Feast Day of Fools

  “¿Qué tal?” Ethan Riser repeated.

  “Yeah, what’s up?”

  “I know what it means.”

  “Say what’s on your mind.”

  “This is a personal call and off the record.”

  “I’m the sheriff of this county. I’m sitting at my office desk, on the job, in my official capacity. Nothing that occurs here is off the record.”

  “You sound a little short.”

  “What do you want, Ethan?”

  “I’m taking early retirement. I wanted to tell you that. Plus a couple of other things.”

  “Like what?”

  “You’re in the way.”

  “Say again?”

  “This guy Noie Barnum is the Holy Grail. We want him, Krill and his people want him, Al Qaeda wants him, Temple Dowling wants him, and now Josef Sholokoff wants him.”

  “Why would a Russian porn dealer risk his immigration status by going into espionage?”

  “Josef Sholokoff has been spreading drug and porn addiction around the country since he arrived in Brighton Beach. Why should doing business with third-world bedbugs bother him?”

  “You said I was in the way.”

  “Guys like you are not team players. You’re a hardhead, you don’t chug pud, and you cause major amounts of trouble. Government agencies might say otherwise, but they don’t care for guys like you.”

  “What difference should that make to me?”

  “They won’t have your back, bud.”

  “Have you been drinking?”

  “I’m at a driving range. I wish I’d done more of this a long time ago.”

  “When do you retire?”

  “Three months, more or less. Yeah, about three months.”

  “You’re retiring but you’re not sure when?”

  “I’m terminal.”

  Hackberry leaned forward on his desk. Before he could speak, Riser cut him off. “I used to smoke three packs a day. Five years ago I quit and thought I’d gotten a free pass. I went in for a blister on my nose last week, and the doc said it was already in my liver and pancreas and had reached the brain.”

  “I’m sorry, Ethan.”

  “There’s something I never told you about my history with the Bureau. You remember right after 9/11 when a planeload of bin Laden’s relatives was allowed to leave the country without being detained, except for the fifteen minutes we were allowed to interview them on the tarmac? I was one of the agents who went on board the plane. I should have resigned in protest then. But I didn’t. I’ve always regretted that. Take this for a fact. When you get to the end of the track, you don’t regret the things you did. You regret the things you didn’t do. You’re a good man, Hack. But good men are usually admired in retrospect, after they’re safely dead.”

  After he had hung up, Hackberry sat for a long time in his chair, the right side of his face numb, a sound like an electrical short humming in his ear.

  CHAPTER NINE

  ANTON LING WOKE in the darkness to the flicker of dry lightning and a rumble of thunder that shook the walls of her house in the same way that the reverberations of aerial bombs could travel through the earth and cause a house to rattle miles away. She went to the kitchen and sat at the table in the dark and drank a glass of warm milk and tried not to think about the images reawakened in her unconscious by the thunder and the yellow ignition in the clouds.

  The night was unseasonably cold, the sky churning with clouds that looked filled with soot. She thought she heard a coyote’s wail inside the wind, or perhaps the shriek of a rusty hinge twisting violently back on itself. An empty apple basket bounced crazily past the water tank in the backyard. The tank was overflowing, the blades of the windmill ginning, the stanchions vibrating with tension. Had she been so absentminded that she had forgotten to notch down the shutoff chain on the crankshaft?

  She put on a canvas coat and went outside and was immediately struck by the severity of the wind and a smell that was like creosote and wet sulfur and the stench off a smokestack in a rendering plant. She hooked the chain on the windmill and realized the doors were slamming on all her sheds, a loose section of the tin roof on the barn clanging against the joists, as though things were coming apart and indeed the center could not hold. Was the odor coming from across the border, where industry did as it wished? The clouds were black and billowing and lighted from the inside, like giant curds of smoke rising from wet straw set ablaze by a chemical starter.

  When would she be freed of her dreams and the sensations and shards of memory that followed her into the day and fouled her blood and made her wonder if her entire mission wasn’t that of a hypocrite? Why could she not accept the fact that amnesia did not necessarily accompany absolution?

  Don’t think about it, she told herself. Pray for the maimed and the dead and ask nothing more from life than another sunrise, and maybe along the way do a good deed or two. She couldn’t change the past. Why did she have to revisit the same slide show over and over?

  Gasoline and diesel, drums of it, with Tide detergent poured into the mix so that the liquid adhered to every surface it touched, a homemade form of napalm dropped end over end from a few hundred feet while tiny figures below raced from their huts into the trees or sometimes rolled burning in the rice paddies to smother the fire on their skin.

  From a great distance, she had witnessed the B-52 raids in Cambodia and had heard the thump of the bombs and had felt the explosions through the soles of her shoes and had seen the surface of rice paddies wrinkle, but the tremolo that spread invisibly through the floor of a rain forest was little different from the vibration of a subway train passing under the streets of a metropolitan city. The fifty-gallon drums filled with diesel or gasoline or both were different; they were up close and personal, their effect unforgettable. She had helped slide them off the tailgate of a Chinook, had cupped her hands around their hard rims, had watched them suddenly detach themselves from the plane and drop as heavily as woodstoves through the air into a landscape of elephant grass and tropical trees and fields of poppies that bloomed pink and red against a backdrop of blue mountains. Then she had seen them explode in a village that was a resupply depot for the Pathet Lao, but also a home to people who ate monkeys and dogs and harvested rice with their hands, and who knew nothing of the global powers that had decided to use their country as a battlefield.

  She went back inside the house and hung her canvas coat on a peg and checked the locks on the doors, then sat down on the side of her bed, her head bent forward, the images and sounds from her dream gradually disappearing. The wind gusted under the house, causing the floor and the walls to creak and a tin cup to topple into the kitchen sink. She got up from the bed to pull the curtain on the window just as a net of lightning bloomed in the clouds. By the corner of the old bunkhouse, she saw a shadow. No, it was more than a shadow. It not only moved; light reflected off it. She stared into the darkness, waiting for the electricity to jump in the clouds again. Instead, drops of rain began to patter on the roof and in the dust around the windmill and in the nubbed-down grass near the barn, and all she could see through her bedroom window was darkness and the sheen of rain on the bunkhouse and an empty dark space where she thought she had seen the outline of a man.

  She opened the bottom drawer of her dresser and reached inside it and groped under a pile of folded clothes for an object she hadn’t touched or even thought about in many months. She went into the kitchen and pulled open a drawer, and from a collection of screwdrivers and hammers and pliers and duct tape and wrenches and scattered nails, she removed a flashlight. Then she put on a baseball cap and unlocked the back door and went outside, this time without her coat.

  She moved the beam of the flashlight along the side of the bunkhouse and the stucco cottage, then shone it on the railed horse lot and through the open door of the barn, the light sweeping against the stalls and wood posts inside. She crossed the yard and looked inside the bunkhouse, then inside the cottage. She searched behind the bu
nkhouse and worked her way back to the corner where she thought she had seen the figure.

  The rain was ticking on her cap and her shoulders, spotting her clothes and running down the back of her neck. She walked toward the barn, the flashlight beam spearing the darkness and bouncing off the tools and dust-covered tack inside. She took a deep breath, oxygenating her blood, and stepped through the door into the heady odor of horse sweat and decayed manure and pounded-down clay that was green with mold.

  “What are you doing here?” she said.

  “Nothing,” said the figure in the shadows, raising his arm against the glare of the flashlight.

  “You were looking through my windows.”

  “I was not. I just wanted to talk. I didn’t understand what you said there at the grocery store.”

  “About what?”

  “You said I shouldn’t presume. You said I didn’t know who I was messing with. You thought I was threatening you? I wouldn’t do that. You made me feel bad, like I was a bully or a freak or something. Ma’am, is that a pistol in your hand?”

  “What does it look like?”

  “We’re kindred spirits.”

  “No, we’re not. How long have you been out here?”

  “Just a few minutes. Maybe I was gonna knock on your door. I know you stay up. I’ve seen those candles glowing in your chapel late at night.”

  “How did you see them?”

  “I got a telescope on my deck. I do stargazing sometimes. It’s a hobby I got.”

  “Where’s your vehicle?”

  “Down the road a mite.”

  “You’re a voyeur, Reverend Cody. Get off my property. If you ever come on it again, I’ll shoot you.”

  “Don’t talk like that. You got me all wrong, ma’am.”

  “No, I don’t. I think you’re haunted by a terrible deed you did to a woman or a group of women. It’s something so bad you can’t talk about it to anyone. But that’s your problem, not mine. Get out of here and never come back. You understand?”

  “Yes, ma’am, if that’s what you say.”

  She lowered the pistol and stepped aside. When he ran past her, his face was disjointed with fear and humiliation, like that of a child caught in a shameful act. She went back inside the house and locked the door behind her and replaced the small-caliber pistol in the bottom drawer of her dresser. She took off her damp clothes and dried herself with a towel and put on a pair of pajamas and lay down on the bed, a pillow over her face. She was surprised at how quickly and easily she fell asleep. Outside, a bolt of lightning struck the top of a hill and turned a pine tree into a crisp red fingerprint against the unrelieved blackness of the sky.

  CODY DANIELS’S WAXED canary-yellow pickup was parked off the side of the dirt road, down by a creek bed whose banks were bordered by gravelly soil and cottonwood and willow trees. The rain had beaded on the wax, and when electricity leaped between the clouds, his truck looked like a bejeweled artwork, a thing of beauty and power and comfort that had always given him an enormous sense of pleasure and pride and control. But now Cody Daniels took no joy in anything—not his truck, nor his Cowboy Chapel, nor his title of Reverend, nor the house he had built up in the cliffs, where he had strode the deck like the captain of a sailing vessel.

  He had not only been caught hiding in the Chinese woman’s barn, he had been accused of voyeurism and driven from her property as a degenerate might. Worse, he could not explain to himself, much less to Anton Ling, why he had gone there. To tell her he was sorry for approaching her in the grocery store while he was drunk? Maybe. To tell her that no matter what he might have done in the past, he would not try to harm her? Maybe. To look through her windows?

  He wanted to say no to his last question but found himself hesitating. Of course he wouldn’t do something like that, he told himself. Never in his life had he ever entertained thoughts like that. Why would she think that of him? Why would he doubt himself now?

  Because there was no question he had become obsessed with her. While he set out his prayer books in the Cowboy Chapel or tried to prepare a sermon, he wondered what kind of services she conducted inside that little room where racks of candles burned in rows of blue and red vessels. He wondered why none of the Hispanics, at least the legal ones, ever came to his church. What did he ever do to them? He wondered if Anton Ling possessed powers that would never be given to him. What was the line in Scripture? Many are called but few are chosen? That seemed like saying there was a collection of real losers out there and Cody Daniels was probably one of them.

  Was that his lot? To have the calling but never feel the hot finger of destiny on his forehead? Was he cursed with the worst state of mind that could befall a man, envy of a woman, in this case an Oriental whose features and figure and grace turned his loins to water?

  He turned his face toward the sky. Why have you done this to me? he asked.

  If there was any reply, he didn’t hear it. The only sound he heard was that of a heavy vehicle, one with a diesel-powered engine, grinding its way down a dirt track between two hills on the north side of the Chinese woman’s property. He could see the headlights in the rain and the outline of the extended cab and the large bed in back. It was an expensive vehicle that could seat a driver and five passengers easily. What was it doing in these hills at this time of night? It was now dipping off the road, proceeding down a long incline that fed into flatland and a string of cedar fence posts with no wire.

  Cody got into his pickup and rolled down the passenger window so he could watch the diesel-powered truck as it approached the back of Anton Ling’s house, its headlights turned off.

  Maybe they’re part of her Underground Railroad or whatever the hell they call it, he told himself.

  But he knew better. He opened his cell phone and looked at the screen. No service. Well, that’s the breaks, he thought. What had she told him? To get out, to never come back? Something like that. So, sayonara, see you tomorrow, or whatever they said over there. Maybe next time you’ll appreciate it when a good man comes around. Voyeur, my dadburned foot, he thought.

  He clicked on his headlights, dropped his transmission into gear, and drove south into the rain, away from Anton Ling’s property, the clouds crackling like cellophane behind him.

  IT WAS STILL dark when she woke and realized that the four men standing around her bed were not part of a dream. She could smell the mud on their boots and the rain and leaves on their hooded slickers. She could hear their weight shift on the boards in the floor. She could see their gloved hands and the heavy dimensions of their torsos and arms. The sense of physicality in the three men who stood closest to her was overwhelming, as palpable as a soiled hand violating one’s person. The fourth man, who stood in the background, did not seem to belong there. He was much shorter, his physical proportions lost inside his raincoat. The only thing she couldn’t see were their faces, which were covered with a camouflage-patterned fabric that had been drawn tight against the skin, the material creased with lines like a prune might have.

  She sat up in bed, the sheet pulled to her waist, her heart beating high up in her chest. She waited for one of them to speak. But none of them did. The luminous clock on her dresser said 4:54 A.M. Another hour until sunrise. “The doors were dead-bolted,” she said.

  “Not anymore they’re not,” one man said. He was taller than the others, maybe wearing cowboy boots, a military-style wristwatch with no reflective surfaces strapped just above the glove on his left hand.

  “I’m of no value to you,” she said.

  “What makes you think this is about you?” the man asked.

  “The man you’re looking for stayed here briefly. I gave him food and dressed his wounds. But he’s not here anymore, and I don’t know where he has gone. So I’m in possession of nothing you want.”

  “You never can tell,” the man said.

  She tried to look straight into his eyes and confront his sexual innuendo. But she could see nothing behind the holes in his mask. “How ma
ny of you are outside?” she asked.

  “What makes you think anyone is outside?”

  “There are at least two. One in front, one in back. Because you used four men to confront one woman inside the house, you have personnel to spare. So there are at least two outside.”

  “You’re a smart lady,” the tall man said. “But we knew that when we came here.”

  “Then you know I’m not trying to deceive you. It wouldn’t be in my interest or in the interest of the work I do. I have no personal agenda and nothing I need to hide from you.”

  “Maybe I know that. But others may not. You were in Laos and Cambodia. You were in Tibet, too. You did airdrops to the Tibetan resistance. Not many people have a history like that.”

  “More than you think.”

  “The Communists had their hands on you for a while. Where did that happen?”

  “In Tibet.”

  “What was that like?”

  “Not very pleasant.”

  “Your record indicates you gave them nothing and lived to tell about it. So others might take that to mean we shouldn’t believe anything you say unless it withstands the test of ordeal. Don’t make us go through that, ma’am.”

  “Do you think politeness in language excuses you from what you’re doing? You break in to my home and wake me from my sleep and suggest you might torture or rape me, then address me as ‘ma’am’? What kind of men are you? Does it bother you that you mask your faces in order to bully a woman?”

  She realized she was saying too much, that she was taking the exchange over the edge and ignoring the fact that her intruders wore masks because they did not plan to kill her. She tried to keep her face empty of expression, to not signal them in any way that she understood their thought processes or the methods they were considering using against her. It was time to distract them by giving them information they probably already had that would indicate she was telling the truth but be of no help to them. “The man you’re searching for is probably with a homicidal lunatic by the name of Jack Collins.”