Lay Down My Sword and Shield (Hackberry Holland 1)

“I spent three hours thinking of the wrong words to say,” I said.

“You don’t need to, Hack.”

“Yes, I do. A man’s death deserves an explanation, but I don’t have it. Every time I saw a guy buy it in Korea I tried to see some rational equation in death, but it had no more reason or meaning than those faded billboard signs out on the highway.”

“Art’s brother phoned this afternoon and told me how he died. It didn’t have anything to do with anybody. There’s nothing to say about it.”

So I didn’t try to say anything else. I turned the Cadillac around in the dust, and we drove back down the corrugated road between the rows of clapboard shacks and dirt yards to the main street. The slip of moon had turned yellow and risen above the hills in the dark sky. The air was hot, motionless, and the oak trees on the square looked as though they had been etched in metal. The deputy who had given me the road map out of town stood under the neon sign in front of the beer tavern, talking with two men in overalls. His khaki shirt was dark around the neck and armpits with perspiration. He took the toothpick out of his mouth and stared hard as the car passed.

“Have they been bothering you?” I said.

“We had three arrests on the picket last week, and two nights ago somebody burned a cross in the front yard. It’s strange to walk out on the porch and see something that ugly in the morning light. They’d nailed strips of tires to the wood, and I could still smell the melted rubber.”

“Well, by God, we can do something about the Klan. The F.B.I. wants to nail them any way they can.”

“The local fed thinks it was high school kids, even though some Chicanos in the tavern saw a half-dozen men in the back of a pickup with the cross propped against the cab.”

“Rie, we have civil rights statutes that can get those men one to ten in Huntsville.”

“We don’t care about them.”

“Listen, those men are dangerous and violent people, and they should be in the penitentiary.”

“We’ve given the farm companies until Monday to sign, and then we shut it down. We have enough people organized now to do it, too.”

“Do you know what it’s going to be like when the cotton starts burning in the rows and the citrus goes soft because it wasn’t picked in the first week? Those farmers are going to lose their ass, and those K.K.K. bastards will have chains and baseball bats next time.”

“They won’t stop the strike.”

“I don’t want to see them pouring kerosene on your house, either.”

“Let’s don’t talk about it anymore, Hack. I’m really tired.”

And then I felt that I had selected almost every bad sentence possible in the three hours of driving from Austin to the Valley. I followed the blacktop south of town and crossed the concrete bridge over the Rio Grande. The low, black water rippled through the trash caught in the pilings, willow trees and scrub brush grew along the sandy banks, and the windows of the adobe huts on the Mexican side glowed with candlelight and oil lamps. I stopped at the port of entry, and a tired Mexican immigration official in a rumpled khaki uniform and plastic-brim hat told me not to go farther than fifteen miles into the interior without a tourist’s permit. Rie’s face had the shine of ivory in the light from the official’s small office. If I touched my fingers to her cheek I knew the skin would be as cool and dry as stone. All the pain was way down inside her, and it would stay there without ever burning through her composure. Somewhere she had learned how to be a real soldier, I thought. Either in those insane billy-swinging, head-busting campus riots, or maybe in a Mississippi jail where they put cattle prods to civil rights workers, but somewhere she had earned her membership in a private club.

I drove down the bad tar-surfaced highway between tall rows of cedar and poplar trees. The evening star flickered dimly above the bare hills in the west, and a hot breeze had started to blow across the flatland from the Gulf. Most of the adobe houses by the roadside were in ruins, the mudbricks exposed and crumbling, the roofing timbers hanging inside the doorways like long teeth. I could never drive into old Mexico at night without feeling the presence of Villa and Zapata in those dark hills, or the ghosts of Hood’s Texas cavalry who chose exile in a foreign country rather than surrender when the Confederacy fell. Even on my drunken excursions to meet three-dollar Mexican whores, the wild smell of the land and the long stretch of burned hills and all the mystery in them cut through my sexual fantasies. Even now, with Rie beside me, her drawn face painfully beautiful as she held a match unevenly to her cigarette, I still heard the jingle of sabers and the cock of rifles, pointed by the thousands down a hill at some forgotten army.

Ten miles from the port of entry there was a small town of flat, adobe buildings, cobbled streets caked with horse manure, whorehouses, two or three dangerous bars, a rural police station, and a cemetery against the hillside with a stucco wall around it. High up on the hill and formed with whitewashed fieldstones were the words PEPSI-COLA. The adobe houses were as brown as the land, but the doors were painted blue, fingernail-polish red, and turquoise to prevent spirits from crossing the threshold. Most of the people in the town were poor Indians, but the whorehouses and the bars were run by either the police or marginal gangsters from Monterrey. Oil-field workers sat in the open-front cantinas with fifteen-year-old girls, the jukeboxes blaring with mariachi horns, and farther up the narrow main street two policemen in dirty uniforms stood in the lighted doorway of the town’s largest whorehouse. One of them beckoned to me as I passed, then he saw Rie and turned his attention to the car behind me.

The cervezería and café was across the small square from the church. The owner had hung lights in the mimosa trees over the outdoor tables, and the shadows flickered in webbed patterns on the flagstones and the white oilcloth table covers. In the middle of the square was a weathered bandbox, with a round, peaked roof, and I could see the altar candles burning in the darkness beyond the open door of the church. We sat under the trees, with the dappled shadows breaking across us,

and I ordered dinner and two bottles of Carta Blanca.

“Could I have a tequila?” Rie said.

“The stuff they sell here is like pulque. It’s yellow and you can see the threadworms swimming in it.”

“I’d like one just the same.”

The waiter brought us a quart bottle with a cork in it, two slender shot glasses, and a plate of sliced limes and a salt shaker. I poured into our glasses, and she drank it neat, without touching the limes or the water chaser, her eyes fixed on the darkened square. She winced a little with the bitter taste, and for just a moment there was a flush of color in her cheeks.

“That’s not the way to do it,” I said.

“Let me have another one.”

“You can burn holes the size of a dime in your stomach with that stuff.”

“I would like for you to pour me another one.”