James Burke - Feast Day of Fools

The Sun was blinding when Caleb approached the butte where he thought he had seen one of the bikers split off from the pack and power up the hillside. His eyes were stinging with salt, his mouth dry, and he wanted to stop and take a drink from his canteen, but he felt a cautionary sense he couldn’t dispel. Why had the biker left his comrades? Who or what was up in the rocks where Caleb had seen book pages flipping in the wind? And why hadn’t the biker come back down the hill? He cupped his hands around the sides of his mouth. “Hello up there!” he yelled. “I’ve got an injured man on the trail and need some help!”

He heard his voice echo in an arroyo that twisted toward the crest and opened into a saddle green with trees. “I don’t have cell-phone service,” he called out. “I need somebody with a vehicle to go for help!”

Caleb began walking up the slope toward the boulder where he had seen the book. He heard slag sliding down the hill and clacking into a gully. A man appeared on a sandy patch of ground between a boulder and two pinon trees. He was wearing dark goggles and a bandanna on his head and a black leather vest that was discolored a sickly yellow under the armpits. The sun was shining in Caleb’s eyes, but he could see that the man’s face and arms and chest hair were streaked with blood.

“Did you spill your bike?” Caleb asked.

“I went off into the gully and busted my head. You say you got a hurt man with you?”

“He twisted his ankle.”

“Let’s take a look at him.”

“Where’s your dirt bike?”

“At the bottom of the gully.”

“You cain’t drive it?”

“No, it’s finished.”

“What’s wrong with it?”

“It’s broken.”

“Maybe we can fix it. I’m a fair mechanic.”

“I’m not?”

“We need your vehicle. I have to get my friend out of here. He’s not well, and the heat has been pretty hard on him.”

“That’s what I said. Let’s take a look at him.”

“Maybe you should sit down. You’ve got blood all over you.”

“It’s no problem. What’s your friend doing out here?”

“He’s an FBI agent.”

“Is that a fact?”

“Where are the guys you were riding with?”

“Gone.”

“They deserted you?”

“Are you a law dog, too, pilgrim?”

“Parks and Wildlife. I’m not sure I like the way you’re talking to me.”

“Don’t Parks and Wildlife people carry weapons? I would. This area is full of rattlers.”

“Where’s the cut on your head? I don’t see it.”

“You’re pretty damn inquisitive for a man asking other people’s he’p. How far back is your FBI friend?”

“Not far. Are the other bikers coming back or not?”

“You cain’t tell about a bunch like that. Y’all should know. They tear up the countryside wherever and whenever they want, and y’all don’t do squat about it.”

“They?”

The man in goggles pressed the back of his wrist to his mouth, as though his lip were split or his teeth had been broken or knocked out. Then Caleb realized there was nothing wrong with his mouth or teeth and that he was making a decision, one that would probably have irreversible implications for both of them.

“This is my neighborhood. You made your bed when you came into it,” the man in goggles said.

“This is public land. It belongs to the people of Texas. We’ll go wherever we please in it.”

“Don’t pretend you don’t know who I am.”

Caleb wet his lips and closed and opened his hands at his sides. “Give yourself up, Mr. Collins.”

“You’re honeymooning here?”

“What’s it to you?”

“Answer me.”

“I was recently married, if it’s any of your business.”

“Oh, it’s my business, all right. You should have stayed with your woman. You’ve spat in the soup, fellow.”

“I’m going to walk out of here now. When I come back, I hope you’re gone. If you’re not, you’re going to be in custody.”

Jack Collins thumbed the goggles off his face and threw them aside. He reached behind the boulder and lifted up the Thompson and pointed it at Caleb’s midsection. “Why’d you wander in here, boy? Why’d you let the FBI use you?”

Caleb felt the muscles in his face flex, but no words came out of his mouth.

“You have cuffs or ligatures on you?” Jack Collins said.

“No.”

“Where’s the agent?”

“In a cool place out of the sun. Let him be.”

“What’s his name?”

“Riser.”

“Ethan Riser?”

“You know Ethan?” When Collins didn’t answer, Caleb said, “You killed the biker?”

The bumps and knots and sallow skin and unshaved jowls that constituted the face of Jack Collins seemed to harden into a mask, as though his breathing and all the motors in his head had come to a stop. His eyes became lidded, without heat or anger or emotion of any kind. Then his chest began to rise and fall. “Sorry to do this to you, kid,” he said.

“Buddy, before you-”

“Don’t talk.” Jack Collins’s eyes closed, and his mouth formed into a cone, as though he were devolving into a blowfish at the bottom of a dark aquarium, a place where he was surrounded by water that was so cold he had no feeling at all.

Ethan was sitting on a flat rock inside an alcove that had a sandy floor and was protected on the north side by a big sandstone boulder. He heard an abrupt sound inside the wind, like a burst of dirty thunder, and for a moment thought the plane with the sputtering engine had returned or the dirt biker had cranked up his machine and was gunning across the hardpan. Riser stood up and stepped from behind the boulder. Out of the white haze, he saw a figure walking toward him, a man wearing a leather vest with a panama hat slanted on his head, his face swollen with lumps that looked like infected insect bites, his trousers stuffed into the tops of his cowboy boots. The man was holding a Thompson submachine gun with his right hand. “Need to talk,” he said.

Riser stepped back quickly behind the boulder and pulled his semiautomatic from the holster on his hip.

“You hear me? It doesn’t have to end the way you think,” the man called out.

Ethan inched forward and looked around the edge of the boulder. The man with the Thompson was gone, probably up in the rocks from which he could follow a deer trail over the top of the alcove or remain where he was and wait for Ethan to come out in the open.

“You sick down there?” the man said from somewhere up in the pinon trees.

“Come down here and find out,” Ethan said.

“You’re not calling the shots, Mr. Riser.”

“Other people know where I am.”

“No, I think you’re out here on your own hook.”

“Where’s Caleb?” Ethan said.

“He’s not here.”

“Where is he?”

“He’s somewhere else.”

“You killed him?”

“I’m going to ask you a question. You need to think carefully before you answer. If you lie, I’ll know it. Are you the agent who burned me out?”

“No. What did you do to Caleb?”

“Did you order my house burned?”

“That wasn’t a house. It was a shack. You were squatting in it.”

“Did you order it burned? Did you burn my Bible?”

“No, I had nothing to do with it. Where’s Caleb?”

“Who told you where I was?”

“No one.”

“It was your buddy Caleb, wasn’t it? He and his wife took a picture of Noie Barnum and showed it to you.”

“You’ve got your facts turned around, Collins. We received reports on you from the Border Patrol. They’d rounded up some illegals who’d seen you up here.”

“Why would wetbacks take note of a fellow like me?”

“It’s your BO. As soon as they mentioned it, we knew who they were talking about.”