Feast Day of Fools

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Ethan Riser got up from the place where he had been resting and followed Caleb, his young friend from Austin, across the stretch of flatland that was streaked with alkali and dotted with green brush and that was now turning into a mirror under the hot sun. Ahead, he could see hills that gave shade and the promise of a cool alcove where the stone still smelled of predawn hours and flowers that opened only at night.

“What the hell?” Caleb said.

A group of at least five dirt-bike riders were headed across the hardpan, their engines whining like dentist drills, their deeply grooved tire treads scissoring the topsoil and weaving trails of dust and smoke in the air. Sometimes a biker roared over a knoll and became airborne, or gunned his engine and deliberately lifted his front wheel off the ground, scouring a long trench with his back tire. The collective cacophony the bikers created was like broken glass inside the eardrum. Worse, at least to Ethan and his friend, the smells of exhaust and burnt rubber were the industrial footprint of modern Visigoths determined to prove that no pristine scrap of an earlier time was safe from their presence.

“This is one bunch that needs to get closed down in a hurry,” Caleb said. He opened his badge holder and held it up in front of him so the sun would reflect off it. But the bikers either ignored his attempt to identify himself or were so committed to recontouring the area that they never saw him at all.

Just as Caleb took out his cell phone, the bikers were gone, as quickly as they had arrived, disappearing over a rise, their bandannas flapping, the roar of their exhausts echoing off a butte where pinon trees grew in the rocks.

“I’ll make a deal with you,” Caleb said.

“What might that be?” Ethan said. The armpits of his long-sleeve blue shirt were looped with sweat, his khaki pants hanging low on his stomach, his eyes squinting in the glare, even though he was wearing a bill cap. In spite of the semiautomatic on his hip, he looked like an old man who would not concede that disease had already taken him into a country from which no amount of pretense would ever allow him to return.

“We’ll go one more mile, up into the shady spot,” Caleb said. “We can sit by a little creek there. The Indians carved turkey tracks on some of the rocks thereabouts. They always point due north and south. That’s how they marked their route, using the stars, never one degree off. You can set a compass on them. It’s just a real fine place to cool our heels.”

“Then what do we do?”

“We go back. It ain’t up for grabs, either,” Caleb said.

“I’ll sit down with you a minute, but then I’m going on.”

“Sometimes we have to accept realities, Ethan.”

“That I’m worn out and can’t make it?”

Caleb looked at the mottled discoloration in his friend’s face. “I don’t think Jack Collins is out here. If he is, we’ll hear about it and come back and nail his hide to a cottonwood. In the meantime, it’s not reasonable to wander around under a white sun.”

“I spent seven months in a bamboo cage. The man next to me had a broken back and was in there longer than I was,” Ethan said.

“In Vietnam?”

“Who cares where it was?” Ethan said.

In the distance, they heard the sound of a solitary dirt bike, the engine screaming as though the back tire had lost traction and the RPMs had revved off the scale. Then there was silence.

“Collins is here,” Ethan said.

“How do you know?”

Ethan looked to the north, where turkey buzzards were turning in a wide circle against a cloudless blue sky. “Know what death smells like?”

“Yeah, like some dead critter up there. Don’t let your imagination start feeding on loco weed.”

“Do you smell anything?”

“No, I don’t.”

“I can. It’s Collins. It’s Collins who smells like death. He’s here. When you’ve got death in you, you can smell it on others.”

Jack did not like what he was watching. Where did this bunch get off, invading a place that was his, one that could have been sawed loose from the edges of Canaan and glued onto the southwestern rim of the United States? Why was the government worried about working-class people crossing the border when a bunch like this were given licenses and machines to destroy public lands? Jack knelt on a sandstone ledge, the butt of his Thompson resting by his knee, the drum magazine packed with fifty. 45 rounds, the clean steel surfaces of his weapon smelling slightly of the oilcloth he had used to wipe down and polish it last night. He longed to raise the stock to his shoulder and lead the bikers with iron sights and squeeze off three or four short bursts and blow them into a tangle of machines and spinning tires and disjointed faces, not unlike the images in the Picasso painting depicting the fascist bombing of Guernica.

One of the bikers, as though he had read Jack’s thoughts, veered away from his companions and roared up the hillside toward Jack’s position, his goggles clamped like a tanker’s on his face, one booted foot coming down hard on the dirt to keep his machine erect, his jeans stiff with body grease, his black leather vest faded brown and yellow under his naked armpits.

The biker throttled back his engine and swerved to a stop just twenty feet below Jack’s position, smoke and dust rising behind him in a dirty halo. His teeth looked feral inside his beard, his chest hair glistening with sweat. Jack laid his Thompson on a clean, flat rock and stood up in full view. “How do, pilgrim?” he said.

“Were you flashing a mirror at me?” the biker asked.

“Not me.”

“I think it was you. You got one of those steel signal mirrors? You being cute or something?”

“You probably saw the reflection off my field glasses.”

“So you want to tell me what the hell you’re doing?”

“Not much. Studying on the general state of mediocrity that seems to characterize the country these days. Did you know the United States has the highest rate of functional illiteracy in the Western world, even though we have the most libraries? What’s your thought on that?”

“My thought is, I’m getting a crick in my neck looking up at you. Who the fuck you think you are?”

“The worst mistake you ever made.”

The biker put a pinch of snuff under his lip. “It’s been good talking to you. Keep your flopper oiled and cocked. The right girl is out there waiting for you somewhere.”

“Maybe you can he’p me with a theory I have. It has to do with atavistic behavior. That means a throwback to the way things were when people hunted each other with rocks and sharp sticks. Did you ever notice that most of the fellows in biker gangs are strange-looking? By that I mean way overweight, with double hernias and beetle brows and pig noses and bulging scrotums and hair growing out of their ears. You’d think it would dawn on them.”

The biker pushed his goggles up on his forehead with his thumb. There were white circles around his eyes. “What would dawn on them?”

“That ugly and stupid people find each other.”

The biker twisted the gas feed with his right hand, revving his engine, making a decision. “I hate to tell you this, pal, but I don’t think your opinion carries a lot of weight. If you haven’t noticed, your suit looks like Sasquatch wiped his ass with it. You’ve got pecker tracks on your fly and enough dirt under your fingernails to grow tomatoes. If the wind turns around, I expect I’ll have to put on a respirator.”

Jack gazed across the flats into the distance. With his naked eye, he could not see the two hikers. The wind was up, out of the south, the pinon trees bending. The sound of a short burst might be mistaken for the backfire of a dirt bike or be lost altogether inside the wind. Yes, maybe this was an opportune moment. “You like tearing up the countryside, making lots of noise with your machines, smearing your scat on the morning? Look at me.”

“What for?”

“The man who snuffs your wick is always the one you least suspect. You’re tooling along, and you shoot off your mouth to the wrong fellow in the middle of a desert, and somebody stuffs a cactus plant up your ass. That’s what the crossroads is all about.”

“ You’re the wick snuffer?”

“Close your eyes and count to three and open them again. I have a surprise for you.”

“Screw you,” the biker said.

He turned his bike around and rode back down the slope, shooting Jack the finger just before heading across the flats, a fountain of gravel and silt flying from under his back wheel.

Jack let out his breath with a sigh. Just two more seconds, he thought. Oh well, maybe it was better that he kept his priorities straight. But before Jack could turn his attention to the hikers, the goggled, head-wrapped dirt biker had reconsidered and nullified his wise choice and spun his machine in a circle. He was headed back full-bore to the hillside, his thighs spread, his knees high, his shoulders humped, a simian throwback determined to teach a lesson to an unwashed, ignorant old man.

He veered north of Jack’s position and bounced onto a narrow trail that would take him to where Jack was standing behind a boulder. Jack temporarily lost sight of him, then heard the biker gun his engine and mount a steep grade, gravel splintering off his back wheel.

Jack waited, his Thompson hanging from his right hand, his coat fluttering open in the wind, a half-smile on his face. The biker had reached the top of the grade and was bouncing up and down with the roughness of the trail as he approached Jack’s position. Thirty feet below was a gully strewn with chunks of yellow chert and the dried and polished limbs of dead trees. Jack stepped out from behind the boulder and raised the muzzle of the Thompson at the biker’s chest.

“I cain’t blame you, pilgrim. Pride is my undoing, too,” he said.

He never got a chance to squeeze the trigger. The biker saw the Thompson and threw his hands in front of his face, then plummeted off the trail straight into the gully, upside down, his machine crashing on top of him.

Jack walked to the edge of the trail and peered down at the biker and the wrecked bike, its front tire still spinning. “Ouch,” he said.

The Sun was blinding when Caleb approached the butte where he thought he had seen one of the bikers split off from the pack and power up the hillside. His eyes were stinging with salt, his mouth dry, and he wanted to stop and take a drink from his canteen, but he felt a cautionary sense he couldn’t dispel. Why had the biker left his comrades? Who or what was up in the rocks where Caleb had seen book pages flipping in the wind? And why hadn’t the biker come back down the hill? He cupped his hands around the sides of his mouth. “Hello up there!” he yelled. “I’ve got an injured man on the trail and need some help!”

He heard his voice echo in an arroyo that twisted toward the crest and opened into a saddle green with trees. “I don’t have cell-phone service,” he called out. “I need somebody with a vehicle to go for help!”

Caleb began walking up the slope toward the boulder where he had seen the book. He heard slag sliding down the hill and clacking into a gully. A man appeared on a sandy patch of ground between a boulder and two pinon trees. He was wearing dark goggles and a bandanna on his head and a black leather vest that was discolored a sickly yellow under the armpits. The sun was shining in Caleb’s eyes, but he could see that the man’s face and arms and chest hair were streaked with blood.

“Did you spill your bike?” Caleb asked.

“I went off into the gully and busted my head. You say you got a hurt man with you?”

“He twisted his ankle.”

“Let’s take a look at him.”

“Where’s your dirt bike?”

“At the bottom of the gully.”

“You cain’t drive it?”

“No, it’s finished.”

“What’s wrong with it?”

“It’s broken.”

“Maybe we can fix it. I’m a fair mechanic.”

“I’m not?”

“We need your vehicle. I have to get my friend out of here. He’s not well, and the heat has been pretty hard on him.”

“That’s what I said. Let’s take a look at him.”

“Maybe you should sit down. You’ve got blood all over you.”

“It’s no problem. What’s your friend doing out here?”

“He’s an FBI agent.”

“Is that a fact?”

“Where are the guys you were riding with?”

“Gone.”

“They deserted you?”

“Are you a law dog, too, pilgrim?”

“Parks and Wildlife. I’m not sure I like the way you’re talking to me.”

“Don’t Parks and Wildlife people carry weapons? I would. This area is full of rattlers.”

“Where’s the cut on your head? I don’t see it.”

“You’re pretty damn inquisitive for a man asking other people’s he’p. How far back is your FBI friend?”

“Not far. Are the other bikers coming back or not?”

“You cain’t tell about a bunch like that. Y’all should know. They tear up the countryside wherever and whenever they want, and y’all don’t do squat about it.”

“They?”

The man in goggles pressed the back of his wrist to his mouth, as though his lip were split or his teeth had been broken or knocked out. Then Caleb realized there was nothing wrong with his mouth or teeth and that he was making a decision, one that would probably have irreversible implications for both of them.

“This is my neighborhood. You made your bed when you came into it,” the man in goggles said.

“This is public land. It belongs to the people of Texas. We’ll go wherever we please in it.”

“Don’t pretend you don’t know who I am.”

Caleb wet his lips and closed and opened his hands at his sides. “Give yourself up, Mr. Collins.”

“You’re honeymooning here?”

“What’s it to you?”

“Answer me.”

“I was recently married, if it’s any of your business.”

“Oh, it’s my business, all right. You should have stayed with your woman. You’ve spat in the soup, fellow.”

“I’m going to walk out of here now. When I come back, I hope you’re gone. If you’re not, you’re going to be in custody.”

Jack Collins thumbed the goggles off his face and threw them aside. He reached behind the boulder and lifted up the Thompson and pointed it at Caleb’s midsection. “Why’d you wander in here, boy? Why’d you let the FBI use you?”

Caleb felt the muscles in his face flex, but no words came out of his mouth.

“You have cuffs or ligatures on you?” Jack Collins said.

“No.”

“Where’s the agent?”

“In a cool place out of the sun. Let him be.”

“What’s his name?”

“Riser.”

“Ethan Riser?”

“You know Ethan?” When Collins didn’t answer, Caleb said, “You killed the biker?”

The bumps and knots and sallow skin and unshaved jowls that constituted the face of Jack Collins seemed to harden into a mask, as though his breathing and all the motors in his head had come to a stop. His eyes became lidded, without heat or anger or emotion of any kind. Then his chest began to rise and fall. “Sorry to do this to you, kid,” he said.

“Buddy, before you-”

“Don’t talk.” Jack Collins’s eyes closed, and his mouth formed into a cone, as though he were devolving into a blowfish at the bottom of a dark aquarium, a place where he was surrounded by water that was so cold he had no feeling at all.

Ethan was sitting on a flat rock inside an alcove that had a sandy floor and was protected on the north side by a big sandstone boulder. He heard an abrupt sound inside the wind, like a burst of dirty thunder, and for a moment thought the plane with the sputtering engine had returned or the dirt biker had cranked up his machine and was gunning across the hardpan. Riser stood up and stepped from behind the boulder. Out of the white haze, he saw a figure walking toward him, a man wearing a leather vest with a panama hat slanted on his head, his face swollen with lumps that looked like infected insect bites, his trousers stuffed into the tops of his cowboy boots. The man was holding a Thompson submachine gun with his right hand. “Need to talk,” he said.

Riser stepped back quickly behind the boulder and pulled his semiautomatic from the holster on his hip.

“You hear me? It doesn’t have to end the way you think,” the man called out.

Ethan inched forward and looked around the edge of the boulder. The man with the Thompson was gone, probably up in the rocks from which he could follow a deer trail over the top of the alcove or remain where he was and wait for Ethan to come out in the open.

“You sick down there?” the man said from somewhere up in the pinon trees.

“Come down here and find out,” Ethan said.

“You’re not calling the shots, Mr. Riser.”

“Other people know where I am.”

“No, I think you’re out here on your own hook.”

“Where’s Caleb?” Ethan said.

“He’s not here.”

“Where is he?”

“He’s somewhere else.”

“You killed him?”

“I’m going to ask you a question. You need to think carefully before you answer. If you lie, I’ll know it. Are you the agent who burned me out?”

“No. What did you do to Caleb?”

“Did you order my house burned?”

“That wasn’t a house. It was a shack. You were squatting in it.”

“Did you order it burned? Did you burn my Bible?”

“No, I had nothing to do with it. Where’s Caleb?”

“Who told you where I was?”

“No one.”

“It was your buddy Caleb, wasn’t it? He and his wife took a picture of Noie Barnum and showed it to you.”

“You’ve got your facts turned around, Collins. We received reports on you from the Border Patrol. They’d rounded up some illegals who’d seen you up here.”

“Why would wetbacks take note of a fellow like me?”

“It’s your BO. As soon as they mentioned it, we knew who they were talking about.”

“Throw your piece out on the sand. Throw your cuffs out, too.”

“You’re a public fool, Collins. You’re not a religious warrior or an existentialist hero. You’re a basket case who probably killed his mother. You murder young girls and pose as a political assassin. Let me tell you a story. You know what the Feast Day of Fools was in medieval times? It was a day when all the lower-level dysfunctional people in the church were allowed to do whatever they wanted. They got sodden drunk, fist-fought in front of the altar, farted to hymnal music, buggered each other and each other’s wives and sodomized animals or anything with a heartbeat, and had a glorious time. They got it out of their system, and the next day they all came to church hungover and were forgiven.

“Five hundred years ago there was a place for a pitiful fuck like you, but now there isn’t. So you trail your BO around the desert and terrorize unarmed people and pretend you’re the scourge of God. You need to sew bells on your suit, Collins. Maybe you can get a job as a jester in a medieval reenactment.”

Ethan waited for Collins’s response. The only sound he heard was the wind.

“I rumpled your feelings?” Ethan said. “Hypersensitivity usually goes back to a person’s problems with his mother. Sexual abuse or constant criticism, that kind of thing. If so, we’ve got a special titty-baby unit we can get you into.”

Ethan waited, his palm perspiring on the grips of his semiauto. A gust of wind blew a cloud of alkali dust into his face. He wiped his eyes clear and tried to see above the top of the alcove without exposing himself to a burst of submachine-gun fire. He stepped back into the shade, letting his eyes readjust. Then he knew something was wrong. The alkali dust had not dissipated but had grown thicker. Above, he heard footsteps inside dry brush and the sound of tree branches being broken and dragged over a stone surface. He smelled an odor like greasewood burning and realized he had not been looking at alkali dust but at smoke from a fire, one that was being stoked into a blaze that was so hot, it immediately consumed whatever was dropped into it.

“You burn a man out of his house and excuse yourself by calling it a shack?” Collins said. “Now it’s your turn, Agent Riser. See how you like it.”

A rain of burning grass and tree limbs and trash scraped out of a deadfall showered down on the opening to the alcove, filling the air with smoke and soot and red-hot cinders. Then Collins pushed another load of dry fuel down on top of it.

“I can keep doing it all day, Mr. Riser,” Collins said. “Or you can throw your weapon on the far side of the fire and walk out after it. I won’t shoot.”

“You were the right age for Vietnam. Where were you when the rest of us went?” Ethan said.

“Those were your enemies, not mine. I never injured a man who didn’t ask for it.”

“How about Caleb?”

“Maybe he’s still breathing. Come out of your hiding place and we’ll go see.”

Ethan charged through the flames, his clothes catching fire, his eyebrows and hair singeing. He whirled about, raising his semiauto, hoping for a clear shot at Preacher Jack. But the black silhouette he saw imprinted against the sky was armed with a magic wand that burst with light brighter than the sun, brighter than the fire eating Ethan’s skin, even brighter than the untarnished shield to which he had dedicated most of his adult life. The Thompson seemed to make no sound, but its bullets struck his body with the impact of an entire hillside falling on top of him.

Jack Collins climbed down the slope, careful not to scrape the wood or the steel surfaces of his submachine gun on the rocks, and removed the semiautomatic from Ethan’s hand and the cell phone from the pocket of his khakis. He flipped open the phone and idly reviewed the most recently dialed numbers. The first name to appear on the list was not one he was expecting to see.

Riser had been in touch with her only that morning. Why?

He tossed the cell phone into the fire, and for just a moment he thought he saw the face of the Chinese woman called La Magdalena rise from the flames.