Feast Day of Fools hh-10 Read online

  The 1960s had been a transitional time in Texas’s political history. Hispanic farmworkers were unionizing, and huge numbers of black people had been empowered by the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Hackberry had watched the changes take place from a distance, at least when he wasn’t driving across the river to the brothels in Coahuila or Nuevo Leon, or staining the shaved ice in a tall glass one jigger at a time, with four inches of Jack Daniel’s, adding a sprig of mint and a teaspoon of sugar, just before taking the first drink of the day, one that rushed through his body with the intensity of an orgasm. Both the Democratic ticket and Hackberry’s first wife, Verisa, were delighted at the prospect of a handsome, towering war hero representing their district. Hackberry soon discovered that his addiction to whiskey and the embrace of a Mexican girl’s thighs didn’t hold a candle to the allure of celebrity and political power.

  The attraction was not entirely meretricious in nature. Couched inside the vulgarity and the crassness of the new rich who surrounded him, and the attempts at manipulation of the sycophants, were moments that made him feel he was genuinely part of history. For good or bad, he had become a player in the Jeffersonian dream, a decorated former navy corpsman from a small Texas town about to take up residence at the center of the republic. Maybe Jefferson’s dream had been tarnished, but that did not mean it was lost, he had told himself. Even George Orwell, describing a Spanish troop train leaving a station on its way to the front while brass bands were blaring and peasant girls were throwing flowers, had said that maybe there was something glorious about war after all.

  Hackberry remembered one balmy summer night of the campaign in particular. He had been standing on a balcony at the Shamrock Hotel in Houston, wearing only a bathrobe, a tumbler of whiskey and ice in one hand. Far below, columns of electric light glowed beneath the surface of a swimming pool built in the shape of a four-leaf clover. Across the boulevard, in a strange blend of the rural South and the New American Empire, oil wells pumped up and down- clink, clank, clink, clank -like the steady and predictable rhythm of lovers copulating, while cattle grazed nearby in belly-deep grass and thunder leaked from banks of black- and plum-colored rain clouds overhead.

  The hotel had been built by a notorious wildcatter who sometimes came into the Shamrock Room and got into brawls with his own patrons, wrecking the premises and adding to a mythos that told all of its adherents they, too, could become denizens of the magic kingdom, if only the dice toppled out of the cup in the right fashion. In forty-five minutes Hackberry was to address a banquet hall filled with campaign donors who could buy third-world countries with their credit cards. When he was in their midst, he sometimes had glimpses in his mind of a high school baseball pitcher who resembled him and who took a Mexican girl to a drive-in theater in 1947, knowing that as soon as he went into the restroom, he would be beaten senseless. But Hackberry did not like to remember the person he used to be. Instead, he had made a religion out of self-destruction and surrounded himself with people he secretly loathed.

  On that balcony high above the pool, he had not heard the senator walk up behind him. The senator had cupped his palm around the back of Hackberry’s neck, massaging the muscles as a father might do to his son. “Are you nervous?” the senator had said.

  “Should I be?”

  “Only if you plan to tell them the truth.”

  “What is the truth, Senator?”

  “That the world we live in is a sweet, sweet sewer. That most of them would drink out of a spittoon rather than give up their access to the wealth and power you see across the boulevard. That they want to own you now so they don’t have to rent you later.”

  Hackberry had drunk from the tumbler, the ice cubes clattering against the glass, the palm fronds moving in the breeze down below, the warmth of the whiskey slowing his heart like an old friend reassuring him that the race was not to the swift. “Telling the truth would be my greatest sin? That’s an odd way of looking at public service, don’t you think?”

  “There’s a far graver sin.”

  “What would that be?”

  “You already know the answer to that one, Hack.”

  “A worse sin would be disloyalty to someone who has reached out and anointed me with a single touch of his finger on my brow?” Hackberry had said.

  “That’s beautifully put. Your wife said you bedded a Mexican whore in Uvalde last night.”

  “That’s not true. It was in San Antonio.”

  “Oh, that’s good. I have to remember that one. But no more local excursions. There will be time enough for that when you get to Washington. Believe it or not, it will be there in such abundance that you’ll eventually grow bored with it, if you haven’t already. Usually, when a man of your background screws down, he’s not seriously committed to infidelity. It’s usually an act of anger rather than lust. A bit of trouble at home, that sort of thing. It beats getting drunk. Is that the case with the girl in San Antonio?”

  Hackberry had not answered.

  “Fair enough. There’s no shame in having a vice. It’s what makes us human,” the senator had said. Then he had patted Hackberry gingerly on the back of the head, after first leaning over the rail and spitting, even though people were eating at poolside tables directly below.

  Those moments on the balcony and the touch of the senator’s hand on his head had remained with Hackberry like a perverted form of stigmata for over four decades.

  An hour after tearing up the message left by Temple Dowling, Hackberry glanced through the front window and saw a man park a BMW at the gate and walk up the flagstones to the gallery. The visitor had thick silver-and-black hair and lips that were too large for his mouth. He was carrying an ice bucket with a dark green bottle inserted in it. Hackberry opened the door before his uninvited guest could ring the bell.

  “Hello, Sheriff. Did you find my note?”

  “Yes, sir, you’re Mr. Dowling. Leave the bucket and the bottle on the gallery and come in.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Guests in my home drink what I have or they don’t drink at all.”

  “I was supposed to meet a lady friend, but she stood me up. I hate to see a good bottle of wine go to waste. My father said you used to have quite a taste for it.”

  “You want to come in, sir?”

  “Thank you. And I’ll leave my bucket behind.” Dowling stepped inside and sat down in a deep maroon leather chair and gazed through the picture window, patting the tops of his thighs, a thick gold University of Texas class ring on his left hand. He wore a gray suit and a tie that was as bright as a halved pomegranate. But it was the composition of his face that caught the eye-the large lips, the pink cheeks and complexion that looked as though they had been dipped out of a cosmetics jar, the heavy eyelids that seemed translucent and were flecked with tiny vessels. “What a lovely view. The hills in front of your house remind me of-”

  “Of what?”

  “A Tahitian painting. What was his name? Gauguin? He was big on topless native women.”

  “I haven’t studied on it.”

  Temple Dowling smiled, his fingers knitting together.

  “Do I amuse you, sir?” Hackberry said.

  “I was thinking of something my father said. He admired your elan. I told him I’d heard you’d had a lot of girlfriends. My father replied, ‘Mr. Holland is a great lover of humanity, son. But let’s remember that half the human race is female.’”

  “I think maybe the senator misrepresented the nature of our relationship. We were not friends. We used each other. That’s a reflection on me, not him.”

  “Call me Temple.”

  “I was a drunkard and a whoremonger, not a man who simply had girlfriends. I used the bodies of poor peasant girls across the river without thinking about the misery that constituted their lives. When I met Senator Dowling, I was arrogant and willful and thought I could play chess with the devil. Then the day came when I realized I had gravely underestimated Senator Dowling’s potential. After I mentioned my fat
her’s political principles and his friendship with Franklin Roosevelt, the senator explained why my father had shot and killed himself. My father had taken a bribe. The people who bribed and later tried to blackmail him were friends of Senator Dowling. The senator took great pleasure in telling me that story.”

  “I’m not my father, Sheriff.”

  “No, sir, you’re not. But you’re not here out of goodwill, either.”

  “How much money do you think it would take to shut down the city of New York?”

  “I wouldn’t know, and I’m not interested.”

  “I don’t mean to just disrupt it, like the 9/11 attacks. I mean to flood the tunnels and destroy the bridges and hospitals and poison the water supply and to spread fire and plague and anthrax and suffering all over the five boroughs. What if I told you that fifty thousand dollars spent in the right place by the wrong guys could turn New York into Dante’s ninth circle?”

  “What business are you in, sir?”

  “The defense of our nation.”

  “Would you answer the question, please?”

  “Unmanned aerial vehicles.”

  “Drones that fire missiles?”

  “Sometimes. Other times they’re observation vehicles. The cost to manufacture a Patriot missile is three million dollars. The cost of drones is nickels and dimes in comparison. A small drone can be powered with batteries and is invulnerable to heat-seeking missiles. They can fly so slowly that jet interceptors can’t lock down on them. Hezbollah has used them inside Israeli airspace.”

  “What do you want from me?”

  “Nothing. I’m here to offer my services.”

  “They’re not needed, and they’re not wanted.”

  “Somewhere out there in those hills is a man named Noie Barnum. He’s an idealistic idiot who believes that sharing knowledge about our weapons will make for a safer world.”

  “My impression is that he was kidnapped and about to be sold to Al Qaeda when he escaped. He doesn’t sound like a willing participant in any of this.”

  “So why doesn’t he come in?” Dowling said.

  “That’s a good question.”

  “Barnum has told others he has ‘problems of conscience.’ His ‘problem’ is the fact that UAVs can cause collateral damage. I wonder what he thinks about the collateral influences of napalm and bombs dropped from B-52s. Or maybe he’d like more of our soldiers killed while digging ragheads out of their caves.”

  “Why are you here, sir?” Hackberry said.

  “I want Noie Barnum in a cage. I don’t want him in front of a microphone or a camera. I’d like to see him buried under concrete at Guantanamo, after his head was wrapped in a towel and half the Atlantic was poured into it.”

  “I’ll pass on your remarks to the FBI the first opportunity I have.”

  “Sheriff, who do you think runs this country?”

  “You tell me.”

  “Lyndon was put into office by Brown and Root. Lyndon is moldering in the grave, but Brown and Root merged with Halliburton and is still alive and well. You think our current president is going to rescind their contracts at almost every United States military base in the world?”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  Temple Dowling stood up from his chair and removed a strand of cat hair from his sleeve. “My father said you were never a listener.”

  “You ever hear of Preacher Jack Collins?”

  “No, who is he?”

  “The most dangerous man I’ve ever met,” Hackberry said.

  “What does that have to do with Noie Barnum?”

  “Jack may be feeding and protecting him. I’m not sure why. Maybe because the feds burned Jack’s shack. Keep hanging around this area, and you might get a chance to meet him. If he chats you up, try to get it on tape.”

  “Why would I want to do that?”

  “Because it’s the only record people will have of your death. Thanks for coming by.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  Using only starlight, Jack Collins and Noie Barnum made their way up a deer trail along the side of a bluff and into a narrow canyon that was threaded by a creek and strewn with chertlike yellow rock that had toppled from the ridges. Jack was in the lead, a nylon pack on his back, the straps pinching his suit coat tightly into his armpits, his body straining forward. Noie was limping badly, barely able to keep up, one arm tucked against his rib cage. There was a layer of fertile soil on the ground that sloped from the base of the cliffs down to the creek, and grass and wildflowers grew on it.

  Jack paused and wiped his face and took his companion’s measure. “You want to sit down, bud?” he asked.

  “No, sir, I’m fine.”

  “You’re a tough hombre. ”

  “I’m not in your class, Jack. You’re a mountain goat.”

  Jack walked back down the trail to where his companion was leaning on the twisted remains of a cedar tree, breathing through his nose. “It gets steep up yonder. Put your arm on my shoulder. If you hear a rattler, hold still and give him time to get out of your way.”

  “What if he doesn’t?”

  “Throw a rock at him.”

  “For real?”

  “I have the feeling people didn’t tell a lot of jokes where you’re from.”

  A cabin stood at the head of the canyon. Next to it was a loading chute that had turned gray with dry rot. In back were a barn with a sliding door and, farther up the hillside, an aluminum cistern supported on steel stanchions. Jack helped Noie the rest of the way up the trail, then slung his pack on the cabin’s porch and eased Noie down on the steps. “I’ll open up and fire the stove and get some food started,” he said.

  “Who owns this?” Noie asked.

  “Me.”

  “You own property?”

  “A mess of it.”

  “You’re quite a kidder, Jack.”

  “That’s me.”

  Jack removed the door key from behind a wallboard, unlocked the cabin, and went inside. He stuffed newspaper and kindling and three chunks of firewood in the cookstove and set them ablaze, then went outside and started the gasoline motor that powered the water pump and the electric lights. He slid open the barn door and gazed at an unpainted Trans Am that had lines of rust around the fenders, though it was mounted with four Michelin tires that looked fresh from the dealership. Then he returned to the cabin and opened two cabinets lined with canned goods and boxes of cereal and jars of preserves. He filled a skillet with corned beef and hash and dumped a can of spinach into a pan and set them on the stove. He went back on the porch and helped Noie to his feet. “I think your ribs are fractured,” he said. “The pain will probably be with you six weeks at the inside. You take the bunk, and I’ll make a pallet on the floor.”

  “Jack, I have no idea what’s going on. Is this really your camp?”

  “You haven’t figured out who I am?”

  “No, sir, I’m pretty confused.”

  “I was a longtime exterminator for Orkin. I still have my license. That’s a fact.”

  “You’re a pest exterminator?”

  “That says it all,” Jack replied.

  “Why are you doing all this for me?”

  “I like your accent. I never met a Quaker from Alabama.”

  In the early morning, Jack rose from his pallet and slipped on his boots and retrieved a flashlight and a shovel from the barn. The sky was bursting with stars as he labored up a path to a cave entrance that was not much wider than his hips. He squeezed through the opening, then stood up slowly, in a crouch, and flicked on the flashlight. The interior of the cave was as orange and pale as the inside of a pumpkin, the roof jagged and blackened by the cook fires of hunters and gatherers who may have been there before the Indians. On one wall, petroglyphs and images cut with stone tools depicted the slayings of both animals and people. Jack sometimes wondered if the battle in the stone mural had been fought over food or if the animals had been slain to ensure that the survivors would starve. There was another artifact in
the cave that seemed to answer the question for him. A hole used to grind corn had been augered into a slab of table rock that ran the length of one wall. Jack believed the grinding hole proved the battle was not over game. In Jack’s opinion, man killed because he had lost Eden. The bitterness was obviously so great that nothing short of mass fratricide could assuage it. Why else did people enjoy it so? Killing over food? Who was kidding whom? The throngs who attended blood sports weren’t worried about the quality of the hot dogs.

  The air inside the cave was cool and smelled of guano and damp clay and the field mice that nested on the ledges. Jack worked his way to the rear of the shaft, then set his light on the table rock and went to work, his dirty panama pulled down on his brow, his unshaved cheeks as lined as old parchment. The mixture of sand and clay and charcoal curdled up like old skin on the shovel’s blade as he pushed the handle toward the rear wall, peeling the ground away in layers, tossing each shovel load to one side. When he was down less than a foot, he glimpsed a piece of black vinyl in the dirt. He got to his knees and began scraping the dirt out of the hole with his fingers, brushing off the vinyl, pushing his hands sideways into the dirt to find purchase on the outer edges of the bag, feeling the hard, familiar contours inside it. He dug faster, his heart beating, his throat tingling with anticipation, his breath loud inside the confines of the cave. He sculpted the bag free of dirt from head to foot, then fitted both hands under it and lifted it from the ground. A damp odor that was as cool and pungent as bruised nightshade rose into his face.

  In his haste, he knocked the flashlight off the table rock, and the inside of the cave went black. He groped in the dirt until he felt the aluminum cylinder with his fingers, but when he pushed the switch on and off, nothing happened. The inside of the cave contained a level of darkness that only a blind man would understand. Jack felt as though his eyes had been scooped out of his head with a spoon. He stared up the shaft, hoping to see a glimmer of starlight through the opening, but there was both a bend and a drop in the floor, and the darkness was so absolute that it seemed to flow like liquid through his eyes into his skull.