“I got two Purple Hearts in my trunk and you can have both of them.” He put out his cigarette, peeled the paper back carefully along the seam, and poured the unused tobacco in his Bugler pack.
“Do I get to be the dartboard again?” I said.
“The next time you’re in Pueblo Verde get Rie to give you a tour of the farmworker camps. Stick your head in a few of those stinking outdoor toilets, or talk with the kids sitting in doorways with flies swarming over their faces. Have dinner with a few of the families and see how the food sits on your stomach. Get a good breath of the dead rats under the houses and the garbage rotting in the ditches. Check the scene out, man. It really comes alive for you when you breathe it up both nostrils.”
“It looks like I
have to stay white when I talk with you, doesn’t it?”
“You’re a good friend, Hack, but you’re a straight and your mind is white as Clorox.”
He got to me with that one.
“What should I be?” I said. “You want me to apologize because I was born me instead of you?”
“No, man. You still don’t see. It’s mind style, something you grew up with. Your people go through life like they’re looking down a long tunnel and they never see anything on the edges. You roar down the highway a hundred miles an hour and never remember anything later except a motel billboard because everything on the other side of the fence is somebody else’s scene. It don’t belong to you. It’s painted by some screw who lost his brushes and forgot what he was doing.”
“I don’t like to tell you that you’re full of shit.”
“Take the tour, buddy.”
“I’ve been on the tour. I grew up around it.”
“No point, cousin. You’re right in the middle of the pipe.”
“Another gringo, one of the oppressors? A dickhead with the liberal tattoo.”
The guard heard me, and he took the cigar out of his mouth between his fingers and leaned forward, with his stomach folding over his gun belt. The chair legs splayed slightly under his buttocks, and his crossed eyes were fixed in the smooth fat of his face.
“Look, Hack, if I make the street we’re going on a sweet drunk together. We’ll hit every Chicano joint in San Antonio. We won’t have to pay for nothing, either. We’ll slop down the booze and ball with brown-skin chicks till our eyes fall out. Yokohama on a three-day pass. A real wild one.”
“You’re cooking with butane now,” I said.
“I ain’t kidding you. I’m going to wash this jailhouse stink off me in the Guadalupe and buy my own beer truck. We’ll just tool around the roads drinking and slinging bottles at the highway signs. Then when I get back to Pueblo Verde they’re going to learn what real trouble is.”
“You want to go back for some more?”
“The ball game’s just starting. We’re going to hit them with a strike in August. I don’t know if we can win, but a lot of cotton is going to burn in the rows if we don’t.”
“Our defense will work like piss in a punch bowl if you have a half-dozen new charges against you.”
“I can’t sweat that.”
“You’d damn well better, unless you want to end up here again with another five to do.”
“The only thing we got on our side is us. The cops, the legislature, the farm bureau, the whole fucking bunch—we got to bust them the only way we can, and that’s to shut down the harvest until they recognize our union and start to negotiate.”
“You can’t make a strike work in the fields. There’s ten people standing in line for the job you walk off of.”
“They’re going to win in California. We’ll win here, too, as long as they can’t scare us or turn us against each other. You see, man, that’s what their real bag is all about. We twist the screws because of the shacks they give us and the seventy-dollar rents, and they throw out twenty or thirty families and tell them they got to do it because the union’s forcing standards on them they can’t meet. But people ain’t buying that shit anymore.”
The guard looked at his watch and pointed a fat finger at us, then cleared his mouth of tobacco spittle and spat it into the spittoon.
“I left two cartons of cigarettes for you at the desk,” I said.
“Yeah, thanks, man. Look, you were straight when you said two weeks, weren’t you?” His dark eyes were concentrated into mine, and one hand opened and closed on his forearm.
“I can’t set it on the day.”