Feast Day of Fools (Hackberry Holland 3)

“Folks like me and you and your mother and sister. We’re the descendants of John Brown. We have no home in this world except the one we create inside us.”

Just then two pheasants had burst from the stubble, rising fat and magnificent and thickly feathered and multicolored into the air, their wings whirring, their strength and aerial agility like a denial of their size and the laws of gravity.

“Shoot, little fellow! They’re yours!” his grandfather had said.

When Noie let off the twelve-gauge, the recoil almost knocked him down. Unbelievably, the pattern hit both birds; they seemed to become broken in midair, dysfunctional, their wings crumpling, their necks flopping, their feet trying to hook the air as they tumbled into the stubble.

That night Noie had cried, then the sun rose in the morning as though he had wakened from a bad dream, and for years he did not think about the birds he had killed.

But after 9/11, the dream came back in a mutated form, one in which he no longer saw himself or his grandfather. Instead, he saw curds of yellow smoke angling at forty degrees across an autumnal blue sky and two giant birds on a window ledge entwining their broken wings and then plunging into a concrete canyon where fire trucks swarmed far below.

Noie woke from the dream, raising his head off his chest, unsure where he was, staring down the long dirt road that led to an unpainted gingerbread house.

“Who’s Amelia?” Jack asked.

“My half sister. I must have dozed off. Where are we?” Noie said.

“Right up from the Chinese woman’s place. Does your sister live in Alabama?”

“No, she died nine years ago.”

“Sorry to hear that. I was an only child. It must warp something inside you to see your sibling taken in an untimely way.”

“I don’t like to talk about it.”

“That’s the way I figure it. We all get to the same barn. Why study on it?” When Noie didn’t reply, Jack said, “You scared of it?”

“Of what?”

“Dying.”

“There are worse things.”

“Cite one.”

“Letting evil men harm the innocent. Not doing the right thing when honor is at stake. Why are we parked here?”

“Since we’re wanted all over the state of Texas, I thought it might be a good idea to wait until it was dark before we drove into the yard of somebody who knows us.”

“I don’t think this is smart, Jack.”

“Many a man has tried to put me in jail, but I’ve yet to spend my first day there.”

Jack got out of the car and unlocked the trunk and came back with a suitcase that he set on the hood.

“What are you doing?” Noie asked.

“Changing clothes.”

“On a dirt road in the dark?”

Jack began stripping off his soiled white shirt and unbuckling his trousers and slipping his feet from his battered cowboy boots, not replying, intent upon the project at hand, whatever it was. His chest and shoulders and arms and legs were white in the moonlight, and scars were crosshatched on his back from his ribs to his shoulder blades. He buttoned on a soft white shirt and pulled on a pair of tan slacks and slipped a pair of two-tone shoes on his feet, then unfolded a western-cut sport coat from the suitcase and pushed his arms into the sleeves. He sailed his wilted panama hat up an arroyo and knotted on a tie with a rearing horse painted on it and fitted a blocked short-brim Stetson on his head. He turned toward Noie for approval. “You know the mark of a man? It’s his hat and his shoes,” he said.

“You look like the best-dressed man of 1945,” Noie said. “But what in God’s name is on your mind, Jack?”

“Options.”

“Can you translate that?”