Feast Day of Fools

  Temple Dowling was on the driving range with three friends, whocking balls in a high arc, his form perfect, the power in his shoulders and thick arms and strong hands a surprise to those who noted only the creamy pinkness of his complexion and the baby fat under his chin and his lips that were too large for his mouth. The coordination of his swing and the whip of his wrists and the twist of his hips and buttocks seemed almost an erotic exercise, one that was not lost on others. “Temp, you’re the only golf player I ever saw whose swing could make the right girl cream her jeans,” one of his companions said.

  They all roared, then sipped from their old-fashioneds and gin gimlets and turned their attention to the two-inch-thick bloodred steaks Temple had just forked onto the barbecue grill.

  “What was that?” said one of the friends, a man with hair like an albino ape’s on the backs of his wrists and arms.

  “What was what?” Dowling said. He looked around, confused.

  “I don’t know,” his friend said. “I thought I saw something. A red bug.”

  “Where?”

  The friend rubbed at one eye with his wrist. “I probably looked into the sun. I think I need new contacts.”

  “It looked like it was fixing to crawl in your collar,” another man said.

  Temple Dowling pulled his shirt loose from his slacks and shook it. “Did I get it?”

  “Nothing fell out.”

  “It wasn’t a centipede, was it?”

  “It was a little round bug,” said the man with white hair on his arms.

  Temple Dowling straightened his collar. “Screw it. If it bites me, I’ll bite it back,” he said. His friends grinned. He picked up a fork and turned the steaks, squinting in the smoke. “Right on this spot, before this was a country club, my father had a deer stand where he used to take his friends. I wasn’t supposed to be there, but I snuck off to it and shot a nine-point buck with my twenty-two. Except I gut-shot him. He took off running, just about where that water trap is now. I had to hit him four more times before he went down. I was so excited I pissed my pants. I showed my father what I’d done, and he dipped his hand in the deer’s blood and smeared it on my face and said, ‘Damn if I don’t think you’ve turned into a man. But we got to get you a thirty-thirty, son, before you shoot up half the county.’”

  “Were you and your father pretty close, Temp?”

  “Close as ice water can be to a drinking glass, I guess.”

  Dowling’s companions nodded vaguely as though they understood when in fact they did not.

  “My father had his own way of doing things,” he said. “There was his way, and then there was his way. If that didn’t work out, we did it his way over and over until his way worked. No man could ride a horse into the ground or a woman into an asylum like my old man.”

  The others let their eyes slip away to their drinks, the steaks browning and dripping on the fire, the golfers lifting their drives high into the sunset, a skeet shooter powdering a clay pigeon into a pink cloud against the sky. At the club, candor about one’s life was not always considered a virtue.

  “On your shirt, Temp,” said the man with white hair on his wrists and arms. “There. Jesus.”

  Dowling looked down at his clothes. “Where?”

  One man dropped his gimlet glass and stepped away, his eyebrows raised, his hands lifted in front of him, as though disengaging from an invisible entanglement that should not have been part of his life. The two other men were not as subtle. They backed away hurriedly, then ran toward the Ninth Hole, coins and keys jingling in their pockets, their spiked shoes clicking on the walkway, their faces disjointed as they looked back fearfully over their shoulders.

  Out on the county road, one hundred yards away, Felix Chavez walked from an abandoned mechanic’s shed to an unmarked car, threw a rifle on the backseat, and drove home to eat dinner with his family.

  HACKBERRY WAS DOZING in his chair, his hat tilted down on his face, his feet on his desk, when the 911 call came in. Maydeen and Pam and R.C. had stayed late that afternoon. Maydeen tapped on Hackberry’s doorjamb. “Temple Dowling says somebody put a laser sight on him at the country club,” she said.

  “No kidding,” Hackberry said, opening his eyes. “What would Mr. Dowling like us to do about it?”

  “Probably bring him some toilet paper. He sounds like he just downloaded in his britches,” she replied.

  “Maydeen—”

  “Sorry,” she said.

  “Is Mr. Dowling still at the club?”

  “He’s in his cottage. He says you warned him about Jack Collins.” She looked at a notepad in her hand. “He said, ‘That crazy son of a bitch Collins is out there, and you all had better do something about it. I pay my goddamn taxes.’”

  “Is there any coffee left?” Hackberry asked.

  “I just made a fresh pot.”

  “Let’s all have a cup and a doughnut or two, then R.C. and Pam and I can motor on out,” Hackberry said. He stretched his arms, his feet still on his desk, and tossed his hat on the polished tip of one boot. “I’d better take down the flag before we go, too. It looks like rain.”

  “You want me to call Dowling back?”

  “What for?”

  “To tell him y’all are on your way.”

  “He knows our hearts are in the right place,” Hackberry replied.

  Forty minutes later, it was misting and the clouds were hanging like frozen steam on the hills when Hackberry and Pam arrived at the club in one cruiser and R.C. in another. Temple Dowling met them at the door of his cottage, a drink in his hand, his face splotched, his eyes looking past them at the fairways and trees and the shadows that the trees and buildings and electric lights made on the grass. The wind toppled a table on the flagstones by the swimming pool, and Temple Dowling’s face jumped. “What kept y’all?” he said. “Who’s this woman Maydeen?”

  “What about her?”

  “She told me to fuck myself, is what’s about her.”

  Hackberry stared at him without replying.

  “Come inside. Don’t just stand there,” Dowling said.

  “This is fine.”

  “It’s raining. I don’t want to get wet,” Dowling said, his gaze focusing on a man stacking chairs behind the Ninth Hole.

  “R.C., go up to the clubhouse and see what you can find out. We’ll be here with Mr. Dowling. Let’s wrap this up as soon as we can.”

  “Wrap this up?” Dowling said. “Somebody is trying to kill me, and you say ‘wrap this up’?”

  Pam and Hackberry stepped inside the cottage and closed the door behind them. “You say somebody locked down on you with a sniper’s rifle?”

  “Yeah. Why do you think I called?”

  “And Maydeen told you to fuck yourself? That doesn’t sound like her.”

  Dowling’s eyes were jumping in their sockets. “Are you listening? I know a laser sight when I see one. Who cares about Maydeen?”

  “Did your security guys see it?”

  “If they had, Collins would be turning on a rotisserie.”

  “The last time a couple of your guys ran into Jack, they didn’t do too well,” Hackberry said. “The coroner had to blot them up with flypaper and a sponge. Did you call the feds?”

  “You listen,” Dowling said, his voice trembling with either anger or fear or both. He set down his drink on a bare mahogany table, trying to regain control of his emotions. The velvet drapes were pulled on the windows, the dark carpets and wood furniture and black leather chairs contributing somehow to the coldness pumping out of the air-conditioning ducts. “Collins has killed at least two federal agents. Nobody can do anything about him. Even Josef Sholokoff is afraid of him. But you have a personal relationship with him. If you didn’t, you’d be dead. I think you’re leaving him out there purposely.”

  “Jack Collins tried to kill Chief Deputy Tibbs. He knows what I’ll do to him if I get the chance, Mr. Dowling. In the meantime, I’m not sure anything happened here. If Jack had wanted to pop y
ou, your brains would be on your shirt.”

  Even in the air-conditioning, the armpits of Dowling’s golf shirt were damp, his face lit with a greasy shine. He picked up his drink, then set it down again, clearing a clot out of his voice box. “I want to talk to you alone,” he said.

  “What for?”

  “You’ll see.”

  “Pam, would you wait up at the club?”

  “I love your decor, Mr. Dowling,” she said. “We busted some metalheads and satanists who were growing mushrooms inside a place that looked just like it.”

  Dowling went into the bedroom and returned with a cardboard file folder secured by a thin bungee cord. He removed the cord and laid the folder flat side down on a dining room table, his chest rising and falling, as though wondering if he were about to take a wrong turn into the bad side of town. “I was going to give you this anyway,” he said. “So I’m not giving it to you as a bribe or a form of extortion or anything like that.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Hackberry said.

  Dowling lifted his glass and drank and set the glass down again, his words steadying in his throat. “Years ago, when you were going across the border, my father had you surveilled and photographed. And buddy, did he get you photographed. Through windows and doorways, in every position and compromising moment a man and woman can put themselves in. You used three cathouses and three cathouses only. Am I right?”

  “I don’t know. I had blackouts back then.”

  “Trust me, if my father said you did, you did. Nobody in the history of the planet was better at cooking up a witches’ brew to destroy people than he was. He drove my mother mad and ruined his enemies financially and politically. In your case, he planned to blackmail you after you went to Congress. Except you married the union lady and got reborn with the proletariat and left the campaign.”

  “Why give me the photos?”

  “I wanted to show you we’re on the same side.”

  “We’re not.”

  Dowling drank the rest of the whiskey in his glass, his cheeks blooming as though his soul had taken on new life. “Look, I don’t have illusions about your feelings toward me. You think I’m a degenerate, and maybe I am. But I’m going to do something for you that nobody else can. You’ve made statements to people about your trips to Mexican whorehouses and the possibility that you screwed some underage girls. You were a whoremonger, all right, but not with young girls. If you had been, the photos would be in that file.” Dowling pushed the folder toward Hackberry. “They’re yours,” he said.

  “What about the negatives?”

  “They’re in there.”

  “And how about other prints?”

  “There aren’t any. I don’t have any reason to lie. You may not like me, but I’m not my father.”

  “No, you’re not,” Hackberry said ambiguously.

  “There’s a barbecue grill on the patio out back. A little charcoal lighter and one match, and you can feed your mistakes to the flames.”

  “I tell you what,” Hackberry said, sliding the folder back toward Dowling. “I’ll provide you several phone numbers. You can give these photos to the San Antonio newspapers and my political opponents or ship them off to Screw magazine. Or you can thumbtack them to corkboards in Laundromats around town or glue them on the walls of washrooms and the sides of trucks. The Internet is another possibility.”

  “I thought I was doing the decent thing. I thought I’d put my own indiscretions in Mexico behind us. I thought you might hold me in a little higher regard.”

  “You profit off of war and people’s misery, Mr. Dowling. My opinion about you has no weight in the matter. You’re a maker of orphans and widows, just as your father was. You send others to fight wars that you yourselves will never serve in. Like a slug, your kind stays under a log, white and corpulent, and fears the sunlight and the cawing of jays. You have many peers, so don’t take my comments on too personal a basis.”

  Dowling sat down in a straight-back chair, his hands cupped like dough balls. He was breathing through his mouth, looking upward, as though all the blood had drained out of his head. “You’re a cruel, unforgiving man,” he said.

  “No, just a guy who has a long memory and doesn’t allow himself to get bit by the same snake twice.”

  Pam Tibbs opened the front door without knocking and leaned inside. “Better come out here, Hack,” she said. “R.C. talked to a caddie who saw a guy prowling around Mr. Dowling’s SUV. R.C. is getting under it now.”

  The rain had stopped and the sky had started to clear and water was dripping off the fronds of the banana plants and palm trees and the roof of the shed on the driving range as they walked to the parking lot, Dowling’s security men trailing behind them. In the waning of the sunset, they saw R.C. emerge from under the SUV, his uniform streaked with mud, one hand holding a serrated steel object. “It’s either Chicom or Russian-made,” he said. “The pin was wired to the wheel. One revolution would have pulled the pin and released the spoon.”

  “Where was it?” Dowling asked.

  “This one was under the front seat,” R.C. said.

  “This one?” Dowling repeated.

  “I thought I saw something back by the gas tank. I’ll get a better light and check,” R.C. said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  IT TOOK ONLY two hours of worry and fear and the darker processes of the imagination to put Temple Dowling at Hackberry’s front door.

  “It’s a little late,” Hackberry said, a book in his hand.

  “I’ll tell you what I know, and you can do what you please with it. But you will not accuse me of being a murderer again.”

  “I didn’t say that. I said you profited from it.”

  “Same thing.”

  “Do you want to come in or get off my property?”

  Dowling sat in a chair by the front wall, away from the window, hands on the armrests like a man awaiting electrocution. He had showered and shaved and put on fresh clothes, but his face looked parboiled, his jaw disjointed, as though his mouth could not form the words he had to say. “I was a business partner with Josef Sholokoff,” he said.

  “In making and vending porn?”

  “In entertainment. I didn’t ask for details. It’s a two-hundred-billion-dollar industry.”

  “What is?”

  “Pornography. It’s big business.”

  “You just said . . . Never mind. What about weapons?”

  “I’m a defense contractor, but no, I don’t work with Sholokoff. He does things off the computer with agencies that want anonymity. He’s not the only one.”

  “Why does Sholokoff have it in for you?”

  “He stiffed me on a deal, and I initiated an IRS investigation into his taxes. That’s why he wants to get his hands on Noie Barnum. Josef will turn him over to Al Qaeda.”

  “What does he have to gain?”

  “I hired Barnum. I thought he was a brilliant young engineer with a great future in weapons design. If Josef can compromise our drone program, I’ll never get a defense contract again.”

  “You think Barnum would give military secrets to Islamic terrorists?”

  “Of course. He’s a pacifist and a flake or a bleeding heart, I don’t know which. You don’t think his kind want to flush this country down the drain? They want to feel good about themselves at somebody else’s expense. What do you know about Barnum, anyway?”

  Hackberry was sitting on the couch, half of his face lit by the reading lamp. He kept his expression blank, his eyes empty. “I don’t know anything about him.”

  “No, you’re hiding something,” Dowling said.

  “Like what?”

  “I’m not sure.” Dowling leaned forward. “You set me up.”

  “In what way?”

  “At the country club. My father always said your best pitch was a slider. Son of a bitch. You took me good, didn’t you?”

  Hackberry shook his head. “You’ve lost me, Mr. Dowling.”

>   “The grenade under my vehicle, the laser dot on my clothes. I must be the dumbest white person I ever met.” Dowling waited. “You just gonna sit there and not say anything?”

  Through the front window, Hackberry could see the hills and the stars and the arid coarseness of the land and the wispy intangibility of the trees in the arroyos and the glow of the town in the clouds. For what purpose had a divine hand or the long evolutionary patterns of ancient seas and volcanic eruption and the gradual wearing away of sedimentary rock created this strange and special place on the earth? Was it meant to be a magical playground for nomadic Indians who camped on its streams and viewed its buttes and mesas as altars on which they stood and stared at the western sun until they were almost blind? Or a blood-soaked expanse where colonials and their descendants had slain one another for four hundred years, where narco-armies waited on the other side of the Rio Grande, armed with weapons shipped from the United States, the same country that provided the market for the weed and coke and skag that went north on a daily basis? As Hackberry stared out the window, he thought he heard the rattle of distant machine-gun fire, a tank with a busted tread trying to dislodge itself from a ditch, the boiling sound napalm made when it danced across a snowfield. What did soldiers call it now? Snake and nape? What was the language of the killing fields today?

  “You zoning out on me?” Dowling said.

  “No, not at all. I was thinking about you and what you represent.”

  “Yes?” Dowling said, lifting his hands inquisitively.

  “That’s all, I was just having an idle thought or two. Goodbye, Mr. Dowling. There’s no need for you to drop by again. I think your appointment in Samarra isn’t far down the track. But maybe I’m wrong.”

  “My appointment where?”

  NOIE BARNUM HAD experienced a recurrent dream for years that was more a memory than a dream. He would see himself as a boy again, hunting pheasants on his grandfather’s farm in eastern Colorado. Noie had no memory of his father, who had died when he was three, but he would never forget his grandfather or the love he’d had for him. His grandfather had been a giant of a man, and a jolly one at that, who dressed every day in pressed bib overalls and, even though he was a Quaker, wore a big square beard like many of his Mennonite neighbors. When Noie was eleven, his grandfather had taken him pheasant hunting in a field of wild oats. The plains rolled away as far as Noie could see, golden and gray and white in the sunshine, backdropped by an indigo sky and the misty blue snowcapped outline of the Rocky Mountains. He remembered telling his grandfather he never wanted to leave the farm and never wanted to go back to the little town where his half sister was not allowed to bring her female date to the high school prom.