James Burke - Feast Day of Fools

At the bottom of Danny Boy Lorca’s land was a ravine that few people knew about or chose to travel. It led from Mexico into the United States, but the entrance was overgrown with thornbushes that could scrape the skin off a man or the paint from an automobile. The sides of the ravine went straight up into the sky and had been marked in four places by the lances of mounted Spaniards who littered the bottom of the ravine with the bones of Indians whose most sophisticated weapons had been the sharpened sticks they used to plant corn. The few illegals who used the ravine and even the coyotes who guided them swore they had seen Indians standing on ledges in the darkness, their faces as dry and bloodless and withered as deer hide stretched on lodge poles. The specters on the ledges did not speak or show any recognition of the nocturnal wayfarers passing between the walls. Their eyes were empty circles that contained only darkness, their clothes sewn from the burlap given them by their conquerors. No one who saw the specters ever wanted to return to the area, except Danny Boy Lorca.

He woke to the grinding noise of a car in low gear laboring up a grade and a brittle screeching that was like someone scratching a stylus slowly down a blackboard. When he went to his back door, he saw a gas-guzzler bounce loose from the ravine, its lights burning in the fog, strings of smoke rising from the rust in its hood. He saw the silhouettes of perhaps four men inside the vehicle.

He pulled on his boots and lifted his twenty-gauge from the antler rack on the wall and limped out onto the back porch. The fog smelled of dust and herbicide and a pond strung with green feces and someone burning raw garbage. The gas-guzzler was traversing his property, its engine rods knocking, its low beams swimming with dust particles and candle moths.

He walked toward it, a pain flaring in his thigh each time his foot came down on the ground, the shotgun cradled across the crook of his left arm. His twenty-gauge was called a dogleg, a one-barrel one-shot breechloader he had used to hunt quail and doves and rabbits when he was a boy. It was a fine gun that had served him well. There was a problem, though: He had not bought shells for it in years. He was carrying an unloaded weapon.

He limped through the chicken yard and past the three-sided shed where his firewood was stacked and through one end of his barn and out the other until he stood squarely in the headlights of the gasguzzler. The driver touched his brakes and stuck his head out the window. “We got a little lost, amigo. Know where the highway is at?”

Danny Boy moved out of the headlights’ glare so he could see the driver more clearly. “You got dope in that car?” he said.

“We’re workers, hombre, ” the driver said. “We don’t got no dope. We are lost. That canyon was a pile of shit. You got a cast on your leg.”

“Yeah, and you got a bullet hole in your window,” Danny Boy said.

“These are dangerous times,” the driver said. “You have an accident?”

“No, a guy put a shank in me. Did you see the Indians in the ravine?”

“A shank? That ain’t good. You said Indians? What is with you, man?” the driver said. He turned to the others. “The guy is talking about Indians. Anybody here see Indians?”

The other men shook their heads.

“See, ain’t nobody seen no fucking Indians,” the driver said. “We’re going to Alpine. Come on, man, you need to stand aside with that gun and let us pass.”

Danny Boy’s gaze had been fixed on the driver’s orange hair and whiskers and the gorilla-like bone structure of his face, so he had not paid attention to the man sitting in the passenger seat. At first the passenger’s sharp profile and unnaturally wide shoulders and slit of a mouth were like parts of a bad dream returning in daylight. When Danny Boy realized who the passenger was, he felt his breath catch in his throat. He stepped back from the car window, gripping the shotgun tightly. “I seen you before,” he said.

“You talking to me?” the passenger said.

It ain’t too late. Don’t say no more, a voice inside Danny Boy said. They will disappear and it will be like they were never here. “I remember your trousers.”

“What about them?”

“Dark blue, with a red stripe down each leg. Like trousers a soldier might wear, or a marine.”

“These are exercise pants. But why should you care about my clothes? Why are they of such consequence?”

Danny Boy had to wet his lips before he spoke. “I watched you from the arroyo. I heard that man screaming while you did those things to him.”

“You’re mixed up, man,” the driver said. “We ain’t from around here. You ain’t never seen us.”

“Let him talk,” said the passenger.

“You tied the man’s scalp on your belt,” Danny Boy said. “You heard a sound up in the rocks and looked up at where I was hiding. I acted like a coward and hid instead of he’ping that guy you killed.”

“Many of our people use this place to enter Texas. We are workers trying to feed our families,” the man said. “Why make an issue with us? It is not in your interest.”

“Listen to him, indio, ” the driver said. “You can get that shotgun kicked up your ass.”

“This is my land. That house is my home,” Danny Boy said.

“So we’re going off your land now,” the driver said. “So get out of our way. So stop being a hardheaded dumb fuck who don’t know not to mess with the wrong guys.”

“You ain’t gonna talk to me like that on my land,” Danny Boy said.

“What I’m gonna do is spit on you, indio. I don’t give a shit if you got a gun or not.”

Danny Boy reversed the twenty-gauge in his hands and drove the stock into the driver’s mouth, snapping back his head, whipping spittle and blood onto the dashboard and steering wheel.

“?Matelo!” a man in the backseat said. “Kill that motherfucker, Negrito.”

“No!” the passenger in the front seat shouted, getting out of the car. “You!” he said, pointing across the top of the roof. “Put your gun away. We are no threat to you.”

The driver was still holding his mouth, trying to talk. “Let me, Krill,” he said. “This one deserves to die.”

“No!” the passenger said. “ You, Indian man, listen to me. You are right. This is your land, and we have violated it. But we mean you no harm. You must let us pass and forget we were here. I saw no Indians in the canyon, but I know they’re there. I’m a believer, like you. We are brothers. Like you, I know our ancestors’ spirits are everywhere. They don’t want us to kill one another.”

The passenger had walked through the headlights and was standing four feet from Danny Boy, his eyes roving over Danny Boy’s face, waiting for him to speak.

“I was in Sugar Land with guys like you. You’re a killer. You ain’t like me, and we ain’t brothers,” Danny Boy said.

“Have it as you wish. But you’re putting us in a bad position, my friend. Your fear is taking away all our alternatives.”

“Fear? Not of you. Not no more.” Danny Boy pushed the release lever on the top of the shotgun’s stock and broke the breech and exposed the empty chamber. “See, I ain’t got a shell in it. I ain’t afraid of you. I ain’t afraid of them guys in the car, either.”

“ Esta loco, Krill,” one of the men inside the car said.

The passenger folded his arms and stared into the darkness as though considering his options. “You got some real cojones, man,” he said. “But I don’t know what we’re going to do with you. Are you going to turn us in?”

“When I can get to a phone.”

“Where’s your cell phone?”

“I ain’t got one.”