James Burke - Feast Day of Fools

In that moment he wished Preacher Jack Collins would once again appear in the middle of his life, his cheeks unshaved, his fingernails half-mooned with dirt, his rumpled suit coat and sweat-stained dress shirt like those of a drunkard out to spoil a party, the Thompson pointed dead center at Hackberry’s chest. You feared whiskey in your dreams or in a store window or behind a bar, not when you drank it, Hackberry thought. You feared death only as long as you held on to life. Mr. Death lost his dominion as soon as you faced and engaged him and dared him to do his worst.

None of these thoughts brought comfort to Hackberry Holland. The unalterable reality that governed every moment of his waking day was simple: The love of his life was dead, and he would never see her again.

Danny Boy Lorca’s home was not so much a house as a collection of buildings and shacks and pole sheds in or under which he cooked his food or ate or slept or worked or got drunk. He smoked his own meat and grew his own vegetables, did his own repairs on his army-surplus flatbed truck, and washed his clothes in an outdoor bathtub and dried them on a smooth-wire fence. He seldom locked his doors, except on a shed whose walls were layered like armor plate from the roof to the ground with chrome hubcaps. The interior of the shed had nothing to do with mechanized vehicles. It was there that he kept the cases of Corona and the gallon bottles of Bacardi and Oso Negro he bought in Mexico and brought back into the States through a ravine where seventeenth-century Spaniards had carved Christian crosses on the rocks to commemorate a battle in which they had slain dozens of Indians.

When Danny Boy drank, he did it methodically and with dedication, his time frame open-ended, his progress from the first drink to the last as steady and unrelenting and disciplined as anyone’s can be while he is systematically sawing himself apart. His benders lasted from a few days to a few weeks, and they always commenced when a clock inside him would go off without warning and a voice would whisper, It’s time. Danny Boy never argued with the voice. He would fill a bucket with crushed ice he bought from a filling station down the road, unlock the shed where he kept his beer and liquor, and stuff a dozen bottles of Corona into the ice. Then he would sit down at a plank table that overlooked the miles of ancient topography to the south, pour three inches of Bacardi into a jelly glass, and snap the cap off a Corona, the foam sliding down the bottle neck and wrapping around his wrist like a white snake.

The first drink produced the second, then the third, and eventually he would lose count of his consumption and slip into a blackout in which his motor control still functioned but his soul went somewhere else. When his supply in the shed was gone, he would panhandle on the streets or swamp out bars in exchange for alcohol, sleeping in alleys or on the floor of a jail cell. The pattern never changed. The first two days of his bender were memorable. The rest of it was a void that he learned about later from police officers and bailiffs.

It was four A.M. when he began his current bender at the plank table behind his house. The sky was spangled with stars, the desert floor silvery and pale green and rustling with forms of life that no one saw in the daytime. The visions he had of the land and its great alluvial vastness were always a puzzle to him. Sometimes he thought he saw dinosaurs rearing their long necks out of a marshy bog, great tendrils of vegetation and root systems hanging from their mouths, while people wearing animal skins squatted by campfires up in the rocks. Someone had told him that his visions were nonsense, that dinosaurs were extinct long before man appeared on the planet. Danny Boy did not argue with his detractors. How could he? Even though he had once claimed the powers of a shaman, he had hidden, as a coward would, while a defenseless man was tortured to death. Any powers he had possessed had been taken from him and surely given to someone else. Danny Boy did not contend with his fate. He had failed. A shaman did not fear either this world or the next. But if his power was gone, why was he experiencing another vision, in this instance a figure walking up the long alluvial plain toward him, a man who seemed made of sticks? The figure was wearing a pale wide-brimmed hat and a shapeless business suit, the cuffs of his trousers stuffed inside the tops of his cowboy boots, an old-style holster slung at an angle on his hip, brass cartridges inserted in the leather ammunition loops.

Danny Boy watched the figure draw nearer, the toes of his boots cracking through the shell of baked clay along the streambed, the sky behind him a royal purple, the mesquite and pinon trees on the hillsides alive with birds that only minutes ago had been sleeping. Danny Boy drank the rum from his jelly glass and lifted the Corona bottle and swallowed until he could no longer taste the rum in his mouth, until his tongue was dead and his chest was warm and empty of fear. He rubbed at his eyes with the back of his wrist, hoping that when he stared back down the slope, the figure would be gone, just another gargoyle that took up temporary residence in Danny Boy’s dreams and went away.

“Some people say insomnia is a disorder. I say it’s not,” the man said, the wind ruffling the brim of his hat and fanning open his coat over his flat stomach. “I say it’s a mark of somebody who sees things as they are.”

Danny Boy remained silent, his face as square and expressionless as a stone carving, his shoulders slumped, his hands resting palms down on the table, like animal paws.

“You know who I am?” the man asked.

Danny Boy seemed to think about the question. “Maybe,” he replied. “But probably not. I get things mixed up in my head sometimes.”

“It doesn’t make any difference. I’m here. That’s all that counts. It’s a fine spot to stand on, too. What a vista.”

“Where’d you come from?”

“Out yonder.” The man looked over his shoulder and pointed at a distant spot on the horizon.

“Where you’re pointing at is Mexico.”

“I get around.”

“Why you carrying a pistol?”

“For snakes and such. You getting a jump on the morning or tapering off from last night? You look like you got rode hard and put away wet.”

Danny Boy thought about what the man had said. “I reckon some people’s ways ain’t the best,” he replied. He looked without focus at the tops of his hands and at the grain in the table’s planks. He kept waiting for the visitor to speak, but he didn’t. “You want a drink?”

“I’m not keen on alcohol. Can I sit down?”

This time it was Danny who didn’t speak. He felt the visitor’s eyes roving over his face in the silence. “You spend some time in the prize ring?” the visitor asked.

“I was a club fighter.”

“You took some hits.”

“Not from fighting other pugs. We traveled from town to town, like wrestlers do. The owner wheeled the fights any way he wanted. We all knew each other and slept at the same motel.”

“So what happened to your face?”

“For a hundred bucks, locals could go three rounds with me. I got half of the hundred to let them go the full three. I got sixty-five if I let them work me over.” He tried to smile when he spoke, the scar tissue in his eyebrows stretching his eyes into the shape of a Chinaman’s. “They’d knock my mouthpiece into the seats. All the time I was holding them up, and they’d be hitting me with everything they had. Their gloves would be shiny with my blood, and all the time they’d be thinking how they busted up a pro.”

“What you did back then isn’t important. You’re not an ordinary guy.” The visitor turned and looked behind him, down the slope, his gaze lifting into the stars. Then he looked at Danny Boy again. “What do you see out yonder?”