Lay Down My Sword and Shield (32 page)

I took the pilot through the front hall into my library and opened a bottle of whiskey for him and filled a silver bucket with ice cubes. He sat in my leather chair, his wet cigarette still in his mouth, and poured the glass half full without water.

“I usually stay on a formal basis with my passengers,” he said, his face fatigued over the raised glass, “but are you guys on a kamikaze mission or something?”

I closed the door behind me without answering, and walked into the living room. The Senator was sitting in the deer-hide chair by the bar, dressed in blue slacks and a gray golf shirt with a highball balanced on his crossed knee (the whiskey was just enough to color the water). His tan was darker than when I had seen him last, and his mowed white hair moved slightly in the soft current from the air conditioner. John Williams leaned against the bar with his sunglasses on, tall, the face pale and as unnatural-looking as smooth rubber, and his tan suit hung on him without a line or crease in it. Verisa sat on the couch in a sundress she had bought three weeks ago at Neiman Marcus, and if she had a hangover from the alcohol or the sedation she had done a wonderful job of burying it inside her. Her auburn hair was brushed back against her shoulders, the makeup on her face made her look fresh and cool, and she lay back comfortably against the cushions with the stem of her wineglass between her fingers as though she were at a D.A.R. cocktail party. But there was also a quick glint in her eyes when I walked into the room, and I knew she was looking forward to a painful retribution on my part.

The Senator rose from his chair and shook hands with me. His blue eyes wrinkled at the corners when he smiled, and his hand was as square and hard as a bricklayer’s.

“You’ve had an eventful weekend,” he said.

“It was probably exaggerated by the television boys,” I said.

“I don’t believe there was any camera distortion there. Do you?” The acetylene-blue eyes wrinkled again so that it was impossible to read them. “But, anyway, you know John Williams.”

“Mr. Holland,” Williams said, and raised his glass.

“Hi.”

“I’m enjoying your taste in whiskey.”

“Help yourself to a bucket of it,” I said.

“Thank you. I think I will,” he said, and smiled somewhere behind his sunglasses.

“In fact, take a case with you. I have a crate of limes on the back porch to go with it.”

The room was silent a moment. Bailey looked at the floor, his brown windbreaker dark with rain, then went behind the bar and raked a mint julep glass through the ice bin.

“You want water in it, Hack?” he said.

“Give it to Mr. Williams. I’m changing my taste in whiskey.”

“Maybe I had better wait on the porch,” Williams said.

“There’s no need for that,” the Senator said, and his blue eyes moved onto my face again.

“Hell, no,” I said. “That’s a real storm out there, Mr. Williams. Enough to short out all the electric circuits on an ICBM.”

I despised him and what he represented, and I let him have a good look at the anger I felt toward his presence in my home. He finished his drink and clicked his glass on the bar.

“I think it’s better, Allen,” he said.

“Fix John another drink,” the Senator said to Bailey.

“Get some limes, too, Bailey,” I said.

“For one afternoon would you talk without your histrionics?” Verisa said.

“I haven’t had much of a chance to talk today. Bailey has spent the last two hours giving me the south Texas sonofabitch award.”

“This doesn’t have to be unpleasant, Hack,” the Senator said.

“Talking reasonably is beyond him,” Verisa said. “It violates some confirmed principle he has about offending other people.”

“Give Mr. Williams a drink, Bailey,” I said. “See about the pilot, too. I think he’s getting plowed.”

“Well, we won’t drag it out then, Hack,” the Senator said. “The state committee called last night and asked me if we should drop you and run a boy from Gonzales. I told them that we would still carry the district no matter who runs, and I want you in the House in January.”

“That’s good of you, Senator, but I wonder why we all have this intense commitment to my career,” and I looked right through the wrinkled light in his eyes.

“Because I feel an obligation to your father, who was a good friend to me. I think what you’ve done is irresponsible, but with time you’ll probably make a fine congressman.”

“I’m afraid that I’m through with political fortunes.”

“That’s a lovely attitude at this point,” Verisa said.

“I believe Hack is still a little angry with Rio Grande policemen,” the Senator said. “Actually, we may have picked up more of the union vote, and your arrest won’t hurt you with the Negroes and the Mexicans. The important factor is that we make use of it before the Republican gentleman does.”

“Sorry. I think that boy from Gonzales would be a better bet.”

“You’re everything I expected today,” Verisa said.

“How about the car planted against the fence?”

“You’re lovely just as you are. It couldn’t have been more anticipated,” she said.

“I want to finish this, Hack,” the Senator said. “I plan to talk to the committee this afternoon and give them your assurance about the rest of the campaign.”

“I don’t think you should do that, Senator.”

“The assault charge can be taken care of,” he said. “It will probably involve a small appointment in Austin, but it’s a simple matter.”

He had still chosen not to hear me, and I felt the anger rising inside me.

“Don’t you realize what’s being done for you?” Bailey said from behind the bar. “Try to think about it a minute. You committed a felony yesterday that could get you disbarred or even sent to jail.”

“No, I don’t realize a damn thing, because I have an idea that all this investment in me isn’t out of goodwill and old friendships. What do you think, Mr. Williams?”

He sipped from his fresh drink with a sprig of mint leaves in it, rested his arm on the bar, and looked at me from behind his sunglasses. The texture of his skin was the most unnatural I had ever seen on a human being.

“I think it would save time if the case was explained to you a little more candidly,” he said.

The Senator looked at Williams, and momentarily I saw the same uncomfortable flicker in his eyes that I had seen on the trip to Washington when I had realized that predators came in various sizes. He paused a moment, then turned back to me before Williams could speak again, his fingers pressed on the highball glass.

“Possibly your alternatives aren’t as clear or easy as you might believe, Hack,” he said. “I’ve made some commitments in this election that I intend to see honored.”

“It’s a matter of votes on a House bill to rescind the oil-depletion allowance, Mr. Holland. Although Allen doesn’t run again for two years, it’s been necessary to promise several oil companies that the right people will be on a committee to prevent anyone from lowering the twenty-seven-and-a-half-percent allowance that we now have. As you know, it involves a great deal, and so a few people have pressed Allen rather hard on winning support.”

Williams was enjoying the Senator’s discomfort, but I didn’t care about either of them then. I felt light inside, like a high school athlete who had been told he was needed to pick up the towels in the locker room.

“Did you know about this shit, Bailey?” I said.

“No.”

“You sold my ass all over the state and you never guessed what it was about.”

“I didn’t know, Hack.”

“Well, you saw me coming, Senator,” I said.

“Are we going to enjoy a melodrama about it now?” Verisa said.

“No, I think I just finished the ninth inning, and you can have the whole goddamn ballpark.”

“I believe you’re being overly serious about this. The oil-depletion allowance is in the interest of the state,” the Senator said. “Also, every holder of office pays some kind of personal price to represent his constituency.”

“I’d call that boy in Gonzales. Let me have a beer, Bailey.”

“Maybe you should tell Mr. Holland about the rest of his alternative now,” Williams said. He raised his drink slowly to his mouth.

“I thought you’d been saving something special out,” I said. Bailey handed me the beer in a glass, and I took a cigar from the oakwood box on the coffee table. The Senator sat down in the deer-hide chair and crossed his legs with his highball in his hand, but his eyes didn’t look at me.

“I don’t like to do this, but there’s a man named Lester Dixon in Kansas City and he’s made a deposition about the time he spent with you in a North Korean prison camp,” he said. His eyes looked at the end of his shoe, thoughtful, as though he were considering a delicate premise before he spoke again.

Verisa took a cigarette from her pack and put it in her mouth. Her arm lay back against the couch, and her breasts swelled against her sundress when she breathed.

I lit my cigar and stared into the Senator’s face.

“What did Airman First Class Dixon have to say?” I said.

“I don’t believe we have to talk about all of it here,” he said.

“I think you should, Senator. I imagine that Lester’s deposition was very expensive.”

“Two men from your shack were executed after they were informed upon.” He raised his eyes into my face and tried to hold them there, but I stared back hard at him and he took a drink from his glass.

“Did he tell you how it was done?” I said.

“I never met him.”

“He’s an interesting person. I helped send him to prison for five years.”

“The statement is twenty pages long, and it’s witnessed by two attorneys,” he said. “It’s been compared for accuracy with the transcript from his court-martial, and I don’t think you’ll be able to contest what he says about your complicity in the deaths of two defenseless men.”

“The telephone is in the hall, Senator. Next to it is a list of numbers, one of which is
The Austin American.
No, instead finish your drink and let Verisa get the city desk for you.”

“It will be done more subtly than that. Possibly a leak from someone on the state committee, a small rumor at first, and then a reporter will be given the whole thing.”

“You probably have ways I’ve never dreamed about.”

“That’s true, but the outcome will be the same in this case.”

“Then I guess we can all say good day to each other.”

“No, there’s one more thing,” he said, and his eyes took on the same expression they had before he drove the tennis ball into my nose. “Right now you’re enjoying your virtue. With an impetuous decision you’ve become a Spartan lying on his shield, and I’m sure you’ll need this image for yourself during the next few weeks. But I want to correct a couple of your ideas about integrity in political office. Negotiation and compromise are part of any politician’s career, and your father learned that lesson his first term in Congress.”

“What do you mean?”

“He accepted a fifteen-thousand-dollar contribution to sponsor the sale of public land to a wildcat company in Dallas. The land sold for fifty dollars an acre.”

“Bailey, do you want to tell these men to get out, or you want to wait on me?”

He looked down at the bar, his forehead white.

“Bailey,” I said.

The balding spot on his head was perspiring, and I could see the raised veins in the back of his hands.

“Just look at me,” I said.

“I’m sorry, Hack. I didn’t know they were going to do this.”

“Then you tell them to get out.”

He leaned on his arms, his face still turned downward, and I felt my head begin to grow light, as though there were no oxygen in my blood.

“Goddamn it, you’re not going to bring these men into my home to do this, and then stare at the bar,” I said.

“He was going to lose the ranch, Hack. He knew heart disease was killing him, and he was afraid he’d die and leave us nothing.”

The rain blew against the windows, and I could hear the oak branches sweeping heavily back and forth on the roof. Outside, the light was gray in the trees, and the stripped leaves stuck wetly against the trunks. My dead cigar felt like a stick between my fingers.

“You and this man will leave now, Senator,” I said.

“Thank you for the drink, Mr. Holland,” Williams said, and set his glass on the bar. “You have a nice home here.”

“Thank you, too, Verisa,” the Senator said. “I’m sorry if we’ve made the day a little hard for you.”

The three of them rose and walked together to the front hall. They could have been people saying good-bye after a Sunday dinner. Verisa’s sundress fit tightly against her smooth back, and she had a way of holding herself at a door that made her look like a little girl. Williams raised his hand once to me, backward, the way a European would, and smiled again somewhere behind those black-green glasses.

“Good-bye, Hack,” the Senator said.

I lit my cigar and didn’t look back at him, then I heard the door click shut as I stared down into the flame.

“I’m sorry,” Bailey said.

“Forget it and give me one hard one.”

“I wouldn’t have brought you back for this.”

“I know that. Just make it about three inches and a little water.”

He poured into a tall shot glass and let the whiskey run over the edge. He started to wipe off the counter with a towel, and then knocked the glass into the sink.

“Christ, Hack,” he said.

“I’m all right,” I said, and poured the shot glass full myself and drank it down neat.

“You goddamn fool,” Verisa said.

“Leave him alone,” Bailey said.

“You’re going to pay for it with every stick and nail in this house,” she said.

I walked away from them toward the hall. The hum of the air conditioners and the heavy sweep of the oaks against the eaves were loud in my head, and the boards in the floor seemed to bend under my boots. I could feel something important begin to roll loose inside, in the way that you pull out a brick from the bottom of a wall. I opened the door to my library and took the cigar out of my mouth. The pilot still sat in my leather chair with the half-empty bottle of Jack Daniel’s in his lap. His face was colorless, and he had dropped a lighted cigarette on the rug.