Feast Day of Fools (Hackberry Holland 3)

“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.”

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; “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.”