“Enough to buy this county and a couple of others.”
“Hack, I can’t do that. There must be fifty people in there.”
“There’s more in the next room,” I said.
“And they’ll be spread all over Mexico when they’re supposed to be in court.”
“Will you stop screwing around and just do it?”
“If you ain’t a pistol, the craziest goddamn man I ever met. All right, but I’m going to send your brother a bill for a change, and it’s going to bust his eyeballs.”
“Good, and give me a cigar while you’re at it.”
The bondsman arrived, and R.C. wrote out a check on the stone wall for the whole amount. The bondsman, a small man with greed and suspicion stamped in his face, thought he was either drunk or insane. He held the check between his fingers with the ink still drying and looked at R.C. incredulously.
“Call the First National Bank in Dallas collect and use my name,” R.C. said, “or I’ll find me another man right fast.”
We had to wait ten minutes, then the sheriff opened the doors to both holding rooms and the corridor was filled with people, laughing and talking in Spanish. A deputy unlocked one of the cells set back in the wall, and Mojo stepped out barefoot in the light, blinking his red eyes, with his stringless shoes in his hands.
“What happened?” he said. “The Man get tired of us already?”
A Mexican man put his arm around Mojo’s shoulders and pulled him into the crowd walking toward the stairwell. The Mexican spoke no English, but he pointed his thumb into his mouth in a drinking motion.
“There you go, brother,” Mojo said.
The sheriff glared at us all, the red knots on his face tight against the skin.
I came up behind Rie and slipped my arm around her waist, and kissed the cool smoothness of her cheek. She turned her face up to me and I kissed her again and ran my hand through her hair.
“How did you do it, babe?” she said.
“I want you to meet R. C. Richardson,” I said.
R.C. lifted off his Stetson with a slow, exact motion and let it rest against his pants leg, and bent forward with a slight bow and his best look of southern deference to womanhood on his face. He pulled in his stomach and stiffened his shoulders, and for just a moment you didn’t notice the bolo tie and the yellow cowboy boots.
“I’m proud to meet you, miss,” he said.
“Rie Velasquez,” she said, and her eyes smiled at him.
“I was just telling Hack I didn’t have time to eat breakfast this morning, so why don’t we go across the street to the café and see if we can get a steak?”
His eyes were looking over Rie’s face, and I knew that it took everything in him to prevent them from going further. He stepped aside and let us walk in front of him as we followed the crowd upstairs. R.C. was about to begin one of his performances. He had several roles, and he did each of them well: good-natured oilman when he was buying leases; humble Kiwanian and patriot; friend-of-the-boys with a wallet full of unlisted telephone numbers. But now he was a gentleman rancher, somebody’s father, an older friend with his fingers on all the right buttons when you were in trouble. We had to wait for the deputy to find the brown envelopes with our wallets, change, and belts in them. He was young and evidently new to his job, and he had difficulty reading the handwriting of the people who had booked us.
“Snap it up, boy,” R.C. said. “We don’t want to grow no older in this place.”
“R.C., we still have about seventy-five feet to go to the door,” I said.
“You either do a job or you don’t,” he said. “That’s what’s wrong all over this country. Like that little bondsman back there. He don’t spit without sitting down and thinking about it first.”
We signed for our possessions, and R.C. slipped his sli
cker over Rie’s shoulders. It was still raining hard outside. It came down in curving sheets that swept across the flooded courthouse lawn. Some of the oaks were almost bare, and the leaves floated up against the trunks in islands. Cars and trucks were stalled in the street, the headlight beams weak in the driving rain, and somewhere a horn was stuck and blowing. The neon sign over the café and tavern looked like colored smoke in the wet, diffused light.
R.C. opened up a big umbrella over our heads, and we splashed down the sidewalk toward the café. The air smelled clean and cool, and even the rain, slanting under the umbrella and burning against the skin, felt like an absolution after the day and night in jail. There’s no smell exactly like that of a jail, and when you can leave it behind you and walk out into a rainstorm you feel that the other experience was never really there.
The water in the street was up to our knees, and R.C. held Rie by one arm and covered our heads with the umbrella while exposing his own. The rain sluiced off the brim of his pearl-gray Stetson, his western suit was drenched, his shirt had popped open more above his belt, and his stomach winked out like a roll of wet dough. He was an old crook and a lecher, but I liked him in a strange way—maybe because he had no malice toward anyone, and even in his dishonesty he was faithful to the corrupt system that he served, and his buffoonery lent a little humor to it. Possibly that’s an odd reason to like someone, but I had known much worse men in the oil business than R. C. Richardson.
He opened the door for us, and we went inside with the rain swirling through the screen. Men in cowboy boots and blue jeans were drinking bottles of Pearl and Jax at the counter, a Negro was racking pool balls in back under an electric bulb with a tin shade around it, and the jukebox, with cracks all over the plastic casing, was playing a lament about lost women and the wild side of life. R.C. took off Rie’s slicker and held the chair for her at one of the tables with oilcloth covers tacked around the sides. In his politeness he was awkward, like a man who had been put together with bad hinges, but it was seldom that he was called upon to show manners above those practiced in the Dallas Petroleum Club.