James Burke - Feast Day of Fools

Love That Santa Fe blew air through his lips, and Missy’s Playboy whipped his tail back and forth across his hind legs.

Hackberry had nailed an apple basket against the side of the barn, roughly approximating the heart of the strike zone for a six-foot batter. He took a fielder’s glove and a canvas bag of baseballs out of the tack room and carried them to the improvised mound he had constructed sixty feet from the apple basket. “Watch this,” he said to the horses. “The batter is crowding the plate and staking out territory he hasn’t earned. We’re going to serve up a forkball to help him in his search for humility.”

Hackberry spread two fingers on the ball, notching the stitches, hiding the pitch in his glove, then let fly at the basket, whipping the pitch overhand, throwing his shoulder and butt into it. The ball smacked into the wood, just wide of the apple basket, and the two horses whirled and plunged out of the light and into the darkness, making a wide circle and returning, their tails flagging.

“Okay, you got that out of your system?” Hackberry said to the horses. “Now watch. This next one is a changeup, to be followed by a slider and then my favorite.”

For the changeup, he held the ball in the back of his palm and floated it into the basket and then buzzed the slider wide and knocked a slat out of the basket.

“All right, forget the slider,” he said. “The ball is getting thrown around the infield. The last guy to touch it before it comes back to me is the shortstop. This guy has no ethics at all. He’s cut a hole in the pocket of his glove, and between his palm and the pocket is a wet sponge. When the ball comes back to me, it feels like it’s been through a car wash.”

Hackberry put two fingers in his mouth, then fired an in-shoot into the basket that sounded like silk ripping.

“What do you think of that, fellows?” he said.

He realized he had lost the attention of his foxtrotters and that they were looking at something out in the darkness, something just on the edge of the floodlight’s glare.

“I didn’t mean to give you a start,” a voice said.

“Who are you?” Hackberry asked.

“Dennis Rector is my name. You’re Sheriff Holland, right?”

“I was when I woke up this morning. What are you doing on my property?”

“I got a couple of hypotheticals to ask you.”

“Where’s your vehicle?”

“Out yonder, on the road, just about out of gas.”

Dennis Rector walked farther into the floodlight. He was a small man whose head was shaved and whose skin was white and whose body looked molded from plastic. His jeans were too large for him and were rolled in big cuffs above his work boots. His shirt was torn and the side of his face scraped.

“You carrying a weapon, Mr. Rector?”

“No, sir. I’m not a violent man. But I know men who are. Men you’re looking for.”

“You’re looking right into a flood lamp, Mr. Rector. But the pupils of your eyes are as big as inkwells. Can you tell me why that is?”

“I’m a truck driver, sir. I’ve pulled Monarch and Wolf Creek Pass when it was ten below, and I’ve gone sliding sideways on ice at forty miles an hour through Pagosa Springs. I’ve driven from Manhattan to Los Angeles in one haul, and I mean not ever shutting it down, either. I used to do whites on the half-shell, then I got into black beauties and have never quite got rid of their appeal. Those babies will flat cook your mush, I’m here to testify. Know a man name of Josef Sholokoff?”

“What about him?” Hackberry said.

“What about him, he asks,” Dennis Rector said, as though a third party were there. “What this is about is I ain’t no Judas Iscariot. I don’t like getting treated as one, either. I don’t like getting run through brambles and chased across the countryside like a fugitive from a chain gang is what I’m talking about. I shaved my head to disguise myself. I do not like this way of life.”

“That’s interesting. I think you might like our detox unit, Mr. Rector. You can get some medication and therapy and maybe enter a program. Let’s take a walk up to the house, and I’ll arrange some transportation, and in the meantime you can tell me about Josef Sholokoff.”

“You can keep your detox and three hots and a cot, Sheriff, ’cause that ain’t why we’re having this meeting of the minds. I did what I was asked and got involved in something that just ain’t my way. I know how things work. A bunch decides to do something really awful, and I mean awful, as bad as it gets, something that’s worse than any nightmare, and one man gets blamed for it and becomes the stink on horse pucky.”

“You have a point,” Hackberry said. “There’s a chair by the tack room. Take a load off, and I’ll be right back with a couple of sodas. How’s that sound?”

“I could use it, yes, sir.”

Hackberry walked up to the house and called for a cruiser. Then he took two cans of ginger ale from the icebox and dropped two pieces of fried chicken in a paper bag and walked back down to the barn. He saw no sign of Dennis Rector. The moon was brilliant over the hills, the wind sweeping in the trees, his horses blowing in the pasture. The lights were still on inside the barn, and he heard a sound like the speed bag thumping irregularly against the rebound board in the rear stall, as though it were being struck by someone who did not know how to use it.

Then he noticed that the chair he kept on the concrete pad was gone and that the tack room door was ajar. He dropped the two cans of soda and the bag of fried chicken into the dirt and ran inside the barn and threw open the tack room door. The chair lay on its side. Above it, Dennis was still swinging from the impact of the drop, his throat wrapped tightly with horse reins, his arms twitching, his neck broken.

Preacher Jack Collins was not in a good mood. Since the long drive from the cabin on the creek, he had said little to Noie Barnum. Also, he had offered no explanation for his and Noie’s sudden departure, scowling whenever Noie asked a question, brooding and moving his lips without sound as though sorting out his thoughts with a hay fork. The decrepit stucco house they had moved into had been a home for bats and field mice and smelled of the damp earth under the floors. The toilet and sink and bathtub were streaked with orange rust and filled with the shells of dead roaches. In the back of the house was a butte that resembled a row of giant clay columns eroding side by side, creating an effect that was both phallic and effete. The front windows gave onto a long sloping plain and a junkyard that was surrounded by a twelve-foot fence with spools of razor wire on top. In the late-afternoon sun, the compacted and polished metal in the junkyard and the razor wire protecting it took on the sharpened brilliance of hundreds of heliographs.

Jack had flung his suitcase on a bunk bed, then brought his guitar case inside and set it on the kitchen table and unsnapped the top.

“What’s that?” Noie asked.

“They were called trench sweepers in the Great War,” Jack replied, setting the Thompson and two ammunition pans and box upon box of cartridges on an oily cloth. “They were manufactured too late to be used in the trenches, though. That’s how guys like John Dillinger and Baby Face Nelson ended up with them.”

“What are you doing with one, Jack?”

“Home protection.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Get what?”

“Anything we’re doing.”

“There’re people out there who want to hurt me. It’s not a difficult concept.”

“Hurt you why?”

“I’m hiding you, boy.” Noie’s adenoidal accent was starting to wear on him. Jack threaded a cleaning patch through the tip of a metal pod and dripped three drops of oil on the patch and pushed it down the muzzle of the Thompson. He worked the rod up and down, then inserted a piece of white paper in the chamber and looked down the inside of the barrel at the whorls of reflected light spinning through the rifling. “Did you ever take classes in speech or diction?”