Lay Down My Sword and Shield

CHAPTER 2

The Shamrock Hilton Hotel in Houston was crowded that night with Democrats from all over Texas. They came in party loyalty almost seven hundred strong — the daughters of forgotten wars, the state committee from Austin, the A.F.L.-C.I.O. fat boys, the oil-depletion wheelers, manicured newspaper publishers, slick public relations men, millionaire women dressed in Neiman Marcus clothes with Piney Woods accents, young lawyers on their way up in state politics (each of them with a clear eye, hard grip, and a square, cologned jaw like Fearless Fosdick), the ten-percenters, the new rich who bought their children’s way into Randolph-Macon, the ranchers with a bright eye on the agriculture subsidy, a few semi-acceptable Mafia characters from Galveston, several ex-hacks, doormen, flunkies, and baggage carriers from Lyndon’s entourage, three Hollywood movie stars who had been born in Texas, an astronaut, one crippled commander of the Veterans of the Spanish-American War who sat in a wheelchair, an alcoholic baseball player who used to pitch for the Houston Buffaloes before he went up to the Cardinals, some highly paid prostitutes, an Air Force general who has probably won a footnote in military history for his dedication in the firebombing of Dresden, and United States Senator Allen B. Dowling.

I had driven from San Antonio in two and a half hours, highballing wide-open like a blue shot through small towns and farm communities, while drunken cowboys drinking beer in front of saloons stared at me in disbelief. I pulled into the white circular drive of the Shamrock and waited in the line of cars for the band of uniformed Negro porters to take over my luggage, my Cadillac, and even my attempt to open a door by myself. They moved about with the quick, electric motion of rubber bands snapping, their teeth white, their faces black and cordial, obsequious and yet confidently efficient. I imagined that they could have cut all our throats with pleasure. They reminded me of Negro troops in Korea when they were dealing with Mr. Skins, a white officer. They could go about a job in a way that deserved group citations, and at the same time insult an officer and laugh in his face without doing anything for which they could be reprimanded unless the officer wanted to appear a public fool.

I idled the car up to the glass doors at the entrance; one Negro pulled open the car door for me, another got behind the wheel, and a third took my suitcase from the trunk. I handed out one-dollar tips to each of them (with the stupid feeling of an artificial situation that you have when you pay a shoeshine boy), and followed the third porter into the hotel. And I wondered, looking at his gray, uniformed back, the muscles stiff and flat under the cloth, Would you really like to tick a razor across my jugular, you uprooted descendant of Ham, divested of your heritage, dropped clumsily and illiterate into a south Texas cotton patch, where you could labor and exhaust yourself and kind through the next several generations on tenant shares? Yes, I guess you could, with a neat, sharp corner of the blade that you would draw gingerly along the vein.

But I still had a fair edge on from the Jack Daniel’s, the Mexican girl, and the dream, and I imagine that is why I suddenly had such strange insights into that black mind walking before me.

I gave my name at the desk and was told that my wife had taken a suite of rooms on the tenth floor. She and my brother Bailey had come to Houston yesterday when the convention had started, and I was supposed to join them today at noon for lunch on the terrace with several of the oil-depletion boys who had all types of money to sink into a young congressman’s career. However, I didn’t have to speak before the convention until ten that night, and I didn’t think that I could take a full day of laughing conversation, racial jokes, polite gin by the swimming pool, and powdered, middle-aged oil wives who whispered banal remarks like slivers of glass in my ear. I had met all of them before in Dallas, Austin, Fort Worth, and El Paso, and they were always true to themselves, regardless of the place or occasion. The men wore their same Oshman western suits and low-topped boots, the diamond rings from Zale’s that looked out of place on their fat hands, the string ties or open-neck sports shirts that directed attention away from the swift eyes and the broken veins in the cheeks. They spoke of huge finance with indifference, but I knew that their groins tingled with pleasure at the same time. Their women liked me because I was young and good-looking, successful as a lawyer, tanned from playing in fashionable tennis courts, and with an inner steeled effort I could clink the ice in my glass and look pleasant and easy while they told about all the trivial problems in their insipid lives (in this respect I was very self-disciplined, because I always knew when to excuse myself and walk away before the inner rigidity broke apart).

Besides, I really didn’t need them to be elected congressional representative from my district. The Holland name and my father’s reputation would assure almost any member of my family a political position if he wanted it. Also, people still remembered when I returned from the war as a wounded hospital corpsman, dressed in Marine tropicals with a walking cane, an ex-P.O.W. who had resisted brainwashing for thirty-two months while other American troops were signing confessions, informing on each other, and defecting to the Chinese.

Finally, my Republican opponent was a seedy racist, so fanatical even in his business dealings that his insurance agency failed. At different times he had belonged to the John Birch and Paul Revere societies, the Independent Million, the White Citizens League, and the Dixiecrat Party. He was a mean and obnoxious drunk, a bully toward his wife and children, and I don’t know why the Republicans let him run, except for the fact that he could always raise money from fools like himself and they hadn’t won an election in DeWitt since Reconstruction, anyway.

Verisa had taken a five-room suite with a cocktail bar, deep rugs, oil paintings on the walls, potted rubber plants, and a porch that overlooked the swimming pool far below. The porter set my suitcase down and closed the door behind me. I could see the anger in Verisa’s eyes. She sat on the couch in a white evening gown, her legs crossed tightly, with the tip of one high-heeled shoe pointed into the coffee table. Her auburn hair was brushed to a metallic shine, and her skin looked as bloodless and smooth as marble. If I had been closer to her I could have smelled the touch of perfume behind her ears, the powdered breasts, the hinted scent of her sex, a light taste of gin on her breath. She looked at me briefly, then turned her eyes away and lit a cigarette. The toe of the shoe flicked momentarily into a carved design in the side of the table. She was always able to hold her anger in well. She had learned part of that at Randolph-Macon and the rest from living with me. She could reduce flying rage to a hot cigarette ash or a few whispered and rushed words in the corner of a cocktail party, or maybe one burst of heat after we were home; but the pointed flick of the shoe was a fleshy bite into my genitals for seven years of marriage, broken young-girl dreams, her embarrassment when I brought oil-field workers or soldiers from Fort Sam Houston to the country club, my drunken discussions in the middle of the night about my Korean War guilt, and for the stoic and futile resignation she had adopted, out of all her social disappointments, in hopes of becoming the wife of a Texas congressman on his way to the Senate and that opulent world of power that goes far beyond any of the things you can buy or destroy with money.

“Hack, don’t you give a goddamn?” she said quietly, still looking straight ahead.

“What did I miss?”

“A day of my making excuses for you, and right now I’m rather sick of it.”

“Lunch by the pool with the Dallas aristocracy can’t be that awful.”

“I’m not in a flippant mood, Hack. I don’t enjoy apologizing or lying for you, and I don’t like sitting three hours by myself with boorish businesspeople.”

“Those are the cultured boys with the money. The fellows who oil all the wheels and make Frankenstein run properly.”

I went to the bar and poured a double shot of whiskey over ice. It clicked pleasantly on the edge of the afternoon drunk, and I felt even more serene in the sexual confidence that I always had toward Verisa after whoring.

“I don’t know where you’ve been, but I suspect it was one of your Okie motel affairs.”

“I had to meet R. C. Richardson in Austin.”

“How much do you pay them? Do they go down on you? That’s what they call it in the trade, isn’t it?”

“It’s something like that.”

“They must be lovely girls. Do they perform any other special things for you?”

“Right now R.C.’s working on a deal to patent hoof-and-mouth disease. He has federal contracts for Vietnam that run in millions.”

“Your girlfriends probably have had some nice diseases of their own.”

“Let it go, Verisa.”

“Oh, I shouldn’t say anything to you? Is that it? I should spend a day of congenial conversation with people who chew on toothpicks, and then meet you pleasantly at the door after you return from screwing a Mexican whore.”

Something inside me flinched at her accuracy. I poured a short drink into the bottom of the glass.

“I bet you’ve gone to bed with me, not knowing whether they had given you one of their diseases,” she said.

She was really tightening the iron boot now.

“Do you want a highball? I’m going to change clothes.”

“Oh Christ, you’ve probably done it,” she said, and put her fingers over her mouth.

“I never did that to you.”

“You probably don’t even remember. You have to wait two weeks to know, don’t you?”

“You’re letting it walk away with you.” But she was right. I didn’t remember.

“It happened to a girl I knew in college, but she was a dumpy thing who did it in the backseats of cars with Marines and sailors. I didn’t believe it ever happened with your husband.”

“You’re deliberately upsetting yourself,” I said.

“I wonder that you didn’t give me sulfa tablets.”

I fixed her a drink with a squeeze of lemon and set it on the table in front of her.

“I’m sorry that you got strung out today,” I said. “I thought Bailey would take you to lunch if I didn’t make it.”

“Tell me if you really did it to me.”

“Look, it was a shitty day for you. I should have been here to eat lunch with those bastards, or I should have called Bailey and told him to take care of it. But I’m going to change clothes now. We should go downstairs in a few minutes.”

“You must have a very special clock to go by. It starts to work correctly when you feel the corner at your back.”

“You ought to drink your highball.”

“Why don’t you drink it? It makes you more electric and charming in public,” she said.

“You’ve gotten it out pretty far in a short time.”

“I might stretch it out so far that you ache.”

“Isn’t this just spent effort? If you want to believe that you’ve won the ball game in the ninth inning, go ahead. Or maybe you would like me to kiss your ass in apology.”

“You’ve done that without a need for apologizing. An analyst would have a wonderful time with you.”

“I won’t go into embarrassing descriptions, but as I recall you enjoyed every little piece of it.”

“Yes, I remember those sweet experiences. You tried to enact all the things you had learned in a Japanese whorehouse while you slobbered about two boys who died in a Chinese prison camp.”

“You better shut it off in a hurry.”

“What was the boy’s name from San Angelo and the Negro sergeant from Georgia?”

“You don’t listen when I tell you something, do you?”

“It’s just a little bit of recall from things you brought up. Didn’t you say they were buried in a latrine? In your words, to lend more American fertilizer to the Korean rice crop.”

“Stop trying to fuck me over, Verisa.”

“Are you going to hit me? That would make a perfect punctuation mark in my day.”

“Just ease up on the batter a little bit.”

“Don’t walk away, Hack. If you blow this for us, I’ll divorce you and sue for the home. Then I’ll repay you in the most fitting way I can think of. I’ll cover that historical cemetery of yours with concrete.”

I took the bottle of whiskey and my glass from the bar and slammed the bedroom door behind me. I could feel the anger beating in my head and the veins swelling in my throat. I seldom became angry about anything, but this time she had reached inside me hard and had gotten a good piece between her nails. I drank out of the bottle twice and started to change clothes. My face was flushed with heat in the mirror. I kicked my trousers against the wall and pulled off my shirt, stripping the buttons. I stood in my underwear and had another drink, this time with measured sips. The whiskey began to flatten out inside me, and I felt a single drop of perspiration run down off an eyebrow. Hold it in, sonofabitch, I thought. The Lone Ranger never blows his Kool-Aid. You just give the sheriff a silver bullet and let Tonto pour you a drink. But Verisa had really been off her style this time. She had collected a valise of surgical tools during the day for an entry into all my vital organs. In fact, I didn’t know whether to mark this to her debit or credit. As I said, in the past she could always load all of her outrage into a quiet hypodermic needle, thrust subtly into the right place (her best probe, the one she used after I had done something especially painful to that private part of her soul, was to go limp and indifferent under me, her arms spread back on the pillows, during my disabling moment of climax).

I had one more drink, just enough to go over the back of the tongue, then brushed my teeth, took three aspirins and two vitamin pills, and rinsed out my whiskey breath with Listerine. I dressed in an Italian silk shirt, a dark tie, and a pressed white suit, and rubbed the polish smooth on my boots with a damp towel. I lit a cigar and breathed out the smoke in the mirror. You’re all right, Masked Man, I thought.

I heard Verisa open the front door, then the voices of Bailey and Senator Dowling.

“Hack,” Verisa said, tapping her fingernails lightly on my door. I knew she had already gone into her transformation as the pleasant wife of a congressional candidate. It was amazing how fast it could take place.

I stepped out of the bedroom and shook hands with the Senator.

“How are you, Hack?” he said, his face healthy and cheerful. He was fifty-five years old, but his handshake was still hard and his wrist strong. He was six inches shorter than I, solidly built, his shoulders pulled straight back, and his white hair trimmed close to the scalp. His acetylene-blue eyes were bright and quick, impossible to penetrate, and you knew after he glanced confidently into your face that his lack of height was no disadvantage to him. He had the small, hard chest of a professional soldier, and his tailored suit didn’t have a fold or a bulge in it. He wore dentures, and they caused him to lisp slightly with his Texas accent, but otherwise he was solid. Also, Senator Dowling had managed to remain a strong southern figure through five administrations. He had been on many sides over the years, and he always walked out of the ballpark with the winning team (and therein lay his gift, the ability to sense change before anyone else got a whiff of it). He was put into Congress by a one-million-acre southwest Texas corporation ranch in 1940, and in the next two years he paid off his obligations by sponsoring large subsidies for growing nothing on arid land. Then he represented the oil interests, the franchised utility companies, and the Houston and Dallas industries up on antitrust suits. He assured his constituents that he was a segregationist until the Kennedy administration, then he backed one of the first civil rights bills. In the meantime he acquired a three-thousand-acre ranch in the Hill Country north of Austin, and stock in almost every major corporation in Texas with a defense contract.

“Fine, Senator. How have you been?” I said.

“Good. Relaxing at the ranch. Fishing and playing tennis a little bit before the campaign.”

“Hack, fix the Senator a drink,” Verisa said.

“Thank you. A half jigger and some soda will be fine,” he said.

“You should try the bass in Hack’s ponds,” Bailey said. He sat in one of the tall bar chairs with his arm over the back. Good old Bailey, I thought. He could always come through with an inane remark at the right time. He looked like my twin, except five years older and fifteen pounds heavier, with wrinkles in his forehead and neck. Bailey was a practical man who worried about all the wrong things.

“I’d hoped to talk with you earlier today,” the Senator said, and looked straight into my face with those acetylene-blue eyes.

“I had to stop over in Austin with a client. Maybe we can talk after my speech,” I said.

“Verisa says you’re having people up for drinks later. I’d rather we have some time between ourselves.”

“Hack, we’re invited for breakfast at the River Oaks Country Club in the morning,” Bailey said. “Maybe the Senator can join us. You all can talk, and then we’ll play some doubles.”

“That sounds fine,” the Senator said. “I could use a couple of sets against an ex — Baylor pitcher.”

The sonofabitch, I thought.

“My opponent hasn’t somehow organized his ragtail legions, has he?”

“Oh no, no. I don’t think we need to spend too much time on this gentleman.” He laughed with his healthy smile. “I wanted to talk with you about several things that will come later in Washington. Your father helped me a great deal when I was first elected to Congress, and I learned then that it’s invaluable to have an experienced friend.”

I handed him his highball glass with the half jigger and soda. He had learned to be a cautious person with liquor, and I knew he wouldn’t finish the glass I had given him.

“Well, I appreciate it, Senator. But I don’t know how good my Baylor arm will be on the court,” I said, biting down inside myself.

“Hack is defensive tonight,” Verisa said.

“He should be,” the Senator said. His eyes took on a deeper blue with his smile.

“I have a weak serve, but I’m hell on defending the net,” I said. “One flash of the wrist and I drive tennis balls into concrete.”

“We had better go downstairs pretty soon,” Bailey said. His face was flat, but his discomfort showed in the nervous tic of his fingers on his trouser leg.

“I don’t expect that our audience will disappear,” the Senator said. “They usually have their way of waiting, as a U.S. Senator sometimes does.”

Sorry, you bastard. I’m all out of sackcloth and ashes tonight, I thought. I set my cigar in the ashtray and poured an inch of Jack Daniel’s into a glass. Bailey’s face began to tighten in the silence. Verisa’s eyes waited on me, her lips pinched slightly, but I held out. I sipped the whiskey and drew in on the cigar as though the conversation were far removed from me.

“Would you like to drive with us out to the country club in the morning?” Bailey said.

“Thanks. I’ll find my way there. From what I understand, Hack drives like he’s trying to put A. J. Foyt back in the grease pit,” the Senator said.

“I wouldn’t try to beat a Texas boy at his own game, Senator.”

“It depends on what type of game.” His eyes crinkled at me.

“I have a pretty good shutout record in my field.”

“I remember, Hack. I watched you pitch twice. But as I recall you used to have a little trouble with a left-handed batter.”

“Sometimes you have to bear down a little more.”

He took a thin swallow of his highball and placed the glass on the bar, his expression assured and pleasant, then looked casually at his watch.

“Bailey’s probably right. We should go downstairs. I’ll drop up later for a few minutes and say hello to your guests,” he said, and put his hand on the small of my back. “Then tomorrow we’ll see what type of tennis game we can work out.”

I saw the ease come back into Verisa’s face, and Bailey stood up stiffly as though he had just been unstrapped from an electric chair. I took my typewritten speech in its leather folder from my suitcase, and we walked down the carpeted corridor toward the elevator like an amiable family of four.

The dining tables in the Shamrock Room were filled. The silver, the crystalware, the white tablecloths, the spangled evening gowns, and the decanters of wine reflected softly under the lights. The Senator introduced me from the rostrum, and the rows of faces became hushed and polite. Even the fat boys from the oil interests, in their string ties and cowboy boots, looked quietly deferential. I read them my twenty-minute speech of non-language and they applauded thirteen times. Whenever I approached some vague conclusion, pointed at nothing, I could see their eyes grow more intent, their heads nodding slightly, as some private anger with the nation, the universe, or themselves found a consensus in my empty statements, then the hands would begin clapping. They had found a burning spokesman to represent all the outraged good guys. I was tight enough to be unconscious of my speech’s stupidity, and after a while I even felt that I might be saying something meaningful. They rose to their feet when I finished. I shook dozens of hands, smiled with country boy humility at the compliments, and invited half the dining room to Verisa’s cocktail party.

The party was a success in every way. Verisa was able to become the radiant wife of a congressional candidate, moving with detached pleasantness between groups of people (the society editors from The Houston Post and The Chronicle both agreed the next day that Mrs. Holland was one of the most lovely hostesses to appear in Texas politics in a long time). And I was able to make a doubleheader out of the evening: I managed to get drunk twice in one day. The Negro waiters put a fresh whiskey and water in my hand every time I flicked my eyes in their direction, and within two hours Mr. Hyde had begun to prowl obscenely through the hallways of my mind. The room was so crowded by midnight that the air-conditioning couldn’t clear the smoke, and the noise brought complaints from the floors above and below us. People whom I had never seen before drank three cases of bourbon and Scotch, ate four hundred dollars’ worth of catered food, burned cigar holes in the carpet, charged thirty-minute long-distance calls to my room, and threw glasses and bottles off the terrace into the swimming pool. Someone wheeled in the commander from the Veterans of the Spanish-American War, who sat stupefied in one corner, staring out at the bedlam from his atrophied, withered face, until a sentimental World War II veteran decided to take him on a careening ride through the corridor. The alcoholic baseball pitcher and I argued about how to throw a crippling beanball, one of the society editors threw up in the bathroom and had to be put in bed by Verisa, and the firebomber of Dresden unzipped the back of a woman’s evening dress.

I insulted the astronaut and his wife, who left after a polite five-minute interval, then two of the Negro bartenders quit when an oil broker made a racial remark to them. I took over the bar and poured all the remaining bourbon, gin, and Scotch into a punch bowl, and insisted that everyone in the room have a drink. This resulted in four more people passed out, a clogged toilet, and a group plan to open up the dining room for steak and eggs. Someone brought in a hillbilly singer from a nightclub, who propositioned Verisa, and the Air Force general drank six glasses from the punch bowl and urinated off the balcony. By four A.M. the room was totally destroyed. All the furniture was either burned or broken, the floor was littered with cigar and cigarette butts, the French doors were smashed, the potted plants overturned, and the electric plug in the drink mixer had short-circuited and melted into the wall socket. (Later, I received an eight-hundred-dollar repair bill from the Shamrock Hilton, and I kindly forwarded it to the Texas Democratic Committee in Austin.)

At five A.M. the last of the guests supported each other out the door, while Verisa accepted their incoherent compliments and told them to visit us at the ranch (she was still radiant, even through her fatigue). I lay down on the bed next to the society editor, and as the false dawn glowed on the horizon and touched the room with its gray light, she rolled her head toward me, her mouth wide with snoring, her face oval and white, and I thought, Good night, good night, sweet Desdemona, and I fell once more into Mr. Hyde’s world.

The clay tennis courts at the country club were green and freshly chalked under a hot, blue sky. I sat at a marble-topped table with Bailey under the shade trees, sipping a glass of tomato juice and vodka, while Verisa and the Senator whocked the ball back and forth across the net. Behind the courts the sun shattered off the swimming pool, and children in dripping swimsuits lined up on the diving board. In the distance the smooth green contours of the golf course arched away through the oak trees, and the sand traps looked like ground white crystal in the light. My hangover was bad. I was sweating unnaturally, shaking inside like a tuning fork vibrating to the wrong chord, and I felt a hard pressure band across one side of my head. My tennis shorts and polo shirt were already wet, although I hadn’t been on the court yet, and the vodka wouldn’t take hold. Bailey kept talking about our law practice in Austin, my failure to come into the office regularly, and my rudeness to the Senator. His words were like pieces of broken china in my head. He spoke from some abstraction inside himself, looking into my eyes occasionally, his face earnest with the dumb innocence of a nondrinker talking to a man with a bleeding hangover. I lit a cigar, tried to concentrate on the tennis game, and had another vodka and tomato juice.

“It’s insane to do these things to yourself,” he said. “You’re hungover three days out of seven, you go into court with your fingers shaking, and in the meantime other people are picking up after you.”

“Are you picking up after me, Bailey?”

“What do you think I did yesterday? And last night you insulted a half-dozen people within fifteen minutes.”

“I thought I only got the astronaut.” I wiped the sweat off my forehead on my sleeve and drained the vodka and tomato juice.

“You want to get blasted again?”

“I might unless the conversation changes.”

“You can be in office in a few months. The youngest congressman from the state. After one or two terms you can do anything you want in Texas.”

“I know those things.”

“Then why don’t you act like you have more than two functional brain cells?”

I held my glass up to the waiter for another drink.

“You count on too much from people,” Bailey said.

“Will you go to hell or shut up for about five minutes?”

“You can get angry, but I’m right in what I say.”

“Bailey, would you get away from me a few minutes?”

“You see what that booze does?”

“Go swimming or chase golf balls if you like. Believe me, I’m up to my eyes with it.”

He stood up, his face slightly hurt and angry, and walked across the clipped grass to the clubhouse. I knew that in a half hour he would be back as though nothing had been said, and then later he would start to bore in again. Bailey was a good man, but he was simply unteachable.

The Senator moved about the court like a man twenty years younger than his age. I have to admit that he looked good out there. The matted gray hair on his chest and his thick, muscular shoulders glistened with sweat, and he whocked the ball in a white streak across the net. For a short man he had a fine driving serve, and his backhand was always accurate and strong. He had a good eye for court distance, and most of his shots just skimmed the top of the net and hit in a low bounce on the clay. Verisa was a good tennis player, but he took her in two easy sets. The Senator was a competitor, and his gentlemanly affectation ended when he entered the games.

They joined me at the table, and the waiter served us a cold lunch of peeled shrimp on cracked ice. For the next hour I listened to the Senator’s advice on my campaign, the upcoming year in Congress, and contributions from several oil companies (the checks, which already amounted to over sixty-five thousand dollars, had all been deposited by Bailey in a special account in Austin). Then I was told indirectly, with compassion, to avoid public statements on civil rights, at least while in Texas, and that I shouldn’t lean too far toward labor, since as a Democrat I could already count on their vote. I nodded my head and listened as intelligently as possible, but my hangover wouldn’t let go and few of his sentences seemed to have any relationship to one another. Actually, more than any instruction in Texas politics, he wanted to exact penance from me because of yesterday, and I was in the perfect condition for it — a mental cripple.

“Next week I plan to visit the wounded Vietnam veterans in Walter Reed,” he said. “I think it might be good for you to come along.”

“Why’s that?”

“You were wounded yourself in Korea. I think the boys like to know that they have congressmen who understand what they’ve been through.”

“I’m afraid I had enough of V.A. hospitals, Senator,” I said.

“We’ll be there an hour or so. Then you’ll be back home the same night.”

“I better pass.”

“Go on, Hack. Bailey will be at the office,” Verisa said.

“No, I don’t—”

“You need a trip. Enjoy it,” Bailey said. He had come back from the clubhouse fresh with resolve.

“I spent two months in the V.A. in ’53 and I really—” I was smiling in my best convivial way.

“This type of exposure is important to you, Hack,” the Senator said.

Fuck it, I thought. “All right, Senator. I’ll be glad to.”

We finished lunch and played a set of doubles. Verisa and I stood the Senator and Bailey, and the sweat rolled down my face and chest in rivulets. My timing was bad, my movements uncoordinated, and I drove most of my serves into the bottom of the net. My head was thundering from the heat and exertion. The air seemed so humid that it was like steam on my skin. If Bailey hadn’t been such a bad player we would have lost the set six games straight, but Verisa managed to keep us only one game behind. I was even proud of her. In her short white tennis skirt and cap with a green visor she was the loveliest thing on the courts. Her legs and shoulders were freckled with suntan, her auburn hair wet and shining on the back of her neck, and you could get a good look at her lovely bottom when she bent over with her serve.

We went into the final game five to four, and I wanted to beat the Senator very badly. He played confidently, controlling the back line with an easy sweep of his racket in either direction. His thick eyebrows were heavy with perspiration, and his blue eyes refracted a mean success every time he drove the ball into my shoelaces.

However, I soon learned that the Senator’s revenge for yesterday wasn’t complete yet. I moved up to the net for the final point, Verisa served, and Bailey returned the ball in an easy, high-arching lob. I whocked it with all the strength in my shoulder straight into the Senator. The game should have been over and the set tied, but the Senator caught my drive with one short, forearm chop of the racket, and smashed the ball murderously into my face. My sunglasses broke on the court, my eyes watered uncontrollably, and I felt the blood running from my nose. Through the tears I could see him walking quickly toward me, his face gathered in concern, but there was victory in his eyes.

Later, Verisa drove us back to the hotel while I held a blood-flecked towel filled with ice cubes to my nose. The bridge was already swollen, and there was a sickening taste in the back of my throat. I tilted my head back on the seat and looked with one eye out the window at the stream of angry traffic along South Main. At the court the Senator had apologized in his most empathic manner, the tennis pro arrived with a first-aid kit and tried to push cotton balls up my nose, a Negro waiter put another vodka and tomato juice on the table and left, and now Bailey sat in the backseat talking about going to the hospital for an X ray.

“Do you think it’s broken?” Verisa said.

“No, he just flattened it a little. A warning,” I said. My words were nasal and smothered under the towel.

“It was an accident,” Bailey said. “You cut the ball right into him.”

“Why don’t you get off the goodguymanship ethic? Leave the Boy Scouts for a while, at least till we get to the hotel,” I said. “He was out to tear my head off.”

“That’s hangover paranoia.”

“Oh, shit,” I said.

“How many U.S. Senators would spend their time trying to help a thirty-five-year-old lawyer’s political career?”

“Don’t you know a sonofabitch when you see one?”

“You’re constructing things to fit some strange frame of reference in your own mind.”

“You’re an amateur, Bailey. You better learn to recognize sophisticated viciousness.”

“You’re really thinking foolishly.”

“I don’t care if you want to look at the world like Little Orphan Annie. But right now I feel like someone took a shit in my head, my nose is full of blood, and if you say anything more I’m going to call the Senator from the hotel and give him my best delivery.”

“You better take us to Herman Hospital,” Bailey said.

“I’ve had my nose broken before and I know what it feels like. Just turn it off for a few more blocks.”

“I’ll have the hotel doctor come to the room,” Verisa said.

“Forget that, too,” I said. “I’m driving down to the Valley this afternoon. Just as soon as I can get six aspirins down and a double shot of Jack Daniel’s.”

“You’re going to the Valley!” Verisa said. Her head turned sharply at me.

“I got a letter from a Mexican fellow I was in Korea with. He got involved in some trouble with this farm labor union, and he’s in the county jail waiting to go up to prison on a five-year sentence.”

“What am I supposed to do in the meantime?” she said.

“Ride back home with Bailey or take a flight. You don’t like to drive with me, anyway.”

“So I’m left with the pleasant experience of explaining the condition of the room to the management. Is that it?” she said. “I imagine that by this time the cleaning woman has run down the hall in hysterics.”

“Ignore them. We didn’t do the damage. They know what to expect when they contract for a convention. Particularly when it’s composed of lunatics.”

“It’s lovely of you to leave me with these things.”

“All right. I’ll talk with the manager on the way out. I’ll drip a few drops of blood on his desk, talk with him cordially, and then I’ll tell him to go to hell.”

“You do what you want, Hack,” she said. “Get drunk for a week in the Valley, go across the border and find a sweet two-dollar girl, indulge all your disgusting obsessions.”

She turned the car into the hotel drive, and a doorman stepped out to the edge of the walk under the canopy. I rubbed the dampness of the towel over my face.

“I have to go see this man,” I said. “He was a good friend to me when I went on the line. I was so goddamned scared I couldn’t paste a Band-Aid on a scratch.”

“Just don’t talk about it,” she said. “Drive down the road and forget anything else. That’s the way you do things best.”

“Listen a minute. I don’t enjoy driving three hundred miles in one-hundred-degree heat with a hangover and a bloody nose. But this man has five years hard time to do because of a scuffle on a picket line. He doesn’t have a goddamn cent and he can’t get a white lawyer to file an appeal for him. Next week he’ll be chopping cotton on the prison farm and there won’t be a thing I can do for him.”

“We can call the A.C.L.U. You don’t have to go down there today,” Bailey said.

“No, you go on, Hack,” she said. “It would be too terrible for you to live through one day of putting things together without beginning another adventure.”

“Okay, piss on it,” I said. “I’ll catch air in a few minutes, and you can go back to the ranch and serve cocktails to the D.A.R. Then next week we can take a trip to Walter Reed and shake hands with the basket cases. A wartime V.A. ward should be included on all bus tours. You can meet the dummies in their wheelchairs and the guys without human faces. It’s quite an experience.”

Bailey lit his pipe in the backseat and Verisa’s eyes were brilliant with anger as the doorman stepped around the front of the car. I lowered the window and dumped the cracked ice in the towel onto the concrete.

People stared at me in the lobby as I walked toward the elevator with the towel under my nose. I still wore my tennis shorts and canvas shoes, with a sports coat over my blood-streaked polo shirt. Verisa and Bailey walked on each side of me as impervious as granite. Upstairs, I showered and changed into a pair of cream slacks and a soft, maroon shirt, ordered a bottle of Jack Daniel’s from the bar, and ate a half- dozen aspirins in the bathroom. I could hear Verisa making reservations on an afternoon flight to San Antonio. I looked in the mirror at my swollen nose, a slightly puffed upper lip, and the white discoloration in my face, and I decided to leave the whiskey doubleheaders to Grover Alexander or some other better left-hander than I. A bellboy brought the bottle; I took one drink out of it and closed the suitcase. I started to speak to Verisa, but she put a cigarette in her mouth and looked out through the smashed French doors at the oil wells pumping in the distance.