Feast Day of Fools

CHAPTER FIVE

Late Sunday afternoon Pam Tibbs parked the department’s Jeep Cherokee at Hackberry’s front gate and walked up the flagstone steps to his gallery and knocked on the door. He answered in his sock feet, his reading glasses on his nose. “I called twice and you didn’t answer, so I thought I’d drive out,” she said.

“I was in the pasture,” he said.

“Maydeen got a report on an illegal dumping and another one on a break-in at a hunting camp. Both instances involved two guys. The dumping turned out not to be a dumping.”

“I’m not following you.”

“Last night a motorist saw two guys prowling in a creek bed and thought they were dumping trash. It turned out they were rifling the back of a camper. They stole some clothes and shoes and sleeping bags and a propane stove and a first-aid kit. This morning a guy with a long, pointy beard, wearing a tattered suit coat, was seen busting the lock on the back door of a hunting camp. He sounds like the same homeless guy who’s been getting into people’s garbage by Chapala Crossing. Except this time he had someone with him. They cleaned about forty pounds of venison out of the game locker. The witness said the guy in the tattered coat looked like he belted his trousers with a piece of clothesline. Sound familiar?”

“Jack Collins is dead,” Hackberry said.

“You’re convinced of that?”

“He either died of his wounds underground or was eaten by coyotes or cougars. He wasn’t a supernatural entity. He was a psychopath and misogynist who probably couldn’t tie his shoes without a diagram.”

“Then who’s the guy who keeps showing up around here?”

“Another lunatic. We’re not in short supply of them.”

“The guy with the tramp was limping. Like maybe a guy who ran a long distance with no shoes on.”

“The man who escaped from Krill?”

“You know that burned-out shack where the tramp with the beard was probably living?”

“What about it?”

“I checked it out. It was soaked with an accelerant. Who would go to that much trouble to burn a shack?”

“You really think Collins is alive?”

“I’m not sure. But I’m bothered that you won’t accept the possibility. I think you want to believe that evil dies.”

She couldn’t tell if he was thinking about what she had said or if he had lost interest. The sun had gone behind a hill, darkening the inside of his house, and she couldn’t see past him into the shadows. “Did I disturb you?” she said.

“Pardon?”

“You didn’t invite me in. Are you with someone?”

“Do I look like it?”

“You tell me. Did you enjoy your Mexican dinner with China’s answer to Mary Magdalene?” She didn’t wait for him to reply. “It’s a small town. Why don’t you at least spend the gas money to go into another county?”

“You need to concentrate on other matters, Pam.”

“You’re eating out with a woman who’s part of a homicide investigation. Maybe someone who’s aiding and abetting.”

“Come in.”

“No.”

“Don’t be resentful toward her.”

“I’m resentful toward you. You’re letting her jerk you around. You’re acting like a damn fool.”

“You mean an old fool.”

“Don’t put words in my mouth. Don’t you dare act like I’ve ever been disloyal to you.”

He held his eyes on hers, refusing to concede an inch. She picked up his hand and pressed it against her left breast, clenching down on his wrist so he couldn’t remove it. “Feel my heart.”

“Don’t do this, Pam.”

“Don’t you ever accuse me of disloyalty.”

“I wouldn’t do that, Pam. Never.”

“Then why the hell do you hurt me?”

“I don’t mean to.”

“That’s all you’re going to say?”

“Yes, ma’am, that’s about it.”

“I want to hit you. With my fists. As hard as I can. I want to break the bones in your face.”

“Go ahead.”

Her eyes went in and out of focus, a nest of blue veins pulsing by her temple. “What do you want me to do now?” she said.

“About what?”

“About Preacher Jack Collins or whoever this tramp and his friend are. About doing my goddamn job.”

“We start at the hunting camp. Later, I’d like to buy you dinner.”

“In your dreams,” she said. “I’ll wait for you in the Jeep.”

Inside a ravine snaking back through a collection of sandstone formations that resembled pillars in an ancient church, a man wearing a soiled panama hat tipped down over his brow and a pin-striped suit coat that was frayed white on the tips of the sleeves squatted at the opening to a cave. He stared into a cook fire that he had built inside a ring of stones, and he fed the fire incrementally, stick by stick, as though fascinated with either his power over the flames or an image he saw inside them. In the firelight, his face seemed dotted with lumps of proud flesh, his cheeks and throat streaked with the irregular stubble of a man who had shaved with a dry razor.

“Why are you grinning?” asked the man on the opposite side of the fire ring.

“No reason,” the man in the suit coat replied.

But he was not telling the truth. Inside the flames, he saw a woman’s hair and the paleness of her face and the redness of her mouth. He saw the wantonness of her smile, the lewdness in her eyes, the flash of an incisor tooth as she glanced at him from behind a blanket she had hung on the wash line dividing the boxcar where she and her son lived. He heard the heavy weight of a Mexican gandy dancer settling between her thighs.

“You’re a mysterious fellow,” said the man on the far side of the fire ring.

“How’s that?”

“You have little to share, but you befriend a stranger who has nothing. You’re willing to break the law to find food for a man you owe nothing.”

“Maybe I stole it for myself.”

“A man as poor as you is not a thief.”

“Maybe I like your name.”

“It’s hardly original,” said the man on the opposite side of the fire. His face was long and homely, his ears too large, his nose shaped like a big teardrop, his shoulders knobbed as though they had been turned on a lathe. His name was Noie Barnum.

“Noie restarted the human race,” the man in the suit coat said. “Noie watched Yahweh hang the archer’s bow in the sky. ‘God gave Noie the rainbow sign / It’s not by water, it’s the fire next time.’ You know that song?”

“I haven’t heard it.”

“Yahweh made a contract. He stopped the rain and stilled the water and brought Noie and the ark to land. Before the flood, man was not supposed to break the skin of an animal with a knife. After the flood, the lion was supposed to lie down with the lamb. But it didn’t work out that way. That’s why the land is cursed.”

“You’re either a closet college professor or you’ve spent a lot of time in the public library,” Noie Barnum said.

“You wouldn’t mock a fellow, would you?” the man in the suit coat replied. His teeth shone at the corner of his mouth when he spoke, but there was no rancor in his voice.

“No, sir, I think you’re a good man. You and the Asian lady saved my life.”

“Which Asian lady?”

“The one the Mexicans call La Magdalena.”

“The papist?”

“I’m not sure what she is. I know she’s brave and she’s kind. I think she’s a lot like you, Jack.”

“I doubt that.” Jack flipped a twig into the fire, fascinated with its fate. He pried open the blade from his pocketknife and stripped the bark from a mesquite branch and sharpened the end into a point, then speared four chunks of venison and watched them curl and brown over the campfire. His fingernails were rimmed with dirt, his shapeless trousers stuffed inside the tops of his cowboy boots. As he squatted on his heels, his buttocks looked as thin as barrel slats. He opened a can of beans and stuck them down in the coals. He poured water from a canteen into two aluminum cups and handed one of them to Noie. “You hear that sound?” he asked.

“What sound?”

“Out yonder, to the southwest, just below the evening star.”

“I don’t hear or see anything,” Noie said.

“It’s a helicopter. When it flies over, don’t look up. The light always reflects off your face. Even starlight does. Ever see ducks or geese change their flight pattern when you glance up at them? They read the propensities down below a lot better than we do.”

“Shouldn’t we put out the fire?”

“These hills and canyons and dry washes are full of fires. The people in that helicopter are looking for white men. They’re looking for us.”

“Who are you, Jack?”

“You don’t want to know.”

From his belt loops, Jack pulled the piece of rope he had been using to hold up his trousers. He dropped it in the fire and watched it spark and then dissolve on the coals like a snake blackening and curling back on itself. He uncoiled a belt he had taken from the camper shell of the parked pickup and threaded it through the loops on his trousers, working the point around his skinny hips to the buckle, totally absorbed with the task.

“I didn’t mean to offend you,” Noie said.

“Why study on a wretch like me?” Jack said. The thropping sounds of a helicopter passed overhead, the airframe silhouetting briefly against the moon like a giant predator. Jack sat motionlessly on a rock, smiling crookedly from under the brim of his panama hat, until the helicopter and the downdraft of its blades had disappeared in the darkness. He tossed Noie a tin plate. “Eat up. White-tailed venison cooked on a mesquite fire with a little pepper and salt is about as good as it gets.”

Pam and Hackberry’s investigation into the theft at the hunting camp and from the camper shell of the pickup truck went nowhere. There were no recoverable prints and no witnesses who could provide any additional information or descriptive detail about the two men who had committed the break-ins. Early Monday morning Hackberry drove by himself to the burned shack where the tramp had occasionally been seen. But he was not the first to arrive there.

Ethan Riser was standing among several men holding a conversation between two parked SUVs. Even though the morning air was soft, the sun hardly above the hills, the ground moist with night damp, all of the men were in shirtsleeves and wore shades, as though the sun were blazing in the center of the sky. Only Riser bothered to look at Hackberry when he got out of the cruiser and approached the SUVs. “Be with you in a minute, Sheriff,” Riser said.

“No, sir, I need to talk with you now,” Hackberry said.

Riser separated himself from the group and walked beside Hackberry toward the pile of ash and charcoal that had once been a shack where a nameless tramp sometimes lived. “Are you here for the same reasons I am?” Hackberry said.

“What would that be?” Riser asked.

“Don’t try to take me over the hurdles, Ethan.”

“The federal employee we’re looking for is named Noie Barnum. If this guy falls into the wrong hands, he can do enormous injury to this country. Believe me, you cannot imagine the extent of the damage. I need your cooperation, and by ‘cooperation’ I mean you have to stop intervening in our affairs.”

“Noie?”

“Yeah, like the spelling in the King James Bible,” Riser said. “People in the southern mountains pronounce it ‘No-ee.’”

“This is my county and my jurisdiction. You guys are our guests,” Hackberry said.

“That’s outrageous.”

“So is federal arrogance.”

“I have to get back to work.”

“No, you don’t,” Hackberry said. “What’s your interest in a burned-down shack?”

“That’s not your concern.”

“You think Jack Collins might have given refuge to Barnum?”

“If you’ve figured everything out, why bother asking the FBI?”

“I’m not asking the FBI. I’m asking you, man to man.”

“We never found Collins’s body. His case is still open.”

“You think he burned his shack to get rid of his prints?”

“We haven’t come to any conclusions about any of this, at least not that we can pass on.”

“ We? I asked you for an opinion about the torching of the shack. It’s not a difficult question.”

“I think you should take your mind off world events. Do that for us, and we’ll do our best to stay out of your hair.”

Hackberry gazed at the gray and black humps of ash and charcoal and scorched boards and cans of food that had exploded in the heat and the strips of rusted corrugated tin protruding from the pile. A charred Bible had been raked out on the grass. The pages, all of them burned as black as carbon paper along the outer margins, were flipping in the wind. Hackberry turned his attention back to Riser.

“You didn’t bag the Bible,” Hackberry said.

“Why should I?”

“To see if Collins’s prints are on it.”

Riser removed a ballpoint from his shirt pocket. He seemed to study it a moment; then he started clicking it. “I can never get these things to work right.”

“You already know whose Bible that is. It belongs to Collins, doesn’t it?” Hackberry said.

Riser stuck the ballpoint back in his pocket and glanced at his watch and at his colleagues by the SUVs. “I hope all this works out for everybody. Be seeing you, Sheriff,” he said.

“Something else happened here. Collins didn’t burn the shack, did he?”

“How do you know that?”

“He’s a religious fanatic. He wouldn’t burn his Bible.”

“You’re too smart for your own good. I mean that in a kindly way.”

“You guys did it.”

“No, we did not do it.”

“Or somebody from ICE or the Border Patrol or the DEA. But one of y’all did it. Tell me I’m wrong. I want you to.”

“So maybe you’re not wrong,” Riser said. “Maybe a hothead got pissed off and wanted to send Collins a message. Maybe unlike you, not everybody is always in control of his emotions.”

“You’re telling me one of your people soaked private property with an accelerant and put a match to it, and you’re telling me lawmen do this with regularity?”

“The U.S. Forest Service used to burn out squatters all the time.”

“Nobody can be this dumb. Do you realize what y’all have done?”

“The Department of Justice isn’t exactly Pee-wee Herman. We don’t quake in our shoes because we have to hunt down a self-anointed messiah who probably hasn’t changed his underwear since World War Two.”

Hackberry walked over to the group of federal agents, still gathered between the two SUVs. “Which one of you guys torched the shack?” he asked.

They stared at him blankly from behind their shades. “What shack?” one of them said.

“I dug up nine of Jack Collins’s victims, all of them Asian, all female, some of them hardly more than children. He used a Thompson submachine gun, a full drum, fifty rounds, at almost point-blank range. Then they were bulldozed over behind the ruins of a church. One of them may have been still alive when she went into the ground. A Phoenix mobster sent three California bikers to pop him. Jack bribed their chippies to set them up and then turned the three of them into wallpaper.”

“Sounds like the right guy might have got his house burned down,” one of the agents said.

Hackberry walked back toward his cruiser, his face tight, his temples knotted with veins. Behind him, he heard one of the agents make a remark the others laughed at. But Hackberry didn’t look back. Instead, he kept his eyes focused on Ethan Riser. “That bunch of Ivy League pissants back yonder?” he said.

“What about them?” Riser said.

Hackberry opened the door to his cruiser. “I thought you were different, that’s all,” he said.

“You should have stayed with the ACLU, Sheriff. At least they have an understanding of procedure and protocol,” Riser said. “They try to think twice before they put their own agenda ahead of their country’s security. Where do you get off lecturing other people? Who died and made you God?”

“Nobody. And that’s the problem every one of y’all has, Ethan. You wrap your lies in the flag and put the onus on others. Shame on every one of you,” Hackberry said.

When he drove away, the back tires of his cruiser ripped two long lines out of the grass.

That evening Hackberry was about to relearn that the past wasn’t necessarily a decaying memory and that its tentacles had the power to reach through the decades and fasten themselves onto whatever prey they could slither their suction cups around. When he returned home from work, he found an envelope stuck in his doorjamb. Inside was a silver-edged sheet of stationery folded crisply through the center. The note on it was written in bright blue ink, in a flowing calligraphy, the curlicues fading into wispy threads. It read: Dear Sheriff Holland, Congratulations on all your political success. My father always spoke fondly of you and I’m sure he would be very proud of you. Forgive me for dropping by without calling first, but your number was unlisted. Call my car phone if you can have drinks or dinner, or I’ll try to drop by later or at your office. With kindest regards,

Temple Dowling

Unconsciously, Hackberry glanced over his shoulder after reading the note, as though an old adversary lay just beyond the perimeter of his vision. Then he went into the house and tore the note and envelope into four pieces, then tore them again and dropped them in the kitchen waste can and washed his hands in the sink.

It was easier to cleanse his skin than rinse his memory of Temple’s father, United States Senator Samuel Dowling. And Hackberry’s thoughts about the senator were uncomfortable not because the senator had been mean-spirited and corrupt to the core, but because Hackberry, when he ran for Congress, had, of his own choosing, fallen under the senator’s control.

The 1960s had been a transitional time in Texas’s political history. Hispanic farmworkers were unionizing, and huge numbers of black people had been empowered by the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Hackberry had watched the changes take place from a distance, at least when he wasn’t driving across the river to the brothels in Coahuila or Nuevo Leon, or staining the shaved ice in a tall glass one jigger at a time, with four inches of Jack Daniel’s, adding a sprig of mint and a teaspoon of sugar, just before taking the first drink of the day, one that rushed through his body with the intensity of an orgasm. Both the Democratic ticket and Hackberry’s first wife, Verisa, were delighted at the prospect of a handsome, towering war hero representing their district. Hackberry soon discovered that his addiction to whiskey and the embrace of a Mexican girl’s thighs didn’t hold a candle to the allure of celebrity and political power.

The attraction was not entirely meretricious in nature. Couched inside the vulgarity and the crassness of the new rich who surrounded him, and the attempts at manipulation of the sycophants, were moments that made him feel he was genuinely part of history. For good or bad, he had become a player in the Jeffersonian dream, a decorated former navy corpsman from a small Texas town about to take up residence at the center of the republic. Maybe Jefferson’s dream had been tarnished, but that did not mean it was lost, he had told himself. Even George Orwell, describing a Spanish troop train leaving a station on its way to the front while brass bands were blaring and peasant girls were throwing flowers, had said that maybe there was something glorious about war after all.

Hackberry remembered one balmy summer night of the campaign in particular. He had been standing on a balcony at the Shamrock Hotel in Houston, wearing only a bathrobe, a tumbler of whiskey and ice in one hand. Far below, columns of electric light glowed beneath the surface of a swimming pool built in the shape of a four-leaf clover. Across the boulevard, in a strange blend of the rural South and the New American Empire, oil wells pumped up and down- clink, clank, clink, clank -like the steady and predictable rhythm of lovers copulating, while cattle grazed nearby in belly-deep grass and thunder leaked from banks of black- and plum-colored rain clouds overhead.

The hotel had been built by a notorious wildcatter who sometimes came into the Shamrock Room and got into brawls with his own patrons, wrecking the premises and adding to a mythos that told all of its adherents they, too, could become denizens of the magic kingdom, if only the dice toppled out of the cup in the right fashion. In forty-five minutes Hackberry was to address a banquet hall filled with campaign donors who could buy third-world countries with their credit cards. When he was in their midst, he sometimes had glimpses in his mind of a high school baseball pitcher who resembled him and who took a Mexican girl to a drive-in theater in 1947, knowing that as soon as he went into the restroom, he would be beaten senseless. But Hackberry did not like to remember the person he used to be. Instead, he had made a religion out of self-destruction and surrounded himself with people he secretly loathed.

On that balcony high above the pool, he had not heard the senator walk up behind him. The senator had cupped his palm around the back of Hackberry’s neck, massaging the muscles as a father might do to his son. “Are you nervous?” the senator had said.

“Should I be?”

“Only if you plan to tell them the truth.”

“What is the truth, Senator?”

“That the world we live in is a sweet, sweet sewer. That most of them would drink out of a spittoon rather than give up their access to the wealth and power you see across the boulevard. That they want to own you now so they don’t have to rent you later.”

Hackberry had drunk from the tumbler, the ice cubes clattering against the glass, the palm fronds moving in the breeze down below, the warmth of the whiskey slowing his heart like an old friend reassuring him that the race was not to the swift. “Telling the truth would be my greatest sin? That’s an odd way of looking at public service, don’t you think?”

“There’s a far graver sin.”

“What would that be?”

“You already know the answer to that one, Hack.”

“A worse sin would be disloyalty to someone who has reached out and anointed me with a single touch of his finger on my brow?” Hackberry had said.

“That’s beautifully put. Your wife said you bedded a Mexican whore in Uvalde last night.”

“That’s not true. It was in San Antonio.”

“Oh, that’s good. I have to remember that one. But no more local excursions. There will be time enough for that when you get to Washington. Believe it or not, it will be there in such abundance that you’ll eventually grow bored with it, if you haven’t already. Usually, when a man of your background screws down, he’s not seriously committed to infidelity. It’s usually an act of anger rather than lust. A bit of trouble at home, that sort of thing. It beats getting drunk. Is that the case with the girl in San Antonio?”

Hackberry had not answered.

“Fair enough. There’s no shame in having a vice. It’s what makes us human,” the senator had said. Then he had patted Hackberry gingerly on the back of the head, after first leaning over the rail and spitting, even though people were eating at poolside tables directly below.

Those moments on the balcony and the touch of the senator’s hand on his head had remained with Hackberry like a perverted form of stigmata for over four decades.

An hour after tearing up the message left by Temple Dowling, Hackberry glanced through the front window and saw a man park a BMW at the gate and walk up the flagstones to the gallery. The visitor had thick silver-and-black hair and lips that were too large for his mouth. He was carrying an ice bucket with a dark green bottle inserted in it. Hackberry opened the door before his uninvited guest could ring the bell.

“Hello, Sheriff. Did you find my note?”

“Yes, sir, you’re Mr. Dowling. Leave the bucket and the bottle on the gallery and come in.”

“Excuse me?”

“Guests in my home drink what I have or they don’t drink at all.”

“I was supposed to meet a lady friend, but she stood me up. I hate to see a good bottle of wine go to waste. My father said you used to have quite a taste for it.”

“You want to come in, sir?”

“Thank you. And I’ll leave my bucket behind.” Dowling stepped inside and sat down in a deep maroon leather chair and gazed through the picture window, patting the tops of his thighs, a thick gold University of Texas class ring on his left hand. He wore a gray suit and a tie that was as bright as a halved pomegranate. But it was the composition of his face that caught the eye-the large lips, the pink cheeks and complexion that looked as though they had been dipped out of a cosmetics jar, the heavy eyelids that seemed translucent and were flecked with tiny vessels. “What a lovely view. The hills in front of your house remind me of-”

“Of what?”

“A Tahitian painting. What was his name? Gauguin? He was big on topless native women.”

“I haven’t studied on it.”

Temple Dowling smiled, his fingers knitting together.

“Do I amuse you, sir?” Hackberry said.

“I was thinking of something my father said. He admired your elan. I told him I’d heard you’d had a lot of girlfriends. My father replied, ‘Mr. Holland is a great lover of humanity, son. But let’s remember that half the human race is female.’”

“I think maybe the senator misrepresented the nature of our relationship. We were not friends. We used each other. That’s a reflection on me, not him.”

“Call me Temple.”

“I was a drunkard and a whoremonger, not a man who simply had girlfriends. I used the bodies of poor peasant girls across the river without thinking about the misery that constituted their lives. When I met Senator Dowling, I was arrogant and willful and thought I could play chess with the devil. Then the day came when I realized I had gravely underestimated Senator Dowling’s potential. After I mentioned my father’s political principles and his friendship with Franklin Roosevelt, the senator explained why my father had shot and killed himself. My father had taken a bribe. The people who bribed and later tried to blackmail him were friends of Senator Dowling. The senator took great pleasure in telling me that story.”

“I’m not my father, Sheriff.”

“No, sir, you’re not. But you’re not here out of goodwill, either.”

“How much money do you think it would take to shut down the city of New York?”

“I wouldn’t know, and I’m not interested.”

“I don’t mean to just disrupt it, like the 9/11 attacks. I mean to flood the tunnels and destroy the bridges and hospitals and poison the water supply and to spread fire and plague and anthrax and suffering all over the five boroughs. What if I told you that fifty thousand dollars spent in the right place by the wrong guys could turn New York into Dante’s ninth circle?”

“What business are you in, sir?”

“The defense of our nation.”

“Would you answer the question, please?”

“Unmanned aerial vehicles.”

“Drones that fire missiles?”

“Sometimes. Other times they’re observation vehicles. The cost to manufacture a Patriot missile is three million dollars. The cost of drones is nickels and dimes in comparison. A small drone can be powered with batteries and is invulnerable to heat-seeking missiles. They can fly so slowly that jet interceptors can’t lock down on them. Hezbollah has used them inside Israeli airspace.”

“What do you want from me?”

“Nothing. I’m here to offer my services.”

“They’re not needed, and they’re not wanted.”

“Somewhere out there in those hills is a man named Noie Barnum. He’s an idealistic idiot who believes that sharing knowledge about our weapons will make for a safer world.”

“My impression is that he was kidnapped and about to be sold to Al Qaeda when he escaped. He doesn’t sound like a willing participant in any of this.”

“So why doesn’t he come in?” Dowling said.

“That’s a good question.”

“Barnum has told others he has ‘problems of conscience.’ His ‘problem’ is the fact that UAVs can cause collateral damage. I wonder what he thinks about the collateral influences of napalm and bombs dropped from B-52s. Or maybe he’d like more of our soldiers killed while digging ragheads out of their caves.”

“Why are you here, sir?” Hackberry said.

“I want Noie Barnum in a cage. I don’t want him in front of a microphone or a camera. I’d like to see him buried under concrete at Guantanamo, after his head was wrapped in a towel and half the Atlantic was poured into it.”

“I’ll pass on your remarks to the FBI the first opportunity I have.”

“Sheriff, who do you think runs this country?”

“You tell me.”

“Lyndon was put into office by Brown and Root. Lyndon is moldering in the grave, but Brown and Root merged with Halliburton and is still alive and well. You think our current president is going to rescind their contracts at almost every United States military base in the world?”

“I wouldn’t know.”

Temple Dowling stood up from his chair and removed a strand of cat hair from his sleeve. “My father said you were never a listener.”

“You ever hear of Preacher Jack Collins?”

“No, who is he?”

“The most dangerous man I’ve ever met,” Hackberry said.

“What does that have to do with Noie Barnum?”

“Jack may be feeding and protecting him. I’m not sure why. Maybe because the feds burned Jack’s shack. Keep hanging around this area, and you might get a chance to meet him. If he chats you up, try to get it on tape.”

“Why would I want to do that?”

“Because it’s the only record people will have of your death. Thanks for coming by.”