Feast Day of Fools - James Lee Burke [188]
“Then why do you say chinga tu madre to each other at every opportunity?” Jack had said.
“I am not equipped to discuss abstractions with a man of your intelligence,” Eladio had said. “But my mother is eighty and still tells stories of her mother, who was a concubine of Pancho Villa and one of those who helped hide his severed head in the Van Horn Mountains. That is the level of respect we have for the women in our family.”
Jack had made a mental note about the level of stability in his employees.
At this particular moment, he was irritated with the weather, the clouds of black flies buzzing over a calf’s carcass in a nearby streambed, and the fact that the two cousins seemed incapable of doing anything right except killing people. The man who owned the airstrip and the hangar and the improvised café outside it had installed a jukebox just inside the hangar door, one loaded with gangsta-rap recordings that blasted through the speakers so loudly that the side of the tin hangar shook. Jack had told Eladio and Jaime to talk with the jukebox’s owner, but either the owner had ignored the warning or they had not bothered. So while he was trying to make notes in preparation for his conversation with the sheriff, his eardrums were being assailed by a level of electronic percussion that was like having a studded snow tire driven over his head.
Jack capped his pen, stuck it between the pages of his notebook, and went inside the hangar, where the owner was cleaning the concrete pad with a push broom. “Can I help you, señor?” he said.
Jack pointed to his ear, indicating he couldn’t hear.
“You got a problem with your ear?” the owner shouted.
Jack pulled the plug on the jukebox, cut the electric cord in two with his pocketknife, and set the plug on top of the casing. “No, I’m fine now. Thanks,” he said.
Then he sat down at his table under the canvas flap and drank a glass of seltzer and chewed on a lime slice, staring into space, each eye like a glass orb with a dead insect frozen inside it. He dialed his cell phone with his thumb and lifted the phone to his ear and waited, his body heat increasing inside his clothes, his pulse quickening. Why would his metabolism react to calling the sheriff? It could be anything, he told himself. Why dwell on it? Maybe it was because he had finally found a worthy opponent.
Or maybe it was something else.
What?
Don’t think about it, he told himself.
Why not? I’m supposed to be afraid of my own thoughts? he asked himself.
Maybe Holland is the father you never had. Maybe you want him to like you.
Like hell I do.
You could have taken him off the board a couple of times. Why didn’t you do it, Jackie Boy?
The situation was one-sided. There’s no honor in that. Don’t call me that name.
There was honor in the shooting of the nine Thai women?
I don’t want to talk about that. It’s over. I did my penance in the desert.
He thought he heard the hysterical laughter of a woman, someone who always hung just on the edge of his vision, ridiculing him, waiting for him to slip up, her smile as cruel as an open cut in living tissue.
When the female deputy answered, Jack said, “Put the sheriff on the line, woman.”
Whatever she said in response never registered. Instead, he heard the voice of the woman who lived in his dreams and his unconscious and his idle daytime moments and his futile attempts at joy. He heard her incessant, piercing laughter, louder and louder, and he knew