Lay Down My Sword and Shield (Hackberry Holland 1)

“Look at it. There’s Mexico,” I said. “Fifty yards and you can drop right through the bottom of the twentieth century.”

Rie sat down on a rotted log with her bare feet in the water. The moonlight turned the burned tips of her hair to points of silver.

“A whole land full of bandit ghosts and Indian legends,” I said. “You just step through the hole in the hedge, and there’s Pancho Villa splashing across the river with pistols and bandoliers hanging all over him. Zapata cutting down federales with his machete. Illiterate peasants executing French kings. Cortez destroying an entire culture.”

“There’s diphtheria in the well water of those adobe huts, too,” Rie said.

“You’re like every Marxist I ever met. No humor or sense of romance.”

“Quit shouting.”

“Isn’t that straight?” I said. “It’s the revolutionary mind. You can’t realize that man is more a clown than a Satan. You approach everything with a sullen mind and try to convert buffoons into Machiavelli.”

“Oh for God’s sake, man.”

I took a drink out of the bottle. The whiskey splashed over my mouth.

“You goddamn people don’t know what human evil is. One of these days you and I are going to have some Chinese tea and talk about the Bean Camp together. I’ll also give you a couple of footnotes on Pak’s Palace and No Name Valley.”

I felt the ground shift under my feet, and I thought I was going to fall. I put my arm on her shoulder to keep my balance.

“There’s mudcat nesting in that car. I know how to get them, too,” the Negro said. He took off his shirt and shoes, and laid the remaining bottles of beer in an even line on the bank. “You just swim your hand under the water and back that shovel-mouth into a corner and catch him real fast inside the gill. Come on, brother. I’m going to teach you how to fish like black people.”

He waded out into the river up to his hips and pulled open the rusted car door with both hands. The moon’s reflection off the water made his black body glow.

“He does this when he gets drunk,” Rie said. “You can do it, too, if you want me to take both of you down to the county hospital tonight.”

“That’s just what a Yankee would say. Don’t you know that colored people catch fish when white people couldn’t bring them up with a telephone crank?”

I sat down on the mudflat and pulled off my boots. I felt the water soak through the seat of my trousers.

“He had eight stitches the last time he handfished in that car,” she said.

“I don’t believe it. That sounds like more Marxist-Yankee bullshit.”

I walked out into the river, and the warm, muddy current swirled around my waist and my feet sunk into the silt. The Negro was bent over the top of the front seat with both his arms submerged to the shoulder. His face was concentrated, his eyes looking into nothing, as though his fingers were touching some vital and delicate part of the universe.

“She’s backed up and fanning right next to the trunk. She’s got young ones under her,” he said.

“Watch her fins.”

“She’ll open up in a minute to get a piece of my finger, then I’ll grab a whole handful of meat inside her gill.”

He ducked forward, the surface of the water shook and quivered momentarily, and then he drew one hand back with a ragged cut between the thumb and forefinger. The drops of blood squeezed out through the bruised edges of the skin and ran down his wrist. He closed his eyes in pain and sucked the cut.

“I told you to—” Then I heard the sirens rolling in a low moan down the dusty street in front of the union building.

“Shit,” Rie said from the riverbank.

I turned around and saw the revolving blue and yellow lights on top of three police cars, winking and flashing in the dark.

“The Man done arrived,” the Negro said, with his cut hand still held before his mouth.

Sheriff’s deputies and city police went through the front door of the building, walked around the sides with flashlights, looked in the outhouse, and then focused two car spotlights on us in the river. The electric white glare made my eyes water.

“You people walk toward me with your hands on top of your head!” a voice shouted from behind the light.

“Them dudes can reach out from a long way, can’t they?” the Negro said. He flopped both his arms over his bald head and started wading out of the river. The light broke around his body as though he had been carved out of burnt iron.