Feast Day of Fools hh-10 Read online

  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.?”

  “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.”

  “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?”

  R.C. had taken one sip from the canteen and had started to take another. But he stopped and set the canteen down on the edge of the grave and stared at it, his hand still cupped on the canvas snap-button pouch that held it. He waited, his eyes fixed in empty space, the wind flattening the mesquite along the banks of the streambed. He knew what was coming.

  “Here’s the situation as I see it,” the strange man said. “The sheriff tried to kill me by firing a whole magazine down a mine shaft. He has also insulted me several times on a personal level without provocation, even though I have always treated him with respect. So principle requires that I do something in kind to him, otherwise I’ll be guilty of what’s called a sin of omission. Are you following me?”

  “You’re Preacher Jack Collins. Around here, that translates into ‘crazy.’ I don’t have conversations with crazy people.”

  Collins shifted his weight and pulled his revolver from its holster and fitted his thumb over the hammer. “You’d better listen up, boy.” He pulled back the hammer to full cock and touched the muzzle to R.C.’s temple. “With one soft squeeze, I can scatter your buckwheats all over that streambed. There will be a flash of light and a loud roar in your ears, then you’ll be with your dead mother. I’ll make sure the sheriff understands I did this as payback for what he’s done to me. In that way, I’ll rob him of any peace of mind for the rest of his life. But there’s a problem with that choice. Other than not knowing how to stay out of a hot-pillow joint, you’re an innocent boy and shouldn’t have to pay the price for the sheriff’s actions. So I’m going to create a choice for you that most people in your situation don’t have.”

  Collins lowered the hammer and released the lock on the cylinder and tipped it sideways from the revolver’s frame. He shucked the six brass cartridges into his palm. “Are you a gambling man?” he said.

  “Whatever it is you’re thinking about, I’m not interested.”

  “Believe me, you will be.”

  “Sheriff Holland is gonna hunt you down in every rat hole in Coahuila. Don’t be talking down to me about no whorehouses, either. You got whores working for you as informants, and I suspect that ain’t all they’re doing for you, provided they’re not choosy.”

  Collins stood up. “I’m going to put one in the chamber and spin the cylinder. When I hand you the revolver, I’m going to cover the cylinder so you cain’t see where the load is. If you’ll hold the muzzle to your head and pull the trigger twice without coming down on the wrong chamber, I’ll turn you loose. If you refuse
, I’ll pop you here and now.”

  “Why you doing this to me?”

  “Boy, you just don’t listen, do you?”

  “Let me think it over. Okay, I have. Kiss my ass. And when you’re done doing that, kiss my ass again.”

  “Why don’t you have another sip of water and rethink that statement?”

  “I don’t need no more of y’all’s mouth germs.”

  “Get up.”

  “What for?”

  Jack Collins laughed to himself. “You’re fixing to find out.”

  “I’m tired of all this.”

  “Tired?”

  “Yeah, of being treated like a sack of shit. Just like I told that guy who took me out here, go on and do what you’re gonna do. Fuck you, I couldn’t care less. Hackberry Holland is gonna turn you into the deadest bucket of shit that was ever poured in the ground.”

  Jack Collins let the revolver hang loosely at his side, outside the holster. “Stand up and look me in the face.”

  R.C. got to his feet, his knees popping. He wiped the sweat and beaded rings of dirt from his neck and looked at his hand. His eyes drifted to the revolver in Preacher Jack’s right hand. He closed his eyes and opened them again, forcing them wide, refusing to blink. On the edge of his vision, he thought he saw his mother watching him, a cone of cotton candy clutched in her hand.

  “Just to set the record straight, the breed who buried you wasn’t coming back. He’s in Durango now, drunk out of his senses,” Jack Collins said. “You would have died underground of thirst and starvation. If I had my druthers, I’d take a bullet anytime.”

  “I’ll take a bullet just so I don’t have to listen to you no more,” R.C. said.

  Jack Collins laughed again and picked up the canteen and looped the web belt over R.C.’s head, easing it down so as not to clip his ear. “Stay on the edge of the hillside and go due north for about three miles, and you’ll hit a dirt road. Follow it eastward, and you’ll intersect an asphalt two-lane that’ll take you to the border.”