James Burke - Feast Day of Fools

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.

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 hydrate 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.