Feast Day of Fools - James Lee Burke [207]
Her first shot hit him an inch above the groin; the second one entered his mouth and exited an inch above the neatly etched hairline on the back of his neck.
His friend dropped his semiautomatic to the floor and lifted his hands in the air just before Anton Ling shot him in the heart.
Upstairs, the Thompson began firing again without letup, the rounds thudding into walls all over the house, the casings dancing on the floors, as though Jack Collins had declared war on all things that were level or square or plumb or that possessed any degree of geometric integrity.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
NOBODY COULD SAY Preacher Jack Collins wasn’t a fan of Woody Guthrie. “Adiós to you Juan, adiós Rosalito, adiós mi amigo Jesus and Maria,” he sang above the roar of the Thompson as he burned the entire ammo drum, hosing down the house from one end to the other, the barrel so hot that it scalded his hands when he reloaded.
He hunted down Sholokoff’s men in closets, crawl spaces, and behind and under the furniture and kitchen counters, blowing them apart as they cowered or tried to break and run.
These were the dreaded transplants from Russia and Brighton Beach or their surrogates in Phoenix? What a laugh.
Jack was having a fine time. He even enjoyed the rain blowing through the broken windows. It filled the house with a soft mist and the wet smell of grass and cornstalks and freshly plowed fields. The smell reminded him of rural Oklahoma during a summer rain, when the rivers and buttes were red and the plains green. His mother took him once to an Easter-egg roll behind a church where she had decided to get reborn. For whatever reason, Jack thought, it sure didn’t take. In fact, he’d always had the feeling that his mother had seduced the preacher.
No matter. When Jack’s Thompson was deconstructing the environment and people around him, he was no longer troubled by thoughts of his mother’s cruelty and the strange form of catatonic trance that seemed to take control of her metabolism and cause her to slip from one personality into another. Well, she got hers when she took a fall off the rocks on the property that eventually became his. It was an accident, of course. More or less. Yes, “accident” was a good word for it, he thought. Even though he had been in his late thirties when it happened, the details had never quite come together for him. How had the chain of events started? She had tried to grab his hand, right? Yes, he was sure about that, although he was a little hazy on what caused her to trip and start slipping backward off the ledge. But he definitely remembered her reaching out, her fingers clutching at his shirt, then at his wrist, then at the ends of his fingers. So he was not really a player in any of it, just a witness. Maybe that was her way of airbrushing herself out of his life. One second she was there; a second later, she was receding into the ground, growing smaller and smaller as she fell, looking back at him as if she had just spread herself out on a mattress for a brief nap.
When anybody got up the nerve to ask Jack how his mother had died, he always gave the same reply: “As she had lived. On her back. All the way down.”
Jack loved crime novels and film noir but could never understand the film critics’ laudatory attitude toward James Cagney’s portrayal of Cody Jarrett in White Heat. Would a mainline con like Jarrett crawl into his mother’s lap? Yuck, Jack thought. The image made his phallus shrivel up and want to hide. And how about that last scene, when Jarrett stands on the huge propane tank outside a refinery, shouting at the sky? Here’s a guy about to be burned to a crisp, and what does he say? “Made it, Ma! Top of the world!”
What a douchebag. Didn’t Cagney know better? The real Jarrett would have had his mother stuffed and used as a hat rack or doorstop.
Jack stood in the middle of the kitchen and gazed at the house’s interior and the level of destruction he had visited upon it. No one could accuse him of leaving the wounded on the field.