Feast Day of Fools

by James Lee Burke

  “’Cause I seen a murder and I didn’t do nothing to stop it. ’Cause maybe I can make up for it by he’ping a guy name of Noie Barnum. He got away from this fellow Krill. He run right past me. Maybe he’s hiding out with the one called the Preacher.”

  Joe Tex studied the tops of his fingers and the hair that grew from the backs of his hands along his wrists and under the metal band of his watch and the snap-button cuffs of his embroidered shirt. “This isn’t the place to square a personal beef. The shot and the beer are on the house. Let’s eighty-six the eggs. This isn’t a souvenir shop.”

  Joe Tex walked away, his metal-plated boots making dull sounds on the duckboards. Danny Boy’s eyes closed and opened as he tried to think his way through the haze and confusion that Joe Tex’s words had caused in his head. He drank from the shot glass, a small sip at a time, chasing it with the beer, slumping forward for balance, one work-booted foot on the bar rail, his facial muscles oily and uncoordinated, the row of bottles on the back counter sparkling with light. The shot glass and the schooner seemed to go empty by themselves, his foot slipping off the rail as he stared wanly at them. “Hit me again,” he said when Joe Tex walked past him to wait on a customer at the far end of the bar.

  Danny Boy waited for his schooner and shot glass to be refilled, as though his level of desire were enough to make a reality out of a wish. But Joe Tex remained at the far end of the bar, talking to some college kids who were asking him about Big Bend National Park, and Danny Boy’s shot glass and schooner did not get refilled. “Give me another one,” he said to Joe Tex’s back.

  He rested his hand on top of the heavy, solid, thick shapes of the fossilized eggs and stared at the way Joe Tex’s shirt stretched tightly across his shoulders, the tendon and sinew that tapered down to a thirty-two-inch waist, the wide belt he wore and the tight western-cut gray trousers and the polished Tony Lama boots. Couldn’t Joe hear him? Danny Boy knocked on the bar with his knuckles. “Give me a beer and a sandwich,” he said. “One of them ham and onion ones. Give me a shot, too.”

  But no one was listening to him. Not Joe Tex or the college kids or the dancers or the people drinking and eating at the tables. Didn’t others understand the value of what he had found? The eggs proved a great antediluvian world was still out there, inhabited by stubby-legged creatures with reptilian necks. All you had to do was believe and you could see through time into the past and maybe even touch it with your hand. That’s what happened when you went inside the desert and were absorbed by the rocks and the layers of warm air rising off the sand. You became part of a place where there was no past or future and where all things happened at the same time. “Hey, Joe, why you talking to them people?” he said. “I want a drink. Forget them kids. I want a fucking drink.”

  Did he just say that?

  Joe Tex walked slowly toward him on the duckboards, a pocket of air forming in one cheek. He picked up the shot glass and schooner and set them in an aluminum sink filled with dirty water. The glass and the schooner sank down through the film of soap and grease and disappeared. “Time to go home, Danny,” he said.

  “I come here to pay my tab. I come here to drink like anybody else.”

  “Another time.”

  “I’ll pay my tab tomorrow. I’ll find somebody to buy the eggs.”

  Joe Tex lifted his hands and set them on the bar again. “I can get someone to drive you home, or you can sleep it off in back,” he said. “That’s it. We’re done.”

  When Joe Tex walked away, Danny Boy felt like he was standing on a street corner by himself, watching a city bus lumber away from the curb, his reflection on the windows sliding past him, the passengers inside reading newspapers or talking to one another or listening to music through earphones as though he didn’t exist. His lips were caked, his throat clotted, the veins tightening in his scalp, the bottles of rum and bourbon and tequila and vodka as mysterious and alluring as the radiance in a rainbow. “I been a good customer. I been your friend,” he heard himself say.

  Then he felt instantly ashamed at his plaintive tone, the pathetic role of victim once again his public mantle.

  “Want a drink, chief?” a voice said.

  When Danny Boy turned around, he saw a tall, clean-shaven man with wavy brown hair standing behind him. Three other men were sitting at a table behind the tall man, smoking cigarettes, drinking beer from the bottle. The tall man could have been a cowboy or a buyer of rough stock for a rodeo, but in reality, he probably did something else, Danny Boy thought, like manage a big-game ranch up in the Glass Mountains or cater to the needs of a rich man who hired others to do his work for him. He wore mirrored sunglasses and a sky-blue silk shirt and Wrangler jeans belted high up on his flat stomach. He had an easy smile and big hands with knuckles that looked like walnuts. Maybe he was a cowboy after all, Danny Boy thought, a regular guy who didn’t mean anything by the word “chief.”

  “I’m tapped out,” Danny Boy said.

  “That’s not just booze talking. You got some dino eggs in there?”

  Danny Boy tried not to acknowledge the first part. “They come from the back of my place. I dug them up.” He glanced at the bottles on the back counter and wiped his nose with a handkerchief. He watched the cowboy drink from the bottle of Mexican beer, his throat working smoothly, his cheeks glistening with aftershave, the label on the bottle gold and red and translucent and somehow beautiful. Danny Boy waited for the cowboy to offer him a drink.

  “Maybe I could help you out,” the cowboy said.

  Danny waited, trying not to let his gaze settle on the bottles of whiskey and rum and gin and vodka.

  “Can I look at them?” the cowboy said, cupping his hand on the outline of the eggs.

  “Maybe this ain’t the place.”

  “I don’t see any problem.” The cowboy slipped a wallet from his back pocket and set it on the bar. The edges of a thick sheaf of crisp bills protruded from the braided edge of the wallet.

  Danny Boy loosened the drawstring on the duffel bag and stuck his arm inside and slowly removed each dinosaur egg and placed it carefully on the bar. When he looked back into the cowboy’s mirrored sunglasses, he saw the reflected image of a dark-skinned, truncated man in a dirty olive-colored T-shirt and canvas trousers he had probably pissed in without remembering.

  “How much you want for them?” the cowboy asked.

  “Two thousand for each.”

  “They look like a pair of petrified titties to me, and not very good ones, at that.”

  Danny Boy made a snuffing sound down in his nose and looked at the far wall and at the people on the dance floor and at the layers of smoke that flattened and sometimes swirled under the ceiling. “I could go eighteen hunnerd for each.”

  “And you’re gonna use this money to round up a fellow name of Noie Barnum? You’re kind of a specialist in solving big-picture problems? Tell you what, before you answer that question, how about one-fifty for both your busted titties here, and then you take yourself and your stink out of here? Have you noticed that your britches look like somebody shoved a wet towel in your crotch?”

  Danny Boy stared at his reflection of the man trapped inside the cowboy’s sunglasses. The trapped man’s hair was cut in bangs, his skin so dark it looked as though it had been smoked on a fire; his emotionless expression was like that of a retarded man who absorbed insults without understanding the words; the scar tissue in his eyebrows and the gaps in his teeth and the rounded mass of his shoulders were those of a man who had been pounded into the ground for a lifetime, a hod carrier working under the scaffolding of a cathedral while stone dust filtered down on his head. He stared into the cowboy’s sunglasses until the image of himself seemed to break into gold needles.

  “I dug them up on my place,” he said. “I’m gonna use the money to he’p this fellow Noie Barnum. I think you know who he is or you wouldn’t be talking down to me.”

  The cowboy gripped Danny Boy’s upper arm tightly with one hand, leaning over to whispe
r in his ear, his words wet with the smokeless tobacco tucked inside his lip. “I’m gonna walk you outside, boy, then we’re gonna have a talk. In the meantime, you keep your mouth shut.”

  “I was a middleweight. I fought at the Olympia in L.A. I knew Tami Mauriello. He give me some pointers once. He sat in my corner and said I was as good as him. Tami almost nailed Joe Louis.”

  “You get your goddamn worthless stink-ass Indian carcass out front. You hear me, boy? You know what no God or law west of the Pecos means? It means this is still a white man’s country.”

  The cowboy’s teeth were clenched, his anger telegraphing through his grip, his breath wet against the side of Danny Boy’s face.

  Maybe it was the use of the word “boy” or the ferocity of his grip. Or maybe it was the years of contempt and ridicule and insult that Danny Boy had come to accept as a way of life, part of the tab that came with being a drunk and a swamper of saloons and bathrooms where people vomited in the lavatory and threw their paper towels on the floor and shit on the edge of the bowl. Or maybe it was none of these things. Maybe he just wanted to be seventeen again, fresh out of the Golden Gloves, lean and hard, his left as quick as a snake’s head, his right hook under the heart enough to make a grown man’s eyes beg.

  This time Danny Boy’s right didn’t hook in to an opponent’s rib cage; it went straight into the cowboy’s mouth, breaking his lips against his teeth, knocking his mirrored shades off his face. The shock and pain in the cowboy’s eyes could be compared to that of a man stepping out of a car and being hit by a bus. Before the man could raise his hands to protect himself, Danny Boy threw the whole factory at him: two left jabs, one in the eye, one high up on the cheekbone and the bridge of the nose, then a right delivered straight from the shoulder with his weight solidly behind it, his fist driving into the bloody hole he had already created in the bottom of the cowboy’s face, breaking off his teeth at the gums, knocking a wad of blood and phlegm and smokeless tobacco down his throat.

  All sound in the saloon stopped except for the voice of Willie Nelson on the jukebox. He was singing “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain,” his voice like a long strand of baling wire being pulled through a hole in a tin can. Danny Boy replaced the dinosaur eggs in the duffel bag and wrapped the drawstring around his forearm and started toward the door. The fight should have been over. The cowboy was sprawled backward on the floor, his nose and mouth dripping blood on his sky-blue shirt. Even Joe Tex, who usually broke up fights immediately, was observing silently from behind the bar, indicating that it was over, that all Danny Boy had to do now was walk out of the saloon.

  That was how it should have gone. But it didn’t. Danny Boy had taken only three steps when he heard the cowboy coming hard behind him. He turned, the duffel hanging from his left forearm, automatically setting himself, ready to unload with his right and this time click off the cowboy’s switch.

  Except the cowboy came in under the swing, gripping an antler-handled knife with a four-inch blade, the blade protruding from the heel of the hand and the fingers, his forearm and elbow raised in front of his face to absorb Danny Boy’s next blow. Danny Boy tried to jump backward but tripped against a chair. He felt the knife go into his thigh like an icicle, all the way to the bone, thudding dully against it, a pocket of pain and nausea spreading out of the wound into his groin and stomach. He remembered hearing about an artery the heart depended on, and then he was outside himself, watching Danny Boy Lorca labor toward the door, his duffel bag swinging from his arm, his right leg as stiff as wood, the knife driven all the way to the hilt against his canvas trousers. Outside, bathed in the orange glow of a neon sign that advertised a Texas saloon and a Cambodian brothel, the entire world and the stars above it were draining down his leg into shale that creatures with long serpentine necks had probably once walked upon. It was a funny way to catch the elevator going south, he thought, just as the parking lot rose up and hit him between the eyes with the impact of a fist.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  THE ATTENDANT who stayed in the back of the ambulance with Danny Boy during the ride to the county hospital had acne on his forehead and on the bridge of his nose and on the point of his chin, so that his profile looked like it had been sawed out of a shingle with a dull knife. His skin and clothes were rife with the smell of nicotine, his hair flecked with dandruff, his arms as thin as sticks inside his shirtsleeves. The asphalt road was badly cracked, and Danny Boy’s gurney and the equipment inside the ambulance were vibrating loudly, but the attendant seemed to take little notice.

  “What do you call that artery in the thigh?” Danny Boy asked. “The one you don’t want to get cut?”

  “The femoral,” the attendant said.

  “Is that where he got me?”

  “Guess.”

  “He didn’t?”

  The attendant untwisted the cellophane on a piece of peppermint. “I got dry mouth,” he said. “I’d offer you one, but you’re not supposed to have anything right now.”

  “The artery is okay?”

  “Jesus, buddy, what do you think?”

  “I think I used to know you. Your nickname was Stoner or something like that.”

  “That doesn’t sound familiar.”

  Danny Boy continued to stare at the attendant’s profile. “I worked at a carnival in Marathon. I saw you at the free clinic. You were trying to get clean.”

  “Yeah, that could have been me. You were in a program there?”

  “I went to the clinic ’cause of my headaches.”

  “The guy you decked, he’s a private detective. He works for Temple Dowling.” The attendant waited. Danny Boy stared at him without replying, the inside of the ambulance rattling each time the tires thudded across a tar-patched crack in the road. “You don’t know who Temple Dowling is?”

  “No.”

  “His father was a senator.”

  “Of what?”

  The attendant shook his head. “The bartender told the cops you wanted to put a reward on a guy named Barnum. You know, same name as the circus?” He blew his nose on a tissue and stuck the tissue in his shirt pocket, sniffing, his gaze shifting sideways onto Danny Boy. “Maybe I know where he is. Or who he’s with. You following me?”

  “Tell the sheriff.”

  “Were you ever in N.A.?”

  “What’s that?”

  The attendant sniffed again. “I sold some medical supplies to a guy. A guy I don’t like to think about. He had me meet him at night out in the desert. You know who I’m talking about?”

  “Maybe. What’s his name?”

  “If you meet this guy, you don’t use his name.”

  “The one they call Preacher?”

  “You said it, I didn’t.”

  Through the back window, Danny Boy could see the reflection of the emergency lights racing along the sides of the highway. “That guy’s a killer,” he said. “You were selling him dope you stole?”

  “Maybe I don’t feel good about it.”

  “My leg hurts. I don’t want to listen to this no more.”

  “I want to go to California and get clean and start over. Give me one of the eggs. I got the information you want.”

  Danny Boy looked at the attendant for a long time, his eyes going dull with fatigue. “My duffel bag is on the floor.”

  “You’re doing the right thing, man. But I got to ask you something. Why you want to help this guy Barnum?”

  “’Cause I got to make up for something.”

  “Like what?”

  “I was there when Barnum escaped from some killers. I saw the killers torture a man to death.”

  “For real?”

  “Where’s Noie Barnum?”

  “I don’t know the exact place, but when I gave the man in the desert the medical supplies, he looked at the north and said, ‘It’s fixing to rain snakes and frogs up yonder.’ I go, ‘Where up yonder?’ He says, ‘In the Glass Mountains. You ought to come up there and stand in front of a gully washer. It’d flat hydr
ate all that dope out of your system, make a man out of you.’” The attendant looked into space. “He’s got a special way of making people feel small.”

  Danny Boy didn’t reply.

  “He made you feel the same way, didn’t he?” the attendant said.

  “Not no more he cain’t,” Danny Boy said.

  IT RAINED THAT night. To the south, a tropical storm had blown ashore on the Mexican coast, and the air smelled as dense and cool and laden with salt as seawater, almost as if a great displaced ocean lay just beyond the hills that ringed the town. Before Hackberry Holland and Pam Tibbs arrived at the hospital to interview Danny Boy, a bolt of lightning knocked out the power all over the county. Flashes of white electricity flickered inside the clouds, and Hackberry thought he could smell tropical flowers and dried kelp in the wind and gas inside the trees on the hospital lawn. He was sure these were the musings of a self-absorbed old man, one who could not stop thinking about the past and the ephemerality of his life.

  He and Pam Tibbs interviewed Danny Boy before he went into surgery, then tried unsuccessfully to find the ambulance attendant. Hackberry and Pam and their deputies and the surgeons and the other hospital personnel all did their jobs throughout the power outage, not thinking, just doing, never taking the time to wonder if any of it mattered or not. You did your job and you let the score take care of itself. How many times a day did Hackberry offer that same tired workhorse counsel to himself? Was that how one ended his days? Probably, he thought. No, there was no “probably” about it. If you thought about mortality in any other fashion, you’d go insane or put a gun in your mouth.

  After the power came back on, he and Pam drove two blocks to a café on the courthouse square and had coffee and a piece of pie. Through the window, Hackberry could see the trees on the courthouse lawn and the mist blowing across the lawn and the streetlights shining on a bronze statue of a World War I doughboy, his ’03 Springfield gripped in one hand, his other hand raised above his head as though he were rallying his comrades.