Lay Down My Sword and Shield

  I hung up the receiver and sat numbly in the chair with my eyes closed and my fingers trembling on my forehead. So that was it. Just like that. Two crazed men single out another man, for no reason other than the fact that he walked into their bent, angry minds at the wrong time, and then they tear all the thirty-six years of life and soul from his body in seconds. My right hand was still sweating from the heat of the phone receiver and my ears burned with the casual language of the guard’s report and the warden’s footnotes. I couldn’t shut out the vision of the two Negroes dismembering a man who had nothing to do with their lives, their brains boiling in a furnace of satisfaction, just as sometime in the future several other madmen would seat them in a wooden chair fitted with leather straps and buckles and metal hood and place a cotton gag in their mouths and burst every cell in their bodies with thousands of volts of electricity. Bailey poured a drink in a glass and placed it in my hand. I watched the brown light shimmering in the whiskey. My arm felt too weak and lifeless to raise the glass to my mouth.

  “I’m sorry, Hack,” Bailey said.

  I stood up and set the glass on the desk. My movements seemed wooden, disconnected from one another, as though I had just awoke in the center of a vacuum. I could feel the beat of my pulse swelling into my eardrums. For just a moment the room looked unfamiliar, the ordered arrangement of chairs and desk and file cabinets foreign to anything that was me. I began putting on my coat.

  “Where are you going?” Bailey said.

  “I’m going to try to explain how a—”

  “Sit down a minute and finish your drink.”

  “I said I’m going down to the Valley and try to explain how a good man was murdered in a prison where he shouldn’t have been in the first place. And then I’ll explain how I won appeal on a man twenty-four hours after he was dead.”

  “Don’t let it take you like this, Hack.”

  “How should we take it, Bailey? Maybe if I go to work fast I can arrange to have his body shipped home before he’s buried in a prison cemetery with a wood marker. And if I’m too late to prevent that, I can always work on a court order to have the body exhumed. And while we’re doing all that we can consider that a lynch court had this in mind for him when he was first charged.”

  “Here, drink it, and I’ll go with you.”

  “You wouldn’t like it.”

  “I’ll rent a plane and we’ll fly down tonight.”

  I drank from the glass, but the whiskey had no taste. I had started to perspire under my coat, and the shapes and late afternoon shadows in the room were as strange as the distorted lines in a dream. Outside, the air-hammer thudded into the asphalt. I felt the sweat dripping off my hair down the back of my neck. The glass was empty in my hand.

  “They wouldn’t like you, either,” I said.

  “Goddamn it, Hack, you can’t drive like this.”

  “They don’t buy that work-with-the-system stuff. And I don’t feel like telling them the system is all right, except for those twenty-four-hour differences that you have to take into allowance. And I don’t like to tell them that I was having drinks with the D.A.R. ladies and shaking hands with the paraplegics while Art’s clock was one day behind the court’s. Give me another one.”

  He put his arm on my elbow and tried to turn me toward the chair.

  “Just get the bottle, Bailey. Pour yourself a super one while you’re at it.”

  He went to the desk and came back with the bottle of Jack Daniel’s. He held the stopper in one hand.

  “All right, sit down, and I’ll call the airport.”

  “Would you listen to me just for one goddamn time?” I said. “I’m not going down to meet with a Rotarian luncheon, and number two I’m not a fucking lunatic who needs his older brother to strap a control harness on his back.”

  I took the bottle out of his hand and drank from the neck. I swallowed until the muscles in my throat closed and the whiskey backed up in my mouth.

  “There, goddamn. That glues everything a little tighter,” I said.

  “Hack.”

  I left him standing in the open door with the bottle in his hand, his lined face covered with pinpoints of moisture.

  On the four-lane highway west of town I opened up the Cadillac, lowered the windows, and passed long strings of late afternoon traffic, hitting the shoulders and showering gravel over the asphalt. The red sun burned across the tops of the hills and lighted the dark edges of the post oaks and blackjack, and the shadows of the cedar-post fences along the road broke silently against my fenders like a blinking eye. Although I had driven that same highway hundreds of times, the sunset gave a different cast and color to the land than anything I had seen there before. The windmills were motionless in the static air; the cattle in the fields were covered with scarlet, their heads stationary in the short grass, and the neat white ranch houses seemed as devoid of life and movement as an abandoned film set; the irrigation ditches were dry and cracked with drought, the thickets of mesquite like burned scratches against the hillsides, and the few horses in the pastures looked as though they had been misplaced.

  The shadows deepened over the hills, the traffic thinned, and I kept the accelerator to the floor for the next fifty miles. The signboards, the oil rigs, and the three-dollar Okie motels sped past me in the twilight, but none of it would click together as a stable piece of geography that I had lived around all my life. It was removed, unconnected, and the whiskey from my flask made it even emptier and more disjointed. As a southerner I had been brought up to believe that through conditioning and experience you could accept with some measure of tranquility any of the flaws in the human situation. But death is one flaw that always lands like a fist in the center of the forehead. No matter how many times you see it, or smell its gray rotting odor, or come close to buying it yourself, each time is always like the first. No amount of earlier experience prepares you for it, and after it happens the world is somehow unfairly diminished and bent out of shape.

  It was night and just the horn of the moon shone above the hills when I reached Pueblo Verde. Lights glowed inside farmhouses beyond the dark fields and orchards of citrus trees, and the river was as black as gunmetal under the starless sky. Everything was closed on the main street except the hotel and beer tavern, and I turned down the rutted road into the Mexican district, wondering what type of inadequate words I would choose to tell Rie and her friends that Art’s death had come about the same way that a stupid fool steps on your foot aboard a crowded bus. I understood why Western Union offices always kept a pamphlet of prepared condolences on their counters. Death is the one occasion when words have as much relevance as a housewife talking across her back fence about a broken washing machine.

  My flask was empty. I stopped in the Mexican tavern for a fifth of Jack Daniel’s and had two drinks from the bottle in the car before I pulled up in front of the union headquarters. Bugs flicked against the screen door and turned in the yellow square of light on the porch. One of the windows had a large, spiderwebbed hole in the center, and someone had taped a piece of cardboard over it from the inside. Okay, doc, let’s go, I thought.

  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.