James Burke - Feast Day of Fools

The shooting stopped as quickly as it had begun. The air was filled with smoke and lint and dust and tiny pieces of fiberboard. In the light from the hallway door, he could see two of Sholokoff’s men standing in the drift of smoke, one with a revolver, the other with a semiautomatic carbine that was fitted with a skeleton stock. He realized that Pam Tibbs was down, somewhere behind several crates of wine bottles that were broken and draining onto the floor. He could not see either Krill or Anton Ling. He found his shotgun among the cardboard boxes and propped the butt against the floor and used it to raise himself to one knee, his side and back on fire.

He saw the silhouette of a small man go across the doorway at the head of the stairs. “Frank?” a voice with a Russian accent said. “What’s happening down there?”

“We nailed the sheriff and his deputy,” Frank said. “I’ve got everything under control.”

“Are they dead?” the man with the Russian accent said.

“I’m not sure, sir.”

“Then be sure. Kill them. I want to see their heads.”

“You want to see their-”

“I want you to bring me their heads,” the man with the Russian accent said.

“Where’s Collins, sir?” Frank asked.

“Somewhere in the house. You finish down there and come around behind him. This is your opportunity to redeem yourself. Do not disappoint me, Frank.”

Frank raised the carbine with the wire stock to his shoulder and began firing at random all over the cellar, the bullets notching the stone walls, whanging off the cell doors, splintering the cases of wine that were bleeding pools of burgundy on the floor. With one knee for support, Hackberry raised the twelve-gauge and fired at the two men who stood at the bottom of the stairs. Most of the pattern struck a wood post, and the rest of the load flattened harmlessly against a wall behind the stairs.

Hackberry tried to work the pump and hold the shotgun with one hand, but instead of ejecting the spent shell, the mechanism jammed, and the spent shell was crimped sideways between the bolt and the chamber. In the gloom, he saw Pam sitting flatly on her buttocks behind a stack of rubber tires, her legs stretched out straight in front of her. There was a bullet wound in her back and what appeared to be an exit wound in the top of her left arm. She was trying to free her. 357 from her holster, but her hand kept fluttering on the grips and the leather strap fastened at the base of the hammer.

“Throw out your piece, Sheriff Holland,” Frank said. “I’ll talk with Mr. Sholokoff. He’s a businessman. This doesn’t have to end badly. Our common enemy up there is that smelly son of a bitch Jack Collins. Why take his weight?”

Hackberry’s side was throbbing, his face breaking with sweat. He could hear glass crunching under the boots of Sholokoff’s men as they began working their way carefully toward the pile of tires behind which Pam Tibbs had taken cover.

“Think about it, Sheriff,” Frank said. “The people you’re trying to rescue down here are killers. They murdered a guy who tried to treat them in a kindly way. Yeah, that’s right. Mike was his name. He was a good guy. He’s lying dead on the floor now, with shoestrings wrapped around his throat. How about it, Sheriff? How many guys get a second chance like this?”

Frank had grown cavalier about Krill and the Asian woman. When Anton Ling gathered herself up from the floor with the Air-weight. 38 five-round Smith amp; Wesson in her hand, Frank’s expression seemed amused, taking her inventory, his eyes sliding over her blood-streaked shift, the bruises on her face and arms and shoulders, the gash in her lower lip.

“I had a Chinese bitch of my own once,” Frank said. “Play your cards right and I might keep you around.”

Her first shot hit him an inch above the groin; the second one entered his mouth and exited an inch above the neatly etched hairline on the back of his neck.

His friend dropped his semiautomatic to the floor and lifted his hands in the air just before Anton Ling shot him in the heart.

Upstairs, the Thompson began firing again without letup, the rounds thudding into walls all over the house, the casings dancing on the floors, as though Jack Collins had declared war on all things that were level or square or plumb or that possessed any degree of geometric integrity.

Nobody could say Preacher Jack Collins wasn’t a fan of Woody Guthrie. “ Adios to you Juan, adios Rosalito, adios mi amigo Jesus and Maria,” he sang above the roar of the Thompson as he burned the entire ammo drum, hosing down the house from one end to the other, the barrel so hot that it scalded his hands when he reloaded.

He hunted down Sholokoff’s men in closets, crawl spaces, and behind and under the furniture and kitchen counters, blowing them apart as they cowered or tried to break and run.

These were the dreaded transplants from Russia and Brighton Beach or their surrogates in Phoenix? What a laugh.

Jack was having a fine time. He even enjoyed the rain blowing through the broken windows. It filled the house with a soft mist and the wet smell of grass and cornstalks and freshly plowed fields. The smell reminded him of rural Oklahoma during a summer rain, when the rivers and buttes were red and the plains green. His mother took him once to an Easter-egg roll behind a church where she had decided to get reborn. For whatever reason, Jack thought, it sure didn’t take. In fact, he’d always had the feeling that his mother had seduced the preacher.

No matter. When Jack’s Thompson was deconstructing the environment and people around him, he was no longer troubled by thoughts of his mother’s cruelty and the strange form of catatonic trance that seemed to take control of her metabolism and cause her to slip from one personality into another. Well, she got hers when she took a fall off the rocks on the property that eventually became his. It was an accident, of course. More or less. Yes, “accident” was a good word for it, he thought. Even though he had been in his late thirties when it happened, the details had never quite come together for him. How had the chain of events started? She had tried to grab his hand, right? Yes, he was sure about that, although he was a little hazy on what caused her to trip and start slipping backward off the ledge. But he definitely remembered her reaching out, her fingers clutching at his shirt, then at his wrist, then at the ends of his fingers. So he was not really a player in any of it, just a witness. Maybe that was her way of airbrushing herself out of his life. One second she was there; a second later, she was receding into the ground, growing smaller and smaller as she fell, looking back at him as if she had just spread herself out on a mattress for a brief nap.

When anybody got up the nerve to ask Jack how his mother had died, he always gave the same reply: “As she had lived. On her back. All the way down.”

Jack loved crime novels and film noir but could never understand the film critics’ laudatory attitude toward James Cagney’s portrayal of Cody Jarrett in White Heat. Would a mainline con like Jarrett crawl into his mother’s lap? Yuck, Jack thought. The image made his phallus shrivel up and want to hide. And how about that last scene, when Jarrett stands on the huge propane tank outside a refinery, shouting at the sky? Here’s a guy about to be burned to a crisp, and what does he say? “Made it, Ma! Top of the world!”

What a douchebag. Didn’t Cagney know better? The real Jarrett would have had his mother stuffed and used as a hat rack or doorstop.

Jack stood in the middle of the kitchen and gazed at the house’s interior and the level of destruction he had visited upon it. No one could accuse him of leaving the wounded on the field. Everyone he had shot was not only dead but dead several times over. He turned in a circle, the Thompson cradled across his chest, a tongue of smoke curling out of the barrel. The rain and wind were cool blowing on his skin through the shattered windows. On the lawn, he could see the slop bucket the maid had dropped when she was highballing for the cornfield. Where oh where was little Josef?