Feast Day of Fools - James Lee Burke [52]
She drove away without replying, her truck rattling and leaking smoke at every rusted seam.
“Presume what?” he shouted after her.
HACKBERRY WORKED LATE that evening, and at dusk he removed his hat from the peg on his office wall and put it on and hung his gun belt and holstered white-handled revolver from his shoulder and drove out to the site where Jack Collins had machine-gunned the two PIs. The crime-scene tape that had been wrapped around the mesquite and yucca had been broken by wild animals, the brass cartridges from Collins’s gun picked up from the ground, the blood splatter washed from the rocks by the previous night’s rain, even the sandwich crumbs eaten by ants and the ants in all probability eaten by armadillos. Other than the broken yellow tape, impaled and fluttering among the creosote bush and agaves and prickly pear, there was little to indicate in the reddish-blue melt of the sunset that two men had pleaded for their lives on this spot less than thirty-six hours ago, their sphincters failing them, their courage draining through the soles of their feet, all their assumptions about their time on earth leached from their hearts, their last glimpse of the earth dissolving in a bloody mist.
What good purpose could lie in his visit to the site of an execution? he asked himself. Perhaps none. In reality, he knew why he was there, and the reason had little to do with the two gunshot victims. Hackberry had come to learn that wars did not end with a soldier’s discharge. The ordeal, if that was not too strong a word, was open-ended, an alpha without an omega, a surreal landscape lit by trip flares that could burst unexpectedly to life in the time it took to shut one’s eyes.
Hackberry had many memories left over from the war: the human-wave assaults; the .30-caliber machine-gun barrels that had to be changed out with bare hands; the Chinese dead frozen in the snow as far as the eye could see; the constant blowing of bugles in the hills and the wind furrowing across the ice fields under a sky in which the sun was never more than a gaseous smudge. But none of these memories compared to a strip of film that he could not rip from his unconscious, or kill with alcohol or drugs or sex or born-again religion or psychotherapy or good works or sackcloth and ashes. He did not see the filmstrip every night, but he knew it was always on the projector, waiting to play whenever it wished, and when that happened, he would be forced to watch every inch of it, as though his eyelids were stitched to his forehead.
In the filmstrip, Sergeant Kwong would finish urinating through a sewer grate on Hackberry’s head, then extract him from the hole where, for six weeks, Hackberry had learned how to defecate in a GI helmet and survive on a diet of fish heads and weevil-infested rice. In the next few frames of the strip, Hackberry would stand woodenly in the cold, his body trembling, his eyelashes crusted with snow, while Kwong lifted his burp gun on its strap and fired point-blank into the faces of two prisoners from Hackberry’s shack, their bodies jackknifing backward into an open latrine.
They died and Hackberry lived. The other prisoners in his shack were also spared. But all of them were made to believe their comrades’ deaths were caused by them and their willingness to confess to imaginary conspiracies in order to free themselves from the holes in the ground where they shivered nightly.
If Hackberry had to face Sergeant Kwong’s burp gun again, would he be less fearful than the morning he had watched his fellow POWs executed, their hands lifting helplessly in front of their faces? If he met Kwong on a street, would he let the past remain in the past? Or would he call him out, as would his grandfather Old Hack, pistol-whipping Kwong to his knees?
Hackberry would never know the answer to those questions. Kwong had probably gone back home after the war and repaired bicycles or worked on a communal rice farm. With regularity, he had probably battered and