Lay Down My Sword and Shield

CHAPTER 3

The late sun was red on the hills above the Rio Grande. The river was almost dry in places, dividing around bleached sandbars, and in the twilight the water had turned scarlet. On the other side, in Mexico, there were adobe huts and wooden shacks along the banks, and buzzards circled high in the sky. I turned off the air conditioner, rolled down the windows, and let the warm air blow through the car. In the first quick rush of wind I could smell the sweet ripeness of the whole Valley: the citrus groves, the tomato and watermelon fields, the rows of cotton and corn, the manure, and pastures of bluebonnets. The windmills were spinning, and cattle moved lazily toward the troughs. A single scorch of cloud stretched across the sun, which now seemed to grow in size as it dipped into the hills. The base of the pin oaks and blackjack trees grew darker, then the bottom rim of the sky glowed with flame.

I had mended from my hangover during the long drive, and I felt the numb serenity of a longtime dying man who had just received an unexpected extension of life. Then, in that cool moment of reflection, I wondered why I always drank twice as much when I had to make ritual appearances; or why I had gone to Houston in the first place, since my talk before a few hundred semiliterate oilmen had little to do with my probable election, anyway; or lastly, why I had ever entered politics and the world of Senator Allen B. Dowling.

I could guess at the answers to the first two questions, which weren’t of particular consequence, except that I didn’t want another hangover and defeat at the tennis court like I’d had this morning; but the answer to the third question worked its way through the soft tissue and dropped like an ugly, sharp-edged black diamond into a bright space in the center of my mind. Inside, under all the cynicism, the irreverence toward the icons and totems, my insults to astronauts and country club women, I wanted a part of the power at the top.

I tried to believe that my motive was to atone for Verisa’s spent dreams, or that I wanted to equal my father in his law and congressional career, or at least that I was simply an ironic man who felt he could do as good a job as comic-page segregationists; or maybe at worst I was just a pragmatist with knowledge of the money to be made in the dealings between the federal government and the oil interests. But that black diamond had blood crusted on its edges, and I knew that I had the same weaknesses as Verisa and the Senator; I wanted power itself, the tribal recognition that went with it, and that small key to its complexities carried secretly in my watch pocket.

I accelerated the Cadillac through the low hills toward Pueblo Verde. The evening had started to cool, the sky deepened to dark purple, and the last of the sun’s afterglow burned into itself in a gathering fire at one small point on the horizon. I didn’t care for these moments of reflection, even though they came with the cool release from hangover, and I had learned long ago that solitude and introspection always bring you to Mr. Hyde’s cage. Every jailer knows that an inmate would rather take a beating with a garden hose than go to solitary, where the snakes start coming out of hibernation and the voices from years ago thunder through long tunnels. The North Koreans and the Chinese knew the same trick. The broken noses and smashed fingertips, or even digging your own grave under Sergeant Tien Kwong’s burp gun, weren’t nearly as effective as six weeks in a dirt hole with an iron sewer grate over your head. There you could concentrate on your guilt for forgotten sins, your inadequacy as a man, your lack of courage when you dropped a wounded Marine on a stretcher and ran, your resentment toward a dying Australian who was always given the largest portion of rice in the shack; or you could look up through the iron slits in the grate at the Chinese sentry who watched you while you squatted like a dog and defecated into a helmet.

So Socrates and his know-thyself ethic were full of shit, I thought, or he never spent time in solitary before he drank the hemlock or drove down a south Texas road on a clear summer evening with Mr. Hyde sitting in the passenger’s seat.

The main street in Pueblo Verde was almost empty, the wood frame buildings along the high sidewalks locked and darkened. A few old cars and pickup trucks were parked in front of a beer tavern with an insect-encrusted neon sign buzzing above a broken screen door. In the Sunday night quiet I could hear the hillbilly music from the jukebox and the laughter of a half-dozen high school kids smoking cigarettes under the oaks in the courthouse square.

The hotel was a two-story wood building with flaking white paint and a latticed verandah. The letters on the ROOMS FOR GUESTS sign were blistered and faded, and the small lobby, with a plastic television set in one corner and wilted flowers in dime-store vases, smelled like dust and old wallpaper. I signed the register while the desk clerk looked over my shoulder at my Cadillac parked in front, then I could feel his eyes become more intent on the side of my face.

“Will you have somebody wake me at seven in the morning?” I said.

“You’re getting on the road early, huh?”

“No, I’ll be in town.”

“Oh.” His narrow gray face continued to watch me as I followed the Negro hired man with my bag toward the staircase.

My room overlooked the street and the trees on the courthouse lawn. I sent the Negro to the tavern for six bottles of Jax, pulled off my shirt, and turned on the overhead wooden fan. It was probably too late to visit the jail, and also I was too spent to argue with night-duty cops. I sat in a straw armchair with my feet in the open window and pried the cap off a beer with my pocketknife. The foam boiled over the top and ran down cold on my chest. I tilted the bottle and drank it straight to the bottom. I could still feel the highway rushing under my automobile, the mesquite and blackjack sweeping behind me, and I drank two more beers, tasting each cool swallow slowly. Then a breeze began to blow through the window, a train whistle echoed beyond the dark hills, and I fell asleep in the chair with a half-empty bottle held against my bare stomach.

At first I felt only the swaying motion of the boxcar and the vibration of the wheels clicking across the switches. Then I heard my own voice, loud with urgency, telling me to wake up before it started. But it was too late, or that alter-self inside was inept in turning off the right valve, because I now saw the drawn faces of the other men crowded in the boxcar with me. Outside in the night the snow was driving almost parallel to the ground, there was a slick of ice on the floor of the car, and some of the men had already been stripped of their boots by the Chinese. Their feet were beginning to discolor with the first stages of frostbite, and by morning the skin would be an ugly yellow and purple, the toes swollen into balloons. I watched a Greek urinate on his feet, then dry them carefully and rewrap them with his scarf. The wounds in my calves throbbed with each pitch of the car, and the blood had run down into my socks and frozen. But I had been lucky. The Chinese had machine-gunned all our wounded before we were loaded on the train, and I would have been shot, too, except that I had managed to keep limping forward in the line between two Marines. Before the guard slammed the boxcar door and bolted it, I looked out into the snow at the bodies of the men who had been thrown begging in front of the burp guns. Their mouths and eyes were still wide with disbelief and protest, their hair flecked with snow like old men.

In the next fifteen hours the train stopped three times, and each time we heard a boxcar door slide open, hysterical shouts in English and Chinese, and the firing of burp guns. Whenever the train slowed we became a community of fear as each of us listened, motionless, to the decreasing metallic clack of the wheels. Once, while pulled off on a siding, we heard several guards crunching outside in the snow, then they stopped in front of our boxcar. They talked for a minute, laughed, and one of them slid back the iron bolt on the door. I looked dumbly into the black eyes of the Greek who had urinated on his feet, and the heart-racing fear and desperate question mark in his face seemed to join us together in a quick moment of recognition. Then another train roared by us a few feet away, its whistle screaming in our ears, and our boxcar jolted forward, knocking us backward into one another. We heard the bolt slam into place and the guards running toward the caboose.

By morning the car was rancid with excrement and urine. We had no water, and several men broke ice from the floor with their boots and melted it in a helmet over a dozen cigarette lighters. It tasted like wheat chaff, sweat, and manure. The snow had stopped blowing and the sun shone through the cracks in the walls. The light broke in strips on our bodies, and the stench from the corner began to grow more intense. During the night I had been unable to stand up and urinate through a crack in the car wall, and I had to let it run warmly down my thighs. My own odor sickened me. I wondered if the Jews who had been freighted to extermination camps in eastern Europe ever felt the same self-hating, cynical disgust at their condition, lying in their own excretions, or if they tried to tear the boards out of the walls with their fingernails and catch one SS guard around the throat with probing thumbs. My feeling was that they went to their deaths like tired people lined up before a movie that no one wanted to see, revulsed by themselves and the human condition, their naked bodies already shining with the iridescence of the dead.

I woke into the hot morning with a dark area of warm beer in my lap. Two Negro trusties from the jail, the white letter P Cloroxed on the backs of their denim shirts, were watering the courthouse lawn. The wet grass was shiny with light, and the shade of the oaks was like a deep bruise on the sidewalks. At the edge of the square there was an open-air fruit market, with canvas stretched on poles over the bins, and Mexican farmhands were unloading cantaloupes and rattlesnake melons from the bed of a stake truck. The sky was clear blue, and the shadows from a few pink clouds moved over the hills.

I dressed in my linen suit with a blue silk shirt and walked down the main street to a café. I had a breakfast steak with two fried eggs on top, then smoked a cigar and drank coffee until the courthouse opened. Even though I could feel the July heat rising, it was still a beautiful day, the orchards at the foot of the hills were bursting with green and gold, I was free from the weekend’s whiskey, and I didn’t want to visit the jail. Most people think that the life of a criminal lawyer is a romantic venture, but it’s usually a sordid affair at best. I had never liked dealing with redneck cops, bailbondsmen, and county judges with high school educations, or talking with clients at two A.M. in a drunk tank.

I crossed the street to the courthouse and went to the sheriff’s office in the back of the building. By the office door there was a glass memorial case filled with junk from the World Wars and Korea — German helmets, bayonets, a Mauser rifle without a bolt, an American Legion medal, canteens, a.30-caliber machine gun with an exploded barrel, and a Chinese bugle. A deputy in a khaki uniform sat behind an army surplus desk, filling out forms with a short pencil. He was lean all over, tall, and his crew-cut, glistening head was pale from wearing a hat in the sun. His fingers were crimped over the pencil as he worked out each sentence in printed and longhand letters. His shirt was damp around the shoulders, and his long arms were burned brown and wrinkled with veins.

“Can I help you?” he said without looking up.

“I’d like to see Arturo Gomez.”

He put the pencil down and turned his face up at me. His green, yellow-flecked eyes were flat, his face expressionless.

“Who are you?”

“My name’s Hackberry Holland. I’m a lawyer.”

“You ain’t his.”

“He’s a friend of mine from the service.”

“Well, visiting hour is at two o’clock.”

“I have to go back to Austin this morning. I’d appreciate it if I could talk with him a few minutes.”

The deputy turned the pencil in a circle on the desktop with his finger. There was a hard knot of muscle in the back of his arm.

“You working with these Mexican union people?”

“No.”

“You just drove down from Austin to see a friend in jail?”

“That’s right.”

“It won’t help him none. He’s going up to the state farm Wednesday. And I expect there might be a few more with him soon.”

“I wouldn’t know about that.” I bent over and tipped my cigar ashes into the spittoon, then waited for the deputy to continue the statement which he had prepared long ago for strangers, slick lawyers, and nigger and Mexican lovers.

“You can take it for what it’s worth, Mr. Holland, but these Mexicans was stirred up by agitators from the outside. They can make fair wages in the field any time they want to work, but they stay drunk on wine half the time or sit in the welfare office.” His yellow-flecked eyes looked into my face. “Then those union organizers started telling them they could get twice as much money by shutting down the harvest. Just let the cotton and grapefruit rot and they’re all going to be nigger-rich. People around here is pretty fed up with it, and it’s lucky that a couple of them California Mexicans haven’t been drug behind a car yet.”

“As I said, I’m not representing anyone.”

“It’s against the rule, but I’ll take you down to see Gomez a minute. I just thought you ought to know we ain’t pushing these people into a corner they didn’t build for themselves.”

I followed him down a staircase into the basement of the building. The rigid angles in his body, the rolled khaki sleeves, and the flush of anger in his neck reminded me of several drill instructors whom I had met at Parris Island. They all had the same intense dedication to perverse abstractions that had been created for them by someone else.

The basement of the courthouse, the jail, had been constructed with large blocks of limestone, sawed and chiseled and set with mortar in uneven squares. The corridor was lighted by two bulbs screwed into sockets on the ceiling, and the cells looked like caves cut back into the rock with iron doors on them. The stone was damp with humidity, and the air was rank with disinfectant, D.D.T., urine, and tobacco smoke. Each of the iron doors had a row of holes perforated in the top, and a slit and apron for a food tray. At the end of the corridor was a large room, with two wide barred doors that swung open like gates, and overhead on the rock in broken white letters were the words Negro Male. I could see the spark of hand-rolled cigarettes in the dark, and smell the odor of stale sweat and synthetic wine. There was a wire-screen cage built against one wall, with a small table and two wooden chairs inside. The deputy unlocked the door and opened it.

“Wait in here and I’ll bring him out,” he said. He walked back down the corridor and slipped the bolt on one of the cells. He had to use both hands to pull the door open.

Art stepped out into the light, his pupils contracted to small black dots. His denim jail issue was too big for him and his hair hung down over his ears. He was barefoot, his shirt and trousers were unbuttoned, and his thin frame was stooped as he walked toward the cage, as though the rock ceiling was crushing down on him. He had a cigarette in an empty space where a tooth had been, and there was a cobweb scar on the edge of one eye. He had started to get jailhouse pallor, and the two pachuco tattoos on his hands looked like they had just been cut into the skin with brilliant purple ink. I hadn’t seen him in five years, when he was contracting tomato harvests in DeWitt County, but it seemed that everything in him had shrunken inward, hard and brittle as bone. The deputy closed the cage door on us and locked it.

“You can talk ten minutes,” he said, and walked back down the corridor. The light gleamed on his shaved head.

“What about it, Hack? You want to play Russian roulette with me?” Art said, and smiled with the cigarette in his teeth. His long fingers were spread out on the tabletop.

“How in the hell did you go up for assault because of a picket-line arrest?”

“What happened and what I got tried for ain’t the same thing. The Texas Rangers moved in on our picket line because they said we wasn’t fifty feet apart. They knocked a couple of our people down, and when I yelled about it they put the arm on me. I pushed this one fat bastard on his ass, and he got up and beat the shit out of me with a blackjack. Man, they’re real bad people when they turn loose. I can still see that guy swinging down on me. His eyes was sticking out of his head. He must have saved it up for a long time.”

“What did your lawyer do in the trial?”

“He was appointed by the court. He lives right here in the county and he wanted me to plead guilty. I told him to go fuck himself, so he chewed on his pipe for three days, cross-examined one witness, and shook hands with me after the judge gave me five years.

“Look, Hack, I know I’m leaning on you for a favor, but I want to beat this shit. Our union’s got a chance if we don’t get broke up. We got a few people in Austin on our side, and some of the locals are afraid enough of the Chicano vote that they might come around if we stay solid. But our treasury’s broke and I got nobody but kids to organize the pickets and boycotts while I’m in the pen. And I’ll tell you straight I don’t want to build no five years. Four cents a day chopping cotton ain’t good pay.” He smiled again, and took the cigarette from his lips and put it out on the bottom of the table.

“All right, I’ll try to file an appeal. It takes time, but maybe with luck I can spring you on bond.”

He took another cigarette from his shirt pocket, popped a kitchen match on his thumbnail, and lit it. The scar tissue around his eye was yellow in the flame. “A year ago I was ready to charge the hill with a bayonet in my teeth. Corporal Gomez going over the top like gangbusters with a flamethrower. I was ready to build life in the pen for our union, but three months in lockdown here, man, it leaves a dent. Every night when that bastard sticks a plate of grits and fried baloney through the slit I say hello to his fingernails.”

“You know what you’re doing is crazy, don’t you?”

“Why? Because we’re tired of getting shit on?”

“These people have lived one way for a hundred and fifty years,” I said. “You can’t make them change with a picket sign.”

His face sharpened, and his yellow-stained fingers pressed down on the cigarette.

“Yeah, we been eating their shit for just about that long. But we ain’t going that route no more. We got more people than the Anglos, and this land belonged to us before their white ass ever got on it.”

“You can’t alter historical injustice in the present. You’re only putting yourself and your people up against an executioner’s wall.”

“You can jive about all that college bullshit you want, but we been picking your cotton for six cents a pound. You ever do stoop labor? Your back feels like a ball of fire by noon, and at night you got to sleep on the floor to iron out your spine. All you Anglos are so fucking innocent. You got the answers counted out in your palm like pennies. You march off every Christmas and hand out food baskets to the niggers and greaseballs, and then for the next twelve months you congratulate yourself on your Christianity.”

He drew in on the cigarette and pushed his long black hair out of his face. He looked at the table and breathed the smoke out between his lips. “Okay, man, I’m sorry. I sit in my cell all day and think, and I don’t get to talk with nobody except the hack. So I just made you my dartboard.”

“Forget it,” I said.

“But learn something about our union before you start to piss on us.”

“All right.”

“Like maybe we ain’t just a bunch of uppity niggers.”

“The deputy’s going to be back in a minute.”

“Look, watch out for that motherfucker. The other night one of the blacks started screaming in the tank with the d.t.’s, and he kicked him in the head. I think he’s a Bircher, and the guys in here say he’s got a bad conduct discharge from the Corps for crippling a guy in the brig.”

“Okay, let’s finish before he gets back. Were there any Mexicans on the jury?”

“What world do you live in, man?”

“We can use jury selection in an appeal, even though I’d rather hang them on the charge itself. I’ll have to get a transcript of the trial and talk with your lawyer.”

“Don’t fool with him. I told you he wouldn’t pour water on me if I was burning. He’s a little fat guy with a bald head, he owns five hundred acres of blackland, and he thinks I was brainwashed in Korea. When I asked him about an appeal he chewed on his pipe and farted.”

“What’s his name?”

“That’s Mr. Cecil Wayne Posey. His office is right across the street.”

“Why didn’t you write me before the trial?”

“I don’t like to bruise old friends.”

“Well, you sure picked a shitty time to bring in a relief pitcher.”

“You’re a good man, Hack. I trust your arm.”

I heard the stairway door slam and the deputy walking down the stone corridor in his brogans.

“I’ll be back tomorrow,” I said. “You want anything?”

“No, just watch after yourself in town. They’re pissed, and that southern accent of yours won’t help you none when they find out you’re working with our union.”

“I don’t think they’ll roll a congressional candidate around too hard.”

“I mean it, Hack. They don’t give a damn who you are. We stepped on their balls with a golf shoe. There ain’t been any Klan activity here since the 1920s, and last week they burned a cross on an island in the middle of the river. You better keep your head down, buddy.”

Art lit another cigarette off the butt while the deputy unlocked the cage.

“Tomorrow,” I said.

“Yeah, stay solid, cousin.”

I looked at the black soles of his bare feet as the deputy led him back to his cell. The deputy clanged the door shut, shot the bolt, and stared at me with a fixed gaze while I tore the cellophane wrapper off a cigar. I bit the end off and spit it on the floor. I could feel his hot eyes reaching me through the wire screen. He rattled his change in one pocket with his hand.

“You want to get out of here this morning, Mr. Holland?” he said.

Upstairs by the office door a girl leaned against the wall with a carton of cigarettes in her hand. She wore sandals, bleached blue jeans, and a maroon blouse tied in a knot under her breasts. She had on large, amber sunglasses, hoop earrings, and a thin strand of Indian beads around her neck. Her skin was brown, her body lithe and relaxed, and her curly brown hair was burned on the ends by the sun. Her eyes were indifferent through her glasses as she looked at me and the deputy.

“Would you give these to Art Gomez, please?” she said. Her voice was level, withdrawn, almost without tone.

The deputy took the carton of cigarettes and dropped it in his desk drawer without answering. He sat down in his chair and began to sharpen a pencil with his pocketknife into the wastebasket. I knew that each stroke of that knife was cutting into his own resentment at the restraint his job forced upon him in dealing with a hippie girl and a slick, outside lawyer. He bent over his traffic forms, his knuckles white on the pencil, and began to print out his report as though we were not there.

The girl walked back toward the entrance. There was a pale line of skin above the back of her blue jeans, and her bottom had the natural, easy rhythm that most women try to learn for a lifetime. Everything in her was smooth and loose, and her motion had the type of cool unconcern that bothers you in some vague place in the back of your mind.

“Hello,” I said.

She turned around, framed in the square of yellow light through the entrance, and looked at me. She wore no makeup, and in the black shadow over her face she looked like a nun in church suddenly disturbed from prayer.

“I expect you work with Art’s union. My name’s Hack Holland. I’m trying to file an appeal for Art before he goes up to prison.”

She remained immobile in the light.

“I’d like to meet some of the people in your union,” I said.

“What for?”

“Because I don’t know anybody in this town and I might need a little help.”

“There’s nothing we can do for you.”

“Why don’t you give me a chance to see?”

“You’re wasting your time, man.”

“I’d like to see Art out in the next light-year, and from what I understand so far I can’t expect any help from his lawyer, the court, or the clerk of records. So I can either wander around town a few more days and talk with people like the deputy in there or cowboys in the beer joint, or I can meet someone who’ll tell me what happened on that picket line.”

“We told what happened.”

“You told it in a local trial court that was prejudiced. I’m going to take the case to the Court of Criminal Appeals in Austin.”

“What’s your thing with Art?”

“We were in Korea together.”

“You can’t do any good for him. The A.C.L.U. has had our cases in Austin before.”

“Maybe I’m a better lawyer,” I said.

“Believe it, man, you’ve got a bum trip in mind.”

“I believe in the banzai ethic. At least I’ll leave a dark burn across the sky when I go down.”

“You ought to find a better way to pay back army debts.”

“I was a Navy corpsman, and I paid off all my debts before I was discharged.”

She turned back into the light to walk outside.

“Do you want a ride?” I said.

“I’ll walk.”

“You don’t want to miss a good experience with the most arrested driver in Texas. Besides, I need some directions.”

“Stay away from our union headquarters if you want to help Art.”

“I don’t expect that we’ll all end up in the penitentiary if I drive you home.”

We walked down the courthouse sidewalk under the shade of the oak trees to my automobile. The sun had risen high in the sky, and the tar surfacing on the street was hot and soft under our feet. The heat shimmered off the concrete walk in front of the hotel.

We drove into the Negro and Mexican section back of town. The dirt roads were baked hard as rock, and clouds of dust swept up behind my car. The unpainted wood shacks were pushed into one another at odd angles, the ditches strewn with garbage, and the outhouses were built of discarded boards, R.C. Cola signs, and tar paper.

“I have to see Art’s lawyer after I drop you off, but I’ll come back a little later,” I said.

“I thought you didn’t expect any help from him.”

“I don’t, but maybe I can use inadequate defense as a reason for appeal.”

She took a package of cigarettes from her blue-jeans pocket and lit one. I glanced at the smooth curve of her breasts as she pushed the package back in her pocket.

“You’re pretty sure I’ve got a loser, aren’t you?” I said.

“I just don’t think you know very much about the county you’re working in.”

“So you’re up against some cotton growers who don’t want to pay union scale, and a few part-time Klansmen. And you’ve met a redneck deputy sheriff who probably rents his brains by the week. That doesn’t change the law or trial procedure.”

“Wow. You must walk into court with a copy of the National Review between your teeth.”

“I’ve had eight years of law practice, babe, and I haven’t lost many cases.”

“I don’t believe you’ve dealt very much with union farmworkers, either.”

“I’ve spent all my life in Texas. I don’t expect to find out anything very new about it in this case.”

“Don’t you realize the rules in your court don’t apply to us? Art’s jury brought in a guilty verdict in fifteen minutes, and later the foreman said it took them that long because they sent out for some cold drinks.”

“All right, I can use things just like that in the appeal.”

“I’m not kidding you, man; lose some of those comic-book attitudes if you want to do anything for him,” she said.

“You really know how to turn on the burner, don’t you?”

“I’m just telling you about the bag you’re trying to pick up.”

“You’re a hard girl.”

“Do I get that free with the ride home?” The sunlight through the window was bright on the burned ends of her hair. She had her arm back on the seat while she smoked, and I could see the whiteness at the top of her breasts.

“You’re not from Texas. What are you doing here, anyway?”

“Would you like to flip through the celluloid windows in my wallet?”

“It’s just a question.”

“It seems like an expensive trip home.”

“Maybe I should put on my chauffeur’s cap, and you can sit in the backseat and I’ll close the glass behind me.”

“I was a graduate student in social work at Berkeley. I got tired of writing abstract papers about hungry people so I joined the Third World and came out to your lovely state.”

I hit a chuckhole in the road and felt the car slam down on its springs. The dust was so heavy that it had started to filter through the air-conditioning system. Two Negro children were running along the edge of a ditch, throwing stones at an emaciated dog scabbed over with mange. The road reached a dead end in front of a converted general store with a sign above the door that read UNITED FARM WORKERS LOCAL 476. The glass display windows were yellow and pocked with BB holes, and filmed with dirt on the inside and outside. Strips of Montgomery Ward brick had been nailed over the rotted boards in the walls, the steps had collapsed, cinder blocks were propped under one side of the building to keep it from sagging, and I could almost hear the flies humming around the outhouse in back. A boy of about nineteen, barefoot and without a shirt, sat on the front porch playing a twelve-string Gibson guitar.

“Don’t wrinkle your eyes at it, man,” she said. “We’re lucky we could rent anything in this town.”

“I didn’t say a thing.”

“I could hear the tumblers click over in your head. You’ve got the middle-class hygiene thing. Anything except green lawns and red brick sends you running up the street.”

“That’s a lot of shit.”

“Okay. Thanks for the ride.”

She closed the door and walked down the dusty path to the building. I watched the motion of her hips and her full thighs as she stepped up on the porch, then I turned the Cadillac in a circle and headed back toward town.

I went to Mr. Cecil Wayne Posey’s office and was told by his junior partner that I could find him at home. His ranch was all blackland, lined with rows of cotton and corn and orange trees. A dozen Mexicans and Negroes were hoeing in the cotton, and horses stood in the groves of live oak trees on the low hills. The large, one-story house had new white paint and a wide screened-in porch, and poplar trees were planted along the front lane. There were two great red barns in back with lightning rods and weather vanes on the peaks, a windmill pumping water into a trough, and rolls of barbed wire and cords of cedar posts stacked against a tractor shed.

As I walked up the lane I heard a woodpecker rattling against a dead limb in the heat. Mr. Posey rose from his round-backed wicker chair on the porch and shook hands. The lower portion of his stomach was swollen all the way across the front of his pants. His skin was soft, pudgy to the touch, and his head was almost completely bald except for a few short gray hairs. His eyes were colorless, and his voice had the bland quality of oatmeal. He reminded me of a miniature, upended white whale. When he sat down the watch in his pocket bulged against the cloth like a hard biscuit.

A Negro maid in a lace-trimmed apron served us iced tea with mint leaves and slices of lemon on a silver service, then I began quietly to press Mr. Posey for his reasons in not filing an appeal for Art. Actually, my questions, or even my presence there, would probably be considered a violation of professionalism among attorneys, since I was indirectly implying that he had been negligent in the case; but the flicker of insult never showed in his eyes, and if his tone or the pale expression around his mouth indicated anything, it was simply that I was an idealistic young lawyer who had embarked on a fool’s errand. He lowered his face into the tea glass when he drank, and momentarily the moisture gave his lips a streak of color.

“I didn’t feel there was basis for appeal, Mr. Holland,” he said. “I originally advised Art to plead guilty in hopes of a reduced charge, but he refused, and I doubt if the Court of Criminal Appeals will consider the case of a man who was convicted on the testimony of four Texas Rangers and two bystanders. He did hit the officer twice before he was restrained, and that’s the essential and inalterable fact of the case.”

“Who were these bystanders?”

“Two county workmen who were operating a grading machine on the road when the arrests were made.”

I looked at him incredulously.

“Did you feel these men were objective witnesses?” I said.

“They had no interest in the issue. They merely stated what they saw.”

“I understand that most of the people on the picket line testified, also.”

“Unfortunately, most of them have been in local court before, and I’m afraid that their statements were overly familiar to the jury. One young man admitted to the district attorney that he’d been three hundred yards away from the arrest, but he was sure that Art hadn’t struck the officer. It’s difficult to contest a conviction on evidence of that sort, Mr. Holland.”

His face bent into the iced tea glass again, and a drop of perspiration rolled off his temple down his fat cheek. He shifted his buttocks in the wicker chair and crossed his legs. His massive, soft thighs stretched the crease in his slacks flat.

“Art’s been organizing a farmworkers’ union in this county for the past year. Do you believe any members of the jury had preconceived feelings toward him?”

“None that would affect the indictment against him. He was tried for assaulting a Texas Ranger, not for his involvement in a Mexican union.”

I borrowed a match from Mr. Posey and lit a cigar. I looked at him through the curl of flame and smoke and wondered if he had any conception of his irresponsibility in allowing his client to be sentenced to five years in a case that would be considered laughable by a law school moot court.

He put his empty pipe in the center of his teeth, drew in with a wet rattling sound, and farted softly in the back of the chair. I finished my tea, shook hands and thanked him for his help, and walked down the gravel path to my automobile under the trees. Behind me I heard him snap the metal latch into place on the screen door.

I drove back to town and had lunch and two beers at the café, then spent an hour in the clerk of records office while an aged secretary made a Xerox copy of the trial transcript for me. There was no breeze through the windows, my sunglasses filmed with moisture in the humidity, and the electric fans did nothing but blow drafts of hot air across the room. The deputy sheriff came in once to drop a pile of his penciled reports on the clerk’s desk, and as he walked past me he stared into my face without speaking.

I spent the rest of the afternoon in the hotel, with my feet propped in the window, reading the transcript and sipping whiskey poured over ice. The flies droned dully in the stillness, and occasionally I would hear the hillbilly music from the beer tavern. Across the square the sun slanted on the rows of watermelons and cantaloupes in the open-air fruit market.

The transcript was an incredible record to read. The trial might have been constructed out of mismatched parts from an absurd movie script about legal procedure. There had been no challenge of the jurors, each of the Texas Rangers contradicted the others, a Baptist minister testified that many of the union members were Communists, and the two county workmen said they had seen a Mexican attack a Ranger, although they had been eating their lunch in the back of a truck a half mile down the road at the time. The three witnesses for the defense were sliced to pieces by the district attorney. They were led into discrediting statements about their own testimony, forced into stumbling admissions about their involvement in revolution, and referred to sixteen times as outside agitators. And Cecil Wayne Posey never raised an objection. Normally, any two pages torn at random from such a comic scenario would be grounds for appeal, but under Texas law the appeal has to be made in local court within ten days of sentencing, unless good cause is shown for an extension, and since Mr. Posey’s refusal to continue the case had virtually guaranteed that his client would go to prison, I would have to start the whole process over again in Austin.

It was dusk outside now. I threw the transcript in my suitcase, took a cold bath, and shaved, with a glass of whiskey on top of the lavatory. As a rule I didn’t try to correct the inadequacies inherent in any system, but in this case I thought I would send a letter to the Texas Bar Association about Mr. Posey. Yes, Mr. Posey should receive some official recognition for his work, I thought, as I drew the razor blade down in a clean swath through the shaving cream on my cheek.

I ate a steak for supper and drove back to the union headquarters in the Mexican district. There were thunderclouds and heat lightning in the west, an electric flash all the way across the horizon, and then a distant, dry rumble. The air tasted like brass in my mouth. Parts of the dirt road had been sprinkled with garden hoses to wet down the dust, and the cicadas in the trees were deafening with their late evening noise. Fireflies glowed like points of flame in the gathering dusk, and across the river in old Mexico the adobe huts on the mudflat wavered in the light of outdoor cook fires. High up in the sky, caught in the sun’s last afterglow, a buzzard floated motionlessly like a black scratch on a tin surface.

I parked the car in front of the union headquarters and walked up the path to the wooden steps. The boy with the Gibson twelve-string still sat on the porch. He had three steel picks on his fingers and a half-gallon bottle of dago red next to him. His bare feet were covered with dust, and there were tattoos on each arm. He chorded the guitar and didn’t turn his head toward me.

“She’s inside, man,” he said.

“Do I knock or let myself in?”

“Just do it.”

I tapped with my knuckle on the screen door and waited. I heard dishes rattling in a pan in the back of the building.

“Hey, Rie, that guy’s back,” the boy shouted over his shoulder.

A moment later the girl walked through a back hallway toward me. Her arms were wet up to the elbow. She had splashed water on her blouse, and her breasts stood out against the cloth.

“Man, like you really want to meet us, don’t you?” she said, pushing open the screen with the back of her wrist.

“I decided against watching television in the hotel lobby this evening.”

“Come in the kitchen. I have to finish the dishes.”

The flowered wallpaper in the main room was yellowed and peeling in rotted strips, coated with mold and glue. United Farm Workers signs, pop art posters of Che Guevara and Lyndon Johnson on a motorcycle, and underground newspapers were thumbtacked over the exposed sections of boarding in the walls. A store-window mannequin lay on top of the old grocery counter with an empty wine bottle balanced on her stomach. A mobile made of beer-bottle necks clinked in the breeze from an oscillating fan that rattled against the wire guard each time it completed a turn. The single lightbulb suspended from the ceiling gave the whole room a hard yellow cast that hurt the eyes.

I followed her through the hallway into the kitchen. Her brown hips moved as smoothly as water turning in the current. Two young girls, a college boy, and a Negro man were scraping dishes into a garbage can and rinsing them under an iron pump. Through the back window I could see the last red touch of the sun on a sandbar in the middle of the Rio Grande.

“We had a neighborhood dinner tonight,” the girl from Berkeley said. “There’s some tortillas and beans in the icebox or you can get a dish towel.”

“You have a charge account with the supermarket?”

“We get the day-old stuff from the Mexican produce stands,” she said.

“I think I’ll just have a whiskey and water if you’ll give me a glass.” I took my silver flask from my coat pocket.

“Help yourself,” she said.

I offered the flask to the others.

“You got it, brother,” the Negro said.

He picked up a tin cup from the sideboard and held it in front of me. His bald, creased head and round black face shone in the half-light. Four of his front teeth were missing, and the others were yellow with snuff. I poured a shot in his cup and then splashed some water in my glass from the pump. I could taste the rust in it.

“So what would you like to find out about the United Farm Workers?” the girl said.

“Nothing. I read the trial transcript and talked with Mr. Posey this afternoon. The conviction won’t hold.”

The Negro laughed with the cup held before his lips. The college boy straightened up from the garbage can and looked at me as though I had dropped through a hole in the ceiling.

“You believe that?” the Negro said. He was still smiling.

“Yes.”

“I mean, you ain’t bullshitting? You’re coming on for real?” the college boy said. He wore blue jeans and a faded yellow and white University of Texas T-shirt.

“That’s right, pal,” I said.

The Negro laughed again and went back to work scraping plates. The two young girls were also smiling.

“Who you working for, man?” the boy said.

“Judge Roy Bean. I float up and down the Pecos River for him on an inner tube.”

“Don’t get strung out,” the girl said.

“What am I, the visiting straight man around here?”

The girl dried her hands on a towel and took a bottle of Jax out of the icebox. “Come on out front,” she said.

“We wasn’t trying to give you no truck. We ain’t got bad things here,” the Negro said. He grinned at me with his broken, yellow teeth.

In the front room the girl sat in a straight-backed chair, with one leg pulled up on the seat, her arm propped across her knee, and drank out of the beer bottle. Behind her on the wall was a poster with a rectangular, outspread bird on it and the single word HUELGA.

“They’re kids, and they don’t know if you’re putting them on or if you’re a private detective working for their parents,” she said. “The black guy has been in the movement since the Progressive Labor Party days, and he’s heard a lot of jiveass lawyers talk about appeals.”

“I guess I just don’t like people to work out their problems on my head.”

“I told you this afternoon about coming down here.”

“Maybe I should have worn my steel pot and flak jacket.”

“They don’t have any bad will toward you. They’re good people.”

“I’m paranoid and suspicious by nature.”

“That’s part of the middle-class syndrome, too. It goes along with the hygiene thing.”

“I picked a hell of a ball game to relieve in. Between you, Cecil Wayne Posey, and that deputy at the jail I feel like I’m standing ten feet from the plate and lobbing volleyballs at King Kong.”

She took the bottle from her lips and laughed, and her almond eyes were suddenly full of light. She touched away the foam from the corner of her mouth with two fingers.

“I should have put on my Groucho Marx clothes this evening,” I said. “You know, an hour or so of Zeppo and the gang throwing pies while your people go up to the pen.”

I finished my drink, and the minerals and iron rust in the water tasted like a gladiator’s final toast in the back of my throat.

“You’re out of sight,” she said.

I poured a thin shot over the orange flecks in the bottom of the glass and drank it down. The smoky, charcoal-filtered taste of undiluted Jack Daniel’s, born out of Tennessee limestone springs and rickyards of hickory, rolled down inside me with the lightness of heated air, then I began to feel the amber caution signal flashing somewhere behind my forehead.

“Yeah, I’m a walking freak show. The next time I’ll appear with my whole act. Seals blowing horns, monkeys riding unicycles, jugglers, clowns with exploding bombs in their pants.”

“Wow, you really let it hang out,” she said. Her wet eyes were bright with refractions of light.

“It comes free with the ride home.” I poured the rest of the whiskey into my glass. “Come on, let’s drink.”

“What do you do when you’re not defending ex — Korean War buddies?” she said.

“I work for the money boys. Oil corporation suits, swindles against the government, the Billy Sol account. I also run for Congress part-time.”

“You’re putting me on.”

“Buy a copy of The Austin American November fifth. I’ll be smiling at you on the front page.”

“If you’re not jiving, you must be an unbelievable guy.”

“You want to talk about my geek act some more?” I said.

“I mean, what do you expect? You drop in here from outer space and come on like H. L. Hunt and W. C. Fields at the same time.”

“I was put together from discarded parts.” I finished my glass, and the amber light flashed red and began to beat violently.

“Tell me, really, why did you come here tonight?”

“I already told you. Television ruptures the blood vessels in my eyes.”

The Negro, the two girls, and the college boy walked out from the kitchen.

“There’s a man who likes to drink,” I said.

“You been reading my mail,” the Negro said.

“How about a case of Jax and a bottle of Jack Daniel’s?” I took a twenty-dollar bill from my wallet.

“We got a few more people coming over tonight,” he said.

“Get two cases. Take my car.”

“It’s just down the road. I’d get busted for grand auto in that Cadillac, anyway.”

He took the twenty-dollar bill and stuck it in the pocket of his denim shirt.

“You ain’t going to tip me later, are you?” he said.

“I left my planter’s hat in the car.”

He laughed and his round black face and brown eyes glistened with good humor. “You’re all right,” he said, and went out the screen door with the college boy.

“You always do this on a case?” the girl said.

“No. I usually don’t drink with the people I know. Most of them belong to the ethic of R. C. Richardson and the Dallas Petroleum Club. They like to throw glasses and urinate off hotel balconies. They also like to feel waitresses under the table. R. C. Richardson is a very unique guy. In the last fifteen years he’s taken the state and the federal government for a little less than one million dollars. He wears yellow cowboy boots, striped western pants, and a string tie, and he has a one-hundred-pound stomach that completely covers his hand-tooled belt. Three days a week he sits in the Kiwanis and Rotary and Chamber of Commerce luncheons and belches on his boiled weenies and sauerkraut, and then rises like a soldier and says the pledge of allegiance with his hand over his heart. But actually, the guy has class. The others around him are clandestine in their midnight dealings and worm’s-eye view of the world. They don’t have his sincere feeling for vulgarity.”

“He must be an interesting man to work for,” she said.

“Do you have another beer in the icebox?”

“This is the last one. Take it.”

“I never take a girl’s last drink. It shows a lack of gentility.”

“You are from outer space.”

I could feel the blood tingling in my hands and face. My scalp started to sweat from the whiskey.

“What’s your name, anyway?” I bit the end off a cigar.

“Rie Velasquez.”

“You’re not Mexican.”

“No.”

“So what are you?” I reached over and took the beer bottle out of her hand.

“My father was Spanish. He came from Spain during the Civil War.”

I let the beer and foam roll down my throat over the dry taste of the whiskey and cigar smoke.

“Hence, you joined the Third World Liberation Front. The gasoline and dynamite gang.”

“You ought to change your brand of whiskey.”

“Right or wrong? Didn’t they incinerate a few college buildings in the last year?”

“Don’t you think that sounds a bit dumb?”

“Bullshit. Ten of those people could have a whole city in flames within twenty-four hours.”

She took a cigarette from the pack in her blue jeans and lit it. She pinched the end between her lips as she drew in on the smoke.

“What type of bag do you think we operate out of, man?” she said. “Did you see any kerosene rags and coal oil hidden under the porch? You believe we all came down here because of your tourist brochures about the scenic loveliness of the Texas desert?”

“I just don’t buy that revolution shit.”

“Why don’t you read something about the United Farm Workers? They don’t have anything to do with revolution. They’re tired of being niggers in somebody’s watermelon patch.”

“Yow!” the Negro yelled, as he kicked open the screen door with a case of beer on one shoulder and a block of ice wrapped in newspaper on the other. “Man, we got it. Spodiodi and brew. We’re in tall cotton tonight, brothers.”

The college boy carried the second case of beer, and the boy with the guitar had already cut the seal on the bottle of Jack Daniel’s. They put the two cases on the old grocery counter, and the Negro chopped up the ice with a butcher knife and spread it over the bottles. He opened the first bottle by putting the cap against the edge of the counter and striking downward quickly with the flat of his hand. The white foam showered up over his head and splattered on the floor. He covered the lip of the bottle with his mouth and drank until it was almost empty. The beer streamed down his chin into the matted black hair on his chest.

“Lord, you can’t beat that,” he said.

I took the whiskey and poured three inches into my glass.

“You’ll drive nails through your stomach like that. Put a little brew on top of it,” the Negro said. He slapped another cap off on the edge of the counter and handed the bottle to me.

“Use this and avoid the slashed hand shot,” Rie said, and threw an opener to the college boy.

Eight Mexican field hands, all dressed in faded denim clothes, overalls, straw hats, and work shoes, came through the screen door in single file as though they had been lined up at a bus stop. They were potbellied and short, thin and stooped, tattooed with pachuco crosses and hung with religious medals, scarred and stitched, some of them missing fingers, sunburned almost black, with trousers bagging in the rear and their Indian hair wet and combed straight back over the head.

They had a pint of Old Stag and a gallon milk bottle filled with blackberry wine. The Negro began passing out the Jax, and an hour later the room roared with mariachi songs and Apache screams.

“Let me try that guitar, buddy,” I said to the boy from the front porch. He sat on the floor with his back against the wall and a glass of wine and whiskey between his legs. His face was bloodless and his eyes couldn’t fix on my face. I put the strap of the twelve-string around my neck and tried to pick out “The Wreck of Old ’97,” but my fingers felt as though a needle and thread had been drawn through all my knuckles. Then I tried “The Wildwood Flower” and “John Hardy,” and each time I began over again I hit more wrong notes or came up on the wrong fret. I smoked somebody’s cigarette out of an ashtray, finished my drink, and then started an easy Jimmie Rodgers run that I had learned to pick when I was sixteen. It was worse than before, and I laid the guitar facedown on the counter among the scores of empty beer bottles.

“I bet you blow a good one when you’re cool,” Rie said. She was sitting in the chair next to me with a small glass of wine in her hand. Her legs were crossed, and the indention across her stomach and the white line of skin above her blue jeans made something drop inside me.

“Give me an hour and I’ll boil them cabbages down,” I said.

“Do it tomorrow morning.”

“I’m going to streak out of here like the fireball mail tomorrow morning. My Cadillac and I are going to melt the asphalt between here and Austin.” Someone put the whiskey bottle in my hand, and I took two large swallows and chased it with beer.

“You must have a real dragon inside,” Rie said.

“No, I deal with Captain Hyde. That bastard and I have been together almost fifteen years. However, when he starts acting like an asshole I unscrew my head and throw it in the Rio Grande a couple of times.”

“No kidding, pull it back in, man,” she said.

“I thought you were a hip girl. You’re giving me the concerned eye of a Baptist reformer now.”

“I think you’re probably a madman.”

“You ought to see me and John Wesley Hardin drunk in the streets of Yoakum. He rides on the fender of my Cadillac, busting parking meters and stoplights with a revolver in each hand.”

The noise became louder. All the beer, whiskey, and wine were gone, and I gave one of the Mexican field hands another twenty dollars to go to the tavern. The twelve-string guitar was passed from hand to hand, tuned in a half dozen discords, two strings broken, and finally dropped in a corner. Someone suggested a knife-throwing contest, and a bread cutter, two bowies, a rippled-bladed Italian stiletto, my pocketknife, a hand ax, and a meat cleaver were flung into the wall until the boards were split and shattered and knocked through on the ground outside.

The room was beginning to tip and blur in front of my eyes. I was smoking a dead cigar butt that I had frayed under my boot heel a few minutes earlier.

“Spodiodi, man. It’s the only thing. You got to put them snakes back in the basket,” the Negro said in my face. His eyes were red, and his breath was sour with wine.

“I don’t deal in snakes.”

“Man, they’re crawling through your face.”

I knew that I had an answer for him, but the words wouldn’t rise out of the echoes and flashes of light in my head.

“Let’s go down to the river. This place is hotter than a brick kiln,” I said.

“It’s all that corn,” the Negro said.

“Come on, Judge Roy Bean is holding court in his inner tube,” I said, and pulled Rie up from her chair by the hand.

“Hey, man,” she said.

I carried the bottle of whiskey by the neck and pulled her through the hallway into the kitchen. The Negro followed us with a beer in each hand and a half-dozen bottles stuck down in his trousers.

We walked down the bare slope toward the mudflat. The moon was full and white as ivory in a breathless sky. A rusted Ford coupe with no glass in the windows sat half-submerged in the river. The current eddied and swirled through the gaping window in back and coursed over the top of the seats and the steering wheel. The moon’s reflection rippled across the water’s brown surface, and I could see the sharp backs of garfish turning by the sandbars. Behind us the Mexican field hands were still singing. The Negro finished one beer and threw the bottle arching high over the river.

“Yow!” he yelled.

“Look at it. There’s Mexico,” I said. “Fifty yards and you can drop right through the bottom of the twentieth century.”

Rie sat down on a rotted log with her bare feet in the water. The moonlight turned the burned tips of her hair to points of silver.

“A whole land full of bandit ghosts and Indian legends,” I said. “You just step through the hole in the hedge, and there’s Pancho Villa splashing across the river with pistols and bandoliers hanging all over him. Zapata cutting down federales with his machete. Illiterate peasants executing French kings. Cortez destroying an entire culture.”

“There’s diphtheria in the well water of those adobe huts, too,” Rie said.

“You’re like every Marxist I ever met. No humor or sense of romance.”

“Quit shouting.”

“Isn’t that straight?” I said. “It’s the revolutionary mind. You can’t realize that man is more a clown than a Satan. You approach everything with a sullen mind and try to convert buffoons into Machiavelli.”

“Oh for God’s sake, man.”

I took a drink out of the bottle. The whiskey splashed over my mouth.

“You goddamn people don’t know what human evil is. One of these days you and I are going to have some Chinese tea and talk about the Bean Camp together. I’ll also give you a couple of footnotes on Pak’s Palace and No Name Valley.”

I felt the ground shift under my feet, and I thought I was going to fall. I put my arm on her shoulder to keep my balance.

“There’s mudcat nesting in that car. I know how to get them, too,” the Negro said. He took off his shirt and shoes, and laid the remaining bottles of beer in an even line on the bank. “You just swim your hand under the water and back that shovel-mouth into a corner and catch him real fast inside the gill. Come on, brother. I’m going to teach you how to fish like black people.”

He waded out into the river up to his hips and pulled open the rusted car door with both hands. The moon’s reflection off the water made his black body glow.

“He does this when he gets drunk,” Rie said. “You can do it, too, if you want me to take both of you down to the county hospital tonight.”

“That’s just what a Yankee would say. Don’t you know that colored people catch fish when white people couldn’t bring them up with a telephone crank?”

I sat down on the mudflat and pulled off my boots. I felt the water soak through the seat of my trousers.

“He had eight stitches the last time he handfished in that car,” she said.

“I don’t believe it. That sounds like more Marxist-Yankee bullshit.”

I walked out into the river, and the warm, muddy current swirled around my waist and my feet sunk into the silt. The Negro was bent over the top of the front seat with both his arms submerged to the shoulder. His face was concentrated, his eyes looking into nothing, as though his fingers were touching some vital and delicate part of the universe.

“She’s backed up and fanning right next to the trunk. She’s got young ones under her,” he said.

“Watch her fins.”

“She’ll open up in a minute to get a piece of my finger, then I’ll grab a whole handful of meat inside her gill.”

He ducked forward, the surface of the water shook and quivered momentarily, and then he drew one hand back with a ragged cut between the thumb and forefinger. The drops of blood squeezed out through the bruised edges of the skin and ran down his wrist. He closed his eyes in pain and sucked the cut.

“I told you to—” Then I heard the sirens rolling in a low moan down the dusty street in front of the union building.

“Shit,” Rie said from the riverbank.

I turned around and saw the revolving blue and yellow lights on top of three police cars, winking and flashing in the dark.

“The Man done arrived,” the Negro said, with his cut hand still held before his mouth.

Sheriff’s deputies and city police went through the front door of the building, walked around the sides with flashlights, looked in the outhouse, and then focused two car spotlights on us in the river. The electric white glare made my eyes water.

“You people walk toward me with your hands on top of your head!” a voice shouted from behind the light.

“Them dudes can reach out from a long way, can’t they?” the Negro said. He flopped both his arms over his bald head and started wading out of the river. The light broke around his body as though he had been carved out of burnt iron.

For some drunk reason I closed the car door carefully in the current and lifted the handle upward into place.

“On your head, punk!” the voice shouted.

“Fuck you,” I said.

Suddenly, both of the arcs were turned directly into my face, and the Negro disappeared from my vision in one brilliant explosion of light.

“Don’t screw with them, Hack. Get out of there,” Rie said from the darkness.

I waded out of the shallows with one hand over my eyes. My face burned with the heat from the lights.

“I give you warning. Get them over your head.”

“I told you to go fuck yourself, too.” I tripped on the mud bank and fell on my elbows. My forearms and one side of my face were covered with wet sand. Rie tried to pick me up by the back of my shirt.

“They’ll kill you, Hack. Get up and walk. It’s just a disturbing the peace bust. We’ll be out in the morning,” she said.

A sheriff’s car, with both spotlights burning, drove down the embankment on the hard ground, bounced over a log, and turned to a stop in front of me. As the beams of light changed angle I saw the Mexican field hands lined up against the building, with their arms outstretched before them and their legs widespread, while two policemen shook them down.

The whip aerial on the car rocked back and forth, and the deputy from the jail opened the driver’s door and walked toward me. I stood up and put a wet cigar in my mouth. My clothes were filled with sand and mud, and my hair felt like paint on top of my head. His.357 Magnum and the cartridges in his leather belt glinted in the moonlight. There was a line of perspiration down the front of his shirt, and his package of cigarettes stuck up at an angle under the flap of his pocket, which struck me at the time as an odd thing for a military man. His jawbones were as tight as his crew-cut scalp.

“I figured that you was you, Mr. Holland, and I didn’t want nobody dropping the hammer on you for some wetback crossing the river,” he said.

“What have you got? Disturbing the peace? Disorderly conduct?”

“We got all kinds of things. I expect if we look around here a while we might find some dope.”

“Why don’t you let these people alone? There wasn’t any complaint from this neighborhood.”

“Get in the car, please, miss,” he said to Rie.

“Look, she was out here. She didn’t have anything to do with that drunk party.”

He opened the back door of the automobile and took Rie by the elbow.

“Just keep your peckerwood hands in your pockets a minute,” I said.

“What?”

“You heard me, motherfucker.”

“Mr. Holland, you can drive out of here tonight in that Cadillac of yours and I’ll forget about that. The next time you want to help out the niggers and the wetbacks you just write out a check to the Community Chest and stay out of this county.”

“I’ll be all right. Go to Austin tomorrow and put it in for Art,” she said. She sat in the backseat behind the wire-mesh screen.

“Let her out,” I said.

“You really want to push it, Mr. Holland?”

“Yeah, I do. From what I understand you have a b.c.d. from the Marine Corps and you do most of your law enforcement on helpless winos in a drunk tank. So why don’t you get off the badass act?”

“You’re under arrest. I don’t expect you’re going to get out of our jail very soon, either.”

“You’re fucking with the Lone Ranger, too, peckerwood,” I said.

He brought his billy out of his back pocket and caught me right above the temple. A shotgun shell exploded in my head, and I fell against the car door and hit the ground on my hands and knees. He kicked me once in the stomach, and my breath rushed out of me as though someone had opened a large hole in the middle of my chest. The inside of my mouth was coated with sand, my eyes bulged, and I started to vomit, then his boot cut across the back of my head with the easy swing of a football player kicking an extra point.