There was no answer. Hackberry stepped inside the darkness of the cave as though slipping from the world of light into one of perpetual shade.
The body of a man lay behind a boulder. The wounds in his chest and stomach and legs were egregious. The amount of blood that had pooled around him and soaked into his sheep-lined leather coat and bradded orange work pants seemed more than his body could have contained.
“You can do a good deed here, Jack,” Hackberry called out.
After the echo died, he thought he heard a rattling sound in the dark, farther back in the cave.
“Did you hear me, Jack?”
“You’re backlit, Sheriff,” a voice said from deep in the cave’s interior.
“That’s right. You can pop me any time you want.” Hackberry paused. “You’re not above doing a good deed, are you?”
“What might that be?”
“Mrs. Dolan has children. They want her back. How about it?”
“I’ll take it under advisement.”
“I don’t think you’re a man who hides behind a woman.”
“I don’t have to hide behind anyone. You hear that sound? Why don’t you come toward me a little more and check out your environment?”
“Rattlers are holed up in here?”
“Probably not more than a couple of dozen. Just flatten yourself out against the wall.”
“Your voice sounds a little strange, Jack.”
“He’s had an anaphylactic reaction to peanut butter. It may be fatal,” a woman’s voice said.
“You shut up,” Collins said.
“Is that right, Jack? You want to go to a hospital?” Hackberry said.
But there was no answer.
“I was a navy corpsman,” Hackberry said. “Severe anaphylaxis can bring on respiratory and coronary arrest, partner. It’s a bad way to go, strangling in your spit, your sphincter letting go, that sort of thing.”
“I can squeeze this trigger, and you’ll be a petroglyph.”
“But that’s not what this is about, is it? You’re haunted by the women and girls you killed because your act was that of a coward, not because you robbed them of their lives. You don’t want redemption, Jack. You want validation, justification for an act you know is indefensible.”
“Sheriff Holland, don’t bait this man or try to reason with him. Kill him so he doesn’t kill others. I’m not afraid,” the woman said.
Hackberry gritted his teeth in his frustration with Esther Dolan. “That’s not why I’m here, Jack. I’m not your executioner. I’m not worthy of you. You already said it—I’m a drunk and the sexual exploiter of poor third-world women. I’ve got to hand it to you, for good or bad, you’re the kind of guy who belongs to the ages. You screwed up behind the church, but I think the order for the mass shooting came from Hugo Cistranos and wasn’t your idea. That’s important to remember, Jack. You’re not a coward. You can prove that this morning. Turn Mrs. Dolan loose and take your chances with me. That’s what real cojones are about, right? You say full throttle and fuck it and sail out over the abyss.”
There was a long silence. Hackberry could feel the wind puffing around him, blowing coldly on his neck and the backs of his ears. Again he heard a rattling sound, like the wispy rattling of seeds inside a dried poppy husk.
“I’ve got to know something,” Collins said.
“Ask me.”
“That night I went inside your house, you said my mother wanted me aborted, that I was despised in the womb. Why would you treat me with such contempt and odium?”
“My remark wasn’t aimed at you.”
“Then who?”
Hackberry paused. “We don’t get to choose our parents.”
“My mother wasn’t like that, like what you said. She wasn’t like that at all.”
“Maybe she wasn’t, sir. Maybe I was all wrong.”
“Then say that.”
“I just did.”
“You think your words will make me merciful now?”
“Probably not. Maybe I’ve just been firing in the well.”
“Get out of here, Mrs. Dolan. Go back to your family.”
Unbelievingly, Hackberry saw Esther Dolan running out of the darkness, her shoulder close to the right wall, her arms gathered across her chest, her face averted from something on the left side of the cave.
Hackberry grabbed her and pushed her behind him out into the light. He turned and went back into the cave, lifting his revolver from his holster. “You still there, Jack?”
“I’m at your disposal.”
“Do I have to come in after you?”
“You could wait me out. The fact that you’ve chosen otherwise tells me it’s you who’s looking for salvation, Sheriff, not me. Something happen in Korea you don’t tell a lot of people about?”
“Could be.”
“I’ll be glad to oblige. I’ve got fifty rounds in my pan. Do you know what you’ll look like when I get finished?”
“Who cares? I’m old. I’ve had a good life. Fuck you, Jack.”
But nothing happened. Inside the darkness, Hackberry could hear the rilling sound of small rocks, as though they were slipping down a grade.
“Maybe I’ll see you down the road, Sheriff,” Collins said.
Suddenly, a truck flare burst into flame far back in the cave. Collins hurled it end over end onto a rock shelf where diamondbacks as thick as Hack’s wrists writhed among one another, their rattlers buzzing like maracas.
Hackberry emptied his .45 down the cave shaft, then pulled the Beretta from the back of his belt and let off all fourteen rounds, the bullets sparking on the cave walls, thudding into layers of bat guano and mold, ricocheting deep underground.
When he finished firing, he was almost deaf, his eardrums as insensate as lumps of cauliflower. The air was dense with smoke and the smell of cordite and animal feces and the musky odor of disturbed birds’ and rats’ nests. He could see the snakes looping and coiling on the shelf, their eyes bright pinpoints in the hot red glare of the truck flare. Tarantulas the diameter of baseballs, with black furry legs, were crawling down the sides of the shelf onto the cave floor. Hackberry opened and closed his mouth and swallowed and forced air through his ears. “I get you, Jack?” he called out.
He listened for an answer, his head slightly bowed. All he heard in response were feet moving farther down the shaft, deeper into the mountain, and the voice of an impaired man saying, “Ma, is that you? It’s Jack, your son. Ma?”
EPILOGUE
THE WEEKS PASSED, then months, and Hackberry Holland’s life slipped back into routine. Search teams and spelunkers crawled deep into the tunnel where Jack Collins had disappeared. A geologist borrowed from the University of Texas, with a flair for the poetic in his report, described the tunnel as “serpentine in pattern, in places as narrow as a birth canal, the floor and ceiling ridged with sharp projections that lacerate the palms, knees, and back simultaneously, the air akin in its foulness to a water well with a dead cow in it.”
Everyone who went into the cave conceded that somewhere on the other side of the mountain there was an air source, perhaps a small one hidden behind brush growing out of the rock, but an opening of some kind that allowed water and light and small animals into the mountain’s interior, because on the far side of the spot where the tunnel bottomed and then rose at a forty-five-degree angle, there were seeds from piñon trees that had drifted down from above, and on a flat rock a hollowed-out depression that had probably been used as an Indian grinding bowl.
The official statement from a government spokesman indicated that Jack Collins had probably been wounded by gunfire and died inside the mountain, and his remains would probably never be found. But local residents began to report sightings of an emaciated man who foraged in landfills and Dumpsters and wore rags that were black with grime and a rope for a belt and whose beard grew in a point to the middle of his chest. The emaciated man also wore cowboy boots whose soles were held on with duct tape, and a fedora wit
h holes in the creases.
When a reporter asked Hackberry Holland about his speculations on the fate of Jack Collins, he thought for a moment and said, “What difference does it make?”
“Sir?” the reporter said.
“Preacher’s kind don’t go away easily. If Jack isn’t out there now, his successor is.”
“You sound like y’all had a personal relationship,” the reporter said.
“I guess you could say I got to know him in North Korea.”
“I’m confused,” the reporter said. “Korea? You’re saying the guy’s a terrorist or something?”
“How about I buy you coffee up at the café?” Hackberry said.
No charges were ever filed against Pete Flores, in large part because the perpetrators of the massacre behind the church were thought to be dead and no local or federal official wanted to see a basically innocent and decent man inserted into a process that, once started, becomes irreversible and eventually destroys lives for no practical purpose. If there was any drama at all in the aftermath of the events that took place on the mountainside above Jack Collins’s burned and bulldozed cottage, it occurred in an idle moment when Vikki Gaddis was sorting through her purse at the kitchen table and found a business card she had put away and forgotten about.
“What’s that?” Pete said. He was drying the dishes, glancing back at her from the kitchen counter.
“A guy from the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band left it at the steak house. He liked my music.”
“Did you call him?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Why should I?”
He didn’t have an answer. A few minutes later, he picked up the card from the table and walked outside and over a bare knoll dotted with clusters of prickly-pear cactus. From the top of the knoll, he could see a half-dozen oil wells methodically pumping up and down on a rolling plain that seemed to bleed into the sunset. The air smelled of natural gas and creosote and a stack of old tires someone had burned. Behind him, the ever-present dust gusted off the road and floated in a gray cloud over the clapboard house he and Vikki rented. He opened his cell phone and dialed the number on the business card.
Six weeks later, Vikki Gaddis cut her first record at Martina and John McBride’s Blackbird Studio in Nashville.
For Hackberry Holland, the end of the story lay not in the fate of Jack Collins or Hugo Cistranos and Arthur Rooney or any of their minions. By the same token, it did not lie in the fact that justice was done for Pete Flores and that the talent of his wife, Vikki Gaddis, was recognized by her fellow artists, or even in the fact that Vikki and Pete later bought a ranch at the foot of the blue Canadian Rockies. Instead, the conclusion of Hackberry’s odyssey from Camp Five in No Name Valley to an alluvial floodplain north of the Chisos Mountains was represented by a bizarre event that remained, at least for him, as an emblematic moment larger than the narrative about it.
It involved the unexpected arrival of Nick Dolan, the former operator of a skin joint, on Collins’s property, driving an SUV that had the lacquered brilliance of a maroon lollipop, a stolen American flag with a broomstick for a staff mounted on the rear bumper, his passengers a blue-collar community-college student who thought it perfectly natural to sing Carter Family spirituals in a beer joint and a former American soldier who was so brave he had forgotten to be afraid.
The three of them made for an improbable cast of heroes. Perhaps like an ancient Roman watching a Vesuvian mountain grow red and translucent until it exploded and rained its sparks on a dark sea, they did not recognize the importance of the events taking place around them or the fact that they were players in a great historical drama. They would be the last to claim they had planned the charge across the hardpan into Jack Collins’s camp. But that was the key to understanding them: Their humility, the disparity in their backgrounds, the courage they didn’t acknowledge in themselves, the choices they made out of instinct rather than intellect, these characteristics constituted the glue that held them together as individuals and as a people. Empires came and went. The indomitable nature of the human spirit did not.
Or at least these were the lessons that Hackberry Holland and Pam Tibbs tried to take from their own story.
Turn the page for a look at
FEAST DAY OF FOOLS
James Lee Burke’s masterful new novel
featuring Hackberry Holland
Coming from Simon & Schuster
September 2011
Some people said Danny Boy Lorca’s visions came from the mescal that had fried his brains, or the horse-quirt whippings he took around the ears when he served time on Sugar Land Farm, or the fact he’d been a middleweight club fighter through a string of dust-blown sinkholes where the locals were given a chance to beat up what was called a tomato can, a fighter who leaked blood every place he was hit, in this case a rumdum Indian who ate his pain and never flinched when his opponents broke their hands on his face.
Danny Boy’s black hair was cut in bangs and fitted his head like a helmet. His physique was as square as a door, his clothes always smelling of smoke from the outdoor fires he cooked his food on, his complexion as dark and coarsened by the sun and wind as the skin on a shrunken head. In summer, he wore long-sleeve cotton work shirts buttoned at the throat and wrists to keep the heat out, and in winter a canvas coat and an Australian flop hat tied down on his ears with a scarf. He fought his hangovers in a sweat lodge, bathed in ice water, planted by the moon, cast demons out of his body into sand paintings that he flung at the sky, prayed in a loincloth on a mesa in the midst of electric storms, and sometimes experienced either seizures or trances during which he spoke a language that was neither Apache nor Navaho, although he claimed it was both.
Sometimes he slept in the county jail. Other nights he slept behind the saloon or in the stucco house where he lived on the cusp of a wide, alluvial floodplain bordered on the southern horizon by purple mountains that in the late-afternoon warp of heat seemed to take on the ragged irregularity of sharks’ teeth.
The sheriff who allowed Danny Boy to sleep at the jail was an elderly six-foot-five widower by the name of Hackberry Holland, whose bad back and chiseled profile and Stetson hat and thumb-buster .45 revolver and history as a drunk and whoremonger were the sum total of his political cachet, if not his life. To most people in the area, Danny Boy was an object of pity and ridicule and contempt. His solipsistic behavior and his barroom harangues were certainly characteristic of a wet brain, they said. But Sheriff Holland, who had been a prisoner of war for almost three years in a place in North Korea called No Name Valley, wasn’t so sure. The sheriff had arrived at an age when he no longer speculated on the validity of a madman’s visions or, in general, on the foibles of human behavior. Instead, Hackberry Holland’s greatest fear was his fellow man’s propensity to act collectively, in militaristic lockstep, under the banner of God and country. Mobs did not rush across town to do good deeds, and in Hackberry’s view, there was no more odious taint on any social or political endeavor than universal approval. To Hackberry, Danny Boy’s alcoholic madness was a respite from a far greater form of delusion.
It was late, on a Wednesday night in April, when Danny Boy walked out into the desert with an empty duffle bag and an army surplus entrenching tool, the sky as black as soot, the southern horizon pulsing with electricity that resembled gold wires, the softness of the ground crumbling under his cowboy boots, as though he were treading across the baked shell of an enormous riparian environment that had been layered and beveled and smoothed with a sculptor’s knife. At the base of a mesa, he folded the entrenching tool into the shape of a hoe and knelt down and began digging in the ground, scraping through the remains of fossilized leaves and fish and birds that others said were millions of years old. In the distance, an igneous flash spread silently through the clouds, flaring in great yellow pools, lighting the desert floor and the cactus and mesquite and the greenery that was trying to bloom along a riverbed that never held water except dur
ing the monsoon season. Just before the light died, like figures caught inside the chemical mix of a half-developed photograph, Danny Boy saw six men advancing across the plain toward him, their torsos slung with rifles.
He scraped harder in the dirt, trenching a circle around what appeared to be two tapered soft-nosed rocks protruding from the incline below the mesa. Then his e-tool broke through an armadillo’s burrow. He inverted the handle and stuck it down the hole and wedged the earth upward until the burrow split across the top and he could work his hand deep into the hole, up to the elbow, and feel the shapes of the clustered objects that were as pointed and hard as calcified dugs.
The night air was dense with an undefined feral odor, like cougar scat and a sun-bleached carcass and burnt animal hair and water that had gone stagnant in a sandy drainage traced with the crawl lines of reptiles. The wind blew between the hills in the south and he felt its coolness and the dampness of the rain mist on his face. He saw the leaves on the mesquite ripple like green lace, the mesas and buttes shimmering whitely against the clouds, then disappearing into the darkness again. He smelled the piñon and juniper and the scent of delicate flowers that bloomed only at night and whose petals dropped off and clung to the rocks at sunrise like translucent pieces of colored rice paper. He stared at the southern horizon but saw no sign of the six men carrying rifles. He wiped his mouth on his sleeve and went back to work, scooping out a big hole around the stonelike objects that were welded together as tightly as concrete.
The first shot was a tiny pop, like a wet firecracker exploding. He stared into the fine mist that was swirling through the hills. Then the lightning flared again and he saw the armed men stenciled against the horizon and the silhouettes of two other figures who had broken from cover and were running toward the north, toward Danny Boy, toward a place that should have been safe from the criminality and violence that he believed was threading its way out of Mexico into his life.
A Billy Bob and Hackberry Holland Ebook Boxed Set Page 81
