Feast Day of Fools - James Lee Burke [106]
Was it worth it? The great irony was that no one cared enough to even ask the question. The dates, the battles, the strafing of civilian refugees by American F-80s, the misery of the Chosin Reservoir, the red-hot thirty-caliber barrels they unscrewed with their bare hands, leaving their flesh on the steel, the systematic cruelty inside the gulag of prison camps in the north, Hackberry’s time in a place called Pak’s Palace, which had been housed in an abandoned brick factory where the North Koreans refined a method of torture known as Pak’s Swing, all these things were smudged entries in a tragedy that had become little more than an inconvenient memory. But the participants never forgot the details of their experience, and like the Wandering Jew, they were condemned to remain their own history books, each containing a story they could not pass on to others and from which no one would learn anything of value.
Hackberry could see himself in R.C., walking down the flume of an ancient riverbed, staring back into the Jeep’s headlights, his mouth cut with a grin, the soft white baked clay cracking under his weight. Youth was its own anodyne, Hackberry thought. For R.C., the world was still a fine place, his faith in his fellow man renewed by the arrival of his friends, his life unfolding before him as though it had been charted with the same divine hand that had placed our progenitors in an Edenic paradise. For just a second, Hackberry wanted to take all the experience out of his own life and give it to R.C. and pray that he would do better with it than Hackberry had.
He rolled down the passenger window. “Miss your turnoff to San Antone?” he said.
“I knew y’all would be along,” R.C. said, grinning broadly, getting in the back. “What kept you? I was starting to get a little antsy.”
“Bad traffic jam. What kept us? What the hell happened out here?” Hackberry said.
“This half-breed Negrito buried me after he almost took my head off with a shovel, that’s what happened. Then Jack Collins and two Mexicans dug me up.”
Pam put her foot on the brake. “Collins is down here?”
“He was.”
“Where?” she asked.
“Him and the two Mexicans walked over a rise and just went poof, gone, just like that.”
“Did they have a car?” Hackberry said.
“I didn’t hear one. But the wind was blowing out of the north. Maybe I just didn’t hear them start it up.”
“What did Collins say to you?” Hackberry said.
“He said I had a choice. I could play Russian roulette or he’d pop me. When I told him I wouldn’t do it, he gave me directions to the highway. I cain’t figure it out. Maybe everything people say about him ain’t altogether true.”
“Don’t fool yourself,” Hackberry said.
“So why’d he cut me loose?”
“He told you to tell me something, didn’t he?”
“He’s got you on his mind, that’s for sure, but he didn’t send no message. No, sir.”
Hackberry looked straight ahead at the countryside and at the stars that were going out of the sky.
“Did I miss something back there?” R.C. asked.
Collins wants me in his debt, Hackberry thought. But that was not what he said. “You did just fine, R.C. Who cares what goes on in the head of a madman?”
“I do. He’s a scary guy.”
“He is. He kills people.”
“No, in a different way. His breath. It smells like gas. His skin, too. It doesn’t smell like sweat. He doesn’t smell human.”
The Mexicans say he walks through walls, Hackberry thought.
“Sir?”
“There’s a town not far away. You hungry?”
“A twenty-ounce steak and five pounds of fries and a gallon of ice cream would probably get me through till breakfast,” R.C. replied.
“You got it, bub,” Hackberry said.
BY DAWN HACKBERRY was back home. He called Ethan Riser’s cell phone and left a message, then slept four hours and showered and called Riser again. This time Riser answered. “I need you here, partner,” Hackberry said.
“I got your message about Collins. We’ve contacted all the authorities in Coahuila.”
“That’s like telling me you just masturbated.”
“Why do you go out of your way to be offensive?”
“Anton Ling told me she was involved in an arms-for-dope