James Burke - Feast Day of Fools

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 whisper 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.