Feast Day of Fools

by James Lee Burke

  “Something else happened here. Collins didn’t burn the shack, did he?”

  “How do you know that?”

  “He’s a religious fanatic. He wouldn’t burn his Bible.”

  “You’re too smart for your own good. I mean that in a kindly way.”

  “You guys did it.”

  “No, we did not do it.”

  “Or somebody from ICE or the Border Patrol or the DEA. But one of y’all did it. Tell me I’m wrong. I want you to.”

  “So maybe you’re not wrong,” Riser said. “Maybe a hothead got pissed off and wanted to send Collins a message. Maybe unlike you, not everybody is always in control of his emotions.”

  “You’re telling me one of your people soaked private property with an accelerant and put a match to it, and you’re telling me lawmen do this with regularity?”

  “The U.S. Forest Service used to burn out squatters all the time.”

  “Nobody can be this dumb. Do you realize what y’all have done?”

  “The Department of Justice isn’t exactly Pee-wee Herman. We don’t quake in our shoes because we have to hunt down a self-anointed messiah who probably hasn’t changed his underwear since World War Two.”

  Hackberry walked over to the group of federal agents, still gathered between the two SUVs. “Which one of you guys torched the shack?” he asked.

  They stared at him blankly from behind their shades. “What shack?” one of them said.

  “I dug up nine of Jack Collins’s victims, all of them Asian, all female, some of them hardly more than children. He used a Thompson submachine gun, a full drum, fifty rounds, at almost point-blank range. Then they were bulldozed over behind the ruins of a church. One of them may have been still alive when she went into the ground. A Phoenix mobster sent three California bikers to pop him. Jack bribed their chippies to set them up and then turned the three of them into wallpaper.”

  “Sounds like the right guy might have got his house burned down,” one of the agents said.

  Hackberry walked back toward his cruiser, his face tight, his temples knotted with veins. Behind him, he heard one of the agents make a remark the others laughed at. But Hackberry didn’t look back. Instead, he kept his eyes focused on Ethan Riser. “That bunch of Ivy League pissants back yonder?” he said.

  “What about them?” Riser said.

  Hackberry opened the door to his cruiser. “I thought you were different, that’s all,” he said.

  “You should have stayed with the ACLU, Sheriff. At least they have an understanding of procedure and protocol,” Riser said. “They try to think twice before they put their own agenda ahead of their country’s security. Where do you get off lecturing other people? Who died and made you God?”

  “Nobody. And that’s the problem every one of y’all has, Ethan. You wrap your lies in the flag and put the onus on others. Shame on every one of you,” Hackberry said.

  When he drove away, the back tires of his cruiser ripped two long lines out of the grass.

  THAT EVENING HACKBERRY was about to relearn that the past wasn’t necessarily a decaying memory and that its tentacles had the power to reach through the decades and fasten themselves onto whatever prey they could slither their suction cups around. When he returned home from work, he found an envelope stuck in his doorjamb. Inside was a silver-edged sheet of stationery folded crisply through the center. The note on it was written in bright blue ink, in a flowing calligraphy, the curlicues fading into wispy threads. It read:

  Dear Sheriff Holland,

  Congratulations on all your political success. My father always spoke fondly of you and I’m sure he would be very proud of you. Forgive me for dropping by without calling first, but your number was unlisted. Call my car phone if you can have drinks or dinner, or I’ll try to drop by later or at your office.

  With kindest regards,

  Temple Dowling

  Unconsciously, Hackberry glanced over his shoulder after reading the note, as though an old adversary lay just beyond the perimeter of his vision. Then he went into the house and tore the note and envelope into four pieces, then tore them again and dropped them in the kitchen waste can and washed his hands in the sink.

  It was easier to cleanse his skin than rinse his memory of Temple’s father, United States Senator Samuel Dowling. And Hackberry’s thoughts about the senator were uncomfortable not because the senator had been mean-spirited and corrupt to the core, but because Hackberry, when he ran for Congress, had, of his own choosing, fallen under the senator’s control.

  The 1960s had been a transitional time in Texas’s political history. Hispanic farmworkers were unionizing, and huge numbers of black people had been empowered by the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Hackberry had watched the changes take place from a distance, at least when he wasn’t driving across the river to the brothels in Coahuila or Nuevo León, or staining the shaved ice in a tall glass one jigger at a time, with four inches of Jack Daniel’s, adding a sprig of mint and a teaspoon of sugar, just before taking the first drink of the day, one that rushed through his body with the intensity of an orgasm. Both the Democratic ticket and Hackberry’s first wife, Verisa, were delighted at the prospect of a handsome, towering war hero representing their district. Hackberry soon discovered that his addiction to whiskey and the embrace of a Mexican girl’s thighs didn’t hold a candle to the allure of celebrity and political power.

  The attraction was not entirely meretricious in nature. Couched inside the vulgarity and the crassness of the new rich who surrounded him, and the attempts at manipulation of the sycophants, were moments that made him feel he was genuinely part of history. For good or bad, he had become a player in the Jeffersonian dream, a decorated former navy corpsman from a small Texas town about to take up residence at the center of the republic. Maybe Jefferson’s dream had been tarnished, but that did not mean it was lost, he had told himself. Even George Orwell, describing a Spanish troop train leaving a station on its way to the front while brass bands were blaring and peasant girls were throwing flowers, had said that maybe there was something glorious about war after all.

  Hackberry remembered one balmy summer night of the campaign in particular. He had been standing on a balcony at the Shamrock Hotel in Houston, wearing only a bathrobe, a tumbler of whiskey and ice in one hand. Far below, columns of electric light glowed beneath the surface of a swimming pool built in the shape of a four-leaf clover. Across the boulevard, in a strange blend of the rural South and the New American Empire, oil wells pumped up and down—clink, clank, clink, clank—like the steady and predictable rhythm of lovers copulating, while cattle grazed nearby in belly-deep grass and thunder leaked from banks of black- and plum-colored rain clouds overhead.

  The hotel had been built by a notorious wildcatter who sometimes came into the Shamrock Room and got into brawls with his own patrons, wrecking the premises and adding to a mythos that told all of its adherents they, too, could become denizens of the magic kingdom, if only the dice toppled out of the cup in the right fashion. In forty-five minutes Hackberry was to address a banquet hall filled with campaign donors who could buy third-world countries with their credit cards. When he was in their midst, he sometimes had glimpses in his mind of a high school baseball pitcher who resembled him and who took a Mexican girl to a drive-in theater in 1947, knowing that as soon as he went into the restroom, he would be beaten senseless. But Hackberry did not like to remember the person he used to be. Instead, he had made a religion out of self-destruction and surrounded himself with people he secretly loathed.

  On that balcony high above the pool, he had not heard the senator walk up behind him. The senator had cupped his palm around the back of Hackberry’s neck, massaging the muscles as a father might do to his son. “Are you nervous?” the senator had said.

  “Should I be?”

  “Only if you plan to tell them the truth.”

  “What is the truth, Senator?”

  “That the world we live in is a sweet, sweet sewer. That mos
t of them would drink out of a spittoon rather than give up their access to the wealth and power you see across the boulevard. That they want to own you now so they don’t have to rent you later.”

  Hackberry had drunk from the tumbler, the ice cubes clattering against the glass, the palm fronds moving in the breeze down below, the warmth of the whiskey slowing his heart like an old friend reassuring him that the race was not to the swift. “Telling the truth would be my greatest sin? That’s an odd way of looking at public service, don’t you think?”

  “There’s a far graver sin.”

  “What would that be?”

  “You already know the answer to that one, Hack.”

  “A worse sin would be disloyalty to someone who has reached out and anointed me with a single touch of his finger on my brow?” Hackberry had said.

  “That’s beautifully put. Your wife said you bedded a Mexican whore in Uvalde last night.”

  “That’s not true. It was in San Antonio.”

  “Oh, that’s good. I have to remember that one. But no more local excursions. There will be time enough for that when you get to Washington. Believe it or not, it will be there in such abundance that you’ll eventually grow bored with it, if you haven’t already. Usually, when a man of your background screws down, he’s not seriously committed to infidelity. It’s usually an act of anger rather than lust. A bit of trouble at home, that sort of thing. It beats getting drunk. Is that the case with the girl in San Antonio?”

  Hackberry had not answered.

  “Fair enough. There’s no shame in having a vice. It’s what makes us human,” the senator had said. Then he had patted Hackberry gingerly on the back of the head, after first leaning over the rail and spitting, even though people were eating at poolside tables directly below.

  Those moments on the balcony and the touch of the senator’s hand on his head had remained with Hackberry like a perverted form of stigmata for over four decades.

  An hour after tearing up the message left by Temple Dowling, Hackberry glanced through the front window and saw a man park a BMW at the gate and walk up the flagstones to the gallery. The visitor had thick silver-and-black hair and lips that were too large for his mouth. He was carrying an ice bucket with a dark green bottle inserted in it. Hackberry opened the door before his uninvited guest could ring the bell.

  “Hello, Sheriff. Did you find my note?”

  “Yes, sir, you’re Mr. Dowling. Leave the bucket and the bottle on the gallery and come in.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Guests in my home drink what I have or they don’t drink at all.”

  “I was supposed to meet a lady friend, but she stood me up. I hate to see a good bottle of wine go to waste. My father said you used to have quite a taste for it.”

  “You want to come in, sir?”

  “Thank you. And I’ll leave my bucket behind.” Dowling stepped inside and sat down in a deep maroon leather chair and gazed through the picture window, patting the tops of his thighs, a thick gold University of Texas class ring on his left hand. He wore a gray suit and a tie that was as bright as a halved pomegranate. But it was the composition of his face that caught the eye—the large lips, the pink cheeks and complexion that looked as though they had been dipped out of a cosmetics jar, the heavy eyelids that seemed translucent and were flecked with tiny vessels. “What a lovely view. The hills in front of your house remind me of—”

  “Of what?”

  “A Tahitian painting. What was his name? Gauguin? He was big on topless native women.”

  “I haven’t studied on it.”

  Temple Dowling smiled, his fingers knitting together.

  “Do I amuse you, sir?” Hackberry said.

  “I was thinking of something my father said. He admired your élan. I told him I’d heard you’d had a lot of girlfriends. My father replied, ‘Mr. Holland is a great lover of humanity, son. But let’s remember that half the human race is female.’”

  “I think maybe the senator misrepresented the nature of our relationship. We were not friends. We used each other. That’s a reflection on me, not him.”

  “Call me Temple.”

  “I was a drunkard and a whoremonger, not a man who simply had girlfriends. I used the bodies of poor peasant girls across the river without thinking about the misery that constituted their lives. When I met Senator Dowling, I was arrogant and willful and thought I could play chess with the devil. Then the day came when I realized I had gravely underestimated Senator Dowling’s potential. After I mentioned my father’s political principles and his friendship with Franklin Roosevelt, the senator explained why my father had shot and killed himself. My father had taken a bribe. The people who bribed and later tried to blackmail him were friends of Senator Dowling. The senator took great pleasure in telling me that story.”

  “I’m not my father, Sheriff.”

  “No, sir, you’re not. But you’re not here out of goodwill, either.”

  “How much money do you think it would take to shut down the city of New York?”

  “I wouldn’t know, and I’m not interested.”

  “I don’t mean to just disrupt it, like the 9/11 attacks. I mean to flood the tunnels and destroy the bridges and hospitals and poison the water supply and to spread fire and plague and anthrax and suffering all over the five boroughs. What if I told you that fifty thousand dollars spent in the right place by the wrong guys could turn New York into Dante’s ninth circle?”

  “What business are you in, sir?”

  “The defense of our nation.”

  “Would you answer the question, please?”

  “Unmanned aerial vehicles.”

  “Drones that fire missiles?”

  “Sometimes. Other times they’re observation vehicles. The cost to manufacture a Patriot missile is three million dollars. The cost of drones is nickels and dimes in comparison. A small drone can be powered with batteries and is invulnerable to heat-seeking missiles. They can fly so slowly that jet interceptors can’t lock down on them. Hezbollah has used them inside Israeli airspace.”

  “What do you want from me?”

  “Nothing. I’m here to offer my services.”

  “They’re not needed, and they’re not wanted.”

  “Somewhere out there in those hills is a man named Noie Barnum. He’s an idealistic idiot who believes that sharing knowledge about our weapons will make for a safer world.”

  “My impression is that he was kidnapped and about to be sold to Al Qaeda when he escaped. He doesn’t sound like a willing participant in any of this.”

  “So why doesn’t he come in?” Dowling said.

  “That’s a good question.”

  “Barnum has told others he has ‘problems of conscience.’ His ‘problem’ is the fact that UAVs can cause collateral damage. I wonder what he thinks about the collateral influences of napalm and bombs dropped from B-52s. Or maybe he’d like more of our soldiers killed while digging ragheads out of their caves.”

  “Why are you here, sir?” Hackberry said.

  “I want Noie Barnum in a cage. I don’t want him in front of a microphone or a camera. I’d like to see him buried under concrete at Guantánamo, after his head was wrapped in a towel and half the Atlantic was poured into it.”

  “I’ll pass on your remarks to the FBI the first opportunity I have.”

  “Sheriff, who do you think runs this country?”

  “You tell me.”

  “Lyndon was put into office by Brown and Root. Lyndon is moldering in the grave, but Brown and Root merged with Halliburton and is still alive and well. You think our current president is going to rescind their contracts at almost every United States military base in the world?”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  Temple Dowling stood up from his chair and removed a strand of cat hair from his sleeve. “My father said you were never a listener.”

  “You ever hear of Preacher Jack Collins?”

  “No, who is he?”


  “The most dangerous man I’ve ever met,” Hackberry said.

  “What does that have to do with Noie Barnum?”

  “Jack may be feeding and protecting him. I’m not sure why. Maybe because the feds burned Jack’s shack. Keep hanging around this area, and you might get a chance to meet him. If he chats you up, try to get it on tape.”

  “Why would I want to do that?”

  “Because it’s the only record people will have of your death. Thanks for coming by.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  USING ONLY STARLIGHT, Jack Collins and Noie Barnum made their way up a deer trail along the side of a bluff and into a narrow canyon that was threaded by a creek and strewn with chertlike yellow rock that had toppled from the ridges. Jack was in the lead, a nylon pack on his back, the straps pinching his suit coat tightly into his armpits, his body straining forward. Noie was limping badly, barely able to keep up, one arm tucked against his rib cage. There was a layer of fertile soil on the ground that sloped from the base of the cliffs down to the creek, and grass and wildflowers grew on it.

  Jack paused and wiped his face and took his companion’s measure. “You want to sit down, bud?” he asked.

  “No, sir, I’m fine.”

  “You’re a tough hombre.”

  “I’m not in your class, Jack. You’re a mountain goat.”

  Jack walked back down the trail to where his companion was leaning on the twisted remains of a cedar tree, breathing through his nose. “It gets steep up yonder. Put your arm on my shoulder. If you hear a rattler, hold still and give him time to get out of your way.”

  “What if he doesn’t?”

  “Throw a rock at him.”

  “For real?”

  “I have the feeling people didn’t tell a lot of jokes where you’re from.”

  A cabin stood at the head of the canyon. Next to it was a loading chute that had turned gray with dry rot. In back were a barn with a sliding door and, farther up the hillside, an aluminum cistern supported on steel stanchions. Jack helped Noie the rest of the way up the trail, then slung his pack on the cabin’s porch and eased Noie down on the steps. “I’ll open up and fire the stove and get some food started,” he said.