality than a flat coat button.

  “Hey, sacerdote of the garbage dump and eater of your own feces! You think we treated your little Quaker friend bad?” he called out. “What if I bring you down here and make you suck my dick? I can do that to you, man, with great pleasure.”

  There was no reply from the hillside, and R.C. could see no movement among the shadows and mesquite and rocks and the dead juniper trees that looked like gnarled and polished bone. Negrito continued to stare into the darkness, his nostrils swelling, his profile as snubbed as a piranha’s. He squeezed his scrotum with his left hand. “Come take it, cabrón!” he yelled.

  The moon broke from behind a cloud and turned the hillside gray, the scrub brush pooling with shadows. “No? You prefer shooting women and people who ain’t got no guns? You’re a sorry Christian, Mr. Preacher. A Christian without cojones.”

  “You know Preacher Collins?” R.C. said.

  “The crazy man up there ain’t gonna help you. So give that up,” Negrito replied, backing down the slope, his gaze still concentrated on the hillside. “He’s the hunter, the left hand of God. He don’t have interest in a boy like you.”

  “But he’s interested in you?” R.C. said.

  “Of course. He knows we’re brothers. Under our skin, we’re no different.”

  “Brothers?”

  “That’s right, Tejano boy. Preacher and I are both dead. Our souls died many years ago. What do you see in my eyes?”

  “Nothing.”

  “That’s right. Nothing. And that’s why you’re gonna start to dig. Or maybe I’m gonna start shooting you in various places that will hurt more than you can believe.”

  “I done told you, I ain’t gonna do it. So you’d better kill me, ’cause somewhere down the road, I’m gonna catch up with you. You damn betcha I will.”

 
Negrito’s eyes were rheumy, his face dull with fatigue, his mouth caked. He made a snuffing sound and rubbed his nose with the back of his wrist. “Release the shovel and get in the trunk of the car.”

  “What are you gonna do?”

  “I got to dig your hole. That makes me very mad. You are lucky I am a merciful man.”

  R.C. let the shovel fall to the ground and started toward the gasguzzler, glancing warily over his shoulder, then tripping and stumbling. He heard Negrito pick up the shovel.

  “Look up there,” Negrito said.

  “At what?”

  “The preacher up there in the rocks. See, against the moon. He wants to be your friend. The sacerdote who eats his own mierda has come to your rescue. Or maybe it’s the sheriff you work for. Maybe this is your lucky day.”

  R.C. stared at the clumps of brush in the arroyos and at the layers of rock exposed by erosion in the hillside and at the tailings of a mine that spilled like rust down to the wash. He saw a shadow move across the moon. “That’s a coyote,” he said.

  He turned around just as Negrito whipped the shovel with both hands through the air and almost flattened the concave steel blade on the back of R.C.’s head.

  “I think you was right. It was just a coyote,” Negrito said, staring up the hill.

  JACK COLLINS LAY below the crest of the hill, his belly and loins and legs stretched out on a flat rock that had ripples in it like water, his hat beside him, his eyes raised just above a pile of crumbling stone. Behind him, the two Mexican informers, cousins who did murders for hire, were talking quietly to each other, sometimes glancing up in his direction. They were restless men and did not like either indecision or complexity and often found themselves caught between their own self-protective instincts and their hesitancy to challenge the strange ways of the gringo loco whose lethality was a legend in Coahuila and Chihuahua. Finally, the one named Eladio approached the unshaved and unwashed American who dressed in rags and wore a heavy revolver on his hip, squatting down so as not to silhouette against the sky. “Señor Jack?” he said.

  “Be patient,” Jack said, peering down the opposite slope.

  “Why don’t we just go down there in the streambed and kill Negrito? I’ll do it without no charge.”

  Jack looked back over his shoulder and grinned. “You boys were supposed to give me the man named Krill. We didn’t come out here to hunt an orange ape.”

  “I thought Krill would be at the farmhouse. He’s a very hard man to catch, boss. This is the place Negrito sometimes uses to bury his victims. It is fortunate that I knew that.”

  “So we’re saved from your incompetence by the intervention of the fates, and that should make me feel good?”

  “You talk too fast for me to understand sometimes, boss.”

  Jack worked his way backward on the rock until he was well under the level of the hillcrest, then got to his feet. He dusted off his knees and the elbows of his suit coat and fitted on his hat, glancing at the strips of black cloud across the moon. He gestured for the other cousin to join him and Eladio. But minutes seemed to pass before he spoke. In the silence, he glanced at one man, then the other, and then into space, as though viewing two different screens in his head. “I pay you boys enough?” he asked.

  “Sí,” both of them said, nodding.

  “Krill has done great injury to a friend of mine. The one down the slope, the ape, isn’t even a cipher.”

  “What is this ‘cipher’? These kinds of words don’t mean nozzing to us, boss,” Eladio said.

  “The fact you boys were raised up poor and ignorant isn’t your fault. Most of y’all’s mothers would have had you aborted if they’d had the money. But today there’s no excuse for ignorance in an adult. People in mud huts watch CNN. The Internet is available in a street-corner café. You boys have access to the same knowledge a university professor does. I suggest y’all start showing a little more initiative regarding your self-improvement.”

  “We seek to please you, not to upset you, Señor Jack,” Eladio said.

  “You did very well following Temple Dowling for me. You did well learning of the machinations of Negrito with the young lawman. But you haven’t given me Krill. Krill is the objective, not his monkey. Are y’all listening?”

  “We ain’t perfect, boss,” the cousin said. His name was Jaime, and of the two Mexican killers, he was the less intelligent and the more recalcitrant.

  Eladio looked angrily at his cousin, then turned his attention back to Jack, trying to undo any damage his cousin might have caused. “We can take Negrito alive and entertain him in ways he’ll understand,” Eladio said.

  “Is he the kind of man who gives up reliable information when he’s in pain?” Jack said. “Or does he lie and tell you what you want to hear?”

  “You are very intelligent, Señor Jack,” Eladio said. “Negrito has the strength of a mule and the brain of a snake. Pain means nothing to him. As a boy, he blew flaming kerosene from his mouth in a carnival. His putas say they can still smell it on him.”

  Jaime chewed on a weed and took a watch with a broken strap from his shirt pocket and looked at it. “Eladio is right. If Negrito ain’t of no value, maybe it’s time we took care of him and also the American you don’t like at the whorehouse and get some sleep. What is of more importance? The cost of a bullet or the time we waste speaking of these men you say are worthless? Constantly talking of these men makes me resentful of myself.”

  Jack’s face registered no emotion. It seemed as serene as a layer of plastic that had melted and cooled and dried in dirty lumps. He watched the lights in the sky and the dust that swirled off the desert floor and buttoned the top of his shirt with one hand as though expecting rain or cold. The Mexicans who worked for him were a mystery, an improbable genetic combination of Indian bloodlust and the cruelty of the Inquisition. The angular severity of their features, the way their skin stretched tautly on their bones, the greasy black shine in their uncut hair, the obsidian glint in their eyes at the mention of violence or pain made him wonder if they were remnants of a lost tribe from biblical times, perhaps an unredeemed race that had floated on the Flood far away from where Noah had landed on Mount Ararat. It would make sense. They were unteachable and killed one another with the dispassion and moral vacuity of someone who idly watches his children wander onto a freeway.

  What was Jaime saying now? His lips were still moving, though no sound seemed to come from his mouth. Jack disengaged from his reverie and stared at him. “Repeat that?” he said.

  “How come we ain’t at least killed the abusador de niños? He was at the whorehouse. We could have done it easy. Not even the policía would object to our killing such a man.”

  “I don’t go in whorehouses,” Jack said. “Also, don’t speak to me of your policemen’s virtue. They’re jackals and will steal the coins off a dead man’s eyes. What none of you seems to recognize is that your country is ungovernable. Your national heroes are peons who decorated trees with the bodies of their fellow peons. Do not tell me what I should do and not do.”

  “Señor Jack is very wise. We need to listen to him, Jaime,” Eladio said.

  “But we keep playing games with gringos who should be food for worms,” Jaime said. “This man Holland is the enemy of Señor Jack, but we don’t do nozzing about him. Why not kill Holland? It would give me great pleasure to do this for Señor Jack. What is so special about this man?”

  Jack pulled the weed from Jaime’s mouth and tossed it to one side. “Do not refer to Sheriff Holland by his last name only. His name is Mr. Holland or Sheriff Holland. Do you understand that?” he said.

  Jaime started to speak, but Eladio squeezed his arm. “You are a man of honor. We will always follow you and do as you tell us,” Eladio said.

  “You wouldn’t josh a fellow, would you?” Jack said.

  “We are hurt deeply when you talk like that to us, Señor Jack,” Eladio said.

  “Really?” Jack said. He gazed out at the desert and the nightt
ime glow of a distant town in the clouds. “That flatters and humbles me. I declare, you boys are full of surprises.”

  The two cousins waited for him to continue, neither of them meeting his eyes, Eladio’s hand still locked on Jaime’s forearm. “You didn’t develop laryngitis on me, did you?” Jack asked.

  “We are simple men, boss,” Eladio said.

  “That’s why I like you. That’s why I consider you not just friends but family. I wouldn’t offend either of you for the world.”

  “Is true what you say?” Eladio asked.

  “Cross my heart,” Jack replied, his teeth showing in the moonlight. “But right now I want to see what this hombre malo Negrito is doing. He’s a pistol, isn’t he? A man that keeps his own private burying ground. Y’all surely grow some strange critters down here.”

  Jack walked back up the slope, then shook out a handkerchief and placed it on the ground and knelt on one knee so he could look down the far side of the hill without silhouetting. While he studied the scene down below, his right hand played with his revolver, lifting it partially out of the holster, reversing the butt, then reversing it again, dropping it back into the hardened leather with a dry plop.

  “Come on up here and check this out,” he said, motioning at the cousins.

  The two Mexicans approached him, bent over, gravel rilling from under their cowboy boots, each of them attentive to the motion or lack of motion in Jack’s right hand. Out on the hardpan, the gasguzzler was driving away, its headlights lighting the scrub brush and cactus. “What is it?” Eladio said.

  “I was just talking about strange critters,” Jack said. He stood up and pointed down the slope. “Look yonder at that new grave. What’s that sticking out of the dirt?”

  Both cousins stared down into the moonlit wash, their foreheads knitted with thought. “An elephant’s trunk?” Eladio said.