Lay Down My Sword and Shield

CHAPTER 9

It was dark as Rie and I drove through the sloping hills toward the Valley. Her face was soft in the glow of the dashboard, and she rubbed one hand on my shoulder.

“You’ve kept all that inside you for fifteen years?” she said quietly.

“There aren’t a lot of other places to put it.”

“You weren’t to blame for their deaths. The others had already informed.”

“That’s the strange thing about a certain type of guilt. When you try to confess it and draw the whips across your own back, there’s always someone there to tell you that you’re really not guilty of anything. Dixon came back from China a year after the war, and I testified against him at his court-martial. But I didn’t care what happened to him anymore. I only wanted to confess before some type of authority and be exposed publicly for cowardice. Each time that I tried to tell them I had informed, I was told to answer the questions directly and they disregarded anything else I had to say. After they gave Dixon five years, officers shook my hand and wished me luck in law school.”

“What happened to the others?”

“Bertie died of beriberi before the truce. O.J. married an Indian girl and was swelling like a balloon with beer fat, and Joe Bob bought a pool hall in Baton Rouge. Four others from the shack testified against Dixon, and the afternoon that he got his five years we all got drunk together, but we found that we didn’t have many good things to talk about.”

She slipped her arm across my chest and kissed me behind the ear, and I felt her wet eyelashes against my skin. I wanted her again, more strongly than I had ever wanted a woman in my life, and I pressed the accelerator down and the rolling highway raced toward me in the headlights. We dropped down into the Valley, and I saw the Rio Grande under the moon and the candlelit windows of the adobe houses on the far side. She pressed her breasts close to me, rubbing her curly hair against my cheek, and I turned onto the main highway toward my motel.

I woke early the next morning and leaned over her and kissed her lightly on the mouth. Her sunburned hair was spread on the pillow, and without opening her eyes she put her arms around my neck and pulled me down on top of her. Her body was warm with sleep, and she widened her thighs and ran her hands down my back and moved her lips across my cheek. She breathed softly in my ear, touching the lobe with her tongue, and each time she pressed her stomach into me I felt my skin burn. Then my eyes were closed and I felt my body go weak, the heat gathering like a flame in my loins, and I tried to rise on my elbows and hold it back, but she held her breasts tight against my chest and she tightened her thighs around me and ran her fingers up my neck into my hair.

“Do it now, Hack, and then we’ll do it again and again and again.”

She stretched out her legs and flattened her stomach, and then the flame grew more intense and went out of me in a long heart-beating rush.

It had been years since I had slept with a woman whom I really loved, and the experience now was as strange and wonderful as the first time I had made love to a girl in high school. The times of need with Verisa, which she and I had both grown to accept, with our feigned affection in the dark, and the indifference toward each other when it was over, seemed like a sophisticated imitation of a Tijuana film that we had seen so many times we were no longer embarrassed by it.

Rie lay against me with her arm across my chest and her face close to my cheek, and I felt her large breasts and the heat in her thighs, and she told me about the strange world of revolution and political rage that she came from: her father, the University of Madrid professor, who was marked for execution by the Guardia Civil during the Civil War and walked barefoot across the mountains into France before the border was closed; her Irish mother, a member of the I.W.W., who worked years for the release of the Scottsboro Boys during the 1930s, went to jail during World War II in protest against the treatment of the Nisei Japanese, and was blacklisted as a schoolteacher in California during the McCarthy era. Rie joined CORE and the Mississippi Freedom Project when she was nineteen and rode across the country to McComb in an old school bus with a boiling radiator and freedom signs painted in white letters on the sides. They were going to integrate lunch counters, bus depots, and water fountains and sit in front of segregated hotels with their arms locked in a chain and sing “We Shall Not Be Moved.” Instead, their bus was burned, they were knocked off lunch-counter stools and beaten senseless by clean-cut high school kids, dragged by their hair along sidewalks and thrown into police vans, shocked with cattle prods, spat on by housewives, hit with nightsticks, and crowded into filthy drunk tanks, and some of them ended up on Parchman Farm.

“Most of the people on our bus were middle-class kids who believed southern cops were a creation out of a Paul Muni movie,” she said. “We were taught how to roll up in a ball with our hands over our heads when they started swinging their clubs, but nobody really thought they would do it. It was just something to talk about on the bus, and everyone was sure that if it really got tight Mr. Clean would appear from somewhere with the Constitution in his hand. After it was all over I was able to accept the cops and what they did and the housewives who were having trouble with their period, but there was one scene I couldn’t get out of my head for a long time. The first day in McComb we tried to integrate the lunch counter in Penney’s, and a thug hit the black guy next to me in the head with a sugar shaker and split his skin. The black guy tried to look straight ahead and hold his head up level, and a blond chick of about seventeen took the cap off a salt shaker and poured it into the cut.”

I felt her breast rise under my hand, and I pulled her close against me and pressed her face into my neck and kissed her hair. The smooth curve of her back felt like the graceful line of a statue, and when she looked up from the pillow to be kissed again her almond eyes and the slight separation of her lips made my head swim and then the fire began to build inside me again.

Later, we had breakfast in a wood-frame café filled with farm and ranch families that had come into town for church, then we drove down the highway under the early sun toward Pueblo Verde. There was still dew on the pastures, and the light breaking across the hills cast a purple haze over the sage and short grass. The air was heavy with the smell of morning and the oak thickets and the churned mud around the windmill troughs, and when the breeze changed direction I could smell the horses and cattle in the fields and the burning hickory in a smokehouse. A few clouds were drifting in from the Gulf, and great areas of shadow passed briefly over the cattle and moved across the crest of the hills. For just a moment I thought I could taste rain in the air, and then the sky was clear again and the blacktop highway began to gather pools of light.

There was a union strike meeting and barbecue planned at the Catholic church in the Mexican district that afternoon, and Rie was supposed to provide transportation for the families in the migrant worker camps who didn’t have automobiles. Many of them had been brought in on buses from New Jersey, South Carolina, and Florida, and their crew leaders, who contracted the harvest, would do nothing to help the union, and sometimes they refused to take migrants to the next job if they were seen talking with strike organizers. So we waited on the front porch of the union headquarters for a dozen battered cars and pickup trucks to arrive, and then we rolled in a long rattling caravan down a dusty county road to the first of three labor camps.

The land was flat here, without trees, and the weeds in the ditches along the road were covered with dust. The camp was surrounded with a barbed-wire fence, and crude hand-lettered signs were nailed to the cedar posts: NO TRESPASSING, BEWARE OF DOG, TRAILERS FOR COLORED, UNAUTHORIZED PEOPLE STAY OUT. The buildings were made of wood and covered on the sides with red tar paper. The windows didn’t have glass or screens, and the wooden shutters were propped open with boards. The corrugated tin roofs reflected brightly in the sun, and I could hear the hum of flies around the community toilets. The yards were bare of grass, and boxes of garbage stood along the dirt lane that ran through the camp. At intervals between every third cabin there was an iron water spigot where the women washed out diapers and cleaned their dishes, but Rie said the handles were often removed by the camp owner because the children left the water running. The showers were located in a gray concrete enclosure without doors or a roof in the center of the camp, and when you passed close to it you could smell the wet reek of the walls and the mold and the sour stench of stagnant water in the bottom of the stalls.

Men and women with towels over their shoulders and toothbrushes went inside together, barefoot brown children in frayed and wash-faded clothes played in the dirt yards, and emaciated dogs with bent spines and mange on their bodies slunk about in the lane. Four dilapidated school buses with broken windows and license plates from several states on them were parked by a tin trailer with an air-conditioning unit in the window and OFFICE painted above the door. Rie walked up on the porch of a cabin and knocked while I leaned against the automobile and smoked a cigar. Mexican men walking toward the shower building looked at me and the Cadillac, and I dropped my eyes to the ground and concentrated on the end of my cigar. I felt the same way that I had when I drove into the penitentiary to see Art. I had intruded into a place where even a courteous nod from me and the world I represented was a form of patronization.

Several children stood ten feet from me and stared at my face and the interior of the car. Their black hair was full of nicks and uneven scissor cuts, and their knees and elbows were covered with dirt. A small girl carried a kitten on her shoulder, and one little boy in cutoff overalls had a broken cap pistol in his hand. I smiled at them, but their faces showed no expression in return. I reached inside and turned on the radio, and the insane, blaring voice of a fundamentalist preacher roared out of the dashboard.

“Do you kids go to school?” I said. Now that’s cool, Holland. Come up with another good one like that.

They looked at me with their silent black eyes.

“We’re going to a barbecue this afternoon. Why don’t you ask your folks if you can come along?”

The little girl set the kitten down in the dust and pushed at him with her bare foot. The others continued to stare at the strange man who had just dropped from the stratosphere right on his head. I switched off the radio, closed the car door, stuck my hands in the back pockets of my khakis, and looked off into any direction where I wouldn’t have to answer those questioning brown faces. Behind me I heard Rie talking with a woman on the front porch of the cabin, and then a man in a dirty T-shirt, with a swollen stomach, as though he had a hernia, stepped out of the tin trailer and walked toward us.

His blue jeans were bursting just below his navel, his crew-cut head was beaded with sunlight in the center, and his fly was only partly zipped. His shoulders were too small for his head, and the blue jeans sagged in the rear. There was a line of sunburn and dandruff where he wore a hat, and his gray eyes went from me to the Cadillac and back again. I took the cigar out of my mouth and nodded at him.

“How do, sir,” he said.

“Pretty fine. How are you today?”

“It’s a right nice day, all right.” He ran one hand over his fat hip and looked at a spot over my shoulder. “I keep the office here, and I’m supposed to take anybody around the camp that wants to see the workers. Sometimes people can’t find who they’re looking for, and I got all the cabin numbers up in my trailer.”

“Thank you. We’re just giving some people a lift to the church.”

He pulled a dead cigar butt from his pocket and put it in his mouth. He lowered his crew-cut head and scraped his foot in the dust and rolled the frayed end of the cigar wetly between his lips.

“You see, the soda-pop people that own this land don’t like just anybody coming on it. It don’t matter to me, but sometimes them union agitators come down here and try to fire up the Mexicans and nigras and shut down the harvest, and I’m supposed to see that nobody like that gets a free run around here. Now, like that Mexican woman up there on the porch. Her husband run off two weeks ago and she’s got five kids in there. She can’t afford to miss a day’s work because some union man won’t let her get into the field.”

We talked politely, on and on, while Rie loaded the Cadillac full of children and two huge Negro women. Well, we have a barbecue planned at the church today. I don’t think that would bother the soda-pop people. Why don’t you have a fresh cigar? Like I don’t have nothing against any religion or group of people, but there’s a priest down there that’s preaching commonism or something at the Mexicans, and it’s going to come to a lot of broken heads and people without no paychecks. I can tell you that for a fact, by God. It ain’t any skin off my ass, I got that trailer and a salary whether they work or not, but I don’t like to see them lose their jobs and get kicked out of their cabins because they listen to people that steals their money in union dues while the citrus burns on the tree. Now, that ain’t right. I have a little Jack Daniel’s in a flask. Would you like a ditch and another cigar before we leave?… No, sir, I’m working right now, but tonight when you come back, drop up to the trailer and I’ll buy you a shot with a couple of cold ones behind it… Thank you. I’m looking forward to it… Yes, sir. You come back, hear?

I drove back out the barbed-wire gate and headed down the road past the rows of identical cabins with their shimmering tin roofs. The dust rolled away behind me.

“You ought to do public relations for us, you con man,” Rie said, and smiled at me over the heads of the children sitting between us.

The Catholic church was made of white stucco and surrounded by oak and chinaberry trees. Pickup trucks and junker cars were parked in the side yard, and Negro, Mexican, and a few white families sat on folding metal chairs with paper plates of barbecued chicken in their laps. Their clothes were sun-faded and starched by hand, and many of the women wore flower-patterned dresses that were sewn from feed sacks. A priest in shirt sleeves was turning chickens on the barbecue grill while the Negro from the union headquarters pulled bottles of beer out of a garbage can filled with cracked ice. I parked the car in the shade of a post oak, and the children raced off across the lawn and started throwing chinaberries at each other. In minutes their washed overalls and checkered shirts were stained with the white, sticky milk from the berries.

“Come on. I want you to meet this wild priest,” Rie said.

“I never got along with the clergy.”

“Wait till you catch this guy. He’s no ordinary priest.”

“Let’s pass.”

“Hack, your prejudices are burning through your face.”

“It’s my Baptist background. You can never tell when the Antichrist from Rome is going to sail his submarine across the Atlantic and dock in DeWitt County.”

“Good God,” she said.

“You never went to church in a large tent with a sawdust floor.”

“With a box of snakes at the front of the aisle.”

“There you go,” I said.

“Wow. What an out-of-sight place to come from.” She took my hand and walked with me across the lawn toward the barbecue pit.

Two Mexican men sat on a table behind the priest and the Negro, playing mariachi guitars with steel picks on their fingers. They looked like brothers with their flat, Indian faces and straw hats slanted over their eyes. The steel picks glinted in the sun as their fingers rolled across the strings.

“What do you say, whiskey brother?” the Negro said. His eyes were red with either a hangover or the beginnings of a new drunk, and his breath was heavy with alcohol and snuff. He popped the cap off a sweating bottle of Lone Star and handed it to me. The foam slipped down the side over my hand.

“I guess I have a couple of shots in the car if the smoke gets too much for you,” I said. Then it struck me, as I looked at his cannonball head and remembered the humiliation I had seen in his face the other night, that I had never learned his name.

“I’m cool today, brother,” he said. “Saturday’s for drinking, and Sunday you catch all kinds of sunshine with these church people.”

The priest looked like a longshoreman. His thick arms were covered with black hair, and he had a broad Irish face with a nose like Babe Ruth’s and a wide neck and powerful shoulders under his white shirt. His black eyes were quick, and when Rie introduced us I had the feeling that he had done many other things before he had become a priest.

“You handled Art’s appeal, didn’t you?” he said.

“Yes, I did.” I took a cigar from my pocket and peeled off the wrapper.

“His family appreciated it a great deal. The rest of us did, too.”

“I knew him in the service,” I said.

“He told me. I saw him before he was sent to prison.”

I chewed off the tip of my cigar and looked away at the line of battered cars and trucks gleaming in the sunlight. Overhead, two blue jays were fighting in the chinaberry tree. Every clergyman has to be so goddamn frank, I thought.

“Have you been here very long, Father?”

“Three months, but I’m being transferred to Salt Lake in September.”

“He’s the church’s favorite Ping-Pong ball,” Rie said, and laughed. “He’s had five parishes in six years. Kicked out of New Orleans, Compton, California, the Pima reservation in Arizona, and now he’s going to turn the Mormons on. I bet those guys will be a real riot.”

“You’re not improving my image, Rie.”

“Listen. This was the guy that took black children through those lines of screaming women and thugs when the elementary schools were integrated in New Orleans. He dumped a cop on his ass in the school doorway and said mass in a Negro church the same day in Plaquemines Parish while the Klan burned crosses on the front lawn.”

“Rie’s given to hyperbole sometimes, Mr. Holland.”

“No, I’m afraid she’s pretty exact most of the time, Father,” I said.

“Well, at least it wasn’t that dramatic. A little pushing and shoving and a few truck drivers sitting on the curb with more Irish in them than they deserve.”

He filled two paper plates with chicken, rice dressing, and garlic bread, and handed them to us. There were small scars around his knuckles, and his wrists and forearms were as thick and hard as cordwood. He smelled of hickory smoke from the fire, and his balding head glistened with perspiration in the broken shade. Rie was right — he wasn’t an ordinary man. I remembered the television newsreels about the priest and ex — paratrooper chaplain who had led terrified Negro children from the buses through the spittle and curses in front of an elementary school in New Orleans in 1961. I also recalled the one short film clip that showed him backing down four large men who had poured beer on the children as they walked up the school steps.

We sat in the shade and ate from our paper plates and drank bottles of Lone Star while the guitar players picked and sang their songs about infidelity, their love for peasant girls in hot Mexican villages, and Villa’s raid on a train loaded with federales and machine guns mounted on flatcars. The children had established forts behind two lines of folding chairs, and chinaberries flew back and forth and pinged against the metal, and because it was somebody’s birthday the Negro climbed up an oak tree, grabbing the trunk with his knees, and hung a piñata stuffed with candy from a piece of cloth clothesline. Then he formed all the children into a line, in stair-step fashion, with a foaming beer in his hand, and gave the first child a sawed-off broom handle to swing against the cardboard-and-crepe-paper horse turning dizzily in the dappled light. The children flailed the piñata, and twists of candy showered out over their heads. I borrowed a guitar from one of the musicians and ran my fingers over the strings. The sound hole was inlaid with an Indian design, and there were deep scratches on the face from the steel picks that the owner used.

“Go ahead and boil them cabbages down,” Rie said.

I couldn’t be profane in front of the priest.

“I never play too well sober. Wrong mental atmosphere for hillbilly guitar pickers,” I said.

“Will you go ahead?” she said. Her eyes took on that wonderful brightness they had when she was extremely happy.

I tuned the guitar into D and ran a Jimmie Rodgers progression all the way down the neck, then bridged into an old Woody Guthrie and Cisco Houston song while the Negro opened more bottles of Lone Star and the children rolled over one another in the grass after the candy.

Later, the men on the strike committee pulled two long tables and several benches together in the sun. They sat in the glaring heat, sweat dripping from inside their straw hats over their faces, their browned forearms on the hot wood, as though the sunlight were no different from the shade a few feet away. The warm beer bottles in their hands were bursting with amber light, and their faces were all of one calm and intent expression while Rie spoke to them in Spanish. Her voice was even and flat while she looked quietly back and forth at the two rows of men, and although my Tex-Mex was good enough so that I could understand most of what she said, I realized she was speaking in a frame of reference that had always belonged in the wretched Mexican hovels on the other side of my property line. As I leaned against an oak trunk, watching them through my sunglasses and sipping a beer, I thought about Art’s description of the Anglo roaring down the highway in his Cadillac toward the next Holiday Inn, unaware of anything beyond the billboards that flashed by him like a kaleidoscopic vision. So have another beer on that one, Holland, I thought. And polish your Spanish.

It was late afternoon and hot when the barbecue ended. A dry wind was blowing from the Gulf, and dust devils spun out of the dirt road and whirled away in the fields. We loaded the children and the two Negro women into the car and drove back to the migrant camp. The tar paper shacks seemed to glow with the heat, and my friend the camp manager was sprinkling the dirt lane in front of his trailer with a garden hose. His clothes were even filthier than they had been that morning, and his face had a red whiskey flush. He turned off the water and walked over to the car. The fat in his pot stomach bulged against his T-shirt, and his odor was so strong that I opened the door partway to keep him a few feet from me.

“There was a deputy sheriff down here this afternoon, and he says you’re working with them union people.”

“Must be somebody else.” I watched Rie on the front porch of one of the cabins.

“He knowed this car, and he described you exactly. Even them cigars.”

“What else did he have to say?”

“He says he’s going to lock your ass in jail. And I’ll tell you something else, buddy. You come down here and give me a lot of shit about taking them people to a church barbecue. I don’t like nobody lying to me when they come on the property, and I got a ball bat up there in the trailer to handle anybody that tries to make my job harder than it is.”

I bit into the soft wetness of my cigar and closed the door carefully. I felt the anger draw tight across my chest, the blood swelling in my temples, and I looked straight ahead at the sunlight beating down on his silver trailer. I coughed on my cigar smoke and picked a piece of tobacco off my lip.

“Well, sir, we should be gone in a few minutes,” I said.

“You better get your luck off that porch and haul it down the road a lot faster than that.”

I opened the door again, hard, so that it hit him sharply in the knees and stomach, and looked into his face.

“You’re about two remarks ahead of the game right now, podner,” I said. “Say anything more and you’re going to have problems that you never thought about. Also, if you have any plans about using that baseball bat, you’d better find an apple box to stand on first.”

His red face was caught between angry insult and fear, and the sweat glistened in his brows over his lead-gray eyes.

“You’re trespassing, and I’m putting in a call to the sheriff’s office,” he said, and walked away in the dust toward his trailer.

Rie got back in the car. I closed the windows and turned on the air conditioner as high as it would go, and we rolled out the front gate and headed down the county road toward town. There were buzzards drifting high in the sky on the wind stream, and the sun burned white as a chemical flame. The rocks and alkali dust on the road roared away under the Cadillac.

“Say, take it easy, Lone Ranger,” Rie said.

“I’ve been easy all my life. One of these days I’m going to blow all my Kool-Aid and rearrange a guy like that for a long time.”

She put her hand on my arm. “That’s not your kind of scene, Hack.”

“I’m up to my eyes with rednecks that come on with baseball bats.”

“Hey, man, you’re not acting like a good con man at all. What did he say?”

“Nothing. He’s defending the soda-pop people.”

“He clicked a couple of bad tumblers over in your brain about something.”

“I burn out a tube once in a while with the chewing-tobacco account. Forget it.”

“I heard him say something about getting your luck off the porch. Was that it?”

“Look, Rie, I was raised by a strange southern man who believed that any kind of anger was a violation of some aristocratic principle. So I turn the burner down every time it starts to flare, and sometimes I get left with a broken handle in my hand.”

“What did he mean?”

The air conditioner was dripping moisture.

“A guy like that doesn’t mean anything,” I said. “The words just spill out of a junk box in his head.”

“Talk straight, Hack.”

“It’s a racial remark.”

“Is it important to you?”

I felt my heart quicken, because we both knew now why he had gotten inside me.

“All right, I lived around that shit all my life, and maybe I’m not as far removed from it as I thought. If I was a cool city attorney with liberal tattooed on my forehead I would have yawned and rolled up the window on him. But I never could deal with people abstractly, and he stuck his finger in the wrong place.”

The perspiration on my face felt cold in the jet of air from the dashboard. I looked straight ahead at the white road and waited for her to speak. Instead, she slipped close to me and kissed me behind the ear.

“You great goddamn woman,” I said, and hit the road shoulder in a spray of rocks when I pulled her to me.

“Let’s go back to the house,” she said, and put her hand under my shirt and rubbed her fingers along my belt line.

“What about those college kids and the Negro?”

“I already asked them to do something else this afternoon.”

She looked up at me with her bright, happy eyes, and I wondered when I would stop discovering things about her.

I bought a bottle of cold duck in town, and we drove down the corrugated road through the Mexican district to the union headquarters. The beer tavern was roaring with noise, and fat women sat on the front porches of their paint-blistered houses, fanning themselves in the heat. Rie walked up the path in front of me, lifting her shirt off her breasts with her fingertips. The rusted Dr Pepper thermometer nailed to the porch post read 106 degrees, and the sky was so hot and blue that a cloud would have looked like an ugly scratch on it. Rie opened the screen door and a yellow envelope fell down from the jamb at her feet.

“Hey, buddy, somebody found you,” she said.

I set the heavy bottle of cold duck on the porch railing and tore open the telegram with my finger. Flies hummed in the shade of the building.

Rie looked at me quietly with her back against the screen.

“It’s just my goddamn brother with his peptic ulcer,” I said.

“What is it?”

“I was supposed to make a speech to the Lions or Rotary last night.”

“Is that all of it?” Her quiet eyes watched my face.

“Bailey thinks an offense against the business community has the historical importance of World War III.” I folded the telegram and put it in my shirt pocket. “He’s probably swallowing pills by the bottle right now. Do you have a telephone?”

“There’s one down in the beer joint.”

“I’ll be back in a few minutes. Put the wine in the icebox.”

“All right, Hack.”

“I mean, I don’t want the poor bastard to rupture his ulcer on a Sunday.”

“Go on. I’ll be here.”

I walked down the road in the hot light to the tavern. Inside, the bar was crowded with Mexican field hands and cedar-cutters, dancers bumped against the plastic jukebox, and billiard balls clattered across the torn green covering of an old pool table. Cigarette smoke drifted in clouds against the ceiling. I called the house collect from the pay phone on the wall, bending into the receiver away from the noise, then heard Bailey’s voice on the other end of the line.

“Where are you?” he said.

“In a bowling alley. What’s it sound like?”

“I mean where?”

“In Pueblo Verde, where you sent your telegram. What the hell are you doing at the house, anyway?”

“Verisa’s pretty upset. You’d better get back home.”

“What is this shit, Bailey? You knew why I had to leave Friday.”

“The Senator wasn’t very pleasant with her when he called here, and maybe all of us are just a little tired of you not showing up when you’re supposed to. They waited the banquet an hour for you before they called our answering service, and I had to drive to San Antonio at ten o’clock and offer an apology for you.”

“Look, you arranged that crap without asking me first, and you knew when I left Austin that I wouldn’t be back this weekend. So you hang that bag of shit on the right pair of horns, buddy. And if the Senator wants to be unpleasant with someone, I’ll give you this number or the one at the motel.”

“Why do you want to behave like this, Hack? You’ve got all the easy things right in your hand.”

A pair of drunk dancers knocked against me, and then waved their hands at me, smiling, as they danced back onto the floor in the roar of noise.

“I just want a goddamn weekend free of migraine headaches and Kiwanians and telegrams,” I said. “I’ll be back at the office in a couple of days. In the meantime you can schedule yourself for the next round of speeches with the civic club account.”

But he was already off the phone.

“Hack?” Verisa said.

“Yeah.” I closed my eyes against her voice.

“I’m not going to say much to you. I warned you in Houston what I’d do if you blew this for us. I’ve got enough to go into court and win almost all of it. I’ll take the house, the land, and the controlling share of the wells, and you can start over again with your alcoholic law practice.”

I took a breath and waited a moment on that one.

“I should have called you, but I didn’t have time,” I said, evenly. “I thought Bailey would tell you why I had to leave.”

“Oh, my God.”

I started to answer, and instead looked out at the dancers on the floor.

“Why should he have to tell me anything?” she said. “You seem to have a strange idea that Bailey should take care of all your unpleasant marital obligations. He was embarrassed enough apologizing for you last night.”

“Well, I’m a little worn out with people selling me by the pound and then telling me how embarrassed they are for me. And it also strikes me that nobody was ever concerned if I was called out of town by a paying client. Maybe some people wouldn’t get their ovaries so dilated if I was on another case besides a Mexican farmworker’s.”

I heard her breath in the phone, and then, “You bastard.”

I hung up the receiver softly and walked back outside into the sunlight. The road was blinding in the heat, and the noise from the jukebox and Verisa’s voice were still loud in my head. I lit a cigar, sweating, and imagined the stunted rage she was now in. Poor old Bailey, I thought. He would stay at the house the rest of the evening, talking quietly to her while her eyes burned at the wall, and then he would begin to consider all the side streets they could use for my election in November, regardless of what I did in the meantime. He would drink cups of caffeine-free coffee with his ulcer pills, flicking over the alternatives in his mind, and soon he would forget that Verisa was in the room. Or maybe the Senator would phone again, and both of their faces would focus anxiously, their eyes reflecting into one another across the kitchen table, while Bailey’s voice measured out his assurances about my sincerity in the campaign and my deep regret that I wasn’t able to be with the Kiwanians (or whatever) last night. Then they would both wonder if we would ever get to that marble and green island of power where you carried a small, stamped gold key in your watch pocket.

Rie was sitting on the front steps with her back against the porch railing and one leg drawn up before her. She had changed into a pair of faded navy ducks, with the laces on the back, and a rose-flowered silk shirt, and in the shade she looked as cool and beautiful as a piece of dark sculpture. There was an unopened can of Lone Star and a tall, cone glass by her foot. My shirt stuck wetly to my shoulders, and my sunglasses were filmed with perspiration.

“You look like Tom Joad beating his way out of the Dust Bowl,” she said. “You’d better have one of these.”

I sat down beside her and opened the can of beer. The tin was cold against my hand, and the foam rushed up in the glass and streamed over the lip. I took my glasses off and wiped the perspiration and dust out of my eyes, but I avoided looking at her face. There was a broken anthill by the edge of the path, with a deep boot print in one side, and thousands of ants were moving over one another in a hot swarm.

“Was everything cool back there?” she said.

“Yeah.” I drank out of the beer — and squinted my eyes into the bright light. “I’m going to give Bailey a frontal lobotomy team for Christmas. Or a can of alum to drink. He has a remarkable talent for calling up everything bad in a person within seconds.”

I heard her take her cigarettes out of her shirt pocket and rip back the cover.

“He’s not a bad guy. He’s just so goddamn obtuse sometimes.”

“Hack, I’m not pressing you.”

“Then who the hell is?”

“I don’t care what you belong to outside of here.”

I looked at her quiet, beautiful face in the shade.

“I love to be a part of your Saturday morning fishing world and your crazy Indian graves,” she said. “I’d never ask you about anything back there in Austin.”

I took the cigarette from her hand and drew in on the smoke. The trees in the dirt yards along the street were still and green in the heat.

“I put the wine on a block of ice,” she said.

“Maybe we had better drink that, then,” I said. “What do you think, good-looking?”

She smiled at me with her eyes full of light again, and we walked into the back of the house and opened the tall, dark bottle of cold duck. I chipped off a bowlful of ice from the block in the top of the cooler and set it in front of the fan in the bedroom so the wind stream would blow cool across the bed. The sun burned yellow against the window shade, and across the river in Mexico a calf stuck in the mudflat was bawling for its mother. Rie undressed in the half-light and put her arms around my shoulders, and I pressed my face into her neck and felt her smooth stomach and breasts curve against me.

That evening we drove over to the Gulf in the fading, lilac twilight, and just before the highway turned out of the citrus fields onto the coast we could smell the salt in the air and the dead seaweed at the edge of the surf. The water was slate-green, and the whitecaps crashed against the sand and boiled in deep pools, and then sucked out again with the undertow. Brown pelicans and seagulls, like fat white cigars, dipped out of the sky over the water, picking small fish from the crest of the waves with their beaks, and in the distance we could see the gas flares and strings of lights on offshore oil rigs and quarter boats. The red sun was as big as a planet on the horizon, and the light broke across the water in long bands of scarlet. The stretch of brown beach and the palm trees were covered with a dark, crimson glow, and then the sun moved deeper into the Gulf, with a strip of black cloud across its flaming edge, and the moon began to rise behind us over the land.

I bought another bottle of cold duck and some chicken sandwiches in a restaurant, and a Mexican family camped on the beach sold us two salt-water cane poles with treble hooks and a carton of live shrimp. The sand was still warm from the sun, and we sat behind a dune out of the wind and ate the sandwiches and drank half the bottle of wine, then I baited the three-pronged hooks with the shrimp, slipped the lead sinkers close to the bottom of the line, and waded with Rie into the surf to fish the bottom for catfish and flounder. The tide began to come in, and the waves broke across the rotted wooden pilings in the jetties, and when the wind shifted across the water we could smell the dead shellfish and baked scales and salt in the pilings. Rie held her cane pole under her arm, with both hands raised in front of her, while the waves swelled against her breasts. The water was splintered with moonlight, and the salt spray in her hair looked like drops of crystal. Then the tip of her pole arched into the water and went all the way to the bottom.

“What do I do now, Lone Ranger?” she shouted.

“Keep his head up or he’ll break it.”

She leaned backward and strained with both hands, and a cloud of sand rose in the swell at the end of her pole. Then the line pulled out at an angle, quivering, and the pole went down again. She looked at me helplessly, her face shining with water and moonlight.

“Walk him into the shore,” I said.

A large wave crested in front of her and broke across her shoulders.

“Hack, you bastard.”

“You have to learn these things to overcome your Yankee childhood,” I said.

She tried to slip the pole back under her arm and raise it again, but the fish had turned into the waves and was pulling hard for the bottom. I waded over to her and picked up the line with both hands at the water and walked backward with it toward the beach. The line tightened around my knuckles and cut into the skin, and when I reached the shallows I could see the long blue outline of the catfish shaking his head against the three hooks caught in his mouth. I dragged him up on the sand and placed my fingers carefully around his spiked ventral fins and made one cut with my pocketknife through his gill and across the spine. He flipped quietly in the sand and then lay still.

“God, the things you southerners do for kicks,” she said.

But I could see the excitement in her face at having caught a large and beautiful blue-black fish under the moon in waves up to her shoulders.

“It’s against Texas law to keep this kind,” I said. “Maybe we’d better flip him back in.”

She stepped down on the top of my bare foot and pinched my arm with her fingernails. I held her close to me and kissed her wet hair and dried her face against my shirt. I could taste the salt on her skin and smell the Gulf wind in her hair, and she put her arms inside my shirt and ran her hands over my back.

We gave the fish, the poles, and the remaining shrimp to the Mexican family, and built a fire on the sand out of dried wood and dead palm fronds. The wind caught the flames and sent sparks twisting into the sky, and the fronds, coated with sand, and the polished twists of wood snapped in the fire and burst apart in a yellow blaze. We drank the rest of the wine and sat inside the heat with our clothes steaming. On the southern horizon dark storm clouds were building over the water. The moon was high, and I could see the clouds rolling in a heavy wind off the Mexican coast, and a few large whitecaps were hitting the pilings around the oil derricks. The air had become cooler, and there was a wet smell of electricity in the air. I lit a cigar, stuck the cork in the wine bottle, and threw it end over end into the surf.

“We really get it on tomorrow, don’t we, babe?” I said.

She ticked the top of my hand with her finger and looked into the fire.

The wind was blowing in gusts the next morning when we arrived at the cannery and loading platform where the union was setting up its main picket. The sun was brown in the swirling clouds of dust from the fields, and I could still smell the wet electric odor of a storm. Dozens of junker cars and pickup trucks with crude wood shelters on the back were parked along the railway tracks, and Negro and Mexican field workers had formed a long line in front of the platform where the harvest trucks would unload. Their picket signs flopped and bent in the wind, and the sand blew in their faces, while a man in slacks and a tie walked back and forth above them, waving his arms, and told them to get off the company’s property. His tie was blown over his shoulder and his glasses were filmed with grit, and after he was ignored by everyone on the picket he went into his office and came back with a camera and began taking pictures. Two Texas Rangers in sunglasses and Stetson hats leaned against a state car, watching with their tanned, expressionless faces. Their uniforms were ironed as stiff as tin. The priest, in Roman collar, stood in the back of a stake truck, with his sleeves rolled over his thick arms, handing out picket signs to the people who had just arrived, and I saw one of the Rangers raise his finger, aim at the priest, and say something to his partner.

“I didn’t think this was your kind of scene, whiskey brother.”

It was the Negro from the union headquarters, and he was still drunk. His slick face was covered with dust, and he had a wad of snuff under his lip.

“What the hell is your name, anyway?” I said.

“What’s a name, man?” He took a bottle of port wine from his back pocket and unscrewed the cap. “Sam, Tom, You. People give me a lot of them. But I like Mojo Hand the best. That’s a name with shine. It feels good in your mouth just like all these sweet grapes.”

“Put the wine away till later,” Rie said.

“Those dicks ain’t going to bother me. They know a nigger can’t change nothing around here. They want to strum some white heads.” He drank from the bottle and coughed on the tobacco juice in his mouth.

“They’ll use anything they can for the newspapers,” Rie said.

“You know it don’t make any difference what we do out here today. It’s going to read the same way tomorrow morning. Ain’t that right, whiskey brother? They could bust up Jesus with them billy clubs and the people would find out how He started a riot.”

“Let’s hang a good one on later,” I said.

“Where you been, man? There ain’t going to be no later. These dudes have just been practicing so far.”

“Everything is cool now, isn’t it?” I said.

He pulled on the bottle again and laughed, spilling the wine over his lip. “Out of sight. But you’re right. You got to keep thinking cool, cousin. You got to keep a little shine in your name.”

“We don’t want a bust this early,” Rie said. “Stay in the car until the rest of our people get here.”

But he wasn’t looking at us any longer. His red eyes stared over my shoulder in the direction of the county road, and I turned around and saw the two black and white sheriff’s cars, followed by three carloads of townspeople, rolling toward us in the dust. The whip aerials sprang back and forth on their springs, and muscular, shirt-sleeved arms hung out the windows of the other cars, beating against the door sides. The wind flattened the clouds of dust across the road, and a moment later two Texas Ranger cars closed the distance with the rest of the caravan.

“It ain’t cool no more, whiskey brother,” the Negro said.

The line of cars pulled into the gravel bedding along the railway track, and the Rangers and deputy sheriffs walked casually toward the two Rangers in sunglasses who were leaning against their automobile and looking at the priest. The other men stayed behind and formed in a group by a boxcar, their hands in their back pockets, their faces tight, spitting tobacco juice into the rocks, and glaring at the Mexicans and the Negroes. They had crew cuts and faces put together out of shingles, and they wore T-shirts or blue jean jackets with the sleeves cut off at the armpits. There were tattoos of Confederate flags and Easter crosses, Mother and the United States Marine Corps, inscriptions to Billy Sue and Norma Jean, and even the young ones had pot stomachs. They looked like everyone who was ever kicked out of a rural Texas high school.

Then I saw my friend from the sheriff’s office. He walked from behind the freight car with a filter-tipped cigar between his teeth, his khaki trousers tucked inside his half-top boots, and his wide leather cartridge belt pulled tight across his flat stomach. He spoke quietly to the men in T-shirts and denim jackets, smiling, his hands on his hips, and then he and the others turned their faces toward me at one time. His green, yellow-flecked eyes were filled with an intense delight, and his lips pressed down softly on the cigar tip.

“Let’s get into the picket before it starts,” Rie said.

I walked with her to the back of the stake truck, where the priest was still handing down signs. The wind whipped the dust in our faces, and swollen rain clouds were rolling over the horizon. The air was becoming cooler, and I heard the first dull rip of thunder in the distance. The priest wiped his face on his shirt sleeve and grinned at us.

“How are you, Mr. Holland? We can use a good man from the establishment,” he said.

“I know a two-word reply to that, Father,” I said.

“I believe I’ve heard it.”

“Mojo’s drunk. Try to get him into the truck,” Rie said.

“He’s not fond of listening to church people,” the priest said.

“There’s some badass types back by the freight car, and he’s been in a winehead mood since some kids tried to get it on with him the other night,” she said.

“I’ll watch him,” he said.

“Watch that bunch of assholes, too. One of the dicks was winding them up.”

The priest looked over at one of the Rangers who was talking into the microphone of his mobile radio.

“Get into the line. They’re going to start moving in a few minutes,” he said.

Rie picked up two cardboard signs tacked on laths and handed me one of them. A single, large drop of rain splattered on the black eagle over the word HUELGA.

“Come on,” she said.

“Can I get a cigar lit first, for God’s sake?” I said.

“We don’t want anybody arrested outside the picket, Hack.”

“All right, goddamn. Just a minute.”

For some reason I hadn’t yet accepted the fact that I would be walking on a picket line that Monday morning, or any morning, for that matter. The sign bent backward in my hands against the wind, flopping loudly, and my knees felt disjointed as I followed her into the slow line of Mexicans and Negroes in their faded work clothes, battered straw hats, and dresses splitting at the hips. Drops of rain made puckered dimples in the dust, and the wind blew cool inside my shirt, but I was perspiring under my arms, and my face was burning as though I had just done something obscene in public. I saw the eyes of the sheriff’s deputies, the Rangers, and the poolroom account watching me, and my head became light and my cigar tasted bitter and dry in my mouth. I felt as though I had walked naked in front of a comic audience. A fat Negro woman behind me held her child, in cutoff overalls, with one hand and her picket sign in the other. She wore a pair of rippled stockings over the varicose veins in her legs.

“You don’t worry about these children. They ain’t going to bother them,” she said.

I looked away from her brown eyes at the man in slacks and tie on the platform. He was still taking pictures, and his face was quivering at the outrage he had seen that day against the principle of private property. Storm clouds covered the sun, and the fields were suddenly darkened and the shadows leaped across the cannery, the freight cars, and the county road. The men in T-shirts and denim jackets were now pulling the caps on hot cans of beer and spilling the foam down their necks and chests.

“How you doing?” Rie said.

“I think my respect for the demonstrator just went up a couple of points.”

“Look, if those bastards move in on us, you have to take it. Okay?”

“That doesn’t sound cool.”

“No shit, Hack. They’re waiting for reasons to split heads.”

“All right, but when do we finish this?”

“We’ve only been on the picket ten minutes, babe.”

Then I saw a television news car pull into the gravel bedding by the railway track. Two young men got out with cameras attached to half-moon braces that fitted against the shoulder. They walked over to the group of law officers by the squad cars, their faces full of confident foreknowledge about their story, and for the first time it struck me that I had never seen a newsman begin a story any differently; without thinking, they went first to the official source before they considered the people on the other end of the equation.

One of them walked toward the picket and did a sweeping, random shot with his camera, the brace pulled tight against his shoulder. Then he lowered the camera and looked at me steadily, his face as bland and unembarrassed as a dough pan. I threw my cigar away and looked back at him with my meanest southpaw ninth-inning expression. He walked back to his friend and began talking, and the two of them stared in my direction.

“I believe a couple of kids just earned a pay raise,” I said.

“I bet you’re handsome on film,” Rie said.

“Well, here they come. You want to do my P.R. work?”

One of them already had his camera whirring before they were close enough to speak. They had forgotten the cops and the long line of migrant workers; they were both concentrated on the little piece of entrail they might carry back to the station.

“Are you widening your district, Mr. Holland?” His voice was good-natured, and he smiled at me in his best college fraternity fashion.

“No, no,” I said, in my best humorous fashion.

“Do you think your support of the union will affect your election?” He held the microphone toward me, but his eyes were looking at Rie.

“I couldn’t tell you that, buddy.”

“The farm corporations consider this an illegal strike. Do you have a comment on that?”

“I don’t know how it can be illegal to ask for a higher wage.”

“Does the union plan a strike in your area?” He was cocking the rifle now, but his face looked as sincerely inquisitive as a reverent schoolboy’s.

“Not that I know of.”

“Does that mean the conditions of the migrant farm-workers are better in your area?”

“No, it doesn’t,” I said. “But I tell you what, buddy. I need a cigar real bad right now, and it’s hell lighting up in this wind with one hand. So how about holding this sign for a minute, and I can get one of these awful things lit and we can talk all day. That’s right, just take it in your hand and fold your fingers around the stick.”

His face went blank, the lath straining in his palm, and his eyes flicked at his partner and the cops by the railway track. I used three matches to light my cigar while he blinked against the raindrops and shifted his feet in the dust.

“I appreciate that,” I said. “Say, did you interview any of those fellows over by the freight car? I bet that bunch of boys would give you some deathless lines.”

“We just do a job, Mr. Holland.”

“I bet you’ll get there with it, too,” I said.

“Would you like to say something else, sir?” His face was mean now, the eyes dirty.

“You’ve got a whole reel of good stuff there, pal.”

He turned away from me and put the microphone in front of Rie. The sky was almost completely dark, except for the thin line of yellow light on the distant hills. His partner moved around behind him so the lens would catch me in the same shot with Rie.

“Do you think the families in the farm camps will suffer because of the strike?”

“Why don’t you fuck off, man?” Rie said.

Then one of the men by the freight car threw an empty beer can at the picket line. It missed a Negro woman’s head and clattered across the loading platform. The two newsmen backed away from us with their cameras turning. A moment later three more carloads of townspeople arrived and swelled into the group by the freight car, and then one man stepped out from them and started walking toward us, and the rest followed. He wore a tin construction hat back on his shaved head, steel-toed work boots, and denim clothes that were splattered with drilling mud from an oil rig. His eyes had a wet, yellow cast to them, and his front teeth were brown with chewing tobacco. His scrotum bulged in his blue jeans between his heavy thighs, and he stretched out his huge arms, his hands in fists, as though he were just awakening from sleep, and spat a stream of tobacco juice in the dirt.

“Hey, buddy,” he said to me. “Do you eat Mexican pussy?”

I looked straight ahead, my face burning.

“You better get that chili off your mouth, then,” he said.

“Leave that man alone, J.R. You know a lawyer don’t have to eat pussy,” another said.

“This one does.”

The looming outline of the cannery and the rusted freight cars in silhouette against the light rain seemed to shrink and expand before my eyes. My knuckles whitened on the sign lath, and my breath caught in my throat.

“He might beat you to death with that cardboard, J.R.”

“Do you get to try some of these nigger girls?” the oil-field worker said.

My eyes watered and I felt myself leaping toward him before I had even moved or changed my line of vision, but several men behind him shouted and laughed at one time in a phlegmy roar, and he turned his wide back to me. Mojo had been sitting in the cab of the stake truck with his wine bottle until it was empty, and then had decided to join the picket. His shirt was unbuttoned to the waist, his socks were pulled down over his heels, and he walked toward the line as though his knees were connected with broken hinges. There was a patch of snuff on the corner of his lip, and the drops of rain slid over his cannonball head like streaks of black ivory. An unopened can of beer flew out of the crowd and hit him above the eye. He reeled backward, still standing, and pressed his hand like a fielder’s glove against his head, the blood dripping down from his dark palm. His uncovered eye was wide and rolling with pain and shock.

“Goddamn,” I said.

“Don’t, Hack,” Rie said.

“They hurt him bad.”

“Stay in the line,” she said.

Mojo bent forward and let the blood run down his forearm onto the ground, then he started walking toward us again as though he were holding a cracked flowerpot delicately in place. A man in khaki clothes with a green cloth cap on and a Lima watch fob in his pocket stepped into his path and kicked his feet out from under him. Mojo struck the ground headlong, and his face was covered with strings of dust and blood.

“This is too goddamn much, Rie,” I said.

“Don’t get out of the line. They’ll kill him if you do,” she said.

He pushed himself up from the ground and stood erect, the ragged cut on his head already swelling like a baseball. The wind blew his shirt straight out from his body, and his chest heaved and his nostrils dilated when he breathed.

“You can bust me ’cause I’m winehead now, but you ain’t going to beat all these people,” he said. “They too many for you, and they’re going to stand all over this place when you all are long gone.”

The oil-field worker moved toward him, his buttocks flexing inside his blue jeans, but two deputy sheriffs walked up behind Mojo and led him away by each arm toward their automobile. Before they put handcuffs on him, they stripped off his shirt and wrapped it in a twisted knot around his head.

The car rolled off down the road, with Mojo in back behind the wire screen, his blood-soaked shirt like a dark smear against the closed glass.

The priest was next, and they had a special dislike for him as a Catholic clergyman. The man in the khaki clothes shook up a hot beer and sprayed it on him, and the oil-field worker put his hot breath in the priest’s face and insulted him with every whorehouse statement he could make. Several women had joined the crowd, and they rasped at him with their contorted faces, their eyes shrunken inward at some terrible anger, and then one spat on him. She was small and stunted, her thin arms were puckered and wrinkled at the armpits, and her electric hair was scraped back in a tangle over the thinning places on her head, but she gathered all the energy and juice in her wasted body and spat it in an ugly string over his chest.

He blinked his eyes against the spittle and obscenities, but he kept his face straight ahead, his big hands folded around the sign lath, and never broke his step in the line. His composure enraged the women to the point that they were shouting at him incoherently, their heads bent forward like snakes, the veins in their throats bursting against the skin. Then the deputy sheriff who had arrested me walked to the back of the crowd, put his hand on the oil-field worker’s shoulder, and motioned in my direction. Across the railway track I saw two large police vans with cage doors on the back turn off the county road into the cannery gate, and then the crowd came toward me.

Their faces were tight with anger, the lips dry, the eyes hot and receded in the head, as though their own rage had dried out all the fluids in their bodies. In the gloom and swirling patterns of rain their skin looked white and stretched over the bone. Lightning struck against the hills, and the wind was beginning to strip the cotton in the fields.

“We ain’t got a lot of time for you, lawyer. So you know what I’m going to do?” the oil-field worker said, and put a half plug of tobacco in his mouth. He pushed it into his jaw with his tongue and chewed it into pulp, then cleaned the juice off his lip with his finger. “I ain’t going to touch you with my hand. I’m just going to show you how we treat dipshit around here. Now, when you get tired of it, all you got to do is tear that sign up and walk to your car. There won’t nobody hurt you.”

“I’ll tell you something, motherfucker,” I said. “You spit on me and I’ll take your head off.”

The man in the khaki clothes with the green cap reached out with his fist, off balance, as though he were leaping at a departing train, and struck me in a downward swing across the nose. His ring peeled back the skin, and I felt the blood swell to the surface. I stared at them all stupidly, with the sign in my hands, while my eyes filmed and burned. The oil worker was grinning at me.

“You want to cut bait, dipshit?” he said.

The woman who had spat on the priest flicked a lighted cigarette at my face, then I was hit again, this time across the side of the head with something round and wooden. I felt it clack into the bone, and I tumbled sideways, the ocean roaring in my ears, and struck the ground on one knee and an elbow. My ear and the side of my head were on fire, and I looked up through the unshaved legs and denims stained with grease and cow manure and saw a thin, muscular boy of about nineteen with a freight-door pin in his hand. Somebody pulled my shirt loose from my trousers and poured beer down my spine. I felt a cigar burn into my neck, and a woman slapped wildly at my head with a shoe. I tried to raise my arms in front of me, but someone stepped on my hand and the man in khakis tripped in the crowd and fell across my back. I heard Rie’s voice shouting outside the circle of people around me, then the deputy sheriff pulled my head up by the shirt collar and started to raise me to my feet, but before he did he flicked out his knee, in a quick, deft motion, and caught me in the eye. Half my vision exploded in dark red and purple circles, and I pressed my hand into the socket as though I had a piece of sandpaper under the lid. But in the swimming distortion I could still see his khaki trousers stuffed inside his low-topped boots, and his cartridge belt and holster welded against his flat stomach and narrow hips. I rose on one knee and put all my strength into a left-handed swing from the ground and hit him in the stomach an inch above the belt. I felt the muscles collapse under my fist, just like you kick open a door unexpectedly. He bent double, his face white and his mouth open in a wide O, and his breath clicked drily in his throat. His eyes were drowning, and when he fell forward on his knees in the mud, a line of spittle on his cheek, the crowd stepped backward in silence as though someone had thrown an unacceptable icon at their feet.

Then the Rangers, the city police, and the sheriff’s department went to work. They arrested everybody in sight. They handcuffed my arms behind me while the television cameras whirred, gave artificial respiration to the deputy and strapped an oxygen mask to his face, pushed scores of people into the vans with nightsticks until there was no more room, commandeered the stake truck, and arrested the man with the camera on the loading platform by mistake. Two deputies led me by each arm to the van, squeezing tightly into my torn shirt, their faces like hard wax, and the television newsmen were still hard at work with their lenses zooming across my manacled hands and swollen face. The rain was coming down harder now, and the gravel road was covered with wet bolls of cotton and leaves stripped from the citrus orchards. The wind was rattling the tin roof on top of the cannery, and the ditches by the road were slick and brown on the sides with the runoff from the fields. I was the last man put in the second van. The deputies took the handcuffs off me, pushed me inside against the crowd of Mexicans and Negroes, and locked the wire cage doors. The engine started, and we bounced across the railway track and turned through the cannery gate onto the county road.

The men in the van balanced themselves against the walls and each other and rolled cigarettes, or poured Bull Durham tobacco from the pouch between their lip and gums. Somewhere in back a child was crying. I leaned against the cage door and watched the road shift in direction behind the van, while the wind shook the barbed wire on the fences and bent the weeds flat along the irrigation ditches, and then I heard Rie’s voice way back in the crush of people. She pressed her way out between several Mexican men, who raised their arms in the air in order to let her pass, and her face and eyes made my heart drop. She put her arm in mine and touched her fingers lightly against the swollen place on my head, then pulled my arm close against her breast and kissed me on the cheek.

“I was very proud of you, Hack,” she said.

“I’m afraid I screwed up your picket. That was an assault and battery caper I pulled off back there.”

She hugged my arm tighter against her breast, and the rain poured down on the fields and began to flatten the long, plowed rows even with the rest of the land, and in the distance I could see the citrus trees whipping and shredding in the dark wind.