Feast Day of Fools hh-10

by James Lee Burke

  “I always said you were quite a jokester.”

  “That’s not what you just called me. You said I was a coward. I’m many things. But ‘coward’ isn’t among them. A coward fears death. But Death is my friend, Sheriff Holland. You remember the poem by e. e. cummings? How does it go? ‘How do you like your blue-eyed boy now, Mr. Death?’ The poet was talking of Buffalo Bill. Will you be corrupted by the grave like Buffalo Bill? Or will you be freed by it? Can you say you have no fear of the black hole that awaits you?”

  “Rhetoric is cheap stuff.”

  “Is it, now?”

  “I’m going to sign off and ask that you not call again. I’ll be seeing you down the pike. This time out, there won’t be any warning.”

  “You’re a judgmental man, Sheriff. As such, you may be the orchestrator of your own undoing.”

  “I don’t think it’s going to play out that way.”

  “Maybe you’ll rethink your attitude.”

  The red dot of a laser sight appeared on the back of Hackberry’s left wrist and traveled up his arm and across his chest. Hackberry sucked in his breath involuntarily, as though a black widow or tarantula had crawled across his body. He tried to get to his feet as the red dot paused on his heart, but he fell back in the chair, knocking over the iced tea, his back aflame. The red dot dropped to his loins and touched his scrotum and then was gone, all in under two seconds, so fast he wondered if he had imagined the event. He stared into the black-green shadows on the hillside while rocks clacked and spilled from somewhere near the ridgeline and the dial tone of his cordless phone buzzed like an electrified horsefly in his hand.

  He lay sleepless in his bed most of the night, furious that he had let himself be bested by a messianic poseur and mass killer like Preacher Jack Collins, then doubly furious that, in his anger, he was giving away power to Collins and letting Collins rob him of sleep and peace of mind and, finally, self-respect. He had known reformers and Bible-thumpers all his life, and not one of them, in his opinion, ever proved the exception when it came to obsession about sexuality: To a man, they feared their own desires and knew after waking from certain kinds of dreams what they would be capable of doing if the right situation presented itself. Every one of them was filled not with longing but with rage, and their rage always expressed itself in the same fashion: They wanted control of other people, and if they could not have control over them, they wanted them destroyed.

  The legacy of Salem did not go away easily. Vigilantism, the Klan, the acolytes of Senator McCarthy and others of his stripe formed a continuous thread from 1692 to the present, Hackberry thought. But that did not change the fact that Hackberry had failed miserably in dealing with Jack Collins, who killed people whenever and wherever he wished and seemed to walk through walls or leave no indicators of his presence except the funnel-shaped tracks of an animal.

  The next morning did not go well, either. The previous day Ethan Riser had shown little interest in the events at Anton Ling’s house, explaining that the break-in and the assault on her person did not constitute federal crimes and that Jack Collins’s appearance and departure from Anton Ling’s home provided no information or clue as to where he and Noie Barnum were hiding. “Let me call you back early tomorrow,” Riser had said. “I’ll try to find out where Josef Sholokoff is right now. If he’s here, we can probably step into things and leave a lot heavier footprint.”

  “Why the sudden due diligence with Sholokoff and not our local residents?” Hackberry had said.

  “Jack Collins is an aberration who will probably self-destruct. Sholokoff is a contagious disease. If he can get his hands on a working model of a Predator drone or its design, Al Qaeda will have it in twenty-four hours.”

  “How would Sholokoff even know about Noie Barnum?”

  “Temple Dowling used to be a silent business partner of his. We’ve had our eye on Dowling for a long time. He just doesn’t know it. Or care. Weren’t you associated politically with Dowling’s father?”

  “Yeah, I was, much to my regret. I’ll expect your call early in the morning, Ethan,” Hackberry had replied.

  But Riser did not call back, and Hackberry’s messages went unanswered. That afternoon another agent called Hackberry’s office and told him that Ethan Riser had gone back to Washington.

  “What for?” Hackberry asked.

  “Ask him when he gets back,” the agent said, and hung up.

  Hackberry visited Anton Ling in the hospital but otherwise spent the rest of the day unproductively, still resenting himself for allowing Jack Collins to get inside his head. Or was something else bothering him as well?

  That evening he drove to Pam Tibbs’s house with a gallon of vanilla ice cream and a six-pack of A amp;W root beer packed in his cooler. He rang the doorbell, then sat on the front steps, staring into a street lined with bungalows and two-story frame houses that had been built during the 1920s, the porches hung with swings, the flower beds blooming, American flags hanging from staffs inserted into metal sockets on many of the wood pillars. It was a neighborhood that belonged to another era, one for which most Americans are nostalgic, but the people who lived in the neighborhood did not recognize it as such.

  Hackberry heard the back screen slam, then a moment later, a man backed a waxed red convertible into the street and drove away, his attention concentrated on the traffic. Pam opened the front door. “Hi, Hack,” she said.

  He turned around and looked at her. She was wearing blue-jean shorts and a pink blouse and earrings and Roman sandals. “Hi,” he replied.

  “You want to come in?”

  “Who was the guy in the convertible?”

  “My cousin.”

  “I’ve never seen him. Does he live around here?”

  “No.”

  “So where does he live?”

  “He’s a sales rep for a computer company. He travels a lot.”

  “People who travel a lot don’t have addresses?”

  “It’s none of your business, Hack.”

  “You’re right, it isn’t.”

  She looked at the six-pack of root beer next to Hack’s leg. The vapor on top of the cans was contracting, the beaded moisture on the sides running onto the porch. “What’s in the sack?”

  “Vanilla ice cream.”

  “You want to come in?”

  “I should have called first.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “Nothing is going on. I thought you might like a root-beer float. It’s that kind of evening.”

  “What kind?”

  “When I was a kid, it was a treat to go to the A amp;W root-beer drive-in. We thought that was big stuff. Later-spring and summer evenings are the best moments in the year.”

  “Come inside.”

  “Another time.”

  “Come inside or I’m going to kick you in the small of the back as hard as I can.”

  He looked at the street in the gloaming of the day and at the darkness of the lawns in the shade, and he knew what had been bothering him since early that morning. A teenage boy on a bicycle was riding down the sidewalk, sailing a folded newspaper with the accuracy of a marksman onto each porch, whapping it solidly against the front door, the canvas bags slamming hard on his racks each time he banged over a peak in the sidewalk. The boy reminded Hackberry of himself, or maybe he reminded Hackberry of most boys of years ago, winsome in a way that was not calculated, full of expectation, full of innocent pride in their skill at lofting a tightly rolled, string-wrapped newspaper onto a front porch. But why was the boy throwing his route so late? Hackberry wondered. Why was the light so peculiar in tone-sepia-tinted, golden inside the branches of the trees, a smell like chrysanthemums pooling in the flower beds, more like autumn than spring?

  “Hack?” Pam said.

  “Yeah?”

  “I’d really like some ice cream and root beer. It’s very thoughtful of you to bring some by. Come in, won’t you?”

  Her mouth was red, her voice infused with a protect
ive emotion that she rarely allowed anyone to see.

  “Sure. That’s what I was about to do,” he replied.

  She held the screen door open for him while he walked inside. He could feel her eyes slide across the side of his face when she latched the screen behind them. Then he heard her close the inside door and push the dead bolt into place.

  “Why’d you do that?” he asked.

  “Do what?”

  “Lock the door.”

  “I didn’t think about it.”

  “You think Collins will come around?”

  “I hope he does. Except I don’t think he’s interested in me,” she said.

  “Then why did you lock the door?”

  “Maybe I don’t want to be disturbed by a couple of my busybody neighbors. You’re acting a little strange, Hack.”

  “It goes with my persona. The VA gave me a D-minus on normalcy fifty years ago.”

  He went into the kitchen and set the root beer on the counter and put the ice cream in the freezer. His lower back felt like a junkyard that had fallen down a flight of stairs. He propped his hands on the edge of the sink and extended his legs behind him and leaned heavily on his arms, the pain slowly draining out of his spine and disappearing down the backs of his thighs into the floor. She placed her palm against the small of his back. “I hate to see you like this,” she said. “I wish it was me instead of you.”

  “Like what?”

  “In pain, depressed, unhappy. What did Collins say to you when he called your house?”

  “It’s not what he said. It’s what he is. He loves death. That’s his edge.”

  “So he’ll have a smile on his face when we blow his head off.”

  “I met Jim Harrison once. He’s a novelist. He made a remark in passing that I never forgot. He said, ‘We love the earth but we don’t get to stay.’ On an evening like this, an irrefutable truth sometimes has a way of invading your soul. As a nihilist, Collins doesn’t bear that burden. He seeks the dark hole in the ground that the rest of us fear. For that reason, we have no power over him. Even in killing him, we do his will. For that reason alone, I never believed in capital punishment. You said it when we first started dealing with Collins. He wants me to be his executioner.”

  She stretched her arm across his back and hooked her hand on his right shoulder and laid her face against his arm. “You were actually mad because my cousin was here?”

  “No,” he lied.

  “He came to borrow money. His wife left him. He’s a philanderer. No one else in the family will have anything to do with him.” She exhaled and slipped her hand under his arm and squeezed it. “You and I were born by accident in different generations, Hack. But we’re opposite sides of the same coin. Why do you keep thinking of yourself as old? You’re handsome and youthful, and your principles have never changed. Why do you think people around here respect you? It’s because from day to day you’re always the same good man, one who never goes with fashion.”

  “There is no worse fate than for a young woman to marry a drunkard or an old man who is about to fall apart on the installment plan.”

  “Boy, do you know how to rain on a parade.” She brushed her forehead back and forth on his shoulder. “What are we going to do, Hack?”

  “About what?”

  “Us.”

  “You want a root-beer float?” he asked.

  “I feel like running off with my cousin. I probably would if he wasn’t my cousin. I think right now I’d run off with Attila the Hun.”

  “You’re the best, Pam.”

  “Best what?”

  “The best of everything.”

  “I can’t tell you how depressed that makes me feel.”

  The silence that followed seemed to envelop them, as though the inadequacy of the language they used in speaking to each other had come to define in an unalterable way the impossibility of their relationship. His cell phone vibrated in his pocket. It was R.C. “Maydeen told me to call you direct, Sheriff,” he said. “I’m down in Coahuila in kind of a cantina.”

  “What are you doing in Coahuila?”

  “I got a girlfriend in El Cibolo. On the way back, I blew out a tire and found out somebody had stolen my spare. I bummed a ride to this beer joint, except it’s not exactly just a beer joint. There’s some cribs in back, and up the street there’s some reg’lar hot-pillow joints that need turnstiles on the doors. There was an hombre malo in here earlier, one I couldn’t get a good look at, but he looked like he had a dent in his face. After these guys left, I asked this mulatto shooting pool who they were, and he said they were guys I shouldn’t be asking about unless I was interested in guns that went south and cocaine that went north. He also said the guy they worked for was getting his ashes hauled up the street, a joint that specializes in girls in their early teens.”

  “Could the guy with the dent in his face be the one Anton Ling put a screwdriver in?”

  “Maybe. He was back in the shadows, shooting pool on the edge of the light. All I could tell was that one side of his face looked caved in.”

  “Are there any Mexican cops around?”

  “Not unless you count the two who’re getting blow jobs out back.”

  Hackberry took a notepad and a ballpoint pen from his shirt pocket. “What’s the name of this place?” he said.

  R.C. was having a hard time focusing on the face of the mulatto drinking next to him at the bar, not only because of the mescal he’d knocked back a shot glass at a time and chased with Corona but because the light outside and inside the cantina was unnatural and seemed out of sync with the hour of the day and the geography of the countryside. The sun had gone down inside the clouds west of the mountains but had not died. Instead, a dull silver luminescence had pooled like smelted nickel in the clouds, accentuating the darkness of the valley and the poplar trees along the broken highway and the red-lit stucco houses along the street where the prostitutes sat in the windows, wearing flip-flops and loose dresses and no underwear because of the heat and the summerlike deadness in the air.

  Though a big window fan sucked the cigarette smoke out of the cantina, the drain holes in the concrete floor smelled of stagnant water and spilled beer. R.C. could also smell the ammonia-like reek of the long stone trough in the bano, which had the words SOLO PARA URINAR painted over the open door. Most of the electrical lighting in the cantina came from the neon Dos Equis and Carta Blanca signs above the bar; but there was a purple stain to it, from either the gathering of the dusk in the streets or the tarnished glow inside the clouds west of the mountains, and the faces of the men drinking at the bar had the garish characteristics of cartoon figures. For R.C., the drinks the mulatto had bought him were coming at a high cost. His head was ringing, his heart was beating faster than it should, and the atmosphere around him had become as warm and damp and suffocating as a wool cloak.

  Why was he having these thoughts and mental associations and seeing these images? he wondered.

  The mulatto wore a smoke-stained, greasy wide-brimmed leather hat with a leather cord that flopped under his chin, and a leather vest without a shirt and striped suit pants without a belt and boots that had roweled spurs on the heels. Locks of his orange hair were flattened on his forehead; his eyebrows formed a solid line; his square teeth and the bones in his face and the thickness of his lips made R.C. think of a hard, compact gorilla. The mulatto filled his mouth with mescal and gargled with it before he swallowed, then pulled a bandanna from his back pocket and wiped his chin. “What’d you say you was doing here, man?”

  “Trying to get my tire fixed,” R.C. said.

  “Yeah, me, too, man. That’s how I ended up on a street full of puta. Getting my tire fixed. That’s good, man. You ain’t been in back yet?”

  “I’m here ’cause a guy gave me a ride here.”

  “You want a ride, there’s a chica out back will buck you to the ceiling.” The bartender set a plate of sizzling onions and sliced green peppers and skillet grease and tortillas in fr
ont of the mulatto and went away. The mulatto rolled a tortilla full of onions and peppers and started eating. “Put something in your stomach, man. But don’t drink no more mescal. You look like you been on board a ship in a bad storm. Hey, Bernicio, give my friend some coffee.”

  The bartender filled a cup from a tin pot that sat on a hot plate by the line of liquor bottles on the back counter. R.C. lifted the cup to his mouth, blowing on it, hardly able to swallow because it was so hot.

  “What kind of work you do, man, besides drive around in Mexico and have flat tires?” the mulatto asked.

  “I buy and sell livestock.”

  “Wild horses, huh?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “For dog food?”

  “I don’t know what happens to them.”

  “You guys have shot most of them, hombre. There ain’t many left. Where do you go to shoot them now? On the street of puta?”

  “I’m just the middleman.”

  “You’re wearing ironed blue jeans and a clean cowboy shirt with flowers printed on it. You got Tony Lamas on your feet. You got a shave and a new haircut, too. You’re down here for puta, man. You ain’t been buying no horses.”

  “I’ve got me a girlfriend here’bouts, but I don’t call her what you just said.”

  “When you’re in the sack with a woman, hombre, it’s for one reason, and the reason has got one name. Don’t feel guilty about it. It ain’t natural for a man to go against his desires.”

  R.C. drank again from the coffee cup, then set it down on the bar. His throat felt clotted, as though he had swallowed a handful of needles and could not blow them from his windpipe.

  “Here, eat a tortilla,” the mulatto said. “You ever have your throat blessed by the crossing of the candles on St. Blaise’s Day? See, the priest puts the candles in an X on your throat, and for the next year you don’t got to worry about choking on a bone or a piece of glass somebody put in your food. You okay, rubio?”

  “Why you calling me that?”

  “’Cause you’re rubio and macho, man. You’re blond and strong and got cojones and can kick ass, I bet. Here, drink your coffee, then we’ll go out back. It won’t cost you nothing. I got a tab here. The best thing about my tab is I ain’t got to pay it. You know why that is, man?”