Feast Day of Fools hh-10 Page 35

  “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 innocent 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 cafe 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 against 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.

  Temple Dowling was on the driving range with three friends, whocking balls in a high arc, his form perfect, the power in his shoulders and thick arms and strong hands a surprise to those who noted only the creamy pinkness of his complexion and the baby fat under his chin and his lips that were too large for his mouth. The coordination of his swing and the whip of his wrists and the twist of his hips and buttocks seemed almost an erotic exercise, one that was not lost on others. “Temp, you’re the only golf player I ever saw whose swing could make the right girl cream her jeans,” one of his companions said.

  They all roared, then sipped from their old-fashioneds and gin gimlets and turned their attention to the two-inch-thick bloodred steaks Temple had just forked onto the barbecue grill.

  “What was that?” said one of the friends, a man with hair like an albino ape’s on the backs of his wrists and arms.

  “What was what?” Dowling said. He looked around, confused.

  “I don’t know,” his friend said. “I thought I saw something. A red bug.”

  “Where?”

  The friend rubbed at one eye with his wrist. “I probably looked into the sun. I think I need new contacts.”

  “It looked like it was fixing to crawl in your collar,” another man said.

  Temple Dowling pulled his shirt loose from his slacks and shook it. “Did I get it?”

  “Nothing fell out.”

  “It wasn’t a centipede, was it?”

  “It was a little round bug,” said the man with white hair on his arms.

  Temple Dowling straightened his collar. “Screw it. If it bites me, I’ll bite it back,” he said. His friends grinned. He picked up a fork and turned the steaks, squinting in the smoke. “Right on this spot, before this was a country club, my father had a deer stand where he used to take his friends. I wasn’t supposed to be there, but I snuck off to it and shot a nine-point buck with my twenty-two. Except I gut-shot him. He took off running, just about where that water trap is now. I had to hit him four more times before he went down. I was so excited I pissed my pants. I showed my father what I’d done, and he dipped his hand in the deer’s blood and smeared it on my face and said, ‘Damn if I don’t think you’ve turned into a man. But we got to get you a thirty-thirty, son, before you shoot up half the county.’”

  “Were you and your father pretty close, Temp?”

  “Close as ice water can be to a drinking glass, I guess.”

  Dowling’s companions nodded vaguely as though they understood when in fact they did not.

  “My father had his own way of doing things,” he said. “There was his way, and then there was his way. If that didn’t work out, we did it his way over and over until his way worked. No man could ride a horse into the ground or a woman into an asylum like my old man.”

  The others let their eyes slip away to their drinks, the steaks browning and dripping on the fire, the golfers lifting their drives high into the sunset, a skeet shooter powdering a clay pigeon into a pink cloud against the sky. At the club, candor about one’s life was not always considered a virtue.

  “On your shirt, Temp,” said the man with white hair on his wrists and arms. “There. Jesus. ”

  Dowling
looked down at his clothes. “Where?”

  One man dropped his gimlet glass and stepped away, his eyebrows raised, his hands lifted in front of him, as though disengaging from an invisible entanglement that should not have been part of his life. The two other men were not as subtle. They backed away hurriedly, then ran toward the Ninth Hole, coins and keys jingling in their pockets, their spiked shoes clicking on the walkway, their faces disjointed as they looked back fearfully over their shoulders.

  Out on the county road, one hundred yards away, Felix Chavez walked from an abandoned mechanic’s shed to an unmarked car, threw a rifle on the backseat, and drove home to eat dinner with his family.

  Hackberry was dozing in his chair, his hat tilted down on his face, his feet on his desk, when the 911 call came in. Maydeen and Pam and R.C. had stayed late that afternoon. Maydeen tapped on Hackberry’s doorjamb. “Temple Dowling says somebody put a laser sight on him at the country club,” she said.

  “No kidding,” Hackberry said, opening his eyes. “What would Mr. Dowling like us to do about it?”

  “Probably bring him some toilet paper. He sounds like he just downloaded in his britches,” she replied.

  “Maydeen-”

  “Sorry,” she said.

  “Is Mr. Dowling still at the club?”

  “He’s in his cottage. He says you warned him about Jack Collins.” She looked at a notepad in her hand. “He said, ‘That crazy son of a bitch Collins is out there, and you all had better do something about it. I pay my goddamn taxes.’”

  “Is there any coffee left?” Hackberry asked.

  “I just made a fresh pot.”

  “Let’s all have a cup and a doughnut or two, then R.C. and Pam and I can motor on out,” Hackberry said. He stretched his arms, his feet still on his desk, and tossed his hat on the polished tip of one boot. “I’d better take down the flag before we go, too. It looks like rain.”