James Burke - Feast Day of Fools

“When is the lady of the house due back?” he asked.

“Any time now. Sit down. We have plenty of food for everyone.”

“We’re not here to eat,” Jack said.

“You should. You look like a scarecrow,” Isabel said.

Jack stared at her back as she walked away.

“What are you thinking?” Noie asked.

“That woman has a figure like a garbage can with a pair of bowling pins under it.”

“What lies would Miss Anton be telling about you, Jack?”

“Eat up and don’t worry about it.”

A caravan of cars and pickup trucks pulled into the yard, and Mexican working people filed around the sides of the house and through the front door without knocking and out the back door and sat at the tables and began filling their plates, talking incessantly, paying no attention to either Jack or Noie. Through the window of the chapel, Noie could see several of them placing their hands on the base of a wooden statue. “Why do they do that?” he asked.

“They’re ignorant pagans is why. Didn’t you ever read Ernest Hemingway?”

“I don’t think so.”

“You don’t think so? What do you people read in college? Hemingway said Spain was a Catholic country but not a Christian one. Same with this bunch.”

Noie hoped the people sitting near them did not know too much English.

Several children began battering a pinata with a broom handle, tearing apart the papier-mache and colored crepe paper and stringing pieces of wrapped candy over the dirt apron under the tree. Several girls and young women sat down across from Noie and Jack, their backs turned, watching the children, sometimes reaching behind them to pick up a jar of Kool-Aid or a rolled tortilla. Jack was eating frijoles with a spoon, watching the women and girls, a smear of tomato sauce on his chin, the lumps in his face as swollen and hard-looking as cysts. The hair of the women and girls was so black it had a purple tint in it, like satin under a black light. Their skin was sun-browned, their teeth tiny, their eyes elongated, more Indian than Mexican. Their faces and throats were fine-boned, their features free of cosmetics; they looked like girls and young women from the Asian rim who might have just arrived in a new land where they would bear children and be cared for and loved by husbands who considered them a treasure and not simply a helpmate or a commodity.

Jack tore a section of paper towel off a roll on the table and wiped his mouth with it and balled it up in his hand. His eyes seemed to go in and out of focus; he pressed a thumb into his temple as though someone had shot an iron bolt into it.

“You have a migraine?” Noie said.

Jack didn’t answer. He seemed to be counting the number of girls and women sitting on the other side of the plank table. There were nine of them. The wind had come up, fluttering the candles inside the jelly jars, blowing the hair of the women and girls into strands, like brushstrokes in an Oriental painting. The pinata finally exploded from the blows of the broom handle, showering candy on the ground, filling the air with the excited screams of the children. Jack’s eyes were hollow, his mouth gray, his hands like talons on the tabletop.

“You don’t look too good,” Noie said.

“Are you saying something is wrong with me?” Jack said, glaring into Noie’s face. “You saying I got a problem?”

“No, I was wondering if you were sick. Your eyes are shiny, like you’ve got a fever, like you’re coming down with something.” Noie tried to touch Jack’s forehead.

“Mind your damn business, boy.”

“That’s what I’m doing. If you live with someone who’s sick, you ask about him.”

“It’s the dust and the insect repellent and the stink coming out of that pot of tripe. I told you to eat up.”

Jack kept huffing air out his nose, then leaned over and spat into the dust. But he didn’t raise his eyes again and kept his gaze focused on his plate. “Where’s that Amerasian or Chinese woman or whatever she is?”

“Don’t speak rudely of Miss Anton. She’s a fine woman. What’s gotten into you?” Noie said.

“We have to go.”

“It was your idea to come here. It’s a grand night. Look at the stars. Look at the children playing. You should have a family, Jack. You’d see things different.”

“Best shut your mouth, son.”

“Sticks and stones.”

“I cain’t believe I’ve become a warder for a moron.”

Jack stared at the women and girls again and pressed his fist under his chin to keep his hand from shaking. Now Noie had no doubt about the origins of Jack’s discomfort. He lowered his voice when he spoke. “These are poor and desperate people, Jack. Why are you upset by them? Their kind are the salt of the earth. Come on, you’re a better man than the one you’re acting like.”

Jack rose from the bench and picked up Noie’s paper plate and their uneaten food and threw it in the garbage can. “You can get in the car or walk, I don’t care which,” he said.

“There’s Miss Anton now,” Noie said. “Why don’t you talk with her? I’m like these others, I think she’s a holy woman. We’re already here. What’s to lose? It’s just like giving witness at a prayer meeting.”

“You like to quote Saint Paul, do you? ‘I put no woman in authority over a man.’ Did he say that or not? He understood the treachery that’s inherent in their nature. Tell me he didn’t say that?”

“Paul was talking about cultists in Corinth who belonged to a temple dedicated to the worship of Diana. They were courtesans and were behaving as such in the church. Stop acting like you’re unlettered.”

“A pox on you,” Jack replied.

Noie stood up and smiled as Anton Ling headed for their table, but she didn’t acknowledge him. She had parked her truck by the barn and was coming hard across the horse lot, past the windmill and the water tank, amid the tables and the seated diners and the children who were still hunting for the pieces of candy they had scattered on the ground. She paused only long enough to pick up the broom handle the children had used to burst the pinata.

“What are you doing here?” she said to Jack.

The women and the girls at the table scattered.

“To determine if you betrayed me to an FBI agent by the name of Ethan Riser,” Jack said.

“Betrayed you? Are you insane?”

“Agent Riser tried to kill me. With no provocation.”

“You murdered him. You also shot a man from Parks and Wildlife.”

“I defended myself against them.”

“Listen to me, Mr. Barnum,” Anton said. “I don’t know why you’re with this man, but he’s a mass murderer. He killed nine Thai girls with a submachine gun. He’s a coward and a bully and mean to the bone. Stand up, Mr. Collins.”

“I tried to be your friend, woman. I came to your house when Josef Sholokoff’s men attacked you.”

“Don’t you ever address me as ‘woman.’”

“How dare you sass me?”

“How dare you be on the planet?” she said, and swung the broom handle down on the crown of his head just as he was rising from the bench. Then she attacked in serious mode, gripping the bottom of the handle to get maximum torque in her swings, slashing the blows on his ears and shoulders and forearms and forehead, any place that was exposed, cracking him once so hard on the temple that Noie thought the blow might be fatal.

“Miss Anton!” he said. “Miss Anton! Ease up! Please! You’re fixing to kill him!”

Jack stumbled away from the table, blood leaking out of his hair, one arm crooked to protect his face. She followed after him, hitting him in the spine and ribs, finally breaking the broom handle with a murderous swing across the back of his neck. “Go into the darkness that spawned you, you vile man,” she said. “Find the poor woman who bore you and apologize for the fact of your birth.”