Feast Day of Fools - James Lee Burke [61]
After he had hung up, Hackberry sat for a long time in his chair, the right side of his face numb, a sound like an electrical short humming in his ear.
CHAPTER NINE
ANTON LING WOKE in the darkness to the flicker of dry lightning and a rumble of thunder that shook the walls of her house in the same way that the reverberations of aerial bombs could travel through the earth and cause a house to rattle miles away. She went to the kitchen and sat at the table in the dark and drank a glass of warm milk and tried not to think about the images reawakened in her unconscious by the thunder and the yellow ignition in the clouds.
The night was unseasonably cold, the sky churning with clouds that looked filled with soot. She thought she heard a coyote’s wail inside the wind, or perhaps the shriek of a rusty hinge twisting violently back on itself. An empty apple basket bounced crazily past the water tank in the backyard. The tank was overflowing, the blades of the windmill ginning, the stanchions vibrating with tension. Had she been so absentminded that she had forgotten to notch down the shutoff chain on the crankshaft?
She put on a canvas coat and went outside and was immediately struck by the severity of the wind and a smell that was like creosote and wet sulfur and the stench off a smokestack in a rendering plant. She hooked the chain on the windmill and realized the doors were slamming on all her sheds, a loose section of the tin roof on the barn clanging against the joists, as though things were coming apart and indeed the center could not hold. Was the odor coming from across the border, where industry did as it wished? The clouds were black and billowing and lighted from the inside, like giant curds of smoke rising from wet straw set ablaze by a chemical starter.
When would she be freed of her dreams and the sensations and shards of memory that followed her into the day and fouled her blood and made her wonder if her entire mission wasn’t that of a hypocrite? Why could she not accept the fact that amnesia did not necessarily accompany absolution?
Don’t think about it, she told herself. Pray for the maimed and the dead and ask nothing more from life than another sunrise, and maybe along the way do a good deed or two. She couldn’t change the past. Why did she have to revisit the same slide show over and over?
Gasoline and diesel, drums of it, with Tide detergent poured into the mix so that the liquid adhered to every surface it touched, a homemade form of napalm dropped end over end from a few hundred feet while tiny figures below raced from their huts into the trees or sometimes rolled burning in the rice paddies to smother the fire on their skin.
From a great distance, she had witnessed the B-52 raids in Cambodia and had heard the thump of the bombs and had felt the explosions through the soles of her shoes and had seen the surface of rice paddies wrinkle, but the tremolo that spread invisibly through the floor of a rain forest was little different from the vibration of a subway train passing under the streets of a metropolitan city. The fifty-gallon drums filled with diesel or gasoline or both were different; they were up close and personal, their effect unforgettable. She had helped slide them off the tailgate of a Chinook, had cupped her hands around their hard rims, had watched them suddenly detach themselves from the plane and drop as heavily as woodstoves through the air into a landscape of elephant grass and tropical trees and fields of poppies that bloomed pink and red against a backdrop of blue mountains. Then she had seen them explode in a village that was a resupply depot for the Pathet Lao, but also a home to people who ate monkeys and dogs and harvested rice with their hands, and who knew