Lay Down My Sword and Shield (Hackberry Holland 1)

“You’re really thinking foolishly.”

“I don’t care if you want to look at the world like Little Orphan Annie. But right now I feel like someone took a shit in my head, my nose is full of blood, and if you say anything more I’m going to call the Senator from the hotel and give him my best delivery.”

“You better take us to Herman Hospital,” Bailey said.

“I’ve had my nose broken before and I know what it feels like. Just turn it off for a few more blocks.”

“I’ll have the hotel doctor come to the room,” Verisa said.

“Forget that, too,” I said. “I’m driving down to the Valley this afternoon. Just as soon as I can get six aspirins down and a double shot of Jack Daniel’s.”

“You’re going to the Valley!” Verisa said. Her head turned sharply at me.

“I got a letter from a Mexican fellow I was in Korea with. He got involved in some trouble with this farm labor union, and he’s in the county jail waiting to go up to prison on a five-year sentence.”

“What am I supposed to do in the meantime?” she said.

“Ride back home with Bailey or take a flight. You don’t like to drive with me, anyway.”

“So I’m left with the pleas

ant experience of explaining the condition of the room to the management. Is that it?” she said. “I imagine that by this time the cleaning woman has run down the hall in hysterics.”

“Ignore them. We didn’t do the damage. They know what to expect when they contract for a convention. Particularly when it’s composed of lunatics.”

“It’s lovely of you to leave me with these things.”

“All right. I’ll talk with the manager on the way out. I’ll drip a few drops of blood on his desk, talk with him cordially, and then I’ll tell him to go to hell.”

“You do what you want, Hack,” she said. “Get drunk for a week in the Valley, go across the border and find a sweet two-dollar girl, indulge all your disgusting obsessions.”

She turned the car into the hotel drive, and a doorman stepped out to the edge of the walk under the canopy. I rubbed the dampness of the towel over my face.

“I have to go see this man,” I said. “He was a good friend to me when I went on the line. I was so goddamned scared I couldn’t paste a Band-Aid on a scratch.”

“Just don’t talk about it,” she said. “Drive down the road and forget anything else. That’s the way you do things best.”

“Listen a minute. I don’t enjoy driving three hundred miles in one-hundred-degree heat with a hangover and a bloody nose. But this man has five years hard time to do because of a scuffle on a picket line. He doesn’t have a goddamn cent and he can’t get a white lawyer to file an appeal for him. Next week he’ll be chopping cotton on the prison farm and there won’t be a thing I can do for him.”

“We can call the A.C.L.U. You don’t have to go down there today,” Bailey said.

“No, you go on, Hack,” she said. “It would be too terrible for you to live through one day of putting things together without beginning another adventure.”

“Okay, piss on it,” I said. “I’ll catch air in a few minutes, and you can go back to the ranch and serve cocktails to the D.A.R. Then next week we can take a trip to Walter Reed and shake hands with the basket cases. A wartime V.A. ward should be included on all bus tours. You can meet the dummies in their wheelchairs and the guys without human faces. It’s quite an experience.”

Bailey lit his pipe in the backseat and Verisa’s eyes were brilliant with anger as the doorman stepped around the front of the car. I lowered the window and dumped the cracked ice in the towel onto the concrete.

People stared at me in the lobby as I walked toward the elevator with the towel under my nose. I still wore my tennis shorts and canvas shoes, with a sports coat over my blood-streaked polo shirt. Verisa and Bailey walked on each side of me as impervious as granite. Upstairs, I showered and changed into a pair of cream slacks and a soft, maroon shirt, ordered a bottle of Jack Daniel’s from the bar, and ate a half- dozen aspirins in the bathroom. I could hear Verisa making reservations on an afternoon flight to San Antonio. I looked in the mirror at my swollen nose, a slightly puffed upper lip, and the white discoloration in my face, and I decided to leave the whiskey doubleheaders to Grover Alexander or some other better left-hander than I. A bellboy brought the bottle; I took one drink out of it and closed the suitcase. I started to speak to Verisa, but she put a cigarette in her mouth and looked out through the smashed French doors at the oil wells pumping in the distance.

CHAPTER 3

THE LATE SUN was red on the hills above the Rio Grande. The river was almost dry in places, dividing around bleached sandbars, and in the twilight the water had turned scarlet. On the other side, in Mexico, there were adobe huts and wooden shacks along the banks, and buzzards circled high in the sky. I turned off the air conditioner, rolled down the windows, and let the warm air blow through the car. In the first quick rush of wind I could smell the sweet ripeness of the whole Valley: the citrus groves, the tomato and watermelon fields, the rows of cotton and corn, the manure, and pastures of bluebonnets. The windmills were spinning, and cattle moved lazily toward the troughs. A single scorch of cloud stretched across the sun, which now seemed to grow in size as it dipped into the hills. The base of the pin oaks and blackjack trees grew darker, then the bottom rim of the sky glowed with flame.

I had mended from my hangover during the long drive, and I felt the numb serenity of a longtime dying man who had just received an unexpected extension of life. Then, in that cool moment of reflection, I wondered why I always drank twice as much when I had to make ritual appearances; or why I had gone to Houston in the first place, since my talk before a few hundred semiliterate oilmen had little to do with my probable election, anyway; or lastly, why I had ever entered politics and the world of Senator Allen B. Dowling.

I could guess at the answers to the first two questions, which weren’t of particular consequence, except that I didn’t want another hangover and defeat at the tennis court like I’d had this morning; but the answer to the third question worked its way through the soft tissue and dropped like an ugly, sharp-edged black diamond into a bright space in the center of my mind. Inside, under all the cynicism, the irreverence toward the icons and totems, my insults to astronauts and country club women, I wanted a part of the power at the top.

I tried to believe that my motive was to atone for Verisa’s spent dreams, or that I wanted to equal my father in his law and congressional career, or at least that I was simply an ironic man who felt he could do as good a job as comic-page segregationists; or maybe at worst I was just a pragmatist with knowledge of the money to be made in the dealings between the federal government and the oil interests. But that black diamond had blood crusted on its edges, and I knew that I had the same weaknesses as Verisa and the Senator; I wanted power itself, the tribal recognition that went with it, and that small key to its complexities carried secretly in my watch pocket.