Lay Down My Sword and Shield (12 page)

It was afternoon when I awoke, and the wind was blowing hard against the building. The shade flapped back from the window, rattling against the woodwork, and dust devils spun in the air outside. The boards in the floor quivered from the gusts of wind under the building, and there were grains of sand on my skin. My head was dizzy when I stood up, my face tingling, and I could taste the hot dryness of the air in my mouth. I tripped over the fan and opened the door to the hallway. The sudden draft tore the religious calendar and withered palms from the wall, and the mobile made from beer bottles clattered and twisted in circles on the ceiling in the main room. I leaned against the doorjamb in the numbness of awaking from afternoon sleep. Through the front screen I could see the clouds of dust blowing along the street into the trees. I heard Rie walk out of the kitchen toward me. She held a tall glass of ice water in her hand, and she had put on a pair of white shorts and a navy denim shirt. There were freckles on the tops of her bare feet.

“How do you feel?” she said.

“I’ll let you know in a minute.” I took the glass of ice water from her hand and drank it down to the bottom. I didn’t believe that I had ever been so thirsty. The coldness ached inside my empty stomach.

“You have bad dreams,” she said.

“Yeah, I’ve got a whole wheelbarrow full of them.” I walked past her into the kitchen and put my head under the iron pump. I worked the handle, and the water poured over my neck and shoulders and inside my shirt. I wiped my face slick with the palm of my hand. Down the slope the Rio Grande was rippled and dented by the wind. The brown current was turning white around the wreck of the submerged car.

“You can stay here. You don’t have to go back today,” she said.

“I’d better hit it.”

“Wait until the windstorm passes.”

“They don’t pass this time of year. That’s a three-day affair out there.” The water dripped off my clothes onto the floor.

“You can’t see out of your eye.”

“I sight with one eye over my Cadillac hood just like a pistol barrel,” I said.

“I’ll ride to the hotel with you.”

“No, the sheriff will probably be hanging around there somewhere. I think you’ve had enough innings with a left-handed pitcher for one day.”

The building shook in the wind, and pieces of newspaper blew by the window. Across the river two Mexican children were leading a flat-sided, mange-scarred cow off the mud bank into a shed. Her swollen red udder swung under her belly.

“I don’t want to see you get busted again,” Rie said.

“You take care, babe.” I put my hands on her shoulders and kissed her on the cheek. For just an instant the nipples of her breasts touched me and I turned to water inside. Her mouth and eyes made my heart race. “I expect I’ll be back here eventually and try to do something for that Yankee mind of yours.”

“Be careful with yourself, Hack.”

I walked out into the dust and drove to the hotel. Leaves were shredding from the trees on the courthouse lawn and blowing along the sidewalk. An empty tomato basket bounced end over end in the middle of the street, and the wood sign over the hotel slammed back and forth on its iron hooks. The fat deputy who had let me out of the cell that morning sat in the swing on the verandah with his feet propped against the railing. He looked off casually at the yellow sky when I passed him, his huge stomach bursting against his shirt buttons.

“Mr. Holland, we’ll be needing your room tonight,” the desk clerk said inside. His eyes were focused about three inches to the side of my face, then they would flick temporarily across the bridge of my nose and back again to a spot on the far wall.

“By God, that’s right, isn’t it?” I said. “The Cattlemen’s Association is holding its world convention here this week.”

My room had been cleaned, the bed made, the empty beer bottles carried out, as though I had never been there, and my suitcase was packed and closed and sitting just inside the door, ready to be picked up in one convenient motion. Someone had even put a Gideon Bible on the dresser top.

I paid my bill at the desk, and the clerk managed to show me nothing but the crown of his head while he marked off the ticket and counted out my change.

“You don’t sell cigars in here, do you?” I said.

He fumbled in the middle of his counting, his eyelids blinking nervously, and I thought I had him, but he regained his resolve and kept his eyes nailed to the counter. “No sir, but you can get them right next door,” he said, and turned away to the cash register.

I started down the steps to my car, then I heard the swing flop back empty on its chains and the boards of the porch bend under the deputy’s massive weight. What a time not to have a cigar, I thought.

“Mr. Holland, the sheriff wanted me to give you this road map,” he said, pulling it out of the back pocket of his khaki trousers. The paper was pressed into an arc from the curve of his buttocks. “He don’t want you to get lost nowhere on that highway construction before you get into the next county.”

“I guess that would be easy to do unless I had a map. Say, you don’t smoke cigars, do you?” I said. “Let me get a Camel from you, then.”

His eyes looked at me uncomprehendingly out of his white volleyball face. His greased black hair, combed over the balding pate, had grains of sand in it. He pulled a cigarette out of his shirt pocket with two fingers and handed it to me.

“This is nice of you and the sheriff, and I appreciate it.” I borrowed his lighter, which had a Confederate flag on the side of it, and lit the cigarette. “Look, I’ve got two lifetime World Rodeo Association passes that I never use. They’re good for box seats at any livestock show or ass-buster in the state. Here, you take them.”

I pulled the two thick cardboard passes from my billfold and stuck them in his shirt pocket.

“Well, thank you, Mr. Holland,” he said.

I went next door to the tavern, bought a box of cigars and a six-pack of cold Jax, and headed down the road in the blowing clouds of dust, the cornstalks rattling in the wind, the gold of the citrus exposed among the swelling green trees, and each time I made a curve between two hills at ninety miles an hour I felt the old omnipotence vibrate smoothly out of the engine through the steering column into my hands. The fields of cotton, watermelons, and tomatoes flashed by me, and the late sun splintered in shafts of light through the dust clouds and struck on the tops of the hills in soft areas of pale green and shadow. Then the country began to become more level, the twilight took on all the violent purple and yellow colors of an apocalypse, and I felt the wind driving with me eastward down a narrow blacktop highway that stretched endlessly across empty land toward the gathering darkness on the horizon.

CHAPTER 5

T
HE POPLAR TREES
along my front lane were bent in the wind when I got back to the ranch that night. Under the full moon their shadows beat on the white gravel, and the air was full of swirling rose petals from Verisa’s gardens. Someone had forgotten to chain the windmill by the barn, and the blades were spinning in a circle of tinny light while the water overflowed from the trough onto the ground. I could see the dark shapes of ruined tomatoes lying in the rows, and some of the cotton had started to strip. Then I saw Sailor Boy, my Tennessee walking horse that I had bought from Spendthrift Farm for six thousand dollars, knocking against the rails in the lot. His nostrils were dilated, his black head shiny with moonlight and fear, and he was running in a broken gait against each of the rick fence corners, rearing his head and kicking dirt and manure in the air. I climbed into the lot with him, worked him back easy against the rails with both my arms outspread, and got a halter over his head. There was a four-inch cut in one flank, and he had thrown a shoe and splintered part of a hoof against the barn wall. I led him into a stall, slipped an oats bag over his ears, and dressed the ragged split in his skin. Then I went into the house, my blood roaring.

Verisa was reading a book under a lamp in the living room. She wore her nightgown, and she had two curlers set in the front of her hair. A cigarette had burned down to its filter in the ashtray. She had the nocturnal, isolated composure of a woman who might have lived by herself all her life.

“Question number one: who in the hell left Sailor Boy out in the lot?” I said.

She turned and looked at me, and her face whitened under the lamp.

“What—” I saw her eyes trying to adjust on the swollen side of my head.

“Who left Sailor Boy out in a windstorm?”

“Hack, what in God’s name have you done now?”

“I want to know which idiot or combination of idiots left my horse to tear himself up in the lot.”

“I don’t know. Why don’t you stay home and take care of him yourself?”

“The perfect non-think answer. If his gait is thrown off I’m going to set fire to somebody’s hair.”

“You’d better not be talking about me.”

“Read it like you want. It takes a special type of fool to do something that stupid to a fine horse.”

“You just stop your shouting at me.”

“I’ll crack the goddamn ceiling if I want. And as long as we’re on it, question number two: who forgot to chain the windmill? Which might strike you as a minor thing to consider between book pages, but right now our water table is almost dry and there are some crops that have a tendency to burn when they’re not irrigated.”

“I’m getting sick of this,” she said.

“I’m not asking you to walk around in the manure with a cattle prod in your hand. I’d just like you to stick your head out the door occasionally and make sure the whole goddamn place hasn’t blown away.”

“I don’t know where your present adventure took you, but you must have damaged some of the brain tissue. I’m going to bed. If you want to shout some more, either close the door or go down the road to your tavern.”

“Don’t you know what it means to hurt a horse like that?”

“Good night, Hack.”

She set her book down with a marker between the pages and walked past me in her best remote fashion. Her blue nightgown swirled around her legs in a whisper of silk, then she closed the door behind her. I had a drink out of the decanter on the bar, while my chest rose and fell with my breathing. Outside, the trees scratched against the house, and the door on the barn loft kept slamming like a tack hammer in the wind.

In the morning I went to the office in Austin and began work on Art’s appeal. I was supposed to help Bailey that week on two large insurance suits, but after he had recovered from staring at my bandaged head and the swollen corner of my eye under my sunglasses, I told him that he would have to carry it alone for a few days. He was still angry from the weekend, and now his exasperation with his younger brother almost made his eyes cross. He sat with one thigh over the corner of my desk, his hands folded, straining like a stoic to retain his patience, while each word tripped out like an expression from a peptic ulcer.

“This is a two-hundred-thousand-dollar deal, Hack,” he said. “We waited on it for six months.”

“So I’ll pick it up next week.”

“We’re going to try to settle next week.”

“They’re not going to settle. Forget it. We’ll be in court a year.”

“Give that case to the A.C.L.U. They handle them all the time.”

“I just want three uninterrupted days.”

“Even if you win appeal, you won’t get him out of prison on bond.”

“I might if I can get some work done and be let alone for any random period of time.”

“What happened in Pueblo Verde?”

“You won’t buy a car accident, will you? All right, a peckerwood cop kicked the hell out of me and I spent a night in a drunk tank. I was also indirectly presented with a map from the sheriff so I could find my way out of the county. In the meantime I managed to get a dozen other people arrested. Lastly, I’m going to write off their bail on my expense account. Now you can worry about the wire services picking up a sweet piece of interesting journalism on a congressional candidate. Does that make your day any better?”

“I don’t believe you.”

“I have a receipt for the bail if you would like to look at it.”

His stomach swelled as he drew in on his dead pipe. It made a sound that hurt something in the inner ear. His vexed, almost desperate eyes focused out the window. Then his control began to slip, the anger and impotence rose in his face, and he ranted for fifteen minutes in clichés about responsibilities, major accounts, a judge who said that he never wanted me in his chambers again, my career in politics (and its profitable effects on our law practice), and my pending trip to Walter Reed Hospital with Senator Dowling.

“Oh, that’s right,” I said. “We view the Claymore mine and AK-47 cases this weekend. Why don’t you come along, Bailey? You missed the Korean show. These guys are a blast.”

He slammed the door behind him, and I lit a cigar and looked up at the picture of Old Hack and my father on the wall. In the faded photograph, now yellow around the edges, his black eyes still burned from his face, which had begun to grow soft and childlike in his old age. His eyes turned directly into mine as I moved the swivel chair in either direction. They were like shattered obsidian, filled with fire and the quiet intensity of a leveled rifle. His bobbed hair was as white as his starched shirt, and his stiff black coat looked as though a pistol ball would flatten out against it. Next to him, my father’s gentle face and straw skimmer and summer suit made me think of two strangers who had met in the middle of an empty field and had decided to have their picture taken together.

I worked the next three days on the appeal with an energy and freshness that I hadn’t felt in years. In fact, I even felt like a criminal lawyer again rather than an expensive manipulator for the R. C. Richardson account. My bottle of Jack Daniel’s stayed in the desk drawer, and I came to the office at seven in the morning and stayed until dusk. As I said before, the appeal should have been a foregone conclusion, but I began to wonder if any judge in the Austin court would believe that so many absurdities could have actually taken place in one trial. Moreover, each time I went through the transcript I didn’t believe it myself. Thursday afternoon, after I’d had the secretary in my office for five hours of dictation and typing, Bailey’s patience cracked apart again and he came suddenly through the door, his face stretched tight with anger. (The air conditioner was broken, and we had the windows over the street open. The hot air was like warm water in the room.)