Lay Down My Sword and Shield

CHAPTER 7

It took me a half hour to get the warden on the phone. He didn’t want to talk with me, but after I threatened to see him in his home that night he read me the guard’s report about Art’s death and added his own explanations about the unavoidable violence between the Negro and Mexican inmates.

Two Negroes had hidden a paper bag full of Benzedrex inhalers in the tractor shed, and they had been drinking bottles of codeine stolen from the pharmacy and chewing the cotton Benzedrine rings from at least two dozen inhalers when Art went inside the shed to get a lug wrench. A few minutes passed; a mounted guard working a gang in the cotton field heard a single cry, and by the time he rode to the shed and threw open the door the Negroes had disemboweled Art, torn the flesh from his back like whale meat, and severed one arm from his body.

There wasn’t much more to the report. Art had probably been killed with the second or third blow. The Negroes were so incoherent they couldn’t talk, and the guard had no idea why they had attacked Art instead of a half-dozen other men who had been in and out of the shed earlier, although the warden added that “a doped-up nigger isn’t a human being no longer.” The Negroes had been put in solitary confinement and refused to talk about killing Art, if they even remembered doing it, and Art’s body was to be buried in the prison cemetery unless his family was willing to pay for shipment back to Rio Grande City.

I hung up the receiver and sat numbly in the chair with my eyes closed and my fingers trembling on my forehead. So that was it. Just like that. Two crazed men single out another man, for no reason other than the fact that he walked into their bent, angry minds at the wrong time, and then they tear all the thirty-six years of life and soul from his body in seconds. My right hand was still sweating from the heat of the phone receiver and my ears burned with the casual language of the guard’s report and the warden’s footnotes. I couldn’t shut out the vision of the two Negroes dismembering a man who had nothing to do with their lives, their brains boiling in a furnace of satisfaction, just as sometime in the future several other madmen would seat them in a wooden chair fitted with leather straps and buckles and metal hood and place a cotton gag in their mouths and burst every cell in their bodies with thousands of volts of electricity. Bailey poured a drink in a glass and placed it in my hand. I watched the brown light shimmering in the whiskey. My arm felt too weak and lifeless to raise the glass to my mouth.

“I’m sorry, Hack,” Bailey said.

I stood up and set the glass on the desk. My movements seemed wooden, disconnected from one another, as though I had just awoke in the center of a vacuum. I could feel the beat of my pulse swelling into my eardrums. For just a moment the room looked unfamiliar, the ordered arrangement of chairs and desk and file cabinets foreign to anything that was me. I began putting on my coat.

“Where are you going?” Bailey said.

“I’m going to try to explain how a—”

“Sit down a minute and finish your drink.”

“I said I’m going down to the Valley and try to explain how a good man was murdered in a prison where he shouldn’t have been in the first place. And then I’ll explain how I won appeal on a man twenty-four hours after he was dead.”

“Don’t let it take you like this, Hack.”

“How should we take it, Bailey? Maybe if I go to work fast I can arrange to have his body shipped home before he’s buried in a prison cemetery with a wood marker. And if I’m too late to prevent that, I can always work on a court order to have the body exhumed. And while we’re doing all that we can consider that a lynch court had this in mind for him when he was first charged.”

“Here, drink it, and I’ll go with you.”

“You wouldn’t like it.”

“I’ll rent a plane and we’ll fly down tonight.”

I drank from the glass, but the whiskey had no taste. I had started to perspire under my coat, and the shapes and late afternoon shadows in the room were as strange as the distorted lines in a dream. Outside, the air-hammer thudded into the asphalt. I felt the sweat dripping off my hair down the back of my neck. The glass was empty in my hand.

“They wouldn’t like you, either,” I said.

“Goddamn it, Hack, you can’t drive like this.”

“They don’t buy that work-with-the-system stuff. And I don’t feel like telling them the system is all right, except for those twenty-four-hour differences that you have to take into allowance. And I don’t like to tell them that I was having drinks with the D.A.R. ladies and shaking hands with the paraplegics while Art’s clock was one day behind the court’s. Give me another one.”

He put his arm on my elbow and tried to turn me toward the chair.

“Just get the bottle, Bailey. Pour yourself a super one while you’re at it.”

He went to the desk and came back with the bottle of Jack Daniel’s. He held the stopper in one hand.

“All right, sit down, and I’ll call the airport.”

“Would you listen to me just for one goddamn time?” I said. “I’m not going down to meet with a Rotarian luncheon, and number two I’m not a fucking lunatic who needs his older brother to strap a control harness on his back.”

I took the bottle out of his hand and drank from the neck. I swallowed until the muscles in my throat closed and the whiskey backed up in my mouth.

“There, goddamn. That glues everything a little tighter,” I said.

“Hack.”

I left him standing in the open door with the bottle in his hand, his lined face covered with pinpoints of moisture.

On the four-lane highway west of town I opened up the Cadillac, lowered the windows, and passed long strings of late afternoon traffic, hitting the shoulders and showering gravel over the asphalt. The red sun burned across the tops of the hills and lighted the dark edges of the post oaks and blackjack, and the shadows of the cedar-post fences along the road broke silently against my fenders like a blinking eye. Although I had driven that same highway hundreds of times, the sunset gave a different cast and color to the land than anything I had seen there before. The windmills were motionless in the static air; the cattle in the fields were covered with scarlet, their heads stationary in the short grass, and the neat white ranch houses seemed as devoid of life and movement as an abandoned film set; the irrigation ditches were dry and cracked with drought, the thickets of mesquite like burned scratches against the hillsides, and the few horses in the pastures looked as though they had been misplaced.

The shadows deepened over the hills, the traffic thinned, and I kept the accelerator to the floor for the next fifty miles. The signboards, the oil rigs, and the three-dollar Okie motels sped past me in the twilight, but none of it would click together as a stable piece of geography that I had lived around all my life. It was removed, unconnected, and the whiskey from my flask made it even emptier and more disjointed. As a southerner I had been brought up to believe that through conditioning and experience you could accept with some measure of tranquility any of the flaws in the human situation. But death is one flaw that always lands like a fist in the center of the forehead. No matter how many times you see it, or smell its gray rotting odor, or come close to buying it yourself, each time is always like the first. No amount of earlier experience prepares you for it, and after it happens the world is somehow unfairly diminished and bent out of shape.

It was night and just the horn of the moon shone above the hills when I reached Pueblo Verde. Lights glowed inside farmhouses beyond the dark fields and orchards of citrus trees, and the river was as black as gunmetal under the starless sky. Everything was closed on the main street except the hotel and beer tavern, and I turned down the rutted road into the Mexican district, wondering what type of inadequate words I would choose to tell Rie and her friends that Art’s death had come about the same way that a stupid fool steps on your foot aboard a crowded bus. I understood why Western Union offices always kept a pamphlet of prepared condolences on their counters. Death is the one occasion when words have as much relevance as a housewife talking across her back fence about a broken washing machine.

My flask was empty. I stopped in the Mexican tavern for a fifth of Jack Daniel’s and had two drinks from the bottle in the car before I pulled up in front of the union headquarters. Bugs flicked against the screen door and turned in the yellow square of light on the porch. One of the windows had a large, spiderwebbed hole in the center, and someone had taped a piece of cardboard over it from the inside. Okay, doc, let’s go, I thought.

I walked up the dirt path and knocked on the door. The Negro and two Mexicans in cowboy shirts and blue jeans were talking at a table piled with cardboard picket signs and bumper stickers. Only the Negro turned his head toward the door when I knocked; the other two kept talking, their faces calmly intense with whatever they were saying, their hands and fingers gesturing in the air with each sentence.

“Say, hello,” I said.

The Negro looked back at the door again, then pushed back his chair and walked toward me with a beer in his hand, his cannonball head shining in the light. He squinted at the screen with his red-rimmed eyes.

“That’s my whiskey brother out there, ain’t it?” he said. “Come on in, home. You ain’t got to knock around here.”

He pushed open the door for me and put out his large, callused block of a hand.

“Is Rie here?”

“She’s laying down. I’ll get her.”

“Maybe I should come back tomorrow.”

“No, she’ll want to see you. Get yourself a beer off the counter.”

“Look—”

“No, man. It’s all right.”

He went into the back of the building, and a few minutes later Rie walked out of the hall into the light. She was barefoot and wearing blue jeans and a flowered shirt, and her curly, sunburned hair was uncombed. I looked once at her face and realized that she already knew about Art’s death.

“How you doing, babe?”

“Hello, Hack.”

“I started to call first.”

The skin around her eyes was pale and there was no color in her mouth. I felt empty standing in front of her.

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

Her eyes blinked a moment without really seeing any of us.

“There’s a meeting tonight,” she said.

“That’s them church people coming tonight,” the Negro said. “They don’t offer us nothing but prayers. You all go on.”

“I know a place to eat across the river,” I said. “Come on. I might run into a Carta Blanca sign by myself.”

I had peeled off the cellophane wrapper from a cigar and I couldn’t find an ashtray to put it in. It seemed that every word I spoke and every movement I made was somehow inappropriate.

“That’s right. Go on out of here,” the Negro said. “I’m going to run them church people off, anyway. Every time they come here they start sniffing at my wine breath.”

She pushed her hair back with her fingers and slipped on a pair of leather moccasins. She was too strong a girl to have cried much, but her face was wan and drawn and the suntan on it looked as though it didn’t belong there.

We walked out into the dark, down the path, and I put my arm around her shoulders. When I touched her and felt the trembling in her back I wanted to pull her into me and press her head against my chest.

“I spent three hours thinking of the wrong words to say,” I said.

“You don’t need to, Hack.”

“Yes, I do. A man’s death deserves an explanation, but I don’t have it. Every time I saw a guy buy it in Korea I tried to see some rational equation in death, but it had no more reason or meaning than those faded billboard signs out on the highway.”

“Art’s brother phoned this afternoon and told me how he died. It didn’t have anything to do with anybody. There’s nothing to say about it.”

So I didn’t try to say anything else. I turned the Cadillac around in the dust, and we drove back down the corrugated road between the rows of clapboard shacks and dirt yards to the main street. The slip of moon had turned yellow and risen above the hills in the dark sky. The air was hot, motionless, and the oak trees on the square looked as though they had been etched in metal. The deputy who had given me the road map out of town stood under the neon sign in front of the beer tavern, talking with two men in overalls. His khaki shirt was dark around the neck and armpits with perspiration. He took the toothpick out of his mouth and stared hard as the car passed.

“Have they been bothering you?” I said.

“We had three arrests on the picket last week, and two nights ago somebody burned a cross in the front yard. It’s strange to walk out on the porch and see something that ugly in the morning light. They’d nailed strips of tires to the wood, and I could still smell the melted rubber.”

“Well, by God, we can do something about the Klan. The F.B.I. wants to nail them any way they can.”

“The local fed thinks it was high school kids, even though some Chicanos in the tavern saw a half-dozen men in the back of a pickup with the cross propped against the cab.”

“Rie, we have civil rights statutes that can get those men one to ten in Huntsville.”

“We don’t care about them.”

“Listen, those men are dangerous and violent people, and they should be in the penitentiary.”

“We’ve given the farm companies until Monday to sign, and then we shut it down. We have enough people organized now to do it, too.”

“Do you know what it’s going to be like when the cotton starts burning in the rows and the citrus goes soft because it wasn’t picked in the first week? Those farmers are going to lose their ass, and those K.K.K. bastards will have chains and baseball bats next time.”

“They won’t stop the strike.”

“I don’t want to see them pouring kerosene on your house, either.”

“Let’s don’t talk about it anymore, Hack. I’m really tired.”

And then I felt that I had selected almost every bad sentence possible in the three hours of driving from Austin to the Valley. I followed the blacktop south of town and crossed the concrete bridge over the Rio Grande. The low, black water rippled through the trash caught in the pilings, willow trees and scrub brush grew along the sandy banks, and the windows of the adobe huts on the Mexican side glowed with candlelight and oil lamps. I stopped at the port of entry, and a tired Mexican immigration official in a rumpled khaki uniform and plastic-brim hat told me not to go farther than fifteen miles into the interior without a tourist’s permit. Rie’s face had the shine of ivory in the light from the official’s small office. If I touched my fingers to her cheek I knew the skin would be as cool and dry as stone. All the pain was way down inside her, and it would stay there without ever burning through her composure. Somewhere she had learned how to be a real soldier, I thought. Either in those insane billy-swinging, head-busting campus riots, or maybe in a Mississippi jail where they put cattle prods to civil rights workers, but somewhere she had earned her membership in a private club.

I drove down the bad tar-surfaced highway between tall rows of cedar and poplar trees. The evening star flickered dimly above the bare hills in the west, and a hot breeze had started to blow across the flatland from the Gulf. Most of the adobe houses by the roadside were in ruins, the mudbricks exposed and crumbling, the roofing timbers hanging inside the doorways like long teeth. I could never drive into old Mexico at night without feeling the presence of Villa and Zapata in those dark hills, or the ghosts of Hood’s Texas cavalry who chose exile in a foreign country rather than surrender when the Confederacy fell. Even on my drunken excursions to meet three-dollar Mexican whores, the wild smell of the land and the long stretch of burned hills and all the mystery in them cut through my sexual fantasies. Even now, with Rie beside me, her drawn face painfully beautiful as she held a match unevenly to her cigarette, I still heard the jingle of sabers and the cock of rifles, pointed by the thousands down a hill at some forgotten army.

Ten miles from the port of entry there was a small town of flat, adobe buildings, cobbled streets caked with horse manure, whorehouses, two or three dangerous bars, a rural police station, and a cemetery against the hillside with a stucco wall around it. High up on the hill and formed with whitewashed fieldstones were the words PEPSI–COLA. The adobe houses were as brown as the land, but the doors were painted blue, fingernail-polish red, and turquoise to prevent spirits from crossing the threshold. Most of the people in the town were poor Indians, but the whorehouses and the bars were run by either the police or marginal gangsters from Monterrey. Oil-field workers sat in the open-front cantinas with fifteen-year-old girls, the jukeboxes blaring with mariachi horns, and farther up the narrow main street two policemen in dirty uniforms stood in the lighted doorway of the town’s largest whorehouse. One of them beckoned to me as I passed, then he saw Rie and turned his attention to the car behind me.

The cervezería and café was across the small square from the church. The owner had hung lights in the mimosa trees over the outdoor tables, and the shadows flickered in webbed patterns on the flagstones and the white oilcloth table covers. In the middle of the square was a weathered bandbox, with a round, peaked roof, and I could see the altar candles burning in the darkness beyond the open door of the church. We sat under the trees, with the dappled shadows breaking across us, and I ordered dinner and two bottles of Carta Blanca.

“Could I have a tequila?” Rie said.

“The stuff they sell here is like pulque. It’s yellow and you can see the threadworms swimming in it.”

“I’d like one just the same.”

The waiter brought us a quart bottle with a cork in it, two slender shot glasses, and a plate of sliced limes and a salt shaker. I poured into our glasses, and she drank it neat, without touching the limes or the water chaser, her eyes fixed on the darkened square. She winced a little with the bitter taste, and for just a moment there was a flush of color in her cheeks.

“That’s not the way to do it,” I said.

“Let me have another one.”

“You can burn holes the size of a dime in your stomach with that stuff.”

“I would like for you to pour me another one.”

“All right. Hold the lime in your left hand and put some salt between your thumb and forefinger, then sip it.”

I watched her tilt the glass to her lips and drink it down in two swallows. She choked slightly in the back of her throat and sucked on the lime.

“It’s better the second time,” she said. Her eyes had already gone flat.

“If you like I’ll pour some in the ashtray and touch a match to it, and you’ll get some idea of the raw alcohol content.”

“I don’t think it’s as bad as you say.” She drank out of the Carta Blanca bottle and looked past me into the square.

“I’ve invested a good deal of time in it,” I said.

“It makes you feel quiet inside, doesn’t it?”

“Then it pulls open all kinds of doors you usually keep shut.”

“Why don’t you teach me how to drink it, then?”

I gave the waiter my best American tourist look of irritated impatience, and he nodded in return and went to the kitchen window to hurry the cook.

“Give me another one,” she said.

“You’re not a drinker, Rie. Don’t try to compete with the professionals.”

“Here, I’ve finished the beer and I don’t like it. I want you to show me how to drink tequila.”

“The best way is to fill your glass and pour it in your automobile tank.”

“Hack.”

“No, goddamn it.”

“Maybe we should go. It’s hot, anyway, isn’t it?”

“I don’t like to go out on abortive missions.”

“Yes, you do, even to make one point about your knowledge of drinking.”

“Okay, Rie. You nailed me to the wall with that one.” I filled her shot glass and lit a cigar.

“Do you enjoy being angry?”

“No, but I’ll be damned if I’ll take on my idiot brother’s role with somebody else.”

“I believe you enjoy it when the blood starts beating in your head.”

“I’m all out of fire tonight, babe. My white flag is tacked to the masthead.”

She sipped out of her glass and fixed her flat eyes on my face. I drew in on the cigar and waited for it.

“Was there anything we could have done?”

“No.”

“Anything at all so he wouldn’t have been in that toolshed.”

“It was all done.”

“I visited him the day he was transferred to prison. I watched them take him down the courthouse sidewalk in handcuffs, then I went back on the picket the same afternoon, just like nothing had changed.”

“I turned every lock I could. We were almost home free. It was one of those dumb things that nobody can do anything about.”

She raised the glass again, and her almond eyes looked electric in the light from the trees.

“But it had to be black men who killed him. Not a sadist or a racist guard. Two spades who probably lived everything he did.”

The waiter placed our dinner before us, holding the plates by the bottom with a folded napkin, and looked quickly at Rie, then at me.

“Dos mas Carta Blanca,” I said.

“Si, señor,” he said, and drew his curiosity back inside himself.

“I don’t think I’m hungry now,” she said.

“Eat a little bit.”

“I don’t want it. I’m sorry.”

“Be a doll.”

“Let’s go, Hack.”

“I’ll have the waiter wrap it in wax paper.”

“Please, let’s just go.”

I paid the check inside, and the waiter looked offended because we hadn’t eaten, until I explained that my wife was ill and told him to keep the rest of the tequila for himself. We drove back down the cobbled street past the loud bars, and a barefoot Indian child in ragged clothes ran along beside my window with his hand outstretched. The two policemen in front of the whorehouse were helping a drunk American in a business suit from his automobile. He leaned against a stone pillar, his face bloated and white with alcohol under the Carta Blanca sign, and gave each of them a bill from his wallet. I shuddered with the recollection of stepping unsteadily out of taxicabs on similar streets and walking through other garish doorways under the slick eyes of uniformed pimps, and I wondered if my face had looked as terrible as the man’s under the neon sign. I accelerated the Cadillac past the last cantinas and turned back onto the dark highway. The moon broke apart in the branches of the tall cedar trees sweeping by me.

“Why did you say we were almost home free?” she said.

Damn you, Hack.

“I thought I could have him out with some more time.” I kept my eyes on the highway and didn’t look at her when I spoke. “It’s one of those things you can’t tell about. You do everything you can and wait for the court to act.”

I could hear her breathing in the dark.

“It could have gone in the other direction,” I said.

“Oh, Hack,” she said, and put her face against my chest with her hands clenched around my arm. Her tears wet the front of my shirt, and she held on to me tighter each time she tried to stop crying. I pulled her close into me and rubbed the back of her neck and her curly hair; her forehead felt feverish against my cheek and she trembled inside my arm like a frightened girl. I could smell the sun in her hair and the raw tequila on her breath, and I wanted to pull onto the side of the road and press her inside me.

Her face was as white and smooth as alabaster in the light from the dashboard, and when she had stopped crying and tried to sit up straight I held her close against me and pushed my fingers up through her hair. Her eyes were closed, her breasts stopped rising, and I felt the muscles in her back tense once more and then go loose under my palm. She breathed slowly into my neck, and by the time we reached the border she was asleep.

I rolled across the bridge over the Rio Grande, and an immigration official in a Stetson hat looked once at my Texas Bar Association card and waved me through. The hot night air was sweet with the ripe citrus and watermelon, and there was just a taste of salt in the wind from the Gulf. The moon had risen high above the hills now, and a strip of black storm cloud hung off of one yellow horn. I drove slowly over the ruts and chuckholes through the Mexican and Negro district and parked along the broken fence in front of the union headquarters. The light was still on in the front room, and a man was silhouetted behind the screen door with a bottle in his hand. I eased my arm from behind Rie’s neck and rested her head against the seat. Her eyelashes were still damp, her cool face caught the softness of the moon, and when she parted her lips slightly in her sleep I felt the blood sink in my heart. I leaned over and kissed her lightly on the mouth. The screen door slammed, and the Negro walked out on the porch. I went around to the other side of the car and picked Rie up carefully in my arms and carried her up the front path. Her eyes opened momentarily, then shut again, and she turned her face into my neck. The Negro held the door back for me, and I laid her down on the bed in the back room and switched on the electric fan. Her hair moved on the pillow in the breeze, and the alabaster color of her face was even more pale and cold in the half-light. I heard the Negro opening two bottles of beer in the front room, and I closed the door behind me and went back through the hallway.

“Sometimes people got to get high and boil it out,” the Negro said. He put a bottle of Jax in my hand.

“I’ll get some vitamin B and aspirin out of my car. Give it to her if she wakes up before you go to bed.”

“I been on that spodiodi route a long time, man. You ain’t got to tell me how to fight it.”

“I guess we went to the same school.”

“There you go,” he said. “Look, I’m glad you taken her out tonight. Some dudes come by and wanted to give us some shit. For a minute I thought they was really going to get it on.”

“What happened?”

“A couple of carloads of young studs come down the street throwing firecrackers at the houses. Then they parked out front, drinking wine and rolling them cherry bombs up on the porch. I figured they’d get tired of it after a while, but three of them come up to the door and said they wanted to skin out a nigger. Yeah, they said they ain’t hung a nigger up on a skinning hook in a long time. They was blowing wine in my face, and I could smell lynch all over them, just like piss on fire. One of them started to pull open the door, and then a dude in the car blew the horn and hollered out, ‘Don’t waste it on a jig. Let’s find them hippie freaks.’ Two of them cut, but this stud with the door in his hand wanted a pair of black balls. If the Chicanos hadn’t started coming out of their houses, the shit would have gone right through the fan, and I’d be up for icing a white kid. Because I tell you, whiskey brother, I give up on the days of letting white people shove a two-by-four up my ass until the splinters are coming out of my mouth.”

I drank from the beer and looked at the Negro’s face. For the first time since I had met him I saw the hard glass quality in his eyes, the flicker of humiliation in them, the thin raised scar, now as colorless as plastic, on his lower lip. His gleaming head was covered with drops of perspiration, and the lumps of cartilage behind his ears pulsed as though he were chewing angrily on something down inside himself.

“What the hell are you doing here, anyway?” I said.

“I got a bad habit, man. I picked it up in the army digging latrines all over Europe for sweet pink assholes. I figure a yard of white shit went into the ground for every shovelful of dirt I turned. When I got out I decided I paid my dues to Mr. Charlie’s bathroom and I ain’t applying at the back door no more for my mop and pail. You know what I mean, man?”

He licked his tongue over his bottom lip, and the scar glistened like a piece of glass. For the second time that day I felt I had nothing to say. Outside, the cicadas were singing in the stillness. I finished my beer and left him at the table, lighting one of my cigars.

I didn’t believe that I would be welcome again at the rooming house, so I drove thirty miles to the next town on the river and checked into a motel. I lay on the bed in the air-conditioned darkness with my arm over my eyes, and each time that I almost made it into sleep, broken images and voices would click together in my mind like the edges of a splintered windowpane, and I would be awake again with the veins drawing tight against my scalp. The highway rolled toward me out of the twilight, then the bush axes were raised high in the air once more, glinting redly in the gloom of the toolhouse, and a Chinese private leaned his face down to the sewer grate and spat a long stream of yellow saliva on my head. I sat on the edge of the bed in my underwear and drank half the bottle of Jack Daniel’s before I fell asleep in the deep whiskey quiet of my own breathing.

The next morning I dressed in a pair of khakis, my old cowboy boots, and a denim shirt (all of which I carried in a suitcase that always stayed in the trunk of the Cadillac), had my hangover breakfast of a steak with a fried egg on top and a slow cup of coffee and a cigar, then started down the road for Pueblo Verde. The sun was white on the horizon, and the washed-out blue sky hurt your eyes to look at it. The green of the citrus orchards, the fields of corn and cotton, and the sear hilltops floated in the humidity and heat. Watermelons lay fat in the rows, shimmering with light, and the cucumber vines were heavy with their own weight. Even with sunglasses on I had to squint against the glare. Hawks circled over the fields, and on some of the cedar fence posts farmers had nailed dead crows, salted and withered in the sun, to keep the live ones out of the corn. In the middle of an empty pasture, far from the roadside, a sun-faded billboard warned that THE COMING IS SOON, LISTEN TO BROTHER HAROLD’S NEW FAITH REVIVAL ON STATION XERF.

Outside Pueblo Verde I pulled into a clapboard country store shaded by a huge live oak. There was an old metal patent-medicine sign nailed to one wall, three pickup trucks parked on the gravel in front, and on the wood porch was a rusted Coca-Cola cooler with bottle caps spilling out of the opener box. The inside of the store was dark and cool and smelled of cheese and summer sausage and cracklings in quart jars. I bought a wicker picnic basket, a tablecloth, two bottles of California burgundy, some peppered German sausage, white cheese, a loaf of French bread, and six bottles of Jax pushed down in a bag of crushed ice. A small barefoot Negro boy, with blue jeans torn at the knees, helped me carry the sacks to the car. Then I turned back onto the highway into the white brilliance of the sun above the Rio Grande.

The high sidewalks in town were crowded with people, and the beer taverns and pool halls were filled with cowboys and cedar-cutters who had come into town to drink every piece of change in their blue jeans. I was always struck by the way that all small Texas towns looked alike on Saturday morning, whether you were in the Panhandle or the Piney Woods. The same battered cars and farm trucks were parked at an angle to the sidewalks; the same sun-browned old men spat their tobacco juice on the hot concrete; the young boys in crew cuts and Sears Roebuck straw hats with health and blond youth all over their faces stood on the street corners; and the girls with their hair in curlers and bandannas sat in the same cafés, drinking R.C. Cola and giggling about what Billy Bob or that crazy Lee Harper did at the drive-in movie last night.

I drove down the dusty street of the Mexican district with the lisping voice of a local hillbilly singer blaring from my radio:

Rie was sitting at the table in the front room of the union headquarters with a cup of coffee in her hand. She was barefoot and wore a pair of white shorts and a rumpled denim shirt, and her face was pale with hangover. I went through the screen door without knocking.

“Get in the car, woman. I’m going to do something for that Yankee mind of yours today,” I said.

“What?” She looked at me with her hair in her eyes.

“Dinner on the ground and devil in the bush, by God. Come on.”

“Hack, what are you talking about?” Her words were slow and carefully controlled, and I knew she really had one.

“I’m going to introduce you to my boyhood. Goddamn it, girl, get up and stop fooling around.”

“I don’t think I can do anything today.”

“Yes, you can. Never stay inside with a hangover. Charge out into the sunlight and do things you never did before.”

“How much did I drink?”

“You just did it with bad things in your mind.”

“I’m sorry about last night. I must have seemed like a real dumb chick.”

>“You could never be that.”

She smiled and pushed the hair out of her eyes.

“I’m sorry, anyway,” she said.

“Right now there’s a green river about seventy miles from here, and under a big gray limestone rock there’s an eight-pound bass with one of my flies hanging in his lip, and unless you get your ass up I’m going down the road by myself.”

“You’re a real piece of pie, Hack.”

“No, I ain’t. I’m shit and nails and all kinds of bad news. You ought to know that by this time. If you need any references you can contact my brother. I left him yesterday with his ulcer bulging out of his throat.”

She put her fingers to her forehead and laughed, and that wonderful merry flash of light came back into her eyes.

“I’ll be out in a minute. There’s some chicory coffee and corn bread on the stove,” she said.

“For a Yankee girl you may be all right after all,” I said, and watched the smooth curve of her hips against her shorts as she walked into the back of the house.

We drove north through the hills and flat farmland of string bean and corn fields and cow pasture to a wide, green, slow-moving river lined with willow, redbud, and juniper trees, where I had fly-fished as a boy with my father. The river was low from the drought, and the surface was covered with seeds from the juniper trees, but there were still eddies and deep holes behind the boulders in the current, and I knew that I could take all the crappie, bream, and bass that I could put on a stringer. The mud banks were covered with the sharp, wet tracks of deer and raccoons, and mockingbirds and blue jays flew angrily through the hot shade of the trees. The sunlight reflected off the water, and farther down, where the river turned by a grove of cypress trees, the sandbars gleamed hard and white in the middle of the current. Dragonflies flicked over the reeds and lily pads near the bank, and the bream were feeding in the shade of the willows, denting the water in quiet circles, like raindrops, when they rose to take an insect.

I took my three-piece Fenwick fly rod in its felt cover and the small box of number-eighteen dry flies from the trunk, and we walked through the trees and dead leaves and twigs to the river. Comanche and Apache warriors used to camp here on the banks to cut and shave arrow shafts from the juniper wood, and for a moment my eyes became twenty years younger as I looked for the place where they had probably built their wickiups and hung their venison in the trees over smoking fires. I knew that if I looked long enough I could find their old camp: the fire line a foot or so below the soil, the flint chippings from a work mound, the bone awls and shards of pottery. Since I was a boy I always felt that the land breathed with the presence of those dead men who had struggled on it long before we were born, and sometimes as a boy, particularly in the late evening, I almost felt that they were still living out their lives around me, firing their arrows from under the necks of war ponies at pioneer cabins that had long since decayed into loam. Once when I was plowing a field that we had always used for pasture, I felt something hard and brittle snap against the share and grind into pieces over the moldboard. I felt it right through the vibration of the tractor, and before I had shut off the engine and turned around in the metal seat I already knew that I had scraped across a warrior’s grave. The shattered skull and bits of white vertebra were scattered in the furrow, and all of his rose quartz arrowpoints gleamed among his ribs like drops of blood.

We sat under a cypress tree close to the water, and Rie opened the beer and made sandwiches of sausage and cheese while I tied a new tapered leader with one-pound test tippet. I waded out into the warm water and false-cast under the overhang of the trees, pulling out the line from the reel easily with my left hand, and shot the small brown hackle fly into a riffle on the far side of a boulder. The Fenwick was a beautiful rod. It was as light as air in my palm, and it was tapered and balanced so perfectly in its design that I could set the hook hard with one flick of the fingers. The fly drifted through the riffle twice without a strike, but on the third cast a largemouth bass rose from the bottom of the pool, like a green air bubble floating slowly upward, and broke the surface in an explosion of light. He took the fly in the corner of his lip, shaking his head violently, his dorsal fin and tail boiling the water, then he dove deep again toward the heavy current. I kept the rod high over my head with my right arm outstretched and let the line run tightly between my fingers. He sat on it once, deep, pointed downstream, and the tip of the rod bent downward until I knew that he was about to break the leader and I had to give him more line. I waded with him in the current, working him at an angle toward the bank, then he rose once more, the hook now protruding close to his eye, and hit the water sideways. He tried to turn his head back into the current, but he was weakening fast, and I started pulling in the line slowly with my left hand. He waved his tail in the shallows, clouding the water with sand, and each time I lifted the rod to bring his mouth to the surface he sat on it again and bent the tip in a quivering arch. I let him spend his last strength against the spring of the rod, then I worked my hand down the leader and caught him carefully under the stomach. He was heavy and cold in my hand, and I slipped the hook out of his mouth, watching the eye, and placed him back in the water. He remained still for a moment, his gills pulsing, then he moved slowly off through the shallows and dropped into the green darkness of the current.

I leaned the rod against the cypress trunk and drank a bottle of Jax with a sausage and cheese sandwich. The Spanish moss overhead looked like wisps of cobweb against the sun, and I could smell the dank, cool odor of the rotted stumps and worm-eaten logs back in the woods. Rie had waded on the edge of the river while I fished, and her bare, suntanned legs were coated with sand. She sat with her arms behind her, looking at the sandbars and stretch of willows on the far side of the river, and I had to force myself from dropping my eyes to her breasts.

“How did you find such a wonderful place?” she said.

“My father used to take me here when I was a boy. In the spring we’d fish the riffle from that rosebud tree down to where the river turns in the shade. Then we’d dig for an old Indian camp. I found my first bannerstone in the bottom of that wash.”

I sat down beside her on the tablecloth and drank from the beer. A shaft of sunlight struck inside the amber bottle.

“It must be fine to have a father like that,” she said.

“Yeah, he was a good man.”

“Was he a lawyer?”

“He taught southern history at the University of Texas, then he was in Congress two terms during Roosevelt’s administration. He took me deer hunting once on John Nance Garner’s ranch in Uvalde, but I was too small then to believe that the Vice President of the United States could chew on cigars and spit tobacco juice. My father had to convince me that Mr. Jack really did work in an important capacity for the government.”

“Gee, what a great story,” she said.

“I shook hands with Roosevelt once at Warm Springs, too. I wanted to look at the metal braces on his legs, but his eyes were so intense and interested, even in a boy’s conversation, that you couldn’t glance away from them. I was full of all kinds of pride and sunshine when I realized that my father was a personal friend of this man. I watched them drink whiskey on the verandah together, and for the first time I knew my father had another life that I’d never imagined before.”

I drank the foam out of the bottle and looked at the summer haze on the river. It was a wonderful place. The juniper seeds on the water turned in swirls past the sandbars, and stray seagulls that had wandered far inland dipped and hovered over a dead gar on the mud bank.

“Go on,” she said. Her face was happy and so lovely in the broken shade that I had to swallow when I looked at her.

“I don’t like people who show home movies,” I said.

“I do, especially cowboy lawyers that dig up old arrowheads.”

“I told you I’m shit and nails, didn’t I? The Lone Ranger with a hangover.”

“You just think you’re a bad man.”

“There are probably several hundred people who will disagree with you.”

“You’re not even a good cynic.”

“You’re taking away all my credentials.”

“Go on. Please.”

“The old man knew Woody Guthrie, too. He stayed at the house once during the war, and every evening I’d sit with him on the front steps while he played that beat-up old Stella guitar and his harmonica. He always wore a crushed felt hat, and when he spoke his words had a cadence like talking blues. He could never talk very long, at least while he had a guitar in his hands, without starting another song. He played with three steel banjo picks on his fingers, and he had the harmonica wired to a brace around his neck. He played Negro and workingmen’s beer-joint blues so mean and fine that I didn’t want him to ever leave. When we drove him to Galveston to catch a merchant ship my father asked him what the migrant farmworkers thought of the movie Grapes of Wrath, and he said, ‘Most of the people I know ain’t going to pay a quarter to see no more grapes, and I don’t expect they need any more of this here wrath, either.’”

“Wow, did your father know anybody else?”

“Those were the best ones. And I’m all out of stories, babe.”

“Your father must have been an unusual man.”

“Yes, he was.” I bit the tip off a cigar and looked at the haze on the water and the line of willows beyond, and for just a moment, in the stillness and heat of the summer morning, in the time that the flame of my match burned upward in one sulfurous curl, I saw my father lying half out of the chair in the library, the circular explosion of gunpowder on the front of his cream-colored coat, with his mouth locked open as though he had one final statement to make. The pistol had flown from his dead hand with the weight of its own recoil, and his arm had caught behind him at a twisted angle in the chair. His eyes were receded and staring, and his gray hair hung down on his forehead like a child’s. As I stood in the doorway, unable to move toward him, with the shot still loud in my ears and Bailey running down the stairs behind me, I thought: It was his heart. He had to do it. He couldn’t let it kill him first.

“Hey, come in, world,” Rie said.

“The old man had rheumatic fever when he was a kid. All of the things he loved to do put his heart right in a vise.”

She touched the back of my hand with her fingers and looked quietly into my face. Her strands of sunburned hair were gold in the broken light through the cypress tree.

“All right, how about opening another beer?” I said.

“You’re a special kind of guy, Hack.”

“How did we get on this crap, anyway? Come on, girl. Get the beer open.”

“Okay, kemosabe.” Her eyes went flat, and she reached inside the sack of crushed ice.

“I mean, you’re hurting my badass identity.”

She worked the opener on the bottle cap without answering.

“Say, Rie. Come on.”

“You kick doors shut real hard,” she said.

“Look, I behave like a sonofabitch so often that sometimes I don’t think about who I’m talking to.”

“You don’t like anyone to get inside you, and maybe that’s cool, but you ought to hang out a sign for dumb chicks.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s a swell day and you’re still a piece of pie.”

I leaned over her and kissed her on the mouth. I felt her heavy breasts against me, and I slipped my arms under her back and kissed her forehead and her closed eyes and put my face in her hair. She breathed against my cheek and ran her hands under my shirt.

“Oh, Hack,” she said, and moved her whole body into me.

My blood raced and I could feel my heart clicking inside me. Each time I kissed her my head swam, my breath became short, and I felt myself dropping through her into the earth.

She hooked one leg behind mine and held me closer and ran her fingernails up my neck through my hair. When she moved her body against me the dark green of the trees and the summer haze on the river seemed to spin in circles around me.

“I felt you kiss me last night. I didn’t want you to stop,” she said. “All night I wanted to feel you around me.”

“My southern ethic wouldn’t let me take advantage of a bombed girl.”

“You have so many crazy things in your head, Lone Ranger.” She moved her lips over my cheek and bit me on the neck, and then I couldn’t stop it.

I put my hand under her shirt and felt her breasts. They swelled out each time she breathed and I could feel her heart beating under my palm. I unzippered her white shorts and touched her thighs and her flat stomach.

“I’m sorry for the woods. I should take you up the road, but you really got down inside me, babe,” I said.

She smiled and kissed me, and her almond eyes took on all the wonderful color and mysterious light that a woman’s eyes can have when they make you weak with just a glance.

That evening we drove back through the hills and the baked fields of string beans and corn, and stopped at a roadside restaurant and beer tavern north of Rio Grande City for Mexican food. On the broken horizon the sun was orange behind clouds that looked as though they had been burned purple. The sky seemed so vast and empty in its darkening light that my head became dizzy in looking at it.

We finished dinner and drank bottles of Carta Blanca while two drunk cowboys played the jukebox and arm-wrestled with each other at the bar. We had chicory coffee, and I brought in my flask of Jack Daniel’s from the car and poured a shot into our cups. On the jukebox Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs rolled out a Blue Ridge song, in their mournful southern accents, of ancient American loves and distant mountain trains:

I don’t know if it was the whiskey (I eventually drained the whole flask into my cup), the events and emotional fatigue of the past two days, or my need to confess my guilt of fifteen years ago, or a combination of the three, but anyway I began to talk about Korea and then I told her all of it.