Feast Day of Fools - James Lee Burke [35]
“What about them?” Riser said.
Hackberry opened the door to his cruiser. “I thought you were different, that’s all,” he said.
“You should have stayed with the ACLU, Sheriff. At least they have an understanding of procedure and protocol,” Riser said. “They try to think twice before they put their own agenda ahead of their country’s security. Where do you get off lecturing other people? Who died and made you God?”
“Nobody. And that’s the problem every one of y’all has, Ethan. You wrap your lies in the flag and put the onus on others. Shame on every one of you,” Hackberry said.
When he drove away, the back tires of his cruiser ripped two long lines out of the grass.
THAT EVENING HACKBERRY was about to relearn that the past wasn’t necessarily a decaying memory and that its tentacles had the power to reach through the decades and fasten themselves onto whatever prey they could slither their suction cups around. When he returned home from work, he found an envelope stuck in his doorjamb. Inside was a silver-edged sheet of stationery folded crisply through the center. The note on it was written in bright blue ink, in a flowing calligraphy, the curlicues fading into wispy threads. It read:
Dear Sheriff Holland,
Congratulations on all your political success. My father always spoke fondly of you and I’m sure he would be very proud of you. Forgive me for dropping by without calling first, but your number was unlisted. Call my car phone if you can have drinks or dinner, or I’ll try to drop by later or at your office.
With kindest regards,
Temple Dowling
Unconsciously, Hackberry glanced over his shoulder after reading the note, as though an old adversary lay just beyond the perimeter of his vision. Then he went into the house and tore the note and envelope into four pieces, then tore them again and dropped them in the kitchen waste can and washed his hands in the sink.
It was easier to cleanse his skin than rinse his memory of Temple’s father, United States Senator Samuel Dowling. And Hackberry’s thoughts about the senator were uncomfortable not because the senator had been mean-spirited and corrupt to the core, but because Hackberry, when he ran for Congress, had, of his own choosing, fallen under the senator’s control.
The 1960s had been a transitional time in Texas’s political history. Hispanic farmworkers were unionizing, and huge numbers of black people had been empowered by the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Hackberry had watched the changes take place from a distance, at least when he wasn’t driving across the river to the brothels in Coahuila or Nuevo León, or staining the shaved ice in a tall glass one jigger at a time, with four inches of Jack Daniel’s, adding a sprig of mint and a teaspoon of sugar, just before taking the first drink of the day, one that rushed through his body with the intensity of an orgasm. Both the Democratic ticket and Hackberry’s first wife, Verisa, were delighted at the prospect of a handsome, towering war hero representing their district. Hackberry soon discovered that his addiction to whiskey and the embrace of a Mexican girl’s thighs didn’t hold a candle to the allure of celebrity and political power.
The attraction was not entirely meretricious in nature. Couched inside the vulgarity and the crassness of the new rich who surrounded him, and the attempts at manipulation of the sycophants, were moments that made him feel he was genuinely part of history. For good or bad, he had become a player in the Jeffersonian dream, a decorated former navy corpsman from a small Texas town about to take up residence at the center of the republic. Maybe Jefferson’s dream had been tarnished, but that did not mean it was lost, he had told himself. Even George Orwell, describing a Spanish troop train leaving a station on its way to the front while brass bands were blaring and peasant girls were throwing flowers, had said that maybe there was something glorious about war after all.
Hackberry remembered one balmy summer night of the campaign in particular. He had been standing on a balcony