Feast Day of Fools - James Lee Burke [129]
“This is one bunch that needs to get closed down in a hurry,” Caleb said. He opened his badge holder and held it up in front of him so the sun would reflect off it. But the bikers either ignored his attempt to identify himself or were so committed to recontouring the area that they never saw him at all.
Just as Caleb took out his cell phone, the bikers were gone, as quickly as they had arrived, disappearing over a rise, their bandannas flapping, the roar of their exhausts echoing off a butte where piñon trees grew in the rocks.
“I’ll make a deal with you,” Caleb said.
“What might that be?” Ethan said. The armpits of his long-sleeve blue shirt were looped with sweat, his khaki pants hanging low on his stomach, his eyes squinting in the glare, even though he was wearing a bill cap. In spite of the semiautomatic on his hip, he looked like an old man who would not concede that disease had already taken him into a country from which no amount of pretense would ever allow him to return.
“We’ll go one more mile, up into the shady spot,” Caleb said. “We can sit by a little creek there. The Indians carved turkey tracks on some of the rocks thereabouts. They always point due north and south. That’s how they marked their route, using the stars, never one degree off. You can set a compass on them. It’s just a real fine place to cool our heels.”
“Then what do we do?”
“We go back. It ain’t up for grabs, either,” Caleb said.
“I’ll sit down with you a minute, but then I’m going on.”
“Sometimes we have to accept realities, Ethan.”
“That I’m worn out and can’t make it?”
Caleb looked at the mottled discoloration in his friend’s face. “I don’t think Jack Collins is out here. If he is, we’ll hear about it and come back and nail his hide to a cottonwood. In the meantime, it’s not reasonable to wander around under a white sun.”
“I spent seven months in a bamboo cage. The man next to me had a broken back and was in there longer than I was,” Ethan said.
“In Vietnam?”
“Who cares where it was?” Ethan said.
In the distance, they heard the sound of a solitary dirt bike, the engine screaming as though the back tire had lost traction and the RPMs had revved off the scale. Then there was silence.
“Collins is here,” Ethan said.
“How do you know?”
Ethan looked to the north, where turkey buzzards were turning in a wide circle against a cloudless blue sky. “Know what death smells like?”
“Yeah, like some dead critter up there. Don’t let your imagination start feeding on loco weed.”
“Do you smell anything?”
“No, I don’t.”
“I can. It’s Collins. It’s Collins who smells like death. He’s here. When you’ve got death in you, you can smell it on others.”
JACK DID NOT like what he was watching. Where did this bunch get off, invading a place that was his, one that could have been sawed loose from the edges of Canaan and glued onto the southwestern rim of the United States? Why was the government worried about working-class people crossing the border when a bunch like this were given licenses and machines to destroy public lands? Jack knelt on a sandstone ledge, the butt of his Thompson resting by his knee, the drum magazine packed with fifty .45 rounds, the clean steel surfaces of his weapon smelling slightly of the oilcloth he had used to wipe down and polish it last night. He longed to raise the stock to his shoulder and lead the bikers with iron sights and squeeze off three or four short bursts and blow them into a tangle of machines and spinning tires and disjointed faces, not unlike the images in the Picasso painting depicting the fascist bombing of Guernica.
One of the bikers, as though he had read Jack’s thoughts, veered away from his companions and roared up the hillside toward Jack’s position, his goggles clamped like a tanker’s on his face, one