Feast Day of Fools hh-10 Page 5

  She was wearing khakis and sandals and a white shirt with flowers on it and a white baseball cap with a purple bill. When he didn’t answer, she looked around her, uncertain. “You have a beautiful place.”

  “What can I do for you, Miss Anton?”

  “Two nights ago a man came to my house. He said his name was Antonio. But I think he’s the man called Krill.”

  “What did this fellow want?”

  “He said he was a hunter. He said he was hunting a man for pay. I told him the man he was looking for had been at my house, but he had gone and wouldn’t be there again.”

  “Why did you wait to report this?”

  There was a beat. “I’m not sure.”

  “You thought you would be violating a confidence?”

  “This man is deeply troubled. In part, I think he came to me for help. Why are you shaking your head?”

  “Don’t be disingenuous about these guys. You know what the conversion rate is on death row? Try a hundred percent. Turn them loose and see what happens.”

  “You believe the state has the right to kill people?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Who cares?”

  “Sheriff, I came here as an act of conscience. This man probably won’t harm me, but eventually, he’ll kill others. So I had to come here.”

  “You don’t think he’ll hurt you? Why should you get an exemption?”

  “Three of his children were killed by a helicopter gunship. He believes their spirits will wander until they’re baptized. He thinks somehow I can baptize them retroactively. He says he can’t take his problem to a priest because he murdered a French Jesuit.”

  “I think you’re dealing with someone who’s morally insane, Miss Anton. I think it’s both naive and dangerous to pretend otherwise. Who’s he working for?”

  “I asked him that. He wouldn’t say.”

  “Who’s the guy you gave refuge to?”

  “A man of peace. A man who became involved in a military program that kills innocent people.”

  “Has the FBI interviewed you?”

  “No.”

  “When they do, I suggest you give them a better answer than the one you just gave me. You were in the employ of Air America in Indochina, Miss Anton. People who have a lot of guilt have a way of showing up under one flag or another.”

  She took a Ziploc bag from her pocket. In it was a dirty paper plate. “Antonio ate from this. I suspect it will be of some help to you.”

  “Why are both the FBI and Krill after the same man?”

  “Ask them. Before I go, I need to straighten out something. My work has nothing to do with guilt. We live in a country that has created a huge serving class of illegals who work for low pay at jobs Americans won’t do. We get along very well with these people during prosperous times. But as soon as the economy goes down, they’re treated like dirt. You’re obviously an intelligent and educated man. Why don’t you act like it?”

  She turned and began walking back toward the gate. Then she stopped and faced him again. For some reason, her baseball cap and her tight-fitting flowered shirt made her look younger and smaller than she was. “One other thing, sir,” she said. “Why do you look at me so strangely? It’s quite rude.”

  Because you remind me of my beloved wife, he thought.

  The Reverend Cody Daniels had carpentered his house to resemble the forecastle of a ship, up on a bluff that overlooked a wide arid bowl flanked by hills that contained layers of both red and chalk-colored stone, giving them in the sunset the striped appearance of a freshly sliced strawberry cake. A sandstone bluff rose straight into the air behind the house, and on it he had painted a huge American flag, one that was of greater dimension than the roof itself. In the evening, Cody Daniels liked to walk back and forth on his front deck, surveying the valley below, sometimes gazing at the southern horizon through the telescope mounted on the deck rail, sometimes simply taking pleasure in the presence of his possessions-his canary-yellow pickup, his horse trailer, his cistern up on the hill, his silver propane tanks that ensured he would never be cold, the smell of the game he had shot or beef he had butchered dripping into the ash inside his smokehouse, the wood shell of a church that came with the property down on the hardpan, a building he had given a second life by putting pews inside it and a blue-white neon cross above the front door.

  Some evenings, after the last wash of gold light on the eastern side of the valley had risen into the sky and disappeared like smoke breaking apart in the wind, he would focus his telescope on a gingerbread house far to the south and watch the events that seemed to unfold there two or three times a week.

  When the evening star rose above the hills, Cody Daniels could see small groups of people moving out of the haze that constituted the Mexican border-like lice fleeing a flame, he thought, carrying their possessions in backpacks and knotted blankets, their children stringing behind them, not unlike nits.

  He had heard about the woman who lived in the gingerbread house. The wets coming across the border knelt before her altar and believed the glow of votive candles burning at the base of a statue somehow signaled they had reached a safe harbor. Not true, Cody Daniels thought. Not as long as he had the power to send them back where they came from. Not as long as there were still patriots willing to act independently of a government that had been taken over by mud people who were giving away American jobs to the beaners.

  Cody could have tapped just three digits into his phone console and brought the authorities down on the Asian woman’s head. The fact that he didn’t made him swell with a sense of power and control that was rare in his life. The Asian woman, without even knowing it, was in his debt. Sometimes she passed him on the sidewalk in town, or pushing a basket in the grocery store, her eyes aimed straight ahead, ignoring his tip of his hat. He wondered what she would say if she knew what he could do to her. He wondered how she would enjoy her first cavity search in a federal facility. He wondered if she would be so regal in a shower room full of bull dykes.

  On the deck this evening, with the wind cool on his face, he should have felt at peace. But the memory of his treatment by the deputy sheriff, the one named Tibbs, was like a thumbtack pressed into his scalp. His eyes had the cupped look of an owl’s from the Mace she had squirted into them. The baton stroke she had laid across the back of his calves flared to life each time he took a step. Then, for reasons he didn’t understand, the thought of her slamming him against the truck, of forcing him on his face and kneeing him in the spine and hooking him up, brought about a weakening in his throat, a stiffening in his loins, and fantasies in which he and the woman were in a soundproof room that had no windows.

  But Cody did not like to pursue fantasies of this kind, because they contained images and guilty sensations that made no sense to him. It was not unlike watching two or three frames of a film-an image of her hand flying out at his face, a fingernail cutting his cheek-and refusing to see what was on the rest of the spool.

  Unconsciously, he rubbed the dime-sized pieces of scar tissue on the back of his fingers. Long ago, when he was hardly more than a boy riding freight trains across the American West, he had learned lessons he would take to the grave: You didn’t sass a railroad bull; you didn’t sass a hack on a county penal farm; and you didn’t put tattoos on your body that told people you were nobody and deserving of whatever they did to you. You rinsed their abuse off your skin and out of your soul; you became somebody else, and once you did, you no longer had to feel shame about the person who somehow had brought degradation upon himself.

  Then you did to others what had been done to you, freeing yourself forever of the role of victim. Or at least that was what some people did. But he hadn’t done that, he told himself. He was a minister. He had an associate of arts degree. Truckers talked about him on their CBs. He handed out pocket Bibles to rodeo cowboys behind the bucking chutes. Attractive waitresses warmed up his coffee for free and called him Reverend. He wrote letters of rec
ommendation for parolees. He had baptized drunkards and meth addicts by submersion in a sandy pool by the river that was as red as the blood of Christ. How many men with his background could say the same? And he had done it all without therapists or psychiatrists or titty-baby twelve-step groups.

  But his self-manufactured accolades brought him no solace. He had been bested by Sheriff Holland’s chief deputy and, in a perverse way, had enjoyed it. He had been threatened with bodily harm by the sheriff, as though he were white trash. And while all this was happening, an Oriental woman was openly aiding the wets and getting christened for her efforts as La Magdalena. Anything wrong with this picture?

  Maybe it was time to let Miss Chop Suey 1969 know who her neighbors were.

  In the fading twilight he drove in his pickup down the long, tire-worn dirt track that traversed the valley from his house to the county road that eventually led to the southern end of the Asian woman’s property. He passed two abandoned oil storage tanks that had turned to rust, a burned-out shack where a deranged tramp sometimes stayed, and a private airstrip blown with tumbleweed, the air sock bleached of color. He turned onto the Asian woman’s property and passed a paint-skinned gas-guzzler driven by two men who were sitting on a hillside, staring north at the Asian woman’s compound. They were smoking hand-rolled cigarettes and wore new straw hats and boots that were curled up at the toes. One of them pulled on a bottle that had no label, and gargled with whatever was inside before he swallowed. The other man, the taller of the two, had a pair of binoculars hanging from his neck. His shirt was open on his chest, and his skin looked as brown and smooth as clay from a riverbank. Cody Daniels nodded at him but didn’t know why. The man either ignored or took no notice of Cody’s gesture.

  If you want to live in this country, why don’t you show some manners? Cody thought.

  He drove between the gateless walls of the Asian woman’s compound and was surprised by what he saw. Mexicans were eating from paper plates on the gallery and the front steps and at a picnic table under a willow in the middle of the yard. Obviously, no effort was being made to conceal their presence. He got down from his truck and immediately saw the Asian woman staring at him from the gallery. She was the only person among all the people there who looked directly at him. She stepped into the yard and walked toward him, her eyes never losing contact with his. He felt himself clear his throat involuntarily.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked.

  “Introducing myself. I live up yonder, in the bluffs. I’m Reverend Cody Daniels, pastor of the Cowboy Chapel.”

  “I know who you are. You’re a nativist and not here on a good errand.”

  “A what?”

  “State your business.”

  “Who are all these people?”

  “Friends of mine.”

  “Got their papers, do they?”

  “Why don’t you ask them?”

  “I don’t speak Spanish.”

  “You have a cell phone?”

  “Yeah, I do, but the service isn’t real good here. Want to borrow it?” He felt the open door of his truck hit him in the back.

  “Either call 911 or leave.”

  “I didn’t come here to cause trouble.”

  “I think you did.”

  “I try to save souls, just like you. I saw y’all from my deck up there, that’s all. I got a telescope. I’m an amateur astronomer.”

  She stepped closer to him. “Let me see your hands.”

  “Ma’am?”

  “I won’t hurt you.”

  “I know that,” he said, half laughing.

  “Then let me see your hands.”

  He held them out, palms up, in front of her. But then she turned them over and moved her thumbs across the scar tissue on the back of his fingers. “You were in prison, weren’t you?” she said.

  “I don’t know if I’d call it prison.” He paused. “I was on a county farm in New Mexico when I was a boy.”

  “You had your tattoos removed when you came out?”

  “I did it myself. Burned them off with acid and took out the leftover flesh with nail clippers.” He started to pull his hands away from her, but she held on to them. He grinned. “I know what you’re gonna say. You’re gonna tell me I had ‘love’ and ‘hate’ on my fingers, aren’t you? Well, I didn’t. I guess that shows how much you know.”

  “No, you had the letters B-O-R-N tattooed on your left hand, the letter T on your left thumb, the letter O on your right thumb, and L-O-S-E on your right hand. Who taught you such a terrible concept about yourself?”

  “I had no such thing on there.”

  “Why do you feel guilty over things that weren’t your fault? You were just a boy. People hurt you and tried to rob you of your innocence. You don’t have to be ashamed of what happened to you. You don’t have to be afraid of people who look different or speak a different language.”

  He felt himself swallowing. Through the wetness in his eyes, he saw the people in the yard and on the steps and gallery shimmer and go in and out of focus. “I’m not afraid of anything. If I ever catch up with the sonsofbitches who did what they did, you’ll see how afraid I am.”

  She squeezed both of his hands tightly in hers. “You have to forgive them.”

  He tried to pull away from her again, but she held on. He said, “I hope those men go to hell. I hope they burn from the top down and the bottom up. I hope Satan himself pours liquid fire down their throats.”

  “Would you drink poison in order to get even with others?”

  “Sell that Dr. Phil douche rinse to somebody else. They draped me across a sawhorse. I was seventeen. You ever been raped? You wouldn’t be so damn quick to advise if you had.”

  “Stay and eat with us.”

  “Are you out of your mind, woman? Let go of me.”

  But she didn’t. She squeezed his hands tighter, her face staring intently up into his. He freed one of his hands and used it to pull her other hand off his and fling it from him. He got into his truck and started the engine and rammed the transmission into reverse. He steered by glancing over his shoulder, the pedal to the floor, scouring dirt out of the yard, so he would not have to look into the Asian woman’s face again.

  How had she gotten into his head? How did she know his history with such accuracy? He had always claimed he could read people’s thoughts. But that wasn’t true. He could read personalities, character traits, and especially secret designs that hid in the eyes of a manipulator. Every survivor could. That was how you became a survivor. But she was the real thing. She had seen into his past in a way no one ever had, and that thought made him grind his molars.

  The purple haze he had seen earlier had spread across the valley floor, and he had to turn on his headlights to see his way down the dirt track to the county road. He had forgotten about the two Mexicans who had been smoking on the hillside earlier; he had even temporarily forgotten the rudeness one of them had shown Cody when he tried to say hello. The two men had gotten back into the gas-guzzler, and evidently had decided to stop and urinate at a spot where the dirt track was pinched on either side by big piles of rock.

  He slowed his pickup and hit his high beams, drenching the two figures with an electric brilliance, carving their rounded spines, their splayed knees, the cupping of their phalluses, the amber arc of their urination out of the darkened landscape.

  The license plate on the gas-guzzler was dented and filmed with a patina of dried mud and attached to the bumper with coat-hanger wire. Cody could see COAHUILA at the bottom of the plate. He mashed on his horn, holding the button down, clicking his high beams on and off, while the two men stuffed their phalluses back in their pants, their eyes glinting like glass.

  The shorter of the two men walked toward Cody’s truck, shielding his eyes from the glare with one hand. His jaw was as heavy-looking as a mule’s shoe, his forehead ridged like a washboard, his hair and chin stubble the color of rust. “You got a problem, chico?” he said.

  “ Chico
?” Cody said.

  “That means ‘boy,’” the man with orange hair said. “You got a problem, chico boy?”

  “Yeah, how about getting your shitbox off the road? Also, find a public restroom and stop polluting the countryside. There’s one at the truck stop up on the four-lane. It’s got a dispenser of toilet-seat covers on the wall. The sign on the dispenser says MEXICAN PLACE MATS . That’s how you’ll know you’re in the restroom.”

  “This is a funny guy here,” the man called back to his friend. “Come up here and listen. He is very funny.”

  Cody looked in his rearview mirror and could see only a dim glow from the compound of the Asian woman. The stars seemed to arch overhead and stretch beyond the horizon and curve over the earth’s rim. “I need to get about my business. How about it?” He lifted his finger to indicate their vehicle, but his hand felt disconnected from his wrist, lighter than it should.

  “What is your business, senor?” said the man with a jaw like a mule’s shoe, leaning in the window, his breath rife with onions and mescal, the whites of his eyes a watery red.

  “I’m a preacher.”

  “Hey, jefe, the funny gringo is a preacher. That’s why he called my car a shitbox and shone his headlights on us while we were relieving ourselves.”

  The second man approached Cody’s window, touching his friend on the shoulder, indicating he should move aside. “That’s right? You’re a preacher?” he said.

  “Reverend Cody Daniels. But I got to be getting on my way.”

  “You work with La Magdalena?”

  “I’m just a neighbor making a neighborly visit. I live up yonder, in the bluffs. I got people waiting on me.”

  The tall man’s shoulders seemed unnaturally wide for his thin waist. His profile made Cody think of an ax blade. “Why are you so nervous?” the man asked. “I do something to make you nervous? You have never seen somebody relieve himself on a road in the dark?”