James Burke - Feast Day of Fools

One minute clicked on the clock mounted on the wall, then two, then three. He heard Krill’s and Negrito’s boots walking across the chapel floor. He closed his eyes and clasped his hands between his thighs. He could hear his breath rasping in his throat. His fingers were trembling, his sphincter constricting. Then he heard the front door of the chapel swing open and felt a rush of air sweep through the pews. A moment later, he heard the gas-guzzler start up and drive away.

Cody opened his eyes and got up from the chair and began stacking dirty cups and saucers and plates in the sink and wiping down the long table in the center of the room. He had never thought the act of cleaning up a coffee room could be so pleasurable. Why had he spent so much of his life concentrating on every problem in the world rather than simply enjoying the small pleasures that an orderly life provided? Why did wisdom come only when it was too late to make use of it?

He poured a cup of coffee and put a small teaspoon of sugar in it and gazed out the window at the rain blowing off the hills and mesas in the west. Tumbleweed was bouncing as high as a barn, smacking his church, skipping through the yard, embedding under the stairs that led to his deck. A storm was a fine and cleansing thing, he thought, not to be feared or avoided but welcomed as one would a cool finger touching one’s brow.

He heard the front door open a second time, and the wind cut through the chapel and blew a stack of hymnal sheets fluttering in the air. He set down his coffee cup but remained seated at the table. “I told y’all we were done,” he called into the chapel.

A small, muscular man appeared in the doorway. “Brought some friends with me,” Dennis Rector said. “You met them before, but they had masks on. Look, I’m just making a buck. Don’t take this as personal.”

Anton Ling opened the back door of her house to let in her cat and smelled the smoke inside the rain. She looked up into the bluffs and, in the blackness of the storm, saw a fire burning as bright and clean as the red point of flame on an acetylene torch. She dialed 911 and reported the fire, then got into her truck and headed down the dirt road for Cody Daniels’s house, a fire extinguisher bouncing on the passenger seat.

Cody Daniels knew his fate was not up for discussion when he saw that the men who had followed Dennis Rector into the chapel had not bothered to mask their faces. What he had not anticipated was the severity of design they were about to impose on his person. They pulled back the velvet curtain on the stage in the chapel and lifted him above their heads, as college kids might at a fraternity celebration, trundling him on their extended arms and hands to the wood cross he had constructed for a passion play that had never become a reality. They were smiling as though Cody were in on the joke, as though it were a harmless affair after which they would all have a drink.

The man actually in charge was not Rector but a diminutive man who spoke in an accent that sounded like Russian. His chin was V-shaped, his teeth the color of fish scale, his nose beaked, his cheeks and neck unshaved, his maroon silk shirt unbuttoned on a chest that looked almost skeletal. He wore three gold chains on his neck and a felt hat cocked jauntily on his head. He had the face of either a goat or a pixie, although the purple feather in his hatband suggested a bit of the satyr as well.

“Have you seen my good friend the Preacher lately?” he asked.

The men had set down Cody on the stage so he could face the man in the cocked hat. “The killer? I saw him once at Miss Ling’s house. But I don’t know him,” Cody said.

“I need to find my friend the Preacher and his companion Noie Barnum. I think Ms. Ling has probably told you where they are.”

“No, sir, she didn’t do that.”

“Why should I believe you?”

“Why shouldn’t you? I don’t know anything about Barnum. I wish I had never heard of him.”

“But you do know Temple Dowling.”

“I wish I’d never heard of him, either.”

“Did you know he was a pedophile?”

“No.”

“When you went to work for him, he didn’t ask you to find young girls for him?”

“I’m not gonna even talk about stuff like that.”

“Before this is over, you’ll talk about many things. We have all night.”

Cody felt himself swallow. The man with the Russian accent sat down in the front pew and smiled and made a gesture to his men with his right hand. His men picked up the cross that had been propped against the back wall and laid it down on the stage, then spread Cody Daniels on top of it and removed his shoes. Cody had constructed the cross out of railroad ties, and he could smell the musky odor of the creosote and oil and cinders in the grain and feel the great hardness of the wood against his head and back and buttocks and thighs.

They’re only going to scare me. They won’t do this, a voice inside him said.

Then he heard the pop of the nail gun and felt a pain explode through the top and bottom of his foot. He tried to pull himself erect, but a man on either side of him held his arms fast against the cross’s horizontal beam. He closed his eyes and then opened them and stared upward into the cathedral ceiling. For the first time in his life, Cody Daniels had a sense of finality from which he knew there was no escape. “I shot over the heads of poor Mexicans coming into the country,” he said. “When I was a boy, I made a fifteen-year-old colored girl go to bed with me. I wrote a bad check to some old people who let me charge groceries at their store. I stole a woman’s purse in the bus depot in Denver. I took a watch off a drunk man in an alley behind the Midnight Mission in Los Angeles. I almost killed a woman outside Baltimore.”

“What is he saying?” said the man with the Russian accent.

“He’s sorry he’s on the planet,” said a man holding one of Cody’s arms.

“See what else he has to say,” said the man with the Russian accent.

Cody heard the nail gun again and felt his other foot flatten against the vertical shaft of the cross and try to constrict against the nail that had pinioned it to the wood. This time he thought he screamed, but he couldn’t be sure, because the voice he heard did not seem like his own. The popping of the nail gun continued, the muzzle working its way along the tops of his feet and his palms and finally the small bones in his wrists. He felt himself being lifted up, the top of the cross thudding against the wall behind him, his weight coming down on the nails, the tendons in his chest crushing the air from his lungs. Through a red haze, he could see the faces of his executioners looking up at him, as though they had been frozen in time or lifted out of an ancient event whose significance had eluded them. He heard himself whispering, his words barely audible, his eyes rolling up into his head.

“What’d he say?” one man asked.

“‘I’m proud my name is on her book,’” another man said.

“What the fuck does that mean?” the first man asked.

“It’s from the song ‘The Great Speckled Bird,’” Dennis Rector said.

“What is this speckled bird?” asked the man with the Russian accent, standing at the foot of the stage.

“In the song, it’s supposed to mean the Bible,” Dennis Rector replied.

The man with the Russian accent gazed through the side window at the rain striking the glass.

“What do you want us to do, Mr. Sholokoff?” Rector asked. “Is he alive?”

“I think he is.”

“You think?” Sholokoff said.

“Just tell me what you’d like me to do, sir,” Rector said.

“Do I have to write it down?”

“No, sir.”