Feast Day of Fools - James Lee Burke [176]
“The woman’s truck is by the barn, but there is no one moving in the house, and no electric light is turned on. But look through the window of the chapel. The candles are burning in front of the Virgin’s statue.”
“Of course. She burns candles all the time. That’s what people like her do. They burn candles. The rest of us work and sweat and sometimes take bullets, but they burn candles.”
“No, this one has been to war, Negrito. She is not one to go off somewhere or take a nap while an open flame burns in her house.”
“You make a complexity of everything,” Negrito said. “You are a man who cannot bear to have a quiet and simple thought. You constantly construct spiderwebs so you can walk through them.”
“Look on the far side of the fence, beyond the barn, where the grass is tall.”
“It’s grass. So what is the great mystery about grass?”
“There is a channel through it. The wind is not making the channel. Somebody walked through there.”
“Animals did. Deer or horses. They cross the field by walking on it. It took you a long time to figure that out?”
“No horses are in that field. And deer do not make paths on flat land, only on hillsides, where their feet have to find the same spot every day.”
“See what I mean? A simple visit to the home of this pretender sacerdote becomes a torture of the brain.”
“The back door is ajar, Negrito. There is something wrong in that house. You stay here and guard my back. You keep the rifle, but do not use it unless absolutely necessary. If everything is normal, I will come to the door and wave to you with my right hand, not my left.”
“Claro, man. My head is starting to hurt again with all your cautions. I cannot stand this. We were never afraid before. I told you from the beginning, this woman who wears men’s trousers was bad luck. But your obsession has no bounds.”
“Then leave. Go to Durango. Bathe in the diseased fluids of your whores,” Krill said.
Negrito was breathing heavily, the whiskers around his mouth as thick as a badger’s. His pupils were no bigger than pinheads, the skin around his eyes wrinkled and flecked with scales. “You make me want to do something that’s very bad.”
“You want to be me, Negrito, to leave your own body and live inside mine. And because you are a killer by nature, you believe a bullet can give you my heart and brain.”
“I am a loyal servant and follower and brother, not an assassin. I want you to be you and the leader you used to be, Krill, not a self-hating fool ruminating on his sins.”
“If I wave with my left hand from the door, rather than my right, what message will I be sending you?”
“I see only one message in any of this: that of a man being led with a ring through his nose by the Chinese puta.”
“You are brave in ways that few men are, Negrito. But do not try to think anymore. For some men, thinking is a dangerous vanity. You must accept that about yourself.”
Krill stood and walked toward the back entrance of the house, a holstered .357 Magnum hanging from the right side of his web belt, his skinning knife in a scabbard on his left. He stepped up on the back porch and listened, then felt a breeze on the back of his neck and heard the windmill come to life and water running into the horse tank. But where were the horses? Or the illegals who came almost every evening for food or benediction at the house of La Magdalena?
He paused at the back door and listened again. The windmill was stenciled against the black and gray patterns in the sky, and tumbleweed was bouncing through the yard, hanging in the fences, skipping by the junked car where Negrito was crouched with the M16. Krill pushed open the door and stepped inside.
Through the hallway, he could see her sitting very still in a straight-back chair, her hands resting on her knees, her hair tied in a bun. In the gloom, he could hardly make out her features. Her face was so still that in profile, it looked like it had been painted on the air. He eased his .357 from its holster