Lay Down My Sword and Shield hh-1

by James Lee Burke

  Besides, I really didn’t need them to be elected congressional representative from my district. The Holland name and my father’s reputation would assure almost any member of my family a political position if he wanted it. Also, people still remembered when I returned from the war as a wounded hospital corpsman, dressed in Marine tropicals with a walking cane, an ex-P.O.W. who had resisted brainwashing for thirty-two months while other American troops were signing confessions, informing on each other, and defecting to the Chinese.

  Finally, my Republican opponent was a seedy racist, so fanatical even in his business dealings that his insurance agency failed. At different times he had belonged to the John Birch and Paul Revere societies, the Independent Million, the White Citizens League, and the Dixiecrat Party. He was a mean and obnoxious drunk, a bully toward his wife and children, and I don’t know why the Republicans let him run, except for the fact that he could always raise money from fools like himself and they hadn’t won an election in DeWitt since Reconstruction, anyway.

  Verisa had taken a five-room suite with a cocktail bar, deep rugs, oil paintings on the walls, potted rubber plants, and a porch that overlooked the swimming pool far below. The porter set my suitcase down and closed the door behind me. I could see the anger in Verisa’s eyes. She sat on the couch in a white evening gown, her legs crossed tightly, with the tip of one high-heeled shoe pointed into the coffee table. Her auburn hair was brushed to a metallic shine, and her skin looked as bloodless and smooth as marble. If I had been closer to her I could have smelled the touch of perfume behind her ears, the powdered breasts, the hinted scent of her sex, a light taste of gin on her breath. She looked at me briefly, then turned her eyes away and lit a cigarette. The toe of the shoe flicked momentarily into a carved design in the side of the table. She was always able to hold her anger in well. She had learned part of that at Randolph-Macon and the rest from living with me. She could reduce flying rage to a hot cigarette ash or a few whispered and rushed words in the corner of a cocktail party, or maybe one burst of heat after we were home; but the pointed flick of the shoe was a fleshy bite into my genitals for seven years of marriage, broken young-girl dreams, her embarrassment when I brought oil-field workers or soldiers from Fort Sam Houston to the country club, my drunken discussions in the middle of the night about my Korean War guilt, and for the stoic and futile resignation she had adopted, out of all her social disappointments, in hopes of becoming the wife of a Texas congressman on his way to the Senate and that opulent world of power that goes far beyond any of the things you can buy or destroy with money.

  “Hack, don’t you give a goddamn?” she said quietly, still looking straight ahead.

  “What did I miss?”

  “A day of my making excuses for you, and right now I’m rather sick of it.”

  “Lunch by the pool with the Dallas aristocracy can’t be that awful.”

  “I’m not in a flippant mood, Hack. I don’t enjoy apologizing or lying for you, and I don’t like sitting three hours by myself with boorish businesspeople.”

  “Those are the cultured boys with the money. The fellows who oil all the wheels and make Frankenstein run properly.”

  I went to the bar and poured a double shot of whiskey over ice. It clicked pleasantly on the edge of the afternoon drunk, and I felt even more serene in the sexual confidence that I always had toward Verisa after whoring.

  “I don’t know where you’ve been, but I suspect it was one of your Okie motel affairs.”

  “I had to meet R. C. Richardson in Austin.”

  “How much do you pay them? Do they go down on you? That’s what they call it in the trade, isn’t it?”

  “It’s something like that.”

  “They must be lovely girls. Do they perform any other special things for you?”

  “Right now R.C.’s working on a deal to patent hoof-and-mouth disease. He has federal contracts for Vietnam that run in millions.”

  “Your girlfriends probably have had some nice diseases of their own.”

  “Let it go, Verisa.”

  “Oh, I shouldn’t say anything to you? Is that it? I should spend a day of congenial conversation with people who chew on toothpicks, and then meet you pleasantly at the door after you return from screwing a Mexican whore.”

  Something inside me flinched at her accuracy. I poured a short drink into the bottom of the glass.

  “I bet you’ve gone to bed with me, not knowing whether they had given you one of their diseases,” she said.

  She was really tightening the iron boot now.

  “Do you want a highball? I’m going to change clothes.”

  “Oh Christ, you’ve probably done it,” she said, and put her fingers over her mouth.

  “I never did that to you.”

  “You probably don’t even remember. You have to wait two weeks to know, don’t you?”

  “You’re letting it walk away with you.” But she was right. I didn’t remember.

  “It happened to a girl I knew in college, but she was a dumpy thing who did it in the backseats of cars with Marines and sailors. I didn’t believe it ever happened with your husband.”

  “You’re deliberately upsetting yourself,” I said.

  “I wonder that you didn’t give me sulfa tablets.”

  I fixed her a drink with a squeeze of lemon and set it on the table in front of her.

  “I’m sorry that you got strung out today,” I said. “I thought Bailey would take you to lunch if I didn’t make it.”

  “Tell me if you really did it to me.”

  “Look, it was a shitty day for you. I should have been here to eat lunch with those bastards, or I should have called Bailey and told him to take care of it. But I’m going to change clothes now. We should go downstairs in a few minutes.”

  “You must have a very special clock to go by. It starts to work correctly when you feel the corner at your back.”

  “You ought to drink your highball.”

  “Why don’t you drink it? It makes you more electric and charming in public,” she said.

  “You’ve gotten it out pretty far in a short time.”

  “I might stretch it out so far that you ache.”

  “Isn’t this just spent effort? If you want to believe that you’ve won the ball game in the ninth inning, go ahead. Or maybe you would like me to kiss your ass in apology.”

  “You’ve done that without a need for apologizing. An analyst would have a wonderful time with you.”

  “I won’t go into embarrassing descriptions, but as I recall you enjoyed every little piece of it.”

  “Yes, I remember those sweet experiences. You tried to enact all the things you had learned in a Japanese whorehouse while you slobbered about two boys who died in a Chinese prison camp.”

  “You better shut it off in a hurry.”

  “What was the boy’s name from San Angelo and the Negro sergeant from Georgia?”

  “You don’t listen when I tell you something, do you?”

  “It’s just a little bit of recall from things you brought up. Didn’t you say they were buried in a latrine? In your words, to lend more American fertilizer to the Korean rice crop.”

  “Stop trying to fuck me over, Verisa.”

  “Are you going to hit me? That would make a perfect punctuation mark in my day.”

  “Just ease up on the batter a little bit.”

  “Don’t walk away, Hack. If you blow this for us, I’ll divorce you and sue for the home. Then I’ll repay you in the most fitting way I can think of. I’ll cover that historical cemetery of yours with concrete.”

  I took the bottle of whiskey and my glass from the bar and slammed the bedroom door behind me. I could feel the anger beating in my head and the veins swelling in my throat. I seldom became angry about anything, but this time she had reached inside me hard and had gotten a good piece between her nails. I drank out of the bottle twice and started to change clothes. My face was flushed with heat in the mirror. I kicked my tr
ousers against the wall and pulled off my shirt, stripping the buttons. I stood in my underwear and had another drink, this time with measured sips. The whiskey began to flatten out inside me, and I felt a single drop of perspiration run down off an eyebrow. Hold it in, sonofabitch, I thought. The Lone Ranger never blows his Kool-Aid. You just give the sheriff a silver bullet and let Tonto pour you a drink. But Verisa had really been off her style this time. She had collected a valise of surgical tools during the day for an entry into all my vital organs. In fact, I didn’t know whether to mark this to her debit or credit. As I said, in the past she could always load all of her outrage into a quiet hypodermic needle, thrust subtly into the right place (her best probe, the one she used after I had done something especially painful to that private part of her soul, was to go limp and indifferent under me, her arms spread back on the pillows, during my disabling moment of climax).

  I had one more drink, just enough to go over the back of the tongue, then brushed my teeth, took three aspirins and two vitamin pills, and rinsed out my whiskey breath with Listerine. I dressed in an Italian silk shirt, a dark tie, and a pressed white suit, and rubbed the polish smooth on my boots with a damp towel. I lit a cigar and breathed out the smoke in the mirror. You’re all right, Masked Man, I thought.

  I heard Verisa open the front door, then the voices of Bailey and Senator Dowling.

  “Hack,” Verisa said, tapping her fingernails lightly on my door. I knew she had already gone into her transformation as the pleasant wife of a congressional candidate. It was amazing how fast it could take place.

  I stepped out of the bedroom and shook hands with the Senator.

  “How are you, Hack?” he said, his face healthy and cheerful. He was fifty-five years old, but his handshake was still hard and his wrist strong. He was six inches shorter than I, solidly built, his shoulders pulled straight back, and his white hair trimmed close to the scalp. His acetylene-blue eyes were bright and quick, impossible to penetrate, and you knew after he glanced confidently into your face that his lack of height was no disadvantage to him. He had the small, hard chest of a professional soldier, and his tailored suit didn’t have a fold or a bulge in it. He wore dentures, and they caused him to lisp slightly with his Texas accent, but otherwise he was solid. Also, Senator Dowling had managed to remain a strong southern figure through five administrations. He had been on many sides over the years, and he always walked out of the ballpark with the winning team (and therein lay his gift, the ability to sense change before anyone else got a whiff of it). He was put into Congress by a one-million-acre southwest Texas corporation ranch in 1940, and in the next two years he paid off his obligations by sponsoring large subsidies for growing nothing on arid land. Then he represented the oil interests, the franchised utility companies, and the Houston and Dallas industries up on antitrust suits. He assured his constituents that he was a segregationist until the Kennedy administration, then he backed one of the first civil rights bills. In the meantime he acquired a three-thousand-acre ranch in the Hill Country north of Austin, and stock in almost every major corporation in Texas with a defense contract.

  “Fine, Senator. How have you been?” I said.

  “Good. Relaxing at the ranch. Fishing and playing tennis a little bit before the campaign.”

  “Hack, fix the Senator a drink,” Verisa said.

  “Thank you. A half jigger and some soda will be fine,” he said.

  “You should try the bass in Hack’s ponds,” Bailey said. He sat in one of the tall bar chairs with his arm over the back. Good old Bailey, I thought. He could always come through with an inane remark at the right time. He looked like my twin, except five years older and fifteen pounds heavier, with wrinkles in his forehead and neck. Bailey was a practical man who worried about all the wrong things.

  “I’d hoped to talk with you earlier today,” the Senator said, and looked straight into my face with those acetylene-blue eyes.

  “I had to stop over in Austin with a client. Maybe we can talk after my speech,” I said.

  “Verisa says you’re having people up for drinks later. I’d rather we have some time between ourselves.”

  “Hack, we’re invited for breakfast at the River Oaks Country Club in the morning,” Bailey said. “Maybe the Senator can join us. You all can talk, and then we’ll play some doubles.”

  “That sounds fine,” the Senator said. “I could use a couple of sets against an ex — Baylor pitcher.”

  The sonofabitch, I thought.

  “My opponent hasn’t somehow organized his ragtail legions, has he?”

  “Oh no, no. I don’t think we need to spend too much time on this gentleman.” He laughed with his healthy smile. “I wanted to talk with you about several things that will come later in Washington. Your father helped me a great deal when I was first elected to Congress, and I learned then that it’s invaluable to have an experienced friend.”

  I handed him his highball glass with the half jigger and soda. He had learned to be a cautious person with liquor, and I knew he wouldn’t finish the glass I had given him.

  “Well, I appreciate it, Senator. But I don’t know how good my Baylor arm will be on the court,” I said, biting down inside myself.

  “Hack is defensive tonight,” Verisa said.

  “He should be,” the Senator said. His eyes took on a deeper blue with his smile.

  “I have a weak serve, but I’m hell on defending the net,” I said. “One flash of the wrist and I drive tennis balls into concrete.”

  “We had better go downstairs pretty soon,” Bailey said. His face was flat, but his discomfort showed in the nervous tic of his fingers on his trouser leg.

  “I don’t expect that our audience will disappear,” the Senator said. “They usually have their way of waiting, as a U.S. Senator sometimes does.”

  Sorry, you bastard. I’m all out of sackcloth and ashes tonight, I thought. I set my cigar in the ashtray and poured an inch of Jack Daniel’s into a glass. Bailey’s face began to tighten in the silence. Verisa’s eyes waited on me, her lips pinched slightly, but I held out. I sipped the whiskey and drew in on the cigar as though the conversation were far removed from me.

  “Would you like to drive with us out to the country club in the morning?” Bailey said.

  “Thanks. I’ll find my way there. From what I understand, Hack drives like he’s trying to put A. J. Foyt back in the grease pit,” the Senator said.

  “I wouldn’t try to beat a Texas boy at his own game, Senator.”

  “It depends on what type of game.” His eyes crinkled at me.

  “I have a pretty good shutout record in my field.”

  “I remember, Hack. I watched you pitch twice. But as I recall you used to have a little trouble with a left-handed batter.”

  “Sometimes you have to bear down a little more.”

  He took a thin swallow of his highball and placed the glass on the bar, his expression assured and pleasant, then looked casually at his watch.

  “Bailey’s probably right. We should go downstairs. I’ll drop up later for a few minutes and say hello to your guests,” he said, and put his hand on the small of my back. “Then tomorrow we’ll see what type of tennis game we can work out.”

  I saw the ease come back into Verisa’s face, and Bailey stood up stiffly as though he had just been unstrapped from an electric chair. I took my typewritten speech in its leather folder from my suitcase, and we walked down the carpeted corridor toward the elevator like an amiable family of four.

  The dining tables in the Shamrock Room were filled. The silver, the crystalware, the white tablecloths, the spangled evening gowns, and the decanters of wine reflected softly under the lights. The Senator introduced me from the rostrum, and the rows of faces became hushed and polite. Even the fat boys from the oil interests, in their string ties and cowboy boots, looked quietly deferential. I read them my twenty-minute speech of non-language and they applauded thirteen times. Whenever I approached some vague conclusion, point
ed at nothing, I could see their eyes grow more intent, their heads nodding slightly, as some private anger with the nation, the universe, or themselves found a consensus in my empty statements, then the hands would begin clapping. They had found a burning spokesman to represent all the outraged good guys. I was tight enough to be unconscious of my speech’s stupidity, and after a while I even felt that I might be saying something meaningful. They rose to their feet when I finished. I shook dozens of hands, smiled with country boy humility at the compliments, and invited half the dining room to Verisa’s cocktail party.

  The party was a success in every way. Verisa was able to become the radiant wife of a congressional candidate, moving with detached pleasantness between groups of people (the society editors from The Houston Post and The Chronicle both agreed the next day that Mrs. Holland was one of the most lovely hostesses to appear in Texas politics in a long time). And I was able to make a doubleheader out of the evening: I managed to get drunk twice in one day. The Negro waiters put a fresh whiskey and water in my hand every time I flicked my eyes in their direction, and within two hours Mr. Hyde had begun to prowl obscenely through the hallways of my mind. The room was so crowded by midnight that the air-conditioning couldn’t clear the smoke, and the noise brought complaints from the floors above and below us. People whom I had never seen before drank three cases of bourbon and Scotch, ate four hundred dollars’ worth of catered food, burned cigar holes in the carpet, charged thirty-minute long-distance calls to my room, and threw glasses and bottles off the terrace into the swimming pool. Someone wheeled in the commander from the Veterans of the Spanish-American War, who sat stupefied in one corner, staring out at the bedlam from his atrophied, withered face, until a sentimental World War II veteran decided to take him on a careening ride through the corridor. The alcoholic baseball pitcher and I argued about how to throw a crippling beanball, one of the society editors threw up in the bathroom and had to be put in bed by Verisa, and the firebomber of Dresden unzipped the back of a woman’s evening dress.