Feast Day of Fools - James Lee Burke [54]
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 piñon 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