Lay Down My Sword and Shield (31 page)

I squeezed her hand, but I saw it made her uncomfortable. The waves from the taxi washed up through the yard and hit against the porch steps. Bailey paid the driver and stepped out the back door into the water. His brown windbreaker was spotted with rain, and the lines in his brow and around his eyes had deepened with lack of sleep. The rims of his eyes were red. In fact, his whole face looked middle-aged, as though he had worked hard to make it that way. He walked up through the water with his head lowered slightly and his mouth in a tight line.

“How you doing, brother?” I said, and took a sip out of the beer.

“I have a plane at the county airport,” he said. He looked straight at me and never turned his head toward Rie.

“Get out of the rain and meet someone and have a beer.”

“We’ll leave your car there. You can fly back and get it later,” he said. His voice had a quiet and determined righteousness to it, the kind of tone that he reserved for particularly tragic occasions, and it had always infuriated me. But I was resolved this time.

“It’s bad weather for a flight, Bailey. You should have waited a day or so,” I said. I was surprised that he had flown at all, because he was terrified of airplanes.

“Do you have anything inside?” he said.

“Not a thing.”

“Then we can be going.”

He was making it hard.

“Would you sit down a minute, for God’s sake?” I said. “Or at least not stand under the eave with rain dripping on your head.”

He stepped up on the porch and wiped his forehead with his palm. He still refused to recognize Rie. I carried a chair over from the other side of the porch and pulled another beer from the ice bucket.

“There. Sit,” I said. “This is Rie Velasquez. She’s the coordinator for the union.”

“How do you do, ma’am?” He looked at her for the first time, and his eyes lingered longer on her face than he had probably wanted them to. She smiled at him, and momentarily he forgot that he was supposed to be a somber man with a purpose.

I opened the bottle of beer and handed it to him. The chips of ice slid down the neck. He started to put the bottle on the porch railing.

“Drink the beer, Bailey. If you had some more of that stuff, you wouldn’t have ulcers.”

“The Senator and John Williams are at the house.”

“John Williams. What’s that bastard doing in my home?”

“He was spending the weekend with the Senator, and he drove down with him this morning.”

“You know the old man wouldn’t let an asshole like that in our back door.”

“He told me he would still like to contribute money to the campaign.”

“You’d better get him out of my house.”

“Why don’t you take care of it yourself? This is my last errand.”

“Do you think we could get that in writing?” I said.

“You don’t know the lengths other people go to for your benefit. The Senator is going to stay with you, and so is Verisa, and I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t feel an obligation to her.”

“What obligation is that, Bailey?” I said.

“I’m going to fix lunch,” Rie said.

“No, stay. I want to hear about this feeling of obligation. What is it exactly, brother?”

His eyes looked quickly at Rie, and he drank out of the beer.

“Don’t worry about decorum or people’s feelings,” I said. “Dump it out on the porch and let’s look at it. You’re doing a swell job so far.”

“I’ll be inside, Hack,” Rie said.

“No, goddamn. Let Bailey finish. He’s saved this up in his head through every air pocket between here and Austin.”

“All right,” he said. “For the seven years of disappointment you’ve given her and the alcoholism and the apologies she’s had to make to people all over the state. A lesser woman would have taken you into court years ago and pulled out your fingernails. Right now she’s under sedation, but that will probably slide past you like everything else in your life does.”

“What do you mean, sedation?” I said.

“She called me up drunk an hour after the television broadcast, and I had to go over to the house with a doctor from Yoakum.”

Rie lit a cigarette and looked out into the rain. Her suntanned cheeks were pale and her eyes bright. I didn’t know why I had forced her to sit through it, and it was too late to change anything now. The wind blew the rain against the bottom of Bailey’s chair.

“How is she now?” I said.

“What do you think? She drank a half bottle of your whiskey, and the doctor had to give her an injection to get her in bed.”

The bottle of beer felt thick in my hand. I wondered what doctor would give anyone an intravenous sedative on top of alcohol.

“She threw away her pills this morning and tried to fix breakfast for the Senator and Williams,” Bailey said. “She almost fell down in the kitchen and I put her to bed again and refilled her prescription.”

“Don’t you know better than to give drugs to people with alcohol in their system?” I said. But he didn’t. His face was a confession of moral earnestness with no awareness of its consequence.

“Go back with him, Hack,” Rie said.

“Bailey, why in the bloody hell do you bring on things like this?” I said.

“Don’t you have it confused?” he said.

“No. You have this talent for turning the simple into a derelict’s hangover.”

“I think you’re shouting at the wrong person.”

“You’ve always got all kinds of cool when you do it, too. Think about it. Isn’t it in moments like these that you’re happiest?”

“I don’t need to listen to this.”

“Hell, no, you don’t. You just dump the hand grenades out on the porch and let other people kick them around.”

“I told you I’m through with this crap, Hack.”

“You’ve been peddling my ass by the chunk to all buyers and bitching about it at the same time, and now you’re through. Is that right, buddy? Frankly, you make me so goddamn mad I could knock you flat out into the yard.”

“Stop it, Hack. Go on back with him,” Rie said. Her face was flushed, and her fingers were trembling on the arm of the wicker chair.

“Should I run a footrace with him down to the airport? Or maybe Bailey can import the whole bunch down here and we can sit on the porch and find out what a sonofabitch I am.”

Rie put her fingers on her brow and dropped her eyes, but I could see the wetness on her eyelashes. None of us spoke. The rain drummed flatly on the shingled roof and ran off the eaves, swinging into the wind. My face was perspiring, and I wiped my forehead on my sleeve and drank the foam out of the bottle. I looked at her again and I felt miserable.

“I’m sorry, babe,” I said.

She turned her head away from Bailey and put an unlit cigarette in her mouth.

“Call me tonight at the beer joint. Somebody will come down for me,” she said.

The wind blew the curls on the back of her neck, and I could see her shoulders shaking. But there was nothing to do or say with Bailey there, and I went inside the screen and asked Mojo to stay with her until I called. When I came back out Bailey was still on the porch.

“I didn’t get out the back door on you,” I said.

But he didn’t understand; he stood against the railing, with the rain blowing across his slacks, as though his physical proximity was necessary to draw me into the automobile. I started to tell him to get in the car and read a road map and not raise his eyes until he heard me open the door, but he would have had something to say about that and we would start back into it all over again. When we drove away Rie was still looking out into the rain with the unlit cigarette in her fingers.

We didn’t speak on the way to the airport. The air conditioner stopped working, and the windows fogged with humidity and the sweat rolled down my face and neck into my shirt. I felt a black anger toward Bailey that you can only feel toward someone you grew up with, and as the heat became more intense in the car I resented every motion that he made. He opened the window and let the rain blow across the leather seats, then he closed it and tried to pull off his windbreaker by the cuffs and hit me against the arm. I turned on the radio and we both listened to a Christian crusade evangelist rant about the communist Antichrist in Vietnam.

The two-engine plane was parked at the end of the runway in three inches of water. The rain beat against the silver, riveted plates of the fuselage, and the wind out of the hills was still strong enough to push the plane’s weight against the anchor blocks around the wheels. In the distance the hills looked as brown and smooth as clay.

The cabin had three metal seats in it, spot-welded to the bulkhead, with old military safety straps, and when the pilot turned the ignition, the electric starter on the port engine wouldn’t take hold. Then the propeller flipped over stiffly several times, black exhaust blew back across the wing, and the whole plane vibrated with the engines’ roar. The backwash from the propellers blew the concrete dry around the plane, and the pilot taxied out slowly on the runway with the nose into the wind. Bailey kept wiping the rainwater and perspiration back through his hair, and his other hand was clenched tightly on his thigh.

“I’m going to jump it up fast,” the pilot said over his shoulder. “There’s bad downdrafts over those hills.”

Bailey reached under his seat and took out a half-pint bottle of sloe gin in a paper sack. He didn’t look at me while he drank. The plane gained speed, the brown water blowing off the sides of the runway, and the wet fields and the few silver hangars flashed by the windows, then we lifted off abruptly into the gray light, the plane shaking against the wind and the strain of its own engines. The crest of the hills swept by below us, and in moments I could see the whole Rio Grande Valley flatten out through the window. The fields were divided into great brown squares of water, the orchards that hadn’t been destroyed by the storm were dark green against the land, and the river had almost covered the willow trees along its banks. There were dead cattle and horses in the fields, their stiff legs turned out of the water, and the barbed-wire fences had been bent down even with the road. Milking barns had been crushed over sideways, and some farmhouses had lost their roofs, and from the air I felt that I was looking down into something private, an arrangement of kitchens and bedrooms and family eating tables that I had been unfairly allowed to see.

Bailey’s face was white, and he pulled on the bottle again and coughed. He hated for me to see him drink, but his terror of the plane was greater than any feeling he had about personal image or even his ulcerated stomach.

“We’ll be there in an hour,” I said. “He’s above any bad currents now.”

Bailey was rigid in the metal seat, the safety belt strapped across his stomach. His fingers were pressed tight across the flat side of the bottle, and the perspiration was still rolling down his face.

“I don’t know what kind of agreement you’ll come to with Verisa and the Senator, but you and I are going to have one with our practice,” he said. His voice was dry, and his accent had deepened with his fear.

“Why do I have to come to an agreement with anyone?” I knew all the answers he had, but he wanted to talk or do anything to forget the plane and the distance from the ground.

“Because you’re holding a big I.O.U. to other people,” he said.

“Did it ever strike you that the Senator is a bad man who never did anything for anyone unless his own ass was buttered first? That for thirty years he’s served every bad cause in this country? Or maybe that he needs me much more than I needed him?”

He sipped out of the sloe gin, and the cap rattled on the bottle’s neck when he tried to screw it back on.

“I’ve already told you, you say it to him,” he said. “I don’t give a goddamn where your paranoia takes you this time, because tomorrow I’m going to write a check for your half of the practice.”

“Okay, Bailey,” I said, and watched him hold in all his anger and bent ideas about a correct world and the correct people who should live in it.

I had thought we would land at one of the small airstrips in Yoakum or Cuero, but Bailey had told the pilot to put the plane down in the empty pasture behind my house. The land was flat and cleared of stones, and ten feet above the riverbed, but even from the air I could see the pools of water that had collected in the Bermuda grass. We circled over the ranch once, the wings tilting in the wind currents, and I tapped the pilot’s shoulder and leaned against the back of his seat.

“There’s armadillo sinkholes and a lot of soft dirt in that field,” I shouted over the noise of the engines.

He turned sideways briefly and nodded, then began his approach over the river. The fields of corn, tomatoes, and cotton rushed toward us, the stalks and green plants pressed into the earth by the wind, and I saw the natural gas wells pumping up and down and the windmill ginning like a flash of light in the thin rain, the gray roof of the stable and the weathered smokehouse leaning into the depression where we put the oak logs, and then the white house itself with the latticework verandah and the rosebushes and poplar trees along the front lane. We dipped suddenly over the post oaks by Cappie’s cabin and hit the pasture in a spray of mud and grass across the front windows. The wheels went deep into the wet ground, the tail lifted momentarily into the air, and the pilot gunned the engines to keep us in a straight line across the pasture, although he couldn’t see anything in front of him. Water and mud streaked across the side windows, then one wheel sunk in a soft spot and we spun in a sliding half circle, with one engine feathered, against the white fence that separated my side lawn and the pasture.

The pilot feathered the other engine and wiped his face on his sleeve. Bailey had spilled the bottle of sloe gin over his slacks.

“Do you have a hard drink inside?” the pilot said.

“If you drink Jack Daniel’s,” I said.

I opened the cabin door, and the rain blew into our faces. We climbed over the white fence and ran across the lawn through the oak trees to the front porch. The Senator’s limousine with the tinted windows was parked on the gravel lane. The poplar trees were arched in the wind, and magnolia leaves and rose petals were scattered across the grass. One of Verisa’s large earthen flowerpots had fallen from the upstairs verandah, and the soft dirt and cracked pottery lay in a pile on the front steps. It seemed a long time since I had been home; maybe the house looked strange to me because the Senator’s car was parked in front, but even the worn vertical line of bullet holes in the porch column seemed new, as though Was Hardin had drilled them there only yesterday.