Feast Day of Fools (Hackberry Holland 3)

“Who spat in your Cheerios this morning?”

“Stop and consider the image that conjures up. Why don’t you and Maydeen develop a small degree of sensitivity about the language you use? Just once, try a little professionalism.” He propped his broom against the wall, knocking it into the wood.

“My uncle said I put him in mind of a cow with the red scours downloading into a window fan,” she said.

Hackberry gave up. Through the window, he saw Cody Daniels rise from the steps and begin walking down the road toward the highway. Pam saw him, too, and seemed to lose her concentration. She stopped sweeping and blew out her breath. “Is there a shortcut to his place?” she asked.

“No, on foot it’s four miles, most of it uphill,” Hackberry replied.

“The sheriff in Jim Hogg told you Daniels was dirty on a clinic bombing back east?”

“He said Daniels was at least a cheerleader in the group. Maybe worse, who knows? He acts like he’s dirty, though. If I had to bet, I’d say he was a player.”

She propped her broom against the scrolled-iron candle rack and bit a piece of skin on her thumb. “Like you say, we treat everyone the same, right?”

“That’s the rule.”

“The guy stood up. It’s not right to pretend he didn’t.”

“I wouldn’t say he stood up completely, but he made an effort.”

“You mind? I’ll make him sit behind the grille.”

“No, I don’t mind at all,” Hackberry replied.

He watched Pam go out the front door and get in her cruiser and drive down the dirt road. She braked to a stop by Cody Daniels, rolling down her window and speaking to him over the sound of the engine. Daniels got in the backseat, ducking his head, like a man coming out of a storm into an unexpected safe harbor.

Go figure, Hackberry thought.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

HACKBERRY HAD NEVER considered himself prescient, but he had little doubt about who would be calling him that evening. As the sun set behind his house, he sat down in a spacious cushioned sway-backed straw chair on his back porch, his Stetson tilted down over his brow, his cordless phone and a glass of iced tea and his holstered .45 on the table beside him. He propped his feet up on another chair and sipped from his tea and crunched ice and mint leaves between his teeth and then dozed while waiting for the call that he knew he would receive, in the same way you know that a dishonorable man to whom you were unwisely courteous will eventually appear uninvited at your front door.

He could hear animals walking through the thickness of the scrub brush on the hillside and, in his half-waking state, see a palm tree on the crest framed against a thin red wafer of sun imprinted on the blue sky. For just a moment he felt himself slip into a dream about his father, the University of Texas history professor who had been a congressman and a friend of Franklin Roosevelt. In the dream there was nothing about President Roosevelt or his father’s political or teaching career or his father’s death, only the time when Hackberry and his father rode horses into the badlands down by the border to hunt for Indian arrowheads. It was 1943, and they had tied their horses outside a beer joint and café built of gray fieldstones that resembled bread loaves. The land dipped away into the distance as though all the sedimentary rock under the earth’s crust had collapsed and created a giant sandy bowl rimmed by mesas that were as red in the sunset as freshly excised molars.

The sun was finally subsumed by clouds that were low and thick and churning and the color of burnt pewter. In the cooling of the day and the pulsation of electricity in the clouds, dust devils began to swirl and wobble and break apart on top of the hardpan. For reasons he was too young to understand, Hackberry was frightened by the drop in barometric pressure and the great shadow that seemed to darken the land, as though a shade were being drawn across it by an invisible hand.

His father had gone inside the café to buy two bottles of cream soda. When he came back out and handed Hack one, the ice sliding down the neck, he saw the expression on his son’s face and said, still hanging on to the bottle, “Something happen out here, son?”

“The land, it looks strange. It makes me feel strange,” Hackberry said.

“In what way?”

“Like everything has died. Like the sun has gone away forever, like we’re the only two people left on earth.”

“Psychiatrists call that a world-destruction fantasy. But the earth will always be here. Hundreds of millions of years ago, out in that great vastness, there was an ocean where fish as big as boxcars swam. Now it’s a desert, but maybe one day it will be an ocean again. Did you know there were probably whales that swam out there?”

“No, sir.”

“It’s true. Mythic creatures, too. See those pale horizontal lines in the mesas? That’s where the edge of the sea was. You see those flat rocks up a little bit higher? That’s where the mermaids used to sun themselves.”

“Mermaids in Texas?”

“One hundred million years ago, you bet.”

“How do you know that, Daddy?”