Feast Day of Fools, Page 3

  He removed his hat when he stepped inside and let his eyes adjust to the poorly lit interior of her home. The furniture looked secondhand, the couch and chairs covered with cheap fabric, the rugs threadbare, an ancient glass wall case stuffed with books probably bought at yard sales. “We’re looking for a man who may have been an intended victim in a homicide, Ms. Ling,” he said.

  “Why do you think he’s here?” she asked.

  Through the back window he could see a stucco cottage by a slat-wall barn, alongside a flat-roofed, oblong building that once could have been a bunkhouse. “Because you live in the middle of an unofficial international highway?” he said.

  “What’s this man’s name?” she asked.

  “We don’t know. The FBI does, but we don’t,” he answered.

  “I see. Well, I don’t think he’s here.”

  “He might have a manacle on one wrist, but we can’t be sure of that. I suspect he’s terrified and desperate,” Hackberry said. “The man he may have been manacled to was tortured to death by six men carrying rifles. They probably came out of Mexico.”

  “If this man is desperate, why wouldn’t he come to you?” the Asian woman said.

  “My guess is he doesn’t trust the authorities.”

  “But he would trust me?”

  “We’re not with ICE or the Border Patrol, ma’am,” Pam said.

  “I gathered that from your uniform and your badge.”

  “The point is, we’re not worried about somebody feeding or sheltering wets,” Pam said. “They’ve been with us a long time.”

  “Yes, they have, haven’t they?”

  Pam seemed to think about the implication of the statement, plainly wondering if the barb was intentional or imaginary. “I was admiring your side room there. Is that a statue of the Virgin Mary in front of all those burning candles?”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “It doesn’t weep blood, does it?” Pam asked.

  “Ms. Ling, if you don’t feel you can confide in us, talk with the FBI. The man we’re looking for barely escaped a terrible fate,” Hackberry said.

  If his suggestion had any viability at all, it did not show in the Asian woman’s face. “I’ll keep in mind what you’ve said,” she replied.

  Pam Tibbs’s arms were folded on her chest. She gave Hackberry a look, waiting for him to speak, the fingers of her right hand opening and closing, her breath audible.

  Hackberry took the manila folder from his side pocket and removed the sheaf of eight-by-ten photos. “These were taken today at a crime scene no more than a half hour from your house. What you see here was done by men who have no parameters, Miss Anton. We have a witness who indicates the victim gave up the name La Magdalena before he died. We think the torture death of the victim was conducted by a man called Krill. That’s why we’re here now. We don’t want these men to hurt you or anyone to whom you may have given shelter. Have you heard of a man named Krill?”

  Her eyes held on his. They were dark, unblinking, perhaps containing memories or knowledge she seldom shared with others.

  “Yes,” she replied. “Three or four years ago, there was a coyote by that name. He robbed the people who paid him to take them across. Some say he raped the women.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “He disappeared.”

  “Do you know how he came by his name?”

  “He was a machine-gunner somewhere in Central America. His nickname came from the food of the whale. He ate the ‘krill’ in large numbers.”

  It was silent in the room. Hackberry glanced through the door of the side room, which must have served as a chapel of some kind. Perhaps thirty or forty candles were burning in red and blue and purple vessels, the light of the flames flickering on the base of the statue. “You Catholic, Miss Anton?” he said.

  “That depends on whom you talk to.”

  “Expecting some visitors tonight?” When she didn’t reply, he said, “Can we look out back?”

  “Why do you ask me? You’ll do it whether I like it or not.”

  “No, that’s not correct,” Pam replied. “We don’t have a search warrant. We’ll do it with your permission, or we can get a warrant and come back.”

  “Do whatever you wish.”

  “Excuse me, ma’am, but what if we just leave you alone here?” Pam said. “Would you prefer that? Then you can deal with Mr. Krill and his friends on your own.”

  “We’ll wander out back, if you don’t mind,” Hackberry said, placing a business card on the coffee table. Then he smiled. “Is it true you worked for Civil Air Transport, Claire Chennault’s old airline?”

  “I did.”

  “It’s an honor to meet you.”

  Minutes later, outside in the wind, Pam Tibbs’s throat was still bladed with color, her back stiff with anger.” ‘An honor to meet you’?” she said. “What the hell is that? She’s a horse’s ass.”

  “Look at it from her point of view.”

  “She doesn’t have one.”

  “She stands up for people who have no power. Why not give the devil her due?”

  Pam went inside the stucco cottage, then came back out, letting the screen slam behind her. “Check it out. There’s a mattress in there soaked in blood, and bandages are scattered all over the floor. The blood is still sticky. I bet that guy was here while we were talking in the house. What was that stuff about Claire Chennault’s airline?”

  “It was a CIA front that became Air America. They supplied the Laotian resistance and flew in and out of the Golden Triangle.”

  “They transported opium?”

  Hackberry removed his hat and knocked a dent out of the crown and put it back on. He felt old in the way people feel old when they have more knowledge of the world than they need. In the south the sky was blackening in the sunset, and dust was rising off the hills. “I think it’s fixing to blow,” he said.

  KRILL SQUATTED ON the edge of the butte and looked out at the desert and at the red sun cooling on the horizon. The sky had turned green when the wind drove the rain from the west, and dust devils were spinning across the landscape below, the air blooming with a smell that was like wet flowers and chalk. He had washed his body with a rag and canteen water, and now his skin felt cool in the breeze and the layer of warm air that had risen from the desert and broken apart in the evening sky. His eyes were a milky blue, his expression composed, his skin dusky and dry and smooth and clean inside his wind-puffed shirt. As often happened in these solitary moments, Krill thought about a village in a country far to the south, its perimeter sealed by jungle, a dead volcano in the distance. Across the road from the house where he had lived, three children played in a dirt yard in front of the clinic that had been constructed by East Germans and burned by the army. In Krill’s reverie, the children turned to look at him, their faces lighting with recognition. Then their faces disappeared, as though airbrushed from his life.

  “What we gonna do now, jefe?” Negrito said, squatting down next to him. He wore a greasy leather flop hat pushed back on his head, his hair curling like flames from under it.

  Because Negrito was of mixed blood and his first language was bastardized English, he believed he and Krill were brothers in arms. But Krill neither liked nor trusted Negrito, whose facial features resembled those of an orange baboon that had fallen into a tub of bleach.

  Krill continued to gaze at the desert and the way the light pooled in the clouds even though the sun had already set.

  “Don’t believe that stuff about La Magdalena. She ain’t got no power, man,” Negrito said. “You know what they say about puta from over there. It’s sideways. That’s the only difference.”

  Krill’s expression never changed, as though Negrito’s words were confetti falling on a flat stone. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Negrito leaning forward, dangerously close to the edge of the bluff, trying to earn his attention.

  “Why’s this guy so important?” Negrito asked. “He got a lot of dope hid someplace?�
�

  “See down there below?” Krill said. “That’s a coyote den. See in that creek bed? Those are cougar tracks. The cougar has to kill fifty fawns to feed just one kitten. Except there aren’t fifty fawns around here. That means the coyote’s pups have to die instead.”

  Negrito’s eyes went back and forth as he tried to puzzle through Krill’s statement. In the fading spark of sun on the horizon, his face was as rosy as a drunkard’s, his jutting forehead knurled, his mouth ringed with whiskers. “I’ll get it out of her. You say the word, jefe. She’ll be asking for knee pads,” he said.

  Krill stared into Negrito’s face. “I’m not your chief. I’m nobody’s chief. You follow me or you don’t follow me.”

  Negrito brushed one hand on top of the other, the horned edges of his palms rasping like sandpaper, his gaze avoiding Krill’s. He rocked on his heels, the points of his cowboy boots inches from the edge of the bluff. “You need a woman. It ain’t natural to be out here long without a woman. We all need a woman. Maybe we ought to go back to Durango for a while.”

  Krill stood up and looked at the other men, all of whom were cooking pieces of jackrabbits they had killed and dressed and speared on sticks above a fire they had built inside a circle of stones. He picked up his rifle and put it across his shoulders and draped his arms over either end of it, creating a silhouette like that of a crucified man. “In the morning,” he said.

  “We get out of here in the morning?” Negrito said. “Maybe to Durango?”

  “You heard me, hombre.”

  “Where you going now?”

  “You’ll hear one shot. It’ll be for the cougar. You hear more than one shot, that means I found some real pissed-off gringos out there.”

  “Because of what we done to that cop?”

  “He worked for the DEA.”

  “Man, you didn’t tell us that.”

  “You still want to go after La Magdalena?”

  Negrito’s eyes contained no emotion, as though they were prosthetic and had been inserted into his face by an indifferent thumb. He stared emptily at the desert, his eyelids fluttering when a cloud of bats lifted from a cave opening down below. Then he looked into the darkness, perhaps considering options, entertaining thoughts he hid by rubbing his forehead, shielding his eyes.

  “You think too much, Negrito,” Krill said. “When a man thinks too much, he’s tempted to go beyond his limitations.”

  Negrito stood up and took off his hat. “Watch this,” he said. He flipped his hat in the air, then scooted under it, catching it squarely on his head, his face splitting into an ape’s grin. He wobbled slightly, his arms straight out for balance, rocks spilling from under his boots over the edge of the bluff. “Chingado, that scared me. Don’t worry, jefe. I’ll always back you up. I don’t care about no pissed-off gringos or Chinese puta that thinks her shit don’t stink, either. You’re my jefe whether you like it or not. I love you, hermano.”

  HACKBERRY HOLLAND HAD come to believe that age was a separate country you did not try to explain to younger people, primarily because they had already made up their minds about it and any lessons you had learned from your life were not the kind many people were interested in hearing about. If age brought gifts, he didn’t know what they were. It had brought him neither wisdom nor peace of mind. His level of desire was the same, the lust of his youth glowing hot among the ashes each morning he woke. He could say with a degree of satisfaction that he didn’t suffer fools and drove from his company anyone who tried to waste his time, but otherwise his dreams and his waking day were defined by the same values and frame of reference that came with his birthright. If age had marked a change in him, it lay in his acceptance that loneliness and an abiding sense of loss were the only companions some people would ever have.

  The most influential event in Hackberry’s life had been his marriage to Rie Velasquez, a labor organizer for the United Farm Workers of America. When she died of uterine cancer, Hackberry had sold his ranch on the Guadalupe River and moved down to the border, leaving behind all memory of the idyllic life they’d shared, ridding himself of the things she had touched that made him so lonely he wanted to drink again, embracing the aridity of a parched land and its prehistoric ambience and its violent sunsets, the way a Bedouin enters the emptiness of the desert and is subsumed and made insignificant by it. Then bit by bit the horse farm he bought became a hologram, a place that fused past and present and re-created his childhood and adolescence and his life with Rie and their twin sons in one shimmering, timeless vision. It was a place where a man could see his beginning and his end, an island that was governed by reason and stewardship and the natural ebb and flow of the seasons, a place where a man no longer had to fear death.

  He had two good wells on his land, and a four-stall barn and two railed pastures where he grazed his quarter horses and registered Missouri foxtrotters. He was also the unofficial owner of three dogs, a one-eyed cat, and two raccoons, none of whom had names but whom he fed outside the barn every morning and night.

  His house was painted battleship gray and had a wide gallery and a breezy screened porch in back and a rock garden and a deep-green lawn he watered with soak hoses and flower beds planted with roses he entered each summer in the competition at the county fair. A china-berry tree grew in his backyard, and a slender palm tree grew at the base of the hill behind the house. He built a brooder house on the side of the barn, and his chickens laid eggs all over the property, under his tractor and in his tack room. On each of his horse tanks he had constructed small ladders out of chicken wire that he wrapped over the lip of the tank, so small creatures that fell into the water could find their way out again. In one way or another, every day that he spent on his ranch became part of an ongoing benediction.

  The two gun cases in his office held a Henry repeater, an 1873 Winchester, a .45–70 trapdoor of the kind the Seventh Cavalry carried into the Little Big Horn, an ’03 Springfield, a German Luger, a nine-millimeter Beretta, a Ruger Buntline .22 Magnum, and the converted .44 Navy Colt his grandfather, Old Hack, had carried the morning he knocked John Wesley Hardin from his saddle and kicked him cross-eyed and nailed him down with chains in a wagon bed before transporting him to the Cuero jail.

  Hackberry loved the place he lived, and he loved waking inside its soft radiance in the morning, and he loved following his grandfather’s admonition to feed his animals before he fed himself. He loved the smell of his roses inside the coolness of the dawn and the smell of well water bursting into the horse tank when he released the chain on the windmill. He loved the warm odor of grass on the breath of his horses and the vinegary smell of their coats, and the powdery green cloud of hay particles that rose around him when he pulled a bale apart and scattered it on the concrete pad in the barn.

  All of these things were part of the Texas in which he had grown up, and they were unsoiled by political charlatans and avaricious corporations and neocolonial wars being waged under the banner of God. He did not tell others about the bugles blowing in the hills, less out of fear that they would suspect him of experiencing auditory delusions than out of his own conviction that the bugles were real and that from the time of Cortés to the present, a martial and savage spirit had ruled these hills and it was no coincidence that a sunset in this fine place looked like the electrified blood of Christ.

  Early on the morning after he and Pam Tibbs had interviewed the Asian woman known by the Mexicans as La Magdalena, Hackberry looked out his bathroom window and saw Ethan Riser park his government motor-pool car by the front gate and walk up the flagstones to the front entrance, holding two Styrofoam containers on top of each other, pausing briefly to admire the flowers in the bed. Hackberry rinsed the shaving cream off his face and stepped out on the veranda. “This can’t wait till eight o’clock?” he said.

  “It could. Or maybe I could come back another day, when you’re not tied up with something important, like shaving,” Riser said.

  “I have to feed my animals.”

 
; “I’ll help you.”

  Ethan Riser’s hair was as white as cotton and had all the symmetry of meringue. His nose and cheeks were threaded with tiny blue and red capillaries, and his stomach and hips protruded over the narrow hand-tooled western belt he wore with a conventional business suit and tie. He had been with the FBI almost forty years.

  “Fix some coffee while I’m down at the barn,” Hackberry said.

  Twenty minutes later, he returned to the house through the back door and washed his hands in the kitchen sink.

  “You got a reason for always making it hard?” Riser said.

  “None I can think of.”

  “Why didn’t you call me about the homicide south of that Indian’s property?”

  “It’s not a federal case. It’s not y’all’s damn business, either.”

  “You’re wrong about that, my friend. The victim was a DEA informant.”

  “It’s still our case. Stay out of it.”

  “Beg your pardon?”

  “I’ve been on a need-to-know basis with y’all before. I always had the feeling I was a hangnail.”

  “The informant’s name was Hector Lopez. He was a dirty cop from Mexico City who worked both sides of the fence. Our people weren’t entirely comfortable with him. Lopez and a physician once tortured a DEA agent to death.”

  “I remember that case. The physician went down for it. Why not the dirty cop?”

  “That’s the way it is. I’m sharing this with you because we can help each other.”

  The microwave made a dinging sound. Ethan Riser took out the two Styrofoam containers and opened them on the breakfast table. They contained scrambled eggs and hash browns and sausage patties smothered with milk gravy. He took the coffeepot off the stove and set cups and silverware on the table. Hackberry watched him. “Does everything meet the standard here? My house tidy enough, that sort of thing?” he said.