Feast Day of Fools (Hackberry Holland Series #3)

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Overview

James Lee Burke returns with his gorgeously crafted thirtieth novel, now in paperback—featuring the return of one of Burke’s most legendary villains, Preacher Jack Collins.

Sheriff Hackberry Holland patrols a small Southwest Texas border town, meting out punishment and delivering justice in his small square of this magnificent but lawless land. When a local drunk named Danny Boy Lorca begs to be locked up after witnessing a man tortured to death by a group of bandits, Hack and his deputy, Pam Tibbs, slowly extract the man’s gruesome tale. It becomes clear that the desert contains a multitude of criminals, including serial murderer Preacher Jack Collins (whom The New York Times called “one of Burke’s most inspired villains”).

Holland’s investigation leads him to the home of Anton Ling, a mysterious Chinese woman whose steely demeanor and aristocratic beauty compels Hackberry to return to her home again and again as the investigation unfolds.

James Lee Burke is at his engrossing and atmospheric best in this, his third Hack Holland novel, as Hackberry plumbs the depths of man’s inhumanity to man—from killers-for-hire to the U.S. government to the misguided souls in search of a better life.

Editorial Reviews

From Barnes & Noble

Two-time Edgar Award winner James Lee Burke has been called "brilliant," "incomparable," "an absolute master," and even "Faulknerian," but readers are too rapt in his stories to browse the reviews. In Feast Day of Fools, he proves his worth again with a deftly layered tale about a desert torture homicide; a terrified ex-boxer; a mysterious, deeply secretive Chinese woman; and the return of serial murderer Preacher Jack Collins. The job of sorting it all out falls into the lap of Southwest Texas border town Sheriff Hackberry Holland. Bound to be a bestseller.

Publishers Weekly
In Edgar-winner Burke's outstanding third novel featuring smalltown Texas sheriff Hackberry Holland (after Rain Gods), Hackberry joins a motley crew of killers, idealists, psychos, mobsters, and Feds in the search for Noie Barnum, a disgruntled former intelligence asset who escaped the human smugglers that were trying to sell him to al-Qaeda. Barnum finds an unexpected protector in Preacher Jack Collins, a quixotic mass murderer, whom Hackberry calls "he most dangerous man I've ever met." The richness of Burke's characters, always one of his strengths, reaches new heights, as shown particularly inKrill, a mentally scarred veteran of Central American violence driven by grief over his slaughtered children, and Cody Daniels, would-be minister and xenophobe, who undergoes a spiritual sea change during his own via crucis. The intricately plotted narrative takes numerous unexpected turns, and Burke handles his trademark themes of social justice and corruption with his usual subtlety. (Sept.)
Library Journal
Burke's fifth entry featuring Texas sheriff Hackberry Holland (after Rain Gods) further cements his status as one of America's greatest contemporary novelists. Hackberry and his deputy, Pam Tibbs, to whom Hack acts as both romantic interest and concerned parent, are forced to unravel a mystery involving dead bodies in the desert, a missing American scientist, and the government agencies and criminal groups searching for him. As with any Burke novel, however, the story is secondary to the characters. From a Chinese woman helping illegal immigrants cross the Texas-Mexico border, to a dying government agent with torn allegiances, to criminals of various stripes, Burke weaves a tapestry of unique characters whose widely differing motivations enrich his tale. Also playing a large role is serial killer Preacher Jack Collins, who returns to bring fear and craziness into Hackberry's life. Fittingly, a novel filled with violence concludes in a similar manner. VERDICT Though not as well known as Dave Robicheaux, Hackberry is a compelling character. This rich novel will satisfy Burke's fans and should draw new ones who have not yet had the privilege of reading his works. [See Prepub Alert, 2/28/11.]—Craig Shufelt, Fort McMurray P.L., Alta.
Marilyn Stasio
Burke is constructing a whole new mythology in this series, with characters haunted by history and driven by ghosts…Burke is only three books into this series, so he hasn't quite assembled all the iconography for future morality plays. But he's already got himself a formidable high priestess and enough sinners to keep her busy for a good long while.
—The New York Times Book Review

Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9781451643114
  • Publisher: Simon & Schuster
  • Publication date: 9/27/2011
  • Pages: 480
  • Sales rank: 36,617
  • Series: Hackberry Holland Series , #3
  • Product dimensions: 6.30 (w) x 9.66 (h) x 1.43 (d)

Meet the Author

James Lee Burke
James Lee Burke

James Lee Burke, named Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America, is the author of twenty-nine previous novels and two collections of short stories. He lives in Missoula, Montana.

Biography

In November 1999, The Atlantic Monthly -- under the headline, "Soft Boiled: Detectives Aren't What They Used to Be" -- noted an odd turn of events in the crime fiction genre: the strong-and-silent hero was on the wane, replaced instead by a bunch of chatty Cathys. "The 1990s detective can't shut up about anything. It's hard to go even a few pages without being assaulted by a confession of inner feelings." As an example, it offered James Lee Burke's Louisiana detective Dave Robicheaux, who "was in Vietnam 'in the early days of the war,' and this has left him with a sizable reservoir of musings about personal anger, which he taps frequently."

But put the aromatherapy away. Robicheaux -- Burke's best-known character and the launch of his financial success as a writer -- is no sensitive New Age guy. He's a police detective who holds his own on the mean streets of New Orleans, who faces the perils of alcoholism every day, and who supplements his work policing the Louisiana parish of New Iberia with running his bait shop on the bayou. Ropy with muscle, he can take -- and, if necessary -- throw a punch with the best of them.

Robicheaux is one of the stars of a series that started with The Neon Rain and continued with such titles as Heaven's Prisoners (turned into a 1996 movie with Alec Baldwin and Kelly Lynch), In the Electric Mist with the Confederate Dead and A Stained White Radiance. The other star is the Louisiana swamp country itself, which shimmers to life at the touch of Burke's pen. The smell of brackish water all but wafts off the page.

And in Robicheaux, Burke has created a complicated and often conflicted protagonist driven by a fierce moral code. "There is a pronounced streak of poetry in Mr. Burke's prose," The New York Times wrote in 1988. "He has the knack of combining action with reflection; he has pity for the human condition, and even his villains can have some sympathetic and redeeming qualities."

Like Robicheaux, Burke himself is a recovering alcoholic. He contributes his teenage drinking to his poor academic standing in high school, and it dogged him throughout much of his career as a writer. Even when he was sober for five years, he has said he still suffered from the same problems as an alcoholic and didn't truly find sanctuary until he joined a 12-step group.

His early days as a writer, in the 1960s, were marked by critical success that he thought meant he was on his way. But after his third novel met with so-so reviews, he only published one book for the next 15 years, supporting his family with an assortment of jobs -- teaching, social work, pipefitting. One novel, The Lost-Get Back Boogie, went unpublished for nearly a decade and was rejected roughly 100 times before finally being picked up by Louisiana State University Press. (It was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.)

Burke credits LSU Press for resurrecting his career. Three years later, when the third Robicheaux novel, Black Cherry Blues, was published, Burke was beginning to reach a wider audience. After the ninth, he launched a new crime series, this one featuring Texas Ranger-turned-lawyer Billy Bob Holland. Despite the shift from the swamps of Louisiana to the dusty streets of Deaf Smith, Texas, much is the same in Burke's new franchise. "The themes that stalk Dave Robicheaux through the swamps in James Lee Burke's Louisiana mysteries -- the arrogance of wealth, the corruption of power and the price a man must pay for the sins of his past -- trail Burke's new series hero, a country lawyer named Billy Bob Holland, out to Texas hill country," The New York Times wrote in a 1999 review of the second book in the series, Heartwood.

He now has a readership for both Robicheaux and Holland. But he has been careful not to take it for granted. In 1996, even after he had three straight books on The New York Times bestsellers list and was building a second home in New Iberia -- to match his house in Missoula -- Burke was vigilant about not letting the mantle of success rest too comfortably on his shoulders.

"By the time I was 35, I had three books published. I thought I was home free," he told People. "But that was vanity. I went a dozen years without selling a book. I couldn't sell ice water in hell."

Good To Know

When Burke is writing, he's typing blind. "I don't think up the stories," he told Publishers Weekly in 1992. "I'm convinced they're already written in the unconscious. My work is simply a day-to-day discovery. I never see more than two scenes around the corner and I don't know a book's ending until the last pages."

His college English papers earned him a string of D-minuses until he talked to his professor about what was wrong. "She said, 'Your spelling is an assault upon the eyeballs. Your penmanship makes me wish the Phoenicians had not developed the alphabet. But I couldn't give you an F because you have so much heart,'" he said in a 1996 interview with People. "Every Saturday I went with her and rewrote the essay for the week. I got a B and made the dean's list. (She) changed my life."

The 1993 publication of Two for Texas marked Burke's return to bookshelves after 11 years. Unable to sell a book after Lay Down My Sword and Shield, Burke finally broke the bad luck streak with his historical novel about the Texas Revolution of 1835. Kris Kristofferson starred in the 1998 TV movie adaptation, which aired on TNT.

    1. Hometown:
      New Iberia, Louisiana and Missoula, Montana
    1. Date of Birth:
      December 5, 1936
    2. Place of Birth:
      Houston, Texas
    1. Education:
      B.A., University of Missouri, 1959; M.A., University of Missouri, 1960
    2. Website:

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER ONE

SOME PEOPLE SAID Danny Boy Lorca’s visions came from the mescal that had fried his brains, or the horse-quirt whippings he took around the ears when he served time on Sugar Land Farm, or the fact he’d been a middleweight club fighter through a string of dust-blown sinkholes where the locals were given a chance to beat up what was called a tomato can, a fighter who leaked blood every place he was hit, in this case a rumdum Indian who ate his pain and never flinched when his opponents broke their hands on his face.

Danny Boy’s black hair was cut in bangs and fitted his head like a helmet. His physique was as square as a door, his clothes always smelling of smoke from the outdoor fires he cooked his food on, his complexion as dark and coarsened by the sun and wind as the skin on a shrunken head. In summer, he wore long-sleeve cotton work shirts buttoned at the throat and wrists to keep the heat out, and in winter, a canvas coat and an Australian flop hat tied down over his ears with a scarf. He fought his hangovers in a sweat lodge, bathed in ice water, planted by the moon, cast demons out of his body into sand paintings that he flung at the sky, prayed in a loincloth on a mesa in the midst of electric storms, and sometimes experienced either seizures or trances during which he spoke a language that was neither Apache nor Navajo, although he claimed it was both.

Sometimes he slept in the county jail. Other nights he slept behind the saloon or in the stucco house where he lived on the cusp of a wide alluvial floodplain bordered on the southern horizon by purple mountains that in the late-afternoon warp of heat seemed to take on the ragged irregularity of sharks’ teeth.

The sheriff who allowed Danny Boy to sleep at the jail was an elderly six-feet-five widower by the name of Hackberry Holland, whose bad back and chiseled profile and Stetson hat and thumb-buster .45 revolver and history as a drunk and a whoremonger were the sum total of his political cachet, if not his life. To most people in the area, Danny Boy was an object of pity and ridicule and contempt. His solipsistic behavior and his barroom harangues were certainly characteristic of a wet brain, they said. But Sheriff Holland, who had been a prisoner of war for almost three years in a place in North Korea called No Name Valley, wasn’t so sure. The sheriff had arrived at an age when he no longer speculated on the validity of a madman’s visions or, in general, the foibles of human behavior. Instead, Hackberry Holland’s greatest fear was his fellow man’s propensity to act collectively, in militaristic lockstep, under the banner of God and country. Mobs did not rush across town to do good deeds, and in Hackberry’s view, there was no more odious taint on any social or political endeavor than universal approval. To Hackberry, Danny Boy’s alcoholic madness was a respite from a far greater form of delusion.

It was late on a Wednesday night in April when Danny Boy walked out into the desert with an empty duffel bag and an army-surplus entrenching tool, the sky as black as soot, the southern horizon pulsing with electricity that resembled gold wires, the softness of the ground crumbling under his cowboy boots, as though he were treading across the baked shell of an enormous riparian environment that had been layered and beveled and smoothed with a sculptor’s knife. At the base of a mesa, he folded the entrenching tool into the shape of a hoe and knelt down and began digging in the ground, scraping through the remains of fossilized leaves and fish and birds that others said were millions of years old. In the distance, an igneous flash spread silently through the clouds, flaring in great yellow pools, lighting the desert floor and the cactus and mesquite and the greenery that was trying to bloom along a riverbed that never held water except during the monsoon season. Just before the light died, Danny Boy saw six men advancing across the plain toward him, like figures caught inside the chemical mix of a half-developed photograph, their torsos slung with rifles.

He scraped harder in the dirt, trenching a circle around what appeared to be two tapered soft-nosed rocks protruding from the incline below the mesa. Then his e-tool broke through an armadillo’s burrow. He inverted the handle and stuck it down the hole and wedged the earth upward until the burrow split across the top and he could work his hand deep into the hole, up to the elbow, and feel the shapes of the clustered objects that were as pointed and hard as calcified dugs.

The night air was dense with an undefined feral odor, like cougar scat and a sun-bleached carcass and burnt animal hair and water that had gone stagnant in a sandy drainage traced with the crawl lines of reptiles. The wind blew between the hills in the south, and he felt its coolness and the dampness of the rain mist on his face. He saw the leaves on the mesquite ripple like green lace, the mesas and buttes shimmering whitely against the clouds, then disappearing into the darkness again. He smelled the piñon and juniper and the scent of delicate flowers that bloomed only at night and whose petals dropped off and clung to the rocks at sunrise like translucent pieces of colored rice paper. He stared at the southern horizon but saw no sign of the six men carrying rifles. He wiped his mouth on his sleeve and went back to work, scooping out a big hole around the stonelike objects that were welded together as tightly as concrete.

The first shot was a tiny pop, like a wet firecracker exploding. He stared into the fine mist swirling through the hills. Then the lightning flared again, and he saw the armed men stenciled against the horizon and the silhouettes of two other figures who had broken from cover and were running toward the north, toward Danny Boy, toward a place that should have been safe from the criminality and violence that he believed was threading its way out of Mexico into his life.

He lifted the nest of stony egg-shaped artifacts from the earth and slid them into the duffel bag and pulled the cord tight through the brass eyelets at the top. He headed back toward his house, staying close to the bottom of the mesa, avoiding the tracks he had made earlier, which he knew the armed men would eventually see and follow. Then a bolt of lightning exploded on top of the mesa, lighting the floodplain and the willows along the dry streambed and the arroyos and crevices and caves in the hillsides as brightly as the sun.

He plunged down a ravine, holding the duffel bag and e-tool at his sides for balance. He crouched behind a rock, hunching against it, his face turned toward the ground so it would not reflect light. He heard someone running past him in the darkness, someone whose breath was not only labored but desperate and used up and driven by fear rather than a need for oxygen.

When he thought that perhaps his wait was over, that the pursuers of the fleeing man had given up and gone away, allowing him to return to his house with the treasure he had dug out of the desert floor, he heard a sound he knew only too well. It was the pleading lament of someone who had no hope, not unlike that of an animal caught in a steel trap or a new inmate, a fish, just off the bus at Sugar Land Pen, going into his first night of lockdown with four or five mainline cons waiting for him in the shower room.

The pursuers had dragged the second fleeing man from behind a tangle of deadwood and tumbleweed that had wedged in a collapsed corral that dog-food contractors had once used to pen mustangs. The fugitive was barefoot and blood-streaked and terrified, his shirt hanging in rags on the pencil lines that were his ribs, a manacle on one wrist, a brief length of cable swinging loosely from it.

“¿Dónde está?” a voice said.

“No sé.”

“What you mean you don’t know? TÚ sabes.”

“No, hombre. No sé nada.”

“¿Para dónde se fue?”

“He didn’t tell me where he went.”

“¿Es la verdad?”

“Claro que sí.”

“You don’t know if you speak Spanish or English, you’ve sold out to so many people. You are a very bad policeman.”

“No, señor.”

“Estás mintiendo, chico. Pobrecito.”

Tengo familia, señor. Por favor. Soy un obrero, como usted. I’m just like you, a worker. I got to take care of my family. Hear me, man. I know people who can make you rich.”

For the next fifteen minutes, Danny Boy Lorca tried to shut out the sounds that came from the mouth of the man who wore the manacle and length of severed cable on one wrist. He tried to shrink himself inside his own skin, to squeeze all light and sensation and awareness from his mind, to become a black dot that could drift away on the wind and re-form later as a shadow that would eventually become flesh and blood again. Maybe one day he would forget the fear that caused him to stop being who he was; maybe he would meet the man he chose not to help and be forgiven by him and hence become capable of forgiving himself. When all those things happened, he might even forget what his fellow human beings were capable of doing.

When the screams of the tormented man finally softened and died and were swallowed by the wind, Danny Boy raised his head above a rock and gazed down the incline where the tangle of tumbleweed and deadwood partially obscured the handiwork of the armed men. The wind was laced with grit and rain that looked like splinters of glass. When lightning rippled across the sky, Danny Boy saw the armed men in detail.

Five of them could have been pulled at random from any jail across the border. But it was the leader who made a cold vapor wrap itself around Danny Boy’s heart. He was taller than the others and stood out for many reasons; in fact, the incongruities in his appearance only added to the darkness of his persona. His body was not stitched with scars or chained with Gothic-letter and swastika and death’s-head tats. Nor was his head shaved into a bullet or his mouth surrounded by a circle of carefully trimmed beard. Nor did he wear lizard-skin boots that were plated on the heels and tips. His running shoes looked fresh out of the box; his navy blue sweatpants had a red stripe down each leg, similar to a design a nineteenth-century Mexican cavalry officer might wear. His skin was clean, his chest flat, the nipples no bigger than dimes, his shoulders wide, his arms like pipe stems, his pubic hair showing just above the white cord that held up his pants. An inverted M16 was cross-strapped across his bare back; a canteen hung at his side from a web belt, and a hatchet and a long thin knife of the kind that was used to dress wild game. The man leaned over and speared something with the tip of the knife and lifted it in the air, examining it against the lights flashing in the clouds. He cinched the object with a lanyard and tied it to his belt, letting it drip down his leg.

Then Danny Boy saw the leader freeze, as though he had just smelled an invasive odor on the wind. He turned toward Danny Boy’s hiding place and stared up the incline. “¿Quién está en la oscuridad?” he said.

Danny Boy shrank down onto the ground, the rocks cutting into his knees and the heels of his hands.

“You see something up there?” one of the other men said.

But the leader did not speak, in either Spanish or English.

“It’s just the wind. There’s nothing out here. The wind plays tricks,” the first man said.

“¿Ahora para dónde vamos?” another man said.

The leader waited a long time to answer. “¿Dónde vive La Magdalena?” he asked.

“Don’t fuck with that woman, Krill. Bad luck, man.”

But the leader, whose nickname was Krill, did not reply. A moment that could have been a thousand years passed; then Danny Boy heard the six men begin walking back down through the riverbed toward the distant mountains from which they had come, their tracks cracking the clay and braiding together in long serpentine lines. After they were out of sight, Danny Boy stood up and looked down at their bloody handiwork, scattered across the ground in pieces, glimmering in the rain.

PAM TIBBS WAS Hackberry’s chief deputy. Her mahogany-colored hair was sunburned white at the tips, and it hung on her cheeks in the indifferent way it might have on a teenage girl. She wore wide-ass jeans and half-topped boots and a polished gun belt and a khaki shirt with an American flag sewn on one sleeve. Her moods were mercurial, her words often confrontational. Her potential for violence seldom registered on her adversaries until things happened that should not have happened. When she was angry, she sucked in her cheeks, accentuating a mole by her mouth, turning her lips into a button. Men often thought she was trying to be cute. They were mistaken.

At noon she was drinking a cup of coffee at her office window when she saw Danny Boy Lorca stumbling down the street toward the department, bent at the torso as though waging war against invisible forces, a piece of newspaper matting against his chest before it flapped loose and scudded across the intersection. When Danny Boy tripped on the curb and fell hard on one knee, then fell again when he tried to pick himself up, Pam Tibbs set down her coffee cup and went outside, the wind blowing lines in her hair. She bent down, her breasts hanging heavy against her shirt, and lifted him to his feet and walked him inside.

“I messed myself. I got to get in the shower,” he said.

“You know where it is,” she said.

“They killed a man.”

She didn’t seem to hear what he had said. She glanced at the cast-iron spiral of steps that led upstairs to the jail. “Can you make it by yourself?”

“I ain’t drunk. I was this morning, but I ain’t now. The guy in charge, I remember his name.” Danny Boy closed his eyes and opened them again. “I think I do.”

“I’ll be upstairs in a minute and open the cell.”

“I hid all the time they was doing it.”

“Say again.”

“I hid behind a big rock. Maybe for fifteen minutes. He was screaming all the while.”

She nodded, her expression neutral. Danny Boy’s eyes were scorched with hangover, his mouth white at the corners with dried mucus, his breath dense and sedimentary, like a load of fruit that had been dumped down a stone well. He waited, although she didn’t know for what. Was it absolution? “Don’t slip on the steps,” she said.

She tapped on Hackberry’s door but opened it without waiting for him to answer. He was on the phone, his eyes drifting to hers. “Thanks for the alert, Ethan. We’ll get back to you if we hear anything,” he said into the receiver. He hung up and seemed to think about the conversation he’d just had, his gaze not actually taking her in. “What’s up?” he said.

“Danny Boy Lorca just came in drunk. He says he saw a man killed.”

“Where?”

“I didn’t get that far. He’s in the shower.”

Hackberry scratched at his cheek. Outside, the American flag was snapping on its pole against a gray sky, the fabric washed so thin that the light showed through the threads. “That was Ethan Riser at the FBI. They’re looking for a federal employee who might have been grabbed by some Mexican drug mules and taken to a prison across the border. An informant said the federal employee could have gotten loose and headed for home.”

“I’ve heard Danny Boy has been digging up dinosaur eggs south of his property.”

“I didn’t know there were any around here,” Hackberry said.

“If they’re out there, he’d be the guy to find them.”

“How’s that?” he said, although he wasn’t really listening.

“A guy who believes he can see the navel of the world from his back window? He says all power comes out of this hole in the ground. Down inside the hole is another world. That’s where the rain and the corn gods live. Compared to a belief system like that, hunting for dinosaur eggs seems like bland stuff.”

“That’s interesting.”

She waited, as though examining his words. “Try this: He says the killing took fifteen minutes to transpire. He says he heard it all. You think this might be the guy the feds are looking for?”

Hackberry bounced his knuckles lightly up and down on the desk blotter and stood up, straightening his back, trying to hide the pain that crept into his face, his outline massive against the window. “Bring your recorder and a pot of coffee, will you?” he said.

THE REPORT DANNY Boy gave of the murder he had witnessed was not one that lent itself to credulity. “You were drinking before you went digging for dinosaur eggs?” Hackberry said.

“No, sir, I hadn’t had a drop in two days.”

“Two days?” Hackberry said.

“Yes, sir, every bit of it. I got eighty-sixed. I didn’t have no more money, anyway.”

“Well, you must have seen what you saw,” Hackberry said. “Want to take a ride?”

Danny Boy didn’t answer. He was sitting on the iron bunk of his cell, wearing lace-up boots without socks and clean jailhouse jeans and a denim shirt, his hair wet from his shower and his skin as dark as smoke. His hands were folded in his lap, his shoulders slumped.

“What’s the problem?” Hackberry said.

“I’m ashamed of what I done.”

“Not helping this guy out?”

“Yes, sir. They was talking about La Magdalena.”

“Who?”

“A holy woman.”

“Don’t feel so down about this, partner. They would have killed you, too. If they had, you wouldn’t be helping us in the investigation, would you?” Hackberry said.

Danny Boy’s eyes were focused on a spot ten inches in front of him. “You didn’t see it.”

“No, I didn’t,” Hackberry replied. He started to say something about his own experience in No Name Valley many years ago but thought better of it. “Let’s get this behind us, partner.”

Pam Tibbs drove the three of them down the main street of the town in the department’s Jeep Cherokee, the traffic light over the intersection bouncing on its cable in the wind. The newer buildings on the street were constructed of cinder blocks; some of the older ones were built out of fieldstones that had been cemented together and sheathed with plaster or stucco that had fallen off in chunks, leaving patterns that resembled a contagious skin disease. Pam followed a winding two-lane state highway southward through hills that looked like big brown ant piles or a sepia-tinted photograph taken on the surface of Mars. Then she drove across Danny Boy’s property, past his stucco house and his barn that was plated from the bottom to the eaves with hubcaps, onto the geological fault that bled into Old Mexico and a strip of terrain that always seemed to ring with distant bugles echoing off the hills. For Hackberry Holland, these were not the horns blowing along the road to Roncevaux.

Pam shifted down and kept the Jeep on the high ground above the riverbed that Danny had walked the previous night, the hard-packed gravel vibrating through the frame. “There,” Danny said, pointing.

“Under the buzzards?” Hackberry said.

“Yes, sir.”

“Where are your dinosaur eggs?”

“At the house.”

“You sure those aren’t rocks?” Hackberry said, his eyes crinkling at the corners.

But his attempt to relieve Danny Boy of depression and fear was to no avail. The guilt and sorrow Danny Boy had taken with him from the previous night would probably come aborning in his dreams for many years, and all the beer in all the beer joints in Texas would not make one dent in it, Hackberry thought. “Get upwind from it,” he said to Pam.

She crossed a slough chained with red pools and layered with clusters of black butterflies sucking moisture from the sand, their wings shuddering as though they were ingesting toxin. She parked on the incline, above the collapsed rails of the corral that had been used by a one-eyed man who killed and sold mustangs for dog food. When Hackberry stepped out on the passenger side, his eyes roved over the tangles of tumbleweed and bleached wood and the remains of the man whose death may have been the most merciful moment in his life. “You ever see anything like this?” Pam said, her words clotting in her throat.

“Not exactly. Maybe close, but not exactly,” Hackberry replied.

“What are we dealing with?” she said.

“Call the coroner’s office, then get Felix and R.C. down here. I want photos of this from every angle. String as much tape as you can around the crime scene. Make sure nobody disturbs those tracks going south.”

She went to the Jeep and made the calls, then walked back down the incline, pulling on a pair of latex gloves, her upper arms ridging with muscle. Danny Boy remained in the vehicle, his head lowered. “What did he say the leader’s name was? Krill?” she said to Hackberry.

“I think that was it.”

“I’ve heard that before. It’s Spanish?”

“It’s a shrimplike creature that whales eat.”

“Funny name for a killer with an M16 strapped on his back.” When he didn’t answer, she looked at him. “You okay, boss?”

He nodded at the slope above where the victim had died.

“Jesus Christ,” she said.

“He was scalped, too.”

Then the wind changed, and a sickening gray odor blew into their faces. It was like fish roe that had dried on warm stone and the putrescence of offal and the liquid wastes poured from a bucket into a ditch behind a brothel on a Saturday night, and it made Pam Tibbs hold her wrist to her mouth and walk back up the incline, fighting to hold back the bilious surge in her stomach.

Hackberry stepped back from the site and repositioned himself so he was upwind again. But that did not change the nature of the scene or its significance. Often he wondered, as an anthropologist might, what the historical environment of the human race actually was. It wasn’t a subdivision of sprinkled lawns and three-bedroom houses inside of which the television set had become the cool fire of modern man. Could it be a vast sunbaked plain broken by mesas and parched riverbeds where the simian and the mud-slathered and the unredeemed hunted one another with sharpened sticks, where the only mercy meted out was the kind that came as a result of satiation and exhaustion?

The compulsion to kill was in the gene pool, he thought. Those who denied it were the same ones who killed through proxy. Every professional executioner, every professional soldier, knew that one of his chief duties was to protect those he served from knowledge about themselves. Or at least those were the perceptions that governed Hackberry’s judgments about societal behavior, even though he shared them with no one.

He looked to the south. Dust or rain had smudged out the mountains, and the plain seemed to stretch endlessly into the distance, the way a snowfield could extend itself into the bottom of a blue winter sky, dipping over the edge of the earth into nothingness. Hackberry found himself swallowing, a nameless fear clutching at his viscera.

The coroner was Darl Wingate, an enigmatic single man who had been a forensic pathologist with the United States Army and CID before he retired back to the place of his birth. He was laconic, with sunken cheeks and a pencil mustache, and he often had liquor on his breath by ten A.M. He also had degrees from Johns Hopkins and Stanford. No one had ever been quite sure why he chose to spend his twilight years in a desolate place on the edge of the Great American Desert. It was certainly not because he was filled with compassion for the poor and the oppressed, although he was not a callous man. Hackberry believed that Darl Wingate was simply a pragmatist who saw no separation or difference between the various categories of the human family. In Darl’s mind, they all belonged to one long daisy chain: They were creatures who came out of the womb’s darkness and briefly saw light before their mouths were stopped with dust and their eyes sealed six feet down. As a consequence of his beliefs, he remained a witness and not a participant.

Darl placed a breath mint on his tongue and put on latex gloves and a surgeon’s mask before he approached the remains of the dead man. The day had grown warmer, the sky more gray, like the color of greasewood smoke, and gnats were rising from the sand.

“What do you think?” Hackberry asked.

“About what?” Darl said.

“What you’re looking at,” Hackberry replied, trying to repress his impatience.

“The fingers scattered up on the slope went one at a time. The toes were next. My guess is he died from shock. He was probably dead when he was scalped and taken apart, but I can’t say for sure.”

“You ever work one like this?”

“On a couple of backstreets in Bangkok. The guy who did it was a church missionary.”

“So the human race is rotten?”

“Say again?” Darl said.

“You’re not giving me a lot of help.”

“What else can I provide you with?”

“Anything of specific value. I don’t need the history of man’s inhumanity to man.”

“From the appearance of the victim—his nails, his emaciated condition, the infection on his manacled wrist, the scabs on his knees, and the lice eggs in the remnant of his hair—I’d say he was held prisoner in primitive and abusive conditions for at least several weeks. The scarring on his face and neck suggests smallpox, which tells me he’s probably Mexican, not American. What doesn’t fit is his dental care.”

“I don’t follow you.”

“It’s first-rate.”

“How would you explain the discrepancy?”

“My guess is he came from humble origins but did something good with his life,” Darl said.

“Successful criminals don’t see dentists?”

“Only when the pain makes it imperative. The rest of the time they’re getting laid or huffing flake up their nose. I think this guy took care of himself. So far, I see no tattoos, no signs of intravenous use, no scars on his hands. I think we might be looking at the remains of a cop.”

“Not bad.”

“What happened here says more about the killer than the victim,” Darl said.

“Pardon?”

“Whatever information he had, he shouted it to the heavens early on. But his tormentor took it to the finish line anyway. You got any idea what he wanted?”

“You ever hear of somebody called La Magdalena?” Hackberry asked.

Darl nodded. “Superstitious wets call her that.”

“Darl, would you please just spit it out?”

The coroner screwed a cigarette into his cigarette holder and put it between his teeth. “Sometimes they call her la china. Her real name is Anton Ling. She’s Indo-Chinese or French-Chinese. She looks like an actress in a Graham Greene film. Ring any bells?”

Hackberry blinked.

“Yeah, that one,” Darl said. He lit his cigarette and breathed a stream of smoke into the air. “I remember something you once said. It was ‘Wars of enormous importance are fought in places nobody cares about.’”

“Meaning?”

“Deal me out of this one,” Darl said. “It stinks from the jump. I think you’re going to be splashing through pig flop up to your ankles.”

© 2011 James Lee Burke

Interviews & Essays

I think of continuing characters primarily as the center of what I consider a continuing story. Again and again my most familiar characters – Dave Robicheaux and Hackberry Holland and Billy Bob Holland – indicate to the reader that in their belief the story is ongoing. Each of them becomes the Everyman figure in medieval drama. The story that Everyman narrates to us, or in which he is the central participant, is the story of us all. Or at least that is my intention. In other words, the historical epic does not change; only the names and faces of the players do.

The characters in my work age, as we all do, and it would be unrealistic to portray them otherwise. With luck and a degree of longevity I hope to portray perhaps the changes a person experiences as he or she goes forward in life. I’ve come to believe that numerical age, both in fiction and in life, is not of consequence. In many ways I knew more when I was twenty-one than when I was forty. I’ve also learned that if age brings wisdom, it has by and large slid right past me. If age brings any knowledge at all, at least in my opinion, it is the acceptance that we know very little.

In terms of one’s fiction, the challenge is to create a character who is somehow emblematic of what is best in us, and at the same time one who reflects our weaknesses and the hubris that is often our undoing. We do not watch Hamlet in order to learn about Elizabethan England; we watch it to learn about ourselves. A good writer creates a character that is a crucible of love and pain, joy and remorse. In order to do this, a writer has to approach his subject, the nature of his fellow man, with both humility and empathy or he will produce only stereotypes or stories that contain little of value.

I began writing about Hackberry Holland in the 1960s. My first story about him is titled “Uncle Sidney and the Mexicans.” In this story, Hackberry is a high-school baseball pitcher who falls in love with a young Mexican girl and has to learn that rejection by his peers is often the price a brave and virtuous man must pay for the sake of honor. I also published a story about Hackberry’s ordeal in a North Korean P.O.W. camp. Later I wrote a novel which dealt with Hackberry’s alcoholic political career titled Lay Down My Sword and Shield. In this novel, Hackberry was cynical and bitter and often flippant. Many years passed before I wrote about him again, this time in a book titled Rain Gods. I wrote this book because I felt I owed Hackberry an amends. I think the sequel, Feast Day of Fools, is an even better book, the best I’ve written, and I hope my amends to Hackberry is complete and that he will pardon me for portraying him as I did in 1971.

The older characters in my fiction carry only one burden, namely, that if there is any wisdom in age, it consists of the sad knowledge we cannot pass it on to others. Unfortunately we try, and therein lies our frustration and often our anger. But as Dave Robicheaux says, what finer experience is there than joining the Earth in its dance through the heavens?

I hope the readers of my books find a few things in them that are helpful in their lives. I don’t believe any writer can have a greater reward.

Customer Reviews

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See All Sort by: Showing 1 – 20 of 41 Customer Reviews
  • Anonymous

    Posted October 30, 2011

    TIRED OF IT!

    I just dropped about $25 for this book because JLB is one of my favorite wrters and in fack I have read EVERY ONE of his books. But, folks, more and more his books are filled with his left wing political opinions and not just a good story. If you read this one here is what you will come away with: 1. Illegal aliens good- american citizens bad. 2. Helping to smuggle illegal aliens into the country is the same as helping slaves escape the south during the civil war. PLEASE! 3. Left wing, totalitarian governments good- american government evil to the core. 4. anyone opposing a total open border policy is a right wing, racist, gun toting, redneck. 5. Left wing goverments should be free to slaughter their own people without us bombing them. i.e. Pol Pot and his band of merry men in Cambodia. JLB, are you putting all this in your last few books to suck up to book reviewers? You don't need to, you know, as we will buy your books anyway, regardless of what some book reviewer says. Put your politics on your web site and leave them out of your books. We pay hard earned money for a novel and if we want political views we will by a non fiction book, on that subject, and will know what we are getting.

    6 out of 7 people found this review helpful.

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  • Posted October 22, 2011

    Disappointing

    Sorry to say it, but Mr. Burke in my opinion has been less and less impressive over his past few novels. I know he is getting up in age, and sad to say, it seems to me he is just becoming another limosine liberal, guilt ridden by all the millions he has made from his writing, and so has taken an overly leftist bent in his story lines. I found the plot muddled and unconvincing. The Predator drone is now this eeeevil piece of hardware that only selfish criminals and psychopaths could support. America is an eeevil country killing innocent civilians around the world. And gosh, those eeevil Americans even think there is something wrong with allowing foreigners to stream across their border on their way to take advantage of the US taxpayer-provided public services. The horror! And his best (worst) line yet - "the Khmer Rouge were uneducated peasants who were bombed by B-52s." Yeah, Mr Burke, just a bunch of innocent peasants..who managed to murder literally millions of their own people. But it's the US' fault, right? After all, we bombed them. Yep, I think Mr Burke has gone over the deep end. Couldn't handle being rich, the guilt is too much. A shame, I"ve always found him to be the best writer of his time.

    2 out of 4 people found this review helpful.

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  • Posted November 1, 2011

    more from this reviewer

    A Master Writer

    James Lee Burke writes fiction that exceeds the norm, and I appreciate his works for that. His writing is fine, his characters always interesting. The corruption of the soul is a favorite topic for him, and for me, but here there is just maybe a little too much of it. A shorter novel may have told the story just as well. As it is, the feast day leaves one a bit exhausted.

    1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted December 27, 2011

    One of Burke's best!

    I've read all of Burke's novels, and he is, with this one, at the top of his game. As usual, there are sharply-drawn characters, crisp dialogue, and a creative assortment of villains. A real page turner.

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  • Posted November 11, 2011

    more from this reviewer

    Great Read

    Another fantastic book by James Lee Burke. Although I am a big fan and still like the Dave Robieheaux character better, Hackberry Holland series is quite good. Feast Day of Fools is much more disturbing than his previous books. He brings back Preacher Jack Collins, a ruthless killer from his previous book, Rain Gods. Will Hackberry finally get Preacher Jack for trying to kill his deputy Pam Tibbs and for all the other people he has gunned down? That is only one part of this complex and dark story. If you are a James Lee Burke fan you will like or even love this book....

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  • Anonymous

    Posted October 30, 2011

    Highly recommend.

    Another great thrilling mystery by James Lee Burke. His books ae always great and well written.

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  • Posted October 22, 2011

    Top Class

    If you're a fan of Burke this is a must. It is full of rich and dark characters, delving in to the depths of our depravity. Always amazed at the descriptive terms that Burke can generate, giving plenty of food for the imagination.

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  • Posted October 11, 2011

    highly recommend

    A very exciting and typical novel of the Hackberry Holland Series by Jas. Lee Burke. I wish he would write more books.

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  • Posted October 3, 2011

    Borderland epic

    Handled deftly by a man who understands the territory and mines deeply the human soul. Texas, Mexico, borders,immigration, oppressed people, corrupt officials, terrorists, psychopaths, religion, goodness, governments, war effects, surveillance, drones, zealots, extreme violence.

    Whoa. I forgot. This is fiction.

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