Lay Down My Sword and Shield (Hackberry Holland 1)

The flowered wallpaper in the main room was yellowed and peeling in rotted strips, coated with mold and glue. United Farm Workers signs, pop art posters of Che Guevara and Lyndon Johnson on a motorcycle, and underground newspapers were thumbtacked over the exposed sections of boarding in the walls. A store-window mannequin lay on top of the old grocery counter with an empty wine bottle balanced on her stomach. A mobile made of beer-bottle necks clinked in the breeze from an oscillating fan that rattled against the wire guard each time it completed a turn. The single lightbulb suspended from the ceiling gave the whole room a hard yellow cast that hurt the eyes.

I followed her through the hallway into the kitchen. Her brown hips moved as smoothly as water turning in the current. Two young girls, a college boy, and a Negro man were scraping dishes into a garbage can and rinsing them under an iron pump. Through the back window I could see the last red touch of the sun on a sandbar in the middle of the Rio Grande.

“We had a neighborhood dinner tonight,” the girl from Berkeley said. “There’s some tortillas and beans in the icebox or you can get a dish towel.”

“You have a charge account with the supermarket?”

“We get the day-old stuff from the Mexican produce stands,” she said.

“I think I’ll just have a whiskey and water if you’ll give me a glass.” I took my silver flask from my coat pocket.

“Help yourself,” she said.

I offered the flask to the others.

“You got it, brother,” the Negro said.

He picked up a tin cup from the sideboard and held it in front of me. His bald, creased head and round black face shone in the half-light. Four of his front teeth were missing, and the others were yellow with snuff. I poured a shot in his cup and then splashed some water in my glass from the pump. I could taste the rust in it.

“So what would you like to find out about the United Farm Workers?” the girl said.

“Nothing. I read the trial transcript and talked with Mr. Posey this afternoon. The conviction won’t hold.”

The Negro laughed with the cup held before his lips. The college boy straightened up from the garbage can and looked at me as though I had dropped through a hole in the ceiling.

“You believe that?” the Negro said. He was still smiling.

“Yes.”

“I mean, you ain’t bullshitting? You’re coming on for real?” the college boy said. He wore blue jeans and a faded yellow and white University of Texas T-shirt.

“That’s right, pal,” I said.

The Negro laughed again and went back to work scraping plates. The two young girls were also smiling.

“Who you working for, man?” the boy said.

“Judge Roy Bean. I float up and down the Pecos River for him on an inner tube.”

“Don’t get strung out,” the girl said.

“What am I, the visiting straight man around here?”

The girl dried her hands on a towel and took a bottle of Jax out of the icebox. “Come on out front,” she said.

“We wasn’t trying to give you no truck. We ain’t got bad things here,” the Negro said. He grinned at me with his broken, yellow teeth.

In the front room the girl sat in a straight-backed chair, with one leg pulled up on the seat, her arm propped across her knee, and drank out of the beer bottle. Behind her on the wall was a poster with a rectangular, outspread bird on it and the single word HUELGA.

“They’re kids, and they don’t know if you’re putting them on or if you’re a private detective working for their parents,” she said. “The black guy has been in the movement since the Progressive Labor Party days, and he’s heard a lot of jiveass lawyers talk about appeals.”

“I guess I just don’t like people to work out their problems on my head.”

“I told you this afternoon about coming down here.”

“Maybe I should have worn my steel pot and flak jacket.”

“They don’t have any bad will toward you. They’re good people.”