Lay Down My Sword and Shield hh-1

by James Lee Burke

  So Socrates and his know-thyself ethic were full of shit, I thought, or he never spent time in solitary before he drank the hemlock or drove down a south Texas road on a clear summer evening with Mr. Hyde sitting in the passenger’s seat.

  The main street in Pueblo Verde was almost empty, the wood frame buildings along the high sidewalks locked and darkened. A few old cars and pickup trucks were parked in front of a beer tavern with an insect-encrusted neon sign buzzing above a broken screen door. In the Sunday night quiet I could hear the hillbilly music from the jukebox and the laughter of a half-dozen high school kids smoking cigarettes under the oaks in the courthouse square.

  The hotel was a two-story wood building with flaking white paint and a latticed verandah. The letters on the ROOMS FOR GUESTS sign were blistered and faded, and the small lobby, with a plastic television set in one corner and wilted flowers in dime-store vases, smelled like dust and old wallpaper. I signed the register while the desk clerk looked over my shoulder at my Cadillac parked in front, then I could feel his eyes become more intent on the side of my face.

  “Will you have somebody wake me at seven in the morning?” I said.

  “You’re getting on the road early, huh?”

  “No, I’ll be in town.”

  “Oh.” His narrow gray face continued to watch me as I followed the Negro hired man with my bag toward the staircase.

  My room overlooked the street and the trees on the courthouse lawn. I sent the Negro to the tavern for six bottles of Jax, pulled off my shirt, and turned on the overhead wooden fan. It was probably too late to visit the jail, and also I was too spent to argue with night-duty cops. I sat in a straw armchair with my feet in the open window and pried the cap off a beer with my pocketknife. The foam boiled over the top and ran down cold on my chest. I tilted the bottle and drank it straight to the bottom. I could still feel the highway rushing under my automobile, the mesquite and blackjack sweeping behind me, and I drank two more beers, tasting each cool swallow slowly. Then a breeze began to blow through the window, a train whistle echoed beyond the dark hills, and I fell asleep in the chair with a half-empty bottle held against my bare stomach.

  At first I felt only the swaying motion of the boxcar and the vibration of the wheels clicking across the switches. Then I heard my own voice, loud with urgency, telling me to wake up before it started. But it was too late, or that alter-self inside was inept in turning off the right valve, because I now saw the drawn faces of the other men crowded in the boxcar with me. Outside in the night the snow was driving almost parallel to the ground, there was a slick of ice on the floor of the car, and some of the men had already been stripped of their boots by the Chinese. Their feet were beginning to discolor with the first stages of frostbite, and by morning the skin would be an ugly yellow and purple, the toes swollen into balloons. I watched a Greek urinate on his feet, then dry them carefully and rewrap them with his scarf. The wounds in my calves throbbed with each pitch of the car, and the blood had run down into my socks and frozen. But I had been lucky. The Chinese had machine-gunned all our wounded before we were loaded on the train, and I would have been shot, too, except that I had managed to keep limping forward in the line between two Marines. Before the guard slammed the boxcar door and bolted it, I looked out into the snow at the bodies of the men who had been thrown begging in front of the burp guns. Their mouths and eyes were still wide with disbelief and protest, their hair flecked with snow like old men.

  In the next fifteen hours the train stopped three times, and each time we heard a boxcar door slide open, hysterical shouts in English and Chinese, and the firing of burp guns. Whenever the train slowed we became a community of fear as each of us listened, motionless, to the decreasing metallic clack of the wheels. Once, while pulled off on a siding, we heard several guards crunching outside in the snow, then they stopped in front of our boxcar. They talked for a minute, laughed, and one of them slid back the iron bolt on the door. I looked dumbly into the black eyes of the Greek who had urinated on his feet, and the heart-racing fear and desperate question mark in his face seemed to join us together in a quick moment of recognition. Then another train roared by us a few feet away, its whistle screaming in our ears, and our boxcar jolted forward, knocking us backward into one another. We heard the bolt slam into place and the guards running toward the caboose.

  By morning the car was rancid with excrement and urine. We had no water, and several men broke ice from the floor with their boots and melted it in a helmet over a dozen cigarette lighters. It tasted like wheat chaff, sweat, and manure. The snow had stopped blowing and the sun shone through the cracks in the walls. The light broke in strips on our bodies, and the stench from the corner began to grow more intense. During the night I had been unable to stand up and urinate through a crack in the car wall, and I had to let it run warmly down my thighs. My own odor sickened me. I wondered if the Jews who had been freighted to extermination camps in eastern Europe ever felt the same self-hating, cynical disgust at their condition, lying in their own excretions, or if they tried to tear the boards out of the walls with their fingernails and catch one SS guard around the throat with probing thumbs. My feeling was that they went to their deaths like tired people lined up before a movie that no one wanted to see, revulsed by themselves and the human condition, their naked bodies already shining with the iridescence of the dead.

  I woke into the hot morning with a dark area of warm beer in my lap. Two Negro trusties from the jail, the white letter P Cloroxed on the backs of their denim shirts, were watering the courthouse lawn. The wet grass was shiny with light, and the shade of the oaks was like a deep bruise on the sidewalks. At the edge of the square there was an open-air fruit market, with canvas stretched on poles over the bins, and Mexican farmhands were unloading cantaloupes and rattlesnake melons from the bed of a stake truck. The sky was clear blue, and the shadows from a few pink clouds moved over the hills.

  I dressed in my linen suit with a blue silk shirt and walked down the main street to a café. I had a breakfast steak with two fried eggs on top, then smoked a cigar and drank coffee until the courthouse opened. Even though I could feel the July heat rising, it was still a beautiful day, the orchards at the foot of the hills were bursting with green and gold, I was free from the weekend’s whiskey, and I didn’t want to visit the jail. Most people think that the life of a criminal lawyer is a romantic venture, but it’s usually a sordid affair at best. I had never liked dealing with redneck cops, bailbondsmen, and county judges with high school educations, or talking with clients at two A.M. in a drunk tank.

  I crossed the street to the courthouse and went to the sheriff’s office in the back of the building. By the office door there was a glass memorial case filled with junk from the World Wars and Korea — German helmets, bayonets, a Mauser rifle without a bolt, an American Legion medal, canteens, a.30-caliber machine gun with an exploded barrel, and a Chinese bugle. A deputy in a khaki uniform sat behind an army surplus desk, filling out forms with a short pencil. He was lean all over, tall, and his crew-cut, glistening head was pale from wearing a hat in the sun. His fingers were crimped over the pencil as he worked out each sentence in printed and longhand letters. His shirt was damp around the shoulders, and his long arms were burned brown and wrinkled with veins.

  “Can I help you?” he said without looking up.

  “I’d like to see Arturo Gomez.”

  He put the pencil down and turned his face up at me. His green, yellow-flecked eyes were flat, his face expressionless.

  “Who are you?”

  “My name’s Hackberry Holland. I’m a lawyer.”

  “You ain’t his.”

  “He’s a friend of mine from the service.”

  “Well, visiting hour is at two o’clock.”

  “I have to go back to Austin this morning. I’d appreciate it if I could talk with him a few minutes.”

  The deputy turned the pencil in a circle on the desktop with his finger. There was a hard knot of musc
le in the back of his arm.

  “You working with these Mexican union people?”

  “No.”

  “You just drove down from Austin to see a friend in jail?”

  “That’s right.”

  “It won’t help him none. He’s going up to the state farm Wednesday. And I expect there might be a few more with him soon.”

  “I wouldn’t know about that.” I bent over and tipped my cigar ashes into the spittoon, then waited for the deputy to continue the statement which he had prepared long ago for strangers, slick lawyers, and nigger and Mexican lovers.

  “You can take it for what it’s worth, Mr. Holland, but these Mexicans was stirred up by agitators from the outside. They can make fair wages in the field any time they want to work, but they stay drunk on wine half the time or sit in the welfare office.” His yellow-flecked eyes looked into my face. “Then those union organizers started telling them they could get twice as much money by shutting down the harvest. Just let the cotton and grapefruit rot and they’re all going to be nigger-rich. People around here is pretty fed up with it, and it’s lucky that a couple of them California Mexicans haven’t been drug behind a car yet.”

  “As I said, I’m not representing anyone.”

  “It’s against the rule, but I’ll take you down to see Gomez a minute. I just thought you ought to know we ain’t pushing these people into a corner they didn’t build for themselves.”

  I followed him down a staircase into the basement of the building. The rigid angles in his body, the rolled khaki sleeves, and the flush of anger in his neck reminded me of several drill instructors whom I had met at Parris Island. They all had the same intense dedication to perverse abstractions that had been created for them by someone else.

  The basement of the courthouse, the jail, had been constructed with large blocks of limestone, sawed and chiseled and set with mortar in uneven squares. The corridor was lighted by two bulbs screwed into sockets on the ceiling, and the cells looked like caves cut back into the rock with iron doors on them. The stone was damp with humidity, and the air was rank with disinfectant, D.D.T., urine, and tobacco smoke. Each of the iron doors had a row of holes perforated in the top, and a slit and apron for a food tray. At the end of the corridor was a large room, with two wide barred doors that swung open like gates, and overhead on the rock in broken white letters were the words Negro Male. I could see the spark of hand-rolled cigarettes in the dark, and smell the odor of stale sweat and synthetic wine. There was a wire-screen cage built against one wall, with a small table and two wooden chairs inside. The deputy unlocked the door and opened it.

  “Wait in here and I’ll bring him out,” he said. He walked back down the corridor and slipped the bolt on one of the cells. He had to use both hands to pull the door open.

  Art stepped out into the light, his pupils contracted to small black dots. His denim jail issue was too big for him and his hair hung down over his ears. He was barefoot, his shirt and trousers were unbuttoned, and his thin frame was stooped as he walked toward the cage, as though the rock ceiling was crushing down on him. He had a cigarette in an empty space where a tooth had been, and there was a cobweb scar on the edge of one eye. He had started to get jailhouse pallor, and the two pachuco tattoos on his hands looked like they had just been cut into the skin with brilliant purple ink. I hadn’t seen him in five years, when he was contracting tomato harvests in DeWitt County, but it seemed that everything in him had shrunken inward, hard and brittle as bone. The deputy closed the cage door on us and locked it.

  “You can talk ten minutes,” he said, and walked back down the corridor. The light gleamed on his shaved head.

  “What about it, Hack? You want to play Russian roulette with me?” Art said, and smiled with the cigarette in his teeth. His long fingers were spread out on the tabletop.

  “How in the hell did you go up for assault because of a picket-line arrest?”

  “What happened and what I got tried for ain’t the same thing. The Texas Rangers moved in on our picket line because they said we wasn’t fifty feet apart. They knocked a couple of our people down, and when I yelled about it they put the arm on me. I pushed this one fat bastard on his ass, and he got up and beat the shit out of me with a blackjack. Man, they’re real bad people when they turn loose. I can still see that guy swinging down on me. His eyes was sticking out of his head. He must have saved it up for a long time.”

  “What did your lawyer do in the trial?”

  “He was appointed by the court. He lives right here in the county and he wanted me to plead guilty. I told him to go fuck himself, so he chewed on his pipe for three days, cross-examined one witness, and shook hands with me after the judge gave me five years.

  “Look, Hack, I know I’m leaning on you for a favor, but I want to beat this shit. Our union’s got a chance if we don’t get broke up. We got a few people in Austin on our side, and some of the locals are afraid enough of the Chicano vote that they might come around if we stay solid. But our treasury’s broke and I got nobody but kids to organize the pickets and boycotts while I’m in the pen. And I’ll tell you straight I don’t want to build no five years. Four cents a day chopping cotton ain’t good pay.” He smiled again, and took the cigarette from his lips and put it out on the bottom of the table.

  “All right, I’ll try to file an appeal. It takes time, but maybe with luck I can spring you on bond.”

  He took another cigarette from his shirt pocket, popped a kitchen match on his thumbnail, and lit it. The scar tissue around his eye was yellow in the flame. “A year ago I was ready to charge the hill with a bayonet in my teeth. Corporal Gomez going over the top like gangbusters with a flamethrower. I was ready to build life in the pen for our union, but three months in lockdown here, man, it leaves a dent. Every night when that bastard sticks a plate of grits and fried baloney through the slit I say hello to his fingernails.”

  “You know what you’re doing is crazy, don’t you?”

  “Why? Because we’re tired of getting shit on?”

  “These people have lived one way for a hundred and fifty years,” I said. “You can’t make them change with a picket sign.”

  His face sharpened, and his yellow-stained fingers pressed down on the cigarette.

  “Yeah, we been eating their shit for just about that long. But we ain’t going that route no more. We got more people than the Anglos, and this land belonged to us before their white ass ever got on it.”

  “You can’t alter historical injustice in the present. You’re only putting yourself and your people up against an executioner’s wall.”

  “You can jive about all that college bullshit you want, but we been picking your cotton for six cents a pound. You ever do stoop labor? Your back feels like a ball of fire by noon, and at night you got to sleep on the floor to iron out your spine. All you Anglos are so fucking innocent. You got the answers counted out in your palm like pennies. You march off every Christmas and hand out food baskets to the niggers and greaseballs, and then for the next twelve months you congratulate yourself on your Christianity.”

  He drew in on the cigarette and pushed his long black hair out of his face. He looked at the table and breathed the smoke out between his lips. “Okay, man, I’m sorry. I sit in my cell all day and think, and I don’t get to talk with nobody except the hack. So I just made you my dartboard.”

  “Forget it,” I said.

  “But learn something about our union before you start to piss on us.”

  “All right.”

  “Like maybe we ain’t just a bunch of uppity niggers.”

  “The deputy’s going to be back in a minute.”

  “Look, watch out for that motherfucker. The other night one of the blacks started screaming in the tank with the d.t.’s, and he kicked him in the head. I think he’s a Bircher, and the guys in here say he’s got a bad conduct discharge from the Corps for crippling a guy in the brig.”

  “Okay, let’s finish before he gets back. Were there a
ny Mexicans on the jury?”

  “What world do you live in, man?”

  “We can use jury selection in an appeal, even though I’d rather hang them on the charge itself. I’ll have to get a transcript of the trial and talk with your lawyer.”

  “Don’t fool with him. I told you he wouldn’t pour water on me if I was burning. He’s a little fat guy with a bald head, he owns five hundred acres of blackland, and he thinks I was brainwashed in Korea. When I asked him about an appeal he chewed on his pipe and farted.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “That’s Mr. Cecil Wayne Posey. His office is right across the street.”

  “Why didn’t you write me before the trial?”

  “I don’t like to bruise old friends.”

  “Well, you sure picked a shitty time to bring in a relief pitcher.”

  “You’re a good man, Hack. I trust your arm.”

  I heard the stairway door slam and the deputy walking down the stone corridor in his brogans.