Feast Day of Fools hh-10 Page 36

  “You want me to call Dowling back?”

  “What for?”

  “To tell him y’all are on your way.”

  “He knows our hearts are in the right place,” Hackberry replied.

  Forty minutes later, it was misting and the clouds were hanging like frozen steam on the hills when Hackberry and Pam arrived at the club in one cruiser and R.C. in another. Temple Dowling met them at the door of his cottage, a drink in his hand, his face splotched, his eyes looking past them at the fairways and trees and the shadows that the trees and buildings and electric lights made on the grass. The wind toppled a table on the flagstones by the swimming pool, and Temple Dowling’s face jumped. “What kept y’all?” he said. “Who’s this woman Maydeen?”

  “What about her?”

  “She told me to fuck myself, is what’s about her.”

  Hackberry stared at him without replying.

  “Come inside. Don’t just stand there,” Dowling said.

  “This is fine.”

  “It’s raining. I don’t want to get wet,” Dowling said, his gaze focusing on a man stacking chairs behind the Ninth Hole.

  “R.C., go up to the clubhouse and see what you can find out. We’ll be here with Mr. Dowling. Let’s wrap this up as soon as we can.”

  “Wrap this up?” Dowling said. “Somebody is trying to kill me, and you say ‘wrap this up’?”

  Pam and Hackberry stepped inside the cottage and closed the door behind them. “You say somebody locked down on you with a sniper’s rifle?”

  “Yeah. Why do you think I called?”

  “And Maydeen told you to fuck yourself? That doesn’t sound like her.”

  Dowling’s eyes were jumping in their sockets. “Are you listening? I know a laser sight when I see one. Who cares about Maydeen?”

  “Did your security guys see it?”

  “If they had, Collins would be turning on a rotisserie.”

  “The last time a couple of your guys ran into Jack, they didn’t do too well,” Hackberry said. “The coroner had to blot them up with flypaper and a sponge. Did you call the feds?”

  “You listen,” Dowling said, his voice trembling with either anger or fear or both. He set down his drink on a bare mahogany table, trying to regain control of his emotions. The velvet drapes were pulled on the windows, the dark carpets and wood furniture and black leather chairs contributing somehow to the coldness pumping out of the air-conditioning ducts. “Collins has killed at least two federal agents. Nobody can do anything about him. Even Josef Sholokoff is afraid of him. But you have a personal relationship with him. If you didn’t, you’d be dead. I think you’re leaving him out there purposely.”

  “Jack Collins tried to kill Chief Deputy Tibbs. He knows what I’ll do to him if I get the chance, Mr. Dowling. In the meantime, I’m not sure anything happened here. If Jack had wanted to pop you, your brains would be on your shirt.”

  Even in the air-conditioning, the armpits of Dowling’s golf shirt were damp, his face lit with a greasy shine. He picked up his drink, then set it down again, clearing a clot out of his voice box. “I want to talk to you alone,” he said.

  “What for?”

  “You’ll see.”

  “Pam, would you wait up at the club?”

  “I love your decor, Mr. Dowling,” she said. “We busted some metalheads and satanists who were growing mushrooms inside a place that looked just like it.”

  Dowling went into the bedroom and returned with a cardboard file folder secured by a thin bungee cord. He removed the cord and laid the folder flat side down on a dining room table, his chest rising and falling, as though wondering if he were about to take a wrong turn into the bad side of town. “I was going to give you this anyway,” he said. “So I’m not giving it to you as a bribe or a form of extortion or anything like that.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Hackberry said.

  Dowling lifted his glass and drank and set the glass down again, his words steadying in his throat. “Years ago, when you were going across the border, my father had you surveilled and photographed. And buddy, did he get you photographed. Through windows and doorways, in every position and compromising moment a man and woman can put themselves in. You used three cathouses and three cathouses only. Am I right?”

  “I don’t know. I had blackouts back then.”

  “Trust me, if my father said you did, you did. Nobody in the history of the planet was better at cooking up a witches’ brew to destroy people than he was. He drove my mother mad and ruined his enemies financially and politically. In your case, he planned to blackmail you after you went to Congress. Except you married the union lady and got reborn with the proletariat and left the campaign.”

  “Why give me the photos?”

  “I wanted to show you we’re on the same side.”

  “We’re not.”

  Dowling drank the rest of the whiskey in his glass, his cheeks blooming as though his soul had taken on new life. “Look, I don’t have illusions about your feelings toward me. You think I’m a degenerate, and maybe I am. But I’m going to do something for you that nobody else can. You’ve made statements to people about your trips to Mexican whorehouses and the possibility that you screwed some underage girls. You were a whoremonger, all right, but not with young girls. If you had been, the photos would be in that file.” Dowling pushed the folder toward Hackberry. “They’re yours,” he said.

  “What about the negatives?”

  “They’re in there.”

  “And how about other prints?”

  “There aren’t any. I don’t have any reason to lie. You may not like me, but I’m not my father.”

  “No, you’re not,” Hackberry said ambiguously.

  “There’s a barbecue grill on the patio out back. A little charcoal lighter and one match, and you can feed your mistakes to the flames.”

  “I tell you what,” Hackberry said, sliding the folder back toward Dowling. “I’ll provide you several phone numbers. You can give these photos to the San Antonio newspapers and my political opponents or ship them off to Screw magazine. Or you can thumbtack them to corkboards in Laundromats around town or glue them on the walls of washrooms and the sides of trucks. The Internet is another possibility.”

  “I thought I was doing the decent thing. I thought I’d put my own indiscretions in Mexico behind us. I thought you might hold me in a little higher regard.”

  “You profit off of war and people’s misery, Mr. Dowling. My opinion about you has no weight in the matter. You’re a maker of orphans and widows, just as your father was. You send others to fight wars that you yourselves will never serve in. Like a slug, your kind stays under a log, white and corpulent, and fears the sunlight and the cawing of jays. You have many peers, so don’t take my comments on too personal a basis.”

  Dowling sat down in a straight-back chair, his hands cupped like dough balls. He was breathing through his mouth, looking upward, as though all the blood had drained out of his head. “You’re a cruel, unforgiving man,” he said.

  “No, just a guy who has a long memory and doesn’t allow himself to get bit by the same snake twice.”

  Pam Tibbs opened the front door without knocking and leaned inside. “Better come out here, Hack,” she said. “R.C. talked to a caddie who saw a guy prowling around Mr. Dowling’s SUV. R.C. is getting under it now.”

  The rain had stopped and the sky had started to clear and water was dripping off the fronds of the banana plants and palm trees and the roof of the shed on the driving range as they walked to the parking lot, Dowling’s security men trailing behind them. In the waning of the sunset, they saw R.C. emerge from under the SUV, his uniform streaked with mud, one hand holding a serrated steel object. “It’s either Chicom or Russian-made,” he said. “The pin was wired to the wheel. One revolution would have pulled the pin and released the spoon.”

  “Where was it?” Dowling asked.

  “This one was under the front seat,” R.C.
said.

  “This one?” Dowling repeated.

  “I thought I saw something back by the gas tank. I’ll get a better light and check,” R.C. said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  It took only two hours of worry and fear and the darker processes of the imagination to put Temple Dowling at Hackberry’s front door.

  “It’s a little late,” Hackberry said, a book in his hand.

  “I’ll tell you what I know, and you can do what you please with it. But you will not accuse me of being a murderer again.”

  “I didn’t say that. I said you profited from it.”

  “Same thing.”

  “Do you want to come in or get off my property?”

  Dowling sat in a chair by the front wall, away from the window, hands on the armrests like a man awaiting electrocution. He had showered and shaved and put on fresh clothes, but his face looked parboiled, his jaw disjointed, as though his mouth could not form the words he had to say. “I was a business partner with Josef Sholokoff,” he said.

  “In making and vending porn?”

  “In entertainment. I didn’t ask for details. It’s a two-hundred-billion-dollar industry.”

  “What is?”

  “Pornography. It’s big business.”

  “You just said… Never mind. What about weapons?”

  “I’m a defense contractor, but no, I don’t work with Sholokoff. He does things off the computer with agencies that want anonymity. He’s not the only one.”

  “Why does Sholokoff have it in for you?”

  “He stiffed me on a deal, and I initiated an IRS investigation into his taxes. That’s why he wants to get his hands on Noie Barnum. Josef will turn him over to Al Qaeda.”

  “What does he have to gain?”

  “I hired Barnum. I thought he was a brilliant young engineer with a great future in weapons design. If Josef can compromise our drone program, I’ll never get a defense contract again.”

  “You think Barnum would give military secrets to Islamic terrorists?”

  “Of course. He’s a pacifist and a flake or a bleeding heart, I don’t know which. You don’t think his kind want to flush this country down the drain? They want to feel good about themselves at somebody else’s expense. What do you know about Barnum, anyway?”

  Hackberry was sitting on the couch, half of his face lit by the reading lamp. He kept his expression blank, his eyes empty. “I don’t know anything about him.”

  “No, you’re hiding something,” Dowling said.

  “Like what?”

  “I’m not sure.” Dowling leaned forward. “You set me up.”

  “In what way?”

  “At the country club. My father always said your best pitch was a slider. Son of a bitch. You took me good, didn’t you?”

  Hackberry shook his head. “You’ve lost me, Mr. Dowling.”

  “The grenade under my vehicle, the laser dot on my clothes. I must be the dumbest white person I ever met.” Dowling waited. “You just gonna sit there and not say anything?”

  Through the front window, Hackberry could see the hills and the stars and the arid coarseness of the land and the wispy intangibility of the trees in the arroyos and the glow of the town in the clouds. For what purpose had a divine hand or the long evolutionary patterns of ancient seas and volcanic eruption and the gradual wearing away of sedimentary rock created this strange and special place on the earth? Was it meant to be a magical playground for nomadic Indians who camped on its streams and viewed its buttes and mesas as altars on which they stood and stared at the western sun until they were almost blind? Or a blood-soaked expanse where colonials and their descendants had slain one another for four hundred years, where narco-armies waited on the other side of the Rio Grande, armed with weapons shipped from the United States, the same country that provided the market for the weed and coke and skag that went north on a daily basis? As Hackberry stared out the window, he thought he heard the rattle of distant machine-gun fire, a tank with a busted tread trying to dislodge itself from a ditch, the boiling sound napalm made when it danced across a snowfield. What did soldiers call it now? Snake and nape? What was the language of the killing fields today?

  “You zoning out on me?” Dowling said.

  “No, not at all. I was thinking about you and what you represent.”

  “Yes?” Dowling said, lifting his hands inquisitively.

  “That’s all, I was just having an idle thought or two. Goodbye, Mr. Dowling. There’s no need for you to drop by again. I think your appointment in Samarra isn’t far down the track. But maybe I’m wrong.”

  “My appointment where?”

  Noie Barnum had experienced a recurrent dream for years that was more a memory than a dream. He would see himself as a boy again, hunting pheasants on his grandfather’s farm in eastern Colorado. Noie had no memory of his father, who had died when he was three, but he would never forget his grandfather or the love he’d had for him. His grandfather had been a giant of a man, and a jolly one at that, who dressed every day in pressed bib overalls and, even though he was a Quaker, wore a big square beard like many of his Mennonite neighbors. When Noie was eleven, his grandfather had taken him pheasant hunting in a field of wild oats. The plains rolled away as far as Noie could see, golden and gray and white in the sunshine, backdropped by an indigo sky and the misty blue snowcapped outline of the Rocky Mountains. He remembered telling his grandfather he never wanted to leave the farm and never wanted to go back to the little town where his half sister was not allowed to bring her female date to the high school prom.

  His grandfather had replied, “It doesn’t matter where we live or go, Noie. The likes of us will always be sojourners.”

  “What are sojourners?”

  “Folks like me and you and your mother and sister. We’re the descendants of John Brown. We have no home in this world except the one we create inside us.”

  Just then two pheasants had burst from the stubble, rising fat and magnificent and thickly feathered and multicolored into the air, their wings whirring, their strength and aerial agility like a denial of their size and the laws of gravity.

  “Shoot, little fellow! They’re yours!” his grandfather had said.

  When Noie let off the twelve-gauge, the recoil almost knocked him down. Unbelievably, the pattern hit both birds; they seemed to become broken in midair, dysfunctional, their wings crumpling, their necks flopping, their feet trying to hook the air as they tumbled into the stubble.

  That night Noie had cried, then the sun rose in the morning as though he had wakened from a bad dream, and for years he did not think about the birds he had killed.

  But after 9/11, the dream came back in a mutated form, one in which he no longer saw himself or his grandfather. Instead, he saw curds of yellow smoke angling at forty degrees across an autumnal blue sky and two giant birds on a window ledge entwining their broken wings and then plunging into a concrete canyon where fire trucks swarmed far below.

  Noie woke from the dream, raising his head off his chest, unsure where he was, staring down the long dirt road that led to an unpainted gingerbread house.

  “Who’s Amelia?” Jack asked.

  “My half sister. I must have dozed off. Where are we?” Noie said.

  “Right up from the Chinese woman’s place. Does your sister live in Alabama?”

  “No, she died nine years ago.”

  “Sorry to hear that. I was an only child. It must warp something inside you to see your sibling taken in an untimely way.”

  “I don’t like to talk about it.”

  “That’s the way I figure it. We all get to the same barn. Why study on it?” When Noie didn’t reply, Jack said, “You scared of it?”

  “Of what?”

  “Dying.”

  “There are worse things.”

  “Cite one.”

  “Letting evil men harm the innocent. Not doing the right thing when honor is at stake. Why are we parked here?”

  “Since w
e’re wanted all over the state of Texas, I thought it might be a good idea to wait until it was dark before we drove into the yard of somebody who knows us.”

  “I don’t think this is smart, Jack.”

  “Many a man has tried to put me in jail, but I’ve yet to spend my first day there.”

  Jack got out of the car and unlocked the trunk and came back with a suitcase that he set on the hood.

  “What are you doing?” Noie asked.

  “Changing clothes.”

  “On a dirt road in the dark?”

  Jack began stripping off his soiled white shirt and unbuckling his trousers and slipping his feet from his battered cowboy boots, not replying, intent upon the project at hand, whatever it was. His chest and shoulders and arms and legs were white in the moonlight, and scars were crosshatched on his back from his ribs to his shoulder blades. He buttoned on a soft white shirt and pulled on a pair of tan slacks and slipped a pair of two-tone shoes on his feet, then unfolded a western-cut sport coat from the suitcase and pushed his arms into the sleeves. He sailed his wilted panama hat up an arroyo and knotted on a tie with a rearing horse painted on it and fitted a blocked short-brim Stetson on his head. He turned toward Noie for approval. “You know the mark of a man? It’s his hat and his shoes,” he said.

  “You look like the best-dressed man of 1945,” Noie said. “But what in God’s name is on your mind, Jack?”

  “Options.”

  “Can you translate that?”

  “An intelligent man creates choices. A stupid man lets others deal the hand for him.”

  “You’re not going to hurt that woman, are you?”

  “You must think pretty low of me.”

  “Not true. But I got to have your word.”

  “That’s what my mother used to say, right before she made me cut my own switch and skinned me into next week,” Jack said.

  The front porch light was on when they parked in the yard of the gingerbread house and knocked on the screen door. “Just an advanced warning, Noie,” Jack said. “I think some lies are being told about me. So don’t necessarily believe everything this lady says.”