Feast Day of Fools hh-10 Page 8

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Late Sunday afternoon Pam Tibbs parked the department’s Jeep Cherokee at Hackberry’s front gate and walked up the flagstone steps to his gallery and knocked on the door. He answered in his sock feet, his reading glasses on his nose. “I called twice and you didn’t answer, so I thought I’d drive out,” she said.

  “I was in the pasture,” he said.

  “Maydeen got a report on an illegal dumping and another one on a break-in at a hunting camp. Both instances involved two guys. The dumping turned out not to be a dumping.”

  “I’m not following you.”

  “Last night a motorist saw two guys prowling in a creek bed and thought they were dumping trash. It turned out they were rifling the back of a camper. They stole some clothes and shoes and sleeping bags and a propane stove and a first-aid kit. This morning a guy with a long, pointy beard, wearing a tattered suit coat, was seen busting the lock on the back door of a hunting camp. He sounds like the same homeless guy who’s been getting into people’s garbage by Chapala Crossing. Except this time he had someone with him. They cleaned about forty pounds of venison out of the game locker. The witness said the guy in the tattered coat looked like he belted his trousers with a piece of clothesline. Sound familiar?”

  “Jack Collins is dead,” Hackberry said.

  “You’re convinced of that?”

  “He either died of his wounds underground or was eaten by coyotes or cougars. He wasn’t a supernatural entity. He was a psychopath and misogynist who probably couldn’t tie his shoes without a diagram.”

  “Then who’s the guy who keeps showing up around here?”

  “Another lunatic. We’re not in short supply of them.”

  “The guy with the tramp was limping. Like maybe a guy who ran a long distance with no shoes on.”

  “The man who escaped from Krill?”

  “You know that burned-out shack where the tramp with the beard was probably living?”

  “What about it?”

  “I checked it out. It was soaked with an accelerant. Who would go to that much trouble to burn a shack?”

  “You really think Collins is alive?”

  “I’m not sure. But I’m bothered that you won’t accept the possibility. I think you want to believe that evil dies.”

  She couldn’t tell if he was thinking about what she had said or if he had lost interest. The sun had gone behind a hill, darkening the inside of his house, and she couldn’t see past him into the shadows. “Did I disturb you?” she said.

  “Pardon?”

  “You didn’t invite me in. Are you with someone?”

  “Do I look like it?”

  “You tell me. Did you enjoy your Mexican dinner with China’s answer to Mary Magdalene?” She didn’t wait for him to reply. “It’s a small town. Why don’t you at least spend the gas money to go into another county?”

  “You need to concentrate on other matters, Pam.”

  “You’re eating out with a woman who’s part of a homicide investigation. Maybe someone who’s aiding and abetting.”

  “Come in.”

  “No.”

  “Don’t be resentful toward her.”

  “I’m resentful toward you. You’re letting her jerk you around. You’re acting like a damn fool.”

  “You mean an old fool.”

  “Don’t put words in my mouth. Don’t you dare act like I’ve ever been disloyal to you.”

  He held his eyes on hers, refusing to concede an inch. She picked up his hand and pressed it against her left breast, clenching down on his wrist so he couldn’t remove it. “Feel my heart.”

  “Don’t do this, Pam.”

  “Don’t you ever accuse me of disloyalty.”

  “I wouldn’t do that, Pam. Never.”

  “Then why the hell do you hurt me?”

  “I don’t mean to.”

  “That’s all you’re going to say?”

  “Yes, ma’am, that’s about it.”

  “I want to hit you. With my fists. As hard as I can. I want to break the bones in your face.”

  “Go ahead.”

  Her eyes went in and out of focus, a nest of blue veins pulsing by her temple. “What do you want me to do now?” she said.

  “About what?”

  “About Preacher Jack Collins or whoever this tramp and his friend are. About doing my goddamn job.”

  “We start at the hunting camp. Later, I’d like to buy you dinner.”

  “In your dreams,” she said. “I’ll wait for you in the Jeep.”

  Inside a ravine snaking back through a collection of sandstone formations that resembled pillars in an ancient church, a man wearing a soiled panama hat tipped down over his brow and a pin-striped suit coat that was frayed white on the tips of the sleeves squatted at the opening to a cave. He stared into a cook fire that he had built inside a ring of stones, and he fed the fire incrementally, stick by stick, as though fascinated with either his power over the flames or an image he saw inside them. In the firelight, his face seemed dotted with lumps of proud flesh, his cheeks and throat streaked with the irregular stubble of a man who had shaved with a dry razor.

  “Why are you grinning?” asked the man on the opposite side of the fire ring.

  “No reason,” the man in the suit coat replied.

  But he was not telling the truth. Inside the flames, he saw a woman’s hair and the paleness of her face and the redness of her mouth. He saw the wantonness of her smile, the lewdness in her eyes, the flash of an incisor tooth as she glanced at him from behind a blanket she had hung on the wash line dividing the boxcar where she and her son lived. He heard the heavy weight of a Mexican gandy dancer settling between her thighs.

  “You’re a mysterious fellow,” said the man on the far side of the fire ring.

  “How’s that?”

  “You have little to share, but you befriend a stranger who has nothing. You’re willing to break the law to find food for a man you owe nothing.”

  “Maybe I stole it for myself.”

  “A man as poor as you is not a thief.”

  “Maybe I like your name.”

  “It’s hardly original,” said the man on the opposite side of the fire. His face was long and homely, his ears too large, his nose shaped like a big teardrop, his shoulders knobbed as though they had been turned on a lathe. His name was Noie Barnum.

  “Noie restarted the human race,” the man in the suit coat said. “Noie watched Yahweh hang the archer’s bow in the sky. ‘God gave Noie the rainbow sign / It’s not by water, it’s the fire next time.’ You know that song?”

  “I haven’t heard it.”

  “Yahweh made a contract. He stopped the rain and stilled the water and brought Noie and the ark to land. Before the flood, man was not supposed to break the skin of an animal with a knife. After the flood, the lion was supposed to lie down with the lamb. But it didn’t work out that way. That’s why the land is cursed.”

  “You’re either a closet college professor or you’ve spent a lot of time in the public library,” Noie Barnum said.

  “You wouldn’t mock a fellow, would you?” the man in the suit coat replied. His teeth shone at the corner of his mouth when he spoke, but there was no rancor in his voice.

  “No, sir, I think you’re a good man. You and the Asian lady saved my life.”

  “Which Asian lady?”

  “The one the Mexicans call La Magdalena.”

  “The papist?”

  “I’m not sure what she is. I know she’s brave and she’s kind. I think she’s a lot like you, Jack.”

  “I doubt that.” Jack flipped a twig into the fire, fascinated with its fate. He pried open the blade from his pocketknife and stripped the bark from a mesquite branch and sharpened the end into a point, then speared four chunks of venison and watched them curl and brown over the campfire. His fingernails were rimmed with dirt, his shapeless trousers stuffed inside the tops of his cowboy boots. As he squatted on his heels, his buttocks
looked as thin as barrel slats. He opened a can of beans and stuck them down in the coals. He poured water from a canteen into two aluminum cups and handed one of them to Noie. “You hear that sound?” he asked.

  “What sound?”

  “Out yonder, to the southwest, just below the evening star.”

  “I don’t hear or see anything,” Noie said.

  “It’s a helicopter. When it flies over, don’t look up. The light always reflects off your face. Even starlight does. Ever see ducks or geese change their flight pattern when you glance up at them? They read the propensities down below a lot better than we do.”

  “Shouldn’t we put out the fire?”

  “These hills and canyons and dry washes are full of fires. The people in that helicopter are looking for white men. They’re looking for us.”

  “Who are you, Jack?”

  “You don’t want to know.”

  From his belt loops, Jack pulled the piece of rope he had been using to hold up his trousers. He dropped it in the fire and watched it spark and then dissolve on the coals like a snake blackening and curling back on itself. He uncoiled a belt he had taken from the camper shell of the parked pickup and threaded it through the loops on his trousers, working the point around his skinny hips to the buckle, totally absorbed with the task.

  “I didn’t mean to offend you,” Noie said.

  “Why study on a wretch like me?” Jack said. The thropping sounds of a helicopter passed overhead, the airframe silhouetting briefly against the moon like a giant predator. Jack sat motionlessly on a rock, smiling crookedly from under the brim of his panama hat, until the helicopter and the downdraft of its blades had disappeared in the darkness. He tossed Noie a tin plate. “Eat up. White-tailed venison cooked on a mesquite fire with a little pepper and salt is about as good as it gets.”

  Pam and Hackberry’s investigation into the theft at the hunting camp and from the camper shell of the pickup truck went nowhere. There were no recoverable prints and no witnesses who could provide any additional information or descriptive detail about the two men who had committed the break-ins. Early Monday morning Hackberry drove by himself to the burned shack where the tramp had occasionally been seen. But he was not the first to arrive there.

  Ethan Riser was standing among several men holding a conversation between two parked SUVs. Even though the morning air was soft, the sun hardly above the hills, the ground moist with night damp, all of the men were in shirtsleeves and wore shades, as though the sun were blazing in the center of the sky. Only Riser bothered to look at Hackberry when he got out of the cruiser and approached the SUVs. “Be with you in a minute, Sheriff,” Riser said.

  “No, sir, I need to talk with you now,” Hackberry said.

  Riser separated himself from the group and walked beside Hackberry toward the pile of ash and charcoal that had once been a shack where a nameless tramp sometimes lived. “Are you here for the same reasons I am?” Hackberry said.

  “What would that be?” Riser asked.

  “Don’t try to take me over the hurdles, Ethan.”

  “The federal employee we’re looking for is named Noie Barnum. If this guy falls into the wrong hands, he can do enormous injury to this country. Believe me, you cannot imagine the extent of the damage. I need your cooperation, and by ‘cooperation’ I mean you have to stop intervening in our affairs.”

  “Noie?”

  “Yeah, like the spelling in the King James Bible,” Riser said. “People in the southern mountains pronounce it ‘No-ee.’”

  “This is my county and my jurisdiction. You guys are our guests,” Hackberry said.

  “That’s outrageous.”

  “So is federal arrogance.”

  “I have to get back to work.”

  “No, you don’t,” Hackberry said. “What’s your interest in a burned-down shack?”

  “That’s not your concern.”

  “You think Jack Collins might have given refuge to Barnum?”

  “If you’ve figured everything out, why bother asking the FBI?”

  “I’m not asking the FBI. I’m asking you, man to man.”

  “We never found Collins’s body. His case is still open.”

  “You think he burned his shack to get rid of his prints?”

  “We haven’t come to any conclusions about any of this, at least not that we can pass on.”

  “ We? I asked you for an opinion about the torching of the shack. It’s not a difficult question.”

  “I think you should take your mind off world events. Do that for us, and we’ll do our best to stay out of your hair.”

  Hackberry gazed at the gray and black humps of ash and charcoal and scorched boards and cans of food that had exploded in the heat and the strips of rusted corrugated tin protruding from the pile. A charred Bible had been raked out on the grass. The pages, all of them burned as black as carbon paper along the outer margins, were flipping in the wind. Hackberry turned his attention back to Riser.

  “You didn’t bag the Bible,” Hackberry said.

  “Why should I?”

  “To see if Collins’s prints are on it.”

  Riser removed a ballpoint from his shirt pocket. He seemed to study it a moment; then he started clicking it. “I can never get these things to work right.”

  “You already know whose Bible that is. It belongs to Collins, doesn’t it?” Hackberry said.

  Riser stuck the ballpoint back in his pocket and glanced at his watch and at his colleagues by the SUVs. “I hope all this works out for everybody. Be seeing you, Sheriff,” he said.

  “Something else happened here. Collins didn’t burn the shack, did he?”

  “How do you know that?”

  “He’s a religious fanatic. He wouldn’t burn his Bible.”

  “You’re too smart for your own good. I mean that in a kindly way.”

  “You guys did it.”

  “No, we did not do it.”

  “Or somebody from ICE or the Border Patrol or the DEA. But one of y’all did it. Tell me I’m wrong. I want you to.”

  “So maybe you’re not wrong,” Riser said. “Maybe a hothead got pissed off and wanted to send Collins a message. Maybe unlike you, not everybody is always in control of his emotions.”

  “You’re telling me one of your people soaked private property with an accelerant and put a match to it, and you’re telling me lawmen do this with regularity?”

  “The U.S. Forest Service used to burn out squatters all the time.”

  “Nobody can be this dumb. Do you realize what y’all have done?”

  “The Department of Justice isn’t exactly Pee-wee Herman. We don’t quake in our shoes because we have to hunt down a self-anointed messiah who probably hasn’t changed his underwear since World War Two.”

  Hackberry walked over to the group of federal agents, still gathered between the two SUVs. “Which one of you guys torched the shack?” he asked.

  They stared at him blankly from behind their shades. “What shack?” one of them said.

  “I dug up nine of Jack Collins’s victims, all of them Asian, all female, some of them hardly more than children. He used a Thompson submachine gun, a full drum, fifty rounds, at almost point-blank range. Then they were bulldozed over behind the ruins of a church. One of them may have been still alive when she went into the ground. A Phoenix mobster sent three California bikers to pop him. Jack bribed their chippies to set them up and then turned the three of them into wallpaper.”

  “Sounds like the right guy might have got his house burned down,” one of the agents said.

  Hackberry walked back toward his cruiser, his face tight, his temples knotted with veins. Behind him, he heard one of the agents make a remark the others laughed at. But Hackberry didn’t look back. Instead, he kept his eyes focused on Ethan Riser. “That bunch of Ivy League pissants back yonder?” he said.

  “What about them?” Riser said.

  Hackberry opened the door to his cruiser. “I thought you were dif
ferent, that’s all,” he said.

  “You should have stayed with the ACLU, Sheriff. At least they have an understanding of procedure and protocol,” Riser said. “They try to think twice before they put their own agenda ahead of their country’s security. Where do you get off lecturing other people? Who died and made you God?”

  “Nobody. And that’s the problem every one of y’all has, Ethan. You wrap your lies in the flag and put the onus on others. Shame on every one of you,” Hackberry said.

  When he drove away, the back tires of his cruiser ripped two long lines out of the grass.

  That evening Hackberry was about to relearn that the past wasn’t necessarily a decaying memory and that its tentacles had the power to reach through the decades and fasten themselves onto whatever prey they could slither their suction cups around. When he returned home from work, he found an envelope stuck in his doorjamb. Inside was a silver-edged sheet of stationery folded crisply through the center. The note on it was written in bright blue ink, in a flowing calligraphy, the curlicues fading into wispy threads. It read: Dear Sheriff Holland, Congratulations on all your political success. My father always spoke fondly of you and I’m sure he would be very proud of you. Forgive me for dropping by without calling first, but your number was unlisted. Call my car phone if you can have drinks or dinner, or I’ll try to drop by later or at your office. With kindest regards,

  Temple Dowling

  Unconsciously, Hackberry glanced over his shoulder after reading the note, as though an old adversary lay just beyond the perimeter of his vision. Then he went into the house and tore the note and envelope into four pieces, then tore them again and dropped them in the kitchen waste can and washed his hands in the sink.

  It was easier to cleanse his skin than rinse his memory of Temple’s father, United States Senator Samuel Dowling. And Hackberry’s thoughts about the senator were uncomfortable not because the senator had been mean-spirited and corrupt to the core, but because Hackberry, when he ran for Congress, had, of his own choosing, fallen under the senator’s control.