Lay Down My Sword and Shield

CHAPTER 6

I spent the next week working on Art’s appeal while the July days grew hotter and my broken air conditioner cranked and rattled in the window. The temperature went to one hundred degrees every afternoon, and the sky stayed cloudless and brilliant with sun. The sidewalks and buildings were alive with heat, and sometimes when the air conditioner gave out altogether I’d open the window and the wind would blow into my face like a torch. In the street below, people walked under the hot shade of the awnings away from the sun’s glare, their faces squinted against the light and their clothes wet with perspiration. The humidity made your skin feel as though it were crawling with spiders, and when you stepped off a curb into the sun the air suddenly had the taste of an electric scorch.

In the evening, when the day had started to cool, I would drive out into the surrounding hills with the windows of the car down. (I had taken a hotel room in town so I could come to the office early each morning, and also Verisa was holding two cocktail parties at the house that week, and I wasn’t up to another round of drinking, and the disaster that always followed, with empty-headed people.)

In the mauve twilight the oak trees and blackjack took on a deeper green, and deer broke through the underbrush and ran frightened across the blacktop road in front of my car, their eyes like frozen brown glass. The air was sweet with the smell of the hills and woods, and jackrabbits and cottontails sat in the short grass with their ears folded back along their flanks. I remembered as a boy how I used to flush them out of a thicket and then whistle shrilly through my teeth and wait for them to stop and look back at me, their ears turned upward in an exact V. A slight breeze blew through the willows growing along the riverbank, and I could see the bass and bream breaking the water among the reeds and lily pads. Fishermen in rowboats with fly rods glided silently by the willows, casting popping bugs into the shadows, then the water would explode and a largemouth bass would climb into the air, shaking the hook in the side of his mouth, and the sun’s last rays would flash off his green-silver sides like tinted gold.

One evening, after a flaming day and a one-hour harangue from Bailey about all my deficiencies, I drove down to the Devil’s Backbone, a geological fault where the land folded sharply away and you could see fifty miles of Texas all at once. On the top of the ridge was a Mexican beer tavern built entirely of flat stones, and as I looked out over the hills at the baked land, the miniature oak trees in the distance, the darkening light in the valleys, and the broken line of fire on the horizon, I felt the breath go out of me and the ground move under my feet. In the wind I could smell the shallow water holes, the hot odor of the mesquite, the carcass of a lost cow that was being pulled apart by buzzards, the wild poppies and bluebonnets, the snakes and the lizards and the dry sand, the moist deer dung in the thickets of blackjack, and the head-reeling resilience of the land itself. I knew that if I stood there long enough, with the shadows spreading across the hills, I would see the ghosts of Apache and Comanche warriors riding their painted horses in single file, their naked bodies hung with scalps and necklaces of human fingers. Or maybe the others who came later, like Bowie and Crockett and Fannin and Milam, with deerskin clothes and powder horn and musket and the self-destructive fury that led them to war against the entire Mexican army.

The stone tavern was cool inside, and the cigarette-burned floor, the yellow mirror behind the bar, the shuffleboard table, and the jukebox with the changing colored lights inside the plastic casing were right out of the 1940s. Cedar-cutters and Mexican farmhands sat at the wooden tables with frosted schooners of beer in their hands, the bartender set down free plates of tortillas, cheese, and hot peppers, and the long-dead voice of Hank Williams rose from the jukebox. The last cinder of the sun faded outside, bugs beat against the screen door, and a brown moon sat low over the hills. I ordered a plate of tacos and a draft beer and watched two cedar-cutters sliding the metal puck through the powdered wax on the shuffleboard. For some reason the Mexican farmhands kept toasting me with their glasses every time they drank, so I bought a round for three tables, and that was the beginning of a good beer drunk.

The next morning I drove to the state penitentiary with my head still full of beer and jukebox music. The blacktop highway stretched through the rolling hills of red clay and cotton and pine trees, and my tires left long lines in the soft tar surfacing. The piney smell of the woods was sharp in the heat, and thin cattle grazed in the fields of burned grass. The rivers were almost dry, the sandbars like strips of bleached bone, and flocks of buzzards turned in slow circles over the treetops. The corn had started to burn on the edges, and in two more weeks, with no rain, the stalks would wither and the ears would lie rotting in the rows.

As I approached the city limits I saw all the familiar warning signs for this world and the next posted along the roadside:

And farther on, in a happier mood,

I stopped at the main gate of the prison and showed my identification to the guard. He wore a khaki uniform and a lacquered straw hat, and his hands and face were tanned the color of old leather. One jaw was swollen with chewing tobacco, and after he had looked at my Texas Bar Association card he spat a stream of brown juice through the rails of the cattleguard, wiped the stain off the corner of his mouth, and handed me a cardboard visitor’s pass with the date punched at the bottom.

“Don’t try to drive back out till the gate man goes through your car,” he said.

The main complex of buildings was at the end of a yellow gravel road that wound through acres of cotton and string beans. The inmates, in white uniforms, were chopping in the rows, their hoes rising and flashing in the sun, while the guards sat on horseback above them with rifles or shotguns balanced across their saddles. The sun was straight up in the sky, and I could see the dark areas of sweat in the guards’ clothes and the flush of heat in the inmates’ faces. Except for the motion of the hoes, or a horse slashing his tail against the green flies on his flanks, they all seemed frozen, removed, in the private ritual that exists between jailer and prisoner. Sometimes a trusty, sharpening tools in the shade of the cedar trees at the edge of the field, would carry a water bucket out to the men in the rows, and they would drink from the dipper with the water spilling over their throats and chests, or a guard would dismount and stand in the shade of his horse while the men sat on the ground and smoked for five minutes; but otherwise the static labor of their workday was unrelieved.

The dust clouds from my car blew back across the fields, and occasionally an inmate would raise his head from his concentration on the end of his hoe and look at me, one of the free people who drove with magic on the way to distant places. And as one of the free people I was the enemy, unable to understand even in part what his microcosm was like. From under his beaded forehead his eyes hated me, and at that moment, looking at my air-conditioned car and the acrid cloud of dust that blew into his face, he could have chopped me up with his hoe simply for the way I took the things of the free world for granted — the women, the cold beer, the lazy Saturday mornings, the endless streets I could walk down without ever stopping.

But I did know his world, maybe even better than he did. I knew the sick feeling of hearing a cage door bolted behind you, the fear of returning to solitary confinement and the nightmares it left you with, the caution you used around the violent and the insane, the shame of masturbation and the temptation toward homosexuality, the terror you had when a cocked gun was aimed in your face, the months and years pointed at no conclusion, the jealousy over a guard’s favor, and the constant press of bodies around you and the fact that your most base physical functions were always witnessed by dozens of eyes. I knew how the weapons were made and where they were hidden: a nail sharpened on stone and driven through a small block of wood; a double-edged razor wedged in a toothbrush handle; barbed wire wrapped around the end of a club; spoons and strips of tin that could open up wrists and jugular veins; and all of it remained unseen, taped between the thighs, carried inside a bandage, tied on a string down a plumbing pipe, or even pushed into the excrement in the latrine.

The reception building was surrounded by trees and a green lawn. Three trusties were trimming the hedges, edging the sidewalks, and weeding the flower beds. They looked right through me as I walked past them to the entrance. I didn’t know why, but I always felt a sense of guilt when I was around prison inmates, as though I should apologize for something. I knew the sequence of absurdities that often put them there, and I knew, also, that the years of punishment and the debilitating ethic that went with it had almost nothing to do with correction; but if I thought too long on any of that I would have had to fold my law degree into a paper airplane and sail it out my office window. I looked directly at the Negro clipping the top of the hedge (he was so black that his white uniform looked like an insult on his skin), and he moved the clippers at a downward angle on the side of the hedge so that his face turned away from me.

In the distance I could see one of the crumbling gray blockhouses left over from the last century, and I wondered if that was the one where John Wesley Hardin spent years chained to the wall of a dark cell. They fed him gruel and water, and whipped him every day with a leather strap to break him, and when he was finally taken out to work in the fields they manacled an iron ball to one ankle, and two guards always stood over him with shotguns. He served his hard time like that, fourteen years in chains with the whip and horse quirt laid across the buttocks.

And I remembered the songs that Leadbelly had sung on the same farm: “The Midnight Special,” “There Ain’t No More Cane on the Brazos,” and “Shorty George,” and the lines about the “black Betty,” a four-inch-wide razor strop, three feet long, nailed to a wooden handle.

I sat in the scrubbed reception room and waited for the guard to bring Art from the fields. The room was divided by a long, low-topped counter, and the inmates sat on one side and the visitors on the other, their heads bent toward one another in a futile attempt at privacy. There was a sign on the far wall that read: DO NOT GIVE ANYTHING TO THE PRISONERS; CIGARETTES CAN BE LEFT WITH THE PERSONNEL. At one end of the counter a huge guard, with rings of fat across his stomach, sat in a wooden chair that strained under his weight. There was a dead cigar in his mouth and a filthy spittoon by his feet. Most of his teeth were gone, and he licked his tongue across the strings of tobacco on his gums. His face was like a pie plate, and the washed-out eyes wouldn’t focus in a straight line. Occasionally, he looked at his watch and pointed one thick finger at an inmate to tell him that his visiting time was over, then he would suck on the flattened end of his cigar. I could almost hear the digestive juices boiling in his stomach.

Art came through a back door with a guard behind him. His black hair was dripping sweat, and the cobweb scar in the corner of his eye was white against his tan. His palms were grimed and his forearms filmed with dirt and cotton lint. There were black rings in the creases of his neck, and his clothes were rumpled and stained at the knees. He had lost more weight, and the veins in his hands stood out like knotted pieces of cord.

“How long we got, boss man?” he said, taking a package of Bugler tobacco from his shirt pocket.

“Fifteen minutes,” the guard said.

Art sat down and curled a cigarette paper between his fingers. He didn’t speak and his eyes remained downcast until the guard had walked back to the door.

“What do you say, cousin?” he said.

“I think we’ll get a new trial.”

“Half the guys in here live on new trials. They don’t talk about nothing else. They write letters like paper is going out of style.”

“The difference is that you’re not guilty of anything.”

“You know that don’t have nothing to do with serving time.”

“Listen, as soon as the appeal goes through I’m going to have you out on bond.”

“That ain’t good-guy jive, is it?”

“I don’t bullshit a client, Art.”

“All right, you don’t. But I’m hanging by my ass in here. This is a rough joint, man.”

“What’s happened?”

He rolled the cigarette and folded down the wet seam with his thumb, watching the guard at the end of the counter.

“A couple of the hacks are laying it on. They know I’m with the union, and they’re getting off their rocks while they got me in the field. Three days ago the hack said I was dogging it in the cotton and they gave me the apple-box treatment. They take you down to the hole without supper, and all night you have to stand on an upended apple crate, even though you piss your pants. If you fall off, the hole boss gives you a few knots to get your attention.”

He took a book of paper matches from his shirt, split one longways with his thumbnail, and lit his cigarette. He breathed the smoke out through the empty space in his teeth.

“The field boss already told me I’d have to wear out a hoe handle a week if I wanted to earn good time from him,” he said. “He stays so close on my ass that horse is shitting and pissing all over me. They’re going to make me build the whole five, man, and I’ll run before I do another month.”

“Don’t do that.”

“I’ll run or I’ll ice one of those bastards. I’m through with that pacifist shit. When I was standing on that box with the hole boss looking down at me from the cage, it hit me what a dumb sonofabitch I’ve been for the last five years. The Anglos want us to be pacifists, just like they taught us that blessed are the poor crap in church. Man, we never knew how blessed we were. They want us to keep our hands in our pockets while they knock the piss out of us.”

“Forget about that running stuff, you hear?”

“It’s not something you plan. You start thinking about all that time and your clock gets wound up, and you’re ready to go through the wall with your fingernails.”

Art’s voice had risen, and the guard was looking at us with his crooked eyes. The fat tissue of his mouth was pressed in a small circle around his dead cigar.

“I spent a little time in a prison compound, too,” I said.

“Then you know what that patience shit sounds like.”

“Give it another couple of weeks and I’ll turn every handle I can to have you on the street.”

“I tell you, buddy, if I make the street they’ll never get me back in again. New trial or not, they better bring the whole goddamn army with them.”

“You’ll walk out of it clean, and I have a feeling that Cecil Wayne Posey’s ass is going to get barbecued, at least if I have anything to do with it. Also, the deputy at the jail is going to have a few interviews with the F.B.I.”

“Say, you cats really pulled a scene, didn’t you? I heard them bring you in that night. Something hit the cell floor like a sack of cement, and one of the blacks in the drunk tank told me it was a tall blond guy in ice-cream pants. You didn’t believe me when I told you to keep your head down.”

“I’m learning. I haven’t made a career of getting my head beat in.”

“So I have, huh? The greaseball who always gets his ass caught in the watermelon fence.”

“I met some of the people you have to deal with. I know it’s bad.”

“Man, you didn’t see nothing. You never got closer to a migrant camp than the highway.”

“I had a small taste of the local law enforcement.”

“I got two Purple Hearts in my trunk and you can have both of them.” He put out his cigarette, peeled the paper back carefully along the seam, and poured the unused tobacco in his Bugler pack.

“Do I get to be the dartboard again?” I said.

“The next time you’re in Pueblo Verde get Rie to give you a tour of the farmworker camps. Stick your head in a few of those stinking outdoor toilets, or talk with the kids sitting in doorways with flies swarming over their faces. Have dinner with a few of the families and see how the food sits on your stomach. Get a good breath of the dead rats under the houses and the garbage rotting in the ditches. Check the scene out, man. It really comes alive for you when you breathe it up both nostrils.”

“It looks like I have to stay white when I talk with you, doesn’t it?”

“You’re a good friend, Hack, but you’re a straight and your mind is white as Clorox.”

He got to me with that one.

“What should I be?” I said. “You want me to apologize because I was born me instead of you?”

“No, man. You still don’t see. It’s mind style, something you grew up with. Your people go through life like they’re looking down a long tunnel and they never see anything on the edges. You roar down the highway a hundred miles an hour and never remember anything later except a motel billboard because everything on the other side of the fence is somebody else’s scene. It don’t belong to you. It’s painted by some screw who lost his brushes and forgot what he was doing.”

“I don’t like to tell you that you’re full of shit.”

“Take the tour, buddy.”

“I’ve been on the tour. I grew up around it.”

“No point, cousin. You’re right in the middle of the pipe.”

“Another gringo, one of the oppressors? A dickhead with the liberal tattoo.”

The guard heard me, and he took the cigar out of his mouth between his fingers and leaned forward, with his stomach folding over his gun belt. The chair legs splayed slightly under his buttocks, and his crossed eyes were fixed in the smooth fat of his face.

“Look, Hack, if I make the street we’re going on a sweet drunk together. We’ll hit every Chicano joint in San Antonio. We won’t have to pay for nothing, either. We’ll slop down the booze and ball with brown-skin chicks till our eyes fall out. Yokohama on a three-day pass. A real wild one.”

“You’re cooking with butane now,” I said.

“I ain’t kidding you. I’m going to wash this jailhouse stink off me in the Guadalupe and buy my own beer truck. We’ll just tool around the roads drinking and slinging bottles at the highway signs. Then when I get back to Pueblo Verde they’re going to learn what real trouble is.”

“You want to go back for some more?”

“The ball game’s just starting. We’re going to hit them with a strike in August. I don’t know if we can win, but a lot of cotton is going to burn in the rows if we don’t.”

“Our defense will work like piss in a punch bowl if you have a half-dozen new charges against you.”

“I can’t sweat that.”

“You’d damn well better, unless you want to end up here again with another five to do.”

“The only thing we got on our side is us. The cops, the legislature, the farm bureau, the whole fucking bunch — we got to bust them the only way we can, and that’s to shut down the harvest until they recognize our union and start to negotiate.”

“You can’t make a strike work in the fields. There’s ten people standing in line for the job you walk off of.”

“They’re going to win in California. We’ll win here, too, as long as they can’t scare us or turn us against each other. You see, man, that’s what their real bag is all about. We twist the screws because of the shacks they give us and the seventy-dollar rents, and they throw out twenty or thirty families and tell them they got to do it because the union’s forcing standards on them they can’t meet. But people ain’t buying that shit anymore.”

The guard looked at his watch and pointed a fat finger at us, then cleared his mouth of tobacco spittle and spat it into the spittoon.

“I left two cartons of cigarettes for you at the desk,” I said.

“Yeah, thanks, man. Look, you were straight when you said two weeks, weren’t you?” His dark eyes were concentrated into mine, and one hand opened and closed on his forearm.

“I can’t set it on the day.”

“I know that. I ain’t dumb about everything.”

“I’ll start on the bond as soon as the appeal goes through.”

“Okay,” he said, and smiled for a moment. “I just don’t want to go on the nutmeg and coffee kick and start flogging my rod in the shower like most of the stir freaks in here. Take care, cousin, and look around for that beer truck.”

I walked back outside into the hard light, and I was perspiring before I reached my automobile. The trusty gardeners were sweeping the cut grass from the sidewalk, their faces turned downward, and a crew of men from the fields were walking in file along the road, four abreast, their hoes over their shoulders in military fashion, with two mounted guards on each side of them. The sun had moved farther into the west, and the shadows from the cedar trees fell to the edge of the cotton field. The sunburned faces and necks of the men ran with sweat, and the guards had their hats slanted over their eyes against the sun.

I drove back down the dusty road and stopped at the gate while two guards looked through my car and in the trunk. As I rumbled over the cattleguard and turned onto the highway I felt a strange release from that confined world behind those high walls. The oaks along the road were greener, the sky a more dazzling blue, the hot wind heavier with the smell of the pinewoods, the murderous sun less of an enemy. The billboard signs advertising charcoaled steaks and frosted bottles of beer penetrated the eye with their color, and even the weathered farmhouses and barns with metal patent-medicine signs nailed on their sides looked like an agrarian romanticist’s finest dream. There’s a line of separation between the world of free people and the confined that you never realize exists until you discover yourself on the opposite side. Once there, behind the barbed wire or mesh screens or concrete walls, all objects and natural phenomena have a different color, shape, angle, and association from anything you had ever known previously. And no one who hasn’t been there can understand the light-headed opulent feeling of walking back into the free world.

Fifty miles up the road I stopped at a tavern and steak house built on stilts above the edge of a green river. The board walls were gray and peeling, and the open windows were covered with screens to keep out the clouds of mosquitoes in the shadows of the willow trees along the bank. A screened eating porch shaded by a tall cypress tree extended over the water, and I sat at one of the checker-cloth tables and ordered a steak and a pitcher of beer. The bottom of the river was soap rock, a type of smooth gray sandstone that the Indians had used to bathe with, and in the middle, where the current had eroded deeply into the rock over thousands of years, you could see the dark shapes of huge catfish and carp moving in and out of the light and shadow, then the surface would ripple with the wind and they would break apart and dissolve in the sun’s refraction. I cut into the steak and soaked up the hot grease with bread, and washed it down with beer. The pitcher and mug were crusted with ice, and the beer was so cold that it made my throat ache. Cowboys and oil-field roughnecks in hard hats were bent over the bar with dozens of empty bottles before them, and the barmaid, in shorts and a sun halter, was opening more bottles as fast as she could pull them from the beer case. Across the river a group of Negroes were cane fishing with worms in the shallows, their black faces shaded with flop straw hats, and the moss in the cypress tree straightened and fell like silk in the wind.

In two more hours I would be back at the ranch, and then Verisa and I would begin to enact our ritual that usually worked itself toward one of three conclusions. The least unpleasant would be a pointless and boring conversation about the office, a new account, a cocktail party at the Junior League, or one of Bailey’s trite suggestions for the campaign. Each of us would listen to the other with feigned interest, the head nodding, the eyes flat and withdrawn. Then, after a careful period, I would change clothes and go into the horse lot, or Verisa would remember at that moment that she had planned to invite people to the ranch from Victoria for the weekend.

More unpleasant was the possibility that the control wouldn’t be there — the Mexican girl had burned everything on the stove, the gardener had dug out the wrong plants from the flower bed, the odor from the gas wells had made the house smell like a Texas City refinery — and the conversation would quickly deteriorate into a sullen silence and a door slammed sharply in another part of the house.

The last alternative was the worst: nothing would be said when I came into the house until we were forced by geographical necessity to be in the same room together for sixty seconds, and then our exchange would have the significance and intensity of two people talking at a bus stop. I’d spend my time in the library with the door closed, drinking whiskey and playing my guitar, and finally when I was in a drunken fog, my fingers thick on the guitar neck, with the house humming as loud as my own blood and Old Hack’s angry ghost walking the front porch, the seams would start to strip and Mr. Hyde’s bloody eyes would look into mine, and Verisa would have to lock the bedroom door until the next morning.

However, Verisa wasn’t always like the person I’ve described here. When I met her at a country club dance in San Antonio eight years ago she was Verisa Hortense Goodman, the only daughter of a millionaire stock financier, a hard-shell Baptist who never drank or smoked and kept his hard body trim with fifty push-ups a day until he dropped dead from a heart attack. That night on the terrace under the mimosa trees the moon-sheen tangled in her auburn hair and her white skin glowed in the light from the Japanese lanterns. Her face was cool and pale, her small mouth achingly beautiful as she looked up at me. There were always men around her, and when she moved across the terrace, her legs like grace in motion against her tight silver gown, the men would follow her, eager, smiling, their own dowdy women left at the drinks table. I took her away from her date that night, and we went on a wild ride with a magnum bottle of champagne through the Hill Country to an open-air German dance pavilion in San Marcos. I had a Porsche convertible then, and I kept it wide open through the black-green hills, drifting across the turns, while she poured the wine in two crystal glasses for us. Her face was happy with adventure and release, her voice loud above the roar of the engine and the wind, and she told me she was sick of country club men and beaux who hadn’t outgrown Kappa Sig, and I knew then that she was the one.

The next four months were all green and gold days and turquoise evenings, fried chicken picnics on the Guadalupe River, a burning hour under a willow tree in an afternoon shower, tennis and gin rickeys at the club, horseback riding into the hills and swimming in the black coldness of the Comal under the moon. We spent weekends at the bullfights in Monterrey, with breakfasts of eggs fried in hot sauce and chicory coffee and boiled milk, and our mornings were filled with sunshine and mad plans for the rest of the day. We danced in beer gardens, hired a mariachi band at a street party in the San Antonio barrio, went to cowboy barbecues, and always kept a bottle of champagne in an ice bucket on the backseat of the Porsche. She never tired, and after another furious night of roaring across the countryside from one wonderful place to the next, she would turn her face up to be kissed, her eyes closed and the white edge of her teeth showing between her lips, and I would feel everything in me drain like water poured out of a cup. I’d leave her at her front door, the mockingbirds singing in the gray stillness of first light, and the road back to the ranch would be as lonely and empty as a stretch of moonscape.

We were married in Mexico City and spent the next three weeks fishing for marlin in the Yucatán. I rented a villa on the beach, and at night the waves crested white in the moonlight and broke against the sand and the Gulf wind blew cool with the smell of salt and seaweed through the open windows in our bedroom. In the mornings we raced horses in the surf, and I taught her how to pick up a handkerchief from the sand at a full gallop. Her skin darkened with tan, and in bed I could feel the heat in her body go into mine. While we ate lobsters in a pavilion on the beach after the afternoon’s fishing, her eyes would become merry, flashing at me privately, and I would already see her undressing before our closet mirror.

But later, as the months went by at the ranch, I began to see other things in Verisa that I had overlooked previously. She was conscious of class, and underneath her rebellion toward country club romance and the pale men with family credentials who had courted her, she was attached to her father and the strict standard he had followed and expected in other men. He was the son of a small grocery-store owner, and after he became wealthy he learned, with some pain, the importance of having family lineage as well as money, and he never failed to remind Verisa that she belonged to a very special class of people who did not associate with those beneath their station. She had learned the lesson well, although she was probably never aware of it. She simply didn’t recognize the world of ordinary people, those who lived on salaries, rode Greyhound buses, or carried drinks from behind a bar; they were there, but they moved about in another dimension, one that existed in the center of hot cities, drab neighborhoods, and loud, workingmen’s taverns.

Also, she didn’t like drunkenness. Although she considered herself an agnostic, a good deal of her father’s devotion to the Baptist church had been left in her (he attributed his financial success to his early redemption at a Dallas revival and the fact that he practiced the teachings of Christ in his business; once he stared me straight in the face and told me that the Jews in the stock market were afraid to deal with a truly Christian man; he also believed that F.D.R. was a Jew). I never liked her father, and I always made a point of serving highballs, filling the room with cigar smoke, and drinking too much when he was at the house. He was glad to have Verisa married into the Holland family, and privately he asked her to name a child after him; so he was always restrained when I poured double shots of whiskey or asked him if he knew a Baptist minister in Dallas who was a grand dragon in the Ku Klux Klan. At first Verisa was indulgent toward my performances with her father, and occasionally, after he had left the house with his face disjointed in concern, she would say something mild, a quiet reproof, in hopes that I would be tolerant of him.

But I couldn’t stand his bigotry, his illiterate confidence in the reasons for his success, and his simplistic and sometimes brutal solutions for the world’s problems. Also, I resented the influence he’d had on Verisa’s mind, that early period when he had infected her with the stupidity of his class. As she grew older I knew she would become more like him, much more sophisticated and intelligent, but nevertheless marked with the rigid social attitudes of the new rich. Worse, as my dislike for him became more open and his weekly visits turned into embarrassing periods of silence in the living room and then finally stopped altogether, I pushed her closer to him and she began to make comparisons between her father and other men who had been given everything. Sometime later, after I had come in drunk from a duck-hunting trip, she commented that heavy drinking was a symptom of the weak who couldn’t stand up under competition.

I paid my bill at the steak house and took two cans of Jax with me for the drive home. Evidently, I was confused about Verisa’s schedule for the week, because one of her afternoon lawn parties was under way when I arrived. The Negro bartender was shaving ice for mint juleps on the screened porch, and blue-haired ladies in sundresses sat around tables on the lawn under the oak trees. Here we go, I thought. Two men from the state Democratic committee were there, neither of whom I wanted to see, and somebody had ridden Sailor Boy and had left him thirsty in the lot with the saddle still on. I went around the far side of the house and entered the library through the side door, but an insurance executive from Victoria and his wife were there, staring at my gun case with drinks in their hands. They turned their flushed faces at me, smiling. “Hello. Good to see you,” I said, and went straight through and into the kitchen. Cappie, an old Negro who lived on the back of my property and sometimes barbecued for us, was chopping green onions and peppers with a cleaver on the drainboard. His gray hair was curled in the thick furrows on the back of his neck.

“Cap, get that saddle off of Sailor Boy and turn him out.”

“There some young ladies been riding him, Mr. Holland.”

“Yeah, I know. Nobody thinks he drinks water, either.”

“Yes, sir.”

I started up the staircase to the bedroom, and then one of the Democratic committee men called from behind me and I was caught in the center of it. I drank mint juleps under the oaks with the blue-haired ladies, listened with interest to their compliments about my wife and ranch, explained politely to a mindless coed that Sailor Boy was a show horse and shouldn’t be ridden into barbed-wire fences, and laughed good-naturedly with the two committee men at their locker-room jokes. People came and left, the sun started to set beyond the line of trees on the horizon, and the bartender moved among the groups with a tray of cool drinks, and at dusk Cappie served plates of barbecued links and chicken and potato salad. My head was drumming with the heat, the whiskey, and the endless conversation. Verisa stood next to me with her hand on my arm, accepting invitations to homes that I would not enter unless I was drugged and chained. Finally, at nine o’clock, when the party moved inside out of sheer exhaustion, I took a bottle of whiskey from the bar and drove down the back road to one of the ponds that I’d had stocked with bass. One of Cappie’s cane poles was leaned against a willow tree, and I dug some worms out of the wet dirt by the bank and drank whiskey and bottom-fished in the dark until I saw the last headlights wind down my front lane to the blacktop.

During the next ten days I spoke at a free Democratic barbecue in Austin (it was crowded with university students and working people, most of whom stayed at the beer kegs and didn’t know or care who was giving the barbecue), addressed two businessmen’s luncheons in San Antonio (the American and Texas flags on each side of me, the plastic plants forever green on the linen-covered tables, the rows of intent faces like expressions caught in a waxworks), talked informally at a private club in Houston (“Well, Mr. Holland, regardless of the mistake we made in Vietnam, don’t you think we have an obligation to support the fighting men?” “Granted that colored people have a grievance, do you believe that the answer lies in destruction of property?” “Frankly, what is your position on the oil depletion allowance?”), and spent one roaring drunk afternoon in a tavern with two dozen oil-field roughnecks and pipeliners who all promised to vote for me, although almost none of them came from the district.

The appeal came through at the close of the second week since I had seen Art. The judge who had reviewed the trial record, a hard old man with forty years on the bench, wrote in his decision that “the conduct of the local court was repugnant, a throwback to frontier barbarism,” and he ordered Art’s release from the state penitentiary on appeals bond pending a new trial. I set down the telephone, took a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and a glass from my desk drawer, and poured a large drink. On my second swallow, with a fresh cigar in my mouth, Bailey walked through the door and hit the broken air conditioner with his fist.

“Why don’t you turn the goddamn thing off so the building can stop vibrating a few minutes?” he said. It had been a bad two weeks for Bailey. The heat bothered him much worse than it did me, and we had lost one of our big accounts, which he blamed on me. He believed that he was developing an ulcer, and each morning he drank a half bottle of some chalky white medicine that left him nauseated for two hours.

“Just turn the knob, Bailey, or you can hit it some more.”

“I see you’re getting launched early this afternoon.”

“No, only one drink. Do you know where I can buy a beer truck?”

“What?” A drop of perspiration rolled down from his hairline like a thick, clear vein.

“I tell you what, buddy. Let’s lock up the office in about an hour, and I’ll take you on a three-day visit to all the Mexican beer joints in San Antonio.”

“Put up the whiskey.”

“Come on. For one time in forty years of Baptist living, close the office early and tie on a real happy one.”

“Did you look at our calendar for this afternoon between drinks?”

“Yeah, R. C. Richardson is about to get burned again, and he needs us to clean up his shit.”

“You accepted him as a client. I don’t like the sonofabitch in the office.”

“You don’t understand that old country boy, Bailey. He’s not a bad guy, as far as sons of bitches go. Anyway, his ass can burn until Monday. Get a glass and sit down. The only ulcer you have is in the head, and you’re going to have a few dozen more there unless you let some cool air into that squeezed mind of yours.”

“If you want to get into the bottle and blow half our practice, do it, but shut off that patronizing crap. I’ve pretty well reached my level of tolerance in the last two weeks.”

“Look, I won appeal today on Art Gomez and the judge has set bond, and you have to admit that we haven’t sprung many of our clients from the state pen. So take a drink and lower your blood rate, and I’ll pick up Richardson’s case early Monday morning.”

“I can’t get it through to you, Hack. You’ve got cement around your head. The office isn’t a tennis club where you play between drinks.”

“All right, forget it,” I said, and picked up the telephone and dialed the number of a bondsman we dealt with. I turned my eyes away from Bailey’s vexed face and waited in the hot stillness for him to leave the room.

The bondsman was named Bobo Dietz. He was a dark, fat man, who always wore purple shirts and patent-leather shoes and a gold ring on his little finger. He had moved to Austin from New Jersey ten years ago, set up a shabby office next to the county jail, and in the time since then he had bought two pawnshops and three grocery stores in the Negro slum. He considered avarice a natural part of man’s chemistry, and you were a sucker if you believed otherwise; but he was always efficient and you could count on him to have bail posted and the client on the street a half hour after you set him in motion.

He assured me over the phone, in his hard Camden accent and bad grammar, that the ten-thousand-dollar bond would be made before five o’clock and Art would be released by tomorrow morning. For some reason Bobo liked me, and as always, when I went bail for a client on my own, he wouldn’t charge me for anything except expenses. Many times I wondered if there was some strange scar in my personality that attracted people like Bobo Dietz and R. C. Richardson to me.

I turned off the air conditioner and opened all the office windows. The stale afternoon heat and noise from the street rose off the yellow awnings below me. My shirt stuck to my skin, and the odor of gasoline exhaust and hot tar made my eyes water. In the middle of the intersection a big Negro in an undershirt was driving an air-hammer into the concrete. The broken street surfacing shaled back from the bit, and the compressor pumped like a throbbing headache. I sipped another straight drink in the windowsill, sweating in the humidity and the heat of the whiskey, then I decided to give Bailey and his fundamentalist mentality another try. I took a second glass from the drawer, poured a small shot in the bottom, and walked into his office.

He was dictating to our secretary, his eyes focused on the wall, and I could see in the nervous flick of his fingers on his knee that he expected an angry exchange, profanity (which he hated in front of women), or a quick thrust into one of his sensitive areas (such as his impoverished bachelorhood, the empty weekends in his four-hundred-dollar-a-month apartment). I leaned against the doorjamb, smoking a cigar, with a glass in each hand. He faltered in his dictation, and his eyes moved erratically over the wall.

“Hack, I’ll talk to you later.”

“No, we have to shut it down today. It’s Friday afternoon and R. C. Richardson will appreciate us a lot more Monday morning. Mrs. McFarland, my brother needs to direct me into the cocktail hour today, so you can leave early if you like.”

The secretary rested her pencil on her pad, her eyes smiling. Her hair was gray, streaked with iron, and her face was cheerful and bright as she waited for the proper moment either to stop work or resume the dictation.

I set Bailey’s drink down before him.

“I’d like to finish if—”

“Sorry, you’re unplugged for the day, brother,” I said. “Go ahead, Mrs. McFarland. There’s a slop chute down the road where I need a warden.”

Bailey saw that I had the first edge of a high on, and he let the secretary go with an apology. (He was the only southerner I ever knew who could have been a character in a Margaret Mitchell novel.)

“That’s too goddamn much,” he said. “I’ve had it with this type of irresponsible college-boy shit around the office. When you’re not loaded you’re coming off a drunk, or you’re spending your time on a union agitator’s appeal while our biggest account gets picked up by a couple of New York Jews. You’ve insulted everybody who’s tried to help you in the election, you got yourself put in jail because you were too drunk to know what universe you were in, and you had the balls to file a civil rights complaint against the man who arrested you.”

“Bailey—”

“Just shut up a minute. Senator Dowling kept that story off the wire services, but since you felt so outraged that you had to file a complaint with the F.B.I. we should have some real fine stuff in the newspapers before November. In the meantime you haven’t been in a courtroom in three months, and I’m tired of carrying your load. If you want out of the partnership, I’ll sign my name to a check and you can fill in the amount.”

“I started off to have a drink with you, brother, but since you’ve brought the conversation down to the bloodletting stage, let’s look at a couple of things closely. Number one, the criminal cases we’ve won in court have been handled by me, and our largest paying accounts, keeping Richardson and his kind out of the pen for stealing millions from the state, have been successful because I know how to bend oil regulation laws around a telephone pole. Number two, you haven’t been pumping my candidacy for Congress just because you want to see your brother’s sweet ass winking at you from Washington, D.C. I don’t like to put it rough to you like that, Bailey, but you don’t understand anything unless it comes at you like a freight train between the eyes. You have all these respectable attitudes and you heap them out on everybody else’s head and ask them to like you for it. You better learn that you have a real load of pig flop in that wheelbarrow.”

On that note of vicious rapport I received the call from Bobo Dietz. Bailey’s face was white, the veins swollen in his neck, his eyes hot as he raised the whiskey to his mouth and I picked up the receiver.

“I don’t know what kind of deal this is, Mr. Holland,” Dietz said.

“What are you talking about?”

“That man’s dead.”

“Look, Dietz—”

“I called the warden. He said a couple of boons chopped him up with bush axes yesterday afternoon.”