Feast Day of Fools

CHAPTER TWELVE

When Hackberry came through the front door of the cantina, he saw the bartender take note of him and Pam, then continue eating from a bowl of tripe, blowing gently on each spoonful before he placed it in his mouth. The bartender was seated on a stool, a napkin tucked inside the top of his shirt, his throat skin as coarse and wrinkled as a turkey’s, his eyes like big brown buttons in a pie-plate face, his head shaved bald and a large black swastika, with red feathers for appendages, tattooed on the crown of his skull. He told Hackberry that he was sorry, but no, he had not seen anyone in the bar resembling Hackberry’s young friend. His hands were big and square and looked like those of a bricklayer rather than those of a bartender. He continued eating, leaning forward over the bowl of tripe, careful not to spill any on top of his stomach.

“How long have you been on duty here?” Hackberry said.

“A few hours,” the bartender replied. “But sometimes I got to serve food and drinks in the back. Maybe your friend was here but I didn’t see him.”

“In back?” Hackberry said.

“That’s right, senor. We rent rooms to people who have traveled from far away. Sometimes they drink too much and want to rest before they drive home again.”

“That’s a very intelligent service you provide. How long does it take for you to carry a service tray to the back and return to the bar where your customers are waiting?”

“That depends, senor. Sometimes my customers take care of themselves. They are poor but honest, and they leave the money on the bar for whatever they drink.”

“What’s your name?” Hackberry asked.

“Bernicio.”

“You have maybe a half-dozen customers in here. You can see everyone in the cantina from the front door to the back. My friend called me from here. He gave me the name of the cantina and directions to it. My friend is tall and looks very much like an Anglo. Don’t offend me by pretending you were not aware of his presence.”

“ Claro that maybe he was here, but I didn’t see him. I wish I had. Then I could be helpful. Then I could finish my supper.”

Hackberry found himself trying to think through a peculiar manifestation of dishonesty that is considered normal in the third world and is totally antithetical to the average North American’s point of view. The individual simply makes up his own reality and states that black is white and white is black and never flutters an eyelash. Appearance and denial always take precedence over substance and fact, and the application of logic or reason will never sway the individual from his self-manufactured convictions.

“Did you see a man with a wound in his face playing pool?” Hackberry asked.

“No, senor.”

“You were already shaking your head before I finished my question,” Hackberry said.

“Because I have no information that can help you. The people who come here are not criminals. Look at those by the pool table. They’re campesinos. Do they have the wary look of dishonest men?”

“I’m an officer of the law in the United States, Bernicio. I have friends who are officials here in Coahuila. If you have deceived us and put my friend in harm’s way, you will have to answer both to them and to the United States government.”

“Will you join me, you and the senorita? I can put onions and extra tortillas in the tripe, and we will have enough for three. I would like very much for you to be my guests and to accept my word about what I have said. I also hope you find your young friend. The Americans who come here are not on a good errand, senor. I hope your friend is not one of these. I worked in Tijuana. Marines would be arrested by our police and moved from jail to jail in the interior and never seen again. Your government could do nothing for them. I served time in one of your prisons. It was a very nice place compared to the prisons here in Mexico. Fortunately, I am a Christian today, and I no longer think about these kinds of things.”

Hackberry studied the swastika that was tattooed as large as a hand and clamped down on the bartender’s shaved scalp. “Do you have to wear a hat when you attend church?” he asked.

Bernicio leaned forward, lifting the spoon to his mouth, his eyes focused close together, as though he were staring at a fly three inches from the bridge of his nose. “Buena suerte, senor,” he said.

Hackberry and Pam went back out onto the street. The dusk had settled on the countryside, and the sky was traced with shooting stars that fell and disappeared beyond the mountains in the south. Farther up the street, a band was playing in a cantina, and prostitutes were sitting on the steps of the brothels, some of them smoking cigarettes that glowed in the shadows and sparked brightly when the girls flipped them into the gutters. Across from where Hackberry and Pam had parked their unmarked Cherokee was a squat one-story building constructed of rough stone with steel bars on the windows and a single tin-shaded yellow bulb over the entrance. Through the main window, Hackberry could see a beetle-browed man in a khaki uniform wearing a khaki cap with a lacquered black brim. The man was absorbed in the comic book he was reading, the pages folded back tightly in one hand.

“You want to check in with the locals?” Pam asked.

“Waste of time,” Hackberry replied.

“It’s like prayer. What’s to lose?”

“It’s not like prayer. The cops run the cathouses.”

She was chewing gum, looking up and down the street, her hands propped on her hips. “This is what hell must look like.”

“It is hell,” he replied.

She glanced at him, then concentrated her attention on the police station across the street. He could hear her gum snapping in her jaw.

“I was a frequent visitor,” he said. “Not to this place in particular but seven or eight like it. I was educated and had money and power and a Cadillac to drive. The prostitutes were hardly more than girls. Some of them were the sole support for their families.”

“How many people were in a North Korean POW camp? How many of them spent months under a sewer grate in a dirt hole in winter?” When he didn’t answer, she glanced at him again, still chewing her gum, shifting it from one side of her jaw to the other. “Let’s stomp some ass, Hack. R.C. said the guy with the hole in his face worked for somebody who was visiting a cathouse?”

“Yeah, one that features teenage girls,” Hackberry replied.

Krill was furious. He paced back and forth in the last silver glimmering of sunlight inside the clouds, staring at the open trunk of the gas-guzzler Negrito had parked behind the ruined adobe house where they were staying. In his right hand, he clenched a braided wallet, the shape as curved as his palm and pocket-worn the color of browned butter. “You smoked some bad weed?” he said to Negrito. “Something with angel dust or herbicide sprinkled on it??Estupido! Ignorant man!”

“Why you say that, Krill? It hurts my feelings,” Negrito said.

“You kidnapped a Texas deputy sheriff!”

“I thought he was valuable, jefe.”

“I’m not your jefe. Don’t you call me that. I am not the jefe of estupidos.”

“It’s clear that he’s a narc. Or maybe worse. Maybe he came down here because of us and the DEA informer we killed. We can sell the Tejano to La Familia Michoacana. They’ll cut his tongue out. He ain’t gonna talk to nobody if he ain’t got a tongue.”

Krill ripped Negrito’s leather hat off his head and slapped him with it, raking it down hard on his face. Negrito stared at Krill blankly, the orange bristles around his mouth and along his jaw and on his throat as stiff as wire, his lips parted, his emotions buried in a stonelike expression that seemed impervious to pain. Krill whipped the hat down on his head again and again, his teeth clenched. “Are you listening to me, estupido?” he said. “Who gave you permission to act on your own? When did you become this brilliant man with a master plan for the rest of us?”

“You keep saying you’re not my jefe. You keep saying we follow or we don’t follow, that you don’t care about these small matters. But when I use my perceptions to make a decision, you become enraged. I am a loyal soldier, Krill.”

“You are a Judas waiting for your moment to act.” Krill hit Negrito once more, and this time the leather chin cord with the tiny wooden acorn on it struck Negrito in the eye, causing it to tear.

“Why you treat me like this? You think I’m an animal and this is your barnyard and you can do whatever you want with me because I’m one of your animals?” Negrito said.

“No, an animal has brains. It has survival instincts. It doesn’t always think with its penis. Who saw you leave the house of puta with the deputy sheriff?”

“It wasn’t a house of puta. I don’t got to go to houses of puta. It was a cantina. Bernicio the bartender drugged his coffee. We took the boy out the back. Bernicio is a member of La Familia and ain’t gonna tell nobody about it. You worry about all the wrong things. Now you’re taking out your anger on your only friend, someone who has been with you from the beginning.”

The dirt yard where they stood was blown with tumbleweeds and chicken feathers and lint from a grove of cottonwood trees. A hatchet was embedded in a stump by an empty hog lot, and on the ground around the stump were at least two dozen heads of chickens, their beaks wide, their eyes filmed with dust. Someone had lit a kerosene lamp inside the ruined adobe house, and through the back window, Krill could see five of his men playing cards and drinking at a table, their silhouettes as black as carbon inside the window glass. He tried to clear his mind of anger and think about what he should do next. He gazed at the bound and gagged figure lying in an embryonic position inside the trunk of the gas-guzzler. It is not smart to abuse Negrito anymore, he told himself. Negrito’s stupidity is incurable and cannot be addressed effectively except by a bullet in the head. There will always be time for that, but not now. The others admire Negrito for his muscular strength and his ability to endure pain and the great reservoir of cruelty that he willingly expends on their behalf. Keep this Judas in full view and never let him get behind you, Krill told himself, but do not abuse or demean him anymore, particularly in front of the others.

When Krill had finished this long thought process, he was about to speak in a less reproving way. But Negrito, being the man he was, began talking again. “See, everybody has been worried about you, man. Bringing that box out here with your children’s bones in it, it’s like you’re putting a curse on us. The dead got to be covered up, Krill. You got to place heavy stones on their graves so their spirits don’t fly around and mess up your head. The dead can do that, man. Even your kids. Baptism can’t do them no good now. They’re dead and they ain’t coming back. That’s why the earth is there, to hide the body’s decay and to make clean the odors it creates. What you’re doing goes against nature. It ain’t just me that says it. You call me a Judas? I’m the only one who tells you the truth to your face. Those inside are not your friends. When you ain’t around, they talk among themselves.”

Krill squatted in the dirt and began pulling the photos and credit cards and the driver’s license and Social Security card and the various forms of personal identification, including a membership card in a state law enforcement fraternity, from the wallet of the Texan who lay bound in the trunk of the car, his mouth wrapped with duct tape, his forehead popping with sweat. Krill took a penlight from his shirt pocket and shone it on a photo of a girl standing in front of a church. The girl was wearing a sundress and a red hibiscus flower in her hair and was smiling at the camera. The church had three bell towers and a tile roof and looked like a church Krill had seen in Monterrey. Krill focused the penlight’s beam on the driver’s license and studied the photo and then shone the penlight on the Texan’s face. Still squatting, he let the contents of the wallet spill to the ground and draped his hands on his thighs.

“What are you thinking, jefe?” Negrito asked.

Krill started to correct him for calling him jefe again, but what was the use? Negrito was unteachable. “Where is the Texan’s money?” he asked.

“He must have spent it all.”

Krill nodded and thought, Yes, that’s why it now resides in your pocket. He stared at the Texan in the trunk and at the dust rising off the hills into the sky and at the chicken heads lying in the dirt. He could hear a sound inside his head like someone grinding a piece of iron unrelentingly against an emery wheel. He squeezed his temples and stared at Negrito. “You know the dirt road that goes into the desert?”

“Of course.”

“You have been there and can drive it in the dark, through the washouts and past the mountains where it becomes flat and no one lives?”

“I’ve done all these things many times, on horseback and in cars and trucks. But why are you talking about the desert? We don’t need no desert. You know the place I use for certain activities. I’m telling you, this is a valuable man. Don’t throw good fortune away. Make good things come out of bad.”

“Do not speak for a while, Negrito. Practice discipline and be silent and listen to the wind blowing and the sounds the cottonwoods make when their limbs knock against each other. If you listen in a reverent and quiet fashion, dead people will speak to you, and you will not be so quick to dismiss them. But you must stop speaking. Do not speak unless you can improve the silence.?Entiendes? Do not speak for a very long time.”

“If you hear dead people talking to you, it’s ‘cause you’re dead, too,” Negrito said, his mouth gaping broadly at his own humor.

Krill gathered up the contents of the Texan’s wallet and began sticking them back in the compartments and plastic windows. He closed the wallet in his palm and walked to the trunk of the car and tossed it inside. While he did these things, he could feel the eyes of Negrito boring into his neck. He stared into the sweating face of the Texan. He could see the indentation in the tape where it covered the Texan’s mouth. He thought he heard the Texan try to cry out when he slammed the trunk shut.

“This is what you need to do, Negrito,” Krill said. “First, you-”

“You don’t got to tell me. I’ll get the shovel and take care of it. But it’s a big waste of opportunity, man. And going out in the desert is a double waste of time and gas and effort. The others ain’t gonna like this. We ain’t been making no money, Krill. Everything we do is about your dead kids and getting even with the Americans ’cause their helicopter killed them. But how about us, man? We have needs and families, too.”

Krill waited for Negrito to finish before he spoke, his face neutral, his white cotton shirt filling with air in the wind. “See, what you don’t understand, my brother in arms, is that the Texan hasn’t done anything to us. You fill the big wood canteen with water and put it in the car, and you put a sack of food with it. Then you drive the Tejano at least fifty kilometers into the desert and turn him loose. Later, you meet us in La Babia. With luck, all this will pass. If you hurt or sell the Texan, we will have no peace. Do you understand that now, my brother?”

“If that’s what you say,” Negrito replied.

“Good.”

“And after La Babia?”

“Who knows? The Quaker belongs to us. We have to get him back. If you want to get paid, that’s how we will all get paid. Then you can entertain all the chicas in Durango and Piedras Negras and Chihuahua. You will be famous among them for your generosity.”

“You’ll sell the Quaker to the Arabs but not the Texan to our own people?”

“The man Barnum has made machines that kill from the air, no matter what kind of conversion he claims to have gone through. All the gringos are makers of war and the killers of our people. Let them lie together in their own waste and eat it, too.”

“I ain’t never gonna understand you.”

Krill watched Negrito enter the back of the farmhouse, the rowels on his spurs tinkling, the pad of orange hair on his arms and shoulders glowing against the light that fell from the kitchen. Unconsciously, Krill rested his palm against the car trunk and felt the exhaust heat in the metal soak into his skin and leave his hand feeling scorched and dirty.

The brothel where two SUVs with Texas plates were parked did not look like a brothel. Or at least it did not resemble the adobe houses or clusters of cribs on the far end of town where the street bled into the darkness of the desert and drunks sometimes wandered away from their copulations to bust beer bottles with their firearms out on the hardpan. The brothel frequented by the Texans was located at the end of a gravel lane and was actually an enclave of buildings that had once made up a ranch. The main house was built of stone quarried out of the mountains and had a wide terrazzo porch with large glazed ceramic urns that were planted with Spanish daggers and flowers that opened only at night. The colonnade over the porch was supported by cedar posts and covered with Spanish tile and tilted downward to direct rainwater during the monsoon season away from the house.

There was no lighting outside the building, which helped preserve the anonymity of the patrons. The night air smelled of flowers and warm sand and water that had pooled and gone stagnant and was auraed by clouds of gnats. Pam Tibbs pulled the Cherokee to a stop and cut the ignition. “How do you want to play it?” she said.

“We wear our badges and carry our weapons in full view,” Hackberry replied.

“I’ve seen that purple SUV before.”

“Where?”

“When I broke both of its taillights in front of the cafe.”

“ That’s Temple Dowling’s vehicle?” he said.

“It was when I broke his taillights. You’re surprised Dowling would be here?”

“Nothing about Dowling surprises me. But I thought the man with the hole in his face might have been working for the Russian, this guy Sholokoff.”

“Let’s find out.”

“You feel comfortable going in there?” he asked.

She rested her hands on top of the steering wheel. Even in the starlight, he could see the shine on her upper arms and the sunburned tips of her hair. He could also see the pity in her eyes. “It’s not me who’s uncomfortable,” she said. “When are you going to accept your own goodness and the fact that you’ve paid for what you might have done wrong when you were young?”

“When the mermaids come back to Texas,” he said.

“Pardon?”

“It was a private joke between my father and me. Ready to make life interesting for the shitbags?”

“Always,” she replied.

They got out on either side of the Cherokee and went inside the brothel. The living room was furnished with a red velvet settee and deep leather chairs and a cloth sofa and a coffee table set with wineglasses and dark bottles of burgundy and a bottle of Scotch and a bucket of ice. There was also a bowl of guacamole and a bowl of tortilla chips on the table. The only light came from two floor lamps with shades that were hung with pink tassels. Two mustached men Hackberry had seen before sat on the sofa, dipping chips into the guacamole and drinking Scotch on the rocks. A Mexican girl not over fifteen, in a spangled blue dress, was sitting on the settee. She wore white moccasins on her feet and purple glass beads around her neck. Her skin was dusky, her nose beaked, her Indian eyes as elongated as an Asian’s. Her lipstick and rouge could not disguise the melancholy in her face.

“How are you gentlemen tonight?” Hackberry said.

“Pretty good, Sheriff. I didn’t think you’d remember us,” one of them said.

“You came to my office with Mr. Dowling,” Hackberry said.

“Yes, sir, that’s us. What might you be doing here?” the man said.

“Not a lot. Just driving around the countryside trying to find a deputy of mine who got himself kidnapped. Do you boys know anything about a kidnapped deputy sheriff by the name of R. C. Bevins?”

The two men looked at each other, then back at Hackberry. “No, sir,” the first man said.

Hackberry could hear the clatter of pool balls in a side room. “Is that more of your crowd in there?”

“Yes, sir, they’re with us. We’d help you if we could, Sheriff, but I think you’ve come to the wrong place.”

“This is the wrong place, all right, but for reasons you evidently haven’t thought about,” Hackberry said.

“Sir?”

“How old do you reckon that girl is?”

“We don’t make the rules down here. Nobody does,” the second man said.

Both men were wearing skintight jeans and snap-button shirts and belts with big silver-and-gold-plated buckles, and they both had the styled haircuts and carefully maintained unshaved look of male models in a liquor ad or on a calendar aimed at homosexuals rather than at women. The second man had a deeper and more regional voice than the first, and a formless blue tattoo, like a smear, inside the whiskers that grew on his throat.

“Were any of y’all in a cantina earlier?” Hackberry said.

“Not us,” the second man said.

“We’re looking for a guy with a hole in his face. You know anybody like that?”

“No, sir,” the first man said.

“I see,” Hackberry said. “Is Mr. Dowling in back?”

Neither of the men spoke. The second man glanced at Pam Tibbs, then filled a taco chip with guacamole and stuck it in his mouth and chewed it while he took her inventory.

“What’s in back?” Hackberry said.

“The whole menu,” the first man said.

“You two guys go outside,” Hackberry said.

“You’ve got no jurisdiction down here, Sheriff,” the second man said.

“Who cares? I’m bigger than you are. You guys want trouble? I’ll give it to you in spades.”

The two men looked at each other again, then got up from the settee. “We’ll honor your request, Sheriff Holland. We do that out of respect for you and our employer,” the first man said.

“No, you’ll do it because if I catch one of y’all putting your hands on this little girl, I’m going to kick your sorry asses all the way to Mexico City. And if I find out you’re involved with the kidnapping of my deputy, I’m going to blow your fucking heads off.”

Hackberry did not wait for their reaction. He walked into the side room, where two men were shooting pool inside a cone of light created by a tin-shaded bulb that hung from the ceiling. The pool table was covered with red velvet, the pockets hung with netted black leather, the mahogany trim polished to a soft glow. “You!” he said, pointing at the man about to break the rack. “Yeah, you! Put your cue down and look at me.”

“?Hay algun problema?”

“Yeah, you. Remember me?”

“Yes, sir, you’re the sheriff.”

“You were shooting pool at a cantina tonight.”

“Maybe I was. Maybe not. So what?” There was a deep indentation below the pool shooter’s left eye, as though a piece of the cheekbone had been removed and the skin under the eye had collapsed and formed a hole a person could insert his thumb in. But the injury was an old one. It was the same wound that Hackberry had seen in the face of one of Temple Dowling’s employees when they came to his office.

“There’s no maybe in this,” Hackberry said. “You were in the Cantina del Cazador. You were shooting pool there. My deputy saw you in there and described you to me. In very few words, you need to tell me what happened to my deputy.”

The pool shooter’s shirt was open on his chest, exposing his chest hair and nipples and a gold chain he wore around his neck. “?Quien sabe, hombre?”

“You sabes, bud. Or you’d better.”

“I was in the cantina. I didn’t see anybody who looked like a deputy sheriff. What else can I say?”

“Why’d your friends out front say you weren’t there?”

“Maybe I didn’t tell them.”

“I can see you’re a man who likes to keep it simple. So how about this?” Hackberry said. He pulled his white-handled blue-black. 45 revolver from his holster and swung it backhanded across the pool shooter’s mouth. The blow made a clacking sound when the heavy cylinder and frame and the barrel broke the man’s lips against his teeth. The pool shooter dropped his cue and cupped both of his hands to his mouth, his face trembling with shock behind his fingers. He removed his hands and looked at the blood on them, then spat a tooth into his palm.

“ Chingado, what the fuck, man!” he said.

“You sabes now?”

“What’s going on here?” said a voice behind Hackberry.

Temple Dowling had come out of a bedroom down the hall. He wore slippers and a towel robe cinched around his waist. Lipstick was smeared on his robe, and his exposed chest looked pink and blubbery and his breasts effeminate. Two young girls were leaning out of the doorway behind him, trying to see what was happening at the front of the house. Hackberry could see a large man in a long-sleeve white cotton shirt and bradded jeans coming out of an office in back, a wood baton gripped in one hand.

Hackberry put his revolver in the holster and raised his left hand, palm out, at the man with the baton. “My business is with Mr. Dowling and his associates. Mix in it and you’ll take their weight,” he said.

“?Que dice?” the man with the baton asked one of the girls who had stepped out of the bedroom.

“No se,” she replied.

“ Esta bien. It’s all right, Hector,” Dowling said to the Mexican with the baton.

“One of my deputies was kidnapped out of a cantina where your hired piece of shit with the bloody mouth was shooting pool,” Hackberry said. “He denies seeing my deputy, even though my deputy described your man to me over his cell phone.”

“Why would one of my employees have any interest in your deputy, Sheriff Holland?” Dowling said. “Are you down here about Jack Collins?”

“No.”

“You’re not?” Dowling said, looking confused.

“Why would I be looking for Collins on a street full of Mexican cathouses?”

“He’s everywhere,” Dowling replied.

“You’ve become a believer?”

“I haven’t done anything to this man. I didn’t say anything about him.”

The register in Dowling’s voice had changed, the vowels and consonants not quite holding together. The skin twitched under one eye as though a fly had settled on his skin. Hackberry wondered how many young girls had paid the price for the fear that Dowling had probably spent a lifetime trying to hide from others.

“Have you had an encounter with Collins?” Hackberry asked.

“I thought you knew.”

“Knew what?”

“I put a reward on him. He killed two of my men. That’s why I put the reward on him.”

“You put a reward on Jack Collins?”

“For arrest and conviction. That’s all the statement says. I didn’t tell people to go out and kill him. It’s what any employer or family member would do if their employees or family members were murdered.”

“Have you seen him?”

“Last night there was a man outside my motel. My men tried to catch him, but he disappeared. He was wearing a dirty hat of some kind. He was in the shadows on the other side of the parking lot, under a sodium lamp. What do you call that kind of hat? A panama? It’s made of straw and has a brim that dips down over the eyes.”

Dowling seemed to wait, hoping that Hackberry would dispel his fears and tell him that the shadowy figure, for whatever reason, could not have been Collins.

“That sounds like Jack, all right,” Hackberry said. “Congratulations, you’ve brought down perhaps the most dangerous man in America on your head. Jack’s a real cutup. I’ve been trying to punch his ticket for over a year. Maybe you’ll be more successful. You guys have any armored vests in your vehicles?”

“You’re enjoying this.”

“I guess it beats hanging in an upscale cathouse that provides services for pedophiles.”

“Don’t you dare talk to me like that.”

“I was a whoremonger, Mr. Dowling. When I see a man like you, I want to shoot myself. I don’t know if some of the girls I slept with were under the legal age or not. Most of the times I went across the river, I was too drunk to know what universe I was in.”

Dowling was not listening. “Did you see anyone down here who looked like him?”

“Like Jack?”

“Who do you think I’m talking about, you idiot?” Dowling said.

“He paid a visit to my ranch just yesterday. He put a laser sight on me, but he didn’t pull the trigger. That tells me he has something else planned for me. In your case, I doubt you’ll see that red dot crawl across your skin. You’ll see his Thompson for a few seconds, then you won’t see anything at all.”

A hulking Mexican woman appeared out of the back office and placed a highball in Temple Dowling’s hand. Dowling looked at the drink as though he couldn’t understand how it had gotten there. The two girls he had been in bed with were whispering under their breath, one translating to the other the conversation of the gringos, both of them trying not to giggle. “Senor, este es muy malo para los negocios,” the Mexican woman said.

Her words of concern about her business realities had no effect on Temple Dowling. Instead, his eyes remained fixed on Hackberry’s, a lump of fear sliding down his throat so audibly that his lips parted and his mouth involuntarily made a clicking sound.

“I don’t have any authority down here, Mr. Dowling,” Hackberry said. “But when I get back to Texas, I’ll make sure the appropriate agencies hear about your sexual inclinations.”

“You’re a bastard, Holland.”

“You don’t know the half of it,” Hackberry replied.