Feast Day of Fools - James Lee Burke [211]
It was a breeze.
“Hack, hold on to me. Please,” Pam said.
“Miss Anton is walking barefoot. You don’t think I can cut it?” he replied.
“I should have popped him,” she said.
He didn’t know what she meant. They had entered the barn and should have been grateful for the warmth and dryness it offered them. Then he saw the firelight flickering in the midst of the pecan orchard. He set down the Thompson and the shotgun and walked to the open doors and stared at the flames swirling up from the interior of the Ford Explorer and the cab of the flatbed truck.
So this was both the reality and the legacy of Jack Collins, Hackberry thought. He wasn’t the light bearer who fell like a shooting star from the heavens. He was the canker in the rose, the worm that flies through the howling storm, a vain and petty and mean-spirited man who left a dirty smudge on all that he touched. He had no power of his own; he was assigned it by others whose personal fears were so great, they would abandon all they believed in and surrender themselves to a self-manufactured caricature who had hijacked their religion.
But Hackberry knew that if there was any lesson or wisdom in his thoughts, he would not be able to pass it on. The only wisdom an old man learns in this world is that his life experience is ultimately his sole possession. It is also the measure of his worth as a human being, the sum of his offering to whatever hand created him, and the ticket he carries with him into eternity. But if a man tries to put all the lessons he has learned on a road map for others, he might as well dip his pen into invisible ink.
They walked miles in the rain, into the hills and through ravines and across flooded creek beds, the sky growing blacker and blacker. Pam stumbled and dropped the AR15. Krill picked it up and then pulled the shotgun from Hackberry’s hand and placed both weapons across his shoulders, draping one hand on the barrels and the other on the stocks, his head hanging forward.
“Give them back,” Hackberry said.
“I am all right, señor,” Krill said. “I would not harm you. You are very good people. I like you very much.”
“You’re wanted for a capital crime,” Hackberry said.
“I know. But that has nothing to do with us. This is Mexico,” Krill said. “It is a place where everything is crazy. I told that to La Magdalena when I cut her down from the beam in the cellar. I told her she smelled like seawater. I told her she was probably a Chinese mermaid and didn’t know it. She thought that was very funny.”
“Say that again?” Hackberry asked.
“I’m very tired. We must go on,” Krill said.
That was what they did. On and on, through rocks and brambles and thorns and deadfalls and cactus and dry washes and tree branches that lashed back into their faces and cut their skin like whips. The sky was as black as oil smoke, the explosions of lightning deafening inside the canyons. But when the four of them ascended a trail that led to a bare knoll, a peculiar event happened. They found themselves in front of two telegraph poles that had no wires attached to the crosspieces; to the west of the knoll was an infinite plain that seemed to extend beyond the edge of the storm into a band of blue sky on the earth’s rim. The wind was bitter and filled with grit, the telegraph poles trembling in the holes where they were sunk, a twisted piece of metal roof bouncing and clanging across the knoll’s surface. Krill stood at the top of the knoll, his arms hanging over the rifle and shotgun stretched across his shoulders.
“It’s stopped raining,” he said. “Look, you can see it blowing like crystal behind us and out on the plain and