Lay Down My Sword and Shield (Hackberry Holland 1)

But he was already off the phone.

“Hack?” Verisa said.

“Yeah.” I closed my eyes against her voice.

“I’m not going to say much to you. I warned you in Houston what I’d do if you blew this for us. I’ve got enough to go into court and win almost all of it. I’ll take the house, the land, and the controlling share of the wells, and you can start over again with your alcoholic law practice.”

I took a breath and waited a moment on that one.

“I should have called you, but I didn’t have time,” I said, evenly. “I thought Bailey would tell you why I had to leave.”

“Oh, my God.”

I started to answer, and instead looked out at the dancers on the floor.

“Why should he have to tell me anything?” she said. “You seem to have a strange idea that Bailey should take care of all your unpleasant marital obligations. He was embarrassed enough apologizing for you last night.”

“Well, I’m a little worn out with people selling me by the pound and then telling me how embarrassed they are for me. And it also strikes me that nobody was ever concerned if I was called out of town by a paying client. Maybe some people wouldn’t get their ovaries so dilated if I was on another case besides a Mexican farmworker’s.”

I heard her breath in the phone, and then, “You bastard.”

I hung up the receiver softly and walked back outside into the sunlight. The road was blinding in the heat, and the noise from the jukebox and Verisa’s voice were still loud in my head. I lit a cigar, sweating, and imagined the stunted rage she was now in. Poor old Bailey, I thought. He would stay at the house the rest of the evening, talking quietly to her while her eyes burned at the wall, and then he would begin to consider all the side streets they could use for my election in November, regardless of what I did in the meantime. He would drink cups of caffeine-free coffee with his ulcer pills, flicking over the alternatives in his mind, and soon he would forget that Verisa was in the room. Or maybe the Senator would phone again, and both of their faces would focus anxiously, their eyes reflecting into one another across the kitchen table, while Bailey’s voice measured out his assurances about my sincerity in the campaign and my deep regret that I wasn’t able to be with the Kiwanians (or whatever) last night. Then they would both wonder if we would ever get to that marble and green island of power where you carried a small, stamped gold key in your watch pocket.

Rie was sitting on the front steps with her back against the porch railing and one leg drawn up before her. She had changed into a pair of faded navy ducks, with the laces on the back, and a rose-flowered silk shirt, and in the shade she looked as cool and beautiful as a piece of dark sculpture. There was an unopened can of Lone Star and a tall, cone glass by her foot. My shirt stuck wetly to my shoulders, and my sunglasses were filmed with perspiration.

“You look like Tom Joad beating his way out of the Dust Bowl,” she said. “You’d better have one of these.”

I sat down beside her and opened the can of beer. The tin was cold against my hand, and the foam rushed up in the glass and streamed over the lip. I took my glasses off and wiped the perspiration and dust out of my eyes, but I avoided looking at her face. There was a broken anthill by the edge of the path, with a deep boot print in one side, and thousands of ants were moving over one another in a hot swarm.

“Was everything cool back there?” she said.

“Yeah.” I drank out of the beer—and squinted my eyes into the bright light. “I’m going to give Bailey a frontal lobotomy team for Christmas. Or a can of alum to drink. He has a remarkable talent for calling up everything bad in a person within seconds.”

I heard her take her cigarettes out of her shirt pocket and rip back the cover.

“He’s not a bad guy. He’s just so goddamn obtuse sometimes.”

“Hack, I’m not pressing you.”

“Then who the hell is?”

“I don’t care what you belong to outside of here.”

I looked at her quiet, beautiful face in the shade.

“I love to be a part of your Saturday morning fishing world and your crazy Indian graves,” she said. “I’d never ask you about anything back there in Austin.”

I took the cigarette from her hand and drew in on the smoke. The trees in the dirt yards along the street were still and green in the heat.

“I put the wine on a block of ice,” she said.

“Maybe we had better drink that, then,” I said. “What do you think, good-looking?”

She smiled at me with her eyes full of light again, and we walked into the back of the house and opened the tall, dark bottle of cold duck. I chipped off a bowlful of ice from the block in the top of the cooler and set it in front of the fan in the bedroom so the wind stream would blow cool across the bed. The sun burned yellow against the window shade, and across the river in Mexico a calf stuck in the mudflat was bawling for its mother. Rie undressed in the half-light and put her arms around my shoulders, and I pressed my face into her neck and felt her smooth stomach and breasts curve against me.

That evening we drove over to the Gulf in the fading, lilac twilight, and just before the highway turned out of the citrus fields onto the coast we could smell the salt in the air and the dead seaweed at the edge of the surf. The water was slate-green, and the whitecaps crashed against the sand and boiled in deep pools, and then sucked out again with the undertow. Brown pelicans and seagulls, like fat white cigars, dipped out of the sky over the water, picking small fish from the crest of the waves with their beaks, and in the distance we could see the gas flares and strings of lights on offshore oil rigs and quarter boats. The red sun was as big as a planet on the horizon, and the light broke across the water in long bands of scarlet. The stretch of brown beach and the palm trees were covered with a dark, crimson glow, and then the sun moved deeper into the Gulf, with a strip of black cloud across its flaming edge, and the moon began to rise behind us over the land.

I bought another bottle of cold duck and some chicken sandwiches in a restaurant, and a Mexican family camped on the beach sold us two salt-water cane poles with treble hooks and a carton of live shrimp. The sand was still warm from the sun, and we sat behind a dune out of the wind and ate the sandwiches and drank half the bottle of wine, then I baited the three-pronged hooks with the shrimp, slipped the lead sinkers close to the bottom of the line, and waded with Rie into the surf to fish the bottom for catfish and flounder. The tide began to come in, and the waves broke across the rotted wooden pilings in the jetties, and when the wind shifted across the water we could smell the dead shellfish and baked scales and salt in the pilings. Rie held her cane pole under her arm, with both hands raised in front of her, while the waves swelled against her breasts. The water was splintered with moonlight, and the salt spray in her hair looked like drops of crystal. Then the tip of her pole arched into the water and went all the way to the bottom.