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, 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.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
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.”
