Lay Down My Sword and Shield (7 page)

I dressed in my linen suit with a blue silk shirt and walked down the main street to a café. I had a breakfast steak with two fried eggs on top, then smoked a cigar and drank coffee until the courthouse opened. Even though I could feel the July heat rising, it was still a beautiful day, the orchards at the foot of the hills were bursting with green and gold, I was free from the weekend’s whiskey, and I didn’t want to visit the jail. Most people think that the life of a criminal lawyer is a romantic venture, but it’s usually a sordid affair at best. I had never liked dealing with redneck cops, bailbondsmen, and county judges with high school educations, or talking with clients at two
A.M.
in a drunk tank.

I crossed the street to the courthouse and went to the sheriff’s office in the back of the building. By the office door there was a glass memorial case filled with junk from the World Wars and Korea—German helmets, bayonets, a Mauser rifle without a bolt, an American Legion medal, canteens, a .30-caliber machine gun with an exploded barrel, and a Chinese bugle. A deputy in a khaki uniform sat behind an army surplus desk, filling out forms with a short pencil. He was lean all over, tall, and his crew-cut, glistening head was pale from wearing a hat in the sun. His fingers were crimped over the pencil as he worked out each sentence in printed and longhand letters. His shirt was damp around the shoulders, and his long arms were burned brown and wrinkled with veins.

“Can I help you?” he said without looking up.

“I’d like to see Arturo Gomez.”

He put the pencil down and turned his face up at me. His green, yellow-flecked eyes were flat, his face expressionless.

“Who are you?”

“My name’s Hackberry Holland. I’m a lawyer.”

“You ain’t his.”

“He’s a friend of mine from the service.”

“Well, visiting hour is at two o’clock.”

“I have to go back to Austin this morning. I’d appreciate it if I could talk with him a few minutes.”

The deputy turned the pencil in a circle on the desktop with his finger. There was a hard knot of muscle in the back of his arm.

“You working with these Mexican union people?”

“No.”

“You just drove down from Austin to see a friend in jail?”

“That’s right.”

“It won’t help him none. He’s going up to the state farm Wednesday. And I expect there might be a few more with him soon.”

“I wouldn’t know about that.” I bent over and tipped my cigar ashes into the spittoon, then waited for the deputy to continue the statement which he had prepared long ago for strangers, slick lawyers, and nigger and Mexican lovers.

“You can take it for what it’s worth, Mr. Holland, but these Mexicans was stirred up by agitators from the outside. They can make fair wages in the field any time they want to work, but they stay drunk on wine half the time or sit in the welfare office.” His yellow-flecked eyes looked into my face. “Then those union organizers started telling them they could get twice as much money by shutting down the harvest. Just let the cotton and grapefruit rot and they’re all going to be nigger-rich. People around here is pretty fed up with it, and it’s lucky that a couple of them California Mexicans haven’t been drug behind a car yet.”

“As I said, I’m not representing anyone.”

“It’s against the rule, but I’ll take you down to see Gomez a minute. I just thought you ought to know we ain’t pushing these people into a corner they didn’t build for themselves.”

I followed him down a staircase into the basement of the building. The rigid angles in his body, the rolled khaki sleeves, and the flush of anger in his neck reminded me of several drill instructors whom I had met at Parris Island. They all had the same intense dedication to perverse abstractions that had been created for them by someone else.

The basement of the courthouse, the jail, had been constructed with large blocks of limestone, sawed and chiseled and set with mortar in uneven squares. The corridor was lighted by two bulbs screwed into sockets on the ceiling, and the cells looked like caves cut back into the rock with iron doors on them. The stone was damp with humidity, and the air was rank with disinfectant, D.D.T., urine, and tobacco smoke. Each of the iron doors had a row of holes perforated in the top, and a slit and apron for a food tray. At the end of the corridor was a large room, with two wide barred doors that swung open like gates, and overhead on the rock in broken white letters were the words
Negro Male.
I could see the spark of hand-rolled cigarettes in the dark, and smell the odor of stale sweat and synthetic wine. There was a wire-screen cage built against one wall, with a small table and two wooden chairs inside. The deputy unlocked the door and opened it.

“Wait in here and I’ll bring him out,” he said. He walked back down the corridor and slipped the bolt on one of the cells. He had to use both hands to pull the door open.

Art stepped out into the light, his pupils contracted to small black dots. His denim jail issue was too big for him and his hair hung down over his ears. He was barefoot, his shirt and trousers were unbuttoned, and his thin frame was stooped as he walked toward the cage, as though the rock ceiling was crushing down on him. He had a cigarette in an empty space where a tooth had been, and there was a cobweb scar on the edge of one eye. He had started to get jailhouse pallor, and the two pachuco tattoos on his hands looked like they had just been cut into the skin with brilliant purple ink. I hadn’t seen him in five years, when he was contracting tomato harvests in DeWitt County, but it seemed that everything in him had shrunken inward, hard and brittle as bone. The deputy closed the cage door on us and locked it.

“You can talk ten minutes,” he said, and walked back down the corridor. The light gleamed on his shaved head.

“What about it, Hack? You want to play Russian roulette with me?” Art said, and smiled with the cigarette in his teeth. His long fingers were spread out on the tabletop.

“How in the hell did you go up for assault because of a picket-line arrest?”

“What happened and what I got tried for ain’t the same thing. The Texas Rangers moved in on our picket line because they said we wasn’t fifty feet apart. They knocked a couple of our people down, and when I yelled about it they put the arm on me. I pushed this one fat bastard on his ass, and he got up and beat the shit out of me with a blackjack. Man, they’re real bad people when they turn loose. I can still see that guy swinging down on me. His eyes was sticking out of his head. He must have saved it up for a long time.”

“What did your lawyer do in the trial?”

“He was appointed by the court. He lives right here in the county and he wanted me to plead guilty. I told him to go fuck himself, so he chewed on his pipe for three days, cross-examined one witness, and shook hands with me after the judge gave me five years.

“Look, Hack, I know I’m leaning on you for a favor, but I want to beat this shit. Our union’s got a chance if we don’t get broke up. We got a few people in Austin on our side, and some of the locals are afraid enough of the Chicano vote that they might come around if we stay solid. But our treasury’s broke and I got nobody but kids to organize the pickets and boycotts while I’m in the pen. And I’ll tell you straight I don’t want to build no five years. Four cents a day chopping cotton ain’t good pay.” He smiled again, and took the cigarette from his lips and put it out on the bottom of the table.

“All right, I’ll try to file an appeal. It takes time, but maybe with luck I can spring you on bond.”

He took another cigarette from his shirt pocket, popped a kitchen match on his thumbnail, and lit it. The scar tissue around his eye was yellow in the flame. “A year ago I was ready to charge the hill with a bayonet in my teeth. Corporal Gomez going over the top like gangbusters with a flamethrower. I was ready to build life in the pen for our union, but three months in lockdown here, man, it leaves a dent. Every night when that bastard sticks a plate of grits and fried baloney through the slit I say hello to his fingernails.”

“You know what you’re doing is crazy, don’t you?”

“Why? Because we’re tired of getting shit on?”

“These people have lived one way for a hundred and fifty years,” I said. “You can’t make them change with a picket sign.”

His face sharpened, and his yellow-stained fingers pressed down on the cigarette.

“Yeah, we been eating their shit for just about that long. But we ain’t going that route no more. We got more people than the Anglos, and this land belonged to us before their white ass ever got on it.”

“You can’t alter historical injustice in the present. You’re only putting yourself and your people up against an executioner’s wall.”

“You can jive about all that college bullshit you want, but we been picking your cotton for six cents a pound. You ever do stoop labor? Your back feels like a ball of fire by noon, and at night you got to sleep on the floor to iron out your spine. All you Anglos are so fucking innocent. You got the answers counted out in your palm like pennies. You march off every Christmas and hand out food baskets to the niggers and greaseballs, and then for the next twelve months you congratulate yourself on your Christianity.”

He drew in on the cigarette and pushed his long black hair out of his face. He looked at the table and breathed the smoke out between his lips. “Okay, man, I’m sorry. I sit in my cell all day and think, and I don’t get to talk with nobody except the hack. So I just made you my dartboard.”

“Forget it,” I said.

“But learn something about our union before you start to piss on us.”

“All right.”

“Like maybe we ain’t just a bunch of uppity niggers.”

“The deputy’s going to be back in a minute.”

“Look, watch out for that motherfucker. The other night one of the blacks started screaming in the tank with the d.t.’s, and he kicked him in the head. I think he’s a Bircher, and the guys in here say he’s got a bad conduct discharge from the Corps for crippling a guy in the brig.”

“Okay, let’s finish before he gets back. Were there any Mexicans on the jury?”

“What world do you live in, man?”

“We can use jury selection in an appeal, even though I’d rather hang them on the charge itself. I’ll have to get a transcript of the trial and talk with your lawyer.”

“Don’t fool with him. I told you he wouldn’t pour water on me if I was burning. He’s a little fat guy with a bald head, he owns five hundred acres of blackland, and he thinks I was brainwashed in Korea. When I asked him about an appeal he chewed on his pipe and farted.”

“What’s his name?”

“That’s Mr. Cecil Wayne Posey. His office is right across the street.”

“Why didn’t you write me before the trial?”

“I don’t like to bruise old friends.”

“Well, you sure picked a shitty time to bring in a relief pitcher.”

“You’re a good man, Hack. I trust your arm.”

I heard the stairway door slam and the deputy walking down the stone corridor in his brogans.

“I’ll be back tomorrow,” I said. “You want anything?”

“No, just watch after yourself in town. They’re pissed, and that southern accent of yours won’t help you none when they find out you’re working with our union.”

“I don’t think they’ll roll a congressional candidate around too hard.”

“I mean it, Hack. They don’t give a damn who you are. We stepped on their balls with a golf shoe. There ain’t been any Klan activity here since the 1920s, and last week they burned a cross on an island in the middle of the river. You better keep your head down, buddy.”

Art lit another cigarette off the butt while the deputy unlocked the cage.

“Tomorrow,” I said.

“Yeah, stay solid, cousin.”

I looked at the black soles of his bare feet as the deputy led him back to his cell. The deputy clanged the door shut, shot the bolt, and stared at me with a fixed gaze while I tore the cellophane wrapper off a cigar. I bit the end off and spit it on the floor. I could feel his hot eyes reaching me through the wire screen. He rattled his change in one pocket with his hand.

“You want to get out of here this morning, Mr. Holland?” he said.

Upstairs by the office door a girl leaned against the wall with a carton of cigarettes in her hand. She wore sandals, bleached blue jeans, and a maroon blouse tied in a knot under her breasts. She had on large, amber sunglasses, hoop earrings, and a thin strand of Indian beads around her neck. Her skin was brown, her body lithe and relaxed, and her curly brown hair was burned on the ends by the sun. Her eyes were indifferent through her glasses as she looked at me and the deputy.

“Would you give these to Art Gomez, please?” she said. Her voice was level, withdrawn, almost without tone.

The deputy took the carton of cigarettes and dropped it in his desk drawer without answering. He sat down in his chair and began to sharpen a pencil with his pocketknife into the wastebasket. I knew that each stroke of that knife was cutting into his own resentment at the restraint his job forced upon him in dealing with a hippie girl and a slick, outside lawyer. He bent over his traffic forms, his knuckles white on the pencil, and began to print out his report as though we were not there.

The girl walked back toward the entrance. There was a pale line of skin above the back of her blue jeans, and her bottom had the natural, easy rhythm that most women try to learn for a lifetime. Everything in her was smooth and loose, and her motion had the type of cool unconcern that bothers you in some vague place in the back of your mind.

“Hello,” I said.

She turned around, framed in the square of yellow light through the entrance, and looked at me. She wore no makeup, and in the black shadow over her face she looked like a nun in church suddenly disturbed from prayer.

“I expect you work with Art’s union. My name’s Hack Holland. I’m trying to file an appeal for Art before he goes up to prison.”

She remained immobile in the light.

“I’d like to meet some of the people in your union,” I said.

“What for?”

“Because I don’t know anybody in this town and I might need a little help.”