Feast Day of Fools (Hackberry Holland 3)

“Why should I care what you do?”

“I just thought I’d say.”

“Your name was in the newspaper. You saw a man tortured to death. He was a corrupt Mexican cop. The man who killed him was named Krill. I aim to find him.”

Danny Boy lowered his eyes. “Did you hear me?”

“I don’t know where he’s at.”

“Are you afraid of him?”

Danny Boy felt his fingers curl up and touch the heels of his hands. His mouth and throat went dry, and he could feel a stone drop in his chest and settle in the bottom of his stomach.

“Cat got your tongue?” the visitor said.

“I hid in a ravine while he killed that fellow.”

Danny Boy pulled the sleeve of his denim jacket up on one arm, then forgot what he was doing and stared emptily at his visitor. There were lumps on the visitor’s face, as though insects had fed on it.

“Is that why you’re a drunk, or were you a drunk before you hid in the ravine?”

“I don’t make no claims about myself. I am what I am.”

“So what are you?”

“What you’re looking at, I reckon.”

“A drunk Indian?”

Danny Boy felt a pain in one temple; it ran down through his eye like an electric current, obscuring his vision, as though a cataract had suddenly formed on the lens. “This is my place. Everything you see here, it’s mine. It’s where I grew up.”

“What’s that mean?”

Danny Boy couldn’t formulate an adequate answer to the question, but he tried. “My daddy drilled a deep-water well with an old Ford engine and grew corn and squash and melons. We sold them at the farmers’ market every Saturday. We’d go to the picture show in the afternoon and sneak in our own popcorn and Kool-Aid in a quart jar. My mother was alive back then. We all went into town together in our truck, with us kids sitting on the flatbed.”

“If there’s some kind of allegorical meaning, it eludes me.”

“You ain’t welcome here.”

“I want the man named Krill. Most of the illegals in this county come through your land or the Asian woman’s. So get used to me being around. Krill hurt a friend of mine. His name is Noie Barnum.”

“The guy named Krill ain’t your problem.”

“Explain that to me.”

Danny Boy reached for his bottle of Corona, but the visitor pulled it from his hand. “You shouldn’t drink any more,” the visitor said.

“Look out yonder.”

“At what?”

“Them.”

The visitor turned and gazed down the slope at the scrub brush and yuccas and mesquite trees rustling in the breeze. Then he stared at the mauve tint in the darkness of the sky and at the silhouettes of the mesas and hills and at the stars disappearing into the false dawn. “You see turtles out there?” the visitor said.

“No, I see the women and girls who been following you.”

“What’d you say?”