He had to before he could receive communion, that’s how; it was going to be the hardest thing he had ever done. Only by making it an offering for Ned’s victory could he do it.
In the driveway of the church rectory a husky mid-thirties man with dark curly hair had his head under the raised hood of an old junker. In passing, Dunc heard the man’s grunt of satisfaction when the engine coughed into life in the Sunday morning quiet.
The black-haired guy came out from under the hood.
“I’ll meet you at the confessional,” he said.
How had he known? Dunc returned to kneel in the twilight box. The little window slid open. He could dimly see the pries! through the veiled opening.
“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been eight weeks since my last confession...”
The halting whispered phrases took a long time.
“An evil man, son,” said the priest when he had finished. “Come to an evil end.” He paused. “But you didn’t come here to tell me somebody else’s sins. What was yours?”
Hent, all meanness burned out of him by imminent death, was more vivid in memory than he had been in reality.
“I didn’t try to stop it, because I was afraid if he lived he’d come after me next. Even now I don’t know what I should have done.”
“So your soul shut its eyes and has been silent?”
“No. I’ve had dreams. Bad dreams. Nightmares.”
The priest grunted with the same satisfaction he’d shown when his old junker of a car had turned over.
“Life isn’t a book and the people you meet on the road aren’t chapters. It’s real, they’re real...” The priest was silent for a long time, finally sighed. “Say twelve rosaries, son. Don’t just rattle them off. Take a couple of weeks, contemplate the Mysteries, think about what sort of light they might shed on what you’ve experienced. They’re not your penance, they’re just preparation for it...”
He spoke seriously again. It was not like any penance Dunc had ever heard of. He didn’t know where to begin.
“I... I’ll try, Father.”
“No. You’ll do. You may not recognize the opportunity as it arrives, maybe no one else would, either, but when the time comes you’ll say, ‘This is it!’ and you’ll do it.”
On Monday it was up at four for ten miles of trotting, fast walking, occasional sprints on the soft sand track that would not give them shinsplints like hard-surface city streets. If not twice around the horse paddock, then a single huge loop through the chilly desert on a narrow Jeep track.
The desert runs were pure magic. Ned’s hulking silhouette gaining definition until the risen sun cast their shadows long and thin beyond them. The thud of their shoes, the raucous call of a flicker arrowing above them. Invariably advice.
“Breathe through the nose. Keep your lips pressed tight together. Mouth breathers don’t got no real stamina.”
Once they saw a roadrunner with the curved beak and crazy tufted head feathers made familiar by the cartoons, beating a foot-long lizard on a rock with swift sideways jerks of its head. It dropped its prey, crowed like a rooster, grabbed up the limp reptile crosswise in its beak, and dashed off into the desert.
They saw a lot of black-tailed jackrabbits, and a couple of times glimpsed coyotes far off on a hillside. It was Ned who spotted a desert tortoise one morning when they were crossing a deep dry wash called a barranca in this part of the country.
His high-domed shell was deeply incised in concentric diamond shapes with orange centers. He trundled his slow way across the yielding sand floor, totally ignoring the two men. Deep within his 300 million years of dim genetic memories were dinosaurs and great armored fish and pterodactyls, the rise of mountains, the drying up of vast shallow inland seas...
Human beings? What were they?
In the barn they would put on their gloves and spar, working on combinations whose geometry was baffling. Feint with the right, hit with the left. Feint twice with the right...
“The old bare-knuckle brawlers could last a hundred, two hundred rounds ’cause when they threw a fist, they had their elbows out and their thumbs down.”
Dunc threw fists thumb-down until his arms were lead.
“Hell, kid, you’re arm-hitting. Do this.” Ned’s fists flew, Dunc went backward into the ropes, head ringing, covering up. “Good! Good! When I’m comin’ at you, go into your shell.”
In teaching the kid, Ned knew he was reinforcing for himself what he already knew. It would take all his skill, all his guile, all his knowledge, to win this one. His blows traveled no more than a foot, some of his hardest only six inches. His whole body threw his uppercuts. Nitro Ned.
“The left hand delivers the mail, the right covers your chin an’ explodes when the time comes.”
Sometimes he just stood there with his arms at his sides, bobbing and weaving. He slipped most of Dunc’s head shots, and those he took, he took going away, so their force was dissipated.
“Don’t dance — shuffle. You’re a bear, not Fred Astaire.”
By telling Dunc his most cherished secret, he told himself.
“When you throw that right at his jaw, you shift your left foot four inches to the side. If he’s throwin’ a right at your jaw, too, you’ll connect an’ hell go over your shoulder.”
Late in the afternoon Ned would spar between five and ten rounds in the outside ring, never pulling a punch or asking his opponent to do so. There were knockdowns and two broken jaws.
After all that work, play.
Dunc dropped Ned, then parked. He had started calling the little gray Ford Grey Ghost Two, in honor of his original Grey Ghost. Inside, the Gladiator was the same: no Lana Turner, no fat man; but a woman playing the slots, Nicky behind the bar.
“Hey, the fuckin’ ginger ale!” and splashed it all over the cuff of his pink shirt. He shook his wet arm, cursing. “Fucking French cuff. Fucking rolled collar.” He ran a finger around the inside of his rolled collar. “Goddamn wife bought me nine of these things for my birthday, they cost me $189, tailor-made. So goddamn mad, I said to her, ‘I love ya, baby, but you ever do that again I’ll break your fucking neck.’ ”
“The shirt fits you great,” said Dunc.
“Like hell. A guy like me with two chins, f’Chrissake, it makes me look like I got no neck.”
“You do got no neck.”
Pepe had appeared, laughing, moving like a dancer, supple and graceful. He shook hands with Dunc.
“Where’s the freeloaders?” Dunc asked. Nicky didn’t answer. “You know,” he persisted, “the fat guy and the blonde.”
Nicky didn’t answer. Pepe beckoned Dunc back to the piano.
“She pissed him off royally, he slapped her around, made a phone call, and nobody’s seen her since.” He played a few bars of the Marche Funèbre. “It’s a big desert out there, Dunc.” He immediately slid into “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue” and added, “The record producer’s due in town tomorrow.”
“You’re gonna knock him dead.”
Dunc carried the tray of drinks back to the poker players.
“What’s with him an’ Davenport?” asked Nicky.
“The son Nitro Ned never had,” said Pepe.
After delivering the drinks, he wandered, stopping to become Henri’s first customer at the blackjack table.
“Where’s Sabine?”
“Her divorce came through. She left.” Henri shook his head and chuckled. “With the bouncer from next door.”
“Hung like a bull?” asked Dunc.
“Shit, kid, don’t rub it in!” laughed Henri.
The casino was filling up. A woman in shorts and a T-shirt over pendulous breasts, loose flesh hanging on her legs and a face trashed by excess, turned to her husband with a hand out.