Feast Day of Fools

by James Lee Burke

  “I think you’re fixing to tell me.”

  “You’ll figure it out,” she said.

  “Has R.C. called in yet?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Let me know when he does. Tell me why musicians make poor criminals.”

  “They believe they have a gift, so they feel less inclined to steal. They also think they’re special and they don’t have to prove anything.”

  “I never thought of it that way,” he said.

  “My first husband was hung like a hamster. But after he recorded once with Stevie Ray Vaughan, you’d think he was driving a fire truck up my leg.”

  “I can’t believe you just said that.”

  “Said what?”

  “Out, Maydeen. And close the door behind you, please.”

  Hackberry walked to the saloon and ate lunch in the darkness of a back booth and tried to forget the image of Dennis Rector hanging from a barn rafter. But a larger issue than the suicide was bothering him. Hackberry believed that most crimes, particularly homicide, were committed for reasons of sex, money, power, or any combination of the three. Beginning with the murder of the DEA informant by Krill, the homicides Hackberry had investigated recently seemed to defy normal patterns. Supposedly, the central issue was national security and the sale of Noie Barnum to Al Qaeda and the compromise of the Predator drone. But that just didn’t wash. The players were all people driven by ideology or religious obsession or personal rage that was rooted in the id. It was too easy to dismiss Preacher Jack Collins as a psychopath. It was also too easy to categorize Josef Sholokoff as a Russian criminal who slithered through a hole in the immigration process during the Cold War. Something much worse seemed to have come into the lives of this small-town society down here on the border, like a spiritual malignancy irradiating the land with its poisonous substance, remaking the people in its image.

  Is that too dark and grandiose an extrapolation from the daily ebb and flow of a rural sheriff’s department? Hackberry wondered. Ask those medieval peasants who were visited in their villages by the representatives of the Inquisition, he said to himself in reply.

  He stared at the diamondback rattlesnake that the saloon owner kept in a gallon jar of yellow formaldehyde on the bar. The snake’s body was coiled thickly upon itself, its mouth spread wide against the glass, its eyes like chips of stone, the venom holes visible in its fangs. The rattlesnake had been in the jar at least three years; its color had begun to fade, and pieces of its body were starting to dissolve in dirty strings inside the preservative. Why leave something that ugly if not perverse on top of a bar for that long?

  Because the owner was making a statement, Hackberry thought. Evil was outside of us, not in the human breast, and could be contained and made harmless and placed on exhibit. Wasn’t the serpent condemned to crawl on its belly in the dust and to strike at man’s heel and be beaten to death with a stick? What more fitting testimony to that fact than a diamondback yawning open its mouth impotently six inches from the tattooed arm of a trucker knocking back shots of Jack and chasing them with a frosted mug of Lone Star?

  Hackberry made a mental note to talk with the bartender. Then his cell phone vibrated on the tabletop. He opened it and placed it to his ear. “Sheriff Holland,” he said.

  “I called the office, Sheriff, but Maydeen said you were eating lunch,” a voice said. “Hope I’m not bothering you.”

  Hackberry looked down at his plate of enchiladas and Spanish rice and frijoles that were growing cold. “Go ahead, R.C.”

  “I did what you said. I got a range-and-township map and looked up the title of every piece of land in a five-mile radius from the spot where that FBI man was killed. I Googled all their names and got a hit on one guy, but he’s not a writer.”

  “What’s the name?”

  “W. W. Guthrie. Google took me to a folksinger by the name of Woodrow Wilson Guthrie.”

  “That’s Woody Guthrie, R.C. He didn’t just write folk songs. He published two books. One was Bound for Glory. It was made into a film. I think you just found the hideout of Preacher Jack.”

  “I’m on my way out there right now. I’ll call you back as soon as I find out anything.”

  “What kind of help are you getting from the feds?”

  “At the courthouse, one of them told me where the men’s room was. Another one said he thought it might rain directly. That’s the word he used—‘directly.’ Like he was talking to somebody on Hee Haw. Are they as bright as they’re supposed to be?”

  “Probably.”

  “They sure know how to hide it,” R.C. said.

  Hackberry finished eating and left thirteen dollars on the table and used the restroom and dried his hands and picked up his hat from the booth and started toward the front door. Then he paused. “I almost forgot,” he said to the bartender.

  “Forgot what?” the bartender said. He was a big, dark-haired man with a deeply creased brow who wore a white dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up high on his arms.

  “Can you put a bag over that snake jar the next time I come here?”

  “Any reason?”

  “Yeah, so I don’t have to look at it while I’m eating.”

  “Who lit your fuse?”

  “Did you read the paper this morning?”

  “Something happen?”

  “If I come in here again, refuse to serve me,” Hackberry said. “I’d really appreciate that.”

  Halfway to the office, his cell phone vibrated again. “Sheriff Holland,” he said.

  “It’s me, Sheriff.”

  “Yeah, I thought it might be you, R.C.”

  “How you doin’?”

  “Fine.”

  “I’m parked at this cabin that’s between a creek and a bluff. You cain’t see it except from the air. Feds are all over the place, but I found something they missed. It’s a checker. They didn’t know what it was.”

  “I’m not quite tracking you.”

  “It’s a homemade checker, one somebody carved out of wood. I’m not explaining myself real good. The property is in the name of W. W. Guthrie, but nobody around here seems to know what he looks like or where he’s from. When the feds got here, the cabin and the house were clean. I went out to the barn and saw the same Michelin tire tracks we saw at Anton Ling’s place. Then I went inside, and this fed was looking at a little round wood button that he found behind the kitchen door. You following me?”

  “Not really.”

  “I’ll try again. On the bottom of it were the initials N.B. For ‘Noie Barnum.’ On the top was a K. The fed didn’t know what that meant. I told him it was K for ‘king.’ So he says, ‘Yeah, it must have rolled behind the door.’ So I went into the bedroom and found another one, except this one was wedged in the side of the dresser. That whole place was broom-sweep clean, Sheriff. The second checker, the one stuck in the dresser, wasn’t left there by mistake. When I showed the fed what I’d found, he looked pretty confused.”

  “Noie Barnum isn’t a willing companion of Jack Collins?” Hackberry said.

  “Or he’s covering his ass,” R.C. replied.

  Or he has his own agenda, Hackberry thought. “You did a fine job, bud. Come on in,” he said.

  Minutes later, he called both Maydeen and Pam into his office.

  “Is this about my language?” Maydeen said. “If it is, I’m sor—”

  “Forget your language. The feds have treated us like dipshits. Find out everything you can about Noie Barnum,” he said.

  KRILL SQUATTED DOWN on a bare piece of ground a few feet from the common grave where he had buried his three children. The grave was marked by a Styrofoam cross wrapped with a string of multicolored plastic flowers. He upended an unlabeled bottle of mescal and drank from it against the sunset, the light turning to fire inside the glass. A copy of the San Antonio Express-News was weighted down on the ground with rocks he had placed on each corner of the front page, the paper riffling with wind. Krill drank again from the bottle, then pressed a c
ork into the neck with his thumb and gazed at the sun descending into a red blaze behind the hills.

  Negrito squatted next to him, his greasy leather hat flattening the hair on his forehead. “Don’t pay no attention to what’s in that newspaper,” he said.

  “They’re gonna put it on us, hombre. It means trouble.”

  “That means trouble? What do you call killing a DEA agent?”

  “He wasn’t an agent. He was an informant and a corrupt Mexican cop. Nobody cares what we did to him. Reverend Cody was a minister.”

  “We didn’t do it to him, man.”

  “But our prints are there, estúpido.”

  “That ain’t what’s bothering you, Krill. It’s something else, ain’t it?”

  “He baptized my children. Nobody else would do that. Not even La Magdalena. To treat him with disrespect now is to treat my children with disrespect.”

  “That don’t make sense.”

  “Where’s your brain? He had the power to set my children free from limbo. Should I tell them I care nothing for the man who did this for them? Can’t you think? What is wrong with you?”

  “You are making me confused. It makes my head hurt.”

  “Because you are stupid and self-centered. Go get the others and meet me at the car.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “To get the men who did this to the minister.”

  “No, no, this is a bad idea. Listen to me, Krill. I’m your friend, the only one you got.”

  “Then follow me or go into the desert. Or to your whores in Durango.”

  “You’re going after Noie Barnum. Some of the others might think you’re gonna sell him and maybe forget to share the money.”

  Krill stood up to his full height and pulled Negrito’s hat off his head. Then he slapped him with it, hard, the leather chin cord biting into the scalp. He waited a few seconds and hit him again. “We’re going after the Russian. He should have been killed a long time ago. Don’t ever accuse me of treachery again.”

  “How you know he did it?” Negrito asked, his eyes watering, his nostrils widening as he ate his pain and humiliation at being whipped by Krill.

  “Because he hates God, stupid one.”

  “I hear this from the killer of a Jesuit priest?”

  “They told us he and the others were Communists. There were five of them. I shot one, and the others shot the rest. It was in a garden outside the house where they lived. We killed the housekeeper, too. I dream of them often.”

  “Everybody dies. Why feel guilt over what has to happen to all of us?”

  “You say these things because you are incapable of thought. So I don’t hold your words or deeds against you.”

  “You hit me, jefe. You would not do that to an animal, but you would do it to me? You hurt me deep inside.”

  “I’m sorry. You are a handicapped man, and I must treat you as such.”

  “I do not like what is happening here. All this makes my head throb, like I have a great sickness inside it. Why do you make me feel like this, jefe?”

  “It is not me. You are one of the benighted, Negrito. Your problems are in your confused blood and your tangled thoughts. For that reason I must be kind to you.”

  “I will forget you said that to me, ’cause you are a mestizo, just like me. I say we return to Durango. I say we get drunk and bathe in puta and be the friends we used to be.”

  “Then you must go and pursue your lower nature.”

  “No, I’ll never leave you, man,” Negrito said. “What does ‘benighted’ mean?”

  Krill gestured toward the hills in the west, where the sun had become a red melt below the horizon and the darkness was spreading up into the sky. “It means the dying of the light,” he said. “The benighted place is out there where the coyotes and carrion birds and Gila monsters live and the spirits wander without hope of ever seeing the light.”

  AT TEN THE next morning Pam Tibbs tapped on the doorjamb of Hackberry’s office. She had a yellow legal pad in her hand. “This is what we’ve found out about Noie Barnum so far,” she said. “There’re a couple of holes in it. You want to hear it now or wait till Maydeen gets off the phone?”

  “Who’s she talking to?”

  “The state attorney’s office in Alabama.”

  “Sit down,” Hackberry said.

  “Barnum grew up in a small town on the Tennessee line and was an honor student in high school. His father died when he was three, and his mother worked at a hardware store and raised him and his half sister by herself. He was never an athlete or a class officer or a joiner of any kind. He won a scholarship to MIT and went to work for the government when he graduated. As far as anybody knew, he was always religious. When it came to girls and social activities, he was as plain as white bread and just about as forgettable. The exception came when he was seventeen. A three-year-old boy wandered away from the neighborhood, and the whole town organized search parties and went looking for him. Barnum found him in a well. He crawled in after him and got bitten in the face by a copperhead but carried the kid on his back four miles to a highway. By all odds, he should have died.”

  “What happened to the mother and the half sister?”

  “The mother passed away while Barnum was at MIT. The half sister moved to New York and went to work for a catering service. Some stories came back about her, but no one is sure of the truth. She wasn’t looked upon favorably in her hometown. She had been arrested in high school for possession of marijuana and was believed to sleep around. This is where it becomes cloudy.”

  “What does?”

  “She used her father’s last name when she moved to New York. Hang on,” Pam said. She got up from the chair and went to the door. “Maydeen’s off the phone.”

  When Maydeen walked into Hackberry’s office, her expression was blank, as though she were looking at an image behind her eyes that she did not want to assimilate.

  “What is it?” Hackberry said.

  “The Alabama state attorney did some hands-on work for us,” she replied. “He found a guy in a state rehab center who was the half sister’s boyfriend. She died in the Twin Towers. She was called in to work on her day off because somebody else was sick. She was in the restaurant on the top floor. She was one of the people who held hands with a friend and jumped.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  AT THE BOTTOM of Danny Boy Lorca’s land was a ravine that few people knew about or chose to travel. It led from Mexico into the United States, but the entrance was overgrown with thornbushes that could scrape the skin off a man or the paint from an automobile. The sides of the ravine went straight up into the sky and had been marked in four places by the lances of mounted Spaniards who littered the bottom of the ravine with the bones of Indians whose most sophisticated weapons had been the sharpened sticks they used to plant corn. The few illegals who used the ravine and even the coyotes who guided them swore they had seen Indians standing on ledges in the darkness, their faces as dry and bloodless and withered as deer hide stretched on lodge poles. The specters on the ledges did not speak or show any recognition of the nocturnal wayfarers passing between the walls. Their eyes were empty circles that contained only darkness, their clothes sewn from the burlap given them by their conquerors. No one who saw the specters ever wanted to return to the area, except Danny Boy Lorca.

  He woke to the grinding noise of a car in low gear laboring up a grade and a brittle screeching that was like someone scratching a stylus slowly down a blackboard. When he went to his back door, he saw a gas-guzzler bounce loose from the ravine, its lights burning in the fog, strings of smoke rising from the rust in its hood. He saw the silhouettes of perhaps four men inside the vehicle.

  He pulled on his boots and lifted his twenty-gauge from the antler rack on the wall and limped out onto the back porch. The fog smelled of dust and herbicide and a pond strung with green feces and someone burning raw garbage. The gas-guzzler was traversing his property, its engine rods knocking, its low beams swimming wi
th dust particles and candle moths.

  He walked toward it, a pain flaring in his thigh each time his foot came down on the ground, the shotgun cradled across the crook of his left arm. His twenty-gauge was called a dogleg, a one-barrel one-shot breechloader he had used to hunt quail and doves and rabbits when he was a boy. It was a fine gun that had served him well. There was a problem, though: He had not bought shells for it in years. He was carrying an unloaded weapon.

  He limped through the chicken yard and past the three-sided shed where his firewood was stacked and through one end of his barn and out the other until he stood squarely in the headlights of the gasguzzler. The driver touched his brakes and stuck his head out the window. “We got a little lost, amigo. Know where the highway is at?”

  Danny Boy moved out of the headlights’ glare so he could see the driver more clearly. “You got dope in that car?” he said.

  “We’re workers, hombre,” the driver said. “We don’t got no dope. We are lost. That canyon was a pile of shit. You got a cast on your leg.”

  “Yeah, and you got a bullet hole in your window,” Danny Boy said.

  “These are dangerous times,” the driver said. “You have an accident?”

  “No, a guy put a shank in me. Did you see the Indians in the ravine?”

  “A shank? That ain’t good. You said Indians? What is with you, man?” the driver said. He turned to the others. “The guy is talking about Indians. Anybody here see Indians?”

  The other men shook their heads.

  “See, ain’t nobody seen no fucking Indians,” the driver said. “We’re going to Alpine. Come on, man, you need to stand aside with that gun and let us pass.”

  Danny Boy’s gaze had been fixed on the driver’s orange hair and whiskers and the gorilla-like bone structure of his face, so he had not paid attention to the man sitting in the passenger seat. At first the passenger’s sharp profile and unnaturally wide shoulders and slit of a mouth were like parts of a bad dream returning in daylight. When Danny Boy realized who the passenger was, he felt his breath catch in his throat. He stepped back from the car window, gripping the shotgun tightly. “I seen you before,” he said.