Feast Day of Fools

by James Lee Burke

  “You talking to me?” the passenger said.

  It ain’t too late. Don’t say no more, a voice inside Danny Boy said. They will disappear and it will be like they were never here. “I remember your trousers.”

  “What about them?”

  “Dark blue, with a red stripe down each leg. Like trousers a soldier might wear, or a marine.”

  “These are exercise pants. But why should you care about my clothes? Why are they of such consequence?”

  Danny Boy had to wet his lips before he spoke. “I watched you from the arroyo. I heard that man screaming while you did those things to him.”

  “You’re mixed up, man,” the driver said. “We ain’t from around here. You ain’t never seen us.”

  “Let him talk,” said the passenger.

  “You tied the man’s scalp on your belt,” Danny Boy said. “You heard a sound up in the rocks and looked up at where I was hiding. I acted like a coward and hid instead of he’ping that guy you killed.”

  “Many of our people use this place to enter Texas. We are workers trying to feed our families,” the man said. “Why make an issue with us? It is not in your interest.”

  “Listen to him, indio,” the driver said. “You can get that shotgun kicked up your ass.”

  “This is my land. That house is my home,” Danny Boy said.

  “So we’re going off your land now,” the driver said. “So get out of our way. So stop being a hardheaded dumb fuck who don’t know not to mess with the wrong guys.”

  “You ain’t gonna talk to me like that on my land,” Danny Boy said.

  “What I’m gonna do is spit on you, indio. I don’t give a shit if you got a gun or not.”

  Danny Boy reversed the twenty-gauge in his hands and drove the stock into the driver’s mouth, snapping back his head, whipping spittle and blood onto the dashboard and steering wheel.

  “¡Mátelo!” a man in the backseat said. “Kill that motherfucker, Negrito.”

  “No!” the passenger in the front seat shouted, getting out of the car. “You!” he said, pointing across the top of the roof. “Put your gun away. We are no threat to you.”

  The driver was still holding his mouth, trying to talk. “Let me, Krill,” he said. “This one deserves to die.”

  “No!” the passenger said. “You, Indian man, listen to me. You are right. This is your land, and we have violated it. But we mean you no harm. You must let us pass and forget we were here. I saw no Indians in the canyon, but I know they’re there. I’m a believer, like you. We are brothers. Like you, I know our ancestors’ spirits are everywhere. They don’t want us to kill one another.”

  The passenger had walked through the headlights and was standing four feet from Danny Boy, his eyes roving over Danny Boy’s face, waiting for him to speak.

  “I was in Sugar Land with guys like you. You’re a killer. You ain’t like me, and we ain’t brothers,” Danny Boy said.

  “Have it as you wish. But you’re putting us in a bad position, my friend. Your fear is taking away all our alternatives.”

  “Fear? Not of you. Not no more.” Danny Boy pushed the release lever on the top of the shotgun’s stock and broke the breech and exposed the empty chamber. “See, I ain’t got a shell in it. I ain’t afraid of you. I ain’t afraid of them guys in the car, either.”

  “Está loco, Krill,” one of the men inside the car said.

  The passenger folded his arms and stared into the darkness as though considering his options. “You got some real cojones, man,” he said. “But I don’t know what we’re going to do with you. Are you going to turn us in?”

  “When I can get to a phone.”

  “Where’s your cell phone?”

  “I ain’t got one.”

  “You got a regular phone in your house?”

  “No, I ain’t got no phone.”

  “You don’t have a telephone? Not of any kind?”

  “You see a pole line going to my house?”

  Krill stared at the house and at the barn and at the truck parked next to the barn. “The man you saw me kill out there in the desert? He was a corrupt Mexican cop who tortured my brother to death.”

  “Then you ain’t no different from the Mexican cop.”

  “You are fortunate to have this fine place to live on. I had a farm once, and children and a wife. Now I have nothing. Don’t judge me, hombre.”

  Krill pulled a long game-dressing knife from a scabbard on his side and walked to Danny Boy’s truck and sliced the air stems off all four tires. “Buenas noches,” he said as he got back in the automobile. “Maybe one day you will understand men like us. Maybe one day the Indians who live in the canyon will tell you who your real brothers are.”

  “They ain’t you!” Danny Boy shouted at the car’s taillights.

  IN THE GLOAMING of the day, Preacher Jack Collins and Noie Barnum pulled into the drive-in restaurant on the state four-lane and parked under the shed and ordered hamburgers and fries and onion rings and frosted mugs of root beer. The evening was warm, the wind blowing steadily across the rolling countryside, the storm clouds in the south bursting with brilliant patterns of white electricity that made Jack think of barbed wire. He had not spoken since they had left the cottage on the hillside above the junkyard.

  “You’re not letting me in on where we’re going?” Noie said.

  Jack chewed on his food, his expression thoughtful. “You give much thought to the papists?”

  “The Catholics?”

  “That’s what I just said.”

  “Not particularly.”

  “That Chinese woman, the one who dressed your wounds, is a puzzle to me.”

  “She’s just a woman with a big heart.”

  “Maybe she’s spread her big heart around a little more than she should have.”

  “If you read Saint Paul, there’s no such thing as being too charitable.”

  “She may have been acting as a friend to the FBI. If that’s true, she’s no friend to us.”

  “You saying she’s a turncoat?”

  “I’d like to talk to her about it. Here’s a question for you.” From the side, Jack’s eyes looked like glass marbles pushed into dough that had turned moldy and then hardened. The amber reflection in them was as sharp as broken beer glass but without complexity or meaning. In fact, the light in his eyes was neutral, if not benign. “You put a lot of work into whittling out that checker set. Each one of those little buttons was a hand-carved masterpiece. But two pieces were missing from your poke, and you didn’t seem to give that fact any thought.”

  “I guess I dropped them somewhere.”

  “When you counted the checkers out, you didn’t notice that two were gone?”

  “Guess not.”

  “Too bad to lose your pieces. You’re an artisan. For a fellow like you, your craft is an extension of your soul. That’s what an artisan is. His thoughts travel through his arm and his hand into the object he creates.”

  “That’s an interesting way to look at it.”

  “Think they might have fallen out in the trunk when we were moving?”

  “I’ll look first chance.”

  “You like your hamburger?”

  “You’d better believe it.”

  “Does it bother you that an animal has to give up its life so we can eat types of food we probably could do without?”

  “You know how to hang crepe, Jack.”

  “Think we’d be welcomed by the papist woman?”

  “You know what I would really like, more than anything else in the world? I mean, if I could have one wish, a wish that would make my whole life complete? That would make me so happy I would never ask for anything else as long as I live?”

  “I cain’t figure what that might be, Noie.”

  “I’d like to make peace with the men who held me hostage and killed the Mexican man I was handcuffed to. I’d like to make peace with the Al Qaeda guys they were going to sell me to. I’d like to apologize to them for the i
nnocent people I helped kill with the drones I helped develop. Most of all, Jack, I’d like to repay you for everything you’ve done. When they made you, they busted the mold.”

  Jack worked a piece of food out of his jaw with his tongue and swallowed, his gaze straight ahead. He sipped from his mug, grains of ice clinging to his bottom lip. An attractive waitress in a rayon uniform roller-skated past the front of the Trans Am on the walkway under the shed, but he didn’t seem to notice. “Who’s ‘they’?” he asked.

  “Pardon?”

  “You said ‘when they made you.’ You didn’t use God’s name. Like it would be irreverent. Is that just a quirk, or are you saying I wasn’t created by the hand of God?”

  “I said it without thinking, that’s all. It was just a joke.”

  “Not to me it isn’t. Know why people use passive voice?”

  “I know that it has something to do with grammar, but I’m an engineer, Jack, not much on the literary arts.”

  “Passive voice involves sentence structure that hides the identity of the doer. It’s a form of linguistic deception. Pronouns that have no referents are also used to confuse and conceal. A linguist can spot a lie faster than any polygraph can.”

  “You never went to college?”

  “I never went to high school.”

  “You’re amazing.”

  “That’s a word used by members of the herd. Everything is either ‘amazing’ or ‘awesome.’ You’re not a member of the herd. Don’t act like you are.”

  “Jack, eating supper with you is like trying to digest carpet tacks. I’ve never seen the like of it. My food hasn’t even hit my stomach, and I’m already constipated.”

  “Look at me and don’t turn around.”

  “What is it?” Noie said.

  “A highway patrol cruiser just pulled in five slots down. There’re two cops in it.”

  The waitress came to the window and picked up the five-dollar tip and lifted the tray off the door and smiled. “Thank you, sir,” she said.

  “My pleasure,” Jack said. He watched her walk away, his eyes slipping off her onto the side of the cruiser.

  “We got to back out and drive right past them,” Noie said. “Or wait for them to leave.”

  “I’d say that sums it up.” Jack bit down on his lip, his face shadowed by the brim of his hat. He removed it and set it on the dashboard and combed his hair in the rearview mirror.

  “What are you doing?” Noie said.

  Jack got out of the car, yawning, rubbing his face, a weary traveler about to hit the road again. “Ask the cops for directions to the cutoff to I-10,” he replied. He gazed up at the sky and at the network of lightning that was as spiked as barbed wire inside the clouds. “You can almost smell the salt and coconut palms on the wind. Mexico is waiting for us, son. Soon as we tidy up a few things. Yes, indeedy, a man’s work is never done.”

  WHEN HACKBERRY ARRIVED at work early the next morning, Danny Boy Lorca was sleeping on a flattened cardboard carton in the alleyway behind the rear entrance, one arm over his eyes.

  “Want to come in or sleep late and let the sun dry the dew on your clothes?” Hackberry said.

  Danny Boy sat up, searching in the shadows as though unsure where he was. “I ain’t drunk.”

  “Where’s your truck?”

  “At the house. Krill cut all my tires. I hitched a ride into town.”

  “Krill was at your house?”

  “I busted his driver in the mouth. There was four of them together. They come up the ravine behind my property.”

  “You sure it was Krill, Danny? You haven’t been knocking back a few shots, have you?”

  “I’m going up to the café now and have breakfast. I told you what I seen and what I done.”

  “Come inside.”

  Danny Boy scratched at a place on his scalp and let out his breath and watched a shaft of sunlight shine on a dog at the end of the alley. The dog had open sores on its skin. “You ought to call the Humane Society and get some he’p for that critter. It ain’t right to leave a sick animal on the street like that.”

  “You’re a good man, Danny Boy. I meant you no offense,” Hackberry said.

  Danny Boy went inside and sat down by the small gas stove and waited, his work-seamed hands folded between his knees, his ruined face without expression, while Hackberry called Animal Control and fixed coffee and attached the flag to the chain on the metal pole out front and ran it up the pole, the flag suddenly filling with wind and popping against the sky.

  “The guy named Krill said I don’t know who my real brothers are,” Danny Boy said.

  “He did, huh?”

  “His eyes are blue. But his hair and his skin are like mine.”

  “I see,” Hackberry said, not understanding.

  “He ain’t got no family or home or country. Somebody took all that away from him. That’s why he kills. It ain’t for money. He thinks it is, but it ain’t. He’d pay to do it.”

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  “He believes the dead are more real than the living. That’s the most dangerous kind of man there is,” Danny Boy said.

  An hour later, Hackberry called R.C. and Pam Tibbs into his office. “Here’s the lay of the land,” he said. “I’ve made six calls so far this morning and have been stonewalled by every fed I’ve talked to. My best guess is that Noie Barnum deliberately got himself kidnapped by Krill so he could infiltrate Al Qaeda’s connections in Latin America. I’m not sure the FBI was in on it. Maybe Barnum is working for an intelligence group inside the NSA or the Pentagon or the CIA. Or maybe he’s working on his own. Frankly, I don’t care. We’ve been lied to over and over while serious crimes were being committed in our county. If any fed obstructs or jerks us around again, we throw his bureaucratic ass in jail.”

  “You sure you want to do that, Hack?” Pam said.

  “Watch me.”

  “I don’t get your reasoning, Sheriff. If Barnum wanted Krill to sell him to these Al Qaeda guys, how come he escaped?” R.C. said.

  “Maybe Krill was going to piece off the action and sell him to a narco gang and wash his hands of the matter. So Barnum decided it was time to boogie.”

  “He wants to do all this to get even for what happened to his sister in the Towers?” R.C. said.

  “Wouldn’t you?” Hackberry asked.

  “I’d do a whole sight more,” R.C. replied.

  “Right now we don’t have eyes or ears out there. We need to find a weak link in the chain,” Hackberry said.

  “These guys are pros, Sheriff. They don’t have weak links,” R.C. said.

  “We’ll create one.”

  “Who?” R.C. asked.

  “I saw Temple Dowling busting skeet by the Ninth Hole last night,” Pam said.

  IT WASN’T HARD to find him. In the county there was only one country club and private golf course and gated community that offered rental cottages. All of it was located on a palm-dotted watered green stretch of rolling landscape that had all the attributes of an Arizona resort, the rentals constructed of adobe and cedar, the walks bordered with flower beds, the lawns flooded daily by soak hoses at sunset, the evening breeze tinged with smoke from meat fires and the astringent smell of charcoal lighter. The swimming pool glowed with a blue radiance under the stars, and sometimes on summer nights, a 1950s-type orchestra performed on the outdoor dance floor; the buffet-style fried-chicken-and-potato-salad dinners were legendary.

  The club not only offered upscale insularity, it also allowed its members to feel comfortable with who they were and gave them sanction to say things they would not say anywhere else. Political correctness ended at the arched entranceway. On the links or in the lounge known as the Ninth Hole, no racial joke was too coarse, no humorous remark about liberals and environmentalists unappreciated. In the evening, against a backdrop of palm trees and golf balls flying under the lights on the driving range, in the dull popping of shotguns and clay pigeons bursting into puffs of colored smoke ag
ainst a pastel sky, one had the sense that the club was a place where no one died, where all the rewards promised by a benevolent capitalistic deity were handed out in this world rather than the next.

  The irony was that most of the members came from the Dallas–Fort Worth area or Houston. The other irony was the fact that the environs on which the club was built were part of the old Outlaw Trail, which had run from the Hole in the Wall Country in Wyoming all the way to the Mexican border. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and Kid Curry and Black Jack Ketchum and Sam Bass and the Dalton Gang had probably all ridden it. Thirty years before, wagon tracks that had been cut into the mire of clay and mud and livestock feces during the days of the Chisholm and Goodnight-Loving trails were still visible in the hardpan. When the topography was reconfigured by the builders of the club, the hardpan was ground up by earth-graders and layered with trucked-in sod and turned into fairways and putting greens and sand traps and ponds, for the pleasure of people who had never heard of Charles Goodnight or Oliver Loving or Jesse Chisholm and couldn’t have cared less about who they were.

  Deputy Sheriff Felix Chavez was twenty-seven years old and had four children and a wife he had married when she was sixteen and he was twenty. He was devoted to his family and loved playing golf and remodeling and improving his three-bedroom house. He was also a master car mechanic and a collector of historical artifacts and military ordnance. Because he often swung his cruiser off the main road and patrolled the country-club parking lot without being asked to do so, the management allowed him to use the driving range free whenever he wished, although the gesture did not extend to the links or access to the Ninth Hole. The consequence was that no one paid particular attention to him on the cloudy afternoon when he parked his cruiser by the clubhouse and got out and watched the golfers teeing off or practicing on the putting green. Nor did they think it unusual that Felix strolled through the lot, either checking on a security matter or enjoying a breezy, cool break in the weather. The drama at the club came later in the day, and Felix Chavez seemed to have no connection to it.