Feast Day of Fools hh-10

by James Lee Burke

  “Lorca is out of surgery,” Riser said. “It’s nice to see you, Chief Deputy.”

  “You, too,” Pam replied.

  “Lorca told me about the ambulance attendant and the possibility of Jack Collins and Noie Barnum being in the Glass Mountains. I have the feeling you might be headed up there, Sheriff.”

  “I can’t say I’ve given it any thought,” Hackberry replied.

  “I have trouble believing that,” Riser said. “This time out, you and Chief Deputy Tibbs need to stay in your own bailiwick. I can’t order you to do that, but I can ask you.”

  “Whatever we decide to do, we’ll coordinate with the Bureau,” Hackberry said.

  “Ever hear how Pretty Boy Floyd died?”

  “Shot down while running from some federal agents on a farm in Ohio?”

  “Something like that. Except there’s an unofficial account to the effect that he didn’t die right away. He was wounded and lying on his back when the agents got to him. One agent asked him if he was Pretty Boy Floyd. Floyd answered, ‘I’m Charles Arthur Floyd.’ Then somebody gave the order to finish him off, and that’s what they did.”

  “Why are you telling us this?” Hackberry said.

  “It makes for a good story, that’s all.”

  “It’s not your style.”

  “Probably not,” Riser said. “I’d sure like some of that pie.”

  “Ethan, did you hear me? That’s not your style.”

  “I’m all talk. You know that. Miss, could I have a piece of that blueberry pie with some ice cream on it and a cup of coffee?”

  “It’s on us,” Pam said.

  “I appreciate it.”

  “Listen to Hack, Agent Riser.”

  “Of course.”

  The waitress brought the pie and ice cream and coffee, and Pam and Hackberry watched Ethan Riser eat. They also watched the way his eyes crinkled and the way his gaze seemed to probe the darkness outside the window, and each sensed in the other the embarrassment they felt while they watched a brave man try to mask the fact that he was under a death sentence.

  “This area has never been quite real to me,” Riser said. “It’s a place where nothing is what it seems. A piece of moonscape where improbable people live and lunatics can hide in plain sight.”

  “All empires have their dustbins,” Hackberry said. “It’s the place we bury our sins.”

  “That’s too deep for me.”

  “What do I know?” Hackberry said.

  “A lot more than the Bureau wants to concede,” Riser said. “They consider you a pain in the ass. Stay out of the Glass Mountains, my friend.”

  Pam drove Hackberry home in the rain. The fields were sodden on either side of the road, the sky black, the long lines of cedar fence posts and barbed wire glistening in the cruiser’s headlights. “He’s going to cool out Collins?” she said.

  “I think that was all rhetoric. He’s angry because he has to die. Ethan’s a straight arrow. People like him make a pact with themselves and never violate it.”

  “I told you to go fuck yourself earlier.”

  “Forget it.”

  “No, I meant it. I just shouldn’t have put it that way.”

  “I see.”

  “Do you?”

  “I’m old, Pam. You think it’s honorable for an old man to take advantage of a young woman’s affections? You want to become romantically involved with a man who would use a young and attractive woman, knowing eventually he would be a burden to her?”

  “I think age doesn’t have crap to do with any of it. With you, it’s all about pride. You’ve never forgiven yourself for the mistakes of your youth, so you have to create a standard that’s superior to everyone else’s. It’s not a lot different from the bad guys who are always trying to convince themselves of their own humanity.”

  “That’s a rotten thing to say.”

  “Too bad.”

  He could feel his left temple throbbing again, and he knew that in the next few seconds, a sliver of pain as cold and hard as a stalactite would slide through his eye and the muscles of his left cheek. Up ahead, he saw his house suddenly illuminated by a bolt of lightning that struck in the trees behind his office, the same trees where Jack Collins had hidden and trained a laser sight on him. “You don’t have to pull into the drive. Just drop me on the road,” he said.

  “You like walking in an electric storm?”

  “In this case, I do.”

  “Too bad again,” she said.

  She drove across a wood bridge that spanned a creek running high with rainwater, the wild roses along the bank trailing in the current; then she turned in to his driveway and stopped at the picket fence that enclosed the front yard. “You think I’m unfair?” she said.

  “I don’t think anything,” he said, getting out of the cruiser.

  “There’s an umbrella in the backseat.”

  “I’ve got my hat,” he said, closing the passenger door.

  She reached into the backseat and gathered up the umbrella and stepped out into the rain. She tried to pop it open, but the catch was jammed.

  “Get back in the cruiser,” he said.

  But she didn’t. She followed him up the flagstones to the gallery. She was wearing a department-issue campaign hat, and the rain was beating on the crown and the brim, rolling in rivulets down her shoulders and shirtfront. “I think I should resign, Hack. I think I should go back to Houston,” she said.

  “That’s not going to happen.”

  “Who the hell are you to tell me anything?”

  “I’m your boss, that’s who.”

  “I can’t tell you how bad you piss me off.”

  He walked back down the flagstones and took the umbrella from her hand and popped it open above both their heads. He could hear the rain thudding as hard as marbles on the nylon. “You’re the most stubborn woman I have ever met. Why do you act like this?”

  “Why do you think?”

  “Come in.”

  “For what?”

  “Just come in.”

  He put his arm over her shoulders and walked her up the steps and unlocked the door and held it open for her. The living room was unlit and smelled of the couch and the carpet and the drapes and the wallpaper and the polished hardwood floors; it smelled like a home; it smelled like a fine place to be while lightning flashed on the hillsides and the wind and rain blew against the windowpanes and whipped an unfastened door on the barn and bent the trees and scattered the lawn with leaves and broken flowers. He dropped the umbrella on the rug and touched her face with his fingers, and in seconds felt her against him, her feet standing on top of his boots, her loins and breasts tight against his body, her hair wet against his cheek, her arms clenched around his back, all his personal resolve and his concerns about age and mortality and honor draining like water through the bottom of a paper bag.

  “Oh, Hack,” she said. “Oh, Hack, Hack, Hack.”

  From his deck Cody Daniels watched the storm move out of the south and seal the sky, trapping the light between a blue-black layer of clouds and the desert floor and mesas that were pink and talc-colored and that made him think of pictures of ancient Phoenician ships he had seen. When the power outage spread across the county, he saw the reflected glow of the town flatten against the clouds and die, a surge of cool air rising from the valley floor into his face. Hailstones clattered on the hardpan and on the deck, dancing in a white haze, and in the smell of ozone and the drop of temperature, he felt as though the world were fresh and clean, as though every bad memory of his life were being washed away, every failure and personal affliction slipping over the edges of the earth.

  If only things were that easy.

  Cody started up his gas-powered generator and went back in the house to resume the most difficult task in his life-writing a letter to the FBI. He had attempted a half-dozen versions on his computer and had been unhappy with all of them. His language was either stilted and sounded self-serving, or it became so confused it was
almost unintelligible. The last attempt was two double-spaced pages long and gave details about his recruitment into a small group of anti-abortion activists in northern Virginia. It wasn’t a bad statement, except it indiscriminately included the names of his fellow travelers, some of whom may have been unaware of the group’s ultimate goal.

  He had gone out on the deck without saving the letter on his hard drive, and the power outage had wiped his screen clean. When he reentered the house, the lights burning dimly on the low wattage produced by his generator, he sat down at his desk and picked up a felt-tip pen and addressed an envelope to the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Washington, D.C., no zip code. He put his return address in the upper-left-hand corner of the envelope. Then he wrote the following letter on a yellow legal pad:

  Dear Sirs,

  I am the pitiful son of a bitch who bought the oven timer for the bomb that blew up the abortion clinic outside Baltimore three years back. I thought the bomb would go off in the middle of the night. But that doesn’t help the woman who got her face blown off. I can’t give you the names of any of the other people involved. This letter is about the evil deed done by one son of a bitch and one son of a bitch only, and as I have stated, that son of a bitch is yours truly,

  Sincerely,

  Rev. Cody Daniels

  From outside, he heard the hiss of air brakes and the sound of a tractor-trailer shifting down. He looked through the window and, in the rain-streaked fading of the twilight, saw an eighteen-wheeler parked by the Cowboy Chapel, its high beams on, the engine still hammering, and what appeared to be a lead car parked in front of it. Cody had seen the lead car before, without the clamped-on brace of yellow lights on the roof; it belonged to a musician, a man who stopped by on occasion at the Cowboy Chapel and drank coffee and ate doughnuts in the hospitality room Cody left open for truckers or travelers on their way to the Big Bend country.

  Cody draped a slicker over his head and went down the wood steps to the coffee room in the back of the chapel. “Getting out of the storm?” he said to a small tight-bodied man sitting at the long table in the middle of the room, a chrome-plated guitar across his thighs.

  “Hey, Reverend, I didn’t see you, so I just come inside,” the man said. “Hope you don’t mind.”

  “That’s what it’s for. The name is Rector, isn’t it?”

  “Dennis Rector, that’s me,” the man replied. “I saw your nail gun there. You’ve been doing some carpentering.”

  “You play a Dobro?”

  “You know your instruments. That’s what it is, resonator and all.” The small man had the dark skin of a field hand and hair that looked like it had been cut with fingernail clippers. He wore lace-up boots and a tie-dyed T-shirt and denim work pants. His upper torso was bent like a question mark. “It’s a Fender, built on the old National model. It feels like a Coca-Cola box packed with ice hanging from your neck.”

  Dennis Rector ran a steel bar up and down the neck of the Dobro and began playing a tune with the steel picks on the thumb and index and middle fingers of his right hand. “Recognize that piece? That’s ‘The Great Speckled Bird.’ Same tune as ‘The Wild Side of Life.’ Same tune as ‘It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky-Tonk Angels.’”

  Through the window, Cody could see two men sitting in the cab of the eighteen-wheeler. “What are y’all carrying?” he asked.

  “Exotic animals. Want one?”

  “You work for a zoo?”

  “I guess you could call it that.” Dennis Rector was smiling as though he possessed private knowledge that he might or might not share. “We supply a wild-game ranch up in Pecos County.”

  Cody nodded and didn’t reply.

  “You’re not keen on them kind of places?”

  “Live and let live.”

  “That’s the way I figure it. Their misfortune and none of my own. You know you got some beaners parked down yonder on your road?”

  “Pardon?”

  “Some pepper-bellies in a beat-up old car with a busted headlight.”

  “Who are they?”

  “Maybe a couple of people fucking. How should I know? I couldn’t see them that good.” The small man was still smiling.

  “This is a church house, even if it’s just the coffee room,” Cody said.

  “Sorry.”

  “Did you catch the tag?”

  “I wasn’t paying them much mind. They looked away from our lights when we passed. That’s why I figure they were people making out. Mexicans tend to breed in the spring and domino in the winter.”

  Cody studied Dennis Rector from behind his eyelashes. “You from here’bouts?”

  “Wherever I hang my hat. Jobs are kind of thin these days. Seems like there’s less and less work for a white man. What’s your feeling about that?”

  “I never lost a job ’cause of my skin color.”

  “That sounds different from a couple of your sermons.”

  “Could I he’p y’all with something?”

  “No, I just wanted to show my friends your church and get out of the storm.”

  Cody nodded again, looking out the door at the truck and the animals he could see behind the ventilation slots in the sides. “You mind locking up when you leave? I’ve got some work to do in the house.”

  The small man filled his mouth with a jelly doughnut, pushing the overflow back into his mouth with his wrist. His chrome-plated instrument swam with an oily blue light. “No problem, Reverend,” he said.

  Cody walked back up the stairs and across his deck into the house, forcing himself not to look back over his shoulder. He felt a sense of ill ease that he couldn’t define. Was it the rawness of Dennis Rector’s language? Or the fact that Cody had helped encourage the role of victim in many of his congregants? Or did he see a reflection of his former self in the lewdness of mind that characterized men like Rector? Why was a man like that playing “The Great Speckled Bird,” a spiritual that was as deep-seated in southern religion as “The Old Rugged Cross”? Something wasn’t a right fit.

  There was also the business about the Hispanics parked on the road. He should have pumped Rector about them. Could the car have contained Krill and Negrito? It couldn’t be them, could it? They were professional criminals, hunted by the local sheriff and the FBI and probably the Texas Rangers. Why would Krill and Negrito invest their lives in persecuting Cody Daniels, a mail-order minister who was awakened at two each morning by a blind woman with a disfigured face rattling his bedroom windows?

  Just as the power went back on, Cody saw the eighteen-wheeler turn in a wide circle, led by Dennis Rector’s car, and head south down the road, the edges of the trailer etched with chains of gold running lights. He folded the confessional letter he had written to the FBI and placed it in the envelope and licked the seal, his stomach churning, his head as light as a helium balloon. Then he sat at his desk, his head in his hands, and wondered how he had made such a catastrophe out of his life.

  The wind was swirling out of the desert, the rain driving hard on the roof, dancing on the handrails of his deck, blowing in the blue-white radiance of the neon cross he had mounted above the entrance to the Cowboy Chapel. Maybe it was time to pile a few belongings into the cab of his truck, drop his letter to the FBI in a mailbox, and disappear inside the vast anonymity of the American West.

  He could sell his truck in California and pick fruit in the San Joaquin, harvest beets up in Oregon and Washington, maybe lumberjack in Montana or get on a fishing boat in Alaska. If the law caught up with him, fine. If it didn’t, that would be fine, too. Why not just roll the dice and stay out of the consequences? In the United States a person could get a new identity and start a new life as easily as acquiring a library card. He had to wonder at the irony of it all. In his fantasy, he was joining the ranks of the migrant workers he had railed against.

  He went into his bedroom and began stuffing the clothes from his dresser and closet into a duffel bag. That was when he felt the air decompress around him and the cold smell of
rain surge through the house, the joists and wood floors creaking as the temperature dropped inside. He turned around and stared into the faces of two men whose hats were wilted on their heads, their brown skin shiny with water, their clothes smelling like horses and wood smoke and sweat that had dried inside flannel.

  “Why won’t y’all leave me alone?” Cody said.

  “You know,” Krill said.

  “I don’t know anything.”

  “Yes, you know. Do not pretend you don’t know. Do not make an insignificance of my children.”

  “I’m worthless as a minister. I’m no different from you. I he’ped put together a bomb that was used on an abortion clinic. I ruined a woman’s life. I’m not worth shooting.”

  Krill was already shaking his head, indicating Cody’s wishes had little to do with what was about to occur. Negrito was smiling broadly. “We told you we’d be back, man. But you don’t listen,” he said. “You got anything to eat? I’m really hungry. What was that about a bombing?”

  “You got a hearing defect?” Cody said.

  “End this silly talk and come with me,” Krill said.

  “Where?”

  “Out into the rain, hombre.”

  “I’m no count as a pastor, no count as a man. That’s not humility talking, either. It’s the truth.”

  “ Venga conmigo. Now. No more talking.”

  “You don’t have to point a gun at me. I’m plumb worn out with people pointing guns at me.”

  “It’s necessary, hombre. Your ears are wood, your thinking processes like cane syrup. It is clear you’re of low intelligence.”

  “You want to hold a gun on me? Here, I’ll he’p you.”

  “Let go of my wrist.”

  “Put one through my heart. I’m tired of y’all pestering me.”

  “Show him,” Negrito said.

  “Don’t underestimate me,” Krill said to Cody. “I have taken many lives. I have machine-gunned a priest.”

  “Then pull the trigger,” Cody said.

  Cody’s hand remained clenched tightly on Krill’s wrist. He could feel Krill’s pulse beating against his palm. Krill’s eyes were inches from his, the onions and wine and fried meat on Krill’s breath as damp as a moist cloth on Cody’s face. “Are you going to help me?” Krill asked.