Feast Day of Fools

by James Lee Burke

  “It’s the hose and filter on a World War Two gas mask. What do you boys think we ought to do about that?” Jack said.

  R. C. BEVINS HAD been raised in a fundamentalist church where the minister went to great lengths to instruct his congregation in the details of Jesus’ crucifixion. His dedication to the macabre seemed equaled only by his dedication to busing as many congregants as possible to the local theater’s showing of The Passion of the Christ. In his presentation, the minister included descriptions of long square-headed spikes that had pierced the victim’s wrists—not his hands, the minister said, because the hands would have torn loose from the fastenings; not so the spikes through the wrists. The bones and tendons in the wrist were much sturdier and up to the task of supporting the victim’s weight. Also, he pointed out, the spikes were not driven through the tops of the feet, as is often depicted. The knees were folded sideways on the perpendicular shaft, the ankles placed one on top of the other. A single long spike was adequate to pinion the two appendages together.

  The minister also explained that death came by asphyxiation as a result of the tendons in the upper torso constricting the lungs and forcing the air back up the victim’s windpipe. But for R.C., the worst detail was the minister’s speculation that the trauma of being nailed to the cross and the cross being dropped heavily into a hole caused the victim to go into shock only to become conscious a few minutes later and discover that he was not waking from a nightmare but instead was anchored hand and foot to a cruciform of pain from which there was no escape.

  That was how R.C. had woken under the ground, with the vague sense that something was wrong with his arms and legs, that he had heard a sifting sound of dirt and gravel sliding off a shovel blade, followed by a thump of stones being dropped heavily on top of him. His eyes were unable to see, his throat raw, as though he had not had water in days. When he tried to raise his head, he realized he was not only impaled by the earth but locked solidly inside it, the air that he breathed coming to him through a tube that smelled of rubber and canvas. The level of panic that occurred in him was like a violent electric surge throughout his body, except the electricity had no place to go.

  The inside of the mask was soggy and foul with his sweat and his own breath, and no light at all came through the plastic eyepieces. He stretched out his fingers and for just a moment thought he might be able to work his hands through the dirt toward the surface an inch at a time. Then he discovered that by straightening his hands, he had allowed the overburden of the grave to press down on him more firmly, like an octopus tightening its tentacles on its prey.

  Who were the fools who constantly taught about man’s harmony with the earth? he asked himself. An uncle who had once worked in a Kentucky coal mine had told R.C. that the earth was not man’s friend, that it was unnatural to enter the ground before one’s time, and that if a man listened carefully, he would hear the earth creak in warning to those who thought they could tunnel through its substructure without consequence.

  He could feel his fear going out of control and his breath beginning to rasp inside the mask, the weight of the earth and stones like knives around his heart. He tried to turn his thoughts into wings that could lift his soul above the ground and allow him to revisit scenes and moments he had associated with the best parts of his life: floating down the Comal River on a burning July afternoon, his wrists trailing in water that was ice-cold, the soap-rock bottom gray and smooth and pooled with shadows from the overhang of the cottonwood trees; dancing with a Mexican girl in a beer garden in Monterrey where Indians sold ears of corn they roasted on charcoal braziers, backdropped by mountains that were hazy and magenta-colored against the sunset; throwing a slider on the edge of the plate for the third strike and third out in the bottom of the ninth at a state championship game in San Marcos, the grass of the diamond iridescent under the electric lights, the evening breeze cool on his skin, a high school girl waiting for him by the bleacher seats, her hands balled into fists as she jumped up and down with love and pride at the perfect game he had just pitched.

  His fondest memory was of his twelfth birthday, when his widowed mother took him on the Greyhound all the way from Del Rio to the state fair in Dallas. That evening he stared in awe at the strings of colored lights of the Ferris wheel and the Kamikaze printed against a blue sky puffed with pink clouds. High school kids screamed inside the grinding roar of the Tilt-A-Whirl and the Super Loops, and the air was filled with music from the carousel and the popping of balloons and target guns on the fairways. He could smell the aerial fireworks spidering in a purple and pink froth above the rodeo grounds, and the caramel corn and fry bread and candied apples and tater pigs in the food concessions. His mother bought cotton candy for him and watched him ride the mechanical bull, holding the cotton candy in her hand, smiling even though she was exhausted from the long day on the bus, her wash-faded dress hanging as limp as a flag on her thin body.

  R.C. tried to fix the fairground in his mind so he could stay safe inside it, free of the grave and the weight on his heart, wrapped in the calliope’s music and the shouts of children and teenage kids, his mother’s smile on the edge of his vision, the electric glow of the amusement rides rising into an ethereal sky that was testimony to everything that was good and beautiful in the world.

  If there was a way, Sheriff Holland would find him, he told himself. He had given the sheriff his location. It was only a matter of time before the sheriff found the bar and forced the bartender to tell him where R.C. had been taken. All R.C. had to do was hold on, to breathe in and out, to not let go of the fairgrounds and the best day of his life. The soul could go where it wanted, he told himself. It existed, didn’t it? If it could fly from you at death, why couldn’t it leave you while you were alive? He didn’t have to abide the condition he had found himself in. Or at least he didn’t have to cooperate with it.

  When he swallowed, his saliva was bilious, and his eyes watered at the fate that had been imposed on him. In his impotence and rage and fear, he cursed himself for his self-pity.

  He heard a shovel sink deep into the dirt and felt it graze his side, not unlike the tip of a Roman spear teasing the rib cage of an impaled man.

  A moment later, the hands of two men began scraping the dirt away from his face and shoulders and arms and sides, lifting his head free, slipping the mask from his face, allowing him to breathe air that was as clean and pure as bottled oxygen. He could see the silhouette of a third man against the moon, a holstered thumb-buster revolver on his hip, his fingernails like the claws on an animal. He wore a sun-bleached panama hat that was grimed with finger smears on the front brim.

  “Who are you?” R.C. said, unsure if he should have even asked the question, his face cold with sweat.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  HACKBERRY LOOKED THROUGH the front windshield at the long, flat, sunbaked rawness of the land and at the purple haze that seemed to rise from the creosote brush and the greasewood and the patches of alkali along streambeds that were hardly more than sand. In the distance, he could see hills in the moonlight and stovepipe cactus in the yard of an adobe house whose roof had collapsed. He looked through his binoculars at the hills and at the house and thought he could see a dirt road behind it that switchbacked up the side of the hill, but he couldn’t be sure.

  The bartender with the swastika tattooed on his scalp had given him and Pam Tibbs directions to the place where he believed Negrito was taking the young Texas lawman. When Hackberry had asked whether he was sure, the bartender had replied, staring at the broken pool cue Hackberry had almost stuffed down his throat, “It’s where Negrito always disposes of people he has no more use for. It’s the underground prison he likes to stand on top of. Maybe he comes back for them. Maybe that’s where you will end up seriously jodido, that’s what I hope.”

  Hackberry’s cell phone vibrated on the Jeep’s dashboard. He picked it up and put it to his ear. “Sheriff Holland,” he said.

  “It’s Maydeen. Did you find R.C.?�
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  “Not yet.”

  “Let me try to get you some backup.”

  “There’s nobody down here I trust.”

  “Hack, I called because I’m at the hospital. Anton Ling says she saw the guy she put a screwdriver in. He and another guy were in the hallway right outside her room.”

  “How did she know it was the guy she hurt? He was wearing a mask when she put the screwdriver in his face.”

  “She said she recognized the guy with him. She said she was mixed up in an intelligence operation of some kind years ago, and this guy was part of it. Felix and I are in her room now. She wants to talk with you.”

  “Put her on.”

  Hackberry heard Maydeen speaking to Anton Ling, then Maydeen got back on the cell. “She wants us to leave the room. When y’all get finished, I’ll come back in. Felix will stay here the rest of the night.”

  “Tell Anton Ling that anything she wants to tell me, she can say in front of you.”

  “Don’t worry about it, Hack. I need a cup of coffee,” Maydeen said.

  A moment later, Anton Ling got on the cell. “I’m sorry to bother you with this, Sheriff Holland, but I needed to get something off my chest,” she said.

  “Miss Anton, in my department, we don’t have private conversations, and we don’t keep secrets from one another,” Hackberry said. “I’m making an exception in this instance because your life may be in jeopardy.”

  “I didn’t want your deputies to hear our conversation for the same reason. I have knowledge that can get people killed.”

  “Knowledge about what?”

  “There was a political scandal years ago that flared and died. A reporter broke a story that the Contras were introducing cocaine into American cities to pay for the guns that were being shipped to Nicaragua. A couple of newspapers in the East debunked the story, and later, the reporter committed suicide. But the story was true. The guns were AK-47s and came from China. They were assembled in California and shipped south. The dope went to the West Coast first, then other places later. I was involved in it.”

  “Why didn’t you tell someone about this?”

  “No one cares. They didn’t care then, they don’t care now. It was The Washington Post and The New York Times that debunked the story.”

  “Do you know the names of the guys you saw outside your room?”

  “No, but I think they were here to wipe the slate clean. The man I recognized was a connection between the Contras and some dope mules in California.”

  “Do you know the name Josef Sholokoff?”

  “I do. He was part of the drug deal with the Contras. There’s no end to this,” she said.

  “To what?”

  “To the grief I’ve caused others.”

  “People like us don’t make the wars, Miss Anton. We just get to fight in them,” he said. “I’ve lost a deputy sheriff down here in Mexico. For all I know, he’s dead now. When I catch the guys who did this, I’m going to cool them out proper and not feel any qualms about it.”

  “I think you’re not served well by your rhetoric.”

  “I’ve got a flash for you, Miss Anton. The only real pacifists are dead Quakers. Ambrose Bierce said that when reflecting on his experience at Shiloh.”

  “It’s also cheap stuff. Good-bye.” She broke the connection.

  “Look up ahead,” Pam said, steering down into the streambed. “There’re tire tracks in the sand. They go through the backyard of that adobe house. This has to be the hill the bartender was talking about.”

  Hackberry turned on the spotlight mounted on the passenger side of the Jeep and shone it through the darkness. A yellow dog with mange on its face and neck, its sides skeletal, its dugs distended, emerged from the shell of the house and stared into the brilliance of the beam before loping away.

  “You want to try the switchback up the hill or go around?” Pam asked.

  “We take the high ground. Park behind the house. We’ll walk over the hill and come down on top of them.”

  “Back there in the cantina, I saw a side of you that bothers me, Hack,” she said.

  “I don’t have another side, Pam. You stand behind your people or you don’t stand behind your people. It’s that simple. We get R.C. back from this collection of cretins. When I was at Inchon, I was very frightened. But a line sergeant told me something I never forgot. ‘Don’t think about it before it happens, and don’t think about it when it’s over.’ We bring R.C. home. You with me on that?”

  “I’m with you in everything. But my words mean little to you,” she replied. “And that bothers me more than you seem able to understand.”

  He didn’t speak again until they had parked the Jeep behind the adobe house, and then it was only to tell her to walk behind him when they went over the crest of the hill.

  THE MAN WEARING the hat and holstered thumb-buster squatted on his haunches, eye level with R.C. His breath was as dense and tannic as sewer gas. Two Mexicans wearing jeans that looked stitched to their skins stood stiffly on either side of him, like bookends fashioned from wire. “You have a bad moment or two down there?” the man asked.

  R.C. nodded, meeting the strange man’s eyes briefly.

  “Enough to make you wet your britches?” the man asked.

  “No, sir, I didn’t do that.”

  The man lifted his chin and pinched the loose flesh under his throat. He was unshaved, and his whiskers looked as stiff as pig bristles. “What’s it like under the ground, with a mask on your face and a lifeline anyone can pinch off with the sole of his boot?”

  “Dark.”

  “Like the inside of a turnip sack, I bet.”

  “That comes right close to it.”

  “Your heart start twisting and your breath start coming out of your windpipe like you swallowed a piece of glass?”

  “That pert’ near says it,” R.C. replied.

  “I can sympathize.”

  “You been buried alive?”

  “Not in the way you have.”

  “You either have or you haven’t.”

  “When I was a little boy, my mother would stick me eight or nine hours inside a footlocker. I’d pretend I was on the spine of a boxcar, flying across the countryside under the stars. Did you have fanciful notions like that? Then you opened your eyes and thought somebody had poured an inkwell inside your head.”

  “Maybe your soul can go somewhere else. That’s the way I figure it. That’s how come people don’t go crazy sometimes,” R.C. said. Then he added, as though he were in the presence of a confidant, “I got wrapped up in a rubber sheet when I was a little baby and almost suffocated. My mother was in the yard and looked through the window and said I’d already turned blue. She ran inside and saved my life.”

  “You saying you had a real mother but mine was cut out of different cloth, maybe burlap?”

  “No, sir, I didn’t say that,” R.C. replied, looking away.

  “I wouldn’t care if you did. Do you think I care about your opinion of my mother?”

  “No, sir.”

  “What’s the nature of your relationship with Sheriff Holland?”

  “Sir?”

  “You deaf?”

  “I’m his deputy. My name is R. C. Bevins. I grew up in Ozona and Del Rio and Marathon. My daddy was a tool pusher in the oil field. My mother was a cashier at the IGA till the day she died. She went to work one day and never came home.”

  “Why should I care what your parents did or didn’t do?”

  “’Cause I know who you are. ’Cause I know what happens to people when you get your hands on them. So if you do the same to me, I want you to know who I am, or who I was.”

  “Who do you think I am?”

  “A stone killer who don’t take prisoners.”

  “For somebody who was just dug up from a grave, maybe you should take your transmission out of overdrive.”

  “Maybe you should have practiced a little self-inventory before you murdered all them Asian girls.”
r />   “You’re ahead of the game, boy. Best respect your elders.”

  “I ain’t the one trying to get inside somebody else’s thoughts, like some kind of pervert.”

  “You were in the whorehouse to play the piano?”

  “If that’s what it was, I was there because I blew out my tire. So don’t go belittling me.”

  The man in the hat glanced up at the two Mexicans, his eyes amused, the soles of his boots grating on the gravel. “You thirsty?”

  R.C. swallowed but didn’t reply.

  “You ever kill a man?”

  “I never had to,” R.C. said.

  “Maybe that’s waiting for you down the pike.”

  “If I got choices, it ain’t gonna happen.”

  “You want a drink of water or not?”

  R.C. sat erect and pulled his knees up before him, the dirt and pea gravel shaling off his clothes. “I wouldn’t mind,” he said.

  The man with yellow fingernails that were as thick as horn signaled for one of the Mexicans to pass R.C. a canteen that was attached to a looped GI web belt.

  “Does Sheriff Holland treat you all right?”

  “We share commonalities. That’s what he calls them, ‘commonalities.’”

  “In what way?”

  “We both pitched baseball. I pitched all the way through high school. He pitched in high school and three years at Baylor. He got an invitation to the Cardinals’ training camp. I wasn’t as good as him, though.”

  “I declare.”

  “He has the Navy Cross and a Purple Heart. He treats everybody the same, black or Mexican or Indian or illegal, it don’t matter. That’s the kind of man he is.”

  “He sounds like a father figure.”

  “If he is, it’s nobody else’s business.”

  “The sheriff is a widower and doesn’t have family close by. It must be a comfort for him to have a young fellow like you around. Someone he thinks of as a son.”

  “I got to use the restroom.”

  The man found a more comfortable position by easing his weight down on one knee. “You might be hard put to find one out here,” he said. He gazed into the distance, his eyes dulled over, seemingly devoid of thought. The collar of his white shirt was yellow with dried soap. “What if I gave you a choice, one that would he’p you define your loyalties in a way you wouldn’t forget? That nobody would forget?”