James Burke - Feast Day of Fools

“I’d like to invite you in,” Anton Ling said to Hackberry. “But I have to go to San Antonio. Some of our people are in jail.”

“Your people?” Pam said.

“Yes, that’s what I call them. They’re destitute, cheated out of their money by coyotes, hunted by nativist snipers, and generally treated as though they’re subhuman. The particular woman I’m going to try to bail out watched her two-year-old daughter die of a rattlesnake bite in the desert.”

“I think Pam was just asking a question, Miss Anton,” Hackberry said.

“No, she was making a statement. She’s done it several times now.”

“Why is it we have to keep coming out here to protect you from yourself? To be honest, it’s getting to be a drag,” Pam said.

“Then your problem can be easily solved. Just leave and don’t bother to come back.”

“I think that’s a good idea,” Pam said.

Hackberry was not listening. The thunderheads had blotted out the sun, dropping the countryside into shadow. He had turned his head toward the southeast, where the wind was whipping dust off the hilltops and riffling the mesquite that grew down the slopes. His eyes fixed on a spot where rain had started to tumble out of the sky and a muted sound like crackling foil seemed to leak from the clouds. Hackberry opened and closed his mouth to clear his ears and listen to the sound that had started and now had stopped.

“What is it?” Pam said.

“Somebody was firing a machine gun,” he replied.

“I didn’t hear it,” she said.

Because you were too busy talking, he thought. But he didn’t say it. “You drive. Good-bye, Miss Anton. Thank you for your time.”

“I’ll follow you,” she said.

“That’s not a good idea,” he said.

“My property line goes right through the hills. I have a right to know who’s on my land.”

“In this case, you don’t. Stay here, please. Don’t make me ask you again,” he said.

He got in the passenger side of the cruiser and closed the door, not looking back, then glanced in the outside mirror. Anton Ling was already getting into a skinned-up pale blue truck seamed with rust, the front bumper secured by baling wire. “This stuff has to stop, Pam,” he said.

“Tell her, ” Pam said.

“You two are more alike than you think.”

“Which two?”

“You and Miss Anton. Who else?”

“Yeah?” she said, giving him a look. “We’ll talk more about that later.”

“No, we won’t. You’ll drive and not speak for me to others when we’re conducting an investigation.”

“Maybe I should turn in my badge, Hack. That’s how you make me feel. No, I take that back. I can’t even describe how you make me feel,” she said. “You treated me like I was a fence post.” She started the engine, then had to stop and concentrate on what she was doing.

“You’re one of the best cops I’ve ever known,” he said.

“Save it. You hide behind your years. It’s a sorry excuse.”

“My wife died on this date, Pam. I don’t want to participate in this kind of conversation today. We’re on the job. We need to give this nonsense a rest.”

“I went out to the grave this morning. I thought you might be there.”

He looked at her blankly. “Why did you go there?”

“I thought you might need somebody. I put flowers on her grave.”

“You did that?”

She stared at the hills, her hands tight on the steering wheel, rain striking on the glass. Her expression was wan, her eyes dead. “I think you heard thunder,” she said. “I don’t believe anything is out there.”

“You put flowers on Rie’s grave?”

She would not speak the rest of the way to the place in the hills where Hackberry believed he had heard the staccato firing of a submachine gun. He took a bottle of aspirin from his shirt pocket and ate two of them and gazed out the window, his thoughts poor consolation for the spiritual fatigue that seemed to eat through all his connective tissue.

Pam drove off the main road and up an incline dotted with cactus and small rocks and mesquite and yucca plants whose leaves were darkening in the rain. She squinted at a flat place between two knolls, the sky sealed with black clouds all the way to the southern horizon.

“There’s a telescope on a tripod. It looks like it has a camera on it,” she said.

“Stop here. You go to the left. I’ll come around from the right,” Hackberry said.

She braked the Jeep and turned off the ignition. “Hack?” she said.

“Yes?”

“Nothing,” she said.

“Say it.”

“I’ve got your back.”

“You always do. That’s why I wouldn’t partner with anyone else,” he said.

She looked directly into his face, her lips slightly parted, her teeth white. She made him think of a young girl outside a prom, her face tilted up, waiting to be kissed. Then she opened the door and stepped out into the rain, unsnapping the strap on her. 357, her arms pumped and brown and glistening. She looked beyond him, down the incline, and lifted her chin as though pointing. He turned around and saw Anton Ling’s pickup truck approaching from the dirt road, clattering across the rocks, the cactus raking under the bumper and oil pan. “Get down there and stop her,” he said.

“Gladly,” Pam said.

As soon as Pam began walking down the incline, Hackberry headed uphill between the two knolls toward the telescope and camera. He pulled his. 45 revolver from its holster and let it hang loosely against his leg, his back straight so the pain that lived in his lower spine would not flare like an electric burn across his back and wrap around his thighs. He glanced once over his shoulder, then continued straight on toward the telescope, knowing already what he would find, knowing also that his nemesis, Jack Collins, had once again written his signature across the landscape with a dirty finger and had disappeared into the elements.

When Hackberry was little more than a teenage boy, in a battalion aid station at Inchon and later on the firing line at the Chosin Reservoir and even later in a giant POW enclosure the prisoners called the Bean Camp, he had acquired an enormous amount of unwanted knowledge about the moribund and the dead and the rites of passage from the world of the living into the land of the great shade. The opalescence in the skin, the wounds that had the glassy brightness of roses frozen inside ice, and the bodies stuffed in sleeping bags and stacked as hard as concrete in the backs of six-bys were the images a war poet might focus on. But the real story resided in the eyes. The marines and soldiers and navy corpsmen who were mortally wounded or dying of disease or starvation had stared up at him with a luminosity that was like ground diamonds, the pupils tiny dots, so small they could not have recorded an image on the brain. Then, in a blink, the light was gone, and the eyes became as opaque and devoid of meaning as fish scale. That was when he had come to believe that the dying indeed saw through the curtain but took their secrets with them.

The two men on the ground, dressed as casual hikers, must have thought they had walked into a Gatling gun. Their clothes were punched with holes from their shoes to their shirt collars. The spray of ejected shell casings showed no pattern, indicating the shooter had probably shifted his position and fired several bursts from different angles, as though enjoying his work. The fact that one man’s hand was twitching at his side seemed almost miraculous, as though the hand were disembodied and the only part of the victim that was still alive.

“Pam! Call for the paramedics and the coroner and tell Felix and R.C. to get out here!” Hackberry shouted down the incline.

He holstered his revolver and walked past a downed tree, the root-ball impacted with dirt. A worthless guitar, the strings coated with rust, lay on the ground. He gazed down a series of flat yellow rocks that descended like stair steps into a wide flume where an SUV was parked and a second vehicle had left a curlicue of tire tracks in the dirt. He strained his eyes against the distance and thought he saw a speck on the horizon that might have been a car, but he couldn’t be sure. Then the speck was lost inside the bolts of lightning that leaped from the earth to the clouds like gold thread.