Feast Day of Fools - James Lee Burke [175]
“You have a daughter?”
“No.”
“I thought that’s what you were gonna tell me.”
“Why?”
“Most of the time they say I remind them of their daughter. They can’t do enough for you.”
“Who?”
“The kind of guys who like to grope young girls in the back of the church bus,” she replied, picking up her purse. “Think I’m kidding? Ask yourself why any middle-aged man wants to make a career out of being a youth minister or a park director or a guy who teaches leather craft to rug rats. Because he likes the way the restroom smells after little kids have pissed all over the bowl? Give me a break.”
“How old are you?”
“Buy me a veggie burger and I’ll tell you. Let’s go, I won’t bite,” she said, squeezing his arm.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
KRILL HAD PARKED the car in a grove of dead fruit trees no more than fifty yards behind the house of the woman Negrito kept referring to as la china. After the setting of the sun, the wind had dropped, and the sky had turned as stark as an ink wash. The gingerbread house and trees and windmill and barn and horse tank, even the hills, seemed drained of color and movement of any kind. The horses and chickens were gone from the yard, and there was no birdsong in the trees. The only sound Krill could hear as he and Negrito approached the house was water ticking from a rusted pipe that extended over the surface of the horse tank. A nimbus of dust hung above the house like a great cloud of gnats.
Krill stopped and knelt on one knee behind a car that had no wheels or glass in the windows and whose metal was still hot from baking in the sun all day. He stared at the house and the absence of electric lights or movement inside. Negrito knelt beside him, the leather cord of his hat swinging under his chin, the heavy gray fog of his odor puffing out of his clothes. “Krill, you got to tell me,” he said.
“Tell you what?”
“Why we are here. I don’t see no percentage, man.”
“There isn’t one. Not for you, anyway, my old friend.”
“The others have deserted you, but still you talk down to me like I’m the enemy and not the maricones who ran away.”
Krill placed his hand on Negrito’s shoulder, which felt like a flannel sack filled with rocks. “Like me, you are a killer. But killing is not a problem for you. You sleep without dreaming and rise each morning into a new day. But I relive all the times I watched the light go out of my victims’ eyes. My thoughts have become my enemies.”
“That’s why there are whores and tequila in Durango. A trip there will ease your problems, jefe.”
“I have to talk to La Magdalena.”
“You want to sleep with her? That’s what’s going on? You think there’s something special about a Chinese woman in bed? They ain’t no different from our women. You love them at night, and in the morning they make your life awful.”
“Poor Negrito. Why do you always think with the head of your penis?”
“’Cause it ain’t never let me down, man,” said Negrito, and cupped his hand on Krill’s shoulder. “Come on, tell me the truth. Why you got to talk to this woman if you ain’t looking to poke her?”
“To confess my sins, hombre. To rid myself of the faces I see in my sleep.”
“It ain’t a sin to kill people in a war. We were farmers and cattle workers until the war came. The people we killed had it coming. What is the big loss when a Communist is killed?”
“My children died because of me.”
“That don’t make no sense, Krill.”
“I used to blame the army and the Americans and those from Argentina who first gave us our guns. But I took the pay of corrupt political men and did what they told me. I killed the Jesuit and the leftists. You know these things are true, Negrito, because you were there. The helicopter machine-gunned the clinic, but I was their brother in arms. I helped bring a curse on our land.”
“No, your head is screwed up, Krill. That woman ain’t no priest. Whatever you confess to her, she’s gonna tell the cops. Then they’re gonna hunt us down. They don’t want nobody to know what we done down there.”
“There’s something strange going on in that house,” Krill said.
“What