“Well, sir, we should be gone in a few minutes,” I said.
“You better get your luck off that porch and haul it down the road a lot faster than that.”
I opened the door again, hard, so that it hit him sharply in the knees and stomach, and looked into his face.
“You’re about two remarks ahead of the game right now, podner,” I said. “Say anything more and you’re going to have problems that you never thought about. Also, if you have any plans about using that baseball bat, you’d better find an apple box to stand on first.”
His red face was caught between angry insult and fear, and the sweat glistened in his brows over his lead-gray eyes.
“You’re trespassing, and I’m putting in a call to the sheriff’s office,” he said, and walked away in the dust toward his trailer.
Rie got back in the car. I closed the windows and turned on the air conditioner as high as it would go, and we rolled out the front gate and headed down the county road toward town. There were buzzards drifting high in the sky on the wind stream, and the sun burned white as a chemical flame. The rocks and alkali dust on the road roared away under the Cadillac.
“Say, take it easy, Lone Ranger,” Rie said.
“I’ve been easy all my life. One of these days I’m going to blow all my Kool-Aid and rearrange a guy like that for a long time.”
She put her hand on my arm. “That’s not your kind of scene, Hack.”
“I’m up to my eyes with rednecks that come on with baseball bats.”
“Hey, man, you’re not acting like a good con man at all. What did he say?”
“Nothing. He’s defending the soda-pop people.”
“He clicked a couple of bad tumblers over in your brain about something.”
“I burn out a tube once in a while with the chewing-tobacco account. Forget it.”
“I heard him say something about getting your luck off the porch. Was that it?”
“Look, Rie, I was raised by a strange southern man who believed that any kind of anger was a violation of some aristocratic principle. So I turn the burner down every time it starts to flare, and sometimes I get left with a broken handle in my hand.”
“What did he mean?”
The air conditioner was dripping moisture.
“A guy like that doesn’t mean anything,” I said. “The words just spill out of a junk box in his head.”
“Talk straight, Hack.”
“It’s a racial remark.”
“Is it important to you?”
I felt my heart quicken, because we both knew now why he had gotten inside me.
“All right, I lived around that shit all my life, and maybe I’m not as far removed from it as I thought. If I was a cool city attorney with liberal tattooed on my forehead I would have yawned and rolled up the window on him. But I never could deal with people abstractly, and he stuck his finger in the wrong place.”
The perspiration on my face felt cold in the jet of air from the dashboard. I looked straight ahead at the white road and waited for her to speak. Instead, she slipped close to me and kissed me behind the ear.
“You great goddamn woman,” I said, and hit the road shoulder in a spray of rocks when I pulled her to me.
“Let’s go back to the house,” she said, and put her hand under my shirt and rubbed her fingers along my belt line.
“What about those college kids and the Negro?”
“I already asked them to do something else this afternoon.”