James Burke - Feast Day of Fools

When his visitors had driven away, Cody could hear kettle drums pounding inside his head. He sat down on a wood bench, his spine bowed, his eyelids fluttering, his muscles as flaccid as if his bones had been surgically removed from his body. The only other time he had felt this level of despair was when two county-prison gunbulls had finished with him and lifted him off a sawhorse and dropped him on a workroom floor like a slab of sweaty beef. He wondered why people thought they had to die in order to go to hell.

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?”