“All right, but when do we finish this?”
“We’ve only been on the picket ten minutes, babe.”
Then I saw a television news car pull into the gravel bedding by the railway track. Two young men got out with cameras attached to half-moon braces that fitted against the shoulder. They walked over to the group of law officers by the squad cars, their faces full of confident foreknowledge about their story, and for the first time it struck me that I had never seen a newsman begin a story any differently; without thinking, they went first to the official source before they considered the people on the other end of the equation.
One of them walked toward the picket and did a sweeping, random shot with his camera, the brace pulled tight against his shoulder. Then he lowered the camera and looked at me steadily, his face as bland and unembarrassed as a dough pan. I threw my cigar away and looked back at him with my meanest southpaw ninth-inning expression. He walked back to his friend and began talking, and the two of them stared in my direction.
“I believe a couple of kids just earned a pay raise,” I said.
“I bet you’re handsome on film,” Rie said.
“Well, here they come. You want to do my P.R. work?”
One of them already had his camera whirring before they were close enough to speak. They had forgotten the cops and the long line of migrant workers; they were both concentrated on the little piece of entrail they might carry back to the station.
“Are you widening your district, Mr. Holland?” His voice was good-natured, and he smiled at me in his best college fraternity fashion.
“No, no,” I said, in my best humorous fashion.
“Do you think your support of the union will affect your election?” He held the microphone toward me, but his eyes were looking at Rie.
“I couldn’t tell you that, buddy.”
“The farm corporations consider this an illegal strike. Do you have a comment on that?”
“I don’t know how it can be illegal to ask for a higher wage.”
“Does the union plan a strike in your area?” He was cocking the rifle now, but his face looked as sincerely inquisitive as a reverent schoolboy’s.
“Not that I know of.”
“Does that mean the conditions of the migrant farm-workers are better in your area?”
“No, it doesn’t,” I said. “But I tell you what, buddy. I need a cigar real bad right now, and it’s hell lighting up in this wind with one hand. So how about holding this sign for a minute, and I can get one of these awful things lit and we can talk all day. That’s right, just take it in your hand and fold your fingers around the stick.”
His face went blank, the lath straining in his palm, and his eyes flicked at his partner and the cops by the railway track. I used three matches to light my cigar while he blinked against the raindrops and shifted his feet in the dust.
“I appreciate that,” I said. “Say, did you interview any of those fellows over by the freight car? I bet that bunch of boys would give you some deathless lines.”
“We just do a job, Mr. Holland.”
“I bet you’ll get there with it, too,” I said.
“Would you like to say something else, sir?” His face was mean now, the eyes dirty.
“You’ve got a whole reel of good stuff there, pal.”
He turned away from me and put the microphone in front of Rie. The sky was almost completely dark, except for the thin line of yellow light on the distant hills. His partner moved around behind him so the lens would catch me in the same shot with Rie.
“Do you think the families in the farm camps will suffer because of the strike?”
“Why don’t you fuck off, man?” Rie said.
Then one of the men by the freight car threw an empty beer can at the picket line. It missed a Negro woman’s head and clattered across the loading platform. The two newsmen backed away from us with their cameras turning. A moment later three more carloads of townspeople arrived and swelled into the group by the freight car, and then one man stepped out from them and started walking toward us, and the rest followed. He wore a tin construction hat back on his shaved head, steel-toed work boots, and denim clothes that were splattered with drilling mud from an oil rig. His eyes had a wet, yellow cast to them, and his front teeth were brown with chewing tobacco. His scrotum bulged in his blue jeans between his heavy thighs, and he stretched out his huge arms, his hands in fists, as though he were just awakening from sleep, and spat a stream of tobacco juice in the dirt.
“Hey, buddy,” he said to me. “Do you eat Mexican pussy?”
I looked straight ahead, my face burning.