Lay Down My Sword and Shield hh-1

by James Lee Burke

  I insulted the astronaut and his wife, who left after a polite five-minute interval, then two of the Negro bartenders quit when an oil broker made a racial remark to them. I took over the bar and poured all the remaining bourbon, gin, and Scotch into a punch bowl, and insisted that everyone in the room have a drink. This resulted in four more people passed out, a clogged toilet, and a group plan to open up the dining room for steak and eggs. Someone brought in a hillbilly singer from a nightclub, who propositioned Verisa, and the Air Force general drank six glasses from the punch bowl and urinated off the balcony. By four A.M. the room was totally destroyed. All the furniture was either burned or broken, the floor was littered with cigar and cigarette butts, the French doors were smashed, the potted plants overturned, and the electric plug in the drink mixer had short-circuited and melted into the wall socket. (Later, I received an eight-hundred-dollar repair bill from the Shamrock Hilton, and I kindly forwarded it to the Texas Democratic Committee in Austin.)

  At five A.M. the last of the guests supported each other out the door, while Verisa accepted their incoherent compliments and told them to visit us at the ranch (she was still radiant, even through her fatigue). I lay down on the bed next to the society editor, and as the false dawn glowed on the horizon and touched the room with its gray light, she rolled her head toward me, her mouth wide with snoring, her face oval and white, and I thought, Good night, good night, sweet Desdemona, and I fell once more into Mr. Hyde’s world.

  The clay tennis courts at the country club were green and freshly chalked under a hot, blue sky. I sat at a marble-topped table with Bailey under the shade trees, sipping a glass of tomato juice and vodka, while Verisa and the Senator whocked the ball back and forth across the net. Behind the courts the sun shattered off the swimming pool, and children in dripping swimsuits lined up on the diving board. In the distance the smooth green contours of the golf course arched away through the oak trees, and the sand traps looked like ground white crystal in the light. My hangover was bad. I was sweating unnaturally, shaking inside like a tuning fork vibrating to the wrong chord, and I felt a hard pressure band across one side of my head. My tennis shorts and polo shirt were already wet, although I hadn’t been on the court yet, and the vodka wouldn’t take hold. Bailey kept talking about our law practice in Austin, my failure to come into the office regularly, and my rudeness to the Senator. His words were like pieces of broken china in my head. He spoke from some abstraction inside himself, looking into my eyes occasionally, his face earnest with the dumb innocence of a nondrinker talking to a man with a bleeding hangover. I lit a cigar, tried to concentrate on the tennis game, and had another vodka and tomato juice.

  “It’s insane to do these things to yourself,” he said. “You’re hungover three days out of seven, you go into court with your fingers shaking, and in the meantime other people are picking up after you.”

  “Are you picking up after me, Bailey?”

  “What do you think I did yesterday? And last night you insulted a half-dozen people within fifteen minutes.”

  “I thought I only got the astronaut.” I wiped the sweat off my forehead on my sleeve and drained the vodka and tomato juice.

  “You want to get blasted again?”

  “I might unless the conversation changes.”

  “You can be in office in a few months. The youngest congressman from the state. After one or two terms you can do anything you want in Texas.”

  “I know those things.”

  “Then why don’t you act like you have more than two functional brain cells?”

  I held my glass up to the waiter for another drink.

  “You count on too much from people,” Bailey said.

  “Will you go to hell or shut up for about five minutes?”

  “You can get angry, but I’m right in what I say.”

  “Bailey, would you get away from me a few minutes?”

  “You see what that booze does?”

  “Go swimming or chase golf balls if you like. Believe me, I’m up to my eyes with it.”

  He stood up, his face slightly hurt and angry, and walked across the clipped grass to the clubhouse. I knew that in a half hour he would be back as though nothing had been said, and then later he would start to bore in again. Bailey was a good man, but he was simply unteachable.

  The Senator moved about the court like a man twenty years younger than his age. I have to admit that he looked good out there. The matted gray hair on his chest and his thick, muscular shoulders glistened with sweat, and he whocked the ball in a white streak across the net. For a short man he had a fine driving serve, and his backhand was always accurate and strong. He had a good eye for court distance, and most of his shots just skimmed the top of the net and hit in a low bounce on the clay. Verisa was a good tennis player, but he took her in two easy sets. The Senator was a competitor, and his gentlemanly affectation ended when he entered the games.

  They joined me at the table, and the waiter served us a cold lunch of peeled shrimp on cracked ice. For the next hour I listened to the Senator’s advice on my campaign, the upcoming year in Congress, and contributions from several oil companies (the checks, which already amounted to over sixty-five thousand dollars, had all been deposited by Bailey in a special account in Austin). Then I was told indirectly, with compassion, to avoid public statements on civil rights, at least while in Texas, and that I shouldn’t lean too far toward labor, since as a Democrat I could already count on their vote. I nodded my head and listened as intelligently as possible, but my hangover wouldn’t let go and few of his sentences seemed to have any relationship to one another. Actually, more than any instruction in Texas politics, he wanted to exact penance from me because of yesterday, and I was in the perfect condition for it — a mental cripple.

  “Next week I plan to visit the wounded Vietnam veterans in Walter Reed,” he said. “I think it might be good for you to come along.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “You were wounded yourself in Korea. I think the boys like to know that they have congressmen who understand what they’ve been through.”

  “I’m afraid I had enough of V.A. hospitals, Senator,” I said.

  “We’ll be there an hour or so. Then you’ll be back home the same night.”

  “I better pass.”

  “Go on, Hack. Bailey will be at the office,” Verisa said.

  “No, I don’t—”

  “You need a trip. Enjoy it,” Bailey said. He had come back from the clubhouse fresh with resolve.

  “I spent two months in the V.A. in ’53 and I really—” I was smiling in my best convivial way.

  “This type of exposure is important to you, Hack,” the Senator said.

  Fuck it, I thought. “All right, Senator. I’ll be glad to.”

  We finished lunch and played a set of doubles. Verisa and I stood the Senator and Bailey, and the sweat rolled down my face and chest in rivulets. My timing was bad, my movements uncoordinated, and I drove most of my serves into the bottom of the net. My head was thundering from the heat and exertion. The air seemed so humid that it was like steam on my skin. If Bailey hadn’t been such a bad player we would have lost the set six games straight, but Verisa managed to keep us only one game behind. I was even proud of her. In her short white tennis skirt and cap with a green visor she was the loveliest thing on the courts. Her legs and shoulders were freckled with suntan, her auburn hair wet and shining on the back of her neck, and you could get a good look at her lovely bottom when she bent over with her serve.

  We went into the final game five to four, and I wanted to beat the Senator very badly. He played confidently, controlling the back line with an easy sweep of his racket in either direction. His thick eyebrows were heavy with perspiration, and his blue eyes refracted a mean success every time he drove the ball into my shoelaces.

  However, I soon learned that the Senator’s revenge for yesterday wasn’t complete yet. I moved up to the net for the final point, Verisa served, and Bailey
returned the ball in an easy, high-arching lob. I whocked it with all the strength in my shoulder straight into the Senator. The game should have been over and the set tied, but the Senator caught my drive with one short, forearm chop of the racket, and smashed the ball murderously into my face. My sunglasses broke on the court, my eyes watered uncontrollably, and I felt the blood running from my nose. Through the tears I could see him walking quickly toward me, his face gathered in concern, but there was victory in his eyes.

  Later, Verisa drove us back to the hotel while I held a blood-flecked towel filled with ice cubes to my nose. The bridge was already swollen, and there was a sickening taste in the back of my throat. I tilted my head back on the seat and looked with one eye out the window at the stream of angry traffic along South Main. At the court the Senator had apologized in his most empathic manner, the tennis pro arrived with a first-aid kit and tried to push cotton balls up my nose, a Negro waiter put another vodka and tomato juice on the table and left, and now Bailey sat in the backseat talking about going to the hospital for an X ray.

  “Do you think it’s broken?” Verisa said.

  “No, he just flattened it a little. A warning,” I said. My words were nasal and smothered under the towel.

  “It was an accident,” Bailey said. “You cut the ball right into him.”

  “Why don’t you get off the goodguymanship ethic? Leave the Boy Scouts for a while, at least till we get to the hotel,” I said. “He was out to tear my head off.”

  “That’s hangover paranoia.”

  “Oh, shit,” I said.

  “How many U.S. Senators would spend their time trying to help a thirty-five-year-old lawyer’s political career?”

  “Don’t you know a sonofabitch when you see one?”

  “You’re constructing things to fit some strange frame of reference in your own mind.”

  “You’re an amateur, Bailey. You better learn to recognize sophisticated viciousness.”

  “You’re really thinking foolishly.”

  “I don’t care if you want to look at the world like Little Orphan Annie. But right now I feel like someone took a shit in my head, my nose is full of blood, and if you say anything more I’m going to call the Senator from the hotel and give him my best delivery.”

  “You better take us to Herman Hospital,” Bailey said.

  “I’ve had my nose broken before and I know what it feels like. Just turn it off for a few more blocks.”

  “I’ll have the hotel doctor come to the room,” Verisa said.

  “Forget that, too,” I said. “I’m driving down to the Valley this afternoon. Just as soon as I can get six aspirins down and a double shot of Jack Daniel’s.”

  “You’re going to the Valley!” Verisa said. Her head turned sharply at me.

  “I got a letter from a Mexican fellow I was in Korea with. He got involved in some trouble with this farm labor union, and he’s in the county jail waiting to go up to prison on a five-year sentence.”

  “What am I supposed to do in the meantime?” she said.

  “Ride back home with Bailey or take a flight. You don’t like to drive with me, anyway.”

  “So I’m left with the pleasant experience of explaining the condition of the room to the management. Is that it?” she said. “I imagine that by this time the cleaning woman has run down the hall in hysterics.”

  “Ignore them. We didn’t do the damage. They know what to expect when they contract for a convention. Particularly when it’s composed of lunatics.”

  “It’s lovely of you to leave me with these things.”

  “All right. I’ll talk with the manager on the way out. I’ll drip a few drops of blood on his desk, talk with him cordially, and then I’ll tell him to go to hell.”

  “You do what you want, Hack,” she said. “Get drunk for a week in the Valley, go across the border and find a sweet two-dollar girl, indulge all your disgusting obsessions.”

  She turned the car into the hotel drive, and a doorman stepped out to the edge of the walk under the canopy. I rubbed the dampness of the towel over my face.

  “I have to go see this man,” I said. “He was a good friend to me when I went on the line. I was so goddamned scared I couldn’t paste a Band-Aid on a scratch.”

  “Just don’t talk about it,” she said. “Drive down the road and forget anything else. That’s the way you do things best.”

  “Listen a minute. I don’t enjoy driving three hundred miles in one-hundred-degree heat with a hangover and a bloody nose. But this man has five years hard time to do because of a scuffle on a picket line. He doesn’t have a goddamn cent and he can’t get a white lawyer to file an appeal for him. Next week he’ll be chopping cotton on the prison farm and there won’t be a thing I can do for him.”

  “We can call the A.C.L.U. You don’t have to go down there today,” Bailey said.

  “No, you go on, Hack,” she said. “It would be too terrible for you to live through one day of putting things together without beginning another adventure.”

  “Okay, piss on it,” I said. “I’ll catch air in a few minutes, and you can go back to the ranch and serve cocktails to the D.A.R. Then next week we can take a trip to Walter Reed and shake hands with the basket cases. A wartime V.A. ward should be included on all bus tours. You can meet the dummies in their wheelchairs and the guys without human faces. It’s quite an experience.”

  Bailey lit his pipe in the backseat and Verisa’s eyes were brilliant with anger as the doorman stepped around the front of the car. I lowered the window and dumped the cracked ice in the towel onto the concrete.

  People stared at me in the lobby as I walked toward the elevator with the towel under my nose. I still wore my tennis shorts and canvas shoes, with a sports coat over my blood-streaked polo shirt. Verisa and Bailey walked on each side of me as impervious as granite. Upstairs, I showered and changed into a pair of cream slacks and a soft, maroon shirt, ordered a bottle of Jack Daniel’s from the bar, and ate a half- dozen aspirins in the bathroom. I could hear Verisa making reservations on an afternoon flight to San Antonio. I looked in the mirror at my swollen nose, a slightly puffed upper lip, and the white discoloration in my face, and I decided to leave the whiskey doubleheaders to Grover Alexander or some other better left-hander than I. A bellboy brought the bottle; I took one drink out of it and closed the suitcase. I started to speak to Verisa, but she put a cigarette in her mouth and looked out through the smashed French doors at the oil wells pumping in the distance.

  CHAPTER 3

  The late sun was red on the hills above the Rio Grande. The river was almost dry in places, dividing around bleached sandbars, and in the twilight the water had turned scarlet. On the other side, in Mexico, there were adobe huts and wooden shacks along the banks, and buzzards circled high in the sky. I turned off the air conditioner, rolled down the windows, and let the warm air blow through the car. In the first quick rush of wind I could smell the sweet ripeness of the whole Valley: the citrus groves, the tomato and watermelon fields, the rows of cotton and corn, the manure, and pastures of bluebonnets. The windmills were spinning, and cattle moved lazily toward the troughs. A single scorch of cloud stretched across the sun, which now seemed to grow in size as it dipped into the hills. The base of the pin oaks and blackjack trees grew darker, then the bottom rim of the sky glowed with flame.

  I had mended from my hangover during the long drive, and I felt the numb serenity of a longtime dying man who had just received an unexpected extension of life. Then, in that cool moment of reflection, I wondered why I always drank twice as much when I had to make ritual appearances; or why I had gone to Houston in the first place, since my talk before a few hundred semiliterate oilmen had little to do with my probable election, anyway; or lastly, why I had ever entered politics and the world of Senator Allen B. Dowling.

  I could guess at the answers to the first two questions, which weren’t of particular consequence, except that I didn’t want another hangover and defeat at the ten
nis court like I’d had this morning; but the answer to the third question worked its way through the soft tissue and dropped like an ugly, sharp-edged black diamond into a bright space in the center of my mind. Inside, under all the cynicism, the irreverence toward the icons and totems, my insults to astronauts and country club women, I wanted a part of the power at the top.

  I tried to believe that my motive was to atone for Verisa’s spent dreams, or that I wanted to equal my father in his law and congressional career, or at least that I was simply an ironic man who felt he could do as good a job as comic-page segregationists; or maybe at worst I was just a pragmatist with knowledge of the money to be made in the dealings between the federal government and the oil interests. But that black diamond had blood crusted on its edges, and I knew that I had the same weaknesses as Verisa and the Senator; I wanted power itself, the tribal recognition that went with it, and that small key to its complexities carried secretly in my watch pocket.

  I accelerated the Cadillac through the low hills toward Pueblo Verde. The evening had started to cool, the sky deepened to dark purple, and the last of the sun’s afterglow burned into itself in a gathering fire at one small point on the horizon. I didn’t care for these moments of reflection, even though they came with the cool release from hangover, and I had learned long ago that solitude and introspection always bring you to Mr. Hyde’s cage. Every jailer knows that an inmate would rather take a beating with a garden hose than go to solitary, where the snakes start coming out of hibernation and the voices from years ago thunder through long tunnels. The North Koreans and the Chinese knew the same trick. The broken noses and smashed fingertips, or even digging your own grave under Sergeant Tien Kwong’s burp gun, weren’t nearly as effective as six weeks in a dirt hole with an iron sewer grate over your head. There you could concentrate on your guilt for forgotten sins, your inadequacy as a man, your lack of courage when you dropped a wounded Marine on a stretcher and ran, your resentment toward a dying Australian who was always given the largest portion of rice in the shack; or you could look up through the iron slits in the grate at the Chinese sentry who watched you while you squatted like a dog and defecated into a helmet.