Lay Down My Sword and Shield (13 page)

“All right, you can let two hundred thousand dollars go to hell, but I’m still paying half the overhead around here,” he said.

“Bailey, look at this goddamn thing, then tell me that I ought to let this guy sit it out in the pen while some kid lawyer from the A.C.L.U. plays pocket pool with himself.”

“I don’t want to look at it. I have a desk covered with twice my ordinary load of work.”

“Then have a drink of water. You look hot.”

“Goddamn it, Hack, you’re putting me over the edge.”

“I just want you to glance at what can happen in a legal court without one voice being raised in protest.”

“What did you expect to find down there? Those union people knew the terms when they came in here.”

“I think I heard a deputy sheriff say about the same thing while he was pouring his mouth full of chewing tobacco.”

And once more Bailey slammed out the door, a furious man who would never understand the real reasons for his anger.

I spent Friday night in an Austin motel, and Saturday morning I met the Senator’s private plane at the airport. I stood on the hot concrete by the terminal in my white suit, and watched the plane tilt across the sky and approach the runway, its wings and propellers awash with sunlight. One wing lifted upward momentarily in the wind, then balanced again, and the wheels touched on the asphalt as smoothly as a soft slipper. The heat waves bounced off the fuselage, and the sun turned the front windows into mirrors exploding with light. At the end of the runway the pilot feathered one engine and taxied at an angle toward me, and I saw the Senator open the back door and wave one arm, his face smiling.

I walked to the plane, and the backdraft from the propeller blew the tail of my coat over my shoulders. The Senator was grinning in the roar, and he extended his hand and helped me into the compartment. I pulled the door shut after me, locked the handle down, and the plane began to taxi out on the main runway again. The Senator was dressed in slacks, a Hawaiian sports shirt, and calfskin loafers. There was fresh tan on his face and a few freckles along the hairline of his white, crew-cropped head. In the opposite seat, with a drink resting on his crossed knee, was a man I didn’t know, although I sensed at the time that I probably would never forget him. He wore a charcoal business suit, a silk shirt with cuff links, and a gray tie, and his face was pale and expressionless behind his sunglasses. The mouth was small and compressed, as though he never spoke except with a type of quiet finality, and his manicured, half-moon fingernails and confident reserve reminded me of a very successful corporate executive, but there was something about the hue of his skin and the trace of talcum powder on his neck that darkened the image.

“Hack, this is John Williams, an old friend from Los Angeles,” the Senator said.

We shook hands, and I felt the coldness in his palm from the highball glass.

“How do you do,” he said. Only the mouth moved when he spoke. The face remained as immobile as plastic. He pushed his smoky, metallic hair back on one temple with his fingertips.

The plane gained speed, the engines roaring faster, then it lifted off the runway, and I felt the weightless, empty feeling of dropping unexpectedly in an elevator as the countryside spread out below us and the blocks of neat houses and rows of trees seemed to shrink away into the earth.

John Williams, I thought. The name. Where?

“What happened to your head?” the Senator said. “I hope you haven’t run into another tennis player with bad aim.”

“A minor car accident.” You shithead, I thought.

“Well, John, this man is going to be the youngest congressman from the state in November.”

Williams nodded and took a sip from his drink. I tried to see his eyes through his sunglasses. John Williams, where did I see the name?

“John’s not from Texas, but he’s a good friend to the party.”

“I see,” I said.

“I’ve had him at the ranch for a few days of shooting. I’m trying to convince him that the only place to build industry today is in the Southwest.”

“A beautiful state,” Williams said. His face was turned to me, but it was impossible to read his meaning or intention.

“Do you mind if I have a drink?” I said.

“I’m sorry, Hack. I usually don’t drink this early myself, and I forget that other people don’t have my same Baptist instincts.” The Senator opened the cabinet door to the bar and folded out a small table from the wall. He picked up three cubes from the ice bucket with the tongs and dropped them into a tall glass and poured in a shot of bourbon.

“I was glad to see you at the airport,” he said. “I thought maybe we were too forceful last Sunday in getting you to come along.”

“Oh, I keep my promises, Senator.”

“We’ll only be there a short while. A couple of the state news services will meet us at the hospital, and then we’ll have dinner and take off again this evening.”

“News services?” I said.

“Yes, the local ones. They usually like to cover this sort of thing for the state television stations.”

“I didn’t know about that.”

“I see you’re a bit new to politics,” Williams said. There was just a touch of a smile at the corner of his mouth, a faint wrinkle in the plastic skin.

“No, no, Hack’s father was a congressman. In fact, a very fine one. It’s just that Hack had some private reservations at first about visiting Walter Reed.”

“Why’s that, Mr. Holland?”

“I suppose it’s connected with superstition. You know, bad luck,” I said.

“Really?” The skin wrinkled again at the corner of his mouth, and he clinked the ice in his glass. I felt the pulse begin to swell in my neck.

“Probably a silly thing, but I never found much pleasure in visiting a veterans’ ward,” I said.

Williams’s face remained opaque as he looked at me, but I saw one finger tighten on his glass.

“Maybe it’s something about the smell of a dressing on a burn. I really couldn’t tell you,” I said.

He continued to stare at me, and I knew that behind those sunglasses his eyes were burning into mine.

“How about another drink, John?”

“I’m fine.”

“I suppose I shouldn’t have brought it up. Actually, Hack was wounded in Korea and spent some time in the V.A. after the war.”

“Is that right, Mr. Holland?”

“It wasn’t of much consequence. A flesh wound. The John Wayne variety,” I said.

“It was a little more serious than that,” the Senator said.

“I’d like to talk with you about your experiences sometime,” Williams said. His voice was as dry as paper.

“They’re not very interesting, but anytime you’re passing through DeWitt County on your way between Washington and L.A., we’ll sure crack a couple of bottles.”

“You’ll see John at my ranch. He visits often,” the Senator said. “Your glass is empty, Hack.”

I wouldn’t have believed it, but the Senator was uncomfortable. His acetylene-blue eyes were bright, and his easy laugh had a fine wire of strain in it. He poured another shot in my glass and pressed the stopper hard in the bottle neck with his thumb. And I began to feel that John Williams was a much more formidable person than I had realized.

“If you continue in politics I’m sure we’ll see a lot more of each other,” Williams said. I could almost taste the bile in his teeth. “It looks like your career is going to be a very good one.”

“I expect that’s one of those things you never know about.”

“I wouldn’t say that.”

Again, I couldn’t tell if there was a second meaning in what he said, or if he used deliberate vagueness to keep his opposition full of unspoken question marks. But I did know that the Senator was still sitting a bit forward in his seat, and his thigh muscles were tensed under the crease of his trousers. Yes, there’s a real lesson in this, I thought. Even the predators sometimes have to lie under the reef while the shadows of much larger fish move through the dark waters overhead. I lit my first cigar of the day and squinted at the Senator and Williams through the smoke, and I wondered what umbilical cord connected them.

I didn’t say anything else that would test that delicate pattern of membrane behind the Senator’s healthy smile, and Williams sensed that the match was over. He set his drink on the table, folded his hands on his knee, and looked out the window like a withdrawn demiurge at the pools of fire in the clouds.

Three hours later I was on my fourth bourbon and water as we began our approach to Dulles Airport.

The air in Washington was humid and hazy with smog. There had been rioting in the Negro district off Pennsylvania Avenue during the week, and from the plane I had seen plumes of smoke blowing across the blocks of red-brick tenement buildings toward the Capitol and the Lincoln Memorial, that island of green and marble and blue water in the center of a colossal slum. Now, standing on the drive among the potted plants in front of the terminal, I could smell just the hint of burned wood in the air, and my eyes watered in the yellow pall that hung over everything in sight.

The Senator’s chauffeured Cadillac limousine picked us up, and on the way to Walter Reed I fixed another drink from the portable bar built into the back of the driver’s seat. The Senator didn’t like it, but he confined his objection to a steady look at the amount of bourbon in my glass. Williams sat silently on the fold-out seat, his back straight and his face turned indifferently to the window; however, I could feel his sense of superiority in the knowledge that I was starting in heavy on the whiskey. That’s all right, motherfucker, I thought. Wes Hardin and I will kick your ass any day in the light-year you want to choose.

Two television newsmen from Houston and Fort Worth were waiting for us by the information desk in the main room of the hospital. They were both young, dressed in narrow-cut suits and knitted neckties and button-down collars, and their hair looked as though it was trimmed every day. They had been leaning against the counter with their cameras hanging loosely in their hands, and when they saw the Senator they snapped into motion and came toward us with their leather soles clicking on the marble floor. Their college-boy faces showed the proper deference and energetic respect, and I thought, Ahhh, there are two young men who will never live within breathing distance of the Fort Worth stockyards.

Three hospital administrators joined us, and we began our tour of the wards holding the Vietnam wounded. I had a fair edge on from the whiskey, but now I wished that I had made a bigger dent in the bottle. The beds, with high metal rails on the sides, stretched out in long rows, and the afternoon sun slanted across the bodies of the men under the sheets. I had made a cynical remark to Williams about the smell of a dressing on a burn, but that was only part of it. The astringent odor of the antiseptic used to scrub the floors mixed with the reek of the bedpans, the sweaty and itching flesh inside the plaster casts, the urine that sometimes dried in the mattress pads of the paraplegics, and the salve oozing from bandages that covered rows of hard stitches. There was another odor in the air, too, one that might be called imaginary, but I could smell the distant rain forests and the sores that formed on men’s bodies from living in wet uniforms and in boots that hardened like iron around the feet. The stench of terror and dried excrement on the buttocks was there, also, and if you wanted to think hard on it you could fill your lungs and catch the sweet-sour gray smell of death.

The Senator shook hands cheerfully from bed to bed, and each time he found a man from Texas he made several banal remarks while the cameras whirred away. A few of the men were bored or irritated at seeing another politician, but the majority of them grinned with their boyish, old men’s faces, propped themselves up on their elbows with cigarettes between their fingers, and listened to the Senator’s thanks about the job they were doing. Only one time did he have trouble, and that was with a Negro Marine who’d had an arm amputated at the shoulder. The Negro’s eyes were bloodshot, and I saw a bottle of paregoric sticking out from under his pillow.

“Don’t thank me for nothing,
man
,” he said. “When I get out of here you better hide that pink ass behind a wall.”

The cameras stopped whirring, and the Senator smiled and walked to the next bed as though the Negro and his anger were there only as the result of some chance accident not worth considering seriously. Then the cameras started working again, the two newsmen were back to their coverage, and the Marine pulled out his bottle of paregoric and unscrewed the cap by flipping it around with one thumb. His bloodshot eyes continued to stare into the Senator’s back.

At the end of each ward the Senator made a speech, and I wondered how many times he had made it in the same wards during World War II and the Korean War. He had probably changed some of the language to suit the particular cause and geographic conquest involved, but the content must have been the same: The people at home support you boys. We’re proud of the American fighting man and the sacrifices he’s made to defend democracy against Communist aggression. You’ve taken up the standard that can only be held by the brave, and we’re not going to let anyone dishonor that standard. It’s been bought at too dear a price…

And on and on.

As I watched him I remembered sitting in a similar ward in 1953 after the last pieces of splintered lead had been removed from my legs, and listening to a state representative make almost the same speech. I didn’t remember his name, or even what he looked like, but he and the Senator were much alike, because in the intense emotional moment of their delivery they believed they had fought the same battles as the men lying before them, felt the same aching lung-rushing gasp when they were hit, bled into the same dark soil, and had fallen through the same endless morphine deliriums in a battalion aid station.

But the Senator had one better. After all the hackneyed patriotic justifications for losing part of one’s life, he outdid himself:

“I bet you boys aren’t burning your draft cards!”

And they replied in unison, one hundred strong:

“NO SIR!”

The Senator went through the doorway with the three hospital administrators, who all the time had been smiling as though they were showing off a nursery of hothouse plants, and one of the newsmen turned his camera on me.