Feast Day of Fools (Hackberry Holland 3)

“You’re wanted for a capital crime,” Hackberry said.

“I know. But that has nothing to do with us. This is Mexico,” Krill said. “It is a place where everything is crazy. I told that to La Magdalena when I cut her down from the beam in the cellar. I told her she smelled like seawater. I told her she was probably a Chinese mermaid and didn’t know it. She thought that was very funny.”

“Say that again?” Hackberry asked.

“I’m very tired. We must go on,” Krill said.

That was what they did. On and on, through rocks and brambles and thorns and deadfalls and cactus and dry washes and tree branches that lashed back into their faces and cut their skin like whips. The sky was as black as oil smoke, the explosions of lightning deafening inside the canyons. But when the four of them ascended a trail that led to a bare knoll, a peculiar event happened. They found themselves in front of two telegraph poles that had no wires attached to the crosspieces; to the west of the knoll was an infinite plain that seemed to extend beyond the edge of the storm into a band of blue sky on the earth’s rim. The wind was bitter and filled with grit, the telegraph poles trembling in the holes where they were sunk, a twisted piece of metal roof bouncing and clanging across the knoll’s surface. Krill stood at the top of the knoll, his arms hanging over the rifle and shotgun stretched across his shoulders.

“It’s stopped raining,” he said. “Look, you can see it blowing like crystal behind us and out on the plain and down in the canyon, but here there is no rain. Qué bueno. I think I will stay right here.”

“Come with us,” Anton said.

“No, this is my place. I am content here,” he replied. “Good-bye to you, Chinese mermaid. And thank you, Sheriff Holland and Señorita Pam. All of you are very nice.”

So this is how it ends, Hackberry thought. A man under a capital sentence stands impaled in a grandiose fashion against a blackened sky, ignoring the fact that he has become a human lightning rod, while two women and another man gaze up at him, all of them stenciled like figures on a triptych, all of them caught in roles they did not choose for themselves.

Maybe the mermaids have not made it to Texas yet, but give them time, and in the meanwhile blessed be God for all dappled things, wherever they occur, Hackberry said to himself, his eyes fixed on the band of blue light in the west.