Lay Down My Sword and Shield

CHAPTER 10

The streets in town were half-filled with water when the vans arrived at the courthouse. Beer cans and trash floated along next to the curb, and the lawn was strewn with broken branches and leaves from the oaks. The deputies, now wearing slickers and plastic covers on their hats, formed us into a long line, two abreast, while the rain beat in our faces, and marched us into the courthouse. The booking room was small, and it took them three hours to fingerprint everyone and sort out the shoelaces, belts, pocket change, and wallets into brown envelopes. Most of the charges were for trespassing or failure to keep fifty feet apart on a picket line, but after the deputy had rolled my fingers on the ink pad the sheriff filled out my charge sheet personally and he wrote for five minutes. I dripped water onto the floor and looked at his steel-rimmed glasses and the red knots and bumps on his face. His fingers were pinched white on the pencil, and toward the bottom of the page he pressed down so hard that he punctured the paper.

Then he picked up a cigarette from the desk and lit it.

“You want to hear them?” he said.

“I bet you have a whole bunch,” I said.

“Assault and battery on a law officer, obstructing an officer in the line of duty, resisting arrest, inciting to riot, and I’m holding a couple of charges open. You ain’t going to get this shifted to no federal court, either. You’re going to be tried right here in this county, and maybe you’ll find out a lawyer’s shit stinks like everybody else’s.”

“I have a phone call coming.”

“It’s out of order.”

“It rang five minutes ago.”

“Take him downstairs,” he said to the trusty.

I was locked in the drunk tank at the end of the stone corridor in the basement. The room was crowded with men, wringing out their clothes on the concrete floor. Their dark bodies shone in the dim light. There were two toilets crusted with filth, without seats, in the corner, and the drunks who had been arrested during the weekend still reeked of sour beer and muscatel. Through the bars I could see the screened cage where I had talked with Art, and the row of cells with the food slits in the iron doors. The stone walls glistened with moisture, and the smoke from hand-rolled cigarettes gathered in a thick haze on the ceiling. An old man in Jockey undershorts, with shriveled skin like lined putty, walked to the toilet and began retching.

Rie had been put with the other women into a second holding room on the other side of the wall. Someone had drilled a small hole in the mortar between the stones, and a Mexican man had his face pressed tightly against the wall, talking to his wife, while a line of other men waited their turn behind him. I wanted to talk with Rie badly, but the line grew longer, and often in the confusion of names and voices the two right people could never get on the opposite sides of the hole at the same time. Twice during the afternoon a deputy, dripping water from his slicker, brought in another prisoner, and each time the door clanged open a tough, bare-chested kid, who was waiting to do a six-year jolt in Huntsville, shouted out from the back of the room, “Fresh meat!” At five o’clock the trusty wheeled in the food cart with our tin plates of spaghetti, string beans, bread, and cups of Kool-Aid, and after the group of men had thinned away from the wall I tried to talk through the hole to a Mexican woman on the other side, but she couldn’t understand English or my bad Spanish, and I gave up.

That night I dragged my tick mattress against the door and lay with my face turned toward the bars to breathe as much air as I could out of the corridor and avoid the odor of the open toilets and the sweet, heavy smell of perspiration. I had one damp cigar left, and I smoked it on my side and looked at the row of gray iron doors set in the rock. Mojo was in lockdown behind one of them, and once I thought I saw the flash of his black face through a food slit. I had never been more tired. I was used up physically the way you are after you’ve thrown every pitch you have in a ten-inning game. There was a raised water blister on my neck from the cigar burn, and a swollen ridge across the side of my head, like a strip of bone, where the boy had caught me with the freight pin. I fell asleep with the dead cigar in my hand, and I slept through until morning without having one dream or even a half-conscious, nocturnal awareness of where I was, as though I had been lowered through the stone into some dark underground river.

I heard the trusty click the food cart against the bars and throw the big lock on the door. The fried baloney, grits, and coffee steamed from the stainless-steel containers, and the men were rising from their tick mattresses, hawking, spitting, and relieving themselves in the toilets, or washing their spoons under the water tap before they formed into line. I had to move my mattress for the trusty to push the cart inside, and when I stood up I realized that I felt as rested and solid as a man in his prime. But it took me a moment to believe the man I saw walking down the stone corridor with the sheriff by his side. He wore yellow waxed cowboy boots, a dark striped western suit, with a watch chain hooked on his handtooled belt, a bolo tie, a cowboy shirt with snap buttons on the pockets, and a short-brim Stetson hat on the back of his head. He didn’t have an undershirt on, and I could see the hair on his swollen stomach above his belt buckle, and his round face was as powdered and smooth as a baby’s. There wasn’t another man in Texas who dressed like that. It was R. C. Richardson, all right.

“Hack, have you lost your goddamn mind? What the hell are you doing in here?” he said, in his flat, east Texas, Piney Woods accent.

“R.C., you old sonofabitch,” I said.

“I was down here buying leases, and I come back to the motel last night and turned on the television, and I couldn’t believe it. What you trying to do to yourself, boy?”

“Get a bondsman, R. C.”

“I already done that. I got his ass out of bed at midnight, but he wouldn’t come till this morning. Do you know the bail they set on you? Ten thousand dollars. I swear to God if you ain’t a pistol, Hack.”

“I tell you, Mr. Richardson,” the sheriff said, “if you go this man’s bond, you’re also going to be responsible for him, because I don’t want to see him again.”

“Well, I guarantee you he won’t be no trouble,” R.C. said. “We might shoot on across the border this afternoon and try the chili, then go on back to DeWitt.”

“R.C., are you going to turn the key on me or just drip water on the floor?” I said.

“Hold on, son. That man will be here in a minute,” he said. “I told him I’d put a boot up his ass if he wasn’t here five minutes after I walked through that door.”

“Bail the rest of them out, too,” I said.

“You know that brother of yours is right. The whiskey’s getting up in your brain.”

“R.C., how many years have I kept you out of prison?”

“Goddamn, how much money do you think I carry around with me?”

“Enough to buy this county and a couple of others.”

“Hack, I can’t do that. There must be fifty people in there.”

“There’s more in the next room,” I said.

“And they’ll be spread all over Mexico when they’re supposed to be in court.”

“Will you stop screwing around and just do it?”

“If you ain’t a pistol, the craziest goddamn man I ever met. All right, but I’m going to send your brother a bill for a change, and it’s going to bust his eyeballs.”

“Good, and give me a cigar while you’re at it.”

The bondsman arrived, and R.C. wrote out a check on the stone wall for the whole amount. The bondsman, a small man with greed and suspicion stamped in his face, thought he was either drunk or insane. He held the check between his fingers with the ink still drying and looked at R.C. incredulously.

“Call the First National Bank in Dallas collect and use my name,” R.C. said, “or I’ll find me another man right fast.”

We had to wait ten minutes, then the sheriff opened the doors to both holding rooms and the corridor was filled with people, laughing and talking in Spanish. A deputy unlocked one of the cells set back in the wall, and Mojo stepped out barefoot in the light, blinking his red eyes, with his stringless shoes in his hands.

“What happened?” he said. “The Man get tired of us already?”

A Mexican man put his arm around Mojo’s shoulders and pulled him into the crowd walking toward the stairwell. The Mexican spoke no English, but he pointed his thumb into his mouth in a drinking motion.

“There you go, brother,” Mojo said.

The sheriff glared at us all, the red knots on his face tight against the skin.

I came up behind Rie and slipped my arm around her waist, and kissed the cool smoothness of her cheek. She turned her face up to me and I kissed her again and ran my hand through her hair.

“How did you do it, babe?” she said.

“I want you to meet R. C. Richardson,” I said.

R.C. lifted off his Stetson with a slow, exact motion and let it rest against his pants leg, and bent forward with a slight bow and his best look of southern deference to womanhood on his face. He pulled in his stomach and stiffened his shoulders, and for just a moment you didn’t notice the bolo tie and the yellow cowboy boots.

“I’m proud to meet you, miss,” he said.

“Rie Velasquez,” she said, and her eyes smiled at him.

“I was just telling Hack I didn’t have time to eat breakfast this morning, so why don’t we go across the street to the café and see if we can get a steak?”

His eyes were looking over Rie’s face, and I knew that it took everything in him to prevent them from going further. He stepped aside and let us walk in front of him as we followed the crowd upstairs. R.C. was about to begin one of his performances. He had several roles, and he did each of them well: good-natured oilman when he was buying leases; humble Kiwanian and patriot; friend-of-the-boys with a wallet full of unlisted telephone numbers. But now he was a gentleman rancher, somebody’s father, an older friend with his fingers on all the right buttons when you were in trouble. We had to wait for the deputy to find the brown envelopes with our wallets, change, and belts in them. He was young and evidently new to his job, and he had difficulty reading the handwriting of the people who had booked us.

“Snap it up, boy,” R.C. said. “We don’t want to grow no older in this place.”

“R.C., we still have about seventy-five feet to go to the door,” I said.

“You either do a job or you don’t,” he said. “That’s what’s wrong all over this country. Like that little bondsman back there. He don’t spit without sitting down and thinking about it first.”

We signed for our possessions, and R.C. slipped his slicker over Rie’s shoulders. It was still raining hard outside. It came down in curving sheets that swept across the flooded courthouse lawn. Some of the oaks were almost bare, and the leaves floated up against the trunks in islands. Cars and trucks were stalled in the street, the headlight beams weak in the driving rain, and somewhere a horn was stuck and blowing. The neon sign over the café and tavern looked like colored smoke in the wet, diffused light.

R.C. opened up a big umbrella over our heads, and we splashed down the sidewalk toward the café. The air smelled clean and cool, and even the rain, slanting under the umbrella and burning against the skin, felt like an absolution after the day and night in jail. There’s no smell exactly like that of a jail, and when you can leave it behind you and walk out into a rainstorm you feel that the other experience was never really there.

The water in the street was up to our knees, and R.C. held Rie by one arm and covered our heads with the umbrella while exposing his own. The rain sluiced off the brim of his pearl-gray Stetson, his western suit was drenched, his shirt had popped open more above his belt, and his stomach winked out like a roll of wet dough. He was an old crook and a lecher, but I liked him in a strange way — maybe because he had no malice toward anyone, and even in his dishonesty he was faithful to the corrupt system that he served, and his buffoonery lent a little humor to it. Possibly that’s an odd reason to like someone, but I had known much worse men in the oil business than R. C. Richardson.

He opened the door for us, and we went inside with the rain swirling through the screen. Men in cowboy boots and blue jeans were drinking bottles of Pearl and Jax at the counter, a Negro was racking pool balls in back under an electric bulb with a tin shade around it, and the jukebox, with cracks all over the plastic casing, was playing a lament about lost women and the wild side of life. R.C. took off Rie’s slicker and held the chair for her at one of the tables with oilcloth covers tacked around the sides. In his politeness he was awkward, like a man who had been put together with bad hinges, but it was seldom that he was called upon to show manners above those practiced in the Dallas Petroleum Club.

“R.C., you’re not a sonofabitch, after all,” I said.

He looked at me strangely, his thick hands on the tabletop.

“Well, I hope your brother was wearing his brown britches when he watched the late news last night,” he said, then blinked at Rie, his smooth face uncertain. “Excuse me. I forget I ain’t in the oil field sometime.”

She smiled at him, and he took in his breath and opened his fingers. We hadn’t eaten at the jail that morning, and I could smell the pork chops and slices of ham frying on the stove. We ordered steaks and scrambled eggs, with side orders of hash browns and tomatoes.

“You must have put your fist plumb up to the elbow in that man’s stomach,” R.C. said. “I’ve never seen a man dump over that hard. I thought he was going to strangle right there on the ground.”

“The local news boys must have done a good job,” I said.

“They sure as hell did. They got it all. You smiling with handcuffs on and them two cops holding you by each arm. I bet Bailey needed a respirator if he seen that.” R.C. laughed and lit a cigar. “Goddamn, if I wouldn’t mark off all that bail money just to see him trying to get to the phone.”

The waiter brought our steaks and eggs and set a pot of coffee on a napkin in the center of the table. I cut a piece of steak and ate it with a slice of peppered tomato. R.C. was still laughing with the cigar in his mouth.

“You reckon he’s already called the mental ward in Austin?” he said.

“I think it’s been a good morning for you,” I said.

“Hack, you and him have been giving me hell all these years, and by God I don’t get many chances to bail my lawyer out of jail.”

“How bad is it going to be, Hack?” Rie said.

“I don’t know.”

The door opened and the rain swept across the floor. I felt the cool air against my neck.

“Miss Rie, don’t worry about Hack losing in court, because he don’t.”

“It might be a little more difficult this time,” I said.

“I remember once I was almost chopping cotton on Sugarland Farm, and you had the case dismissed in a week.”

I remembered it also — painfully. Four years ago R.C. had drilled into a state-owned oil pool and had bribed three state officials, one of whom went to the penitentiary.

“He walks into court with that white suit, and it don’t take him five minutes to have everybody in the jury box watching him.”

Rie looked at me, and I dropped my eyes.

“Once he got a colored man off for raping a white woman, and I swear to God the jury never even knew why they let him go.”

“It’s almost noon. Let’s have a beer,” I said.

“You know you ain’t going to get any time. Why you let this girl worry?”

“Order some beers.”

“You really think they’re going to put somebody from your family in the penitentiary?”

“Would you shut up, R.C.?”

His face was hurt and embarrassed, and Rie touched my hand under the table.

“You’re giving away all his secrets,” she said. “He hates to admit that he’s anything but a left-handed country lawyer.”

He looked at her eyes, and his face mended as though a breeze had blown across it. He was in love with her, and if I hadn’t been at the table his performance would have grown to absurd proportions.

We finished eating, and R.C. paid the check and left a three-dollar tip on the table. We walked across the flooded street in the rain to his Mercedes, and he opened the car door for Rie and held the umbrella over her head while she got in. The inside panels were covered with yellow rolled leather, and the black seats were stitched with a gold longhorn design, and on top of the dashboard there was an empty whiskey glass and a compass inside a plastic bubble. We drove slowly out of town while the water washed back in waves over the curbs, and R.C. pulled a pint of Four Roses from his coat pocket and offered it to us.

“Well, that’s the first time I ever seen you turn one down,” he said, and he drank from the bottle as though it contained soda water.

The county road that led to the cannery had collapsed in places along the edges from the overflow of ditch water, and the rows in the fields had been beaten almost flat by the rain or washed into humps of mud. The gusts of wind covered the brown water with curls and lines like puckered skin, and the torn cotton and leaves turned in eddies around the cedar fence posts. In the distance I saw a cow trying to lift her flanks out of the mud.

A great section of the cannery roof had been blown away in the storm. The metal was ripped upward in a ragged slash, like a row of twisted knives, and there was a huge black hole where the rest of the roof had been. Picket signs were strewn over the ground by my automobile, and the rain drummed down in a roar on the tin building, the loading platform, and the freight cars. R.C. parked as close as he could to the Cadillac and went around to Rie’s side with the umbrella. His western pants were splattered with mud up to the knees, and drops of water ran down his soft face. He closed the door after her and walked around to the driver’s side with me, the rain thudding on the umbrella.

“Look, Hack, it’s going to take some money to beat this thing,” he said. “I know you got plenty of it, but if you need any more you only got to call. Another thing. You take care of that girl, hear?”

“All right, R.C.”

“One more thing, by God. I think you flushed your political career down the hole, but I felt right proud of you out there. That boy looked like he had muscles in his shit till you come off the ground. I always told Bailey you was crazy but you’re still a goddamn good man.”

He slammed the door and splashed through the mud to his automobile, his face bent downward against the rain. We followed him out through the cannery gate onto the county road, and I saw the empty whiskey bottle sail from his window into the irrigation ditch. Then he floored the Mercedes and sped away from us in a shower of mud and brown water.

“He’s a wonderful man,” Rie said.

“I believe he liked you a little bit, too.”

“Where’s he going?”

“Back to his motel room and get sentimentally drunk in his underwear. Then about dark he’ll drive across the border and try to buy a whole brothel.”

“Couldn’t we ask him over?”

“He’d feel better with the morning intact the way it is. In fact, it would hurt him if he had to continue.”

The collapsed places along the edges of the road were beaded with gravel, and cut back into deepening sinkholes in the center. I could feel the soft ground break under my wheels.

“Was he straight about nobody from your family going to the penitentiary?” she said.

“The deputy already has my civil rights charge against him, and if those camera boys were any good they filmed his knee in my eye, and I can make a hard case against the cops. But there’s a good chance I’ll get disbarred.”

“Oh, Hack.”

I put my arm around her wet shoulders and pulled her close to me.

“Stop worrying about it, babe. My grandfather knocked John Wesley Hardin on his ass with a rifle stock, and Hardin was a lot tougher than the Texas Bar Association.”

“I kept making fun of you about picket lines and the union, and now you might get burned worse than any of us.”

Her back was cold under my arm. I kissed the corner of her eye and squeezed her into me.

“Don’t you know that real gunfighters never lose?” I said.

She put her hand on my chest, and I could feel my heart beat against her palm. She looked up at me once, then pressed her cheek against my shoulder the rest of the way back to town.

The dirt yards in the poor district were covered with water up to the front porches, and the waves from my automobile washed through the chicken-wire fences and rolled against the houses. Tin cans, garbage, and half-submerged tree limbs floated in the ditches, and a dead dog, its skin scalded pink by the rain, lay entangled in an island of trash around the base of a telephone pole. Some of the shingles had been stripped by the wind from the union headquarters roof, and the building itself leaned at an angle on the foundation. I took off my boots, and we waded through the water to the porch.

Mojo and a Mexican man were sitting at the table in the front room with a half-gallon bottle of yellow wine between them. They had melted a candle to the table, and Mojo was heating his glass of wine over the flame. The smoke curled in a black scorch around the glass. His eyes were small and red in the light.

“My brother here is teaching me how to put some fire in that spodiodi,” he said. “You can see it climb up right inside the color. That’s what I been doing wrong all these years. Drinking without no style.”

He drank the glass down slowly, and poured it full again. I could smell the wine all the way across the room.

“This telegram was in the door when I got back from the jail, and a man come by in a taxicab looking for you,” he said. “He didn’t leave no name, but he looked just like you. Except for a minute I thought he had to go to the bathroom real bad.”

I tore open the envelope and read the telegram, dated late last night.

Bailey didn’t bother to sign his name.

“What did the man say?” I said.

“He was going up to the café, and then he was coming back,” Mojo said. “He give me a dollar so I’d be sure to tell you.”

Good old perceptive Bailey, I thought.

“I think we ought to buy that man a glass of this mellow heat when he comes back. He needs it,” Mojo said.

“He needs a new mind,” I said.

Rie went into the back to change clothes. I looked in the icebox for a beer, and then drove the Cadillac down to the tavern and bought a dozen bottles of Jax and a block of ice. I found a tin bucket in the kitchen, and chipped the ice over the bottles. Rie came out of the bedroom dressed in a pair of white ducks, sandals, and a flowered shirt. She had brushed back her gold-tipped hair and had put on her hoop earrings and an Indian bead necklace.

“Hey, good-looking,” I said, and put my arms around her. She pressed her whole body against me, with her arms around my neck, and I kissed her on the mouth, then along her cheek and ear. I could smell the rain in her hair.

“Do you have to leave with him?” she said.

“No.”

“Are you sure, Hack?”

“We’ll give him some of Mojo’s sneaky pete. That’s all he needs.”

She ran her fingertips over the back of my neck and pressed her head hard against my chest.

“Don’t feel that way, babe,” I said. “I just have to talk to him.”

She breathed through her mouth and held me tightly against her. I kissed her hair and turned her face up toward me. Her soldier’s discipline was gone.

“I couldn’t ever leave you, Rie,” I said. “Bailey is down here out of his own compulsion. That’s all there is to it.”

I hadn’t lied to her before, and it didn’t feel good. I picked up the bucket of beer and cracked ice by the bail, and we walked onto the porch and sat in two wicker chairs away from the rain slanting under the eaves. The solid gray of the sky had broken into drifting clouds, and I could see the faint, brown outline of the hills in the distance. The Rio Grande was high and swirling with mud, the surface dimpled with rain, and the tall bank on the Mexican side of the river had started to crumble into the water. I opened two beers and raked the ice off the bottles with my palm.

It had been a long time since I had enjoyed the rain so much. The wind was cool and smelled of the wet land and the dripping trees, and I remembered the times as a boy when I used to sit on the back porch and watch the rain fall on the short cotton. In the distance I could see Cappie’s gray cabin framed in the mist by the river, and even though I couldn’t see the river itself I knew the bass were rising to the surface to feed on the caterpillars that had been washed out of the willows.

“Is he really like you describe him?” Rie said.

“I don’t know. Maybe I’m unfair to him. After our father died he had to take care of the practical things while I played baseball at Baylor, and then I quit college to join the Navy, and he had to finish law school and run the ranch at the same time. He can’t think in any terms now except finances and safe people, and he usually makes bad choices with both of them. Sometimes I’m afraid that if he ever finds out where he’s invested most of his life he’ll shoot himself.”

I drank out of the beer and leaned my chair back against the porch wall. Inside, I could hear Mojo singing, “Hey, hey, baby, take a whiff on me.”

“Do you think that’s why people shoot themselves?” she said.

“I never thought there was anything so bad that it could make a man take his life in seconds. But I do know there are other ways to do it to yourself over long periods of time.”

“Bailey sounds like a sad man.”

“He gets some satisfaction from his tragic view. His comparison of himself with me lets him feel correct all the time.”

“Hey, hey, everybody take a whiff on me,” Mojo sang inside.

I saw a taxicab turn into the flooded street and drive toward us, the yellow sides splattered with mud. The floating garbage and tin cans rolled in the car’s wake.

“Do you want me to go for a drive?” she said.

“No. I want you to meet him. It will be the best thing that’s happened to him in a long time.”

“I feel like I shouldn’t be here, Hack.”

“Who the hell lives here, anyway? He doesn’t, and I sure didn’t ask him down.”

I squeezed her hand, but I saw it made her uncomfortable. The waves from the taxi washed up through the yard and hit against the porch steps. Bailey paid the driver and stepped out the back door into the water. His brown windbreaker was spotted with rain, and the lines in his brow and around his eyes had deepened with lack of sleep. The rims of his eyes were red. In fact, his whole face looked middle-aged, as though he had worked hard to make it that way. He walked up through the water with his head lowered slightly and his mouth in a tight line.

“How you doing, brother?” I said, and took a sip out of the beer.

“I have a plane at the county airport,” he said. He looked straight at me and never turned his head toward Rie.

“Get out of the rain and meet someone and have a beer.”

“We’ll leave your car there. You can fly back and get it later,” he said. His voice had a quiet and determined righteousness to it, the kind of tone that he reserved for particularly tragic occasions, and it had always infuriated me. But I was resolved this time.

“It’s bad weather for a flight, Bailey. You should have waited a day or so,” I said. I was surprised that he had flown at all, because he was terrified of airplanes.

“Do you have anything inside?” he said.

“Not a thing.”

“Then we can be going.”

He was making it hard.

“Would you sit down a minute, for God’s sake?” I said. “Or at least not stand under the eave with rain dripping on your head.”

He stepped up on the porch and wiped his forehead with his palm. He still refused to recognize Rie. I carried a chair over from the other side of the porch and pulled another beer from the ice bucket.

“There. Sit,” I said. “This is Rie Velasquez. She’s the coordinator for the union.”

“How do you do, ma’am?” He looked at her for the first time, and his eyes lingered longer on her face than he had probably wanted them to. She smiled at him, and momentarily he forgot that he was supposed to be a somber man with a purpose.

I opened the bottle of beer and handed it to him. The chips of ice slid down the neck. He started to put the bottle on the porch railing.

“Drink the beer, Bailey. If you had some more of that stuff, you wouldn’t have ulcers.”

“The Senator and John Williams are at the house.”

“John Williams. What’s that bastard doing in my home?”

“He was spending the weekend with the Senator, and he drove down with him this morning.”

“You know the old man wouldn’t let an asshole like that in our back door.”

“He told me he would still like to contribute money to the campaign.”

“You’d better get him out of my house.”

“Why don’t you take care of it yourself? This is my last errand.”

“Do you think we could get that in writing?” I said.

“You don’t know the lengths other people go to for your benefit. The Senator is going to stay with you, and so is Verisa, and I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t feel an obligation to her.”

“What obligation is that, Bailey?” I said.

“I’m going to fix lunch,” Rie said.

“No, stay. I want to hear about this feeling of obligation. What is it exactly, brother?”

His eyes looked quickly at Rie, and he drank out of the beer.

“Don’t worry about decorum or people’s feelings,” I said. “Dump it out on the porch and let’s look at it. You’re doing a swell job so far.”

“I’ll be inside, Hack,” Rie said.

“No, goddamn. Let Bailey finish. He’s saved this up in his head through every air pocket between here and Austin.”

“All right,” he said. “For the seven years of disappointment you’ve given her and the alcoholism and the apologies she’s had to make to people all over the state. A lesser woman would have taken you into court years ago and pulled out your fingernails. Right now she’s under sedation, but that will probably slide past you like everything else in your life does.”

“What do you mean, sedation?” I said.

“She called me up drunk an hour after the television broadcast, and I had to go over to the house with a doctor from Yoakum.”

Rie lit a cigarette and looked out into the rain. Her suntanned cheeks were pale and her eyes bright. I didn’t know why I had forced her to sit through it, and it was too late to change anything now. The wind blew the rain against the bottom of Bailey’s chair.

“How is she now?” I said.

“What do you think? She drank a half bottle of your whiskey, and the doctor had to give her an injection to get her in bed.”

The bottle of beer felt thick in my hand. I wondered what doctor would give anyone an intravenous sedative on top of alcohol.

“She threw away her pills this morning and tried to fix breakfast for the Senator and Williams,” Bailey said. “She almost fell down in the kitchen and I put her to bed again and refilled her prescription.”

“Don’t you know better than to give drugs to people with alcohol in their system?” I said. But he didn’t. His face was a confession of moral earnestness with no awareness of its consequence.

“Go back with him, Hack,” Rie said.

“Bailey, why in the bloody hell do you bring on things like this?” I said.

“Don’t you have it confused?” he said.

“No. You have this talent for turning the simple into a derelict’s hangover.”

“I think you’re shouting at the wrong person.”

“You’ve always got all kinds of cool when you do it, too. Think about it. Isn’t it in moments like these that you’re happiest?”

“I don’t need to listen to this.”

“Hell, no, you don’t. You just dump the hand grenades out on the porch and let other people kick them around.”

“I told you I’m through with this crap, Hack.”

“You’ve been peddling my ass by the chunk to all buyers and bitching about it at the same time, and now you’re through. Is that right, buddy? Frankly, you make me so goddamn mad I could knock you flat out into the yard.”

“Stop it, Hack. Go on back with him,” Rie said. Her face was flushed, and her fingers were trembling on the arm of the wicker chair.

“Should I run a footrace with him down to the airport? Or maybe Bailey can import the whole bunch down here and we can sit on the porch and find out what a sonofabitch I am.”

Rie put her fingers on her brow and dropped her eyes, but I could see the wetness on her eyelashes. None of us spoke. The rain drummed flatly on the shingled roof and ran off the eaves, swinging into the wind. My face was perspiring, and I wiped my forehead on my sleeve and drank the foam out of the bottle. I looked at her again and I felt miserable.

“I’m sorry, babe,” I said.

She turned her head away from Bailey and put an unlit cigarette in her mouth.

“Call me tonight at the beer joint. Somebody will come down for me,” she said.

The wind blew the curls on the back of her neck, and I could see her shoulders shaking. But there was nothing to do or say with Bailey there, and I went inside the screen and asked Mojo to stay with her until I called. When I came back out Bailey was still on the porch.

“I didn’t get out the back door on you,” I said.

But he didn’t understand; he stood against the railing, with the rain blowing across his slacks, as though his physical proximity was necessary to draw me into the automobile. I started to tell him to get in the car and read a road map and not raise his eyes until he heard me open the door, but he would have had something to say about that and we would start back into it all over again. When we drove away Rie was still looking out into the rain with the unlit cigarette in her fingers.

We didn’t speak on the way to the airport. The air conditioner stopped working, and the windows fogged with humidity and the sweat rolled down my face and neck into my shirt. I felt a black anger toward Bailey that you can only feel toward someone you grew up with, and as the heat became more intense in the car I resented every motion that he made. He opened the window and let the rain blow across the leather seats, then he closed it and tried to pull off his windbreaker by the cuffs and hit me against the arm. I turned on the radio and we both listened to a Christian crusade evangelist rant about the communist Antichrist in Vietnam.

The two-engine plane was parked at the end of the runway in three inches of water. The rain beat against the silver, riveted plates of the fuselage, and the wind out of the hills was still strong enough to push the plane’s weight against the anchor blocks around the wheels. In the distance the hills looked as brown and smooth as clay.

The cabin had three metal seats in it, spot-welded to the bulkhead, with old military safety straps, and when the pilot turned the ignition, the electric starter on the port engine wouldn’t take hold. Then the propeller flipped over stiffly several times, black exhaust blew back across the wing, and the whole plane vibrated with the engines’ roar. The backwash from the propellers blew the concrete dry around the plane, and the pilot taxied out slowly on the runway with the nose into the wind. Bailey kept wiping the rainwater and perspiration back through his hair, and his other hand was clenched tightly on his thigh.

“I’m going to jump it up fast,” the pilot said over his shoulder. “There’s bad downdrafts over those hills.”

Bailey reached under his seat and took out a half-pint bottle of sloe gin in a paper sack. He didn’t look at me while he drank. The plane gained speed, the brown water blowing off the sides of the runway, and the wet fields and the few silver hangars flashed by the windows, then we lifted off abruptly into the gray light, the plane shaking against the wind and the strain of its own engines. The crest of the hills swept by below us, and in moments I could see the whole Rio Grande Valley flatten out through the window. The fields were divided into great brown squares of water, the orchards that hadn’t been destroyed by the storm were dark green against the land, and the river had almost covered the willow trees along its banks. There were dead cattle and horses in the fields, their stiff legs turned out of the water, and the barbed-wire fences had been bent down even with the road. Milking barns had been crushed over sideways, and some farmhouses had lost their roofs, and from the air I felt that I was looking down into something private, an arrangement of kitchens and bedrooms and family eating tables that I had been unfairly allowed to see.

Bailey’s face was white, and he pulled on the bottle again and coughed. He hated for me to see him drink, but his terror of the plane was greater than any feeling he had about personal image or even his ulcerated stomach.

“We’ll be there in an hour,” I said. “He’s above any bad currents now.”

Bailey was rigid in the metal seat, the safety belt strapped across his stomach. His fingers were pressed tight across the flat side of the bottle, and the perspiration was still rolling down his face.

“I don’t know what kind of agreement you’ll come to with Verisa and the Senator, but you and I are going to have one with our practice,” he said. His voice was dry, and his accent had deepened with his fear.

“Why do I have to come to an agreement with anyone?” I knew all the answers he had, but he wanted to talk or do anything to forget the plane and the distance from the ground.

“Because you’re holding a big I.O.U. to other people,” he said.

“Did it ever strike you that the Senator is a bad man who never did anything for anyone unless his own ass was buttered first? That for thirty years he’s served every bad cause in this country? Or maybe that he needs me much more than I needed him?”

He sipped out of the sloe gin, and the cap rattled on the bottle’s neck when he tried to screw it back on.

“I’ve already told you, you say it to him,” he said. “I don’t give a goddamn where your paranoia takes you this time, because tomorrow I’m going to write a check for your half of the practice.”

“Okay, Bailey,” I said, and watched him hold in all his anger and bent ideas about a correct world and the correct people who should live in it.

I had thought we would land at one of the small airstrips in Yoakum or Cuero, but Bailey had told the pilot to put the plane down in the empty pasture behind my house. The land was flat and cleared of stones, and ten feet above the riverbed, but even from the air I could see the pools of water that had collected in the Bermuda grass. We circled over the ranch once, the wings tilting in the wind currents, and I tapped the pilot’s shoulder and leaned against the back of his seat.

“There’s armadillo sinkholes and a lot of soft dirt in that field,” I shouted over the noise of the engines.

He turned sideways briefly and nodded, then began his approach over the river. The fields of corn, tomatoes, and cotton rushed toward us, the stalks and green plants pressed into the earth by the wind, and I saw the natural gas wells pumping up and down and the windmill ginning like a flash of light in the thin rain, the gray roof of the stable and the weathered smokehouse leaning into the depression where we put the oak logs, and then the white house itself with the latticework verandah and the rosebushes and poplar trees along the front lane. We dipped suddenly over the post oaks by Cappie’s cabin and hit the pasture in a spray of mud and grass across the front windows. The wheels went deep into the wet ground, the tail lifted momentarily into the air, and the pilot gunned the engines to keep us in a straight line across the pasture, although he couldn’t see anything in front of him. Water and mud streaked across the side windows, then one wheel sunk in a soft spot and we spun in a sliding half circle, with one engine feathered, against the white fence that separated my side lawn and the pasture.

The pilot feathered the other engine and wiped his face on his sleeve. Bailey had spilled the bottle of sloe gin over his slacks.

“Do you have a hard drink inside?” the pilot said.

“If you drink Jack Daniel’s,” I said.

I opened the cabin door, and the rain blew into our faces. We climbed over the white fence and ran across the lawn through the oak trees to the front porch. The Senator’s limousine with the tinted windows was parked on the gravel lane. The poplar trees were arched in the wind, and magnolia leaves and rose petals were scattered across the grass. One of Verisa’s large earthen flowerpots had fallen from the upstairs verandah, and the soft dirt and cracked pottery lay in a pile on the front steps. It seemed a long time since I had been home; maybe the house looked strange to me because the Senator’s car was parked in front, but even the worn vertical line of bullet holes in the porch column seemed new, as though Was Hardin had drilled them there only yesterday.

I took the pilot through the front hall into my library and opened a bottle of whiskey for him and filled a silver bucket with ice cubes. He sat in my leather chair, his wet cigarette still in his mouth, and poured the glass half full without water.

“I usually stay on a formal basis with my passengers,” he said, his face fatigued over the raised glass, “but are you guys on a kamikaze mission or something?”

I closed the door behind me without answering, and walked into the living room. The Senator was sitting in the deer-hide chair by the bar, dressed in blue slacks and a gray golf shirt with a highball balanced on his crossed knee (the whiskey was just enough to color the water). His tan was darker than when I had seen him last, and his mowed white hair moved slightly in the soft current from the air conditioner. John Williams leaned against the bar with his sunglasses on, tall, the face pale and as unnatural-looking as smooth rubber, and his tan suit hung on him without a line or crease in it. Verisa sat on the couch in a sundress she had bought three weeks ago at Neiman Marcus, and if she had a hangover from the alcohol or the sedation she had done a wonderful job of burying it inside her. Her auburn hair was brushed back against her shoulders, the makeup on her face made her look fresh and cool, and she lay back comfortably against the cushions with the stem of her wineglass between her fingers as though she were at a D.A.R. cocktail party. But there was also a quick glint in her eyes when I walked into the room, and I knew she was looking forward to a painful retribution on my part.

The Senator rose from his chair and shook hands with me. His blue eyes wrinkled at the corners when he smiled, and his hand was as square and hard as a bricklayer’s.

“You’ve had an eventful weekend,” he said.

“It was probably exaggerated by the television boys,” I said.

“I don’t believe there was any camera distortion there. Do you?” The acetylene-blue eyes wrinkled again so that it was impossible to read them. “But, anyway, you know John Williams.”

“Mr. Holland,” Williams said, and raised his glass.

“Hi.”

“I’m enjoying your taste in whiskey.”

“Help yourself to a bucket of it,” I said.

“Thank you. I think I will,” he said, and smiled somewhere behind his sunglasses.

“In fact, take a case with you. I have a crate of limes on the back porch to go with it.”

The room was silent a moment. Bailey looked at the floor, his brown windbreaker dark with rain, then went behind the bar and raked a mint julep glass through the ice bin.

“You want water in it, Hack?” he said.

“Give it to Mr. Williams. I’m changing my taste in whiskey.”

“Maybe I had better wait on the porch,” Williams said.

“There’s no need for that,” the Senator said, and his blue eyes moved onto my face again.

“Hell, no,” I said. “That’s a real storm out there, Mr. Williams. Enough to short out all the electric circuits on an ICBM.”

I despised him and what he represented, and I let him have a good look at the anger I felt toward his presence in my home. He finished his drink and clicked his glass on the bar.

“I think it’s better, Allen,” he said.

“Fix John another drink,” the Senator said to Bailey.

“Get some limes, too, Bailey,” I said.

“For one afternoon would you talk without your histrionics?” Verisa said.

“I haven’t had much of a chance to talk today. Bailey has spent the last two hours giving me the south Texas sonofabitch award.”

“This doesn’t have to be unpleasant, Hack,” the Senator said.

“Talking reasonably is beyond him,” Verisa said. “It violates some confirmed principle he has about offending other people.”

“Give Mr. Williams a drink, Bailey,” I said. “See about the pilot, too. I think he’s getting plowed.”

“Well, we won’t drag it out then, Hack,” the Senator said. “The state committee called last night and asked me if we should drop you and run a boy from Gonzales. I told them that we would still carry the district no matter who runs, and I want you in the House in January.”

“That’s good of you, Senator, but I wonder why we all have this intense commitment to my career,” and I looked right through the wrinkled light in his eyes.

“Because I feel an obligation to your father, who was a good friend to me. I think what you’ve done is irresponsible, but with time you’ll probably make a fine congressman.”

“I’m afraid that I’m through with political fortunes.”

“That’s a lovely attitude at this point,” Verisa said.

“I believe Hack is still a little angry with Rio Grande policemen,” the Senator said. “Actually, we may have picked up more of the union vote, and your arrest won’t hurt you with the Negroes and the Mexicans. The important factor is that we make use of it before the Republican gentleman does.”

“Sorry. I think that boy from Gonzales would be a better bet.”

“You’re everything I expected today,” Verisa said.

“How about the car planted against the fence?”

“You’re lovely just as you are. It couldn’t have been more anticipated,” she said.

“I want to finish this, Hack,” the Senator said. “I plan to talk to the committee this afternoon and give them your assurance about the rest of the campaign.”

“I don’t think you should do that, Senator.”

“The assault charge can be taken care of,” he said. “It will probably involve a small appointment in Austin, but it’s a simple matter.”

He had still chosen not to hear me, and I felt the anger rising inside me.

“Don’t you realize what’s being done for you?” Bailey said from behind the bar. “Try to think about it a minute. You committed a felony yesterday that could get you disbarred or even sent to jail.”

“No, I don’t realize a damn thing, because I have an idea that all this investment in me isn’t out of goodwill and old friendships. What do you think, Mr. Williams?”

He sipped from his fresh drink with a sprig of mint leaves in it, rested his arm on the bar, and looked at me from behind his sunglasses. The texture of his skin was the most unnatural I had ever seen on a human being.

“I think it would save time if the case was explained to you a little more candidly,” he said.

The Senator looked at Williams, and momentarily I saw the same uncomfortable flicker in his eyes that I had seen on the trip to Washington when I had realized that predators came in various sizes. He paused a moment, then turned back to me before Williams could speak again, his fingers pressed on the highball glass.

“Possibly your alternatives aren’t as clear or easy as you might believe, Hack,” he said. “I’ve made some commitments in this election that I intend to see honored.”

“It’s a matter of votes on a House bill to rescind the oil-depletion allowance, Mr. Holland. Although Allen doesn’t run again for two years, it’s been necessary to promise several oil companies that the right people will be on a committee to prevent anyone from lowering the twenty-seven-and-a-half-percent allowance that we now have. As you know, it involves a great deal, and so a few people have pressed Allen rather hard on winning support.”

Williams was enjoying the Senator’s discomfort, but I didn’t care about either of them then. I felt light inside, like a high school athlete who had been told he was needed to pick up the towels in the locker room.

“Did you know about this shit, Bailey?” I said.

“No.”

“You sold my ass all over the state and you never guessed what it was about.”

“I didn’t know, Hack.”

“Well, you saw me coming, Senator,” I said.

“Are we going to enjoy a melodrama about it now?” Verisa said.

“No, I think I just finished the ninth inning, and you can have the whole goddamn ballpark.”

“I believe you’re being overly serious about this. The oil-depletion allowance is in the interest of the state,” the Senator said. “Also, every holder of office pays some kind of personal price to represent his constituency.”

“I’d call that boy in Gonzales. Let me have a beer, Bailey.”

“Maybe you should tell Mr. Holland about the rest of his alternative now,” Williams said. He raised his drink slowly to his mouth.

“I thought you’d been saving something special out,” I said. Bailey handed me the beer in a glass, and I took a cigar from the oakwood box on the coffee table. The Senator sat down in the deer-hide chair and crossed his legs with his highball in his hand, but his eyes didn’t look at me.

“I don’t like to do this, but there’s a man named Lester Dixon in Kansas City and he’s made a deposition about the time he spent with you in a North Korean prison camp,” he said. His eyes looked at the end of his shoe, thoughtful, as though he were considering a delicate premise before he spoke again.

Verisa took a cigarette from her pack and put it in her mouth. Her arm lay back against the couch, and her breasts swelled against her sundress when she breathed.

I lit my cigar and stared into the Senator’s face.

“What did Airman First Class Dixon have to say?” I said.

“I don’t believe we have to talk about all of it here,” he said.

“I think you should, Senator. I imagine that Lester’s deposition was very expensive.”

“Two men from your shack were executed after they were informed upon.” He raised his eyes into my face and tried to hold them there, but I stared back hard at him and he took a drink from his glass.

“Did he tell you how it was done?” I said.

“I never met him.”

“He’s an interesting person. I helped send him to prison for five years.”

“The statement is twenty pages long, and it’s witnessed by two attorneys,” he said. “It’s been compared for accuracy with the transcript from his court-martial, and I don’t think you’ll be able to contest what he says about your complicity in the deaths of two defenseless men.”

“The telephone is in the hall, Senator. Next to it is a list of numbers, one of which is The Austin American. No, instead finish your drink and let Verisa get the city desk for you.”

“It will be done more subtly than that. Possibly a leak from someone on the state committee, a small rumor at first, and then a reporter will be given the whole thing.”

“You probably have ways I’ve never dreamed about.”

“That’s true, but the outcome will be the same in this case.”

“Then I guess we can all say good day to each other.”

“No, there’s one more thing,” he said, and his eyes took on the same expression they had before he drove the tennis ball into my nose. “Right now you’re enjoying your virtue. With an impetuous decision you’ve become a Spartan lying on his shield, and I’m sure you’ll need this image for yourself during the next few weeks. But I want to correct a couple of your ideas about integrity in political office. Negotiation and compromise are part of any politician’s career, and your father learned that lesson his first term in Congress.”

“What do you mean?”

“He accepted a fifteen-thousand-dollar contribution to sponsor the sale of public land to a wildcat company in Dallas. The land sold for fifty dollars an acre.”

“Bailey, do you want to tell these men to get out, or you want to wait on me?”

He looked down at the bar, his forehead white.

“Bailey,” I said.

The balding spot on his head was perspiring, and I could see the raised veins in the back of his hands.

“Just look at me,” I said.

“I’m sorry, Hack. I didn’t know they were going to do this.”

“Then you tell them to get out.”

He leaned on his arms, his face still turned downward, and I felt my head begin to grow light, as though there were no oxygen in my blood.

“Goddamn it, you’re not going to bring these men into my home to do this, and then stare at the bar,” I said.

“He was going to lose the ranch, Hack. He knew heart disease was killing him, and he was afraid he’d die and leave us nothing.”

The rain blew against the windows, and I could hear the oak branches sweeping heavily back and forth on the roof. Outside, the light was gray in the trees, and the stripped leaves stuck wetly against the trunks. My dead cigar felt like a stick between my fingers.

“You and this man will leave now, Senator,” I said.

“Thank you for the drink, Mr. Holland,” Williams said, and set his glass on the bar. “You have a nice home here.”

“Thank you, too, Verisa,” the Senator said. “I’m sorry if we’ve made the day a little hard for you.”

The three of them rose and walked together to the front hall. They could have been people saying good-bye after a Sunday dinner. Verisa’s sundress fit tightly against her smooth back, and she had a way of holding herself at a door that made her look like a little girl. Williams raised his hand once to me, backward, the way a European would, and smiled again somewhere behind those black-green glasses.

“Good-bye, Hack,” the Senator said.

I lit my cigar and didn’t look back at him, then I heard the door click shut as I stared down into the flame.

“I’m sorry,” Bailey said.

“Forget it and give me one hard one.”

“I wouldn’t have brought you back for this.”

“I know that. Just make it about three inches and a little water.”

He poured into a tall shot glass and let the whiskey run over the edge. He started to wipe off the counter with a towel, and then knocked the glass into the sink.

“Christ, Hack,” he said.

“I’m all right,” I said, and poured the shot glass full myself and drank it down neat.

“You goddamn fool,” Verisa said.

“Leave him alone,” Bailey said.

“You’re going to pay for it with every stick and nail in this house,” she said.

I walked away from them toward the hall. The hum of the air conditioners and the heavy sweep of the oaks against the eaves were loud in my head, and the boards in the floor seemed to bend under my boots. I could feel something important begin to roll loose inside, in the way that you pull out a brick from the bottom of a wall. I opened the door to my library and took the cigar out of my mouth. The pilot still sat in my leather chair with the half-empty bottle of Jack Daniel’s in his lap. His face was colorless, and he had dropped a lighted cigarette on the rug.

“Do you think you can get it up again today?” I said.

“Yeah, buddy, if you don’t mind flying drunk,” he said.

We walked out into the rain, crossed the lawn, and climbed over the fence to the plane. The air was sweet with the smell of the wet land and the dripping trees and the ruined tomatoes that had been pounded into the furrows. The chain on the windmill had broken and the water was spilling white over the lip of the trough into the horse lot. I could see the willows on the riverbank bending against the sky, and the deep cut of the drainages on the distant hills and the thin line of sunlight on the horizon’s edge. My two oil wells glistened blackly in the rain, pumping up and down with their obscene motion, and the weathered shacks of the Negro and Mexican farmworkers stood out against the washed land like matchboxes that had been dropped from the sky at an odd angle.

The pilot wiped the plane’s windows clean of mud and grass with his windbreaker, and we took off across the pasture in a shower of water from the backdraft of the propellers. Just before we reached the river the pilot pulled back on the stick and gave the engines everything they would take, and we lifted over the trees into the sky and turned into the wind. The river, the willows, the post oaks, and Cappie’s cabin dropped away below us, and then the house and the deep tire imprints of the Senator’s limousine on my gravel lane, and finally the small whitewashed markers in the Holland family cemetery.