James Burke - Feast Day of Fools

“You got a regular phone in your house?”

“No, I ain’t got no phone.”

“You don’t have a telephone? Not of any kind?”

“You see a pole line going to my house?”

Krill stared at the house and at the barn and at the truck parked next to the barn. “The man you saw me kill out there in the desert? He was a corrupt Mexican cop who tortured my brother to death.”

“Then you ain’t no different from the Mexican cop.”

“You are fortunate to have this fine place to live on. I had a farm once, and children and a wife. Now I have nothing. Don’t judge me, hombre.”

Krill pulled a long game-dressing knife from a scabbard on his side and walked to Danny Boy’s truck and sliced the air stems off all four tires. “Buenas noches,” he said as he got back in the automobile. “Maybe one day you will understand men like us. Maybe one day the Indians who live in the canyon will tell you who your real brothers are.”

“They ain’t you!” Danny Boy shouted at the car’s taillights.

In the gloaming of the day, Preacher Jack Collins and Noie Barnum pulled into the drive-in restaurant on the state four-lane and parked under the shed and ordered hamburgers and fries and onion rings and frosted mugs of root beer. The evening was warm, the wind blowing steadily across the rolling countryside, the storm clouds in the south bursting with brilliant patterns of white electricity that made Jack think of barbed wire. He had not spoken since they had left the cottage on the hillside above the junkyard.

“You’re not letting me in on where we’re going?” Noie said.

Jack chewed on his food, his expression thoughtful. “You give much thought to the papists?”

“The Catholics?”

“That’s what I just said.”

“Not particularly.”

“That Chinese woman, the one who dressed your wounds, is a puzzle to me.”

“She’s just a woman with a big heart.”

“Maybe she’s spread her big heart around a little more than she should have.”

“If you read Saint Paul, there’s no such thing as being too charitable.”

“She may have been acting as a friend to the FBI. If that’s true, she’s no friend to us.”

“You saying she’s a turncoat?”

“I’d like to talk to her about it. Here’s a question for you.” From the side, Jack’s eyes looked like glass marbles pushed into dough that had turned moldy and then hardened. The amber reflection in them was as sharp as broken beer glass but without complexity or meaning. In fact, the light in his eyes was neutral, if not benign. “You put a lot of work into whittling out that checker set. Each one of those little buttons was a hand-carved masterpiece. But two pieces were missing from your poke, and you didn’t seem to give that fact any thought.”

“I guess I dropped them somewhere.”

“When you counted the checkers out, you didn’t notice that two were gone?”

“Guess not.”

“Too bad to lose your pieces. You’re an artisan. For a fellow like you, your craft is an extension of your soul. That’s what an artisan is. His thoughts travel through his arm and his hand into the object he creates.”

“That’s an interesting way to look at it.”

“Think they might have fallen out in the trunk when we were moving?”

“I’ll look first chance.”

“You like your hamburger?”

“You’d better believe it.”

“Does it bother you that an animal has to give up its life so we can eat types of food we probably could do without?”

“You know how to hang crepe, Jack.”

“Think we’d be welcomed by the papist woman?”

“You know what I would really like, more than anything else in the world? I mean, if I could have one wish, a wish that would make my whole life complete? That would make me so happy I would never ask for anything else as long as I live?”

“I cain’t figure what that might be, Noie.”

“I’d like to make peace with the men who held me hostage and killed the Mexican man I was handcuffed to. I’d like to make peace with the Al Qaeda guys they were going to sell me to. I’d like to apologize to them for the innocent people I helped kill with the drones I helped develop. Most of all, Jack, I’d like to repay you for everything you’ve done. When they made you, they busted the mold.”

Jack worked a piece of food out of his jaw with his tongue and swallowed, his gaze straight ahead. He sipped from his mug, grains of ice clinging to his bottom lip. An attractive waitress in a rayon uniform roller-skated past the front of the Trans Am on the walkway under the shed, but he didn’t seem to notice. “Who’s ‘they’?” he asked.

“Pardon?”

“You said ‘when they made you.’ You didn’t use God’s name. Like it would be irreverent. Is that just a quirk, or are you saying I wasn’t created by the hand of God?”

“I said it without thinking, that’s all. It was just a joke.”

“Not to me it isn’t. Know why people use passive voice?”

“I know that it has something to do with grammar, but I’m an engineer, Jack, not much on the literary arts.”

“Passive voice involves sentence structure that hides the identity of the doer. It’s a form of linguistic deception. Pronouns that have no referents are also used to confuse and conceal. A linguist can spot a lie faster than any polygraph can.”

“You never went to college?”

“I never went to high school.”

“You’re amazing.”

“That’s a word used by members of the herd. Everything is either ‘amazing’ or ‘awesome.’ You’re not a member of the herd. Don’t act like you are.”

“Jack, eating supper with you is like trying to digest carpet tacks. I’ve never seen the like of it. My food hasn’t even hit my stomach, and I’m already constipated.”

“Look at me and don’t turn around.”

“What is it?” Noie said.

“A highway patrol cruiser just pulled in five slots down. There’re two cops in it.”

The waitress came to the window and picked up the five-dollar tip and lifted the tray off the door and smiled. “Thank you, sir,” she said.

“My pleasure,” Jack said. He watched her walk away, his eyes slipping off her onto the side of the cruiser.

“We got to back out and drive right past them,” Noie said. “Or wait for them to leave.”

“I’d say that sums it up.” Jack bit down on his lip, his face shadowed by the brim of his hat. He removed it and set it on the dashboard and combed his hair in the rearview mirror.

“What are you doing?” Noie said.

Jack got out of the car, yawning, rubbing his face, a weary traveler about to hit the road again. “Ask the cops for directions to the cutoff to I-10,” he replied. He gazed up at the sky and at the network of lightning that was as spiked as barbed wire inside the clouds. “You can almost smell the salt and coconut palms on the wind. Mexico is waiting for us, son. Soon as we tidy up a few things. Yes, indeedy, a man’s work is never done.”

When Hackberry arrived at work early the next morning, Danny Boy Lorca was sleeping on a flattened cardboard carton in the alleyway behind the rear entrance, one arm over his eyes.

“Want to come in or sleep late and let the sun dry the dew on your clothes?” Hackberry said.

Danny Boy sat up, searching in the shadows as though unsure where he was. “I ain’t drunk.”

“Where’s your truck?”

“At the house. Krill cut all my tires. I hitched a ride into town.”

“Krill was at your house?”

“I busted his driver in the mouth. There was four of them together. They come up the ravine behind my property.”

“You sure it was Krill, Danny? You haven’t been knocking back a few shots, have you?”