Feast Day of Fools - James Lee Burke [27]
Hackberry tried to convince himself that Collins was dead, his body long ago eaten by coyotes or lost inside the bowels of the earth. Regardless, Hackberry told himself, Collins belonged in the past or the place in the collective unconscious where most demons had their origins. If evil was actually a separate and self-sustaining entity, he thought, its manifestation was in the nationalistic wars that not only produced the greatest suffering but always became lionized as patriotic events.
At 2:41 Saturday morning, his head jerked up from his chest. Outside, he heard a heavy rock bounce down the arroyo, the breaking of a branch, a whisper of voices, then the sound of feet moving along the base of the hill. He unsnapped the strap on his revolver and got up from his desk and went to the back door.
A dozen or more people were following his fence line toward his north pasture. One woman was carrying a suitcase and clutching an infant against her shoulder. The men were all short and wore baseball caps and multiple shirts and, in the moonlight, had the snubbed profiles of figures on Mayan sculptures. So these were the people who had been made into the new enemy, Hackberry thought. Campesinos who sometimes had to drink one another’s urine to survive the desert. They were hungry, frightened, in total thrall to the coyotes who led them across, their only immediate goal a place where they could light a fire and cook their food without being seen. But as John Steinbeck had said long ago, we had come to fear a man with a hole in his shoe.
Hackberry stepped outside with his hat on his head and walked into the grass in his sock feet. In the quiet, he could hear the wind blowing through the trees on the hillside, scattering leaves that had been there since winter. “No tengan miedo. Hay enlatados en la granja,” he called out. “Llenen sus cantimploras de la llave de agua. No dejen la reja abierta. No quiero que me dañen la cerca, por favor.”
There was no response. The people he had seen with enough clarity to count individually now seemed as transitory and without dimension as the shadows in which they hid. “My Spanish is not very good,” he called. “Take the canned goods out of the barn and fill your containers with water from the faucet by the horse tank. Just don’t break my fences or leave the gates open.”
There was still no response or movement at the base of the hill. But what did he expect? Gratitude, an expression of trust from people sometimes hunted like animals by nativist militia? He sat down on the steps and rested his back against a wood post and closed his eyes. Minutes later, he heard feet moving down the fence line, a squeak of wire against a fence clip, then a rush of water from the faucet by the horse tank. No one had opened a gate to access or exit the lot; otherwise, he would have heard a latch chain clank against the metal. He waited a few more minutes before he walked down to the barn. The boxed canned goods were still in the tack room. His two foxtrotters stood three feet from the tank, staring at him curiously. “How you doin’, boys? Make any new friends tonight?” he asked.
No reply.
Hackberry went back inside the house. He dropped his hat on the bedpost and laid his pistol on the nightstand. Still wearing his clothes, he lay down on top of the covers, one arm across his eyes, and fell asleep, his thoughts about war and the irreparable loss of his wife temporarily sealed inside a cave at the bottom of a wine-dark sea.
HACKBERRY KNEW WHAT he was going to do that morning even before he got up. Saturday had always been the day he and his wife attended afternoon Mass at a church where the homily was in Spanish, then later, ate fish sandwiches at Burger King and went to see a movie, no matter what was playing. After her death, he had an excuse to drink, but he didn’t. Instead, he lived inside his loneliness and his silent house from Friday night to Monday morning, his only companion a form of celibacy that he had come to think of as the iron maiden.
Today was going