James Burke - Feast Day of Fools

Noie seemed to study the content of Jack’s words, then he stared at his plate again and put his arms below the table. “I got blood on my hands,” he said.

“From what?”

“Those Predator drones.”

“It’s not your doing.”

“Those things have killed innocent people, Stone Age peasants who don’t have any stake in our wars.”

“That’s just the way it is sometimes.”

“My grandmother used to say there’re two kinds of men never to associate with. One is the man who’ll shed the blood of the innocent, and the other is a man who’ll raise his hand to a woman. She always said they’re cut out of the same cloth. They’re of Cain’s seed, not Abel’s.” Noie picked up his fork and waited for Jack to speak. Then he said, “Go ahead.”

“Go ahead what?” Jack asked.

“You looked like you were fixing to say something.”

“If you see that Parks and Wildlife guy again, don’t be in a hurry to have your picture taken,” Jack said.

“Where you headed?” Noie asked.

“I thought I might tune my guitar. I’ll be up yonder in the rocks.”

“Why are you taking your binoculars?”

“After a storm, there’re all kinds of critters walking around, armadillos and lizards and such. They’re a sight to watch.”

That same morning Anton Ling received the most bizarre phone call of her life. “This is Special Agent Riser, Ms. Ling,” the voice said. “You remember me?”

“I’m not sure,” she replied. “You’re with the FBI?”

“I was the supervising agent who talked to you after your home was invaded.”

“I’d like to believe you’re calling to tell me you have someone in custody.”

“You don’t think much of us, do you?”

“No, I don’t.”

“I don’t blame you. I want to tell you a couple of things, Ms. Ling. We have a file on you that’s three inches thick. I’ve tapped your phones and photographed you from a distance and looked with binoculars through your windows and invaded every other imaginable aspect of your privacy. Some of my colleagues have a genuine dislike of you and think you should have been deported years ago. The irony is you worked for the CIA before a lot of them were born. But my issue is not with them, it’s with myself.

“I want to apologize for the way I and my colleagues have treated you. I think you’re a patriot and a humanitarian, and I wish there were a million more like you in our midst. I think Josef Sholokoff was behind the invasion of your home. I also think we’ve failed miserably in putting his kind away. In the meantime, we’ve often concentrated our efforts on giving a bad time to people such as yourself.”

“Maybe you’re too hard on yourself, Mr. Riser.”

“One other thing: Be a friend to Sheriff Holland. He’s a lot like you, Ms. Ling. He doesn’t watch out for himself.”

“Sir, are you all right?”

“You might hear from me down the track. If you do, that’ll mean I’m doing just fine,” Riser said.

Ethan Riser closed his cell phone and continued up a deer trail that wound along the base of a butte with the soft pink contours of a decayed tooth. He passed the rusted shell of an automobile that was pocked with small-caliber bullet holes and beside which turkey buzzards were feeding on the carcass of a calf. The calf’s ribs were exposed and its eyes pecked out, its tongue extended like a strip of leather from the side of its mouth. The air was still cool from the storm, the scrub brush and mesquite a darker green in the shadow of the butte, the imprints of claw-footed animals fresh in the damp sand along the banks of a tiny stream. Ethan was sweating inside his clothes, his breath coming short in his chest, and he had to sit down on a rock and rest. Behind him was a young man dressed in pressed jeans and a white shirt with pockets all over it and canvas lug-soled shoes. He wore an unpretentious black-banded straw hat with the brim turned down and a western belt with a big, dull-colored metal buckle that fit flat against his stomach.

When the young man reached the rock where Ethan was sitting, he unslung a canteen from his shoulder and unscrewed the cap and offered Ethan a drink before drinking himself. “I got to be honest with you. I think this is a snipe hunt,” he said.

“Hard to say,” Ethan said, blotting his face with a handkerchief.

“That fellow was standing in the shade and wearing a hat when I took his picture. He could be anybody.”

“That’s why I want you to go back now. I’ve wasted enough of your time.”

“You shouldn’t be out here by yourself.”

“It beats twiddling my thumbs in a motel.”

“Let me treat you to lunch.”

“What’s farther up?”

“Jackrabbits and open space and some more hills. A game ranch or two, maybe one guy running cows. A gun club has a couple of leases where some oil-and-natural-gas guys bust skeet and drink whiskey. I think there might be a cabin that somebody uses during deer season.”

“Who might that be?”

“Not somebody anyone ever paid much mind to. Ethan, you don’t look well. Let’s go back.”

“I got no reason to. You’re the one on his honeymoon.”

“I shouldn’t have ever told you about that fellow we ran into. On the homely scale, he was just this side of a mud fence. About as harmless-looking, too. If this guy is a threat to national security, we’re all in deep doo-doo.”

“You also said he talked like he had a mouthful of molasses. Noie Barnum is from northern Alabama.”

“A Quaker from Alabama?”

“I grant you he’s a strange duck. But compared to Jack Collins, he’s as normal as it gets.”

“My folks have always lived here’bouts, and they haven’t heard any talk about hermits wandering around with Thompson machine guns.”

A single-engine plane passed overhead, its shadow racing across the treetops and boulders on the sunny side of a hill.

“It’s a fine day to be out and about, isn’t it?” Ethan said.

“I cain’t argue that.”

“Help me up, will you?”

Ethan Riser’s friend remained motionless.

“What are you looking at?” Ethan asked.

“I thought I saw a reflection of some kind up there on that hill.” The young man removed a small pair of binoculars from a leather case on his belt and adjusted them to his eyes. “I declare, it’s a book.”

“A what?”

“Yeah, its pages are fluttering on top of a rock. Cain’t anybody say people in Southwest Texas aren’t literary. Stop looking at me like that, Ethan. There’s nobody there. It’s just a book somebody left on a rock.”

Preacher Jack Collins was reading in the Book of Kings, the wind and sun on his face, when he glanced up long enough to see the single-engine plane coming out of the southeast, its wings tilting in the updrafts, its engine sputtering as though it were low on gas. He stepped backward into some pinon trees growing out of the rocks, his body motionless, his face pointed at the ground, his thumb inserted as a bookmark in the pages of his Bible. He heard the plane pass overhead, then the engine caught again, and when he climbed to the crest of the hill and looked between two boulders, he saw the plane disappearing over a long stretch of flatland, its wings level and parallel with the horizon.

Feds? Maybe. Probably a rancher who was burning the valves out of his engine with ethanol. Jack resumed reading in his comfortable spot among the rocks, the pages of the Bible as white as snow in the sunlight, the print on them as clear and sharp and defining as the lettering that Yahweh had seared with a burning finger in the Mosaic tablets. For Jack, there was no such thing as “interpretation” of the Scripture; there was also no such thing as “metaphor.” These were devices that allowed the profligate and the libertine to consecrate behavior that made Jack’s stomach curdle.