Butterfly (27 page)

The first name on Danny’s secret “hit” list was Simon Waddell—
Doctor
Simon

Waddell.

There were six other names on the list: the sergeant at Fort Ord who had put Danny

on report for fighting, which had led to the stockade and ultimately to a dishonorable dis-

charge; a schoolteacher who had once whipped Danny with a strap in front of the whole

class; a girl his own age who had once laughed at him because he had a tear in the seat of

his pants; and so on—men and women who had touched Danny’s life at some point in

his twenty-two years and who had done something to him that needed to be paid back.

No one crossed Danny Mackay and got away with it.

Dr. Simon Waddell didn’t know about the list, didn’t even know Danny Mackay

existed. But he was the man Danny most wanted to get even with. And Danny knew

where to find him.

Danny smiled at his reflection in the mirror as he pulled down a perfect curl and

combed it over his forehead. It always took Danny an hour to get dressed: he was metic-

ulous down to the last detail. No threads hanging, no buttons missing, no crease out of

place. He might not be rich yet, but he had the look, and the power—that wasn’t yet his

either, but it too was in the carefully cultivated look.

You’re a dynamite-looking dude,
Danny said to his image.
You son of a West Texas

sharecropper!

He whistled as he smoothed back the sides of his head and made sure there wasn’t a

hair out of place. Danny was in a cocksure mood this morning; he had graduated from

night school yesterday. With honors. Now he was a man with a diploma and the sure

knowledge of where he was going.

As he picked up the cuff links that lay on the dresser and fastened them to his starched

cuffs, he gazed at the battered book that also lay on the dresser. It was Danny’s bible; it

went with him wherever he went. He had memorized it.

The only sure way to possess a conquered city,
Machiavelli had written,
is by destroying it.

Danny carried that lesson one step further: You can totally possess anything only by

destroying it—whether a city, an object, or a human being.

And there were cities and objects and human beings Danny definitely wanted to possess.

But first he had to find his road. The goal he already knew—to be the man with the

power; now all he had to do was discover the way to get there.

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Kathryn Harvey

He whistled as he finished dressing. He tapped his foot and moved his head this way

and that. In three years Danny had become charged with even more restless energy. He

could not be still for a moment. Strangers who met him sensed a vaguely disquieting edge

in the handsome young man with the sly, compelling eyes. He seemed at times to be

relaxed, in the laziness of his gaze and the drawl with which he spoke, but he was hyper-

active, and looked like a young man constantly flirting with the brink. Danny liked this

look, he maintained it, because he knew it made him appear unpredictable, a man to be

wary of. It also gave him power over people.

Before he left his room he paused to give himself one last sideways smile in the mirror.

The world was out there waiting for him. No more supplying girls and booze to the horny

flyboys at Lackland Air Force Base. No more penny-ante jobs like driving trucks or selling

encyclopedias door to door. It was time to get moving.

“Remember my name,” he had said to that stupid bitch Rachel a year ago, the night

he threw her out of his car. “Danny Mackay. A man the whole world is going to know.”

And,
he added now as he walked out into the warm evening,
a man the world is going

to learn to fear.

He drove to Hazel’s, where a few of the girls, in kimonos or baby doll pajamas, were

lounging around the TV set watching Milton Berle. Two sat with customers, making

phony sweet talk. Hazel was serving bad liquor at cutthroat prices, and handing out

Eulalie’s thick ham sandwiches at two bits apiece. Pulling out his Camels, he lit one and

went through the back door into the kitchen. Eulalie was there listening to
Davy Crockett

on the radio and cleaning up after a supper of crunchy-crusted roast pork, mashed potatoes

and gravy, and hot peach pie. Sometimes Danny would come around mornings, and there

would be thick slabs of bacon sizzling in a pan, with slices of tomato frying along with it in

the grease. One thing about Hazel—you couldn’t say she didn’t feed her girls right.

“Howdy there, Eulalie,” he said as he sauntered to the fridge and got himself an ice-

cold grape Nehi.

“It’s a hot one tonight, Mr. Danny,” she said, wiping her face as she whipped the

dough for her famous pound cake. By midnight, along with the blackberry wine, it would

all be gone. Men had more than one appetite that needed feeding, old Eulalie knew.

“Been eatin’ dust all day.”

He pulled out a chair, turned it around, swung one leg over it and sat on it backward,

leaning on the cane back and thumbing through the
San Antonio Light
that lay on the

table. “What do you think of these here niggers in Alabama, Eulalie?” he said, shaking his

head. “Trying to ride white folks’ buses.”

“Won’t nothin’ but bad come of it, Mr. Danny. Folks gotta know their place. There’s

your black coloreds at the bottom, and then your light coloreds, and then your trash and

finally your quality on top. That’s the way it always was, the way it always was meant to

be.”

Danny didn’t listen to her. He knew which category she placed him in: trash. As far as

Eulalie was concerned, quality had never once set foot across Hazel’s well-worn threshold.

There had been a time when Danny never read a paper or bothered with the news. But

that had been before he had gone back to school. Now the makeup of the world and what

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made it turn were the focus of his interest. Studying his target and knowing his competi-

tion better than they knew themselves was what was going to make Danny rise above his

mean beginnings.

Born in 1933, Danny Mackay was one of seven children of a transient sharecropper

and his sickly wife. Danny had never known anything but poverty, from his earliest mem-

ory of nights when they took their beds outside, hoping to catch a breeze, to reporting for

duty at Fort Ord, California. He and his brothers and sisters always went barefoot and

wore overalls with no shirts. They never even had a real comb for their hair, but used a

curry comb, the kind used on animals. When they walked together, into the nearest small

town or to the local grammar school, the Mackay kids always walked with their heads

down because they knew they weren’t as good as the other kids. And they moved—Lord,

how they moved. It was the Great Depression and, like thousands of other families on the

roam for jobs, Augustus Mackay dragged his ragtag brood across Oklahoma, Arkansas,

down into Texas, and eventually into the Hill Country, where he found temporary jobs

on sharecropping farms. They would live in clapboard shacks with gaps between the sid-

ing boards and no electricity, and the outhouse was just a hole in the ground. If Augustus

Mackay failed to produce a good crop, the landowner would call the sheriff and have the

family evicted, and they’d move on like before, heads down, beaten.

Danny didn’t grow up on the Hardy boys and Jack London, like the quality boys of

the middle class; he was fed on pulp magazines. And his sisters weren’t expected to be edu-

cated at all, so they developed animal instincts and learned to make their way on those,

which was how they came to be referred to as “those dirty girls.”

His only prized possession as a boy was a nigger-shooter, which he’d made out of a

forked stick and two pieces of rubber from an old inner tube. He’d take himself far away

from the squalor and hopelessness and spend hours taking potshots at birds with it, using

pebbles. He learned that by being a loner he was in a class by himself, that he had no one

above him to look down on him, that he had no peers to judge him. In his solitary world

there was no such thing as trash or quality, no remembering how to act around your bet-

ters. There was just the endless Texas sky and the eternally blowing wind and a bewildered

little boy. In all those lonely years, however, there had been one other person in Danny

Mackay’s life.

And he loved her with a ferocity that was close to obsession.

“You help yourself to some of that there pie, Mr. Danny,” Eulalie said as she put the

pound cake in the oven. “Them apples was so sweet I didn’t have to put no sugar in.”

Danny helped himself to a large wedge. In all of San Antonio he knew of no woman

who made pie like old Eulalie did.

Someone started to sing “The Yellow Rose of Texas” on the radio while Danny read

about Eisenhower’s heart attack.

Not that he cared about the president’s health. What Danny cared about, was totally

absorbed and fascinated with, was the presidency. Now
there
was real power. In the right

hands the power of the presidency could become something almost unimaginable. And

Danny saw himself as that man.

The song intruded upon his thoughts.

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Kathryn Harvey

It wasn’t a sad song, but the reference to a Texas rose made Danny put down the news-

paper and gaze at the wall, a forkful of pie forgotten in his hand.

He had called
her
that. His Texas rose.

When had he first noticed it, that his mother was the most beautiful woman in the

world? At what age had he looked up from the bare kitchen table and seen her for the first

time, suddenly no longer just his ma but a delicate, fading flower, like a rose among dan-

delions? He had a dim memory of sitting in a cold shack, the boards rattling all around

them, the two younguns crying in their box, the three older ones huddled beneath a

patchwork quilt, trying to get warm. And his ma bent over a stove that barely worked,

stirring something, her face illuminated in a peculiar kind of glow. Of course, it wouldn’t

be until years later that he learned that her frailty and bewitching luminosity were due to

tuberculosis, and that her cheeks flamed not with health but with fever. But by then

Danny Mackay would be so desperately in love with her that he saw only the beauty in

which she walked.

Lord, she had a way about her. It was as if a kind of pride burned flamelike and so

steadily deep within her soul that no amount of Texas dust and heat and wind could blow

it out. She took pain silently, she suffered hunger without complaining, she accepted

charity with dignity, and she taught her son to find worth within himself, and not to walk

with his head bowed. “You’ve got to make something of yourself, son,” she used to say in

her soft-spoken way. “Your pa can’t read and that’s why we’re poor. But I want better for

you and the little uns. I know you hate school, but it’s what’s going to get you ahead in

life. When you’re educated, no one can call you trash.” No matter what chore she was at,

if it was mending their clothes or fixing a meal of sowbelly, black-eyed peas, and molasses,

she did it with a kind of nobility, young Danny thought as he watched her long, slender

hands and the delicate curve of her neck. She didn’t hold to the belief that one was either

quality or trash. “All people are the children of God, Danny,” she would say in her gentle,

melodious voice. “It’s what you do with yourself that counts.”

It was for her that Danny ever attended school, going barefoot the many miles to sit in

a stifling hot classroom and being the butt of other boys’ pranks. He suffered education

for her, he stayed out of trouble for her, he dreamed for her. One day, he vowed with

almost every breath he took, he was going to make something of himself and come back

and take her away from the failed and useless Augustus and set her up in a house complete

with a garden and colored help.

Danny didn’t know anything about New Deals in those days, or government schemes to

bring medical care to the depressed rural areas. He didn’t know that the doctors who came

out in their Chevrolets were paid a subsidy by an agency called the FSA and that Danny and

his family were a statistic. All he knew was that there was nothing those men in their black

suits and stethoscopes could do for his mother, and that once Augustus Mackay couldn’t

even pay his small share of the doctor’s fee they stopped coming, and so his mother had to

turn to local healers for the traditional “nanny tea” and bleeding. That didn’t help either.

It was snowing the night she lay dying, and Danny was all alone with her.

The younguns were all asleep and tucked in the giant iron bed that was pushed against

the wall, where yellow newspaper had been plastered over the gaps. Pa and the two older

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119

ones that were left (Becky had run off with a farm-equipment salesman) had gone the three

miles to the landowner’s house in the hope of talking him into letting them stay through

the winter. His wife was sick, Augustus would be telling the man, and the children had