James Burke - Feast Day of Fools

The bartender placed the flats of his hands on the floor and tried to straighten himself against the jukebox. Hackberry raised his right boot fifteen inches into the air and stomped it down into the bartender’s face. The man’s head pocked a hole the size of a grapefruit in the jukebox. “Where’s my deputy?” Hackberry said.

“I don’t know,” the bartender said.

“You want another one?” Hackberry said.

Three men at a table by the dance floor got up quickly and went out the back door. A fourth man emerged from the bathroom and looked at the scene taking place by the jukebox and followed them outside. Hackberry could hear a whirring sound in his head and behind him the sound of Pam Tibbs chewing gum rapidly, snapping it, her mouth open. “Hack, dial it down,” she said.

“No, Bernicio here wants to tell us where R.C. is. He just wants the appropriate motivation. Right, Bernicio? You have to explain to your friends why you cooperated with your gringo dinner guests.” He brought his boot down again.

“Oh, shit,” Pam said, her voice changing.

Hackberry turned and saw two Mexican policemen in unpressed green uniforms come through the front door and walk the length of the bar. Both of them wore lacquered-billed caps and were short and dark-skinned. Both wore brass badges and shiny black name tags on their shirt pockets and semiautomatic pistols on their hips. One of them wore thick-soled military boots that were spit-shined into mirrors, the laces starched white. He had tucked the cuffs of his trousers into the boots, as a paratrooper might.

“?Quepasa, gringo?” asked the policeman with the shined boots.

Hackberry opened his badge holder and held it up for both policemen to see. “My deputy was kidnapped from this cantina. We were having a discussion with Bernicio as to my friend’s whereabouts. Thank you for your assistance.”

“Chinga tu madre. Tus credenciales valen mierda, hombre,” the policeman in shined boots said.

“My badge is worth shit? I should fuck my mother?” Hackberry said. “I’m not sure how I should interpret that.”

“Venga,” the policeman said, crooking two fingers.

“With respect, we’re not going anywhere with y’all except maybe to find my friend,” Hackberry said. He repeated himself in Spanish and then said in English and Spanish, “Right now we’re wasting time that we don’t have. My friend’s life is in jeopardy. The man on the floor is a criminal. You know that and so do I. We are all officers of the law, separated only by a few miles of geography. I ask your cooperation, and I say all these things to you out of respect for your office and the importance of your legal position in the community.”

“We are not interested in your evaluations of our community. You’re coming with me, gringo,” the policeman replied, this time in English, once again crooking two fingers. “You have no authority here, and you have assaulted an innocent man.”

“How’s this for authority, dickhead?” Pam Tibbs said, pulling her . 357 Magnum from her holster and aiming it with both hands at the policeman’s face.

“You are very unwise,” the policeman said.

“That’s right,” Pam replied. She cocked the hammer on her revolver with her thumb. “I have little judgment. That’s why I’m two seconds from flushing your grits.”

“Flushing? What do you mean, ‘flushing’?”

“Don’t test her, partner,” Hackberry said, surprised at the level of caution in his voice.

“No entiendo,” the policeman said.

Hackberry could feel a band of tension spreading along one side of his head. It was of a kind that he had experienced only a few times in his life. It stretched the blood veins along the scalp into knotted twine. You felt it seconds after hearing the spatter of small-arms fire, a sound that was as thin and sporadic and innocuous as the popping of Chinese firecrackers. Or you felt it when someone shouted out the word “Incoming!” Or when it wrapped itself around your head like piano wire as a monstrosity of a human being in a quilted coat slathered with mud on the front and mucus on the sleeves pulled back the bolt on a Soviet-manufactured burp gun and lifted the muzzle into your face.

Hackberry could smell the stagnant water and expectorated tobacco juice under the drain covers in the concrete floor, and the stale cigarette smoke in the air and the residual odor of dried sweat that seemed layered on every surface of the cantina. From the cribs in back, he could smell a stench that was like fish roe in the sun and human waste leaching from an open ditch. He could hear a drunk singing in one of the cribs in the alleyway. He could hear his own heartbeat starting to crescendo in his ears.

“She’ll kill you, buddy. Don’t lose your life over a man who wears the tattoo of a self-important fool on top of his head,” Hackberry said.

What followed was a phenomenon that Hackberry had seen perhaps no more than a dozen times in war and during his career as a lawman. Perhaps it could be called a vision of mortality. Or a moment when a person simply calculated his risk and evaluated what was to be lost or gained and then made his bet with full knowledge that his foot rested on the edge of the great precipice. Sometimes the heart-stopping pause that took place before the die was cast, when the filmstrip seemed to freeze inside the projector, dissolved into what Hackberry called “the blink.” The blink was not in the eyes but deep down in the soul, and the effect was immediate and as real as the brief twitch, like a rubber band snapping, that shuddered through the person’s face.

“I see nothing either exceptional or of value here,” the policeman with shined boots said. “This is not worthy of official attention. Serious men do not waste their time on situations such as this. Good evening to you, senor and senorita.”

With that, he and his companion walked out of the cantina and into the street.

Hackberry heard Pam release her breath and ease down the hammer on her revolver and return it to its holster. “I don’t want to ever relive that moment or even discuss it,” she said.

“Neither does Bernicio,” Hackberry said, looking down at the bartender. “Right?”

“Fuck you, man,” the bartender said.

Hackberry knelt on one knee, the splintered felt-tipped end of the pool cue still in his hand. He glanced at the front door to ensure that the policemen had not returned. He knew at some point they would try to back-shoot him and Pam in the street or call their friends to devise a means to get even for having their faces put in it by a woman. You didn’t shame a Mexican cop without running up a tab.

“You know where my deputy has been taken,” Hackberry said. “Not approximately but exactly. If you claim to not have this information, I will not believe you. The continuation of your life depends entirely upon your ability to convince me that you know where my friend is. Do you understand the implications of what I have told you?”

“No, I do not understand these things. Your words are mysterious and confusing. Why are you doing this to me?” the bartender said, blood glistening on his upper lip.

“Because you’re an evil man.”

“No, hombre, I am not evil. I’m a worker. I am part of the revolution.”

Hackberry placed his knee against the bartender’s chest and leaned forward and forced the shattered end of the pool cue over his teeth and into his mouth. “In five seconds I’m going to push this down your windpipe and out the side of your neck. Look into my face and tell me I won’t do it.”

He could feel Pam Tibbs’s hand clasp the top of his shoulder and squeeze. “Hack,” she said softly.

He paid no attention.

R.C. massaged his wrists, then picked up the shovel by his foot, as the man named Negrito had told him to do. The sky was black and hazed with dust, and the shooting stars above the hills looked like chips of dry ice that were melting into nothingness. R. C thought he heard a train whistle in the distance and the sound of boxcars with their brakes on sliding down an incline, the wheels shrieking against the rails.