Lay Down My Sword and Shield (Hackberry Holland 1)

“Hey, come in, world,” Rie said.

“The old man had rheumatic fever when he was a kid. All of the things he loved to do put his heart right in a vise.”

She touched the back of my hand with her fingers and looked quietly into my face. Her strands of sunburned hair were gold in the broken light through the cypress tree.

“All right, how about opening another beer?” I said.

“You’re a special kind of guy, Hack.”

“How did we get on this crap, anyway? Come on, girl. Get the beer open.”

“Okay, kemosabe.” Her eyes went flat, and she reached inside the sack of crushed ice.

“I mean, you’re hurting my badass identity.”

She worked the opener on the bottle cap without answering.

“Say, Rie. Come on.”

“You kick doors shut real hard,” she said.

“Look, I behave like a sonofabitch so often that sometimes I don’t think about who I’m talking to.”

“You don’t like anyone to get inside you, and maybe that’s cool, but you ought to hang out a sign for dumb chicks.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s a swell day and you’re still a piece of pie.”

I leaned over her and kissed her on the mouth. I felt her heavy breasts against me, and I slipped my arms under her back and kissed her forehead and her closed eyes and put my face in her hair. She breathed against my cheek and ran her hands under my shirt.

“Oh, Hack,” she said, and moved her whole body into me.

My blood raced and I could feel my heart clicking inside me. Each time I kissed her my head swam, my breath became short, and I felt myself dropping through her into the earth.

She hooked one leg behind mine and held me closer and ran her fingernails up my neck through my hair. When she moved her body against me the dark green of the trees and the summer haze on the river seemed to spin in circles around me.

“I felt you kiss me last night. I didn’t want you to stop,” she said. “All night I wanted to feel you around me.”

“My southern ethic wouldn’t let me take advantage of a bombed girl.”

“You have so many crazy things in your head, Lone Ranger.” She moved her lips over my cheek and bit me on the neck, and then I couldn’t stop it.

I put my hand under her shirt and felt her breasts. They swelled out each time she breathed and I could feel her heart beating under my palm. I unzippered her white shorts and touched her thighs and her flat stomach.

“I’m sorry for the woods. I should take you up the road, but you really got down inside me, babe,” I said.

She smiled and kissed me, and her almond eyes took on all the wonderful color and mysterious light that a woman’s eyes can have when they make you weak with just a glance.

That evening we drove back through the hills and the baked fields of string beans and corn, and stopped at a roadside restaurant and beer tavern north of Rio Grande City for Mexican food. On the broken horizon the sun was orange behind clouds that looked as though they had been burned purple. The sky seemed so vast and empty in its darkening light that my head became dizzy in looking at it.

We finished dinner and

drank bottles of Carta Blanca while two drunk cowboys played the jukebox and arm-wrestled with each other at the bar. We had chicory coffee, and I brought in my flask of Jack Daniel’s from the car and poured a shot into our cups. On the jukebox Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs rolled out a Blue Ridge song, in their mournful southern accents, of ancient American loves and distant mountain trains:

Each year is like some rolling freight train

And cold as starlight on the rails.