Lay Down My Sword and Shield (11 page)

“My deputy wanted to charge you with attempted assault on a law officer, but I ain’t going to do that,” he said. He spread the tobacco evenly in the paper and licked down the edge. “I’m just going to ask you to go down the road, and that’ll be the end of it.”

“Your man is pretty good with his feet and a billy.”

“I reckon that’s what happens when you threaten a law officer, don’t it?” He put the cigarette in his mouth and turned toward me in his swivel chair.

“I don’t suppose that I could bring a charge against him here, but I have a feeling the F.B.I. might be interested in a civil rights violation.”

“You don’t seem to understand what I’m saying, Mr. Holland. I got my deputy’s report right here, cosigned by a city patrolman, and it says you were drunk, resisting arrest, and swinging at an officer with your fists. Now maybe you think that don’t mean anything because you’re an Austin lawyer, but that ain’t worth piss on a rock around here.”

“You’re not dealing with a wetback or a college kid, either.” My head felt as though it were filled with water. Through the window I could see the sun striking across the treetops.

“I know exactly what I’m dealing with. I been sheriff here seven years and I seen them like you by the truckload. You come in from the outside and walk around like your shit don’t stink. I don’t know what you’re doing with them union people, and I don’t really give a goddamn, but you better keep out of my jail. The deputy went easy with you last night, and that’s pretty hard for him to do when he runs up against your kind. But the next time I’m going to turn him loose.”

“You might also tell your trained sonofabitch that he won’t catch me drunk on my hands and knees again, and in the meantime he ought to contact a public defender because I have a notion that he’ll need one soon.”

The sheriff struck a match on the arm of the chair and lit his cigarette. He puffed on it several times and flicked the match toward the spittoon. The knots and bumps on his face had turned a deeper red.

“I’m just about to take you back to lockdown and leave you there till you find some other smart-ass lawyer to get you out.”

“No, you’re not, because you’ve already been through my wallet and you saw a couple of cards in there with names of men who could have a sheriff dropped right off the party ticket.”

“I’ll tell you something. Tonight I’m going out on patrol myself, and if I catch you anywhere in the county you’re going to get educated downstairs and piss blood before you’re through. Pick up your stuff and get out of here.”

“What’s the bail on the others?”

“Twenty-five dollars a head, and you can have all the niggers and pepper-bellies and hippies you want. Then I’ll get my trusties to hose down the cells.”

I picked up my billfold from his desk and put four one-hundred-dollar bills before him.

“That ought to cover it, and some of your water bill, too,” I said.

He figured on a scratch pad with a broken pencil for a moment, smoking the saliva-stained cigarette between his lips.

“No, we owe you fifty dollars, Mr. Holland, and we want to be sure you get everything coming to you.” He opened his desk drawer and counted out the money from a cashbox and handed it to me. “Just sign the receipt and you can collect the whole bunch of them and play sticky finger in that union hall till tonight, then I’ll be down there and we can talk it over again if you’re still around.”

“I don’t believe you’ll be that anxious to talk when you and your deputy and I meet again.”

“I’m going to let them people out myself. Don’t be here when I get back,” he said. He stood up and dropped his cigarette into the spittoon. His flat blue eyes, staring out of that red, knotted face, looked like whorls of swimming color without pupils. He stuck his shirt inside his trousers with the flat of his hand and walked past me with the khaki stiffness of a man who had once more restored structure to his universe.

I sat down in a chair and put my boots on. They were filled with small rocks and mud, and when I stood up again I felt the dizziness and nausea start. I wiped the sweat off my face with my shirt and I wondered how in God’s name I could have ever become involved in a fool’s situation like this. I was glad there were no reflecting windows or glass doors or mirrors in the sheriff’s office, because I was sure that the present image of Hackberry Holland—ripped silk shirt, mud-streaked trousers, swollen temple and blood-matted hair, and face white with concussion and hangover—wouldn’t help me resolve my torn concept of self.

I walked outside into the sunlight to wait for Rie. The sun and shadow sliced in patterns across the lawn, and a warm breeze from the river carried with it the smell of the fields. I sat on the concrete steps and let the heat bake into my skin. My clothes and body reeked of the jail, and the odor became stronger as I started to perspire. Two women passing on the sidewalk looked at me in disgust. “Good morning. How are you ladies today?” I said, and their eyes snapped straight ahead.

A few minutes later Rie and the others came out the front door. The faces of the Mexicans were lined and bloated with hangover, and the guitar player and college boy looked like definitions of death. Their faces were perfectly white, as though all the blood had been drawn out through a tube. Rie carried her sandals in her hand, and she looked as lovely and alive as a flower turning into the sun.

“Thanks for going the bail,” she said.

“I’ll mark it off on my expense account as part of my expanded education. Right now I need to pick up my car, unless our deputy friend set fire to it last night.”

“Rafael’s brother has a truck at the fruit stand. He’ll take us back.”

“Yeah, I don’t think I could walk too far this morning,” I said.

“Say, man, you really took on that bastard, didn’t you?” the college boy said. His face was so wan that his lips moved as though they were set in colorless wax.

“Afraid not,” I said. “It was a one-sided encounter.”

We started walking across the lawn toward the open-air market. My head ached with each step.

“No, man, it takes balls to go up against a prick like that,” he said.

“Stupidity is probably a better word,” I said.

The shade was cool under the trees, and mockingbirds flew through the branches overhead. Across the street a Mexican was wetting down the rows of watermelons in the bins with a hose. Their fat green shapes were beaded with light in the sun. We crossed the street like the ragged remnant of a guerrilla band, and people in passing automobiles twisted their faces around and stuck their heads out of windows at this strange element in the midst of their tranquil Tuesday morning world.

One of the Mexicans and Rie and I got into the cab of a pickup truck and the others climbed in back, and we headed into the poor district. The driver pulled out a half-pint of Four Roses from under the seat and took a drink with one hand on the steering wheel. His face shook with the taste. Then he took three more swallows like he was forcing down hair tonic, and offered the bottle to me.

“Not today,” I said.

He screwed the cap on and passed the bottle out the window of the cab to one of his friends in back. The bottle went from hand to hand until it was empty, then the Negro banged on the roof when we passed the first clapboard beer tavern on the road. He and the Mexicans piled out and went in the screen door, pulling nickels, dimes, and quarters from their blue jeans. Before the truck started up again I could already hear their laughter from inside.

The driver dropped the rest of us off at the union hall. My Cadillac was powdered with white dust so thick that I couldn’t see inside the windows.

“Come in and I’ll put something on your head,” Rie said. The truck rattled back down the road toward the tavern.

“Unless I figured that sheriff wrong, he’s already been to the hotel and my suitcase is waiting for me on the front step.”

“Your eye is starting to close.”

“I keep a couple of glass spares in my glove compartment.”

She put her arm through mine and moved toward the porch.

“All right, no protest,” I said.

“I thought he’d killed you.”

“I don’t believe you’re a hard girl after all.”

“Your eyelids turned blue. I even cried to make that asshole take you into emergency receiving, and he shot me the finger.”

“Don’t worry. I’m going to make this fellow’s life a little more interesting for him in the next few weeks.”

“I didn’t think you believed in charging the barricade.”

“I don’t. There’s always ten others like him who’ll crawl out of the woodwork to take his place, but you can’t fool with the Lone Ranger and Tonto and walk away from it.”

We went inside, and I sat in a chair while she washed the lump on my head with soap and water. The tips of her fingers were as light as wind on the bruised skin.

“There’s pieces of rock and dirt in the cut. I’ll have to get them out with the tweezers,” she said. “You should go to the hospital and get a couple of stitches.”

“Do you have a quart of milk in your icebox?”

She went into the kitchen and came back with a carton of buttermilk and a pair of tweezers in a glass of alcohol. I drank the carton half empty in one long chugging swallow, and for just a moment the thick cream felt like cool air and health and sunshine transfused into my body, then she started picking out the pieces of rock from the cut with the edge of the tweezers. Each alcohol nick made the skin around my eye flex and pucker.

“What are you doing? I don’t need a lobotomy.”

“You probably don’t need blood poisoning, either.” Her eyes were concentrated with each metallic scratch against my skin.

“Look, let me have the tweezers and give me a mirror. I used to be a pretty fair hospital corpsman.”

“Don’t move your head. I almost have it all out.” She bit her lip and squeezed out a splinter of rock from under the cut with her finger. “There.”

Then she rubbed a cotton pad soaked with alcohol over the lump.

“There are other ways to clean a cut. They ought to give first-aid courses in the Third World before you kill somebody with shock.”

“Wait a minute,” she said, and went into the kitchen again and returned with a piece of ice wrapped in a clean dish towel. She held it against my head, her almond eyes still fixed with a child’s concern.

“A cold compress can’t do any good after the first two hours,” I said.

“What was that Bean Camp stuff about last night?”

“Nothing. I create things in my head when I try to run up Jack Daniel’s stock a couple of points.”

“Were you in a prison camp during the war?”

“No.”

The whiskey edge was starting to wear off, and gray worms and spots of light swam before my eyes when I tried to stand up. She pressed her hand down on my shoulder.

“You ought to pull the fishhooks out. You’re all flames inside,” she said.

“I feel like I’ve been dismantled twice in three days, and I’m not up to psychoanalysis right now. It seems that every time my brain is bleeding someone starts boring into my skull with the brace and bit.”

“Okay, man, I’m sorry.”

“I’ve got a brother that can make you grind your teeth down to the nerve with that same type of morning-after insight. There’s nothing like it to send me right through the wall.”

“So I won’t say anything else,” she said.

I felt myself trembling inside, as though all the wheels and gears were starting to shear off against one another at once. My palms were sweating on my knees, and I realized that my real hangover was just beginning.

“Let me have one of your cigarettes,” I said.

She laid the ice compress down, lit a cigarette, and put it in my mouth. The smoke was raw in my throat, and a drop of sweat rolled off my lip onto the paper.

“Does it always take you like that?” she said.

“No, only when I’m stupid enough to get my head kicked in by a redneck cop.”

I smoked the cigarette and exhaled slowly, while my temple and eye beat with pain, then pushed the sweat back into my hair with one hand.

“Look, you’re not a drinker, so you don’t know the alcoholic syndrome,” I said. “I’m not a shithead all the time.”

“Sit down. Your cut is bleeding.”

“I’m going down the road. I’ll take a couple of those hot beers with me if you don’t mind.”

My legs were weak, and the blood seemed to drain downward in my body with the effort of standing.

“You can’t drive anywhere now.”

“Watch.”

“What you’re doing is really dumb.”

I started toward the counter where the remaining bottles of Jax stood, and a yellow wave of nausea went through me. The sour taste of buttermilk and last night’s whiskey came up in my throat, and I felt a great throbbing weight on my forehead. My cigarette was wet down to the ash from the sweat running off my face.

“I really got one this time,” I said.

“Come in the back,” she said, and put her arm around my waist. My shirt stuck wetly against my skin.

We went down the hallway through a side door into a small bedroom. The shade on the window was torn, and strips of broken sunlight struck across the floor. An old crucifix was nailed against one wall above a Catholic religious calendar with two withered palms stuck under the top edges. I drew in on the dead cigarette and gagged in the back of my throat. You’ve just about made the d.t.’s this time, I thought. Work on it again and you’ll really get there.

My body felt as rigid as a snapped twig. She pressed me down on the edge of the bed with her hands and turned on an electric fan. The current of air was like wind blowing over ice against my face.

“Lie down and I’ll put a dressing on your cut,” she said.

Something was rolling loose inside me, and my fingers were shaking on my knees.

“Look, you don’t need—”

“Lie down, Lone Ranger.” Then she leaned over me with her breasts heavy against her blouse, her brown face and wild curly hair a dark silhouette above me, and pressed me back into the pillow.

She rubbed ointment on the cut in a circular motion with her fingers and taped a piece of gauze over it. I could feel the heat of the sun in her skin and hair, and her eyes were filled with a dark shine. I touched the smoothness of her arm with my hand, then the light began to fade beyond the window shade, the fan blew cool over my chest and face, and somewhere out in the hills a train whistle echoed and beat thinly into a brass sky. I heard her close the door softly as on the edge of a dream.