But he had forgotten the machine gun mounted on the flatcar behind the engineer’s cab. He was abreast of the locomotive, and while he looked into the terrified face of the engineer through the square iron cab window and tried to swivel backward in the saddle, he knew that it was simply too late. The man on the machine gun had turned the barrel right at him and was hammering up the elevation with his fist, his face like a twisted monkey’s paw under his cap. Hack tried to extend the Winchester with one hand at a backward angle and fire at him; but it was a comic gesture, he thought, even as the Lewis gun’s barrel flashed at him out of the sunlight, a waving of a silly wand in front of eternity.
He heard the bullets thunk into the rib cage of the Appaloosa, then the horse’s weight went out from under him as though it had been hit between the ears with a sledge. Hack landed on the tall poppies, the reins still tangled around his fist, and felt the hot back draft of the train blow over him. Blue coils of entrail pressed out the stitched wound in his horse’s side. He flung the reins from his hand and ran after the flatcar, heedless of the bullets crisscrossing through the air around him, and emptied the cylinder of his single-action Colt .45 at the machine gunner. He was firing too fast, and the recoil brought the rounds high, each of them whanging into the iron plate of the engineer’s cab. His hammer snapped on a spent shell casing, and he stared after the receding face of the machine gunner.
Remember what I look like, you son of a bitch, he thought, because I’ll be back to get you.
Then he felt his coat jump and saw a neat horizontal tear along the cloth.
Get up, Hack.
It was the captain, and he was having trouble sawing the bit back in the sorrel’s teeth. The horse’s neck was covered with foam, and there was a green froth at its mouth.
“Forget that goddamn Mexican. Swing up behind me. You hear me?”
The captain pulled his boot out of one stirrup, and Hack grabbed the back of the saddle and swung his weight up on the sorrel’s rump. The last of the wooden cars clicked away past them, and in the sudden quiet and the sweep of the wind through the dry poppies, Hack looked back down the track at the small, brown men strewn along the embankment.
The next night back in Juarez they drank and whored until dawn. The girls came to him in succession all during the night and mounted him on the down mattress, his pistols hung on the brass bedstead, holding his sex tightly between their hands before they pressed it inside, as though they drew some power themselves from the blood of their own kind that he had spilled that day. There was a bottle of tequila and a saucer of salt and red peppers and sliced limes on the night table next to his head, and each time he finished with one girl he took another drink, with a bite of pepper in his teeth and a salted lime for a chaser, and he felt the heat swell up through his erection again.
“Get up, Hack. They’re going to cut the cake,” his daughter Bonnie was saying.
He saw the green river again in the afternoon haze and the soft hills that looked like women’s breasts.
The cake was covered with white lace and candy roses, and his name, Hackberry Holland, and the numbers nine and four were written on top in pink icing. Someone had placed nine and then four candles on each number. They sat him in the chair at the head of the table, from where he could see his face reflected in the mahogany-framed mirror on the dining-room wall. In the glow of pink candles he didn’t recognize the face, the white hair that stuck out from under the Stetson, the toothless mouth that made his lips a crooked line, the incongruous baby quality of the skin against the white whiskers.
“I’ll blow them out for you, Grandpa,” Bonnie said.
“Where’s little Hack? Where’s Satchel-ass at?” he said.
“He’s in the service now, Hack,” his son Jack said.
“Why ain’t he here?”
“He’s fighting in the war in Korea, Grandpa,” Bonnie said.
“He’s got more sense than all of you.” For just a moment he saw his grandson, barefoot in his overalls, following the mule sled through the rows of tomato plants, picking the blood drops out of the leaves and dropping them into the baskets, the sun hot on his freckled shoulders.
“I gave him that name Satchel-ass,” he said. “He looked just like a nigra washwoman bent over in the row.”
But they weren’t listening to him now. They were drinking bottles of Lone Star and Pearl and talking loudly about things the way younger people did, as though no one had lived them before. Someone put a piece of cake on a paper plate with a fork in front of him. A burned candle lay flat in the icing.
“Give me my whiskey.”
“One glass,” his daughter said.
“Bonnie,” Jack said.
“Let him have a glass, for God’s sake,” she said.
He saw her pour out of the Jack Daniel’s bottle into the cup in front of him. The whiskey shimmered with brown light in the sun’s glare through the window. He raised the cup with both hands and felt the bourbon spilling over his mouth onto his shirtfront, clicking over his tongue, burning through his throat. His eyes blinked slowly like a bird’s when the heat hit his stomach and ticked with a sharp fingernail at his loins. His hand went out toward the warm, amber light inside the bottle.
“Tomorrow, Hack,” Jack said.
“That’s right, Grandpa,” his son-in-law said, squatting by his chair. “Bonnie and I are spending the weekend, and I want you to tell the story about locking Wesley Hardin in jail. I brought the tape recorder and a nip for both of us.”
“You have the face of an idiot,” Hack said.
He wasn’t sure whether he fell asleep on the porch again or in his bed in the side room. Wakefulness came to him once during the middle of the night when he urinated into the metal pan he held between his naked thighs, and while the drops congealed between his fingers and the pin-oak tree bent outside in the wind, he slipped into a dream as bright and clearly etched in its sequence as a lucifer match touching a candle.
He and his grandson little Hack stood in the ruins of the old county jail. The ceiling and one of the adobe walls had collapsed, the roofing timbers hung down like broken teeth, and there were broken bottles and used condoms in the corners. The little boy ran his fingers over the worn, nail-scratched inscription on the wall: WES HARDIN WILL KILL HACKBERRY HOLLAND FOR NIGGER MEAT.
“Is that where you chained him up, Grandpa?”
“Yes, but Wes didn’t write that. He didn’t send a message when he shot somebody. He just come at you with his pistol already out.”
He looked into his grandson’s face and saw his own face there, and before the boy could ask, he told the story again about how he had put the most dangerous man in Texas in jail. When Hack was sheriff and justice of the peace, he had put out word for John Wesley Hardin never to come into DeWitt County again. A week later Hardin rode drunk all night from San Antonio and came into the lot just at sunrise, his black suit streaked with sweat and mud and whiskey. He had a navy Colt revolver propped on his thigh and a shotgun tied down to the saddle. He drilled five rounds from the pistol into one of the wood columns on the front porch, cocking and firing, while his horse reared and sawed against the bit.
“Get out here, Hack, and I’ll give you a rose petal between the eyes!”
But Hack was in the barn with one of his mares that was in foal, and he waited until Hardin’s pistol snapped on an empty chamber, then stepped into the lot with the Winchester that he always kept in the leather scabbard nailed inside the barn door.
“You goddamn son of a bitch,” he said. “Start to untie that shotgun and I’ll put a new asshole in the middle of your face.”
Hardin laid his pistol against his knee and turned his horse in a half circle.
“You come up behind me, do you?” he said. “Get your pistol and let me reload and I’ll pay them nigger deputies for burying you.”
“I told you not to come back to DeWitt. Now you shot up my house and probably run off half my Mexicans. I’m going to put you in jail and wrap
chains all over you, then I’m taking you into my court for attempted assault on a law officer. Move off that horse.”
Hardin looked back at him steadily with his killer’s eyes, then brought his boots out of the stirrups, slashed his spurs into the horse’s sides, and bent low over the neck with his fingers tangled in the mane as the horse charged for the front gate. But Hack leaped forward at the same time and swung the Winchester by the barrel with both hands, as though he were chopping with an ax, and caught Hardin squarely across the base of the neck. Hardin pitched sideways out of the saddle and landed on his back, and when he tried to raise himself to his feet, Hack kicked him full in the face with his boot. Then he threw him unconscious into the bed of a vegetable wagon, put manacles on his wrists, wrapped him in trace chains, and nailed the end links down to the boards.
“What did he say to you when he was in the cell?” his grandson said.
“He wouldn’t say anything. He’d spit in his food and throw it out on the floor and look at me with them eyes that was like a slow match burning. He didn’t need to say anything else.”
But he hadn’t told his grandson the rest of the story, the part that had bothered him through the years, not because it was singular in itself, but instead because it was not—something that was in him that he had never come to understand.
On the way into Yoakum, with Hardin chained in the back of the wagon, the blood kept beating in his temples, his chest expanded with each breath that he drew, and he whipped the mules over holes that could have broken a wheel. Hardin was conscious, his manacled hands clasped on the front of his black coat like a preacher’s, his body swaying under the chains as the wagon bounced over the ruts, and when Hack looked back into his blood-flecked eyes, he felt a strange relationship with him that was based on neither fear nor hatred.
“You want to stop the wagon and do it proper between us?” Hardin said.
“I don’t want to see you get knocked off your own horse and go to hell in the same day.”
“If you just lock me in jail, you know you ain’t going to sleep tonight, Hack. You make the rules. Pistols or knives or shotguns.”
“Tell me, did you really kill them forty men?”
“Some of them was federal niggers, like your deputies. That don’t really count,” Hardin said. “I tell you what. Take these shackles off me, and we’ll use one pistol and you can hold it. That’ll make it even.”
“You’re a shit hog, Hardin, and that’s what I’m going to use you for in my jail. You’re going to clean slop jars and spittoons until I send you up to Huntsville pen.”
But even after he threw Hardin headlong into the cell and turned the key on him, the blood still hummed in his head, and his face was hot to his own touch. He left the mules in harness behind the jail and rode his deputy’s horse back to the house. He slipped the cinch on the saddle and let it fall to the ground, pulled the bridle over the horse’s head, and slapped its rump toward Yoakum. The Mexican woman (he thought her name was Marta) was at the back of the barn, mixing molasses and feed in a nose bag for the mare that had just given foal. There were dried flecks of blood and gossamer wisps of membrane in the hair of her forearms. She started to smile, then turned toward the stall when she saw his face. Her breasts were too large for the man’s denim shirt she wore, and her thighs were thick from doing stoop labor in the fields. Her flat, Indian face and obsidian eyes looked back at him again, and she tried to bend over into the stall and slip the straps of the nose bag around the mare’s ears before his hands took her shoulders and pulled her back. He pressed her down on the feed sacks, lifted her peasant dress over her hips, and pulled her bloomer underwear down over her legs. She went through it without choice, her face turned away toward the stall, and after he reached that heart-rushing moment and labored with his head pressed between her breasts, she pushed up softly at him with her palms.
“She’ll bite the foal if she don’t eat,” she said.
“No. Again,” he said, and felt the heat burn inside him throughout the morning.
It was a brilliant morning on the front porch, and the blowing clouds left deep areas of shadow, like bruises, on the soft green hills in the distance. His daughter ran her comb through his hair and touched at it with her fingers as she might at a child’s, then placed the Stetson back on his head and moved a white strand away from his eyebrow.
“You look right handsome, Grandpa,” she said.
“But we don’t want you chasing women when we get to town,” his son-in-law said.
He felt them take him by each arm and help him into the yellow convertible, then the front gate went by and the Angus grazing through the short grass in the front pasture, the windmill ginning in the hot breeze and the water pumping out over the trough, and finally the long white fence that bordered the field where his son kept his Thoroughbreds. The rocks clicked under the fenders, then the car rumbled over the cattle guard, and he heard the tires hiss along the soft tar surfacing of the road. The pines and oak trees were thickly spaced along the road, and he could smell the dry needles on the ground and blackjack burning in someone’s smokehouse. Somewhere beyond a watery pool on the bend of the road a train whistle was blowing.
“Where did you say Satchel-ass was at?” he said.
“In Korea, Grandpa. Don’t you remember when he sent the medal home?” his daughter said.
It’s inside him, too, he thought. It didn’t go into any of the others.
The road wound out of the woods and dropped over a hill, then the country flattened out into small farms and neat white houses with tin roofs and rose gardens. The billboards and the huge signs painted on the sides of barns flashed by him, the drive-in root-beer stand and the trailer park, then the prefabricated houses in a bulldozed field, and he tried to call back into memory what that part of the county had looked like before, but the convertible was going too fast.
His son-in-law pulled the car into the high-banked sidewalk with the old tethering rings set in the concrete and put a coin in the parking meter. It was Saturday, and the sidewalk was crowded with Mexicans, Negroes, and farm families, and most of the merchants had rolled out the awnings in front of their stores and put wood chairs by their doors. The sun was hot on the leather seat of the convertible. Hack looked through the front glass into the dark interior of the poolroom straight ahead. He could hear the click of the billiard balls and the laughter of drunk farmhands and cedar cutters and almost smell the bottles of beer set along the bar.
“We’re just going in the dime store, Grandpa,” Bonnie said.
He saw them walk away through the brightness into the awning’s shadow. A drop of perspiration ran out from under his hat and caught in his eyelash like a diamond. It was too hot in the car and he wanted to urinate. Then a large, gray man, with square shoulders and eyes as blue as a butane flame, was standing next to the car door.
“Why, hello, Mr. Holland, how are you today?” he said, and picked up Hack’s hand with his own. “Can I get you a glass of beer from the bar?”
“They won’t give me nothing to drink at home.”
“Well, I don’t expect Bonnie will mind. You wait here and I’ll be right back.”
The tall man stepped back on the high sidewalk in his cowboy boots and went inside the darkness of the poolroom. A moment later he returned with a mug of beer, the foam and ice slipping over his hand.
“After you finish this, Mr. Holland, just wave and I’ll bring you another one.”
“My grandson little Hack is fighting across the big water.”
“Yes sir, we heard about it. They give him the Navy Cross, didn’t they?”
“He’s a Holland. He’s the only one of the bunch that’s got the same thing inside him.”
“Well, okay, Mr. Holland, you let me know when you’re ready.”
Hack raised the mug to his mouth with both hands, his frosted eyes staring into the brassy bead of the beer, and drank it all the way to the bottom. He felt the foam dripping off his chin and a wetness st
art to run down his trousers into his half-topped boots. He pushed the mug up on the dashboard and waved at the dark opening of the poolroom. The people inside moved around like shadows in the noise of the billiard balls and the jukebox. The leather seats burned his hands and the odor from his trousers sickened him. He knocked with his knuckles against the front windshield, his collapsed mouth opening and closing like a fish’s.
Then, suddenly, there was a tall man who looked cut out of burned iron by the side of the car. His silhouette seemed to break the murderous sun in half.
“Why, hello, Hack. How have you been?” the man said.
Hack thought he heard a branch of the pin-oak tree at home snap in the hot wind like a rifle shot.
“I didn’t expect to see you here, Captain McAlester,” he said. He shook the captain’s extended hand, squeezing it, the board roughness biting into his palm, and felt a resilience and strength swell into his arm.
“We haven’t had any fun together since we killed all them Mexicans and spent the night in that hot-pillow house in Juarez,” the captain said. “You remember when you turned the key on Wes Hardin? He said he was going to gun you soon as he come out of Huntsville.”
“He didn’t get a chance, though,” Hack said. “Old John Selman put a ball through his eye first.”
“It’s too hot out here, Hack. Let’s take a walk and have a cigar.”
Hack opened the door and stepped up on the sidewalk in the shade of the awning, his shoulders erect inside his open coat, an unlit Havana cigar in his mouth. He popped a kitchen match on his thumbnail, cupped his hands in the warm breeze, and drew in on the smoke. He felt a physical power and confidence in his body that he hadn’t known since he was in his prime as a middle-aged man.
He and the captain walked the full length of Main Street, tipping their hats to the women and politely refusing invitations for a drink from men who wanted to be seen at the bar with two of the best law officers in south-central Texas.
The Convict and Other Stories Page 8