James Burke - Feast Day of Fools

“He was waiting to be taken downstairs when R.C. brought Barnum in. I remember he was watching us move everybody down to the tank. He was at the window, too, looking down in the alley.”

“He probably wouldn’t know who Barnum is.”

“No, I saw his jacket. He was in Huntsville. He got clemency on a five-bit for sending his cell partner to the injection table. He’s a professional snitch.”

Hackberry thought about it. “Leave him alone. If he has any suspicions, we don’t want to confirm them.”

“Sorry, I had my hands full up there.”

“Forget it,” he said.

She looked at him for a long time before she spoke. “You want them to come after Barnum, don’t you?”

“I haven’t thought about it. I’m not that smart,” he said. “You think I made a target out of Temple Dowling?”

“You’re in the wrong business, kemo sabe, but I love you just the same,” she replied.

What a difference a day and a change of topography could make, Temple Dowling told himself as he gazed through the lounge window of the Santa Fe hotel he and three of his men had checked in to. The evening sky was turquoise and ribbed with pink clouds, a rainbow arching across a canyon in the west, the sun an orange ball behind the mountains. The bartender brought him another vodka Collins packed with shaved ice and cherries and lemon and lime slices, and when Temple lifted it to his lips, the coldness slid down his throat like balm to his soul. Somehow his feelings of failure and humiliation at the hands of that clown Holland had evaporated during the flight to New Mexico. In fact, Temple was confident enough to smile at his foibles, as though someone else had temporarily occupied his skin and admitted his fear of Josef Sholokoff. It was nothing more than a silly lapse, Temple told himself. He had been tired, worn out by worry, beset on all sides by an army of incompetent employees and government bureaucrats and hayseed cops, Holland in particular. Why had Temple’s father ever thought that idiot could be a congressman, a man who probably couldn’t find his dork unless he tied a string on it? Temple sipped from his Collins and dipped a taco chip in a bowl of guacamole and chewed on it. Then an image he didn’t want to remember floated before his eyes-being discovered by Holland and his chief deputy in the Mexican brothel with two underage girls.

He quickly transformed his emotion into one of righteous outrage. Temple Dowling didn’t turn them into prostitutes. Poverty and hunger did. Was that his fault? Should they starve? Would that make the world a better place? What gave Holland the right to look down on him? Wasn’t he intelligent enough to understand that most men who are attracted to children seek innocence in their lives?

He stopped, his mind seizing up as though he had experienced a brain freeze. He shouldn’t have used the word “children.” He was never attracted to children. He was not a pedophile. He just wanted to be with teenage girls while they were blooming into women. What finer creation was there than a young girl? What greater tragedy was there than seeing them left to the mercies of America’s street culture? Or seeing them turned over to degenerates like Sholokoff, who made addicts of them and used them in porn films? Why was Temple Dowling the scapegoat? He had never treated a woman or girl badly in his life.

He drank his glass empty. The sky had darkened over the mountains, as though a lavender rain were starting to fall where the sun had just set. Where were his men?

“Would you like another, sir?” the bartender asked. He wore a white jacket and a red bow tie and black pants. His face had no color, not even the shadow of a beard, but his hair was as black and liquid in appearance as melted plastic.

“Yeah, hit me again,” Temple replied. “What’s all that noise next door?”

“It’s a young people’s organization of some kind.” The bartender’s cheeks were sunken, his mouth like a button.

“Listen to it. That’s a lot of kids.”

“Can I order you something from the grill?”

“They seem to be having fun,” Temple said, still distracted by the celebratory mood next door.

“The hotel gives them the space for their meetings one night a week.”

“That’s pretty nice.” Temple gazed out the door at the teenagers going in and out of the lobby, the shadows of the potted palms sliding off their skin and hair and the flowers some of the girls were wearing.

“It’s called Alla-something,” the bartender said.

“Can you order me a steak?”

“Yes, sir. Right away.”

“I like it pink in the middle,” Temple said.

He worked on his vodka and waited for his food and listened to the pianist play “Claire de Lune.” The pianist was dressed in a summer tux with a red boutonniere, his long fingers floating above the keys in a cone of blue light. Santa Fe was a grand place to be. The Spanish ambience, the wooden colonnades and earthen jars on the terrazzo entrances to the shops along the street, the stars twinkling above the vastness of the mountains-why should a man be afraid in a country as wonderful as this? Or why should a man be ashamed of what he was? He agreed with the liberals and libertines on this one. A man didn’t choose his sexual inclinations. They chose him. Didn’t Jesus say there are those who are made different in the womb?

The girl who came into the lounge from the lobby and sat down next to him at the bar had the face of a pixie, with a pug nose and an uplifted chin and thick dark red hair that was tied in back. She wore a sequined cowboy shirt and tight stonewashed jeans tucked into boots that came almost to her knee. “Hi,” she said.

“Hi,” Temple said.

“Can you help me out?”

“You kill anybody?”

“I’d like to. At least if I have to go back in there.”

“Where?” he asked.

“To the Alateen meeting.”

“What’s Alateen?”

“A meeting that’s a guaranteed cure for insomnia. I got sentenced to it by the court.”

“Why’d the judge send you there?”

“My boyfriend totaled his car and left me unconscious inside it. My boyfriend is not only a needle-dick but a lying shit. I told the judge if he believed my boyfriend, he was a shitbird, too, but I wasn’t sure whether he qualified as a needle-dick. What’s that music?”

“Debussy, I think. You know, Claude Debussy?”

“Who’s that?”

“He was a great composer.”

She was chewing gum, her eyes rolling, her mouth indolent and somehow vulnerable. The sound of her gum wet and smacking in her cheek made him swallow. She smiled lazily, one eye crinkling at the corner. “Will you buy me a drink?”

“Are you legal age?”

“Why do you think I asked you to buy me one?”

“What are you having?”

“I don’t care. Something with candied cherries in it. Something that’s cold and warm at the same time.”

When the bartender served the steak, Temple ordered another Collins for himself and an old-fashioned for the girl. The bartender lowered his eyes with his hands folded, not unlike an undertaker who doesn’t want to broach a difficult subject.

“She’s my niece,” Temple said. “Nobody would believe she’s twenty-two.”

“Very well, sir,” the bartender said, and went to the end of the bar and took a tumbler from a rack on the back counter.

“That was impressive,” the girl said. “I had an uncle like that. He could get people to do things for him and make them feel like they were doing themselves a favor. You know how he’d do that?”

“Tell me.”

“He already knew what they wanted to do. They only needed permission from someone. It was usually about money. Or maybe sex. But one way or another, they were coming across for him. He used to say, ‘Put a smile on their faces, and they’ll follow you over a cliff.’”