Boy, then poured a shot glass up to the brim with Jim Beam and set it on a napkin next to the schooner. His expression made Danny Boy think of a profile carved on the handle of a Mexican walking cane-fixed, slightly worn, the paint chipping away. Joe Texas opened a drawer below the bar and looked in a metal box and removed a slip of paper columned with penciled sums. “Call it seventy-five even,” he said.
“I got some dinosaur eggs. I want to sell them.”
“If I was in the dinosaur business, wouldn’t I have to be worried about something called the Antiquities Act?” Joe Tex’s teeth were white against the deep leathery tan of his face when he smiled.
“These come from the back of my property. The government don’t care what I dig up on my own land. I got two eggs, big ones.” He raised the bag slightly by the drawstring, tightening the canvas against the shapes inside. “They’re worth five thousand apiece. You can have them both for four thousand.”
“That’s how you’re gonna pay your tab?”
“I saw a killing. It was done by a guy named Krill. I’m gonna put a bounty on this guy. I’m gonna put a reward on a guy named Noie Barnum, too, and maybe get him some he’p.”
Joe Tex propped his hands on the bar. He seemed to gaze at the college boys and women and truck drivers sitting at the tables and the couples dancing by the jukebox without actually seeing any of them. He seemed to look at all the illusions that defined the lives of his clientele and maybe think about them briefly and then return to the realities and deceptions that made up his own life. “What are you doing this for, Danny Boy?”
“’Cause I seen a murder and I didn’t do nothing to stop it. ’Cause maybe I can make up for it by he’ping a guy name of Noie Barnum. He got away from this fellow Krill. He run right past me. Maybe he’s hiding out with the one called the Preacher.”
Joe Tex studied the tops of his fingers and the hair that grew from the backs of his hands along his wrists and under the metal band of his watch and the snap-button cuffs of his embroidered shirt. “This isn’t the place to square a personal beef. The shot and the beer are on the house. Let’s eighty-six the eggs. This isn’t a souvenir shop.”
Joe Tex walked away, his metal-plated boots making dull sounds on the duckboards. Danny Boy’s eyes closed and opened as he tried to think his way through the haze and confusion that Joe Tex’s words had caused in his head. He drank from the shot glass, a small sip at a time, chasing it with the beer, slumping forward for balance, one work-booted foot on the bar rail, his facial muscles oily and uncoordinated, the row of bottles on the back counter sparkling with light. The shot glass and the schooner seemed to go empty by themselves, his foot slipping off the rail as he stared wanly at them. “Hit me again,” he said when Joe Tex walked past him to wait on a customer at the far end of the bar.
Danny Boy waited for his schooner and shot glass to be refilled, as though his level of desire were enough to make a reality out of a wish. But Joe Tex remained at the far end of the bar, talking to some college kids who were asking him about Big Bend National Park, and Danny Boy’s shot glass and schooner did not get refilled. “Give me another one,” he said to Joe Tex’s back.
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
