James Burke - Feast Day of Fools

Jack walked back up the slope, then shook out a handkerchief and placed it on the ground and knelt on one knee so he could look down the far side of the hill without silhouetting. While he studied the scene down below, his right hand played with his revolver, lifting it partially out of the holster, reversing the butt, then reversing it again, dropping it back into the hardened leather with a dry plop.

“Come on up here and check this out,” he said, motioning at the cousins.

The two Mexicans approached him, bent over, gravel rilling from under their cowboy boots, each of them attentive to the motion or lack of motion in Jack’s right hand. Out on the hardpan, the gasguzzler was driving away, its headlights lighting the scrub brush and cactus. “What is it?” Eladio said.

“I was just talking about strange critters,” Jack said. He stood up and pointed down the slope. “Look yonder at that new grave. What’s that sticking out of the dirt?”

Both cousins stared down into the moonlit wash, their foreheads knitted with thought. “An elephant’s trunk?” Eladio said.

“It’s the hose and filter on a World War Two gas mask. What do you boys think we ought to do about that?” Jack said.

R. C. Bevins had been raised in a fundamentalist church where the minister went to great lengths to instruct his congregation in the details of Jesus’ crucifixion. His dedication to the macabre seemed equaled only by his dedication to busing as many congregants as possible to the local theater’s showing of The Passion of the Christ. In his presentation, the minister included descriptions of long square-headed spikes that had pierced the victim’s wrists-not his hands, the minister said, because the hands would have torn loose from the fastenings; not so the spikes through the wrists. The bones and tendons in the wrist were much sturdier and up to the task of supporting the victim’s weight. Also, he pointed out, the spikes were not driven through the tops of the feet, as is often depicted. The knees were folded sideways on the perpendicular shaft, the ankles placed one on top of the other. A single long spike was adequate to pinion the two appendages together.

The minister also explained that death came by asphyxiation as a result of the tendons in the upper torso constricting the lungs and forcing the air back up the victim’s windpipe. But for R.C., the worst detail was the minister’s speculation that the trauma of being nailed to the cross and the cross being dropped heavily into a hole caused the victim to go into shock only to become conscious a few minutes later and discover that he was not waking from a nightmare but instead was anchored hand and foot to a cruciform of pain from which there was no escape.

That was how R.C. had woken under the ground, with the vague sense that something was wrong with his arms and legs, that he had heard a sifting sound of dirt and gravel sliding off a shovel blade, followed by a thump of stones being dropped heavily on top of him. His eyes were unable to see, his throat raw, as though he had not had water in days. When he tried to raise his head, he realized he was not only impaled by the earth but locked solidly inside it, the air that he breathed coming to him through a tube that smelled of rubber and canvas. The level of panic that occurred in him was like a violent electric surge throughout his body, except the electricity had no place to go.

The inside of the mask was soggy and foul with his sweat and his own breath, and no light at all came through the plastic eyepieces. He stretched out his fingers and for just a moment thought he might be able to work his hands through the dirt toward the surface an inch at a time. Then he discovered that by straightening his hands, he had allowed the overburden of the grave to press down on him more firmly, like an octopus tightening its tentacles on its prey.

Who were the fools who constantly taught about man’s harmony with the earth? he asked himself. An uncle who had once worked in a Kentucky coal mine had told R.C. that the earth was not man’s friend, that it was unnatural to enter the ground before one’s time, and that if a man listened carefully, he would hear the earth creak in warning to those who thought they could tunnel through its substructure without consequence.

He could feel his fear going out of control and his breath beginning to rasp inside the mask, the weight of the earth and stones like knives around his heart. He tried to turn his thoughts into wings that could lift his soul above the ground and allow him to revisit scenes and moments he had associated with the best parts of his life: floating down the Comal River on a burning July afternoon, his wrists trailing in water that was ice-cold, the soap-rock bottom gray and smooth and pooled with shadows from the overhang of the cottonwood trees; dancing with a Mexican girl in a beer garden in Monterrey where Indians sold ears of corn they roasted on charcoal braziers, backdropped by mountains that were hazy and magenta-colored against the sunset; throwing a slider on the edge of the plate for the third strike and third out in the bottom of the ninth at a state championship game in San Marcos, the grass of the diamond iridescent under the electric lights, the evening breeze cool on his skin, a high school girl waiting for him by the bleacher seats, her hands balled into fists as she jumped up and down with love and pride at the perfect game he had just pitched.

His fondest memory was of his twelfth birthday, when his widowed mother took him on the Greyhound all the way from Del Rio to the state fair in Dallas. That evening he stared in awe at the strings of colored lights of the Ferris wheel and the Kamikaze printed against a blue sky puffed with pink clouds. High school kids screamed inside the grinding roar of the Tilt-A-Whirl and the Super Loops, and the air was filled with music from the carousel and the popping of balloons and target guns on the fairways. He could smell the aerial fireworks spidering in a purple and pink froth above the rodeo grounds, and the caramel corn and fry bread and candied apples and tater pigs in the food concessions. His mother bought cotton candy for him and watched him ride the mechanical bull, holding the cotton candy in her hand, smiling even though she was exhausted from the long day on the bus, her wash-faded dress hanging as limp as a flag on her thin body.

R.C. tried to fix the fairground in his mind so he could stay safe inside it, free of the grave and the weight on his heart, wrapped in the calliope’s music and the shouts of children and teenage kids, his mother’s smile on the edge of his vision, the electric glow of the amusement rides rising into an ethereal sky that was testimony to everything that was good and beautiful in the world.

If there was a way, Sheriff Holland would find him, he told himself. He had given the sheriff his location. It was only a matter of time before the sheriff found the bar and forced the bartender to tell him where R.C. had been taken. All R.C. had to do was hold on, to breathe in and out, to not let go of the fairgrounds and the best day of his life. The soul could go where it wanted, he told himself. It existed, didn’t it? If it could fly from you at death, why couldn’t it leave you while you were alive? He didn’t have to abide the condition he had found himself in. Or at least he didn’t have to cooperate with it.

When he swallowed, his saliva was bilious, and his eyes watered at the fate that had been imposed on him. In his impotence and rage and fear, he cursed himself for his self-pity.

He heard a shovel sink deep into the dirt and felt it graze his side, not unlike the tip of a Roman spear teasing the rib cage of an impaled man.

A moment later, the hands of two men began scraping the dirt away from his face and shoulders and arms and sides, lifting his head free, slipping the mask from his face, allowing him to breathe air that was as clean and pure as bottled oxygen. He could see the silhouette of a third man against the moon, a holstered thumb-buster revolver on his hip, his fingernails like the claws on an animal. He wore a sun-bleached panama hat that was grimed with finger smears on the front brim.