Feast Day of Fools (Hackberry Holland 3)

“I didn’t mean to embarrass you in front of Riser.”

“You didn’t.”

She looked out the window again. “We’re off the clock now. Can I ask you a question?”

No, that’s not a good idea, he thought.

“Hack?” she said, waiting for his response.

“Go ahead.” In his mind’s eye, he saw the motel room in the crossroads settlement north of the Big Bend; he even felt the primal need that had caused him to break all his resolutions about involvement with a woman who was far too young for him and perhaps interested only because he had become a paternal figure in her life.

“Do you think about it?” she asked. “At all?”

“Of course.”

“With regret?”

He took his hat off the rack, glancing into the outer offices. “No, but I have to remind myself that an old man is an old man. A young woman deserves better, no matter how good her heart is.”

“Why is it that I don’t get to make the decision, that you have to make it for me?” she asked.

Because you’re looking for your father, he thought.

“Answer me,” she said.

“I’m still your administrative supervisor. You have to remember that. It’s not up for debate. This conversation is over.”

“I’ve seen your wife’s picture.”

He felt a tic close to his eye. “What are you trying to tell me?”

“The Asian woman. She looks like her, that’s all.”

“I think I’d better head for the house.”

He started to put on his hat, although he never did so unless he was going out a door. She stepped close to him, her thumbs hooked in the sides of her belt. He could smell her hair, a hint of her perfume, the heat in her skin. There was a glaze on her eyes. “What’s wrong, Pam?” he asked.

“Nothing.”

“Tell me.”

“Nothing. Like you say, you’d better go to your house. It’s the kind of evening when most people want to celebrate the sunset, have dinner, dance, hear music. But you’d better go to your house.”

“That’s just the way it is,” he replied. Then he remembered those were the words Ethan Riser had used to defend behavior that Hackberry considered morally indefensible. As he walked away, he heard her draw in a deep breath. He kept his eyes straight ahead so he did not have to look at her face and feel the hole in his heart.

HACKBERRY SELDOM SLEPT well and never liked the coming of darkness, although he spent many hours sitting alone inside of it. Sometimes he fell asleep in his den, his head on his chest, and awoke at two or three in the morning, feeling he had achieved a victory by getting half the night behind him. Sometimes he believed he saw the red digital face on his desk clock through his eyelids. But quickly, the haze inside his head became the dust on a road north of Pyongyang and a molten sun that hung above hills that resembled women’s breasts.

Sometimes as he dozed in the black leather swivel chair at his desk, he heard an airplane or a helicopter fly low overhead, the reverberations of the motors shaking his roof. But he did not identify the sound of the aircraft with a law enforcement agency patrolling the border or a local rancher approaching a private airstrip. Instead, Hackberry saw a lone American F-80 chasing a MiG across the Yalu River, then turning in a wide arc just as the MiG streaked into the safety of Chinese airspace. The American pilot did an aileron roll over the POW camp, signaling the GIs inside the wire that they were not forgotten.

When Hackberry slept in his bed, he kept his holstered blue-black white-handled custom-made .45 revolver on his nightstand. When he dozed in his office, he kept the revolver on top of his desk, the handles sometimes glowing in the moonlight like white fire. It was a foolish way to be, he used to tell himself, the mark of either a paranoid or someone who had never addressed his fears. Then he read that Audie Murphy, for the last two decades of his life, had slept every night with a .45 auto under his pillow, in a bed he had to move into the garage because his wife could not sleep with him.

Sometimes Hackberry heard the wind in the trees or the clattering of rocks when deer came down the arroyo on their way to his horse tanks. Sometimes he thought he heard a messianic homeless man by the name of Preacher Jack Collins knocking through the underbrush and the deadfalls, a mass killer who had eluded capture by both Hackberry and the FBI.

Hackberry tried to convince himself that Collins was dead, his body long ago eaten by coyotes or lost inside the bowels of the earth. Regardless, Hackberry told himself, Collins belonged in the past or the place in the collective unconscious where most demons had their origins. If evil was actually a separate and self-sustaining entity, he thought, its manifestation was in the nationalistic wars that not only produced the greatest suffering but always became lionized as patriotic events.

At 2:41 Saturday morning, his head jerked up from his chest. Outside, he heard a heavy rock bounce down the arroyo, the breaking of a branch, a whisper of voices, then the sound of feet moving along the base of the hill. He unsnapped the strap on his revolver and got up from his desk and went to the back door.

A dozen or more people were following his fence line toward his north pasture. One woman was carrying a suitcase and clutching an infant against her shoulder. The men were all short and wore baseball caps and multiple shirts and, in the moonlight, had the snubbed profiles of figures on Mayan sculptures. So these were the people who had been made into the new enemy, Hackberry thought. Campesinos who sometimes had to drink one another’s urine to survive the desert. They were hungry, frightened, in total thrall to the coyotes who led them across, their only immediate goal a place where they could light a fire and cook their food without being seen. But as John Steinbeck had said long ago, we had come to fear a man with a hole in his shoe.