She took a package of cigarettes from her blue-jeans pocket and lit one. I glanced at the smooth curve of her breasts as she pushed the package back in her pocket.
“You’re pretty sure I’ve got a loser, aren’t you?” I said.
“I just don’t think you know very much about the county you’re working in.”
“So you’re up against some cotton growers who don’t want to pay union scale, and a few part-time Klansmen. And you’ve met a redneck deputy sheriff who probably rents his brains by the week. That doesn’t change the law or trial procedure.”
“Wow. You must walk into court with a copy of the National Review between your teeth.”
“I’ve had eight years of law practice, babe, and I haven’t lost many cases.”
“I don’t believe you’ve dealt very much with union farmworkers, either.”
“I’ve spent all my life in Texas. I don’t expect to find out anything very new about it in this case.”
“Don’t you realize the rules in your court don’t apply to us? Art’s jury brought in a guilty verdict in fifteen minutes, and later the foreman said it took them that long because they sent out for some cold drinks.”
“All right, I can use things just like that in the appeal.”
“I’m not kidding you, man; lose some of those comic-book attitudes if you want to do anything for him,” she said.
“You really know how to turn on the burner, don’t you?”
“I’m just telling you about the bag you’re trying to pick up.”
“You’re a hard girl.”
“Do I get that free with the ride home?” The sunlight through the window was bright on the burned ends of her hair. She had her arm back on the seat while she smoked, and I could see the whiteness at the top of her breasts.
“You’re not from Texas. What are you doing here, anyway?”
“Would you like to flip through the celluloid windows in my wallet?”
“It’s just a question.”
“It seems like an expensive trip home.”
“Maybe I should put on my chauffeur’s cap, and you can sit in the backseat and I’ll close the glass behind me.”
“I was a graduate student in social work at Berkeley. I got tired of writing abstract papers about hungry people so I joined the Third World and came out to your lovely state.”
I hit a chuckhole in the road and felt the car slam down on its springs. The dust was so heavy that it had started to filter through the air-conditioning system. Two Negro children were running along the edge of a ditch, throwing stones at an emaciated dog scabbed over with mange. The road reached a dead end in front of a converted general store with a sign above the door that read UNITED FARM WORKERS LOCAL 476. The glass display windows were yellow and pocked with BB holes, and filmed with dirt on the inside and outside. Strips of Montgomery Ward brick had been nailed over the rotted boards in the walls, the steps had collapsed, cinder blocks were propped under one side of the building to keep it from sagging, and I could almost hear the flies humming around the outhouse in back. A boy of about nineteen, barefoot and without a shirt, sat on the front porch playing a twelve-string Gibson guitar.
“Don’t wrinkle your eyes at it, man,” she said. “We’re lucky we could rent anything in this town.”
“I didn’t say a thing.”
“I could hear the tumblers click over in your head. You’ve got the middle-class hygiene thing. Anything except green lawns and red brick sends you running up the street.”
“That’s a lot of shit.”
“Okay. Thanks for the ride.”
She closed the door and walked down the dusty path to the building. I watched the motion of her hips and her full thighs as she stepped up on the porch, then I turned the Cadillac in a circle and headed back toward town.
I went to Mr. Cecil Wayne Posey’s office and was told by his junior partner that I could find him at home. His ranch was all blackland, lined with rows of cotton and corn and orange trees. A dozen Mexicans and Negroes were hoeing in the cotton, and horses stood in the groves of live oak trees on the low hills. The large, one-story house had new white paint and a wide screened-in porch, and poplar trees were planted along the front lane. There were two great red barns in back with lightning rods and weather vanes on the peaks, a windmill pumping water into a trough, and rolls of barbed wire and cords of cedar posts stacked against a tractor shed.
As I walked up the lane I heard a woodpecker rattling against a dead limb in the heat. Mr. Posey rose from his round-backed wicker chair on the porch and shook hands. The lower portion of his stomach was swollen all the way across the front of his pants. His skin was soft, pudgy to the touch, and his head was almost completely bald except for a few short gray hairs. His eyes were colorless, and his voice had the bland quality of oatmeal. He reminded me of a miniature, upended white whale. When he sat down the watch in his pocket bulged against the cloth like a hard biscuit.