Duncan Delaney and the Cadillac of Doom (2 page)

A cake with twenty-one candles sat there beside a box wrapped in silver paper. Inside the box was a card from Fiona and a black Stetson with a wide brim and a woven green ribbon. He put the hat on and looked in the mirror behind the table. He looked ridiculous. He loved it.

Just when I’m convinced she’s the world’s biggest bitch,
Duncan thought as he fiddled with the hat,
she does something to remind me of how much I love her
.

He lit the candles and blew them out. He forgot to make a wish. He got a plate and a fork and cut a thick slice. It took three swallows before he realized it was graham cracker cake, his childhood favorite, and he knew Fiona had baked it from scratch, like when he was a child. Duncan stopped smiling.

The last time Fiona had baked graham cracker cake was two months short of twelve years before, on the day that, for no good reason, Sean Delaney had allowed himself to be blown to pieces so small that what was finally found of him and put in a seven-foot brass casket could have just as easily been buried in an Italian boot box.

Duncan dreamed a nine-year-old boy playing in a haystack behind a barn beneath a moist August sky filled with clouds and thunder. He dreamed he was that child. He dreamed his father drove up to the barn in a white sixty-five Cadillac convertible.

“Hey, Duncan,” Sean Delaney said as he got out of the car.

“Hi, dad! Nice car.”

“Hi, Mr. Delaney,” Tiffy said.

Duncan was surprised to find her in the hay beside him. Tiffy was a big, beautiful blond with chocolate eyes and strawberry lips and, in the dream, she was twenty-one and naked except for a pair of Italian boots and the black Stetson on her head. She winked at Duncan.

“Hey!” Duncan said. “That’s my hat!”

“Forget about the hat, boy,” Sean said. “We need to talk.”

Tiffy grabbed Duncan and pulled his head between her breasts. “Don’t listen to him, Duncan! He’s dead!”

Duncan pulled free. “He is not!”

Sean smiled and took Duncan’s hand. He was a wide, red-haired man with jackhammer arms and hydraulic lifts for legs, barely as tall as Fiona, but he was young and strong and clearly alive. He had left Ireland at sixteen, made a fortune in Wyoming uranium by twenty, married that year, and saw Duncan born the next.

“Actually,” Sean said as he led Duncan to the creek, “I am dead.”

There had been a dearth of precipitation that year and, despite the clouds and the threat of rain, the ranch was mostly brown. But the Delaney’s creek was fed by a spring and the bank where they sat was green and cool. Sean plucked a blade of grass and put it between his teeth.

“You’ve got hard times ahead, son,” he said. “Take Tiffy back there.”

Duncan looked. Tiffy jumped up and down in the hay. She was still naked and her breasts swayed in a much more than simple harmonic motion. She appeared to be stomping on his Stetson.

“Hey!” Duncan jumped up. “That’s my hat!”

Sean Delaney slapped the back of Duncan’s head.

“Ouch,” said Duncan.

“Never mind your stupid hat, boy. I’m trying to tell you something important.”

Duncan sat. “Sorry, dad.”

“Tiffy doesn’t love you,” Sean said, his voice a soft Irish breeze. “She never really has.”

“Sure she does!”

Sean squeezed Duncan’s shoulder and smiled sadly. “I don’t expect you to believe me, lad,” he said in the dream. “Not yet. But when it happens, remember I warned you. And remember this, too: you will love again.”

A jet from the Air Force base in Cheyenne broke the sound barrier above the ranch and Duncan looked up to watch it pass. When he turned back his father, Tiffy, and the Cadillac were gone.

Duncan awoke to rain and thunder. He lay in bed and wondered what Sean Delaney would think of him now. The only worthwhile things he had done in his twenty-one years were paint with Benjamin and fornicate with Tiffy. His father would probably be proud of the first and impressed with the second. But what would he think of Fiona’s ultimatum?

He would spit in the dirt.

All his life Sean Delaney had asked for nothing and expected less. But Fiona preferred the safe way, and Duncan was as much her son as he was Sean’s. He lay in bed, fears chasing hopes through his head like dogs after rabbits. He watched lightning strike through his window. He listened to thunder and the rain against his roof. He closed his eyes.

It took him a long time to fall asleep again.

Duncan spent the next morning doing chores. He mended fence on the west end and dug out a drainage ditch clogged with branches and mud after the hard rain of the night before. At one o’clock he read the help wanted ads as he ate a grilled cheese sandwich and drank a beer. None of the ads interested him and he threw the paper in the trash. He called Tiffy three times but she never answered.

After lunch he cleared brush from around the stable and tended the horses. He saddled his mare and rode out to the Circle D’s lone oil rig, where he greased the pump and checked the motor. The well produced less than ten barrels a day, but Fiona wanted to do her part to reduce America’s reliance on foreign oil. Duncan was glad to tend the pump. He wanted to do his part too. He was riding back to the stable when a flash of sun on metal caught his eye. He reined his horse and circled until he saw the glint again. He followed the reflection across the grass to the edge of what was once a good-sized crater.

It was not much now, maybe seventy feet across, a shallow, grassy soup bowl in the earth with a rainwater puddle in the middle. Duncan got down from the mare and plucked a silver earring from the grass. It was an inch long and shaped like a jumping trout with small sapphire eyes. He knelt and looked around him, the wet grass soaking unnoticed into his jeans.

The air force people did a good job cleaning up after the crash, but in the twelve years since, Duncan had found numerous jagged metal pieces and Plexiglass shards and lengths of melted wire. When he was ten, he found a tooth there. He had cried until Woody convinced him it was a buffalo molar. That took some time, because it was a big tooth, and Duncan remembered his father as a giant. He had not gone there for a long time after because of the things he might find.

But the scorched earth had grown back green and twelve winters had washed the rocks clean and neither grass nor rocks had been black for years. All that remained of the crash was a grassy rut where the jet had plowed the prairie, leading to a dent in the earth where it finally exploded in a brilliant, futile burst. Duncan dropped the earring in his pocket, mounted the mare, and started back to the house.

Duncan had just walked through the front door when he heard the Purgatory Truck turn off the highway. He popped two beers and stepped onto the porch. Benjamin braked in a dusty whirlwind and leaped out. He stopped when he reached the porch steps.

“Jesus God!” Benjamin declared. “And Fiona says I stink!”

Duncan gave him a beer and went to his room. The earring fell from his pocket when he took off his jeans. He set it beside a picture of him and Tiffy taken at the rodeo when they were high school seniors. Neither had changed much since, though Duncan shaved twice a week now instead of twice a year, and Tiffy spent more on clothes. He went into his bathroom, turned on the water, and stepped under the shower. He soaped and rinsed and dried himself with a thick, lavender-scented towel. He called Tiffy but she still did not answer. He put on clean jeans, got his beer, and went outside. Benjamin sat on the porch, his lips stretched and showing teeth like a hungry coyote.

Duncan sat beside him. “What are you so happy about?”

Benjamin laid six one-hundred dollar bills on the porch.

Duncan looked up. “Who’d you rob this time?”

“Nobody. That’s for your painting of my family!”

Benjamin handed a card to Duncan.
Angela Moncini, Artists’ Agent,
it said in a fine black script. The address above the phone number was on Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills.

“She wants you to call her.” Benjamin closed his eyes. “She is beautiful as the night and smells like rain.” He opened his eyes and his smile faded. “I think I love her.”

Benjamin threw his beer high into the yard. The bottle hit the dirt with a thud and rolled in the dust. It stopped in a beetle’s path. The oppressed insect tarried and contemplated this new impediment in the immutable course of its existence.

“But I do not wish to speak of it,” Benjamin said.

“All right.”

Duncan picked the bottle up. The beetle slowly and with vast dignity went on its way.

“I would, however, like another beer.”

“These were the last.”

“So what are you going to do about it?”

Duncan thought hard. He considered what would happen if he left and what would happen if he stayed. The first prospect terrified him and the second was depressing.

“It’s not a trick question,” Benjamin said.

Duncan made up his mind. “Go to Los Angeles.”

“What I meant was what are you going to do about the beer.”

“Oh.” Duncan stood. “Well, go get some, I guess.”

He went inside and put on his new Italian boots, a t-shirt, and a brown leather jacket. He stopped at the door and went back to get his Stetson.

“Nice hat,” Benjamin said when Duncan got in the truck.

“Birthday present from Fiona.”

“No kidding.” Benjamin slipped the truck into gear. “The bitch did something nice for a change, didn’t she?”

“Yup.” Duncan pulled the hat down over his eyes. “She sure did.”

“I parked on Highway Thirty a few miles east of Medicine Bow,” Benjamin told Duncan on the way to town. “It’s always been a good spot to catch tourists heading for Cheyenne. I set the cowboy painting against a fender and sat in a folding chair in the shade of my truck. No one stopped the first hour, so I leaned the painting against the other fender and moved my chair. No one stopped the second hour, so I set the painting in the chair and leaned against the fender. When no one stopped the third hour I began to worry. Your work always sold within thirty minutes. Then it came to me. It was karma. I told you I would sell both paintings. The lie worked against me. I smacked myself on the forehead. It hurt, but I deserved it.”

“Don’t think I don’t appreciate that,” Duncan said.

“I leaned the picture of my family against my bumper,” Benjamin continued. “Just as I sat down a woman in a Mercedes roared past. She wore dark glasses, but from her profile I could tell that she was beautiful. Brake lights came on. I sat up. She made a U-turn. I stood. She stopped across the highway. I carried your paintings to her.

“She was tall and her hair was dark. Her lips were thin but her mouth was wide and her bones supported a body bordering on amazing. She looked to be forty, but a good forty.

“
‘My penis is a rattler striking in the night,’
I told her.

“
‘One of those Zen Indian sayings no doubt.’
Her voice was wind across a deep lake.

“
‘Arapaho,’
I told her.

“
‘Gesundheit,’
she said.

“She pointed at the painting of my family. She told me she only had six hundred, and asked me if that would do. I took the money and gave her the painting. I swam in her gray eyes.

“
‘I want to be your love slave,’
I said.

“
‘Thank you,’
she replied,
‘but that won’t be necessary.’

“She gave me her business card and told me to have you come see her in Los Angeles. I stood in the center of the highway and watched her drive away. Death in the form of a semi hauling melons from California to Nebraska missed me by inches, its horn a blast of hot wind. I took the hint and got out of Death’s way and went back to the Purgatory Truck.

“I doused your black velvet painting of me and Woody with gasoline and threw it on the asphalt. I touched a match to it and watched it burn. Then I got in the Purgatory Truck and headed for the Circle D.” Benjamin shrugged. “Now you know as much as I do.”

“Wrong,” Duncan said, “I finished high school.”

Benjamin pulled into the parking lot of a Lazy Rancher Market and shut off the engine. They got out and went inside. Benjamin stood by the door and stared at the clerk, a fat, balding man of forty-five with a raw neck and a tattoo of a snake on his forearm. His name was Leroy Kern, and ten years before he had accused Benjamin of stealing a Milky Way, beating him with a yardstick when he could not find the candy bar. Nothing came of it. Benjamin had been picked up for shoplifting before.

If he didn’t rate a beating today,
the sheriff had said,
he’ll rate one tomorrow
.

“What’s his problem?” Leroy Kern asked Duncan. He had forgotten about the Milky Way a long time past.

“Beats me.”

Duncan was not feeling particularly verbose. He was upset that Benjamin had burned the cowboy and Indian painting. He took a case of beer from the cooler and a cheese pizza from the freezer. He grabbed a bag of corn chips and went to the counter. Leroy Kern rang him up.

“Tell him I got a gun,” he said, one eye on Benjamin.

Duncan took a box of miniature chocolate donuts from a rack beside the counter and put it with the beer. He glanced at Benjamin.

“He’s got a gun,” he said. Benjamin kept staring.

“I’m not afraid to use it neither. Killed a punk who came in here four years ago.”

He held up a yellowed newspaper clipping containing a photograph of Leroy Kern behind the counter, a smirk on his gap-toothed face and a forty-five Colt in his hand.
Blood Bath at the Lazy Rancher,
the caption said.

“Did I ever show you this?”

“Only about twenty-seven times.”

Leroy Kern put the clipping back under the counter and held up the chips. “You see how much these were?”

“One ninety-nine.”

Leroy Kern rang up the chips. “He was a heroin addict from New York on his way to lotus land to play guitar in a rock band. He pulled a knife and I blew his brains across the dairy section. Three rounds between the eyes. You tell him that.”