Feast Day of Fools - James Lee Burke [100]
That was how R.C. had woken under the ground, with the vague sense that something was wrong with his arms and legs, that he had heard a sifting sound of dirt and gravel sliding off a shovel blade, followed by a thump of stones being dropped heavily on top of him. His eyes were unable to see, his throat raw, as though he had not had water in days. When he tried to raise his head, he realized he was not only impaled by the earth but locked solidly inside it, the air that he breathed coming to him through a tube that smelled of rubber and canvas. The level of panic that occurred in him was like a violent electric surge throughout his body, except the electricity had no place to go.
The inside of the mask was soggy and foul with his sweat and his own breath, and no light at all came through the plastic eyepieces. He stretched out his fingers and for just a moment thought he might be able to work his hands through the dirt toward the surface an inch at a time. Then he discovered that by straightening his hands, he had allowed the overburden of the grave to press down on him more firmly, like an octopus tightening its tentacles on its prey.
Who were the fools who constantly taught about man’s harmony with the earth? he asked himself. An uncle who had once worked in a Kentucky coal mine had told R.C. that the earth was not man’s friend, that it was unnatural to enter the ground before one’s time, and that if a man listened carefully, he would hear the earth creak in warning to those who thought they could tunnel through its substructure without consequence.
He could feel his fear going out of control and his breath beginning to rasp inside the mask, the weight of the earth and stones like knives around his heart. He tried to turn his thoughts into wings that could lift his soul above the ground and allow him to revisit scenes and moments he had associated with the best parts of his life: floating down the Comal River on a burning July afternoon, his wrists trailing in water that was ice-cold, the soap-rock bottom gray and smooth and pooled with shadows from the overhang of the cottonwood trees; dancing with a Mexican girl in a beer garden in Monterrey where Indians sold ears of corn they roasted on charcoal braziers, backdropped by mountains that were hazy and magenta-colored against the sunset; throwing a slider on the edge of the plate for the third strike and third out in the bottom of the ninth at a state championship game in San Marcos, the grass of the diamond iridescent under the electric lights, the evening breeze cool on his skin, a high school girl waiting for him by the bleacher seats, her hands balled into fists as she jumped up and down with love and pride at the perfect game he had just pitched.
His fondest memory was of his twelfth birthday, when his widowed mother took him on the Greyhound all the way from Del Rio to the state fair in Dallas. That evening he stared in awe at the strings of colored lights of the Ferris wheel and the Kamikaze printed against a blue sky puffed with pink clouds. High school kids screamed inside the grinding roar of the Tilt-A-Whirl and the Super Loops, and the air was filled with music from the carousel and the popping of balloons and target guns on the fairways. He could smell the aerial fireworks spidering in a purple and pink froth above the rodeo grounds, and the caramel corn and fry bread and candied apples and tater pigs in the food concessions. His mother bought cotton candy for him and watched him ride the mechanical bull, holding the cotton candy in her hand, smiling even though she was exhausted from the long day on the bus, her wash-faded dress hanging as limp as a flag on her thin body.
R.C. tried to fix the fairground in his