James Burke - Feast Day of Fools

No, I will not think about that today, he told himself. The sunrise was pink in the east, the sky blue. His quarter horses were grazing in his south pasture, the irrigated grass riffling in the breeze, and he could see a doe with three yearlings among a grove of shade trees at the bottom of his property. The world was a grand place, a cathedral in its own right, he thought. How had Robert Frost put it? What place could be better suited for love? Hackberry couldn’t remember the line.

He slipped a halter on each of the foxtrotters and wormed them by holding their head up with the lead while he worked the disposable syringe into the corner of their mouth and squirted the ivermectin over their tongue and down their throat. Both of them were still colts and liked to provoke him by mashing down on the syringe, holding on until he had to drop the lead and use both hands to pry the flattened plastic cylinder loose from their teeth.

Just when he thought he was done, the chestnut, Missy’s Playboy, grabbed his straw hat and threw it on the branch of a tree, then thundered down the pasture, trailing the lead between his legs, kicking at the air with his hind feet. Hackberry did not hear the woman come up behind him. “I let myself in the gate. I hope you don’t mind,” she said.

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.