James Burke - Feast Day of Fools

He turned around just as Negrito whipped the shovel with both hands through the air and almost flattened the concave steel blade on the back of R.C.’s head.

“I think you was right. It was just a coyote,” Negrito said, staring up the hill.

Jack Collins lay below the crest of the hill, his belly and loins and legs stretched out on a flat rock that had ripples in it like water, his hat beside him, his eyes raised just above a pile of crumbling stone. Behind him, the two Mexican informers, cousins who did murders for hire, were talking quietly to each other, sometimes glancing up in his direction. They were restless men and did not like either indecision or complexity and often found themselves caught between their own self-protective instincts and their hesitancy to challenge the strange ways of the gringo loco whose lethality was a legend in Coahuila and Chihuahua. Finally, the one named Eladio approached the unshaved and unwashed American who dressed in rags and wore a heavy revolver on his hip, squatting down so as not to silhouette against the sky. “Senor Jack?” he said.

“Be patient,” Jack said, peering down the opposite slope.

“Why don’t we just go down there in the streambed and kill Negrito? I’ll do it without no charge.”

Jack looked back over his shoulder and grinned. “You boys were supposed to give me the man named Krill. We didn’t come out here to hunt an orange ape.”

“I thought Krill would be at the farmhouse. He’s a very hard man to catch, boss. This is the place Negrito sometimes uses to bury his victims. It is fortunate that I knew that.”

“So we’re saved from your incompetence by the intervention of the fates, and that should make me feel good?”

“You talk too fast for me to understand sometimes, boss.”

Jack worked his way backward on the rock until he was well under the level of the hillcrest, then got to his feet. He dusted off his knees and the elbows of his suit coat and fitted on his hat, glancing at the strips of black cloud across the moon. He gestured for the other cousin to join him and Eladio. But minutes seemed to pass before he spoke. In the silence, he glanced at one man, then the other, and then into space, as though viewing two different screens in his head. “I pay you boys enough?” he asked.

“Si,” both of them said, nodding.

“Krill has done great injury to a friend of mine. The one down the slope, the ape, isn’t even a cipher.”

“What is this ‘cipher’? These kinds of words don’t mean nozzing to us, boss,” Eladio said.

“The fact you boys were raised up poor and ignorant isn’t your fault. Most of y’all’s mothers would have had you aborted if they’d had the money. But today there’s no excuse for ignorance in an adult. People in mud huts watch CNN. The Internet is available in a street-corner cafe. You boys have access to the same knowledge a university professor does. I suggest y’all start showing a little more initiative regarding your self-improvement.”

“We seek to please you, not to upset you, Senor Jack,” Eladio said.

“You did very well following Temple Dowling for me. You did well learning of the machinations of Negrito with the young lawman. But you haven’t given me Krill. Krill is the objective, not his monkey. Are y’all listening?”

“We ain’t perfect, boss,” the cousin said. His name was Jaime, and of the two Mexican killers, he was the less intelligent and the more recalcitrant.

Eladio looked angrily at his cousin, then turned his attention back to Jack, trying to undo any damage his cousin might have caused. “We can take Negrito alive and entertain him in ways he’ll understand,” Eladio said.

“Is he the kind of man who gives up reliable information when he’s in pain?” Jack said. “Or does he lie and tell you what you want to hear?”

“You are very intelligent, Senor Jack,” Eladio said. “Negrito has the strength of a mule and the brain of a snake. Pain means nothing to him. As a boy, he blew flaming kerosene from his mouth in a carnival. His putas say they can still smell it on him.”

Jaime chewed on a weed and took a watch with a broken strap from his shirt pocket and looked at it. “Eladio is right. If Negrito ain’t of no value, maybe it’s time we took care of him and also the American you don’t like at the whorehouse and get some sleep. What is of more importance? The cost of a bullet or the time we waste speaking of these men you say are worthless? Constantly talking of these men makes me resentful of myself.”

Jack’s face registered no emotion. It seemed as serene as a layer of plastic that had melted and cooled and dried in dirty lumps. He watched the lights in the sky and the dust that swirled off the desert floor and buttoned the top of his shirt with one hand as though expecting rain or cold. The Mexicans who worked for him were a mystery, an improbable genetic combination of Indian bloodlust and the cruelty of the Inquisition. The angular severity of their features, the way their skin stretched tautly on their bones, the greasy black shine in their uncut hair, the obsidian glint in their eyes at the mention of violence or pain made him wonder if they were remnants of a lost tribe from biblical times, perhaps an unredeemed race that had floated on the Flood far away from where Noah had landed on Mount Ararat. It would make sense. They were unteachable and killed one another with the dispassion and moral vacuity of someone who idly watches his children wander onto a freeway.

What was Jaime saying now? His lips were still moving, though no sound seemed to come from his mouth. Jack disengaged from his reverie and stared at him. “Repeat that?” he said.

“How come we ain’t at least killed the abusador de ninos? He was at the whorehouse. We could have done it easy. Not even the policia would object to our killing such a man.”

“I don’t go in whorehouses,” Jack said. “Also, don’t speak to me of your policemen’s virtue. They’re jackals and will steal the coins off a dead man’s eyes. What none of you seems to recognize is that your country is ungovernable. Your national heroes are peons who decorated trees with the bodies of their fellow peons. Do not tell me what I should do and not do.”

“Senor Jack is very wise. We need to listen to him, Jaime,” Eladio said.

“But we keep playing games with gringos who should be food for worms,” Jaime said. “This man Holland is the enemy of Senor Jack, but we don’t do nozzing about him. Why not kill Holland? It would give me great pleasure to do this for Senor Jack. What is so special about this man?”

Jack pulled the weed from Jaime’s mouth and tossed it to one side. “Do not refer to Sheriff Holland by his last name only. His name is Mr. Holland or Sheriff Holland. Do you understand that?” he said.

Jaime started to speak, but Eladio squeezed his arm. “You are a man of honor. We will always follow you and do as you tell us,” Eladio said.

“You wouldn’t josh a fellow, would you?” Jack said.

“We are hurt deeply when you talk like that to us, Senor Jack,” Eladio said.

“Really?” Jack said. He gazed out at the desert and the nighttime glow of a distant town in the clouds. “That flatters and humbles me. I declare, you boys are full of surprises.”

The two cousins waited for him to continue, neither of them meeting his eyes, Eladio’s hand still locked on Jaime’s forearm. “You didn’t develop laryngitis on me, did you?” Jack asked.

“We are simple men, boss,” Eladio said.

“That’s why I like you. That’s why I consider you not just friends but family. I wouldn’t offend either of you for the world.”

“Is true what you say?” Eladio asked.

“Cross my heart,” Jack replied, his teeth showing in the moonlight. “But right now I want to see what this hombre malo Negrito is doing. He’s a pistol, isn’t he? A man that keeps his own private burying ground. Y’all surely grow some strange critters down here.”