Feast Day of Fools hh-10

by James Lee Burke

  “I got no reason to. You’re the one on his honeymoon.”

  “I shouldn’t have ever told you about that fellow we ran into. On the homely scale, he was just this side of a mud fence. About as harmless-looking, too. If this guy is a threat to national security, we’re all in deep doo-doo.”

  “You also said he talked like he had a mouthful of molasses. Noie Barnum is from northern Alabama.”

  “A Quaker from Alabama?”

  “I grant you he’s a strange duck. But compared to Jack Collins, he’s as normal as it gets.”

  “My folks have always lived here’bouts, and they haven’t heard any talk about hermits wandering around with Thompson machine guns.”

  A single-engine plane passed overhead, its shadow racing across the treetops and boulders on the sunny side of a hill.

  “It’s a fine day to be out and about, isn’t it?” Ethan said.

  “I cain’t argue that.”

  “Help me up, will you?”

  Ethan Riser’s friend remained motionless.

  “What are you looking at?” Ethan asked.

  “I thought I saw a reflection of some kind up there on that hill.” The young man removed a small pair of binoculars from a leather case on his belt and adjusted them to his eyes. “I declare, it’s a book.”

  “A what?”

  “Yeah, its pages are fluttering on top of a rock. Cain’t anybody say people in Southwest Texas aren’t literary. Stop looking at me like that, Ethan. There’s nobody there. It’s just a book somebody left on a rock.”

  Preacher Jack Collins was reading in the Book of Kings, the wind and sun on his face, when he glanced up long enough to see the single-engine plane coming out of the southeast, its wings tilting in the updrafts, its engine sputtering as though it were low on gas. He stepped backward into some pinon trees growing out of the rocks, his body motionless, his face pointed at the ground, his thumb inserted as a bookmark in the pages of his Bible. He heard the plane pass overhead, then the engine caught again, and when he climbed to the crest of the hill and looked between two boulders, he saw the plane disappearing over a long stretch of flatland, its wings level and parallel with the horizon.

  Feds? Maybe. Probably a rancher who was burning the valves out of his engine with ethanol. Jack resumed reading in his comfortable spot among the rocks, the pages of the Bible as white as snow in the sunlight, the print on them as clear and sharp and defining as the lettering that Yahweh had seared with a burning finger in the Mosaic tablets. For Jack, there was no such thing as “interpretation” of the Scripture; there was also no such thing as “metaphor.” These were devices that allowed the profligate and the libertine to consecrate behavior that made Jack’s stomach curdle.

  Homosexuality? Sodomy? Not exactly. It was a type of behavior that somehow remained nameless. It was more like a memory or the shadow of a person or an event that hid behind a corner on a long street he was forced to walk in his sleep. The street was uniformly gray, as though all the color had been leached out of the concrete and asphalt and stone. There were no people on the sidewalks or in the buildings, and when he crossed an intersection, he hoped to hear a roar of traffic or at least the footsteps of other pedestrians on a side street, but instead, he heard no sound except the pounding of blood in his ears.

  In his dream, he would try to wake himself before he reached the last block on the street, but his willpower had no influence on his dream. At the corner of a building on the end of the street, a figure was moving into full view on the sidewalk. The figure wore a hooded workout jacket and a print dress and pink tennis shoes and a sequined belt, as though she had dressed randomly off the rack at a Goodwill store. Everything about her was in some fashion a frightening contradiction. She looked too young and pretty for the damage the world had probably done her. Her mouth was down-hooked at the corners, her brow dimpled with anger, her eyes lit with a quiet scorn that showed she was not only privy to Jack’s most private thoughts but disgusted by them. Her meanness of spirit and the depth of her disdain for him did not seem to fit with the youthfulness of her face. How could he possibly understand the physiological riddle that she presented to him?

  She beckoned to him, confident he would come to her, even as she removed her belt and wrapped one end around her palm.

  When he would wake from the dream, he would sit on the side of his bed, his hands clenched between his knees, filled with self-loathing that seemed to have no cause.

  The degradation that invaded his soul in his sleep never left him during his daylight hours, unless he could transfer its origins onto someone else. It might have seemed a twisted way to think, Jack told himself, but he did not invent the world, nor did he create the people who had bedeviled him without cause for a lifetime or gone out of their way to reject him.

  It was the latter category that bothered him most. He did not subscribe to the belief that woman was man’s downfall. Nor did he blame women for their vanity or the fact that guile was sometimes their only defense against man’s exploitation of their bodies. No, it was the strange light in their eyes when they looked upon his person that caused a match to flare on the lining of his stomach. They not only feared him, they were viscerally repelled by him, a man who, in his entire life, had never referred to a woman in a profane or unseemly manner.

  So he had found another kind of woman, one he could trust and who was worthy of a man people on both sides of the border referred to as the left hand of God. She lived inside the Scripture and was always waiting on the attention of his eyes when he turned to the thumb-creased pages where her story began but never ended. This woman did not have one name; she had many. She was Esther, who told Xerxes he would have to walk in her blood before she would allow him to harm her people; she was Rebecca, with the water jug on her shoulder, the strong-willed, intelligent wife of Abraham’s son; she was the Samaritan woman with whom Jesus had the longest conversation in the New Testament; and ultimately, she was Mary of Magdala, who subsidized Jesus’ ministry and stayed with him at the cross and became the first apostle of the new religion when she announced on Easter morning, “He is risen.”

  The figure who hid behind the wall at the end of the street could lay no claim upon Preacher Jack as long as he had his Testament.

  He heard the plane again. This time it was coming out of the northwest, retracing its earlier flight path. He crouched inside the shade of the pinon trees and removed his panama hat and focused his binoculars on the side of the plane as it passed dangerously low over the crest with at least three men inside the cabin. Jack doubted they were feds. Feds didn’t take unnecessary risks; self-important corporate douchebags who paid large sums of money to shoot captured animals on a game farm did. Just for fun, Jack picked up his submachine gun and aimed through the iron sights at the tail of the plane. “Pow,” he whispered as softly as smoke.

  Then he realized the distraction of the plane and his idle thoughts about game farms and douchebags had just cost him. Across the flatland to the southwest, two figures had emerged from a rocky basin and were headed in his direction. In fact, if they stayed on course, they would follow the creek up into the buttes to the natural fort where he had built his cabin.

  He lay on his stomach, his elbows propped on grit, his binoculars aimed through the pinon branches. Both of the figures were men. One was young and athletic-looking, a canteen slung on his shoulder, wearing a hat that a tourist or rock collector would wear. The other man had meringue hair and a flushed face and was sweating and obviously slowing the younger man. The sun was white in the sky and had robbed the morning of all its redemptive qualities. These two men, particularly the older one, were not here to enjoy the Texas landscape.

  What to do? Jack asked himself.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Ethan Riser got up from the place where he had been resting and followed Caleb, his young friend from Austin, across the stretch of flatland that was streaked with alkali and dotted with green brush and that was now turning into a mirror
under the hot sun. Ahead, he could see hills that gave shade and the promise of a cool alcove where the stone still smelled of predawn hours and flowers that opened only at night.

  “What the hell?” Caleb said.

  A group of at least five dirt-bike riders were headed across the hardpan, their engines whining like dentist drills, their deeply grooved tire treads scissoring the topsoil and weaving trails of dust and smoke in the air. Sometimes a biker roared over a knoll and became airborne, or gunned his engine and deliberately lifted his front wheel off the ground, scouring a long trench with his back tire. The collective cacophony the bikers created was like broken glass inside the eardrum. Worse, at least to Ethan and his friend, the smells of exhaust and burnt rubber were the industrial footprint of modern Visigoths determined to prove that no pristine scrap of an earlier time was safe from their presence.

  “This is one bunch that needs to get closed down in a hurry,” Caleb said. He opened his badge holder and held it up in front of him so the sun would reflect off it. But the bikers either ignored his attempt to identify himself or were so committed to recontouring the area that they never saw him at all.

  Just as Caleb took out his cell phone, the bikers were gone, as quickly as they had arrived, disappearing over a rise, their bandannas flapping, the roar of their exhausts echoing off a butte where pinon trees grew in the rocks.

  “I’ll make a deal with you,” Caleb said.

  “What might that be?” Ethan said. The armpits of his long-sleeve blue shirt were looped with sweat, his khaki pants hanging low on his stomach, his eyes squinting in the glare, even though he was wearing a bill cap. In spite of the semiautomatic on his hip, he looked like an old man who would not concede that disease had already taken him into a country from which no amount of pretense would ever allow him to return.

  “We’ll go one more mile, up into the shady spot,” Caleb said. “We can sit by a little creek there. The Indians carved turkey tracks on some of the rocks thereabouts. They always point due north and south. That’s how they marked their route, using the stars, never one degree off. You can set a compass on them. It’s just a real fine place to cool our heels.”

  “Then what do we do?”

  “We go back. It ain’t up for grabs, either,” Caleb said.

  “I’ll sit down with you a minute, but then I’m going on.”

  “Sometimes we have to accept realities, Ethan.”

  “That I’m worn out and can’t make it?”

  Caleb looked at the mottled discoloration in his friend’s face. “I don’t think Jack Collins is out here. If he is, we’ll hear about it and come back and nail his hide to a cottonwood. In the meantime, it’s not reasonable to wander around under a white sun.”

  “I spent seven months in a bamboo cage. The man next to me had a broken back and was in there longer than I was,” Ethan said.

  “In Vietnam?”

  “Who cares where it was?” Ethan said.

  In the distance, they heard the sound of a solitary dirt bike, the engine screaming as though the back tire had lost traction and the RPMs had revved off the scale. Then there was silence.

  “Collins is here,” Ethan said.

  “How do you know?”

  Ethan looked to the north, where turkey buzzards were turning in a wide circle against a cloudless blue sky. “Know what death smells like?”

  “Yeah, like some dead critter up there. Don’t let your imagination start feeding on loco weed.”

  “Do you smell anything?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “I can. It’s Collins. It’s Collins who smells like death. He’s here. When you’ve got death in you, you can smell it on others.”

  Jack did not like what he was watching. Where did this bunch get off, invading a place that was his, one that could have been sawed loose from the edges of Canaan and glued onto the southwestern rim of the United States? Why was the government worried about working-class people crossing the border when a bunch like this were given licenses and machines to destroy public lands? Jack knelt on a sandstone ledge, the butt of his Thompson resting by his knee, the drum magazine packed with fifty. 45 rounds, the clean steel surfaces of his weapon smelling slightly of the oilcloth he had used to wipe down and polish it last night. He longed to raise the stock to his shoulder and lead the bikers with iron sights and squeeze off three or four short bursts and blow them into a tangle of machines and spinning tires and disjointed faces, not unlike the images in the Picasso painting depicting the fascist bombing of Guernica.

  One of the bikers, as though he had read Jack’s thoughts, veered away from his companions and roared up the hillside toward Jack’s position, his goggles clamped like a tanker’s on his face, one booted foot coming down hard on the dirt to keep his machine erect, his jeans stiff with body grease, his black leather vest faded brown and yellow under his naked armpits.

  The biker throttled back his engine and swerved to a stop just twenty feet below Jack’s position, smoke and dust rising behind him in a dirty halo. His teeth looked feral inside his beard, his chest hair glistening with sweat. Jack laid his Thompson on a clean, flat rock and stood up in full view. “How do, pilgrim?” he said.

  “Were you flashing a mirror at me?” the biker asked.

  “Not me.”

  “I think it was you. You got one of those steel signal mirrors? You being cute or something?”

  “You probably saw the reflection off my field glasses.”

  “So you want to tell me what the hell you’re doing?”

  “Not much. Studying on the general state of mediocrity that seems to characterize the country these days. Did you know the United States has the highest rate of functional illiteracy in the Western world, even though we have the most libraries? What’s your thought on that?”

  “My thought is, I’m getting a crick in my neck looking up at you. Who the fuck you think you are?”

  “The worst mistake you ever made.”

  The biker put a pinch of snuff under his lip. “It’s been good talking to you. Keep your flopper oiled and cocked. The right girl is out there waiting for you somewhere.”

  “Maybe you can he’p me with a theory I have. It has to do with atavistic behavior. That means a throwback to the way things were when people hunted each other with rocks and sharp sticks. Did you ever notice that most of the fellows in biker gangs are strange-looking? By that I mean way overweight, with double hernias and beetle brows and pig noses and bulging scrotums and hair growing out of their ears. You’d think it would dawn on them.”

  The biker pushed his goggles up on his forehead with his thumb. There were white circles around his eyes. “What would dawn on them?”

  “That ugly and stupid people find each other.”

  The biker twisted the gas feed with his right hand, revving his engine, making a decision. “I hate to tell you this, pal, but I don’t think your opinion carries a lot of weight. If you haven’t noticed, your suit looks like Sasquatch wiped his ass with it. You’ve got pecker tracks on your fly and enough dirt under your fingernails to grow tomatoes. If the wind turns around, I expect I’ll have to put on a respirator.”

  Jack gazed across the flats into the distance. With his naked eye, he could not see the two hikers. The wind was up, out of the south, the pinon trees bending. The sound of a short burst might be mistaken for the backfire of a dirt bike or be lost altogether inside the wind. Yes, maybe this was an opportune moment. “You like tearing up the countryside, making lots of noise with your machines, smearing your scat on the morning? Look at me.”

  “What for?”

  “The man who snuffs your wick is always the one you least suspect. You’re tooling along, and you shoot off your mouth to the wrong fellow in the middle of a desert, and somebody stuffs a cactus plant up your ass. That’s what the crossroads is all about.”

  “ You’re the wick snuffer?”

  “Close your eyes and count to three and open them again. I have a surprise for you.”<
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  “Screw you,” the biker said.

  He turned his bike around and rode back down the slope, shooting Jack the finger just before heading across the flats, a fountain of gravel and silt flying from under his back wheel.

  Jack let out his breath with a sigh. Just two more seconds, he thought. Oh well, maybe it was better that he kept his priorities straight. But before Jack could turn his attention to the hikers, the goggled, head-wrapped dirt biker had reconsidered and nullified his wise choice and spun his machine in a circle. He was headed back full-bore to the hillside, his thighs spread, his knees high, his shoulders humped, a simian throwback determined to teach a lesson to an unwashed, ignorant old man.

  He veered north of Jack’s position and bounced onto a narrow trail that would take him to where Jack was standing behind a boulder. Jack temporarily lost sight of him, then heard the biker gun his engine and mount a steep grade, gravel splintering off his back wheel.

  Jack waited, his Thompson hanging from his right hand, his coat fluttering open in the wind, a half-smile on his face. The biker had reached the top of the grade and was bouncing up and down with the roughness of the trail as he approached Jack’s position. Thirty feet below was a gully strewn with chunks of yellow chert and the dried and polished limbs of dead trees. Jack stepped out from behind the boulder and raised the muzzle of the Thompson at the biker’s chest.

  “I cain’t blame you, pilgrim. Pride is my undoing, too,” he said.

  He never got a chance to squeeze the trigger. The biker saw the Thompson and threw his hands in front of his face, then plummeted off the trail straight into the gully, upside down, his machine crashing on top of him.

  Jack walked to the edge of the trail and peered down at the biker and the wrecked bike, its front tire still spinning. “Ouch,” he said.

  The Sun was blinding when Caleb approached the butte where he thought he had seen one of the bikers split off from the pack and power up the hillside. His eyes were stinging with salt, his mouth dry, and he wanted to stop and take a drink from his canteen, but he felt a cautionary sense he couldn’t dispel. Why had the biker left his comrades? Who or what was up in the rocks where Caleb had seen book pages flipping in the wind? And why hadn’t the biker come back down the hill? He cupped his hands around the sides of his mouth. “Hello up there!” he yelled. “I’ve got an injured man on the trail and need some help!”