James Burke - Feast Day of Fools

Jack Collins laughed again and picked up the canteen and looped the web belt over R.C.’s head, easing it down so as not to clip his ear. “Stay on the edge of the hillside and go due north for about three miles, and you’ll hit a dirt road. Follow it eastward, and you’ll intersect an asphalt two-lane that’ll take you to the border.”

R.C. stared at him dumbly, the backs of his legs shaking. He tried to think about what Collins had just said. The words made no sense. He felt as though the horizon were tilting sideways, the mountains going in and out of focus.

“You really thought I was going to cap you?” Collins said.

R.C. didn’t answer. He glanced sideways at the spot where his mother had been standing, but she had disappeared.

“I wouldn’t do that to you, kid. You’ve got sand,” Collins said.

With that, he and his friends walked away like Halloween trick-or-treaters who had lost interest in their own pranks.

A few minutes later, Hackberry Holland and Pam Tibbs came over the crest of the hill and looked down on the riparian landscape and the empty streambed that resembled a pale scar cutting across it, and the graves where the half-breed named Negrito had buried his victims, some of whom may have been alive when they went into the ground.

There was no one down below. Pam swept the area with her binoculars and then pointed at the north, handing the binoculars to Hackberry. In the moonlight, he saw a solitary figure walking alongside the streambed, a canteen slung from his shoulder, his shirttail hanging out, his shadow as sharp as a fence post on the ground. “R.C.,” he said.

“How’d he get loose from the guy who kidnapped him?” Pam said.

“I don’t know,” Hackberry said. He focused the lenses on the southern horizon and thought he saw headlights dip over a rise and briefly reflect off a sandstone bluff and then disappear. “Let’s find out.”

They climbed back down the opposite side of the hill and drove north in the Jeep until they were out on the flats again and could drive past the hill and intersect the streambed R.C. was following. As they drove toward him, their high beams suddenly defining him among the pale greenery that grew out of the sand, burning the shadows away from the youthful angularity of his face, Hackberry experienced one of those moments doctors at the navy hospital in Houston defined as post-traumatic stress disorder but that Hackberry thought of as the natural entwining of events and people, past and present, that seemed to take place as one reached the end of his life.

The totality of a man’s days eventually became a circle rather than a sum, and one way or another, he always ended up at the place where he had begun. Or at least that was what Hackberry believed.

As he looked through the windshield at R.C., he saw himself in the late summer of 1953, crossing the wooden pedestrian bridge at Panmunjom, the last man in a column of prisoners being returned from the camps south of the Manchurian border. He had been emaciated, barely able to walk and control his dysentery, his marine utilities stiff with salt and faded almost colorless. A photographer from Stars and Stripes took his picture with a big Speed Graphic camera, and later, the photo was picked up by the wire services and published all over the country above a cutline that began, “The last American soldier to cross Freedom Bridge…”

But he had not been the last man across Freedom Bridge. Others would follow and others would be left behind, perhaps four hundred of them who were moved by their captors across the Yalu River into Communist China and forgotten by the rest of the world.

Was it worth it? The great irony was that no one cared enough to even ask the question. The dates, the battles, the strafing of civilian refugees by American F-80s, the misery of the Chosin Reservoir, the red-hot thirty-caliber barrels they unscrewed with their bare hands, leaving their flesh on the steel, the systematic cruelty inside the gulag of prison camps in the north, Hackberry’s time in a place called Pak’s Palace, which had been housed in an abandoned brick factory where the North Koreans refined a method of torture known as Pak’s Swing, all these things were smudged entries in a tragedy that had become little more than an inconvenient memory. But the participants never forgot the details of their experience, and like the Wandering Jew, they were condemned to remain their own history books, each containing a story they could not pass on to others and from which no one would learn anything of value.

Hackberry could see himself in R.C., walking down the flume of an ancient riverbed, staring back into the Jeep’s headlights, his mouth cut with a grin, the soft white baked clay cracking under his weight. Youth was its own anodyne, Hackberry thought. For R.C., the world was still a fine place, his faith in his fellow man renewed by the arrival of his friends, his life unfolding before him as though it had been charted with the same divine hand that had placed our progenitors in an Edenic paradise. For just a second, Hackberry wanted to take all the experience out of his own life and give it to R.C. and pray that he would do better with it than Hackberry had.

He rolled down the passenger window. “Miss your turnoff to San Antone?” he said.

“I knew y’all would be along,” R.C. said, grinning broadly, getting in the back. “What kept you? I was starting to get a little antsy.”

“Bad traffic jam. What kept us? What the hell happened out here?” Hackberry said.

“This half-breed Negrito buried me after he almost took my head off with a shovel, that’s what happened. Then Jack Collins and two Mexicans dug me up.”

Pam put her foot on the brake. “Collins is down here?”

“He was.”

“Where?” she asked.

“Him and the two Mexicans walked over a rise and just went poof, gone, just like that.”

“Did they have a car?” Hackberry said.

“I didn’t hear one. But the wind was blowing out of the north. Maybe I just didn’t hear them start it up.”

“What did Collins say to you?” Hackberry said.

“He said I had a choice. I could play Russian roulette or he’d pop me. When I told him I wouldn’t do it, he gave me directions to the highway. I cain’t figure it out. Maybe everything people say about him ain’t altogether true.”

“Don’t fool yourself,” Hackberry said.

“So why’d he cut me loose?”

“He told you to tell me something, didn’t he?”

“He’s got you on his mind, that’s for sure, but he didn’t send no message. No, sir.”

Hackberry looked straight ahead at the countryside and at the stars that were going out of the sky.

“Did I miss something back there?” R.C. asked.

Collins wants me in his debt, Hackberry thought. But that was not what he said. “You did just fine, R.C. Who cares what goes on in the head of a madman?”

“I do. He’s a scary guy.”

“He is. He kills people.”

“No, in a different way. His breath. It smells like gas. His skin, too. It doesn’t smell like sweat. He doesn’t smell human.”

The Mexicans say he walks through walls, Hackberry thought.

“Sir?”

“There’s a town not far away. You hungry?”

“A twenty-ounce steak and five pounds of fries and a gallon of ice cream would probably get me through till breakfast,” R.C. replied.

“You got it, bub,” Hackberry said.

By dawn Hackberry was back home. He called Ethan Riser’s cell phone and left a message, then slept four hours and showered and called Riser again. This time Riser answered. “I need you here, partner,” Hackberry said.

“I got your message about Collins. We’ve contacted all the authorities in Coahuila.”

“That’s like telling me you just masturbated.”