James Burke - Feast Day of Fools

“What happened to him?”

“Nothing. He owns a bunch of massage parlors in Los Angeles. Is that a Rolex?”

Temple looked at his watch, then realized how long he had been in the lounge. Where were his men? They had been acting strangely ever since two of them had been dumb enough to get themselves popped by Preacher Jack. “I never noticed. I have about a dozen watches I wear. Do you ride horses?”

“Sometimes. I barrel-raced when I was in Four-H. I was a hot-walker at Ruidoso Downs. Talk about a horny bunch. You ought to be in the bar after the seventh race.”

“Yeah, but that’s not your crowd. I bet you go to college.”

“If that’s what you call working at the McDonald’s inside Wal-mart. How about that for being a two-time loser? Your steak is getting cold.”

“You want one?”

“I’m a vegan. My whole life changed after I gave up meat and milk products. I thought my needle-dick boyfriend was the problem, but I think it was my diet.”

“What problem?”

“My organisms were messed up.”

“Beg your pardon?”

“Meat and cheese and barnyard shit like that are toxic to your erogenous development.” The waiter placed a coaster in front of her and set down her old-fashioned. She wrapped her gum in her napkin. “Anyway, thanks for the drink. I can’t take that group next door. You know their problem?”

“No,” he replied.

She took a drink from her glass and her eyes brightened and her cheeks filled with color, in the same way a thirsty plant might respond immediately to water. He could feel the coldness of her breath when she exhaled. “They feel unloved,” she said.

“You have a lot of insight for such a young woman.”

“Yeah, that’s why I’m in charge of the french-fry basket.”

“You smell like orange blossoms.”

“Maybe that’s because I’m chewing an orange rind.” She turned on the stool toward him, her knee hitting his. She let her eyes hold on his. “I bummed a ride here with a friend, but he’s gonna stay at the meeting for another hour. I live six miles away, and I don’t have money for a cab. I’d like a ride, but when I get home, I go in by myself.”

“You’re the captain of your soul?”

“No, I’m just not somebody’s backseat fuck.”

He picked up a small cooked tomato on the tines of his fork and placed it in his mouth and chewed slowly. “I wouldn’t ever say or even think something like that about you,” he said.

“So you’re gonna give me a ride?”

“If you’ll do one thing for me.”

Her eyes shifted sideways with a level of dependence that made his heart drop. “What’s that?” she said.

“Walk through the open-air jewelry market with me. I’m a sucker for Indian junk. I need an expert hand to guide me.”

“You have a daughter?”

“No.”

“I thought that’s what you were gonna tell me.”

“Why?”

“Most of the time they say I remind them of their daughter. They can’t do enough for you.”

“Who?”

“The kind of guys who like to grope young girls in the back of the church bus,” she replied, picking up her purse. “Think I’m kidding? Ask yourself why any middle-aged man wants to make a career out of being a youth minister or a park director or a guy who teaches leather craft to rug rats. Because he likes the way the restroom smells after little kids have pissed all over the bowl? Give me a break.”

“How old are you?”

“Buy me a veggie burger and I’ll tell you. Let’s go, I won’t bite,” she said, squeezing his arm.

Krill had parked the car in a grove of dead fruit trees no more than fifty yards behind the house of the woman Negrito kept referring to as la china. After the setting of the sun, the wind had dropped, and the sky had turned as stark as an ink wash. The gingerbread house and trees and windmill and barn and horse tank, even the hills, seemed drained of color and movement of any kind. The horses and chickens were gone from the yard, and there was no birdsong in the trees. The only sound Krill could hear as he and Negrito approached the house was water ticking from a rusted pipe that extended over the surface of the horse tank. A nimbus of dust hung above the house like a great cloud of gnats.

Krill stopped and knelt on one knee behind a car that had no wheels or glass in the windows and whose metal was still hot from baking in the sun all day. He stared at the house and the absence of electric lights or movement inside. Negrito knelt beside him, the leather cord of his hat swinging under his chin, the heavy gray fog of his odor puffing out of his clothes. “Krill, you got to tell me,” he said.

“Tell you what?”

“Why we are here. I don’t see no percentage, man.”

“There isn’t one. Not for you, anyway, my old friend.”

“The others have deserted you, but still you talk down to me like I’m the enemy and not the maricones who ran away.”

Krill placed his hand on Negrito’s shoulder, which felt like a flannel sack filled with rocks. “Like me, you are a killer. But killing is not a problem for you. You sleep without dreaming and rise each morning into a new day. But I relive all the times I watched the light go out of my victims’ eyes. My thoughts have become my enemies.”

“That’s why there are whores and tequila in Durango. A trip there will ease your problems, jefe.”

“I have to talk to La Magdalena.”

“You want to sleep with her? That’s what’s going on? You think there’s something special about a Chinese woman in bed? They ain’t no different from our women. You love them at night, and in the morning they make your life awful.”

“Poor Negrito. Why do you always think with the head of your penis?”

“’Cause it ain’t never let me down, man,” said Negrito, and cupped his hand on Krill’s shoulder. “Come on, tell me the truth. Why you got to talk to this woman if you ain’t looking to poke her?”

“To confess my sins, hombre. To rid myself of the faces I see in my sleep.”

“It ain’t a sin to kill people in a war. We were farmers and cattle workers until the war came. The people we killed had it coming. What is the big loss when a Communist is killed?”

“My children died because of me.”

“That don’t make no sense, Krill.”

“I used to blame the army and the Americans and those from Argentina who first gave us our guns. But I took the pay of corrupt political men and did what they told me. I killed the Jesuit and the leftists. You know these things are true, Negrito, because you were there. The helicopter machine-gunned the clinic, but I was their brother in arms. I helped bring a curse on our land.”

“No, your head is screwed up, Krill. That woman ain’t no priest. Whatever you confess to her, she’s gonna tell the cops. Then they’re gonna hunt us down. They don’t want nobody to know what we done down there.”

“There’s something strange going on in that house,” Krill said.

“What’s strange is your head. It glows in the dark. I think you got too many chemicals in it. Remember those nights in Juarez?”

“The woman’s truck is by the barn, but there is no one moving in the house, and no electric light is turned on. But look through the window of the chapel. The candles are burning in front of the Virgin’s statue.”

“Of course. She burns candles all the time. That’s what people like her do. They burn candles. The rest of us work and sweat and sometimes take bullets, but they burn candles.”

“No, this one has been to war, Negrito. She is not one to go off somewhere or take a nap while an open flame burns in her house.”

“You make a complexity of everything,” Negrito said. “You are a man who cannot bear to have a quiet and simple thought. You constantly construct spiderwebs so you can walk through them.”