Lay Down My Sword and Shield

CHAPTER 4

Sometime in the early morning hours I woke up on the stone floor of a cell in the bottom of the courthouse. The cell was almost completely black, except for the dim circles of light through the row of holes in the top of the door. Moisture covered the walls, and the toilet in the corner had overflowed. I pulled myself up on the iron bunk and touched the huge swelling above my temple. It was as tight as a baseball, and the blood had congealed in my hair. My head was filled with distant bugles and claps of thunder, and I felt the cell tilt on its axis and try to pitch me off the bunk into the pool of water by the toilet. Then I vomited between my legs.

I raised my head slowly, my eyes throbbing and the sweat running down my face. I found a dry kitchen match in my shirt pocket and popped it on my thumbnail. I held the flame over my wristwatch and saw the smashed crystal and the hands frozen at five after one. My white pants were still wet and streaked with mud, and my shirt was torn off one shoulder. I stumbled against the door and leaned my face down to the food slit.

“Hey, one of you sons of bitches better—” But my voice broke with the effort of shouting. I tried again, and my words sounded foolish in the stillness.

“Cool that shit, man,” a Negro voice said from down the corridor.

I lay back on the tick mattress with my arm across my eyes. I could smell the urine and stale wine in the cloth, and I imagined that there were lice laying their strings of white eggs along the seams, but I was too sick to care. I slept in delirious intervals, never sure if I was really asleep or dreaming, and my nightmare monsters sat with spread cheeks on my feet and grinned at me with their obscene faces. They appeared in all shapes and sizes of deformity: hunched backs, slanted eyes, split tongues, and lipless mouths. Major Pak was there with his fanatical scream and the electrician’s pliers in his clenched hand, the guards in the Bean Camp who let our wounded freeze to death to save fuel, and then Sergeant Tien Kwong leaned over me and inserted the end of his burp gun into my mouth and said, smiling, “You suck. We give you boiled egg.”

A deputy slipped the bolt on my cell and pulled open the door. I winced in the light and turned my face toward his silhouette. His stomach hung over his cartridge belt. Behind him a Negro trusty was pushing a food cart stacked with tin plates and a tall stainless-steel container of grits.

“You can go now, Mr. Holland, but the sheriff wants to talk with you a few minutes first,” the deputy said.

“Where’s the man who brought me in?”

“He’s off duty.”

“What’s his name?” My head ached when I sat up on the bunk.

“You better talk with the sheriff.”

I got to my feet and stepped out into the corridor. The Negro trusty was ladling spoonfuls of grits and fried baloney into tin plates and setting them on the iron aprons of the cell doors. The uneven stone on the floor hurt my bare feet, and my right eye, which had started to stretch tight from the swelling in my temple, watered in the hard yellow light. The deputy and I went down the corridor and up the stairs to the sheriff’s office. The fat in his hips and stomach flopped inside his shirt each time he took a step. His black hair was oiled and pasted down flat across his balding pate, and he used the handrail on the staircase as though he were pulling a massive weight uphill.

The sheriff sat behind his desk with a hand-rolled cigarette between his lips, and my billfold, pocketknife, and muddy boots in front of him. He wore steel-rimmed glasses, and his ears peeled out from the sides of his head. His face was full of red knots and bumps, a large brown mole on his chin, and his gray hair was mowed right into the scalp, but his flat blue eyes cut through the rest of it like a welder’s torch. He put the cigarette out between his fingers in the wastebasket, and started to roll another one from a package of Virginia Extra in his pocket. The tips of his teeth were rotted with nicotine. He curved the cigarette paper under his forefinger and didn’t look at me when he spoke.

“My deputy wanted to charge you with attempted assault on a law officer, but I ain’t going to do that,” he said. He spread the tobacco evenly in the paper and licked down the edge. “I’m just going to ask you to go down the road, and that’ll be the end of it.”

“Your man is pretty good with his feet and a billy.”

“I reckon that’s what happens when you threaten a law officer, don’t it?” He put the cigarette in his mouth and turned toward me in his swivel chair.

“I don’t suppose that I could bring a charge against him here, but I have a feeling the F.B.I. might be interested in a civil rights violation.”

“You don’t seem to understand what I’m saying, Mr. Holland. I got my deputy’s report right here, cosigned by a city patrolman, and it says you were drunk, resisting arrest, and swinging at an officer with your fists. Now maybe you think that don’t mean anything because you’re an Austin lawyer, but that ain’t worth piss on a rock around here.”

“You’re not dealing with a wetback or a college kid, either.” My head felt as though it were filled with water. Through the window I could see the sun striking across the treetops.

“I know exactly what I’m dealing with. I been sheriff here seven years and I seen them like you by the truckload. You come in from the outside and walk around like your shit don’t stink. I don’t know what you’re doing with them union people, and I don’t really give a goddamn, but you better keep out of my jail. The deputy went easy with you last night, and that’s pretty hard for him to do when he runs up against your kind. But the next time I’m going to turn him loose.”

“You might also tell your trained sonofabitch that he won’t catch me drunk on my hands and knees again, and in the meantime he ought to contact a public defender because I have a notion that he’ll need one soon.”

The sheriff struck a match on the arm of the chair and lit his cigarette. He puffed on it several times and flicked the match toward the spittoon. The knots and bumps on his face had turned a deeper red.

“I’m just about to take you back to lockdown and leave you there till you find some other smart-ass lawyer to get you out.”

“No, you’re not, because you’ve already been through my wallet and you saw a couple of cards in there with names of men who could have a sheriff dropped right off the party ticket.”

“I’ll tell you something. Tonight I’m going out on patrol myself, and if I catch you anywhere in the county you’re going to get educated downstairs and piss blood before you’re through. Pick up your stuff and get out of here.”

“What’s the bail on the others?”

“Twenty-five dollars a head, and you can have all the niggers and pepper-bellies and hippies you want. Then I’ll get my trusties to hose down the cells.”

I picked up my billfold from his desk and put four one-hundred-dollar bills before him.

“That ought to cover it, and some of your water bill, too,” I said.

He figured on a scratch pad with a broken pencil for a moment, smoking the saliva-stained cigarette between his lips.

“No, we owe you fifty dollars, Mr. Holland, and we want to be sure you get everything coming to you.” He opened his desk drawer and counted out the money from a cashbox and handed it to me. “Just sign the receipt and you can collect the whole bunch of them and play sticky finger in that union hall till tonight, then I’ll be down there and we can talk it over again if you’re still around.”

“I don’t believe you’ll be that anxious to talk when you and your deputy and I meet again.”

“I’m going to let them people out myself. Don’t be here when I get back,” he said. He stood up and dropped his cigarette into the spittoon. His flat blue eyes, staring out of that red, knotted face, looked like whorls of swimming color without pupils. He stuck his shirt inside his trousers with the flat of his hand and walked past me with the khaki stiffness of a man who had once more restored structure to his universe.

I sat down in a chair and put my boots on. They were filled with small rocks and mud, and when I stood up again I felt the dizziness and nausea start. I wiped the sweat off my face with my shirt and I wondered how in God’s name I could have ever become involved in a fool’s situation like this. I was glad there were no reflecting windows or glass doors or mirrors in the sheriff’s office, because I was sure that the present image of Hackberry Holland — ripped silk shirt, mud-streaked trousers, swollen temple and blood-matted hair, and face white with concussion and hangover — wouldn’t help me resolve my torn concept of self.

I walked outside into the sunlight to wait for Rie. The sun and shadow sliced in patterns across the lawn, and a warm breeze from the river carried with it the smell of the fields. I sat on the concrete steps and let the heat bake into my skin. My clothes and body reeked of the jail, and the odor became stronger as I started to perspire. Two women passing on the sidewalk looked at me in disgust. “Good morning. How are you ladies today?” I said, and their eyes snapped straight ahead.

A few minutes later Rie and the others came out the front door. The faces of the Mexicans were lined and bloated with hangover, and the guitar player and college boy looked like definitions of death. Their faces were perfectly white, as though all the blood had been drawn out through a tube. Rie carried her sandals in her hand, and she looked as lovely and alive as a flower turning into the sun.

“Thanks for going the bail,” she said.

“I’ll mark it off on my expense account as part of my expanded education. Right now I need to pick up my car, unless our deputy friend set fire to it last night.”

“Rafael’s brother has a truck at the fruit stand. He’ll take us back.”

“Yeah, I don’t think I could walk too far this morning,” I said.

“Say, man, you really took on that bastard, didn’t you?” the college boy said. His face was so wan that his lips moved as though they were set in colorless wax.

“Afraid not,” I said. “It was a one-sided encounter.”

We started walking across the lawn toward the open-air market. My head ached with each step.

“No, man, it takes balls to go up against a prick like that,” he said.

“Stupidity is probably a better word,” I said.

The shade was cool under the trees, and mockingbirds flew through the branches overhead. Across the street a Mexican was wetting down the rows of watermelons in the bins with a hose. Their fat green shapes were beaded with light in the sun. We crossed the street like the ragged remnant of a guerrilla band, and people in passing automobiles twisted their faces around and stuck their heads out of windows at this strange element in the midst of their tranquil Tuesday morning world.

One of the Mexicans and Rie and I got into the cab of a pickup truck and the others climbed in back, and we headed into the poor district. The driver pulled out a half-pint of Four Roses from under the seat and took a drink with one hand on the steering wheel. His face shook with the taste. Then he took three more swallows like he was forcing down hair tonic, and offered the bottle to me.

“Not today,” I said.

He screwed the cap on and passed the bottle out the window of the cab to one of his friends in back. The bottle went from hand to hand until it was empty, then the Negro banged on the roof when we passed the first clapboard beer tavern on the road. He and the Mexicans piled out and went in the screen door, pulling nickels, dimes, and quarters from their blue jeans. Before the truck started up again I could already hear their laughter from inside.

The driver dropped the rest of us off at the union hall. My Cadillac was powdered with white dust so thick that I couldn’t see inside the windows.

“Come in and I’ll put something on your head,” Rie said. The truck rattled back down the road toward the tavern.

“Unless I figured that sheriff wrong, he’s already been to the hotel and my suitcase is waiting for me on the front step.”

“Your eye is starting to close.”

“I keep a couple of glass spares in my glove compartment.”

She put her arm through mine and moved toward the porch.

“All right, no protest,” I said.

“I thought he’d killed you.”

“I don’t believe you’re a hard girl after all.”

“Your eyelids turned blue. I even cried to make that asshole take you into emergency receiving, and he shot me the finger.”

“Don’t worry. I’m going to make this fellow’s life a little more interesting for him in the next few weeks.”

“I didn’t think you believed in charging the barricade.”

“I don’t. There’s always ten others like him who’ll crawl out of the woodwork to take his place, but you can’t fool with the Lone Ranger and Tonto and walk away from it.”

We went inside, and I sat in a chair while she washed the lump on my head with soap and water. The tips of her fingers were as light as wind on the bruised skin.

“There’s pieces of rock and dirt in the cut. I’ll have to get them out with the tweezers,” she said. “You should go to the hospital and get a couple of stitches.”

“Do you have a quart of milk in your icebox?”

She went into the kitchen and came back with a carton of buttermilk and a pair of tweezers in a glass of alcohol. I drank the carton half empty in one long chugging swallow, and for just a moment the thick cream felt like cool air and health and sunshine transfused into my body, then she started picking out the pieces of rock from the cut with the edge of the tweezers. Each alcohol nick made the skin around my eye flex and pucker.

“What are you doing? I don’t need a lobotomy.”

“You probably don’t need blood poisoning, either.” Her eyes were concentrated with each metallic scratch against my skin.

“Look, let me have the tweezers and give me a mirror. I used to be a pretty fair hospital corpsman.”

“Don’t move your head. I almost have it all out.” She bit her lip and squeezed out a splinter of rock from under the cut with her finger. “There.”

Then she rubbed a cotton pad soaked with alcohol over the lump.

“There are other ways to clean a cut. They ought to give first-aid courses in the Third World before you kill somebody with shock.”

“Wait a minute,” she said, and went into the kitchen again and returned with a piece of ice wrapped in a clean dish towel. She held it against my head, her almond eyes still fixed with a child’s concern.

“A cold compress can’t do any good after the first two hours,” I said.

“What was that Bean Camp stuff about last night?”

“Nothing. I create things in my head when I try to run up Jack Daniel’s stock a couple of points.”

“Were you in a prison camp during the war?”

“No.”

The whiskey edge was starting to wear off, and gray worms and spots of light swam before my eyes when I tried to stand up. She pressed her hand down on my shoulder.

“You ought to pull the fishhooks out. You’re all flames inside,” she said.

“I feel like I’ve been dismantled twice in three days, and I’m not up to psychoanalysis right now. It seems that every time my brain is bleeding someone starts boring into my skull with the brace and bit.”

“Okay, man, I’m sorry.”

“I’ve got a brother that can make you grind your teeth down to the nerve with that same type of morning-after insight. There’s nothing like it to send me right through the wall.”

“So I won’t say anything else,” she said.

I felt myself trembling inside, as though all the wheels and gears were starting to shear off against one another at once. My palms were sweating on my knees, and I realized that my real hangover was just beginning.

“Let me have one of your cigarettes,” I said.

She laid the ice compress down, lit a cigarette, and put it in my mouth. The smoke was raw in my throat, and a drop of sweat rolled off my lip onto the paper.

“Does it always take you like that?” she said.

“No, only when I’m stupid enough to get my head kicked in by a redneck cop.”

I smoked the cigarette and exhaled slowly, while my temple and eye beat with pain, then pushed the sweat back into my hair with one hand.

“Look, you’re not a drinker, so you don’t know the alcoholic syndrome,” I said. “I’m not a shithead all the time.”

“Sit down. Your cut is bleeding.”

“I’m going down the road. I’ll take a couple of those hot beers with me if you don’t mind.”

My legs were weak, and the blood seemed to drain downward in my body with the effort of standing.

“You can’t drive anywhere now.”

“Watch.”

“What you’re doing is really dumb.”

I started toward the counter where the remaining bottles of Jax stood, and a yellow wave of nausea went through me. The sour taste of buttermilk and last night’s whiskey came up in my throat, and I felt a great throbbing weight on my forehead. My cigarette was wet down to the ash from the sweat running off my face.

“I really got one this time,” I said.

“Come in the back,” she said, and put her arm around my waist. My shirt stuck wetly against my skin.

We went down the hallway through a side door into a small bedroom. The shade on the window was torn, and strips of broken sunlight struck across the floor. An old crucifix was nailed against one wall above a Catholic religious calendar with two withered palms stuck under the top edges. I drew in on the dead cigarette and gagged in the back of my throat. You’ve just about made the d.t.’s this time, I thought. Work on it again and you’ll really get there.

My body felt as rigid as a snapped twig. She pressed me down on the edge of the bed with her hands and turned on an electric fan. The current of air was like wind blowing over ice against my face.

“Lie down and I’ll put a dressing on your cut,” she said.

Something was rolling loose inside me, and my fingers were shaking on my knees.

“Look, you don’t need—”

“Lie down, Lone Ranger.” Then she leaned over me with her breasts heavy against her blouse, her brown face and wild curly hair a dark silhouette above me, and pressed me back into the pillow.

She rubbed ointment on the cut in a circular motion with her fingers and taped a piece of gauze over it. I could feel the heat of the sun in her skin and hair, and her eyes were filled with a dark shine. I touched the smoothness of her arm with my hand, then the light began to fade beyond the window shade, the fan blew cool over my chest and face, and somewhere out in the hills a train whistle echoed and beat thinly into a brass sky. I heard her close the door softly as on the edge of a dream.

It was afternoon when I awoke, and the wind was blowing hard against the building. The shade flapped back from the window, rattling against the woodwork, and dust devils spun in the air outside. The boards in the floor quivered from the gusts of wind under the building, and there were grains of sand on my skin. My head was dizzy when I stood up, my face tingling, and I could taste the hot dryness of the air in my mouth. I tripped over the fan and opened the door to the hallway. The sudden draft tore the religious calendar and withered palms from the wall, and the mobile made from beer bottles clattered and twisted in circles on the ceiling in the main room. I leaned against the doorjamb in the numbness of awaking from afternoon sleep. Through the front screen I could see the clouds of dust blowing along the street into the trees. I heard Rie walk out of the kitchen toward me. She held a tall glass of ice water in her hand, and she had put on a pair of white shorts and a navy denim shirt. There were freckles on the tops of her bare feet.

“How do you feel?” she said.

“I’ll let you know in a minute.” I took the glass of ice water from her hand and drank it down to the bottom. I didn’t believe that I had ever been so thirsty. The coldness ached inside my empty stomach.

“You have bad dreams,” she said.

“Yeah, I’ve got a whole wheelbarrow full of them.” I walked past her into the kitchen and put my head under the iron pump. I worked the handle, and the water poured over my neck and shoulders and inside my shirt. I wiped my face slick with the palm of my hand. Down the slope the Rio Grande was rippled and dented by the wind. The brown current was turning white around the wreck of the submerged car.

“You can stay here. You don’t have to go back today,” she said.

“I’d better hit it.”

“Wait until the windstorm passes.”

“They don’t pass this time of year. That’s a three-day affair out there.” The water dripped off my clothes onto the floor.

“You can’t see out of your eye.”

“I sight with one eye over my Cadillac hood just like a pistol barrel,” I said.

“I’ll ride to the hotel with you.”

“No, the sheriff will probably be hanging around there somewhere. I think you’ve had enough innings with a left-handed pitcher for one day.”

The building shook in the wind, and pieces of newspaper blew by the window. Across the river two Mexican children were leading a flat-sided, mange-scarred cow off the mud bank into a shed. Her swollen red udder swung under her belly.

“I don’t want to see you get busted again,” Rie said.

“You take care, babe.” I put my hands on her shoulders and kissed her on the cheek. For just an instant the nipples of her breasts touched me and I turned to water inside. Her mouth and eyes made my heart race. “I expect I’ll be back here eventually and try to do something for that Yankee mind of yours.”

“Be careful with yourself, Hack.”

I walked out into the dust and drove to the hotel. Leaves were shredding from the trees on the courthouse lawn and blowing along the sidewalk. An empty tomato basket bounced end over end in the middle of the street, and the wood sign over the hotel slammed back and forth on its iron hooks. The fat deputy who had let me out of the cell that morning sat in the swing on the verandah with his feet propped against the railing. He looked off casually at the yellow sky when I passed him, his huge stomach bursting against his shirt buttons.

“Mr. Holland, we’ll be needing your room tonight,” the desk clerk said inside. His eyes were focused about three inches to the side of my face, then they would flick temporarily across the bridge of my nose and back again to a spot on the far wall.

“By God, that’s right, isn’t it?” I said. “The Cattlemen’s Association is holding its world convention here this week.”

My room had been cleaned, the bed made, the empty beer bottles carried out, as though I had never been there, and my suitcase was packed and closed and sitting just inside the door, ready to be picked up in one convenient motion. Someone had even put a Gideon Bible on the dresser top.

I paid my bill at the desk, and the clerk managed to show me nothing but the crown of his head while he marked off the ticket and counted out my change.

“You don’t sell cigars in here, do you?” I said.

He fumbled in the middle of his counting, his eyelids blinking nervously, and I thought I had him, but he regained his resolve and kept his eyes nailed to the counter. “No sir, but you can get them right next door,” he said, and turned away to the cash register.

I started down the steps to my car, then I heard the swing flop back empty on its chains and the boards of the porch bend under the deputy’s massive weight. What a time not to have a cigar, I thought.

“Mr. Holland, the sheriff wanted me to give you this road map,” he said, pulling it out of the back pocket of his khaki trousers. The paper was pressed into an arc from the curve of his buttocks. “He don’t want you to get lost nowhere on that highway construction before you get into the next county.”

“I guess that would be easy to do unless I had a map. Say, you don’t smoke cigars, do you?” I said. “Let me get a Camel from you, then.”

His eyes looked at me uncomprehendingly out of his white volleyball face. His greased black hair, combed over the balding pate, had grains of sand in it. He pulled a cigarette out of his shirt pocket with two fingers and handed it to me.

“This is nice of you and the sheriff, and I appreciate it.” I borrowed his lighter, which had a Confederate flag on the side of it, and lit the cigarette. “Look, I’ve got two lifetime World Rodeo Association passes that I never use. They’re good for box seats at any livestock show or ass-buster in the state. Here, you take them.”

I pulled the two thick cardboard passes from my billfold and stuck them in his shirt pocket.

“Well, thank you, Mr. Holland,” he said.

I went next door to the tavern, bought a box of cigars and a six-pack of cold Jax, and headed down the road in the blowing clouds of dust, the cornstalks rattling in the wind, the gold of the citrus exposed among the swelling green trees, and each time I made a curve between two hills at ninety miles an hour I felt the old omnipotence vibrate smoothly out of the engine through the steering column into my hands. The fields of cotton, watermelons, and tomatoes flashed by me, and the late sun splintered in shafts of light through the dust clouds and struck on the tops of the hills in soft areas of pale green and shadow. Then the country began to become more level, the twilight took on all the violent purple and yellow colors of an apocalypse, and I felt the wind driving with me eastward down a narrow blacktop highway that stretched endlessly across empty land toward the gathering darkness on the horizon.