“You better get that chili off your mouth, then,” he said.
“Leave that man alone, J.R. You know a lawyer don’t have to eat pussy,” another said.
“This one does.”
The looming outline of the cannery and the rusted freight cars in silhouette against the light rain seemed to shrink and expand before my eyes. My knuckles whitened on the sign lath, and my breath caught in my throat.
“He might beat you to death with that cardboard, J.R.”
“Do you get to try some of these nigger girls?” the oil-field worker said.
My eyes watered and I felt myself leaping toward him before I had even moved or changed my line of vision, but several men behind him shouted and laughed at one time in a phlegmy roar, and he turned his wide back to me. Mojo had been sitting in the cab of the stake truck with his wine bottle until it was empty, and then had decided to join the picket. His shirt was unbuttoned to the waist, his socks were pulled down over his heels, and he walked toward the line as though his knees were connected with broken hinges. There was a patch of snuff on the corner of his lip, and the drops of rain slid over his cannonball head like streaks of black ivory. An unopened can of beer flew out of the crowd and hit him above the eye. He reeled backward, still standing, and pressed his hand like a fielder’s glove against his head, the blood dripping down from his dark palm. His uncovered eye was wide and rolling with pain and shock.
“Goddamn,” I said.
“Don’t, Hack,” Rie said.
“They hurt him bad.”
“Stay in the line,” she said.
Mojo bent forward and let the blood run down his forearm onto the ground, then he started walking toward us again as though he were holding a cracked flowerpot delicately in place. A man in khaki clothes with a green cloth cap on and a Lima watch fob in his pocket stepped into his path and kicked his feet out from under him. Mojo struck the ground headlong, and his
face was covered with strings of dust and blood.
“This is too goddamn much, Rie,” I said.
“Don’t get out of the line. They’ll kill him if you do,” she said.
He pushed himself up from the ground and stood erect, the ragged cut on his head already swelling like a baseball. The wind blew his shirt straight out from his body, and his chest heaved and his nostrils dilated when he breathed.
“You can bust me ’cause I’m winehead now, but you ain’t going to beat all these people,” he said. “They too many for you, and they’re going to stand all over this place when you all are long gone.”
The oil-field worker moved toward him, his buttocks flexing inside his blue jeans, but two deputy sheriffs walked up behind Mojo and led him away by each arm toward their automobile. Before they put handcuffs on him, they stripped off his shirt and wrapped it in a twisted knot around his head.
The car rolled off down the road, with Mojo in back behind the wire screen, his blood-soaked shirt like a dark smear against the closed glass.
The priest was next, and they had a special dislike for him as a Catholic clergyman. The man in the khaki clothes shook up a hot beer and sprayed it on him, and the oil-field worker put his hot breath in the priest’s face and insulted him with every whorehouse statement he could make. Several women had joined the crowd, and they rasped at him with their contorted faces, their eyes shrunken inward at some terrible anger, and then one spat on him. She was small and stunted, her thin arms were puckered and wrinkled at the armpits, and her electric hair was scraped back in a tangle over the thinning places on her head, but she gathered all the energy and juice in her wasted body and spat it in an ugly string over his chest.
He blinked his eyes against the spittle and obscenities, but he kept his face straight ahead, his big hands folded around the sign lath, and never broke his step in the line. His composure enraged the women to the point that they were shouting at him incoherently, their heads bent forward like snakes, the veins in their throats bursting against the skin. Then the deputy sheriff who had arrested me walked to the back of the crowd, put his hand on the oil-field worker’s shoulder, and motioned in my direction. Across the railway track I saw two large police vans with cage doors on the back turn off the county road into the cannery gate, and then the crowd came toward me.
Their faces were tight with anger, the lips dry, the eyes hot and receded in the head, as though their own rage had dried out all the fluids in their bodies. In the gloom and swirling patterns of rain their skin looked white and stretched over the bone. Lightning struck against the hills, and the wind was beginning to strip the cotton in the fields.
“We ain’t got a lot of time for you, lawyer. So you know what I’m going to do?” the oil-field worker said, and put a half plug of tobacco in his mouth. He pushed it into his jaw with his tongue and chewed it into pulp, then cleaned the juice off his lip with his finger. “I ain’t going to touch you with my hand. I’m just going to show you how we treat dipshit around here. Now, when you get tired of it, all you got to do is tear that sign up and walk to your car. There won’t nobody hurt you.”
“I’ll tell you something, motherfucker,” I said. “You spit on me and I’ll take your head off.”
The man in the khaki clothes with the green cap reached out with his fist, off balance, as though he were leaping at a departing train, and struck me in a downward swing across the nose. His ring peeled back the skin, and I felt the blood swell to the surface. I stared at them all stupidly, with the sign in my hands, while my eyes filmed and burned. The oil worker was grinning at me.
“You want to cut bait, dipshit?” he said.
The woman who had spat on the priest flicked a lighted cigarette at my face, then I was hit again, this time across the side of the head with something round and wooden. I felt it clack into the bone, and I tumbled sideways, the ocean roaring in my ears, and struck the ground on one knee and an elbow. My ear and the side of my head were on fire, and I looked up through the unshaved legs and denims stained with grease and cow manure and saw a thin, muscular boy of about nineteen with a freight-door pin in his hand. Somebody pulled my shirt loose from my trousers and poured beer down my spine. I felt a cigar burn into my neck, and a woman slapped wildly at my head with a shoe. I tried to raise my arms in front of me, but someone stepped on my hand and the man in khakis tripped in the crowd and fell across my back. I heard Rie’s voice shouting outside the circle of people around me, then the deputy sheriff pulled my head up by the shirt collar and started to raise me to my feet, but before he did he flicked out his knee, in a quick, deft motion, and caught me in the eye. Half my vision exploded in dark red and purple circles, and I pressed my hand into the socket as though I had a piece of sandpaper under the lid. But in the swimming distortion I could still see his khaki trousers stuffed inside his low-topped boots, and his cartridge belt and holster welded against his flat stomach and narrow hips. I rose on one knee and put all my strength into a left-handed swing from the ground and hit him in the stomach an inch above the belt. I felt the muscles collapse under my fist, just like you kick open a door unexpectedly. He bent double, his face white and his mouth open in a wide O, and his breath clicked drily in his throat. His eyes were drowning, and when he fell forward on his knees in the mud, a line of spittle on his cheek, the crowd stepped backward in silence as though someone had thrown an unacceptable icon at their feet.
Then the Rangers, the city police, and the sheriff’s department went to work. They arrested everybody in sight. They handcuffed my arms behind me while the television cameras whirred, gave artificial respiration to the deputy and strapped an oxygen mask to his face, pushed scores of people into the vans with nightsticks until there was no more room, commandeered the stake truck, and arrested the man with the camera on the loading platform by mistake. Two deputies led me by each arm to the van, squeezing tightly into my torn shirt, their faces like hard wax, and the television newsmen were still hard at work with their lenses zooming across my manacled hands and swollen face. The rain was coming down harder now, and the gravel road was covered with wet bolls of cotton and leaves stripped from the citrus orchards. The wind was rattling the tin roof on top of the cannery, and the ditches by the road were slick and brown on the sides with the runoff from the fields. I was the last man put in the second van. The deputies took the handcuffs off me, pushed me inside against the crowd of Mexicans and Negroes, and locked the wire cage doors. The engine started, and we bounced across the railway track and turned through the cannery gate onto the county road.
The men in the van balanced themselves against the walls and each other and rolled cigarettes, or poured Bull Durham tobacco from the pouch between their lip and gums. Somewhere in back a child was crying. I leaned against the cage door and watched the road shift in direction behind the van, while the wind shook the barbed wire on the fences and bent the weeds flat along the irrigation ditches, and then I heard Rie’s voice way back in the crush of people. She pressed her way out between several Mexican men, who raised their arms in the air in order to let her pass, and her face and eyes made my heart drop. She put her arm in mine and touched her fingers lightly against the swollen place on my head, then pulled my arm close against her breast and kissed me on the cheek.
“I was very proud of you, Hack,” she said.