Lay Down My Sword and Shield hh-1

by James Lee Burke

  “He clicked a couple of bad tumblers over in your brain about something.”

  “I burn out a tube once in a while with the chewing-tobacco account. Forget it.”

  “I heard him say something about getting your luck off the porch. Was that it?”

  “Look, Rie, I was raised by a strange southern man who believed that any kind of anger was a violation of some aristocratic principle. So I turn the burner down every time it starts to flare, and sometimes I get left with a broken handle in my hand.”

  “What did he mean?”

  The air conditioner was dripping moisture.

  “A guy like that doesn’t mean anything,” I said. “The words just spill out of a junk box in his head.”

  “Talk straight, Hack.”

  “It’s a racial remark.”

  “Is it important to you?”

  I felt my heart quicken, because we both knew now why he had gotten inside me.

  “All right, I lived around that shit all my life, and maybe I’m not as far removed from it as I thought. If I was a cool city attorney with liberal tattooed on my forehead I would have yawned and rolled up the window on him. But I never could deal with people abstractly, and he stuck his finger in the wrong place.”

  The perspiration on my face felt cold in the jet of air from the dashboard. I looked straight ahead at the white road and waited for her to speak. Instead, she slipped close to me and kissed me behind the ear.

  “You great goddamn woman,” I said, and hit the road shoulder in a spray of rocks when I pulled her to me.

  “Let’s go back to the house,” she said, and put her hand under my shirt and rubbed her fingers along my belt line.

  “What about those college kids and the Negro?”

  “I already asked them to do something else this afternoon.”

  She looked up at me with her bright, happy eyes, and I wondered when I would stop discovering things about her.

  I bought a bottle of cold duck in town, and we drove down the corrugated road through the Mexican district to the union headquarters. The beer tavern was roaring with noise, and fat women sat on the front porches of their paint-blistered houses, fanning themselves in the heat. Rie walked up the path in front of me, lifting her shirt off her breasts with her fingertips. The rusted Dr Pepper thermometer nailed to the porch post read 106 degrees, and the sky was so hot and blue that a cloud would have looked like an ugly scratch on it. Rie opened the screen door and a yellow envelope fell down from the jamb at her feet.

  “Hey, buddy, somebody found you,” she said.

  I set the heavy bottle of cold duck on the porch railing and tore open the telegram with my finger. Flies hummed in the shade of the building.

  Where the hell are you anyway. Had to cancel speech last nite in San Antonio. Senator has called three times. Verisa quite worried. Hack do you want in or out.

  Bailey.

  Rie looked at me quietly with her back against the screen.

  “It’s just my goddamn brother with his peptic ulcer,” I said.

  “What is it?”

  “I was supposed to make a speech to the Lions or Rotary last night.”

  “Is that all of it?” Her quiet eyes watched my face.

  “Bailey thinks an offense against the business community has the historical importance of World War III.” I folded the telegram and put it in my shirt pocket. “He’s probably swallowing pills by the bottle right now. Do you have a telephone?”

  “There’s one down in the beer joint.”

  “I’ll be back in a few minutes. Put the wine in the icebox.”

  “All right, Hack.”

  “I mean, I don’t want the poor bastard to rupture his ulcer on a Sunday.”

  “Go on. I’ll be here.”

  I walked down the road in the hot light to the tavern. Inside, the bar was crowded with Mexican field hands and cedar-cutters, dancers bumped against the plastic jukebox, and billiard balls clattered across the torn green covering of an old pool table. Cigarette smoke drifted in clouds against the ceiling. I called the house collect from the pay phone on the wall, bending into the receiver away from the noise, then heard Bailey’s voice on the other end of the line.

  “Where are you?” he said.

  “In a bowling alley. What’s it sound like?”

  “I mean where?”

  “In Pueblo Verde, where you sent your telegram. What the hell are you doing at the house, anyway?”

  “Verisa’s pretty upset. You’d better get back home.”

  “What is this shit, Bailey? You knew why I had to leave Friday.”

  “The Senator wasn’t very pleasant with her when he called here, and maybe all of us are just a little tired of you not showing up when you’re supposed to. They waited the banquet an hour for you before they called our answering service, and I had to drive to San Antonio at ten o’clock and offer an apology for you.”

  “Look, you arranged that crap without asking me first, and you knew when I left Austin that I wouldn’t be back this weekend. So you hang that bag of shit on the right pair of horns, buddy. And if the Senator wants to be unpleasant with someone, I’ll give you this number or the one at the motel.”

  “Why do you want to behave like this, Hack? You’ve got all the easy things right in your hand.”

  A pair of drunk dancers knocked against me, and then waved their hands at me, smiling, as they danced back onto the floor in the roar of noise.

  “I just want a goddamn weekend free of migraine headaches and Kiwanians and telegrams,” I said. “I’ll be back at the office in a couple of days. In the meantime you can schedule yourself for the next round of speeches with the civic club account.”

  But he was already off the phone.

  “Hack?” Verisa said.

  “Yeah.” I closed my eyes against her voice.

  “I’m not going to say much to you. I warned you in Houston what I’d do if you blew this for us. I’ve got enough to go into court and win almost all of it. I’ll take the house, the land, and the controlling share of the wells, and you can start over again with your alcoholic law practice.”

  I took a breath and waited a moment on that one.

  “I should have called you, but I didn’t have time,” I said, evenly. “I thought Bailey would tell you why I had to leave.”

  “Oh, my God.”

  I started to answer, and instead looked out at the dancers on the floor.

  “Why should he have to tell me anything?” she said. “You seem to have a strange idea that Bailey should take care of all your unpleasant marital obligations. He was embarrassed enough apologizing for you last night.”

  “Well, I’m a little worn out with people selling me by the pound and then telling me how embarrassed they are for me. And it also strikes me that nobody was ever concerned if I was called out of town by a paying client. Maybe some people wouldn’t get their ovaries so dilated if I was on another case besides a Mexican farmworker’s.”

  I heard her breath in the phone, and then, “You bastard.”

  I hung up the receiver softly and walked back outside into the sunlight. The road was blinding in the heat, and the noise from the jukebox and Verisa’s voice were still loud in my head. I lit a cigar, sweating, and imagined the stunted rage she was now in. Poor old Bailey, I thought. He would stay at the house the rest of the evening, talking quietly to her while her eyes burned at the wall, and then he would begin to consider all the side streets they could use for my election in November, regardless of what I did in the meantime. He would drink cups of caffeine-free coffee with his ulcer pills, flicking over the alternatives in his mind, and soon he would forget that Verisa was in the room. Or maybe the Senator would phone again, and both of their faces would focus anxiously, their eyes reflecting into one another across the kitchen table, while Bailey’s voice measured out his assurances about my sincerity in the campaign and my deep regret that I wasn’t able to be with the Kiwanians (or whatever) last night. Then they would bo
th wonder if we would ever get to that marble and green island of power where you carried a small, stamped gold key in your watch pocket.

  Rie was sitting on the front steps with her back against the porch railing and one leg drawn up before her. She had changed into a pair of faded navy ducks, with the laces on the back, and a rose-flowered silk shirt, and in the shade she looked as cool and beautiful as a piece of dark sculpture. There was an unopened can of Lone Star and a tall, cone glass by her foot. My shirt stuck wetly to my shoulders, and my sunglasses were filmed with perspiration.

  “You look like Tom Joad beating his way out of the Dust Bowl,” she said. “You’d better have one of these.”

  I sat down beside her and opened the can of beer. The tin was cold against my hand, and the foam rushed up in the glass and streamed over the lip. I took my glasses off and wiped the perspiration and dust out of my eyes, but I avoided looking at her face. There was a broken anthill by the edge of the path, with a deep boot print in one side, and thousands of ants were moving over one another in a hot swarm.

  “Was everything cool back there?” she said.

  “Yeah.” I drank out of the beer — and squinted my eyes into the bright light. “I’m going to give Bailey a frontal lobotomy team for Christmas. Or a can of alum to drink. He has a remarkable talent for calling up everything bad in a person within seconds.”

  I heard her take her cigarettes out of her shirt pocket and rip back the cover.

  “He’s not a bad guy. He’s just so goddamn obtuse sometimes.”

  “Hack, I’m not pressing you.”

  “Then who the hell is?”

  “I don’t care what you belong to outside of here.”

  I looked at her quiet, beautiful face in the shade.

  “I love to be a part of your Saturday morning fishing world and your crazy Indian graves,” she said. “I’d never ask you about anything back there in Austin.”

  I took the cigarette from her hand and drew in on the smoke. The trees in the dirt yards along the street were still and green in the heat.

  “I put the wine on a block of ice,” she said.

  “Maybe we had better drink that, then,” I said. “What do you think, good-looking?”

  She smiled at me with her eyes full of light again, and we walked into the back of the house and opened the tall, dark bottle of cold duck. I chipped off a bowlful of ice from the block in the top of the cooler and set it in front of the fan in the bedroom so the wind stream would blow cool across the bed. The sun burned yellow against the window shade, and across the river in Mexico a calf stuck in the mudflat was bawling for its mother. Rie undressed in the half-light and put her arms around my shoulders, and I pressed my face into her neck and felt her smooth stomach and breasts curve against me.

  That evening we drove over to the Gulf in the fading, lilac twilight, and just before the highway turned out of the citrus fields onto the coast we could smell the salt in the air and the dead seaweed at the edge of the surf. The water was slate-green, and the whitecaps crashed against the sand and boiled in deep pools, and then sucked out again with the undertow. Brown pelicans and seagulls, like fat white cigars, dipped out of the sky over the water, picking small fish from the crest of the waves with their beaks, and in the distance we could see the gas flares and strings of lights on offshore oil rigs and quarter boats. The red sun was as big as a planet on the horizon, and the light broke across the water in long bands of scarlet. The stretch of brown beach and the palm trees were covered with a dark, crimson glow, and then the sun moved deeper into the Gulf, with a strip of black cloud across its flaming edge, and the moon began to rise behind us over the land.

  I bought another bottle of cold duck and some chicken sandwiches in a restaurant, and a Mexican family camped on the beach sold us two salt-water cane poles with treble hooks and a carton of live shrimp. The sand was still warm from the sun, and we sat behind a dune out of the wind and ate the sandwiches and drank half the bottle of wine, then I baited the three-pronged hooks with the shrimp, slipped the lead sinkers close to the bottom of the line, and waded with Rie into the surf to fish the bottom for catfish and flounder. The tide began to come in, and the waves broke across the rotted wooden pilings in the jetties, and when the wind shifted across the water we could smell the dead shellfish and baked scales and salt in the pilings. Rie held her cane pole under her arm, with both hands raised in front of her, while the waves swelled against her breasts. The water was splintered with moonlight, and the salt spray in her hair looked like drops of crystal. Then the tip of her pole arched into the water and went all the way to the bottom.

  “What do I do now, Lone Ranger?” she shouted.

  “Keep his head up or he’ll break it.”

  She leaned backward and strained with both hands, and a cloud of sand rose in the swell at the end of her pole. Then the line pulled out at an angle, quivering, and the pole went down again. She looked at me helplessly, her face shining with water and moonlight.

  “Walk him into the shore,” I said.

  A large wave crested in front of her and broke across her shoulders.

  “Hack, you bastard.”

  “You have to learn these things to overcome your Yankee childhood,” I said.

  She tried to slip the pole back under her arm and raise it again, but the fish had turned into the waves and was pulling hard for the bottom. I waded over to her and picked up the line with both hands at the water and walked backward with it toward the beach. The line tightened around my knuckles and cut into the skin, and when I reached the shallows I could see the long blue outline of the catfish shaking his head against the three hooks caught in his mouth. I dragged him up on the sand and placed my fingers carefully around his spiked ventral fins and made one cut with my pocketknife through his gill and across the spine. He flipped quietly in the sand and then lay still.

  “God, the things you southerners do for kicks,” she said.

  But I could see the excitement in her face at having caught a large and beautiful blue-black fish under the moon in waves up to her shoulders.

  “It’s against Texas law to keep this kind,” I said. “Maybe we’d better flip him back in.”

  She stepped down on the top of my bare foot and pinched my arm with her fingernails. I held her close to me and kissed her wet hair and dried her face against my shirt. I could taste the salt on her skin and smell the Gulf wind in her hair, and she put her arms inside my shirt and ran her hands over my back.

  We gave the fish, the poles, and the remaining shrimp to the Mexican family, and built a fire on the sand out of dried wood and dead palm fronds. The wind caught the flames and sent sparks twisting into the sky, and the fronds, coated with sand, and the polished twists of wood snapped in the fire and burst apart in a yellow blaze. We drank the rest of the wine and sat inside the heat with our clothes steaming. On the southern horizon dark storm clouds were building over the water. The moon was high, and I could see the clouds rolling in a heavy wind off the Mexican coast, and a few large whitecaps were hitting the pilings around the oil derricks. The air had become cooler, and there was a wet smell of electricity in the air. I lit a cigar, stuck the cork in the wine bottle, and threw it end over end into the surf.

  “We really get it on tomorrow, don’t we, babe?” I said.

  She ticked the top of my hand with her finger and looked into the fire.

  The wind was blowing in gusts the next morning when we arrived at the cannery and loading platform where the union was setting up its main picket. The sun was brown in the swirling clouds of dust from the fields, and I could still smell the wet electric odor of a storm. Dozens of junker cars and pickup trucks with crude wood shelters on the back were parked along the railway tracks, and Negro and Mexican field workers had formed a long line in front of the platform where the harvest trucks would unload. Their picket signs flopped and bent in the wind, and the sand blew in their faces, while a man in slacks and a tie walked back and forth above them, waving his
arms, and told them to get off the company’s property. His tie was blown over his shoulder and his glasses were filmed with grit, and after he was ignored by everyone on the picket he went into his office and came back with a camera and began taking pictures. Two Texas Rangers in sunglasses and Stetson hats leaned against a state car, watching with their tanned, expressionless faces. Their uniforms were ironed as stiff as tin. The priest, in Roman collar, stood in the back of a stake truck, with his sleeves rolled over his thick arms, handing out picket signs to the people who had just arrived, and I saw one of the Rangers raise his finger, aim at the priest, and say something to his partner.

  “I didn’t think this was your kind of scene, whiskey brother.”

  It was the Negro from the union headquarters, and he was still drunk. His slick face was covered with dust, and he had a wad of snuff under his lip.

  “What the hell is your name, anyway?” I said.

  “What’s a name, man?” He took a bottle of port wine from his back pocket and unscrewed the cap. “Sam, Tom, You. People give me a lot of them. But I like Mojo Hand the best. That’s a name with shine. It feels good in your mouth just like all these sweet grapes.”

  “Put the wine away till later,” Rie said.

  “Those dicks ain’t going to bother me. They know a nigger can’t change nothing around here. They want to strum some white heads.” He drank from the bottle and coughed on the tobacco juice in his mouth.

  “They’ll use anything they can for the newspapers,” Rie said.

  “You know it don’t make any difference what we do out here today. It’s going to read the same way tomorrow morning. Ain’t that right, whiskey brother? They could bust up Jesus with them billy clubs and the people would find out how He started a riot.”

  “Let’s hang a good one on later,” I said.

  “Where you been, man? There ain’t going to be no later. These dudes have just been practicing so far.”

  “Everything is cool now, isn’t it?” I said.

  He pulled on the bottle again and laughed, spilling the wine over his lip. “Out of sight. But you’re right. You got to keep thinking cool, cousin. You got to keep a little shine in your name.”