James Burke - Feast Day of Fools

“I’m not given to making promises, particularly when I’m not the source of the problem,” Cody Daniels said.

Hackberry drummed his fingers on the apron of the food slot. “Deputy Tibbs, would you get the paperwork started on Reverend Daniels’s release?” he said.

“Yes, sir,” she replied.

Cody Daniels’s eyes followed her down the corridor, his gaze slipping down her back to her wide-ass jeans and the thickness of her thighs. “I guess it’s each to his own,” he said.

“Pardon?” Hackberry said.

“No offense meant, but I think I’d rather belly up to a spool of barbed wire. That’s kind of coarse, but you get the picture.”

“I hope you’ll accept this in the right spirit, Reverend. If you ever sass one of my deputies or speak disrespectfully of Chief Deputy Tibbs again, I’m going to hunt around in that pile of scrap wood behind the jail until I find a long two-by-four, one with sixteen-penny nails sticking out of it, then I’m going to kick it so far up your ass you’ll be spitting splinters. Get the picture? Have a nice day. And stay the hell out of my sight.”

Anton Ling heard the man in the yard before she saw him. He had released the chain on the windmill and cupped water out of the spout, drinking it from his hand, while the blades spun and clattered above his head. He was gaunt and wore a short-sleeve shirt with no buttons; his hair hung on his shoulders and looked like it had been barbered with a knife.

“?Que quieres?” she said.

“Comida,” the man replied.

He was wearing tennis shoes. In the moonlight she could see his ribs stenciled against his sides, his trousers flattening in the wind against his legs. She stepped out on the back porch. The shadows of the windmill’s blades were spinning on his face. “You didn’t come out of Mexico,” she said.

“How do you know?” he replied in English.

“The patrols are out. They would have stopped you if you came out of the south.”

“I hid in the hills during the day. I have no food.”

“What is your name?”

“Antonio.”

“You are a worker?”

“Only for myself. I am a hunter. Will you feed me?”

She went into her kitchen and put a wedge of cheese and three tortillas on a paper plate, then covered them with chili and beans that she ladled out of a pot that was still warm on the stove. When she went back outside, the visitor was squatted in the middle of the dirt lot, staring at the moon and the lines of cedar posts with no wire. He took the paper plate from her hand and ignored the plastic spoon and instead removed a metal spoon from his back pocket and began eating. A knife in a long thin scabbard protruded at an angle from his belt. “You are very kind, senora.”

“Where did you learn English?”

“My father was a British sailor.”

“What do you hunt, Antonio?”

“In this case, a man.”

“Has this man harmed you?”

“No, he has done nothing to me.”

“Then why do you hunt him?”

“He’s a valuable man, and I am poor.”

“You’ll not find him here.”

He stopped eating and pointed at the side of his head with his spoon. “You’re very intelligent. People say you have supernatural gifts. But maybe they just don’t understand that you are simply much more intelligent than they are.”

“The man you are looking for was here, but he’s gone now. He will not be back. You must leave him alone.”

“Your property is a puzzle. It has fences all over it, but they hold nothing in and nothing out.”

“This was a great cattle ranch at one time.”

“Now it is a place where the wind lives, one that has no beginning and no end. It’s a place like you, china. You come from the other side of the earth to do work no one understands. You don’t have national frontiers.”

“Don’t speak familiarly of people you know nothing about.”

The man who called himself Antonio lifted the paper plate and pushed the beans and chili and cheese and pieces of tortilla into his mouth. He dropped the empty plate in the dirt and wiped his lips and chin on a bandanna and stood up and washed his spoon in the horse tank and slipped it into his back pocket. “They say you can do the same things a priest can, except you have more power.”

“I have none.”

“I had three children. They died without baptism.” He looked toward the west and the heat lightning pulsing in the sky just above the hills. “Sometimes I think their souls are out there, outside their bodies, lost in the darkness, not knowing where they’re supposed to go. You think that’s what happens after we’re dead? We don’t know where to go until someone tells us?”

“How did your children die?”

“They were killed by a helicopter in front of the clinic where they were playing.”

“I’m sorry for your loss.”

“You can baptize them, china.”

“Do not call me that.”

“It wasn’t their fault they weren’t baptized. They call you La Magdalena. You can reach back in time before they were dead and baptize them.”

“You should talk to a priest. He will tell you the same thing I do. Your children committed no offense against God. You mustn’t worry about them.”

“I can’t see a priest.”

“Why not?”

“I killed one. I think he was French, maybe a Jesuit. I’m not sure. We were told he was a Communist. I machine-gunned him.”

Her eyes left his face. She remained motionless inside the pattern of shadow and light created by the moon. “Whom do you work for?” she asked.

“Myself.”

“No, you don’t. You’re paid by others. They use you.”

“ Conejo, you are much woman.”

“You will not speak to me like that.”

“You didn’t let me finish. You are much woman, but you’ve lied to me. You’ve given Communion to the people who come here, just like a priest. But you turn me away.”

“I think you’re a tormented man. But you won’t find peace until you give up your violent ways. You tortured and killed the man down south of us, didn’t you? You’re the one called Krill.”

His eyes held hers. They were pale blue, the pupils like cinders. In silhouette, with his long knife-cut hair and torso shaped like an inverted pyramid, he resembled a creature from an earlier time, a warrior suckled in an outworn creed. “The man I killed in the south did very cruel things to my brother. He had a chance to redeem himself by being brave. But he was a coward to the end.”

“Others are with you, aren’t they? Out there in the hills.”

“Others follow me. They are not with me. They can come and go as they wish. Given the chance, some of them would eat me like dogs.”

“When you were a coyote, you raped the women who paid you to take them across?”

“A man has needs, china. But it wasn’t rape. I was invited to their beds.”

“Because they had no water to drink or food to eat? Do not come here again, even if you’re badly hurt or starving.”

The man watched the heat lightning, his hair lying as black as ink on his shoulders. “I can hear my children talking inside the trees,” he said. “You have to baptize them, senora. It doesn’t matter if you want to or not.”

“Be gone.”

He raised a cautionary finger in the air, the shadow of the windmill blades slicing across his face and body. “Do not treat me with contempt, Magdalena. Think about my request. I’ll be back.”

Three days later, on Saturday, Hackberry rose at dawn and fixed coffee in a tin pot and made a sandwich out of two slices of sourdough bread and a deboned pork chop he took from the icebox. Then he carried the pot and sandwich and tin cup down to the barn and the railed pasture where he kept his two Missouri foxtrotters, a chestnut and a palomino named Missy’s Playboy and Love That Santa Fe. He spread their hay on the concrete pad that ran through the center of the barn, and then he sat down in a wood chair from the tack room and ate his sandwich and drank his coffee while he watched his horses eat. Then he walked out to their tank and filled it to the rim from a frost-proof spigot, using his bare hand to skim bugs and dust and bits of hay from the surface. The water had come from a deep well on his property and was like ice on his fingers and wrist, and he wondered if the coldness hidden under the baked hardpan wasn’t a reminder of the event waiting for him just beyond the edge of his vision-an unexpected softening of the light, an autumnal smell of gas pooled in the trees, a bugle echoing off stone in the hills.