Lay Down My Sword and Shield (Hackberry Holland 1)

“I turned every lock I could. We were almost home free. It was one of those dumb things that nobody can do anything about.”

She raised the glass again, and her almond eyes looked electric in the light from the trees.

“But it had to be black men who killed him. Not a sadist or a racist guard. Two spades who probably lived everything he did.”

The waiter placed our dinner before us, holding the plates by the bottom with a folded napkin, and looked quickly at Rie, then at me.

“Dos mas Carta Blanca,” I said.

“Si, señor,” he said, and drew his curiosity back inside himself.

“I don’t think I’m hungry now,” she said.

“Eat a little bit.”

“I don’t want it. I’m sorry.”

“Be a doll.”

“Let’s go, Hack.”

“I’ll have the waiter wrap it in wax paper.”

“Please, let’s just go.”

I paid the check inside, and the waiter looked offended because we hadn’t eaten, until I explained that my wife was ill and told him to keep the rest of the tequila for himself. We drove back down the cobbled street past the loud bars, and a barefoot Indian child in ragged clothes ran along beside my window with his hand outstretched. The two policemen in front of the whorehouse were helping a drunk American in a business suit from his automobile. He leaned against a stone pillar, his face bloated and white with alcohol under the Carta Blanca sign, and gave each of them a bill from his wallet. I shuddered with the recollection of stepping unsteadily out of taxicabs on similar streets and walking through other garish doorways under the slick eyes of uniformed pimps, and I wondered if my face had looked as terrible as the man’s under the neon sign. I accelerated the Cadillac past the last cantinas and turned back onto the dark highway. The moon broke apart in the branches of the tall cedar trees sweeping by me.

“Why did you say we were almost home free?” she said.

Damn you, Hack.

“I thought I could have him out with some more time.” I kept my eyes on the highway and didn’t look at her when I spoke. “It’s one of those things you can’t tell about. You do everything you can and wait for the court to act.”

I could hear her breathing in the dark.

“It could have gone in the other direction,” I said.

“Oh, Hack,” she said, and put her face against my chest with her hands clenched around my arm. Her tears wet the front of my shirt, and she held on to me tighter each time she tried to stop crying. I pulled her close into me and rubbed the back of her neck and her curly hair; her forehead felt feverish against my cheek and she trembled inside my arm like a frightened girl. I could smell the sun in her hair and the raw tequila on her breath, and I wanted to pull onto the side of the road and press her inside me.

Her face was as white and smooth as alabaster in the light from the dashboard, and when she had stopped crying and tried to sit up straight I held her close against me and pushed my fingers up through her hair. Her eyes were closed, her breasts stopped rising, and I felt the muscles in her back tense once more and then go loose under my palm. She breathed slowly into my neck, and by the time we reached the border she was asleep.

I rolled across the bridge over the Rio Grande, and an immigration official in a Stetson hat looked once at my Texas Bar Association card and waved me through. The hot night air was sweet with the ripe citrus and watermelon, and there was just a taste of salt in the wind from the Gulf. The moon had risen high above the hills now, and a strip of black storm cloud hung off of one yellow horn. I drove slowly over the ruts and chuckholes through the Mexican and Negro district and parked along the broken fence in front of the union headquarters. The light was still on in the front room, and a man was silhouetted behind the screen door with a bottle in his hand. I eased my arm from behind Rie’s neck and rested her head against the seat. Her eyelashes were still damp, her cool face caught the softness of the moon, and when she parted her lips slightly in her sleep I felt the blood sink in my heart. I leaned over and kissed her lightly on the mouth. The screen door slammed, and the Negro walked out on the porch. I went around to the other side of the car and picked Rie up carefully in my arms and carried her up the front path. Her eyes opened momentarily, then shut again, and she turned her face into my neck. The Negro held the door back for me, and I laid her down on the bed in the back room and switched on the electric fan. Her hair moved on the pillow in the breeze, and the alabaster color of her face was even more pale and cold in the half-light. I heard the Negro opening two bottles of beer in the front room, and I closed the door behind me and went back through the hallway.

“Sometimes people got to get high and boil it out,” the Negro said. He put a bottle of Jax in my hand.

“I’ll get some vitamin B and aspirin out of my car. Give it to her if she wakes up before you go to bed.”

“I been on that spodiodi route a long time, man. You ain’t got to tell me how to fight it.”

“I guess we went to the same school.”

“There you go,” he said. “Look, I’m glad you taken her out tonight. Some dudes come by and wanted to give us some shit. For a minute I thought they was really going to get it on.”

“What happened?”

“A couple of carloads of young studs come down the street throwing firecrackers at the houses. Then they parked out front, drinking wine and rolling them cherry bombs up on the porch. I figured they’d get tired of it after a while, but three of them come up to the door and said they wanted to skin out a nigger. Yeah, they said they ain’t hung a nigger up on a skinning hook in a long time. They was blowing wine in my face, and I could smell lynch all over them, just like piss on fire. One of them started to pull open the door, and then a dude in the car blew the horn and hollered out, ‘Don’t waste it on a jig. Let’s find them hippie freaks.’ Two of them cut, but this stud with the door in his hand wanted a pair of black balls. If the Chicanos hadn’t started coming out of their houses, the shit would have gone right through the fan, and I’d be up for icing a white kid. Because I tell you, whiskey brother, I give up on the days of letting white people shove a two-by-four up my ass until the splinters are coming out of my mouth.”

I drank from the beer and looked at the Negro’s face. For the first time since I had met him I saw the hard glass quality in his eyes, the flicker of humiliation in them, the thin raised scar, now as colorless as plastic, on his