Lay Down My Sword and Shield (Hackberry Holland 1)

“I’m afraid I screwed up your picket. That was an assault and battery caper I pulled off back there.”

She hugged my arm tighter against her breast, and the rain poured down on the fields and began to flatten the long, plowed rows even with the rest of the land, and in the distance I could see the citrus trees whipping and shredding in the dark wind.

CHAPTER 10

THE STREETS IN town were half-filled with water when the vans arrived at the courthouse. Beer cans and trash floated along next to the curb, and the lawn was strewn with broken branches and leaves from the oaks. The deputies, now wearing slickers and plastic covers on their hats, formed us into a long line, two abreast, while the rain beat in our faces, and marched us into the courthouse. The booking room was small, and it took them three hours to fingerprint everyone and sort out the shoelaces, belts, pocket change, and wallets into brown envelopes. Most of the charges were for trespassing or failure to keep fifty feet apart on a picket line, but after the deputy had rolled my fingers on the ink pad the sheriff filled out my charge sheet personally and he wrote for five minutes. I dripped water onto the floor and looked at his steel-rimmed glasses and the red knots and bumps on his face. His fingers were pinched white on the pencil, and toward the bottom of the page he pressed down so hard that he punctured the paper.

Then he picked up a cigarette from the desk and lit it.

“You want to hear them?” he said.

“I bet you have a whole bunch,” I said.

“Assault and battery on a law officer, obstructing an officer in the line of duty, resisting arrest, inciting to riot, and I’m holding a couple of charges open. You ain’t going to get this shifted to no federal court, either. You’re going to be tried right here in this county, and maybe you’ll find out a lawyer’s shit stinks like everybody else’s.”

“I have a phone call coming.”

“It’s out of order.”

“It rang five minutes ago.”

“Take him downstairs,” he said to the trusty.

I was locked in the drunk tank at the end of the stone corridor in the basement. The room was crowded with men, wringing out their clothes on the concrete floor. Their dark bodies shone in the dim light. There were two toilets crusted with filth, without seats, in the corner, and the drunks who had been arrested during the weekend still reeked of sour beer and muscatel. Through the bars I could see the screened cage where I had talked with Art, and the row of cells with the food slits in the iron doors. The stone walls glistened with moisture, and the smoke from hand-rolled cigarettes gathered in a thick haze on the ceiling. An old man in Jockey undershorts, with shriveled skin like lined putty, walked to the toilet and began retching.

Rie had been put with the other women into a second holding room on the other side of the wall. Someone had drilled a small hole in the mortar between the stones, and a Mexican man had his face pressed tightly against the wall, talking to his wife, while a line of other men waited their turn behi

nd him. I wanted to talk with Rie badly, but the line grew longer, and often in the confusion of names and voices the two right people could never get on the opposite sides of the hole at the same time. Twice during the afternoon a deputy, dripping water from his slicker, brought in another prisoner, and each time the door clanged open a tough, bare-chested kid, who was waiting to do a six-year jolt in Huntsville, shouted out from the back of the room, “Fresh meat!” At five o’clock the trusty wheeled in the food cart with our tin plates of spaghetti, string beans, bread, and cups of Kool-Aid, and after the group of men had thinned away from the wall I tried to talk through the hole to a Mexican woman on the other side, but she couldn’t understand English or my bad Spanish, and I gave up.

That night I dragged my tick mattress against the door and lay with my face turned toward the bars to breathe as much air as I could out of the corridor and avoid the odor of the open toilets and the sweet, heavy smell of perspiration. I had one damp cigar left, and I smoked it on my side and looked at the row of gray iron doors set in the rock. Mojo was in lockdown behind one of them, and once I thought I saw the flash of his black face through a food slit. I had never been more tired. I was used up physically the way you are after you’ve thrown every pitch you have in a ten-inning game. There was a raised water blister on my neck from the cigar burn, and a swollen ridge across the side of my head, like a strip of bone, where the boy had caught me with the freight pin. I fell asleep with the dead cigar in my hand, and I slept through until morning without having one dream or even a half-conscious, nocturnal awareness of where I was, as though I had been lowered through the stone into some dark underground river.

I heard the trusty click the food cart against the bars and throw the big lock on the door. The fried baloney, grits, and coffee steamed from the stainless-steel containers, and the men were rising from their tick mattresses, hawking, spitting, and relieving themselves in the toilets, or washing their spoons under the water tap before they formed into line. I had to move my mattress for the trusty to push the cart inside, and when I stood up I realized that I felt as rested and solid as a man in his prime. But it took me a moment to believe the man I saw walking down the stone corridor with the sheriff by his side. He wore yellow waxed cowboy boots, a dark striped western suit, with a watch chain hooked on his handtooled belt, a bolo tie, a cowboy shirt with snap buttons on the pockets, and a short-brim Stetson hat on the back of his head. He didn’t have an undershirt on, and I could see the hair on his swollen stomach above his belt buckle, and his round face was as powdered and smooth as a baby’s. There wasn’t another man in Texas who dressed like that. It was R. C. Richardson, all right.

“Hack, have you lost your goddamn mind? What the hell are you doing in here?” he said, in his flat, east Texas, Piney Woods accent.

“R.C., you old sonofabitch,” I said.

“I was down here buying leases, and I come back to the motel last night and turned on the television, and I couldn’t believe it. What you trying to do to yourself, boy?”

“Get a bondsman, R. C.”

“I already done that. I got his ass out of bed at midnight, but he wouldn’t come till this morning. Do you know the bail they set on you? Ten thousand dollars. I swear to God if you ain’t a pistol, Hack.”

“I tell you, Mr. Richardson,” the sheriff said, “if you go this man’s bond, you’re also going to be responsible for him, because I don’t want to see him again.”

“Well, I guarantee you he won’t be no trouble,” R.C. said. “We might shoot on across the border this afternoon and try the chili, then go on back to DeWitt.”

“R.C., are you going to turn the key on me or just drip water on the floor?” I said.

“Hold on, son. That man will be here in a minute,” he said. “I told him I’d put a boot up his ass if he wasn’t here five minutes after I walked through that door.”

“Bail the rest of them out, too,” I said.

“You know that brother of yours is right. The whiskey’s getting up in your brain.”

“R.C., how many years have I kept you out of prison?”

“Goddamn, how much money do you think I carry around with me?”