“Where’d you come from?”
“Out yonder.” The man looked over his shoulder and pointed at a distant spot on the horizon.
“Where you’re pointing at is Mexico.”
“I get around.”
“Why you carrying a pistol?”
“For snakes and such. You getting a jump on the morning or tapering off from last night? You look like you got rode hard and put away wet.”
Danny Boy thought about what the man had said. “I reckon some people’s ways ain’t the best,” he replied. He looked without focus at the tops of his hands and at the grain in the table’s planks. He kept waiting for the visitor to speak, but he didn’t. “You want a drink?”
“I’m not keen on alcohol. Can I sit down?”
This time it was Danny who didn’t speak. He felt the visitor’s eyes roving over his face in the silence. “You spend some time in the prize ring?” the visitor asked.
“I was a club fighter.”
“You took some hits.”
“Not from fighting other pugs. We traveled from town to town, like wrestlers do. The owner wheeled the fights any way he wanted. We all knew each other and slept at the same motel.”
“So what happened to your face?”
“For a hundred bucks, locals could go three rounds with me. I got half of the hundred to let them go the full three. I got sixty-five if I let them work me over.” He tried to smile when he spoke, the scar tissue in his eyebrows stretching his eyes into the shape of a Chinaman’s. “They’d knock my mouthpiece into the seats. All the time I was holding them up, and they’d be hitting me with everything they had. Their gloves would be shiny with my blood, and all the time they’d be thinking how they busted up a pro.”
“What you did back then isn’t important. You’re not an ordinary guy.” The visitor turned and looked behind him, down the slope, his gaze lifting into the stars. Then he looked at Danny Boy again. “What do you see out yonder?”
“Rocks and sand. A desert. Sometimes bad people bringing dope through the ravines.”
“I’m not an ordinary fellow, either, so don’t talk down to me. I came a long way to see you. I’m going to sit down now. But don’t you disrespect me again.”
“I don’t know why you’re talking to me like this,” Danny Boy said.
“Because you just lied to me.”
Danny Boy watched his visitor raise one foot over the plank seat and sit down at the table, his body all angles, like coat hangers, his holstered pistol binding against his belt and thigh, the leather creaking. “I see an ocean sometimes,” Danny Boy said. “I can hear the waves in the wind. Or maybe it’s just the sound the wind makes in the trees. It sounds like water rushing through a canyon.”
When the visitor made no reply, Danny Boy lifted his arm
and pointed. “The turtle eggs used to hatch in the sand, right at the base of those cliffs. If they hatched in the sunlight, the baby turtles would try to run to the surf before the birds got them. Sometimes I hear the sounds the turtles make when the birds have got them in their beaks. Or maybe it’s the birds squeaking.”
“Is that what you see now?”
“Not no more. I see sand and cactus. I ain’t got no power now. You’re him, ain’t you?”
“Depends on who you mean.”
“Him.”
“You lost me. Some folks get around, but I get around a lot. Is that what you mean, a guy who gets around?”
“There ain’t anything here you want.”
“I’ll decide that.”
Danny Boy watched his visitor’s eyes and hands in the starlight. “I’m gonna put my jacket on. It’s cold. At least for this time of year,” he said.