Lay Down My Sword and Shield (Hackberry Holland 1)

For some drunk reason I closed the car door carefully in the current and lifted the handle upward into place.

“On your head, punk!” the voice shouted.

“Fuck you,” I said.

Suddenly, both of the arcs were turned directly into my face, and the Negro disappeared from my vision in one brilliant explosion of light.

“Don’t screw with them, Hack. Get out of there,” Rie said from the darkness.

I waded out of the shallows with one hand over my eyes. My face burned with the heat from the lights.

“I give you warning. Get them over your head.”

“I told you to go fuck yourself, too.” I tripped on the mud bank and fell on my elbows. My forearms and one side of my face were covered with wet sand. Rie tried to pick me up by the back of my shirt.

“They’ll kill you, Hack. Get up and walk. It’s just a disturbing the peace bust. We’ll be out in the morning,” she said.

A sheriff’s car, with both spotlights burning, drove down the embankment on the hard ground, bounced over a log, and turned to a stop in front of me. As the beams of light changed angle I saw the Mexican field hands lined up against the building, with their arms outstretched before them and their legs widespread, while two policemen shook them down.

The whip aerial on the car rocked back and forth, and the deputy from the jail opened the driver’s door and walked toward me. I stood up and put a wet cigar in my mouth. My clothes were filled with sand and mud, and my hair felt like paint on top of my head. His .357 Magnum and the cartridges in his leather belt glinted in the moonlight. There was a line of perspiration down the front of his shirt, and his package of cigarettes stuck up at an angle under the flap of his pocket, which struck me at the time as an odd thing for a military man. His jawbones were as tight as his crew-cut scalp.

“I figured that you was you, Mr. Holland, and I didn?

?t want nobody dropping the hammer on you for some wetback crossing the river,” he said.

“What have you got? Disturbing the peace? Disorderly conduct?”

“We got all kinds of things. I expect if we look around here a while we might find some dope.”

“Why don’t you let these people alone? There wasn’t any complaint from this neighborhood.”

“Get in the car, please, miss,” he said to Rie.

“Look, she was out here. She didn’t have anything to do with that drunk party.”

He opened the back door of the automobile and took Rie by the elbow.

“Just keep your peckerwood hands in your pockets a minute,” I said.

“What?”

“You heard me, motherfucker.”

“Mr. Holland, you can drive out of here tonight in that Cadillac of yours and I’ll forget about that. The next time you want to help out the niggers and the wetbacks you just write out a check to the Community Chest and stay out of this county.”

“I’ll be all right. Go to Austin tomorrow and put it in for Art,” she said. She sat in the backseat behind the wire-mesh screen.

“Let her out,” I said.

“You really want to push it, Mr. Holland?”

“Yeah, I do. From what I understand you have a b.c.d. from the Marine Corps and you do most of your law enforcement on helpless winos in a drunk tank. So why don’t you get off the badass act?”

“You’re under arrest. I don’t expect you’re going to get out of our jail very soon, either.”

“You’re fucking with the Lone Ranger, too, peckerwood,” I said.

He brought his billy out of his back pocket and caught me right above the temple. A shotgun shell exploded in my head, and I fell against the car door and hit the ground on my hands and knees. He kicked me once in the stomach, and my breath rushed out of me as though someone had opened a large hole in the middle of my chest. The inside of my mouth was coated with sand, my eyes bulged, and I started to vomit, then his boot cut across the back of my head with the easy swing of a football player kicking an extra point.