Lay Down My Sword and Shield (26 page)

“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.

Ezekiel saw that wheel a-whirling

Way up in the middle of the air

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.

Where the hell are you anyway. Had to cancel speech last nite in San Antonio. Senator has called three times. Verisa quite worried. Hack do you want in or out.

Bailey.

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.”