Feast Day of Fools (Hackberry Holland 3)

“I make twenty-six thousand dollars a year. I break up domestic fights and run in drunks and wets and nickel-and-dime meth mules.”

“So?”

“Your friends won’t pay money for me.”

“You want me to shoot you, man?” Negrito raised the .45 and pointed it at R.C. and playfully sighted down the barrel. “Ever see one of these hit a kneecap? Or a guy’s foot? I use hollow-points.”

R.C. swallowed. Each time the gun’s muzzle swung across his person, his colon constricted and his entrails turned to water.

“I’m gonna shoot you in a place that hurts like a son of a bitch, man,” Negrito said. “Then you’re going in the ground with all that pain while you try to breathe through the gas mask. Why you want to do that to yourself?”

R.C.’s head was spinning, bile rising from his stomach, his fear so great and his anger at himself and his despair so intense that he could feel himself walking through a door into a place where nothing mattered anymore. “I just remembered what you look like. I couldn’t think of it. But it’s real clear in my head now,” he said, breathing hard through his mouth.

“Why you always got to talk, man? You are like a woman, always talking, filling the air with sounds that grate on the ear.”

“I couldn’t remember what you remind me of. At the cantina I was thinking about it, but I couldn’t get it straight in my head because I drank too much.”

“What I remind you of?”

“An orange Brillo pad. Those steel-wool pads women use to clean grease and fish skins and fried crud out of skillets. After a while, the pads turn orange and blue with soap and rust and all the glop that’s glommed up inside them.”

“That’s what I look like?”

“Yes, sir, I’d call it a match.”

“Be quiet,” Negrito said, rising to his feet.

“Like my mother says, looks is only skin deep.”

“Silencio, foolish boy who does not hear or listen.”

R.C. realized his tormentor was not interested in deflecting insults and that he had heard something out in the darkness. Negrito walked up the incline, away from the dry wash and the row of graves and the greasewood and the stunted willows along the bank and the tortoise-shaped sandstone boulders that were weathered through with holes the length of a man’s arm. “Is that you out there, Mr. Crazy Man?” he said. “You want to fight Negrito? Come down and fight. I don’t fear you.”

R.C. watched, stupefied.

“The gringos fear you! But I don’t! ¡Me cago en la puta de tu madre! I take a shit in your mother’s womb. How you like that?” Negrito said.

“Who you talking to?”

Negrito said nothing in answer to R.C. He was standing on a slab of stone that was tilted upward on the slope, one pointy cowboy boot stationed in front of the other, his shoulders humped, his .45 hanging from his right hand. In profile, his right eye seemed to watch both the hillside and R.C. simultaneously, the way a shark’s eye views everything in its ken, both enemy and prey, revealing no more emotionality than a flat coat button.

“Hey, sacerdote of the garbage dump and eater of your own feces! You think we treated your little Quaker friend bad?” he called out. “What if I bring you down here and make you suck my dick? I can do that to you, man, with great pleasure.”

There was no reply from the hillside, and R.C. could see no movement among the shadows and mesquite and rocks and the dead juniper trees that looked like gnarled and polished bone. Negrito continued to stare into the darkness, his nostrils swelling, his profile as snubbed as a piranha’s. He squeezed his scrotum with his left hand. “Come take it, cabrón!” he yelled.

The moon broke from behind a cloud and turned the hillside gray, the scrub brush pooling with shadows. “No? You prefer shooting women and people who ain’t got no guns? You’re a sorry Christian, Mr. Preacher. A Christian without cojones.”

“You know Preacher Collins?” R.C. said.

“The crazy man up there ain’t gonna help you. So give that up,” Negrito replied, backing down the slope, his gaze still concentrated on the hillside. “He’s the hunter, the left hand of God. He don’t have interest in a boy like you.”

“But he’s interested in you?” R.C. said.

“Of course. He knows we’re brothers. Under our skin, we’re no different.”

“Brothers?”

“That’s right, Tejano boy. Preacher and I are both dead. Our souls died many years ago. What do you see in my eyes?”