Feast Day of Fools (Hackberry Holland 3)

“I hope you’ll accept this in the right spirit, Reverend. If you ever sass one of my deputies or speak disrespectfully of Chief Deputy Tibbs again, I’m going to hunt around in that pile of scrap wood behind the jail until I find a long two-by-four, one with sixteen-penny nails sticking out of it, then I’m going to kick it so far up your ass you’ll be spitting splinters. Get the picture? Have a nice day. And stay the hell out of my sight.”

ANTON LING HEARD the man in the yard before she saw him. He had released the chain on the windmill and cupped water out of the spout, drinking it from his hand, while the blades spun and clattered above his head. He was gaunt and wore a short-sleeve shirt with no buttons; his hair hung on his shoulders and looked like it had been barbered with a knife.

“¿Qué quieres?” she said.

“Comida,” the man replied.

He was wearing tennis shoes. In the moonlight she could see his ribs stenciled against his sides, his trousers flattening in the wind against his legs. She stepped out on the back porch. The shadows of the windmill’s blades were spinning on his face. “You didn’t come out of Mexico,” she said.

“How do you know?” he replied in English.

“The patrols are out. They would have stopped you if you came out of the south.”

“I hid in the hills during the day. I have no food.”

“What is your name?”

“Antonio.”

“You are a worker?”

“Only for myself. I am a hunter. Will you feed me?”

She went into her kitchen and put a wedge of cheese and three tortillas on a paper plate, then covered them with chili and beans that she ladled out of a pot that was still warm on the stove. When she went back outside, the visitor was squatted in the middle of the dirt lot, staring at the moon and the lines of cedar posts with no wire. He took the paper plate from her hand and ignored the plastic spoon and instead removed a metal spoon from his back pocket and began eating. A knife in a long thin scabbard protruded at an angle from his belt. “You are very kind, señora.”

“Where did you learn English?”

“My father was a British sailor.”

“What do you hunt, Antonio?”

“In this case, a man.”

“Has this man harmed you?”

“No, he has done nothing to me.”

“Then why do you hunt him?”

“He’s a valuable man, and I am poor.”

“You’ll not find him here.”

He stopped eating and pointed at the side of his head with his spoon. “You’re very intelligent. People say you have supernatural gifts. But maybe they just don’t understand that you are simply much more intelligent than they are.”

“The man you are looking for was here, but he’s gone now. He will not be back. You must leave

him alone.”

“Your property is a puzzle. It has fences all over it, but they hold nothing in and nothing out.”

“This was a great cattle ranch at one time.”

“Now it is a place where the wind lives, one that has no beginning and no end. It’s a place like you, china. You come from the other side of the earth to do work no one understands. You don’t have national frontiers.”

“Don’t speak familiarly of people you know nothing about.”

The man who called himself Antonio lifted the paper plate and pushed the beans and chili and cheese and pieces of tortilla into his mouth. He dropped the empty plate in the dirt and wiped his lips and chin on a bandanna and stood up and washed his spoon in the horse tank and slipped it into his back pocket. “They say you can do the same things a priest can, except you have more power.”