Feast Day of Fools - James Lee Burke [110]
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.
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,