Lay Down My Sword and Shield (Hackberry Holland 1)

lower lip. His gleaming head was covered with drops of perspiration, and the lumps of cartilage behind his ears pulsed as though he were chewing angrily on something down inside himself.

“What the hell are you doing here, anyway?” I said.

“I got a bad habit, man. I picked it up in the army digging latrines all over Europe for sweet pink assholes. I figure a yard of white shit went into the ground for every shovelful of dirt I turned. When I got out I decided I paid my dues to Mr. Charlie’s bathroom and I ain’t applying at the back door no more for my mop and pail. You know what I mean, man?”

He licked his tongue over his bottom lip, and the scar glistened like a piece of glass. For the second time that day I felt I had nothing to say. Outside, the cicadas were singing in the stillness. I finished my beer and left him at the table, lighting one of my cigars.

I didn’t believe that I would be welcome again at the rooming house, so I drove thirty miles to the next town on the river and checked into a motel. I lay on the bed in the air-conditioned darkness with my arm over my eyes, and each time that I almost made it into sleep, broken images and voices would click together in my mind like the edges of a splintered windowpane, and I would be awake again with the veins drawing tight against my scalp. The highway rolled toward me out of the twilight, then the bush axes were raised high in the air once more, glinting redly in the gloom of the toolhouse, and a Chinese private leaned his face down to the sewer grate and spat a long stream of yellow saliva on my head. I sat on the edge of the bed in my underwear and drank half the bottle of Jack Daniel’s before I fell asleep in the deep whiskey quiet of my own breathing.

The next morning I dressed in a pair of khakis, my old cowboy boots, and a denim shirt (all of which I carried in a suitcase that always stayed in the trunk of the Cadillac), had my hangover breakfast of a steak with a fried egg on top and a slow cup of coffee and a cigar, then started down the road for Pueblo Verde. The sun was white on the horizon, and the washed-out blue sky hurt your eyes to look at it. The green of the citrus orchards, the fields of corn and cotton, and the sear hilltops floated in the humidity and heat. Watermelons lay fat in the rows, shimmering with light, and the cucumber vines were heavy with their own weight. Even with sunglasses on I had to squint against the glare. Hawks circled over the fields, and on some of the cedar fence posts farmers had nailed dead crows, salted and withered in the sun, to keep the live ones out of the corn. In the middle of an empty pasture, far from the roadside, a sun-faded billboard warned that THE COMING IS SOON, LISTEN TO BROTHER HAROLD’S NEW FAITH REVIVAL ON STATION XERF.

Outside Pueblo Verde I pulled into a clapboard country store shaded by a huge live oak. There was an old metal patent-medicine sign nailed to one wall, three pickup trucks parked on the gravel in front, and on the wood porch was a rusted Coca-Cola cooler with bottle caps spilling out of the opener box. The inside of the store was dark and cool and smelled of cheese and summer sausage and cracklings in quart jars. I bought a wicker picnic basket, a tablecloth, two bottles of California burgundy, some peppered German sausage, white cheese, a loaf of French bread, and six bottles of Jax pushed down in a bag of crushed ice. A small barefoot Negro boy, with blue jeans torn at the knees, helped me carry the sacks to the car. Then I turned back onto the highway into the white brilliance of the sun above the Rio Grande.

The high sidewalks in town were crowded with people, and the beer taverns and pool halls were filled with cowboys and cedar-cutters who had come into town to drink every piece of change in their blue jeans. I was always struck by the way that all small Texas towns looked alike on Saturday morning, whether you were in the Panhandle or the Piney Woods. The same battered cars and farm trucks were parked at an angle to the sidewalks; the same sun-browned old men spat their tobacco juice on the hot concrete; the young boys in crew cuts and Sears Roebuck straw hats with health and blond youth all over their faces stood on the street corners; and the girls with their hair in curlers and bandannas sat in the same cafés, drinking R.C. Cola and giggling about what Billy Bob or that crazy Lee Harper did at the drive-in movie last night.

I drove down the dusty street of the Mexican district with the lisping voice of a local hillbilly singer blaring from my radio:

I warned him once or twice

To stop playing cards and shooting dice.

Rie was sitting at the table in the front room of the union headquarters with a cup of coffee in her hand. She was barefoot and wore a pair of white shorts and a rumpled denim shirt, and her face was pale with hangover. I went through the screen door without knocking.

“Get in the car, woman. I’m going to do something for that Yankee mind of yours today,” I said.

“What?” She looked at me with her hair in her eyes.

“Dinner on the ground and devil in the bush, by God. Come on.”

“Hack, what are you talking about?” Her words were slow and carefully controlled, and I knew she really had one.

“I’m going to introduce you to my boyhood. Goddamn it, girl, get up and stop fooling around.”

“I don’t think I can do anything today.”

“Yes, you can. Never stay inside with a hangover. Charge out into the sunlight and do things you never did before.”

“How much did I drink?”

“You just did it with bad things in your mind.”

“I’m sorry about last night. I must have seemed like a real dumb chick.”

>“You could never be that.”

She smiled and pushed the hair out of her eyes.

“I’m sorry, anyway,” she said.

“Right now there’s a green river about seventy miles from here, and under a big gray limestone rock there’s an eight-pound bass with one of my flies hanging in his lip, and unless you get your ass up I’m going down the road by myself.”

“You’re a real piece of pie, Hack.”

“No, I ain’t. I’m shit and nails and all kinds of bad news. You ought to know that by this time. If you need any references you can contact my brother. I left him yesterday with his ulcer bulging out of his throat.”

She put her fingers to her forehead and laughed, and that wonderful merry flash of light came back into her eyes.

“I’ll be out in a minute. There’s some chicory coffee and corn bread on the stove,” she said.