Lay Down My Sword and Shield (16 page)

In two more hours I would be back at the ranch, and then Verisa and I would begin to enact our ritual that usually worked itself toward one of three conclusions. The least unpleasant would be a pointless and boring conversation about the office, a new account, a cocktail party at the Junior League, or one of Bailey’s trite suggestions for the campaign. Each of us would listen to the other with feigned interest, the head nodding, the eyes flat and withdrawn. Then, after a careful period, I would change clothes and go into the horse lot, or Verisa would remember at that moment that she had planned to invite people to the ranch from Victoria for the weekend.

More unpleasant was the possibility that the control wouldn’t be there—the Mexican girl had burned everything on the stove, the gardener had dug out the wrong plants from the flower bed, the odor from the gas wells had made the house smell like a Texas City refinery—and the conversation would quickly deteriorate into a sullen silence and a door slammed sharply in another part of the house.

The last alternative was the worst: nothing would be said when I came into the house until we were forced by geographical necessity to be in the same room together for sixty seconds, and then our exchange would have the significance and intensity of two people talking at a bus stop. I’d spend my time in the library with the door closed, drinking whiskey and playing my guitar, and finally when I was in a drunken fog, my fingers thick on the guitar neck, with the house humming as loud as my own blood and Old Hack’s angry ghost walking the front porch, the seams would start to strip and Mr. Hyde’s bloody eyes would look into mine, and Verisa would have to lock the bedroom door until the next morning.

However, Verisa wasn’t always like the person I’ve described here. When I met her at a country club dance in San Antonio eight years ago she was Verisa Hortense Goodman, the only daughter of a millionaire stock financier, a hard-shell Baptist who never drank or smoked and kept his hard body trim with fifty push-ups a day until he dropped dead from a heart attack. That night on the terrace under the mimosa trees the moon-sheen tangled in her auburn hair and her white skin glowed in the light from the Japanese lanterns. Her face was cool and pale, her small mouth achingly beautiful as she looked up at me. There were always men around her, and when she moved across the terrace, her legs like grace in motion against her tight silver gown, the men would follow her, eager, smiling, their own dowdy women left at the drinks table. I took her away from her date that night, and we went on a wild ride with a magnum bottle of champagne through the Hill Country to an open-air German dance pavilion in San Marcos. I had a Porsche convertible then, and I kept it wide open through the black-green hills, drifting across the turns, while she poured the wine in two crystal glasses for us. Her face was happy with adventure and release, her voice loud above the roar of the engine and the wind, and she told me she was sick of country club men and beaux who hadn’t outgrown Kappa Sig, and I knew then that she was the one.

The next four months were all green and gold days and turquoise evenings, fried chicken picnics on the Guadalupe River, a burning hour under a willow tree in an afternoon shower, tennis and gin rickeys at the club, horseback riding into the hills and swimming in the black coldness of the Comal under the moon. We spent weekends at the bullfights in Monterrey, with breakfasts of eggs fried in hot sauce and chicory coffee and boiled milk, and our mornings were filled with sunshine and mad plans for the rest of the day. We danced in beer gardens, hired a mariachi band at a street party in the San Antonio barrio, went to cowboy barbecues, and always kept a bottle of champagne in an ice bucket on the backseat of the Porsche. She never tired, and after another furious night of roaring across the countryside from one wonderful place to the next, she would turn her face up to be kissed, her eyes closed and the white edge of her teeth showing between her lips, and I would feel everything in me drain like water poured out of a cup. I’d leave her at her front door, the mockingbirds singing in the gray stillness of first light, and the road back to the ranch would be as lonely and empty as a stretch of moonscape.

We were married in Mexico City and spent the next three weeks fishing for marlin in the Yucatán. I rented a villa on the beach, and at night the waves crested white in the moonlight and broke against the sand and the Gulf wind blew cool with the smell of salt and seaweed through the open windows in our bedroom. In the mornings we raced horses in the surf, and I taught her how to pick up a handkerchief from the sand at a full gallop. Her skin darkened with tan, and in bed I could feel the heat in her body go into mine. While we ate lobsters in a pavilion on the beach after the afternoon’s fishing, her eyes would become merry, flashing at me privately, and I would already see her undressing before our closet mirror.

But later, as the months went by at the ranch, I began to see other things in Verisa that I had overlooked previously. She was conscious of class, and underneath her rebellion toward country club romance and the pale men with family credentials who had courted her, she was attached to her father and the strict standard he had followed and expected in other men. He was the son of a small grocery-store owner, and after he became wealthy he learned, with some pain, the importance of having family lineage as well as money, and he never failed to remind Verisa that she belonged to a very special class of people who did not associate with those beneath their station. She had learned the lesson well, although she was probably never aware of it. She simply didn’t recognize the world of ordinary people, those who lived on salaries, rode Greyhound buses, or carried drinks from behind a bar; they were there, but they moved about in another dimension, one that existed in the center of hot cities, drab neighborhoods, and loud, workingmen’s taverns.

Also, she didn’t like drunkenness. Although she considered herself an agnostic, a good deal of her father’s devotion to the Baptist church had been left in her (he attributed his financial success to his early redemption at a Dallas revival and the fact that he practiced the teachings of Christ in his business; once he stared me straight in the face and told me that the Jews in the stock market were afraid to deal with a truly Christian man; he also believed that F.D.R. was a Jew). I never liked her father, and I always made a point of serving highballs, filling the room with cigar smoke, and drinking too much when he was at the house. He was glad to have Verisa married into the Holland family, and privately he asked her to name a child after him; so he was always restrained when I poured double shots of whiskey or asked him if he knew a Baptist minister in Dallas who was a grand dragon in the Ku Klux Klan. At first Verisa was indulgent toward my performances with her father, and occasionally, after he had left the house with his face disjointed in concern, she would say something mild, a quiet reproof, in hopes that I would be tolerant of him.

But I couldn’t stand his bigotry, his illiterate confidence in the reasons for his success, and his simplistic and sometimes brutal solutions for the world’s problems. Also, I resented the influence he’d had on Verisa’s mind, that early period when he had infected her with the stupidity of his class. As she grew older I knew she would become more like him, much more sophisticated and intelligent, but nevertheless marked with the rigid social attitudes of the new rich. Worse, as my dislike for him became more open and his weekly visits turned into embarrassing periods of silence in the living room and then finally stopped altogether, I pushed her closer to him and she began to make comparisons between her father and other men who had been
given
everything. Sometime later, after I had come in drunk from a duck-hunting trip, she commented that heavy drinking was a symptom of the weak who couldn’t stand up under competition.

I paid my bill at the steak house and took two cans of Jax with me for the drive home. Evidently, I was confused about Verisa’s schedule for the week, because one of her afternoon lawn parties was under way when I arrived. The Negro bartender was shaving ice for mint juleps on the screened porch, and blue-haired ladies in sundresses sat around tables on the lawn under the oak trees. Here we go, I thought. Two men from the state Democratic committee were there, neither of whom I wanted to see, and somebody had ridden Sailor Boy and had left him thirsty in the lot with the saddle still on. I went around the far side of the house and entered the library through the side door, but an insurance executive from Victoria and his wife were there, staring at my gun case with drinks in their hands. They turned their flushed faces at me, smiling. “Hello. Good to see you,” I said, and went straight through and into the kitchen. Cappie, an old Negro who lived on the back of my property and sometimes barbecued for us, was chopping green onions and peppers with a cleaver on the drainboard. His gray hair was curled in the thick furrows on the back of his neck.

“Cap, get that saddle off of Sailor Boy and turn him out.”

“There some young ladies been riding him, Mr. Holland.”

“Yeah, I know. Nobody thinks he drinks water, either.”

“Yes, sir.”

I started up the staircase to the bedroom, and then one of the Democratic committee men called from behind me and I was caught in the center of it. I drank mint juleps under the oaks with the blue-haired ladies, listened with interest to their compliments about my wife and ranch, explained politely to a mindless coed that Sailor Boy was a show horse and shouldn’t be ridden into barbed-wire fences, and laughed good-naturedly with the two committee men at their locker-room jokes. People came and left, the sun started to set beyond the line of trees on the horizon, and the bartender moved among the groups with a tray of cool drinks, and at dusk Cappie served plates of barbecued links and chicken and potato salad. My head was drumming with the heat, the whiskey, and the endless conversation. Verisa stood next to me with her hand on my arm, accepting invitations to homes that I would not enter unless I was drugged and chained. Finally, at nine o’clock, when the party moved inside out of sheer exhaustion, I took a bottle of whiskey from the bar and drove down the back road to one of the ponds that I’d had stocked with bass. One of Cappie’s cane poles was leaned against a willow tree, and I dug some worms out of the wet dirt by the bank and drank whiskey and bottom-fished in the dark until I saw the last headlights wind down my front lane to the blacktop.

During the next ten days I spoke at a free Democratic barbecue in Austin (it was crowded with university students and working people, most of whom stayed at the beer kegs and didn’t know or care who was giving the barbecue), addressed two businessmen’s luncheons in San Antonio (the American and Texas flags on each side of me, the plastic plants forever green on the linen-covered tables, the rows of intent faces like expressions caught in a waxworks), talked informally at a private club in Houston (“Well, Mr. Holland, regardless of the mistake we made in Vietnam, don’t you think we have an obligation to support the fighting men?” “Granted that colored people have a grievance, do you believe that the answer lies in destruction of property?” “Frankly, what
is
your position on the oil depletion allowance?”), and spent one roaring drunk afternoon in a tavern with two dozen oil-field roughnecks and pipeliners who all promised to vote for me, although almost none of them came from the district.

The appeal came through at the close of the second week since I had seen Art. The judge who had reviewed the trial record, a hard old man with forty years on the bench, wrote in his decision that “the conduct of the local court was repugnant, a throwback to frontier barbarism,” and he ordered Art’s release from the state penitentiary on appeals bond pending a new trial. I set down the telephone, took a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and a glass from my desk drawer, and poured a large drink. On my second swallow, with a fresh cigar in my mouth, Bailey walked through the door and hit the broken air conditioner with his fist.

“Why don’t you turn the goddamn thing off so the building can stop vibrating a few minutes?” he said. It had been a bad two weeks for Bailey. The heat bothered him much worse than it did me, and we had lost one of our big accounts, which he blamed on me. He believed that he was developing an ulcer, and each morning he drank a half bottle of some chalky white medicine that left him nauseated for two hours.

“Just turn the knob, Bailey, or you can hit it some more.”

“I see you’re getting launched early this afternoon.”

“No, only one drink. Do you know where I can buy a beer truck?”

“What?” A drop of perspiration rolled down from his hairline like a thick, clear vein.

“I tell you what, buddy. Let’s lock up the office in about an hour, and I’ll take you on a three-day visit to all the Mexican beer joints in San Antonio.”

“Put up the whiskey.”

“Come on. For one time in forty years of Baptist living, close the office early and tie on a real happy one.”

“Did you look at our calendar for this afternoon between drinks?”

“Yeah, R. C. Richardson is about to get burned again, and he needs us to clean up his shit.”

“You accepted him as a client. I don’t like the sonofabitch in the office.”

“You don’t understand that old country boy, Bailey. He’s not a bad guy, as far as sons of bitches go. Anyway, his ass can burn until Monday. Get a glass and sit down. The only ulcer you have is in the head, and you’re going to have a few dozen more there unless you let some cool air into that squeezed mind of yours.”

“If you want to get into the bottle and blow half our practice, do it, but shut off that patronizing crap. I’ve pretty well reached my level of tolerance in the last two weeks.”

“Look, I won appeal today on Art Gomez and the judge has set bond, and you have to admit that we haven’t sprung many of our clients from the state pen. So take a drink and lower your blood rate, and I’ll pick up Richardson’s case early Monday morning.”

“I can’t get it through to you, Hack. You’ve got cement around your head. The office isn’t a tennis club where you play between drinks.”