James Burke - Feast Day of Fools

“Who are you?” R.C. said, unsure if he should have even asked the question, his face cold with sweat.

Hackberry looked through the front windshield at the long, flat, sunbaked rawness of the land and at the purple haze that seemed to rise from the creosote brush and the greasewood and the patches of alkali along streambeds that were hardly more than sand. In the distance, he could see hills in the moonlight and stovepipe cactus in the yard of an adobe house whose roof had collapsed. He looked through his binoculars at the hills and at the house and thought he could see a dirt road behind it that switchbacked up the side of the hill, but he couldn’t be sure.

The bartender with the swastika tattooed on his scalp had given him and Pam Tibbs directions to the place where he believed Negrito was taking the young Texas lawman. When Hackberry had asked whether he was sure, the bartender had replied, staring at the broken pool cue Hackberry had almost stuffed down his throat, “It’s where Negrito always disposes of people he has no more use for. It’s the underground prison he likes to stand on top of. Maybe he comes back for them. Maybe that’s where you will end up seriously jodido, that’s what I hope.”

Hackberry’s cell phone vibrated on the Jeep’s dashboard. He picked it up and put it to his ear. “Sheriff Holland,” he said.

“It’s Maydeen. Did you find R.C.?”

“Not yet.”

“Let me try to get you some backup.”

“There’s nobody down here I trust.”

“Hack, I called because I’m at the hospital. Anton Ling says she saw the guy she put a screwdriver in. He and another guy were in the hallway right outside her room.”

“How did she know it was the guy she hurt? He was wearing a mask when she put the screwdriver in his face.”

“She said she recognized the guy with him. She said she was mixed up in an intelligence operation of some kind years ago, and this guy was part of it. Felix and I are in her room now. She wants to talk with you.”

“Put her on.”

Hackberry heard Maydeen speaking to Anton Ling, then Maydeen got back on the cell. “She wants us to leave the room. When y’all get finished, I’ll come back in. Felix will stay here the rest of the night.”

“Tell Anton Ling that anything she wants to tell me, she can say in front of you.”

“Don’t worry about it, Hack. I need a cup of coffee,” Maydeen said.

A moment later, Anton Ling got on the cell. “I’m sorry to bother you with this, Sheriff Holland, but I needed to get something off my chest,” she said.

“Miss Anton, in my department, we don’t have private conversations, and we don’t keep secrets from one another,” Hackberry said. “I’m making an exception in this instance because your life may be in jeopardy.”

“I didn’t want your deputies to hear our conversation for the same reason. I have knowledge that can get people killed.”

“Knowledge about what?”

“There was a political scandal years ago that flared and died. A reporter broke a story that the Contras were introducing cocaine into American cities to pay for the guns that were being shipped to Nicaragua. A couple of newspapers in the East debunked the story, and later, the reporter committed suicide. But the story was true. The guns were AK-47s and came from China. They were assembled in California and shipped south. The dope went to the West Coast first, then other places later. I was involved in it.”

“Why didn’t you tell someone about this?”

“No one cares. They didn’t care then, they don’t care now. It was The Washington Post and The New York Times that debunked the story.”

“Do you know the names of the guys you saw outside your room?”

“No, but I think they were here to wipe the slate clean. The man I recognized was a connection between the Contras and some dope mules in California.”

“Do you know the name Josef Sholokoff?”

“I do. He was part of the drug deal with the Contras. There’s no end to this,” she said.

“To what?”

“To the grief I’ve caused others.”

“People like us don’t make the wars, Miss Anton. We just get to fight in them,” he said. “I’ve lost a deputy sheriff down here in Mexico. For all I know, he’s dead now. When I catch the guys who did this, I’m going to cool them out proper and not feel any qualms about it.”

“I think you’re not served well by your rhetoric.”

“I’ve got a flash for you, Miss Anton. The only real pacifists are dead Quakers. Ambrose Bierce said that when reflecting on his experience at Shiloh.”

“It’s also cheap stuff. Good-bye.” She broke the connection.

“Look up ahead,” Pam said, steering down into the streambed. “There’re tire tracks in the sand. They go through the backyard of that adobe house. This has to be the hill the bartender was talking about.”

Hackberry turned on the spotlight mounted on the passenger side of the Jeep and shone it through the darkness. A yellow dog with mange on its face and neck, its sides skeletal, its dugs distended, emerged from the shell of the house and stared into the brilliance of the beam before loping away.

“You want to try the switchback up the hill or go around?” Pam asked.

“We take the high ground. Park behind the house. We’ll walk over the hill and come down on top of them.”

“Back there in the cantina, I saw a side of you that bothers me, Hack,” she said.

“I don’t have another side, Pam. You stand behind your people or you don’t stand behind your people. It’s that simple. We get R.C. back from this collection of cretins. When I was at Inchon, I was very frightened. But a line sergeant told me something I never forgot. ‘Don’t think about it before it happens, and don’t think about it when it’s over.’ We bring R.C. home. You with me on that?”

“I’m with you in everything. But my words mean little to you,” she replied. “And that bothers me more than you seem able to understand.”

He didn’t speak again until they had parked the Jeep behind the adobe house, and then it was only to tell her to walk behind him when they went over the crest of the hill.

The man wearing the hat and holstered thumb-buster squatted on his haunches, eye level with R.C. His breath was as dense and tannic as sewer gas. Two Mexicans wearing jeans that looked stitched to their skins stood stiffly on either side of him, like bookends fashioned from wire. “You have a bad moment or two down there?” the man asked.

R.C. nodded, meeting the strange man’s eyes briefly.

“Enough to make you wet your britches?” the man asked.

“No, sir, I didn’t do that.”

The man lifted his chin and pinched the loose flesh under his throat. He was unshaved, and his whiskers looked as stiff as pig bristles. “What’s it like under the ground, with a mask on your face and a lifeline anyone can pinch off with the sole of his boot?”

“Dark.”

“Like the inside of a turnip sack, I bet.”

“That comes right close to it.”

“Your heart start twisting and your breath start coming out of your windpipe like you swallowed a piece of glass?”

“That pert’ near says it,” R.C. replied.

“I can sympathize.”

“You been buried alive?”

“Not in the way you have.”

“You either have or you haven’t.”

“When I was a little boy, my mother would stick me eight or nine hours inside a footlocker. I’d pretend I was on the spine of a boxcar, flying across the countryside under the stars. Did you have fanciful notions like that? Then you opened your eyes and thought somebody had poured an inkwell inside your head.”

“Maybe your soul can go somewhere else. That’s the way I figure it. That’s how come people don’t go crazy sometimes,” R.C. said. Then he added, as though he were in the presence of a confidant, “I got wrapped up in a rubber sheet when I was a little baby and almost suffocated. My mother was in the yard and looked through the window and said I’d already turned blue. She ran inside and saved my life.”