James Burke - Feast Day of Fools

“What are you waiting for, Tejano boy? Start digging,” Negrito said.

R.C.’s hands were propped on the shaft of the shovel, the worn, rounded, silvery tip an inch into the dirt. Strips of severed duct tape hung from his boots. He could feel his heart beating against his ribs and a line of sweat starting to run from each of his armpits. Negrito was squatted on a rise fifteen feet away, his 1911-model United States Army. 45 gripped casually on one knee, his fingers loose around the trigger guard, completely confident about the situation he had created. His leather hat hung on the back of his neck, the chin cord taut against his throat. He picked up a dirt clod and threw it at R.C.’s head.

“I’ve been kind to you,” he said. “Don’t abuse my charity. I’m not a nice man when I’m provoked.”

“I cain’t do it,” R.C. said.

“Si, puedes.”

“I ain’t. That’s what I meant to say.” Even to himself, R.C.’s voice seemed full of broken glass, his words thick, the worst fate he could imagine about to be realized only a few inches from where he stood.

“Meant to say what, Tejano boy?”

“I meant to say I ain’t gonna dig my own grave,” R.C. replied. “And I ain’t no boy.”

“It don’t matter what I call you, man. You’re gonna dig.”

“No matter how it plays out, I ain’t gonna he’p you. No, sir, I won’t do it.”

“That’s what they all say. They buy a little time that way, and it makes them feel less bad about themselves. They want to believe their friends are gonna come over the rise and kill Negrito and take them home to their mothers and fathers and wives and husbands, but finally, they dig. You don’t got to feel bad about it.”

R.C. raised one foot and rested it on the top of the shovel blade, still gripping the shaft with both hands, his eyes stinging with sweat, a vinegary stench rising from his armpits. His heart felt as though it had been invaded by threadworms and was slowly being reduced to the point where it could no longer pump his blood.

“I make twenty-six thousand dollars a year. I break up domestic fights and run in drunks and wets and nickel-and-dime meth mules.”

“So?”

“Your friends won’t pay money for me.”

“You want me to shoot you, man?” Negrito raised the. 45 and pointed it at R.C. and playfully sighted down the barrel. “Ever see one of these hit a kneecap? Or a guy’s foot? I use hollow-points.”

R.C. swallowed. Each time the gun’s muzzle swung across his person, his colon constricted and his entrails turned to water.

“I’m gonna shoot you in a place that hurts like a son of a bitch, man,” Negrito said. “Then you’re going in the ground with all that pain while you try to breathe through the gas mask. Why you want to do that to yourself?”

R.C.’s head was spinning, bile rising from his stomach, his fear so great and his anger at himself and his despair so intense that he could feel himself walking through a door into a place where nothing mattered anymore. “I just remembered what you look like. I couldn’t think of it. But it’s real clear in my head now,” he said, breathing hard through his mouth.

“Why you always got to talk, man? You are like a woman, always talking, filling the air with sounds that grate on the ear.”

“I couldn’t remember what you remind me of. At the cantina I was thinking about it, but I couldn’t get it straight in my head because I drank too much.”

“What I remind you of?”

“An orange Brillo pad. Those steel-wool pads women use to clean grease and fish skins and fried crud out of skillets. After a while, the pads turn orange and blue with soap and rust and all the glop that’s glommed up inside them.”

“That’s what I look like?”

“Yes, sir, I’d call it a match.”

“Be quiet,” Negrito said, rising to his feet.

“Like my mother says, looks is only skin deep.”

“ Silencio, foolish boy who does not hear or listen.”

R.C. realized his tormentor was not interested in deflecting insults and that he had heard something out in the darkness. Negrito walked up the incline, away from the dry wash and the row of graves and the greasewood and the stunted willows along the bank and the tortoise-shaped sandstone boulders that were weathered through with holes the length of a man’s arm. “Is that you out there, Mr. Crazy Man?” he said. “You want to fight Negrito? Come down and fight. I don’t fear you.”

R.C. watched, stupefied.

“The gringos fear you! But I don’t!?Me cago en la puta de tu madre! I take a shit in your mother’s womb. How you like that?” Negrito said.

“Who you talking to?”

Negrito said nothing in answer to R.C. He was standing on a slab of stone that was tilted upward on the slope, one pointy cowboy boot stationed in front of the other, his shoulders humped, his. 45 hanging from his right hand. In profile, his right eye seemed to watch both the hillside and R.C. simultaneously, the way a shark’s eye views everything in its ken, both enemy and prey, revealing no more emotionality than a flat coat button.

“Hey, sacerdote of the garbage dump and eater of your own feces! You think we treated your little Quaker friend bad?” he called out. “What if I bring you down here and make you suck my dick? I can do that to you, man, with great pleasure.”

There was no reply from the hillside, and R.C. could see no movement among the shadows and mesquite and rocks and the dead juniper trees that looked like gnarled and polished bone. Negrito continued to stare into the darkness, his nostrils swelling, his profile as snubbed as a piranha’s. He squeezed his scrotum with his left hand. “Come take it, cabron!” he yelled.

The moon broke from behind a cloud and turned the hillside gray, the scrub brush pooling with shadows. “No? You prefer shooting women and people who ain’t got no guns? You’re a sorry Christian, Mr. Preacher. A Christian without cojones.”

“You know Preacher Collins?” R.C. said.

“The crazy man up there ain’t gonna help you. So give that up,” Negrito replied, backing down the slope, his gaze still concentrated on the hillside. “He’s the hunter, the left hand of God. He don’t have interest in a boy like you.”

“But he’s interested in you?” R.C. said.

“Of course. He knows we’re brothers. Under our skin, we’re no different.”

“Brothers?”

“That’s right, Tejano boy. Preacher and I are both dead. Our souls died many years ago. What do you see in my eyes?”

“Nothing.”

“That’s right. Nothing. And that’s why you’re gonna start to dig. Or maybe I’m gonna start shooting you in various places that will hurt more than you can believe.”

“I done told you, I ain’t gonna do it. So you’d better kill me, ’cause somewhere down the road, I’m gonna catch up with you. You damn betcha I will.”

Negrito’s eyes were rheumy, his face dull with fatigue, his mouth caked. He made a snuffing sound and rubbed his nose with the back of his wrist. “Release the shovel and get in the trunk of the car.”

“What are you gonna do?”

“I got to dig your hole. That makes me very mad. You are lucky I am a merciful man.”

R.C. let the shovel fall to the ground and started toward the gasguzzler, glancing warily over his shoulder, then tripping and stumbling. He heard Negrito pick up the shovel.

“Look up there,” Negrito said.

“At what?”

“The preacher up there in the rocks. See, against the moon. He wants to be your friend. The sacerdote who eats his own mierda has come to your rescue. Or maybe it’s the sheriff you work for. Maybe this is your lucky day.”

R.C. stared at the clumps of brush in the arroyos and at the layers of rock exposed by erosion in the hillside and at the tailings of a mine that spilled like rust down to the wash. He saw a shadow move across the moon. “That’s a coyote,” he said.