Their faces were tight with anger, the lips dry, the eyes hot and receded in the head, as though their own rage had dried out all the fluids in their bodies. In the gloom and swirling patterns of rain their skin looked white and stretched over the bone. Lightning struck against the hills, and the wind was beginning to strip the cotton in the fields.
“We ain’t got a lot of time for you, lawyer. So you know what I’m going to do?” the oil-field worker said, and put a half plug of tobacco in his mouth. He pushed it into his jaw with his tongue and chewed it into pulp, then cleaned the juice off his lip with his finger. “I ain’t going to touch you with my hand. I’m just going to show you how we treat dipshit around here. Now, when you get tired of it, all you got to do is tear that sign up and walk to your car. There won’t nobody hurt you.”
“I’ll tell you something, motherfucker,” I said. “You spit on me and I’ll take your head off.”
The man in the khaki clothes with the green cap reached out with his fist, off balance, as though he were leaping at a departing train, and struck me in a downward swing across the nose. His ring peeled back the skin, and I felt the blood swell to the surface. I stared at them all stupidly, with the sign in my hands, while my eyes filmed and burned. The oil worker was grinning at me.
“You want to cut bait, dipshit?” he said.
The woman who had spat on the priest flicked a lighted cigarette at my face, then I was hit again, this time across the side of the head with something round and wooden. I felt it clack into the bone, and I tumbled sideways, the ocean roaring in my ears, and struck the ground on one knee and an elbow. My ear and the side of my head were on fire, and I looked up through the unshaved legs and denims stained with grease and cow manure and saw a thin, muscular boy of about nineteen with a freight-door pin in his hand. Somebody pulled my shirt loose from my trousers and poured beer down my spine. I felt a cigar burn into my neck, and a woman slapped wildly at my head with a shoe. I tried to raise my arms in front of me, but someone stepped on my hand and the man in khakis tripped in the crowd and fell across my back. I heard Rie’s voice shouting outside the circle of people around me, then the deputy sheriff pulled my head up by the shirt collar and started to raise me to my feet, but before he did he flicked out his knee, in a quick, deft motion, and caught me in the eye. Half my vision exploded in dark red and purple circles, and I pressed my hand into the socket as though I had a piece of sandpaper under the lid. But in the swimming distortion I could still see his khaki trousers stuffed inside his low-topped boots, and his cartridge belt and holster welded against his flat stomach and narrow hips. I rose on one knee and put all my strength into a left-handed swing from the ground and hit him in the stomach an inch above the belt. I felt the muscles collapse under my fist, just like you kick open a door unexpectedly. He bent double, his face white and his mouth open in a wide O, and his breath clicked drily in his throat. His eyes were drowning, and when he fell forward on his knees in the mud, a line of spittle on his cheek, the crowd stepped backward in silence as though someone had thrown an unacceptable icon at their feet.
Then the Rangers, the city police, and the sheriff’s department went to work. They arrested everybody in sight. They handcuffed my arms behind me while the television cameras whirred, gave artificial respiration to the deputy and strapped an oxygen mask to his face, pushed scores of people into the vans with nightsticks until there was no more room, commandeered the stake truck, and arrested the man with the camera on the loading platform by mistake. Two deputies led me by each arm to the van, squeezing tightly into my torn shirt, their faces like hard wax, and the television newsmen were still hard at work with their lenses zooming across my manacled hands and swollen face. The rain was coming down harder now, and the gravel road was covered with wet bolls of cotton and leaves stripped from the citrus orchards. The wind was rattling the tin roof on top of the cannery, and the ditches by the road were slick and brown on the sides with the runoff from the fields. I was the last man put in the second van. The deputies took the handcuffs off me, pushed me inside against the crowd of Mexicans and Negroes, and locked the wire cage doors. The engine started, and we bounced across the railway track and turned through the cannery gate onto the county road.
The men in the van balanced themselves against the walls and each other and rolled cigarettes, or poured Bull Durham tobacco from the pouch between their lip and gums. Somewhere in back a child was crying. I leaned against the cage door and watched the road shift in direction behind the van, while the wind shook the barbed wire on the fences and bent the weeds flat along the irrigation ditches, and then I heard Rie’s voice way back in the crush of people. She pressed her way out between several Mexican men, who raised their arms in the air in order to let her pass, and her face and eyes made my heart drop. She put her arm in mine and touched her fingers lightly against the swollen place on my head, then pulled my arm close against her breast and kissed me on the cheek.
“I was very proud of you, Hack,” she said.
“I’m afraid I screwed up your picket. That was an assault and battery caper I pulled off back there.”
She hugged my arm tighter against her breast, and the rain poured down on the fields and began to flatten the long, plowed rows even with the rest of the land, and in the distance I could see the citrus trees whipping and shredding in the dark wind.
CHAPTER 10
THE STREETS IN town were half-filled with water when the vans arrived at the courthouse. Beer cans and trash floated along next to the curb, and the lawn was strewn with broken branches and leaves from the oaks. The deputies, now wearing slickers and plastic covers on their hats, formed us into a long line, two abreast, while the rain beat in our faces, and marched us into the courthouse. The booking room was small, and it took them three hours to fingerprint everyone and sort out the shoelaces, belts, pocket change, and wallets into brown envelopes. Most of the charges were for trespassing or failure to keep fifty feet apart on a picket line, but after the deputy had rolled my fingers on the ink pad the sheriff filled out my charge sheet personally and he wrote for five minutes. I dripped water onto the floor and looked at his steel-rimmed glasses and the red knots and bumps on his face. His fingers were pinched white on the pencil, and toward the bottom of the page he pressed down so hard that he punctured the paper.
Then he picked up a cigarette from the desk and lit it.
“You want to hear them?” he said.
“I bet you have a whole bunch,” I said.
“Assault and battery on a law officer, obstructing an officer in the line of duty, resisting arrest, inciting to riot, and I’m holding a couple of charges open. You ain’t going to get this shifted to no federal court, either. You’re going to be tried right here in this county, and maybe you’ll find out a lawyer’s shit stinks like everybody else’s.”
“I have a phone call coming.”
“It’s out of order.”
“It rang five minutes ago.”
“Take him downstairs,” he said to the trusty.
I was locked in the drunk tank at the end of the stone corridor in the basement. The room was crowded with men, wringing out their clothes on the concrete floor. Their dark bodies shone in the dim light. There were two toilets crusted with filth, without seats, in the corner, and the drunks who had been arrested during the weekend still reeked of sour beer and muscatel. Through the bars I could see the screened cage where I had talked with Art, and the row of cells with the food slits in the iron doors. The stone walls glistened with moisture, and the smoke from hand-rolled cigarettes gathered in a thick haze on the ceiling. An old man in Jockey undershorts, with shriveled skin like lined putty, walked to the toilet and began retching.
Rie had been put with the other women into a second holding room on the other side of the wall. Someone had drilled a small hole in the mortar between the stones, and a Mexican man had his face pressed tightly against the wall, talking to his wife, while a line of other men waited their turn behi
nd him. I wanted to talk with Rie badly, but the line grew longer, and often in the confusion of names and voices the two right people could never get on the opposite sides of the hole at the same time. Twice during the afternoon a deputy, dripping water from his slicker, brought in another prisoner, and each time the door clanged open a tough, bare-chested kid, who was waiting to do a six-year jolt in Huntsville, shouted out from the back of the room, “Fresh meat!” At five o’clock the trusty wheeled in the food cart with our tin plates of spaghetti, string beans, bread, and cups of Kool-Aid, and after the group of men had thinned away from the wall I tried to talk through the hole to a Mexican woman on the other side, but she couldn’t understand English or my bad Spanish, and I gave up.
That night I dragged my tick mattress against the door and lay with my face turned toward the bars to breathe as much air as I could out of the corridor and avoid the odor of the open toilets and the sweet, heavy smell of perspiration. I had one damp cigar left, and I smoked it on my side and looked at the row of gray iron doors set in the rock. Mojo was in lockdown behind one of them, and once I thought I saw the flash of his black face through a food slit. I had never been more tired. I was used up physically the way you are after you’ve thrown every pitch you have in a ten-inning game. There was a raised water blister on my neck from the cigar burn, and a swollen ridge across the side of my head, like a strip of bone, where the boy had caught me with the freight pin. I fell asleep with the dead cigar in my hand, and I slept through until morning without having one dream or even a half-conscious, nocturnal awareness of where I was, as though I had been lowered through the stone into some dark underground river.
I heard the trusty click the food cart against the bars and throw the big lock on the door. The fried baloney, grits, and coffee steamed from the stainless-steel containers, and the men were rising from their tick mattresses, hawking, spitting, and relieving themselves in the toilets, or washing their spoons under the water tap before they formed into line. I had to move my mattress for the trusty to push the cart inside, and when I stood up I realized that I felt as rested and solid as a man in his prime. But it took me a moment to believe the man I saw walking down the stone corridor with the sheriff by his side. He wore yellow waxed cowboy boots, a dark striped western suit, with a watch chain hooked on his handtooled belt, a bolo tie, a cowboy shirt with snap buttons on the pockets, and a short-brim Stetson hat on the back of his head. He didn’t have an undershirt on, and I could see the hair on his swollen stomach above his belt buckle, and his round face was as powdered and smooth as a baby’s. There wasn’t another man in Texas who dressed like that. It was R. C. Richardson, all right.
“Hack, have you lost your goddamn mind? What the hell are you doing in here?” he said, in his flat, east Texas, Piney Woods accent.
“R.C., you old sonofabitch,” I said.
“I was down here buying leases, and I come back to the motel last night and turned on the television, and I couldn’t believe it. What you trying to do to yourself, boy?”
“Get a bondsman, R. C.”
“I already done that. I got his ass out of bed at midnight, but he wouldn’t come till this morning. Do you know the bail they set on you? Ten thousand dollars. I swear to God if you ain’t a pistol, Hack.”
“I tell you, Mr. Richardson,” the sheriff said, “if you go this man’s bond, you’re also going to be responsible for him, because I don’t want to see him again.”
“Well, I guarantee you he won’t be no trouble,” R.C. said. “We might shoot on across the border this afternoon and try the chili, then go on back to DeWitt.”
“R.C., are you going to turn the key on me or just drip water on the floor?” I said.
“Hold on, son. That man will be here in a minute,” he said. “I told him I’d put a boot up his ass if he wasn’t here five minutes after I walked through that door.”
“Bail the rest of them out, too,” I said.
“You know that brother of yours is right. The whiskey’s getting up in your brain.”
“R.C., how many years have I kept you out of prison?”
“Goddamn, how much money do you think I carry around with me?”
“Enough to buy this county and a couple of others.”
“Hack, I can’t do that. There must be fifty people in there.”
“There’s more in the next room,” I said.
“And they’ll be spread all over Mexico when they’re supposed to be in court.”
“Will you stop screwing around and just do it?”
“If you ain’t a pistol, the craziest goddamn man I ever met. All right, but I’m going to send your brother a bill for a change, and it’s going to bust his eyeballs.”
“Good, and give me a cigar while you’re at it.”
The bondsman arrived, and R.C. wrote out a check on the stone wall for the whole amount. The bondsman, a small man with greed and suspicion stamped in his face, thought he was either drunk or insane. He held the check between his fingers with the ink still drying and looked at R.C. incredulously.
“Call the First National Bank in Dallas collect and use my name,” R.C. said, “or I’ll find me another man right fast.”
We had to wait ten minutes, then the sheriff opened the doors to both holding rooms and the corridor was filled with people, laughing and talking in Spanish. A deputy unlocked one of the cells set back in the wall, and Mojo stepped out barefoot in the light, blinking his red eyes, with his stringless shoes in his hands.
“What happened?” he said. “The Man get tired of us already?”
A Mexican man put his arm around Mojo’s shoulders and pulled him into the crowd walking toward the stairwell. The Mexican spoke no English, but he pointed his thumb into his mouth in a drinking motion.
“There you go, brother,” Mojo said.
The sheriff glared at us all, the red knots on his face tight against the skin.
I came up behind Rie and slipped my arm around her waist, and kissed the cool smoothness of her cheek. She turned her face up to me and I kissed her again and ran my hand through her hair.
“How did you do it, babe?” she said.
“I want you to meet R. C. Richardson,” I said.
R.C. lifted off his Stetson with a slow, exact motion and let it rest against his pants leg, and bent forward with a slight bow and his best look of southern deference to womanhood on his face. He pulled in his stomach and stiffened his shoulders, and for just a moment you didn’t notice the bolo tie and the yellow cowboy boots.
“I’m proud to meet you, miss,” he said.
“Rie Velasquez,” she said, and her eyes smiled at him.
“I was just telling Hack I didn’t have time to eat breakfast this morning, so why don’t we go across the street to the café and see if we can get a steak?”
His eyes were looking over Rie’s face, and I knew that it took everything in him to prevent them from going further. He stepped aside and let us walk in front of him as we followed the crowd upstairs. R.C. was about to begin one of his performances. He had several roles, and he did each of them well: good-natured oilman when he was buying leases; humble Kiwanian and patriot; friend-of-the-boys with a wallet full of unlisted telephone numbers. But now he was a gentleman rancher, somebody’s father, an older friend with his fingers on all the right buttons when you were in trouble. We had to wait for the deputy to find the brown envelopes with our wallets, change, and belts in them. He was young and evidently new to his job, and he had difficulty reading the handwriting of the people who had booked us.
“Snap it up, boy,” R.C. said. “We don’t want to grow no older in this place.”
“R.C., we still have about seventy-five feet to go to the door,” I said.
“You either do a job or you don’t,” he said. “That’s what’s wrong all over this country. Like that little bondsman back there. He don’t spit without sitting down and thinking about it first.”
We signed for our possessions, and R.C. slipped his sli
cker over Rie’s shoulders. It was still raining hard outside. It came down in curving sheets that swept across the flooded courthouse lawn. Some of the oaks were almost bare, and the leaves floated up against the trunks in islands. Cars and trucks were stalled in the street, the headlight beams weak in the driving rain, and somewhere a horn was stuck and blowing. The neon sign over the café and tavern looked like colored smoke in the wet, diffused light.
R.C. opened up a big umbrella over our heads, and we splashed down the sidewalk toward the café. The air smelled clean and cool, and even the rain, slanting under the umbrella and burning against the skin, felt like an absolution after the day and night in jail. There’s no smell exactly like that of a jail, and when you can leave it behind you and walk out into a rainstorm you feel that the other experience was never really there.
The water in the street was up to our knees, and R.C. held Rie by one arm and covered our heads with the umbrella while exposing his own. The rain sluiced off the brim of his pearl-gray Stetson, his western suit was drenched, his shirt had popped open more above his belt, and his stomach winked out like a roll of wet dough. He was an old crook and a lecher, but I liked him in a strange way—maybe because he had no malice toward anyone, and even in his dishonesty he was faithful to the corrupt system that he served, and his buffoonery lent a little humor to it. Possibly that’s an odd reason to like someone, but I had known much worse men in the oil business than R. C. Richardson.
He opened the door for us, and we went inside with the rain swirling through the screen. Men in cowboy boots and blue jeans were drinking bottles of Pearl and Jax at the counter, a Negro was racking pool balls in back under an electric bulb with a tin shade around it, and the jukebox, with cracks all over the plastic casing, was playing a lament about lost women and the wild side of life. R.C. took off Rie’s slicker and held the chair for her at one of the tables with oilcloth covers tacked around the sides. In his politeness he was awkward, like a man who had been put together with bad hinges, but it was seldom that he was called upon to show manners above those practiced in the Dallas Petroleum Club.