Lay Down My Sword and Shield (Hackberry Holland 1)

“Get every man moving you can. We’re going to have gooks coming up our ass.”

However, the artillery cover never came, and we were overrun fifteen minutes later. Our automatic weapons men killed Chinese by the hundreds as they advanced across the rice fields. We packed snow on the barrels of the .30-caliber machine guns to keep them from melting, and the bottom of the ditch was littered with spent shell casings and empty ammunition boxes. The dead lay in quilted rows as far as I could see. They moved forward and died, then another wave took their place. The bugles began blowing again, potato mashers exploded in our wire, and every time a weapon locked empty or a Marine was hit they moved closer to the ditch. Our only tank was burning behind us, the lieutenant was shot through the mouth, and all of our N.C.O.’s were dead. We fired our last rounds, fixed bayonets in a silly Alamo gesture, and then the Chinese swarmed over us.

They ran along the edge of the ditch, firing point-blank into us with their burp guns. They shot the dead and the living alike, in the hysterical relief that comes with the victory of living through an attack. Their weapons weren’t designed for accuracy, but they could dump almost a full pan into a man who was closer than twenty feet. For the first time in my life I ran from an enemy. I dropped the handles of a stretcher with a wounded Marine on it and ran across the bodies, the ammunition boxes, the bent bazookas, the knocked-out machine guns, the lieutenant spitting blood and parts of teeth on his coat, and suddenly I saw a young Chinese boy, not over seventeen, his thin, yellow face pinched with cold, standing above me in tennis shoes and quilted clothes. I guess (as I remember it) that I threw my arms out in front of me to prevent that spray of flame and bullets from entering my face and chest, but the gesture was unnecessary because he was a poor marksman and he never got above my knees. I felt a pain like a shaft of ice through both legs, and I toppled over as though a bad comic had just kicked me deftly across the shins.

My Korean recall, born out of Jack Daniel’s and sexual exhaustion, ended here. I awoke at six-thirty, sweating, my head thick with afternoon whiskey. For a half hour I sat on the shower tile under the cold water, chewing an unlit cigar. The white indentions in my calves felt like rubber under my thumb.

CHAPTER 2

THE SHAMROCK HILTON Hotel in Houston was crowded that night with Democrats from all over Texas. They came in party loyalty almost seven hundred strong—the daughters of forgotten wars, the state committee from Austin, the A.F.L.-C.I.O. fat boys, the oil-depletion wheelers, manicured newspaper publishers, slick public relations men, millionaire women dressed in Neiman Marcus clothes with Piney Woods accents, young lawyers on their way up in state politics (each of them with a clear eye, hard grip, and a square, cologned jaw like Fearless Fosdick), the ten-percenters, the new rich who bought their children’s way into Randolph-Macon, the ranchers with a bright eye on the agriculture subsidy, a few semi-acceptable Mafia characters from Galveston, several ex-hacks, doormen, flunkies, and baggage carriers from Lyndon’s entourage, three Hollywood movie stars who had been born in Texas, an astronaut, one crippled commander of the Veterans of the Spanish-American War who sat in a wheelchair, an alcoholic baseball player who used to pitch for the Houston Buffaloes before he went up to the Cardinals, some highly paid prostitutes, an Air Force general who has probably won a footnote in military history for his dedication in the firebombing of Dresden, and United States Senator Allen B. Dowling.

I had driven from San Antonio in two and a half hours, highballing wide-open like a blue shot through small towns and farm communities, while drunken cowboys drinking beer in front of saloons stared at me in disbelief. I pulled into the white circular drive of the Shamrock and waited in the line of cars for the band of uniformed Negro porters to take over my luggage, my Cadillac, and even my attempt to open a door by myself. They moved about with the quick, electric motion of rubber bands snapping, their teeth white, their faces black and cordial, obsequious and yet confidently efficient. I imagined that they could have cut all our throats with pleasure. They reminded me of Negro troops in Korea when they were dealing with Mr. Skins, a white officer. They could go about a job in a way that deserved group citations, and at the same time insult an officer and laugh in his face without doing anything for which they could be reprimanded unless the officer wanted to appear a public fool.

I idled the car up to the glass doors at the entrance; one Negro pulled open the car door for me, another got behind the wheel, and a third took my suitcase from the trunk. I handed out one-dollar tips to each of them (with the stupid feeling of an artificial situation that you have when you pay a shoeshine boy), and followed the third porter into the hotel. And I wondered, looking at his gray, uniformed back, the muscles stiff and flat under the cloth, Would you really like to tick a razor across my jugular, you uprooted descendant of Ham, divested of your heritage, dropped clumsily and illiterate into a south Texas cotton patch, where you could labor and exhaust yourself and kind through the next several generations on tenant shares? Yes, I guess you could, with a neat, sharp corner of the blade that you would draw gingerly along the vein.

But I still had a fair edge on from the Jack Daniel’s, the Mexican girl, and the dream, and I imagine that is why I suddenly had such strange insights into that black mind walking before me.

I gave my name at the desk and was told that my wife had taken a suite of rooms on the tenth floor. She and my brother Bailey had come to Houston yesterday when the convention had started, and I was supposed to join them today at noon for lunch on the terrace with several of the oil-depletion boys who had all types of money to sink into a young congressman’s career. However, I didn’t have to speak before the convention until ten that night, and I didn’t think that I could take a full day of laughing conversation, racial jokes, polite gin by the swimming pool, and powdered, middle-aged oil wives who whispered banal remarks like slivers of glass in my ear. I had met all of them before in Dallas, Austin, Fort Worth, and El Paso, and they were always true to themselves, regardless of the place or occasion. The men wore their same Oshman western suits and low-topped boots, the diamond rings from Zale’s that looked out of place on their fat hands, the string ties or open-neck sports shirts that directed attention away from the swift eyes and the broken veins in the cheeks. They spoke of huge finance with indifference, but I knew that their groins tingled with pleasure at the same time. Their women liked me because I was young and good-looking, successful as a lawyer, tanned from playing in fashionable tennis courts, and with an inner steeled effort I could clink the ice in my glass and look pleasant and easy while they told about all the trivial problems in their insipid lives (in this respect I was very self-disciplined, because I always knew when to excuse myself and walk away before the inner rigidity broke apart).

Besides, I really didn’t need them to be elected congressional representative from my district. The Holland name and my father’s reputation would assure almost any member of my family a political position if he wanted it. Also, people still remembered when I returned from the war as a wounded hospital corpsman, dressed in Marine tropicals with a walking cane, an ex-P.O.W. who had resisted brainwashing for thirty-two months while other American troops were signing confessions, informing on each other, and defecting to the Chinese.

Finally, my Republican opponent was a seedy racist, so fanatical even in his business dealings that his insurance agency failed. At different times he had belonged to the John Birch and Paul Revere societies, the Independent Million, the White Citizens League, and the Dixiecrat Party. He was a mean and obnoxious drunk, a bully toward his wife and children, and I don’t know why the Republicans let him run, except for the fact that he could always raise money from fools like himself and they hadn’t won an election in DeWitt since Reconstruction, anyway.

Verisa had taken a five-room suite with a cocktail bar, deep rugs, oil paintings on the walls, potted rubber plants, and a porch that overlooked the swimming pool far below. The porter set my suitcase down and closed the door behind me. I could see the anger in Verisa’s eyes. She sat on the couch in a white evening gown, her legs crossed tightly, with the tip of one high-heeled shoe pointed into the coffee table. Her auburn hair was brushed to a metallic shine, and her skin looked as bloodless and smooth as marble. If I had been closer to her I could have smelled the touch of perfume behind her ears, the powdered breasts, the hinted scent of her sex, a light taste of gin on her breath. She looked at me briefly, then turned her eyes away and lit a cigarette. The toe of the shoe flicked momentarily into a carved design in the side of the table. She was always able to hold her anger in well. She had learned part of that at Randolph-Macon and the rest from living with me. She could reduce flying rage to a hot cigarette ash or a few whispered and rushed words in the corner of a cocktail party, or maybe one burst of heat after we were home; but the pointed flick of the shoe was a fleshy bite into my genitals for seven years of marriage, broken young-girl dreams, her embarrassment when I brought oil-field workers or soldiers from Fort Sam Houston to the country club, my drunken discussions in the middle of the night about my Korean War guilt, and for the stoic and futile resignation she had adopted, out of all her social disappointments, in hopes of becoming the wife of a Texas congressman on his way to the Senate and that opulent world of power that goes far beyond any of the things you can buy or destroy with money.

“Hack, don’t you give a goddamn?” she said quietly, still looking straight ahead.

“What did I miss?”

“A day of my making excuses for you, and right now I’m rather sick of it.”

“Lunch by the pool with the Dallas aristocracy can’t be that awful.”

“I’m not in a flippant mood, Hack. I don’t enjoy apologizing or lying for you, and I don’t like sitting three hours by myself with boorish businesspeople.”

“Those are the cultured boys with the money. The fellows who oil all the wheels and make Frankens

tein run properly.”

I went to the bar and poured a double shot of whiskey over ice. It clicked pleasantly on the edge of the afternoon drunk, and I felt even more serene in the sexual confidence that I always had toward Verisa after whoring.

“I don’t know where you’ve been, but I suspect it was one of your Okie motel affairs.”

“I had to meet R. C. Richardson in Austin.”

“How much do you pay them? Do they go down on you? That’s what they call it in the trade, isn’t it?”

“It’s something like that.”

“They must be lovely girls. Do they perform any other special things for you?”

“Right now R.C.’s working on a deal to patent hoof-and-mouth disease. He has federal contracts for Vietnam that run in millions.”

“Your girlfriends probably have had some nice diseases of their own.”

“Let it go, Verisa.”

“Oh, I shouldn’t say anything to you? Is that it? I should spend a day of congenial conversation with people who chew on toothpicks, and then meet you pleasantly at the door after you return from screwing a Mexican whore.”