Feast Day of Fools

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Preacher Jack Collins was not in a good mood. Since the long drive from the cabin on the creek, he had said little to Noie Barnum. Also, he had offered no explanation for his and Noie’s sudden departure, scowling whenever Noie asked a question, brooding and moving his lips without sound as though sorting out his thoughts with a hay fork. The decrepit stucco house they had moved into had been a home for bats and field mice and smelled of the damp earth under the floors. The toilet and sink and bathtub were streaked with orange rust and filled with the shells of dead roaches. In the back of the house was a butte that resembled a row of giant clay columns eroding side by side, creating an effect that was both phallic and effete. The front windows gave onto a long sloping plain and a junkyard that was surrounded by a twelve-foot fence with spools of razor wire on top. In the late-afternoon sun, the compacted and polished metal in the junkyard and the razor wire protecting it took on the sharpened brilliance of hundreds of heliographs.

Jack had flung his suitcase on a bunk bed, then brought his guitar case inside and set it on the kitchen table and unsnapped the top.

“What’s that?” Noie asked.

“They were called trench sweepers in the Great War,” Jack replied, setting the Thompson and two ammunition pans and box upon box of cartridges on an oily cloth. “They were manufactured too late to be used in the trenches, though. That’s how guys like John Dillinger and Baby Face Nelson ended up with them.”

“What are you doing with one, Jack?”

“Home protection.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Get what?”

“Anything we’re doing.”

“There’re people out there who want to hurt me. It’s not a difficult concept.”

“Hurt you why?”

“I’m hiding you, boy.” Noie’s adenoidal accent was starting to wear on him. Jack threaded a cleaning patch through the tip of a metal pod and dripped three drops of oil on the patch and pushed it down the muzzle of the Thompson. He worked the rod up and down, then inserted a piece of white paper in the chamber and looked down the inside of the barrel at the whorls of reflected light spinning through the rifling. “Did you ever take classes in speech or diction?”

“I was an engineering major.”

“It shows.”

“Pardon?”

Jack’s eyes wrinkled at the corners. “Don’t let my tone bother you. I got to stop fretting myself about our enemies. Some people aren’t made for the world. That’s the likes of us. That’s why we’re hunted.”

“A man deals his own play. The world doesn’t have much to do with it,” Noie replied. “That’s the way I look at it.”

With his fingertips, Jack began loading one of the ammunition pans, lifting each. 45 cartridge from its individual hole in a Styrofoam block and lowering it into a pod inside the circular magazine, as though he took more pleasure in the ritual than its purpose. “All I ever wanted from people was to be let alone. Learn it soon or learn it late, a man doesn’t have peace unless he’s willing to make war.”

“Have you shot somebody with that thing?”

“They shot themselves.”

“How so?” Noie asked, his throat clotting.

“They line up to do it. They cain’t wait.”

“That doesn’t answer the question.”

How was Jack to explain that he had two optical screens in his head? On one screen were people who caused him trouble or threatened his life. On the other screen was the backdrop against which they had originally appeared, but they were airbrushed from it. Poof, just like that. The alteration of the images had little to do with him. One side of his brain spoke to the other side. One side defined the problem; the other side took care of it. The people who disappeared from the screen designed their own fate and were responsible for their own diminution.

“Look out the front window,” Jack said.

“At the two-lane?”

“I’m talking about the junkyard. You think anything inside it is of any real value?”

“Not unless you’re keen on junk.”

“But the man who owns the junkyard has razor wire on top of all his fences. That wire probably cost a lot more than anything anybody might steal off those rusted-out or compacted cars. The whole place is the automotive equivalent of a warthog. The wire deflates the value of the property around it and makes Nebraska look like the French Riviera. But nine out of ten people in this county would defend the guy’s right to build a huge eyesore on the highway they paid to have poured.”

“What’s that have to do with your machine gun?”

“Not every asylum has walls.”

“They’re out to get us?”

“The government has been trying to put me out of business for twenty years. So has a guy by the name of Josef Sholokoff. His exbusiness partner, Temple Dowling, would like to see you dead, and Sholokoff would like to see you in a cage so he can sell you to Al Qaeda and screw Dowling. In the meantime, the likes of us are considered criminals. Am I getting through to you?”

“There’s gunpowder residue on your cleaning patch.”

“That’s right.”

“You fired your Thompson recently?”

Jack snapped the top back on the metal drum and began twisting the winding key. “The Oriental woman gave up our location to the FBI. At least that’s my belief until I find out different.”

“Miss Anton? She dressed my wounds. She wouldn’t inform on me.”

“How about on me?”

“You didn’t harm her, did you?”

“No, I did not. But a couple of other guys paid her tab.”

“What are you telling me?”

“You want to be back in Krill’s custody? Time to take the scales from your eyes, son. Who do you think Krill used to work for? The United States government is who.”

“What have you done, Jack?”

“Nothing. I told you that at the outset. Moses slew two hundred of his people for erecting the golden calf. He killed, but he didn’t murder. His followers got what they deserved.”

“Tell me if you killed somebody. Just say it.”

Jack exhaled and stared into space, the lumps in his face spiked with unshaved whiskers. “Years ago I did something that still disturbs me, but you can make up your own mind about it. My mother was a prostitute. Most of her clients were gandy walkers or brake-men off a freight line that went past the boxcar we lived in. One guy in particular would come by every two weeks or so. He had a family in Oklahoma City, but that didn’t stop him from topping my mother when he was on a bender. I’d have to wait outside, which I had more or less gotten used to, but on one occasion it was about fifteen above and snowing, and I spent an hour wrapped in a piece of canvas, crouched down out of the wind behind his car, which he kept locked because he didn’t want a smelly little boy sitting on his leather seats.

“The next summer I was working as a dishwasher in town, and this same fellow came in and ordered the beef-stew special. He looked like he was just coming off a drunk and could have eaten a whole cow between two slices of white bread. That morning I’d swept up some broken glass off the back step and put it in the trash can. The glass was as fine as needles, but I mashed it up even finer and put it in his stew with a lot of potatoes. About thirty minutes later, he went down on the sidewalk like he swallowed a handful of fishhooks. I heard he died, but I didn’t go around asking questions about it.”

Jack snapped the ammunition drum onto his submachine gun and laid the gun lopsidedly inside the guitar case. He wiped the oil off his fingers with a paper towel and gazed somberly into Noie’s face, his eyes melancholy and shiny. Then as though he had been holding his breath underwater to the point where his lungs were bursting, his mouth fell open and his lips creased back in a broad smile. “Got you, boy! I had you convinced you were bunking with Jack the Ripper. My mother was an elementary teacher in Okemah, Oklahoma, and died of Huntington’s chorea. My last job was at a Pee-wee Herman theme park. I couldn’t hurt a fly.”

“What about the submachine gun?”

“I’ve got a whole collection of rare firearms in Rio de Janeiro. One day I’ll show them to you. You don’t believe I’m a rich man, do you?”

“I don’t know what to believe, Jack.”

“That’s because you’re a good kid. Get out your checker set, and let’s put on a pot of coffee and play a game or two.”

The information that came in from the National Crime Information Center on Dennis Rector was of little value, other than to indicate that he had been arrested twice for DWI and once for domestic battery, and the United States Navy had given him a general discharge for the convenience of the service. His wallet contained an Arizona driver’s license, a Social Security card, fourteen dollars, a condom, a GI can opener, a coupon for a box of cereal, a speeding citation that was four months old, a torn ticket to a concert in Branson, Missouri, and a photograph of the deceased in a

navy uniform standing next to an Asian girl wearing a shift and flip-flops. Written in pencil on the back of the photograph were the words “With Luz, Mindanao, Aug. 6, 1982.”

In his right-hand pocket Rector had been carrying seventy-three cents in change, three metal finger picks, and a half stick of gum wrapped in tinfoil.

Hackberry placed Rector’s possessions in a manila envelope and gazed out the window at a pallid and sultry sky and hills that barely contained enough moisture to go with the greening of the season. What was the sum total of a man’s life? Scraps of paper issued by the state? A photo taken with a peasant girl on the rim of the New American Empire on the anniversary of Hiroshima’s bombing? A ticket to a country-music event at which the stage performers wore tasseled red, white, and blue costumes and offered up a meretricious tribute to a culture that celebrated its own vulgarity? A half stick of chewing gum?

Who was Dennis Rector, and what had he come to confess? How could a man who had acquired so little and left such a microscopic trace on the planet be so serious about himself that he would take his own life? What could he have done that was that bad? Hackberry picked up his desk phone. “Would you come in here, Maydeen?” he said.

Ten seconds later, she was standing in his doorway, pear-shaped, wearing a flowery western shirt with her department-issue trousers and a stitched belt and too much lipstick, her perfume flooding the room. “Are you gonna just stare at me or tell me what you want?” she said.

“If someone said to you ‘I ain’t no Judas Iscariot,’ what would you say was on his mind?”

“Did you call him a Judas?”

“ I didn’t. To my knowledge, no one did.”

“I’d say he sold out someone who trusted him, and his guilt was eating his lunch. Are we talking about the guy who hanged himself?”

“That’s the guy.”

“It seems like he had biblical stories on his mind. Like the crucifixion in particular.”

“I believe you’re right.”

“You think he knew Cody Daniels?” she asked.

“He knew Josef Sholokoff, that’s for sure.”

“You think Sholokoff crucified Daniels?”

“I think it was either Sholokoff or Krill. Except a guy like Dennis Rector wouldn’t have occasion to be mixed up with someone like Krill. So that leaves Sholokoff. Is Pam still at lunch?”

“She got a call from the Blue Bonnet Six. A guy skipped on his bill and stole the television set out of the room. Before he skipped, he tried to sell the owner something called a Dobro. What’s a Dobro?”

“A guitar with a resonator in it. It’s played with metal picks, like the ones I just put in this manila envelope.”

“The guy who hanged himself played a musical instrument?”

“Evidently. Why?”

“Musicians make poor criminals. Outside of wrecking hotel rooms, they’re amateurs when it comes to serious criminality,” Maydeen said. When Hackberry didn’t reply, she said, “Know why that is?”

“I think you’re fixing to tell me.”

“You’ll figure it out,” she said.

“Has R.C. called in yet?”

“No, sir.”

“Let me know when he does. Tell me why musicians make poor criminals.”

“They believe they have a gift, so they feel less inclined to steal. They also think they’re special and they don’t have to prove anything.”

“I never thought of it that way,” he said.

“My first husband was hung like a hamster. But after he recorded once with Stevie Ray Vaughan, you’d think he was driving a fire truck up my leg.”

“I can’t believe you just said that.”

“Said what?”

“Out, Maydeen. And close the door behind you, please.”

Hackberry walked to the saloon and ate lunch in the darkness of a back booth and tried to forget the image of Dennis Rector hanging from a barn rafter. But a larger issue than the suicide was bothering him. Hackberry believed that most crimes, particularly homicide, were committed for reasons of sex, money, power, or any combination of the three. Beginning with the murder of the DEA informant by Krill, the homicides Hackberry had investigated recently seemed to defy normal patterns. Supposedly, the central issue was national security and the sale of Noie Barnum to Al Qaeda and the compromise of the Predator drone. But that just didn’t wash. The players were all people driven by ideology or religious obsession or personal rage that was rooted in the id. It was too easy to dismiss Preacher Jack Collins as a psychopath. It was also too easy to categorize Josef Sholokoff as a Russian criminal who slithered through a hole in the immigration process during the Cold War. Something much worse seemed to have come into the lives of this small-town society down here on the border, like a spiritual malignancy irradiating the land with its poisonous substance, remaking the people in its image.

Is that too dark and grandiose an extrapolation from the daily ebb and flow of a rural sheriff’s department? Hackberry wondered. Ask those medieval peasants who were visited in their villages by the representatives of the Inquisition, he said to himself in reply.

He stared at the diamondback rattlesnake that the saloon owner kept in a gallon jar of yellow formaldehyde on the bar. The snake’s body was coiled thickly upon itself, its mouth spread wide against the glass, its eyes like chips of stone, the venom holes visible in its fangs. The rattlesnake had been in the jar at least three years; its color had begun to fade, and pieces of its body were starting to dissolve in dirty strings inside the preservative. Why leave something that ugly if not perverse on top of a bar for that long?

Because the owner was making a statement, Hackberry thought. Evil was outside of us, not in the human breast, and could be contained and made harmless and placed on exhibit. Wasn’t the serpent condemned to crawl on its belly in the dust and to strike at man’s heel and be beaten to death with a stick? What more fitting testimony to that fact than a diamondback yawning open its mouth impotently six inches from the tattooed arm of a trucker knocking back shots of Jack and chasing them with a frosted mug of Lone Star?

Hackberry made a mental note to talk with the bartender. Then his cell phone vibrated on the tabletop. He opened it and placed it to his ear. “Sheriff Holland,” he said.

“I called the office, Sheriff, but Maydeen said you were eating lunch,” a voice said. “Hope I’m not bothering you.”

Hackberry looked down at his plate of enchiladas and Spanish rice and frijoles that were growing cold. “Go ahead, R.C.”

“I did what you said. I got a range-and-township map and looked up the title of every piece of land in a five-mile radius from the spot where that FBI man was killed. I Googled all their names and got a hit on one guy, but he’s not a writer.”

“What’s the name?”

“W. W. Guthrie. Google took me to a folksinger by the name of Woodrow Wilson Guthrie.”

“That’s Woody Guthrie, R.C. He didn’t just write folk songs. He published two books. One was Bound for Glory. It was made into a film. I think you just found the hideout of Preacher Jack.”

“I’m on my way out there right now. I’ll call you back as soon as I find out anything.”

“What kind of help are you getting from the feds?”

“At the courthouse, one of them told me where the men’s room was. Another one said he thought it might rain directly. That’s the word he used-‘directly.’ Like he was talking to somebody on Hee Haw. Are they as bright as they’re supposed to be?”

“Probably.”

“They sure know how to hide it,” R.C. said.

Hackberry finished eating and left thirteen dollars on the table and used the restroom and dried his hands and picked up his hat from the booth and started toward the front door. Then he paused. “I almost forgot,” he said to the bartender.

“Forgot what?” the bartender said. He was a big, dark-haired man with a deeply creased brow who wore a white dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up high on his arms.

“Can you put a bag over that snake jar the next time I come here?”

“Any reason?”

“Yeah, so I don’t have to look at it while I’m eating.”

“Who lit your fuse?”

“Did you read the paper this morning?”

“Something happen?”

“If I come in here again, refuse to serve me,” Hackberry said. “I’d really appreciate that.”

Halfway to the office, his cell phone vibrated again. “Sheriff Holland,” he said.

“It’s me, Sheriff.”

“Yeah, I thought it might be you, R.C.”

“How you doin’?”

“Fine.”

“I’m parked at this cabin that’s between a creek and a bluff. You cain’t see it except from the air. Feds are all over the place, but I found something they missed. It’s a checker. They didn’t know what it was.”

“I’m not quite tracking you.”

“It’s a homemade checker, one somebody carved out of wood. I’m not explaining myself real good. The property is in the name of W. W. Guthrie, but nobody around here seems to know what he looks like or where he’s from. When the feds got here, the cabin and the house were clean. I went out to the barn and saw the same Michelin tire tracks we saw at Anton Ling’s place. Then I went inside, and this fed was looking at a little round wood button that he found behind the kitchen door. You following me?”

“Not really.”

“I’ll try again. On the bottom of it were the initials N.B. For ‘Noie Barnum.’ On the top was a K. The fed didn’t know what that meant. I told him it was K for ‘king.’ So he says, ‘Yeah, it must have rolled behind the door.’ So I went into the bedroom and found another one, except this one was wedged in the side of the dresser. That whole place was broom-sweep clean, Sheriff. The second checker, the one stuck in the dresser, wasn’t left there by mistake. When I showed the fed what I’d found, he looked pretty confused.”

“Noie Barnum isn’t a willing companion of Jack Collins?” Hackberry said.

“Or he’s covering his ass,” R.C. replied.

Or he has his own agenda, Hackberry thought. “You did a fine job, bud. Come on in,” he said.

Minutes later, he called both Maydeen and Pam into his office.

“Is this about my language?” Maydeen said. “If it is, I’m sor-”

“Forget your language. The feds have treated us like dipshits. Find out everything you can about Noie Barnum,” he said.

Krill squatted down on a bare piece of ground a few feet from the common grave where he had buried his three children. The grave was marked by a Styrofoam cross wrapped with a string of multicolored plastic flowers. He upended an unlabeled bottle of mescal and drank from it against the sunset, the light turning to fire inside the glass. A copy of the San Antonio Express-News was weighted down on the ground with rocks he had placed on each corner of the front page, the paper riffling with wind. Krill drank again from the bottle, then pressed a cork into the neck with his thumb and gazed at the sun descending into a red blaze behind the hills.

Negrito squatted next to him, his greasy leather hat flattening the hair on his forehead. “Don’t pay no attention to what’s in that newspaper,” he said.

“They’re gonna put it on us, hombre. It means trouble.”

“ That means trouble? What do you call killing a DEA agent?”

“He wasn’t an agent. He was an informant and a corrupt Mexican cop. Nobody cares what we did to him. Reverend Cody was a minister.”

“We didn’t do it to him, man.”

“But our prints are there, estupido.”

“That ain’t what’s bothering you, Krill. It’s something else, ain’t it?”

“He baptized my children. Nobody else would do that. Not even La Magdalena. To treat him with disrespect now is to treat my children with disrespect.”

“That don’t make sense.”

“Where’s your brain? He had the power to set my children free from limbo. Should I tell them I care nothing for the man who did this for them? Can’t you think? What is wrong with you?”

“You are making me confused. It makes my head hurt.”

“Because you are stupid and self-centered. Go get the others and meet me at the car.”

“Where are we going?”

“To get the men who did this to the minister.”

“No, no, this is a bad idea. Listen to me, Krill. I’m your friend, the only one you got.”

“Then follow me or go into the desert. Or to your whores in Durango.”

“You’re going after Noie Barnum. Some of the others might think you’re gonna sell him and maybe forget to share the money.”

Krill stood up to his full height and pulled Negrito’s hat off his head. Then he slapped him with it, hard, the leather chin cord biting into the scalp. He waited a few seconds and hit him again. “We’re going after the Russian. He should have been killed a long time ago. Don’t ever accuse me of treachery again.”

“How you know he did it?” Negrito asked, his eyes watering, his nostrils widening as he ate his pain and humiliation at being whipped by Krill.

“Because he hates God, stupid one.”

“I hear this from the killer of a Jesuit priest?”

“They told us he and the others were Communists. There were five of them. I shot one, and the others shot the rest. It was in a garden outside the house where they lived. We killed the housekeeper, too. I dream of them often.”

“Everybody dies. Why feel guilt over what has to happen to all of us?”

“You say these things because you are incapable of thought. So I don’t hold your words or deeds against you.”

“You hit me, jefe. You would not do that to an animal, but you would do it to me? You hurt me deep inside.”

“I’m sorry. You are a handicapped man, and I must treat you as such.”

“I do not like what is happening here. All this makes my head throb, like I have a great sickness inside it. Why do you make me feel like this, jefe?”

“It is not me. You are one of the benighted, Negrito. Your problems are in your confused blood and your tangled thoughts. For that reason I must be kind to you.”

“I will forget you said that to me, ’cause you are a mestizo, just like me. I say we return to Durango. I say we get drunk and bathe in puta and be the friends we used to be.”

“Then you must go and pursue your lower nature.”

“No, I’ll never leave you, man,” Negrito said. “What does ‘benighted’ mean?”

Krill gestured toward the hills in the west, where the sun had become a red melt below the horizon and the darkness was spreading up into the sky. “It means the dying of the light,” he said. “The benighted place is out there where the coyotes and carrion birds and Gila monsters live and the spirits wander without hope of ever seeing the light.”

At ten the next morning Pam Tibbs tapped on the doorjamb of Hackberry’s office. She had a yellow legal pad in her hand. “This is what we’ve found out about Noie Barnum so far,” she said. “There’re a couple of holes in it. You want to hear it now or wait till Maydeen gets off the phone?”

“Who’s she talking to?”

“The state attorney’s office in Alabama.”

“Sit down,” Hackberry said.

“Barnum grew up in a small town on the Tennessee line and was an honor student in high school. His father died when he was three, and his mother worked at a hardware store and raised him and his half sister by herself. He was never an athlete or a class officer or a joiner of any kind. He won a scholarship to MIT and went to work for the government when he graduated. As far as anybody knew, he was always religious. When it came to girls and social activities, he was as plain as white bread and just about as forgettable. The exception came when he was seventeen. A three-year-old boy wandered away from the neighborhood, and the whole town organized search parties and went looking for him. Barnum found him in a well. He crawled in after him and got bitten in the face by a copperhead but carried the kid on his back four miles to a highway. By all odds, he should have died.”

“What happened to the mother and the half sister?”

“The mother passed away while Barnum was at MIT. The half sister moved to New York and went to work for a catering service. Some stories came back about her, but no one is sure of the truth. She wasn’t looked upon favorably in her hometown. She had been arrested in high school for possession of marijuana and was believed to sleep around. This is where it becomes cloudy.”

“What does?”

“She used her father’s last name when she moved to New York. Hang on,” Pam said. She got up from the chair and went to the door. “Maydeen’s off the phone.”

When Maydeen walked into Hackberry’s office, her expression was blank, as though she were looking at an image behind her eyes that she did not want to assimilate.

“What is it?” Hackberry said.

“The Alabama state attorney did some hands-on work for us,” she replied. “He found a guy in a state rehab center who was the half sister’s boyfriend. She died in the Twin Towers. She was called in to work on her day off because somebody else was sick. She was in the restaurant on the top floor. She was one of the people who held hands with a friend and jumped.”