James Burke - Feast Day of Fools

“Then what do we do?”

“We go back. It ain’t up for grabs, either,” Caleb said.

“I’ll sit down with you a minute, but then I’m going on.”

“Sometimes we have to accept realities, Ethan.”

“That I’m worn out and can’t make it?”

Caleb looked at the mottled discoloration in his friend’s face. “I don’t think Jack Collins is out here. If he is, we’ll hear about it and come back and nail his hide to a cottonwood. In the meantime, it’s not reasonable to wander around under a white sun.”

“I spent seven months in a bamboo cage. The man next to me had a broken back and was in there longer than I was,” Ethan said.

“In Vietnam?”

“Who cares where it was?” Ethan said.

In the distance, they heard the sound of a solitary dirt bike, the engine screaming as though the back tire had lost traction and the RPMs had revved off the scale. Then there was silence.

“Collins is here,” Ethan said.

“How do you know?”

Ethan looked to the north, where turkey buzzards were turning in a wide circle against a cloudless blue sky. “Know what death smells like?”

“Yeah, like some dead critter up there. Don’t let your imagination start feeding on loco weed.”

“Do you smell anything?”

“No, I don’t.”

“I can. It’s Collins. It’s Collins who smells like death. He’s here. When you’ve got death in you, you can smell it on others.”

Jack did not like what he was watching. Where did this bunch get off, invading a place that was his, one that could have been sawed loose from the edges of Canaan and glued onto the southwestern rim of the United States? Why was the government worried about working-class people crossing the border when a bunch like this were given licenses and machines to destroy public lands? Jack knelt on a sandstone ledge, the butt of his Thompson resting by his knee, the drum magazine packed with fifty. 45 rounds, the clean steel surfaces of his weapon smelling slightly of the oilcloth he had used to wipe down and polish it last night. He longed to raise the stock to his shoulder and lead the bikers with iron sights and squeeze off three or four short bursts and blow them into a tangle of machines and spinning tires and disjointed faces, not unlike the images in the Picasso painting depicting the fascist bombing of Guernica.

One of the bikers, as though he had read Jack’s thoughts, veered away from his companions and roared up the hillside toward Jack’s position, his goggles clamped like a tanker’s on his face, one booted foot coming down hard on the dirt to keep his machine erect, his jeans stiff with body grease, his black leather vest faded brown and yellow under his naked armpits.

The biker throttled back his engine and swerved to a stop just twenty feet below Jack’s position, smoke and dust rising behind him in a dirty halo. His teeth looked feral inside his beard, his chest hair glistening with sweat. Jack laid his Thompson on a clean, flat rock and stood up in full view. “How do, pilgrim?” he said.

“Were you flashing a mirror at me?” the biker asked.

“Not me.”

“I think it was you. You got one of those steel signal mirrors? You being cute or something?”

“You probably saw the reflection off my field glasses.”

“So you want to tell me what the hell you’re doing?”

“Not much. Studying on the general state of mediocrity that seems to characterize the country these days. Did you know the United States has the highest rate of functional illiteracy in the Western world, even though we have the most libraries? What’s your thought on that?”

“My thought is, I’m getting a crick in my neck looking up at you. Who the fuck you think you are?”

“The worst mistake you ever made.”

The biker put a pinch of snuff under his lip. “It’s been good talking to you. Keep your flopper oiled and cocked. The right girl is out there waiting for you somewhere.”

“Maybe you can he’p me with a theory I have. It has to do with atavistic behavior. That means a throwback to the way things were when people hunted each other with rocks and sharp sticks. Did you ever notice that most of the fellows in biker gangs are strange-looking? By that I mean way overweight, with double hernias and beetle brows and pig noses and bulging scrotums and hair growing out of their ears. You’d think it would dawn on them.”

The biker pushed his goggles up on his forehead with his thumb. There were white circles around his eyes. “What would dawn on them?”

“That ugly and stupid people find each other.”

The biker twisted the gas feed with his right hand, revving his engine, making a decision. “I hate to tell you this, pal, but I don’t think your opinion carries a lot of weight. If you haven’t noticed, your suit looks like Sasquatch wiped his ass with it. You’ve got pecker tracks on your fly and enough dirt under your fingernails to grow tomatoes. If the wind turns around, I expect I’ll have to put on a respirator.”

Jack gazed across the flats into the distance. With his naked eye, he could not see the two hikers. The wind was up, out of the south, the pinon trees bending. The sound of a short burst might be mistaken for the backfire of a dirt bike or be lost altogether inside the wind. Yes, maybe this was an opportune moment. “You like tearing up the countryside, making lots of noise with your machines, smearing your scat on the morning? Look at me.”

“What for?”

“The man who snuffs your wick is always the one you least suspect. You’re tooling along, and you shoot off your mouth to the wrong fellow in the middle of a desert, and somebody stuffs a cactus plant up your ass. That’s what the crossroads is all about.”

“ You’re the wick snuffer?”

“Close your eyes and count to three and open them again. I have a surprise for you.”

“Screw you,” the biker said.

He turned his bike around and rode back down the slope, shooting Jack the finger just before heading across the flats, a fountain of gravel and silt flying from under his back wheel.

Jack let out his breath with a sigh. Just two more seconds, he thought. Oh well, maybe it was better that he kept his priorities straight. But before Jack could turn his attention to the hikers, the goggled, head-wrapped dirt biker had reconsidered and nullified his wise choice and spun his machine in a circle. He was headed back full-bore to the hillside, his thighs spread, his knees high, his shoulders humped, a simian throwback determined to teach a lesson to an unwashed, ignorant old man.

He veered north of Jack’s position and bounced onto a narrow trail that would take him to where Jack was standing behind a boulder. Jack temporarily lost sight of him, then heard the biker gun his engine and mount a steep grade, gravel splintering off his back wheel.

Jack waited, his Thompson hanging from his right hand, his coat fluttering open in the wind, a half-smile on his face. The biker had reached the top of the grade and was bouncing up and down with the roughness of the trail as he approached Jack’s position. Thirty feet below was a gully strewn with chunks of yellow chert and the dried and polished limbs of dead trees. Jack stepped out from behind the boulder and raised the muzzle of the Thompson at the biker’s chest.

“I cain’t blame you, pilgrim. Pride is my undoing, too,” he said.

He never got a chance to squeeze the trigger. The biker saw the Thompson and threw his hands in front of his face, then plummeted off the trail straight into the gully, upside down, his machine crashing on top of him.

Jack walked to the edge of the trail and peered down at the biker and the wrecked bike, its front tire still spinning. “Ouch,” he said.