Lay Down My Sword and Shield (Hackberry Holland 1)

I took the whiskey and poured three inches into my glass.

“You’ll drive nails through your stomach like that. Put a little brew on top of it,” the Negro said. He slapped another cap off on the edge of the counter and handed the bottle to me.

“Use this and avoid the slashed hand shot,” Rie said, and threw an opener to the college boy.

Eight Mexican field hands, all dressed in faded denim clothes, overalls, straw hats, and work shoes, came through the screen door in single file as though they had been lined up at a bus stop. They were potbellied and short, thin and stooped, tattooed with pachuco crosses and hung with religious medals, scarred and stitched, some of them missing fingers, sunburned almost black, with trousers bagging in the rear and their Indian hair wet and combed straight back over the head.

They had a pint of Old Stag and a gallon milk bottle filled with blackberry wine. The Negro began passing out the Jax, and an hour later the room roared with mariachi songs and Apache screams.

“Let me try that guitar, buddy,” I said to the boy from the front porch. He sat on the floor with his back against the wall and a glass of wine and whiskey between his legs. His face was bloodless and his eyes couldn’t fix on my face. I put the strap of the twelve-string around my neck and tried to pick out “The Wreck of Old ’97,” but my fingers felt as though a needle and thread had been drawn through all my knuckles. Then I tried “The Wildwood Flower”

and “John Hardy,” and each time I began over again I hit more wrong notes or came up on the wrong fret. I smoked somebody’s cigarette out of an ashtray, finished my drink, and then started an easy Jimmie Rodgers run that I had learned to pick when I was sixteen. It was worse than before, and I laid the guitar facedown on the counter among the scores of empty beer bottles.

“I bet you blow a good one when you’re cool,” Rie said. She was sitting in the chair next to me with a small glass of wine in her hand. Her legs were crossed, and the indention across her stomach and the white line of skin above her blue jeans made something drop inside me.

“Give me an hour and I’ll boil them cabbages down,” I said.

“Do it tomorrow morning.”

“I’m going to streak out of here like the fireball mail tomorrow morning. My Cadillac and I are going to melt the asphalt between here and Austin.” Someone put the whiskey bottle in my hand, and I took two large swallows and chased it with beer.

“You must have a real dragon inside,” Rie said.

“No, I deal with Captain Hyde. That bastard and I have been together almost fifteen years. However, when he starts acting like an asshole I unscrew my head and throw it in the Rio Grande a couple of times.”

“No kidding, pull it back in, man,” she said.

“I thought you were a hip girl. You’re giving me the concerned eye of a Baptist reformer now.”

“I think you’re probably a madman.”

“You ought to see me and John Wesley Hardin drunk in the streets of Yoakum. He rides on the fender of my Cadillac, busting parking meters and stoplights with a revolver in each hand.”

The noise became louder. All the beer, whiskey, and wine were gone, and I gave one of the Mexican field hands another twenty dollars to go to the tavern. The twelve-string guitar was passed from hand to hand, tuned in a half dozen discords, two strings broken, and finally dropped in a corner. Someone suggested a knife-throwing contest, and a bread cutter, two bowies, a rippled-bladed Italian stiletto, my pocketknife, a hand ax, and a meat cleaver were flung into the wall until the boards were split and shattered and knocked through on the ground outside.

The room was beginning to tip and blur in front of my eyes. I was smoking a dead cigar butt that I had frayed under my boot heel a few minutes earlier.

“Spodiodi, man. It’s the only thing. You got to put them snakes back in the basket,” the Negro said in my face. His eyes were red, and his breath was sour with wine.

“I don’t deal in snakes.”

“Man, they’re crawling through your face.”

I knew that I had an answer for him, but the words wouldn’t rise out of the echoes and flashes of light in my head.

“Let’s go down to the river. This place is hotter than a brick kiln,” I said.

“It’s all that corn,” the Negro said.

“Come on, Judge Roy Bean is holding court in his inner tube,” I said, and pulled Rie up from her chair by the hand.

“Hey, man,” she said.

I carried the bottle of whiskey by the neck and pulled her through the hallway into the kitchen. The Negro followed us with a beer in each hand and a half-dozen bottles stuck down in his trousers.

We walked down the bare slope toward the mudflat. The moon was full and white as ivory in a breathless sky. A rusted Ford coupe with no glass in the windows sat half-submerged in the river. The current eddied and swirled through the gaping window in back and coursed over the top of the seats and the steering wheel. The moon’s reflection rippled across the water’s brown surface, and I could see the sharp backs of garfish turning by the sandbars. Behind us the Mexican field hands were still singing. The Negro finished one beer and threw the bottle arching high over the river.

“Yow!” he yelled.