Lay Down My Sword and Shield (5 page)

“Thanks. I’ll find my way there. From what I understand, Hack drives like he’s trying to put A. J. Foyt back in the grease pit,” the Senator said.

“I wouldn’t try to beat a Texas boy at his own game, Senator.”

“It depends on what type of game.” His eyes crinkled at me.

“I have a pretty good shutout record in my field.”

“I remember, Hack. I watched you pitch twice. But as I recall you used to have a little trouble with a left-handed batter.”

“Sometimes you have to bear down a little more.”

He took a thin swallow of his highball and placed the glass on the bar, his expression assured and pleasant, then looked casually at his watch.

“Bailey’s probably right. We should go downstairs. I’ll drop up later for a few minutes and say hello to your guests,” he said, and put his hand on the small of my back. “Then tomorrow we’ll see what type of tennis game we can work out.”

I saw the ease come back into Verisa’s face, and Bailey stood up stiffly as though he had just been unstrapped from an electric chair. I took my typewritten speech in its leather folder from my suitcase, and we walked down the carpeted corridor toward the elevator like an amiable family of four.

The dining tables in the Shamrock Room were filled. The silver, the crystalware, the white tablecloths, the spangled evening gowns, and the decanters of wine reflected softly under the lights. The Senator introduced me from the rostrum, and the rows of faces became hushed and polite. Even the fat boys from the oil interests, in their string ties and cowboy boots, looked quietly deferential. I read them my twenty-minute speech of non-language and they applauded thirteen times. Whenever I approached some vague conclusion, pointed at nothing, I could see their eyes grow more intent, their heads nodding slightly, as some private anger with the nation, the universe, or themselves found a consensus in my empty statements, then the hands would begin clapping. They had found a burning spokesman to represent all the outraged good guys. I was tight enough to be unconscious of my speech’s stupidity, and after a while I even felt that I might be saying something meaningful. They rose to their feet when I finished. I shook dozens of hands, smiled with country boy humility at the compliments, and invited half the dining room to Verisa’s cocktail party.

The party was a success in every way. Verisa was able to become the radiant wife of a congressional candidate, moving with detached pleasantness between groups of people (the society editors from
The Houston Post
and
The Chronicle
both agreed the next day that Mrs. Holland was one of the most lovely hostesses to appear in Texas politics in a long time). And I was able to make a doubleheader out of the evening: I managed to get drunk twice in one day. The Negro waiters put a fresh whiskey and water in my hand every time I flicked my eyes in their direction, and within two hours Mr. Hyde had begun to prowl obscenely through the hallways of my mind. The room was so crowded by midnight that the air-conditioning couldn’t clear the smoke, and the noise brought complaints from the floors above and below us. People whom I had never seen before drank three cases of bourbon and Scotch, ate four hundred dollars’ worth of catered food, burned cigar holes in the carpet, charged thirty-minute long-distance calls to my room, and threw glasses and bottles off the terrace into the swimming pool. Someone wheeled in the commander from the Veterans of the Spanish-American War, who sat stupefied in one corner, staring out at the bedlam from his atrophied, withered face, until a sentimental World War II veteran decided to take him on a careening ride through the corridor. The alcoholic baseball pitcher and I argued about how to throw a crippling beanball, one of the society editors threw up in the bathroom and had to be put in bed by Verisa, and the firebomber of Dresden unzipped the back of a woman’s evening dress.

I insulted the astronaut and his wife, who left after a polite five-minute interval, then two of the Negro bartenders quit when an oil broker made a racial remark to them. I took over the bar and poured all the remaining bourbon, gin, and Scotch into a punch bowl, and insisted that everyone in the room have a drink. This resulted in four more people passed out, a clogged toilet, and a group plan to open up the dining room for steak and eggs. Someone brought in a hillbilly singer from a nightclub, who propositioned Verisa, and the Air Force general drank six glasses from the punch bowl and urinated off the balcony. By four
A.M.
the room was totally destroyed. All the furniture was either burned or broken, the floor was littered with cigar and cigarette butts, the French doors were smashed, the potted plants overturned, and the electric plug in the drink mixer had short-circuited and melted into the wall socket. (Later, I received an eight-hundred-dollar repair bill from the Shamrock Hilton, and I kindly forwarded it to the Texas Democratic Committee in Austin.)

At five
A.M.
the last of the guests supported each other out the door, while Verisa accepted their incoherent compliments and told them to visit us at the ranch (she was still radiant, even through her fatigue). I lay down on the bed next to the society editor, and as the false dawn glowed on the horizon and touched the room with its gray light, she rolled her head toward me, her mouth wide with snoring, her face oval and white, and I thought, Good night, good night, sweet Desdemona, and I fell once more into Mr. Hyde’s world.

The clay tennis courts at the country club were green and freshly chalked under a hot, blue sky. I sat at a marble-topped table with Bailey under the shade trees, sipping a glass of tomato juice and vodka, while Verisa and the Senator whocked the ball back and forth across the net. Behind the courts the sun shattered off the swimming pool, and children in dripping swimsuits lined up on the diving board. In the distance the smooth green contours of the golf course arched away through the oak trees, and the sand traps looked like ground white crystal in the light. My hangover was bad. I was sweating unnaturally, shaking inside like a tuning fork vibrating to the wrong chord, and I felt a hard pressure band across one side of my head. My tennis shorts and polo shirt were already wet, although I hadn’t been on the court yet, and the vodka wouldn’t take hold. Bailey kept talking about our law practice in Austin, my failure to come into the office regularly, and my rudeness to the Senator. His words were like pieces of broken china in my head. He spoke from some abstraction inside himself, looking into my eyes occasionally, his face earnest with the dumb innocence of a nondrinker talking to a man with a bleeding hangover. I lit a cigar, tried to concentrate on the tennis game, and had another vodka and tomato juice.

“It’s insane to do these things to yourself,” he said. “You’re hungover three days out of seven, you go into court with your fingers shaking, and in the meantime other people are picking up after you.”

“Are you picking up after me, Bailey?”

“What do you think I did yesterday? And last night you insulted a half-dozen people within fifteen minutes.”

“I thought I only got the astronaut.” I wiped the sweat off my forehead on my sleeve and drained the vodka and tomato juice.

“You want to get blasted again?”

“I might unless the conversation changes.”

“You can be in office in a few months. The youngest congressman from the state. After one or two terms you can do anything you want in Texas.”

“I know those things.”

“Then why don’t you act like you have more than two functional brain cells?”

I held my glass up to the waiter for another drink.

“You count on too much from people,” Bailey said.

“Will you go to hell or shut up for about five minutes?”

“You can get angry, but I’m right in what I say.”

“Bailey, would you get away from me a few minutes?”

“You see what that booze does?”

“Go swimming or chase golf balls if you like. Believe me, I’m up to my eyes with it.”

He stood up, his face slightly hurt and angry, and walked across the clipped grass to the clubhouse. I knew that in a half hour he would be back as though nothing had been said, and then later he would start to bore in again. Bailey was a good man, but he was simply unteachable.

The Senator moved about the court like a man twenty years younger than his age. I have to admit that he looked good out there. The matted gray hair on his chest and his thick, muscular shoulders glistened with sweat, and he whocked the ball in a white streak across the net. For a short man he had a fine driving serve, and his backhand was always accurate and strong. He had a good eye for court distance, and most of his shots just skimmed the top of the net and hit in a low bounce on the clay. Verisa was a good tennis player, but he took her in two easy sets. The Senator was a competitor, and his gentlemanly affectation ended when he entered the games.

They joined me at the table, and the waiter served us a cold lunch of peeled shrimp on cracked ice. For the next hour I listened to the Senator’s advice on my campaign, the upcoming year in Congress, and contributions from several oil companies (the checks, which already amounted to over sixty-five thousand dollars, had all been deposited by Bailey in a special account in Austin). Then I was told indirectly, with compassion, to avoid public statements on civil rights, at least while in Texas, and that I shouldn’t lean too far toward labor, since as a Democrat I could already count on their vote. I nodded my head and listened as intelligently as possible, but my hangover wouldn’t let go and few of his sentences seemed to have any relationship to one another. Actually, more than any instruction in Texas politics, he wanted to exact penance from me because of yesterday, and I was in the perfect condition for it—a mental cripple.

“Next week I plan to visit the wounded Vietnam veterans in Walter Reed,” he said. “I think it might be good for you to come along.”

“Why’s that?”

“You were wounded yourself in Korea. I think the boys like to know that they have congressmen who understand what they’ve been through.”

“I’m afraid I had enough of V.A. hospitals, Senator,” I said.

“We’ll be there an hour or so. Then you’ll be back home the same night.”

“I better pass.”

“Go on, Hack. Bailey will be at the office,” Verisa said.

“No, I don’t—”

“You need a trip. Enjoy it,” Bailey said. He had come back from the clubhouse fresh with resolve.

“I spent two months in the V.A. in ’53 and I really—” I was smiling in my best convivial way.

“This type of exposure is important to you, Hack,” the Senator said.

Fuck it, I thought. “All right, Senator. I’ll be glad to.”

We finished lunch and played a set of doubles. Verisa and I stood the Senator and Bailey, and the sweat rolled down my face and chest in rivulets. My timing was bad, my movements uncoordinated, and I drove most of my serves into the bottom of the net. My head was thundering from the heat and exertion. The air seemed so humid that it was like steam on my skin. If Bailey hadn’t been such a bad player we would have lost the set six games straight, but Verisa managed to keep us only one game behind. I was even proud of her. In her short white tennis skirt and cap with a green visor she was the loveliest thing on the courts. Her legs and shoulders were freckled with suntan, her auburn hair wet and shining on the back of her neck, and you could get a good look at her lovely bottom when she bent over with her serve.

We went into the final game five to four, and I wanted to beat the Senator very badly. He played confidently, controlling the back line with an easy sweep of his racket in either direction. His thick eyebrows were heavy with perspiration, and his blue eyes refracted a mean success every time he drove the ball into my shoelaces.

However, I soon learned that the Senator’s revenge for yesterday wasn’t complete yet. I moved up to the net for the final point, Verisa served, and Bailey returned the ball in an easy, high-arching lob. I whocked it with all the strength in my shoulder straight into the Senator. The game should have been over and the set tied, but the Senator caught my drive with one short, forearm chop of the racket, and smashed the ball murderously into my face. My sunglasses broke on the court, my eyes watered uncontrollably, and I felt the blood running from my nose. Through the tears I could see him walking quickly toward me, his face gathered in concern, but there was victory in his eyes.

Later, Verisa drove us back to the hotel while I held a blood-flecked towel filled with ice cubes to my nose. The bridge was already swollen, and there was a sickening taste in the back of my throat. I tilted my head back on the seat and looked with one eye out the window at the stream of angry traffic along South Main. At the court the Senator had apologized in his most empathic manner, the tennis pro arrived with a first-aid kit and tried to push cotton balls up my nose, a Negro waiter put another vodka and tomato juice on the table and left, and now Bailey sat in the backseat talking about going to the hospital for an X ray.

“Do you think it’s broken?” Verisa said.

“No, he just flattened it a little. A warning,” I said. My words were nasal and smothered under the towel.

“It was an accident,” Bailey said. “You cut the ball right into him.”

“Why don’t you get off the goodguymanship ethic? Leave the Boy Scouts for a while, at least till we get to the hotel,” I said. “He was out to tear my head off.”

“That’s hangover paranoia.”

“Oh, shit,” I said.

“How many U.S. Senators would spend their time trying to help a thirty-five-year-old lawyer’s political career?”

“Don’t you know a sonofabitch when you see one?”

“You’re constructing things to fit some strange frame of reference in your own mind.”

“You’re an amateur, Bailey. You better learn to recognize sophisticated viciousness.”

“You’re really thinking foolishly.”

“I don’t care if you want to look at the world like Little Orphan Annie. But right now I feel like someone took a shit in my head, my nose is full of blood, and if you say anything more I’m going to call the Senator from the hotel and give him my best delivery.”