Lay Down My Sword and Shield (18 page)

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.”