Lay Down My Sword and Shield hh-1

by James Lee Burke

  I followed her through the hallway into the kitchen. Her brown hips moved as smoothly as water turning in the current. Two young girls, a college boy, and a Negro man were scraping dishes into a garbage can and rinsing them under an iron pump. Through the back window I could see the last red touch of the sun on a sandbar in the middle of the Rio Grande.

  “We had a neighborhood dinner tonight,” the girl from Berkeley said. “There’s some tortillas and beans in the icebox or you can get a dish towel.”

  “You have a charge account with the supermarket?”

  “We get the day-old stuff from the Mexican produce stands,” she said.

  “I think I’ll just have a whiskey and water if you’ll give me a glass.” I took my silver flask from my coat pocket.

  “Help yourself,” she said.

  I offered the flask to the others.

  “You got it, brother,” the Negro said.

  He picked up a tin cup from the sideboard and held it in front of me. His bald, creased head and round black face shone in the half-light. Four of his front teeth were missing, and the others were yellow with snuff. I poured a shot in his cup and then splashed some water in my glass from the pump. I could taste the rust in it.

  “So what would you like to find out about the United Farm Workers?” the girl said.

  “Nothing. I read the trial transcript and talked with Mr. Posey this afternoon. The conviction won’t hold.”

  The Negro laughed with the cup held before his lips. The college boy straightened up from the garbage can and looked at me as though I had dropped through a hole in the ceiling.

  “You believe that?” the Negro said. He was still smiling.

  “Yes.”

  “I mean, you ain’t bullshitting? You’re coming on for real?” the college boy said. He wore blue jeans and a faded yellow and white University of Texas T-shirt.

  “That’s right, pal,” I said.

  The Negro laughed again and went back to work scraping plates. The two young girls were also smiling.

  “Who you working for, man?” the boy said.

  “Judge Roy Bean. I float up and down the Pecos River for him on an inner tube.”

  “Don’t get strung out,” the girl said.

  “What am I, the visiting straight man around here?”

  The girl dried her hands on a towel and took a bottle of Jax out of the icebox. “Come on out front,” she said.

  “We wasn’t trying to give you no truck. We ain’t got bad things here,” the Negro said. He grinned at me with his broken, yellow teeth.

  In the front room the girl sat in a straight-backed chair, with one leg pulled up on the seat, her arm propped across her knee, and drank out of the beer bottle. Behind her on the wall was a poster with a rectangular, outspread bird on it and the single word HUELGA.

  “They’re kids, and they don’t know if you’re putting them on or if you’re a private detective working for their parents,” she said. “The black guy has been in the movement since the Progressive Labor Party days, and he’s heard a lot of jiveass lawyers talk about appeals.”

  “I guess I just don’t like people to work out their problems on my head.”

  “I told you this afternoon about coming down here.”

  “Maybe I should have worn my steel pot and flak jacket.”

  “They don’t have any bad will toward you. They’re good people.”

  “I’m paranoid and suspicious by nature.”

  “That’s part of the middle-class syndrome, too. It goes along with the hygiene thing.”

  “I picked a hell of a ball game to relieve in. Between you, Cecil Wayne Posey, and that deputy at the jail I feel like I’m standing ten feet from the plate and lobbing volleyballs at King Kong.”

  She took the bottle from her lips and laughed, and her almond eyes were suddenly full of light. She touched away the foam from the corner of her mouth with two fingers.

  “I should have put on my Groucho Marx clothes this evening,” I said. “You know, an hour or so of Zeppo and the gang throwing pies while your people go up to the pen.”

  I finished my drink, and the minerals and iron rust in the water tasted like a gladiator’s final toast in the back of my throat.

  “You’re out of sight,” she said.

  I poured a thin shot over the orange flecks in the bottom of the glass and drank it down. The smoky, charcoal-filtered taste of undiluted Jack Daniel’s, born out of Tennessee limestone springs and rickyards of hickory, rolled down inside me with the lightness of heated air, then I began to feel the amber caution signal flashing somewhere behind my forehead.

  “Yeah, I’m a walking freak show. The next time I’ll appear with my whole act. Seals blowing horns, monkeys riding unicycles, jugglers, clowns with exploding bombs in their pants.”

  “Wow, you really let it hang out,” she said. Her wet eyes were bright with refractions of light.

  “It comes free with the ride home.” I poured the rest of the whiskey into my glass. “Come on, let’s drink.”

  “What do you do when you’re not defending ex — Korean War buddies?” she said.

  “I work for the money boys. Oil corporation suits, swindles against the government, the Billy Sol account. I also run for Congress part-time.”

  “You’re putting me on.”

  “Buy a copy of The Austin American November fifth. I’ll be smiling at you on the front page.”

  “If you’re not jiving, you must be an unbelievable guy.”

  “You want to talk about my geek act some more?” I said.

  “I mean, what do you expect? You drop in here from outer space and come on like H. L. Hunt and W. C. Fields at the same time.”

  “I was put together from discarded parts.” I finished my glass, and the amber light flashed red and began to beat violently.

  “Tell me, really, why did you come here tonight?”

  “I already told you. Television ruptures the blood vessels in my eyes.”

  The Negro, the two girls, and the college boy walked out from the kitchen.

  “There’s a man who likes to drink,” I said.

  “You been reading my mail,” the Negro said.

  “How about a case of Jax and a bottle of Jack Daniel’s?” I took a twenty-dollar bill from my wallet.

  “We got a few more people coming over tonight,” he said.

  “Get two cases. Take my car.”

  “It’s just down the road. I’d get busted for grand auto in that Cadillac, anyway.”

  He took the twenty-dollar bill and stuck it in the pocket of his denim shirt.

  “You ain’t going to tip me later, are you?” he said.

  “I left my planter’s hat in the car.”

  He laughed and his round black face and brown eyes glistened with good humor. “You’re all right,” he said, and went out the screen door with the college boy.

  “You always do this on a case?” the girl said.

  “No. I usually don’t drink with the people I know. Most of them belong to the ethic of R. C. Richardson and the Dallas Petroleum Club. They like to throw glasses and urinate off hotel balconies. They also like to feel waitresses under the table. R. C. Richardson is a very unique guy. In the last fifteen years he’s taken the state and the federal government for a little less than one million dollars. He wears yellow cowboy boots, striped western pants, and a string tie, and he has a one-hundred-pound stomach that completely covers his hand-tooled belt. Three days a week he sits in the Kiwanis and Rotary and Chamber of Commerce luncheons and belches on his boiled weenies and sauerkraut, and then rises like a soldier and says the pledge of allegiance with his hand over his heart. But actually, the guy has class. The others around him are clandestine in their midnight dealings and worm’s-eye view of the world. They don’t have his sincere feeling for vulgarity.”

  “He must be an interesting man to work for,” she said.

  “Do you have another beer in the icebox?”

  “This is the las
t one. Take it.”

  “I never take a girl’s last drink. It shows a lack of gentility.”

  “You are from outer space.”

  I could feel the blood tingling in my hands and face. My scalp started to sweat from the whiskey.

  “What’s your name, anyway?” I bit the end off a cigar.

  “Rie Velasquez.”

  “You’re not Mexican.”

  “No.”

  “So what are you?” I reached over and took the beer bottle out of her hand.

  “My father was Spanish. He came from Spain during the Civil War.”

  I let the beer and foam roll down my throat over the dry taste of the whiskey and cigar smoke.

  “Hence, you joined the Third World Liberation Front. The gasoline and dynamite gang.”

  “You ought to change your brand of whiskey.”

  “Right or wrong? Didn’t they incinerate a few college buildings in the last year?”

  “Don’t you think that sounds a bit dumb?”

  “Bullshit. Ten of those people could have a whole city in flames within twenty-four hours.”

  She took a cigarette from the pack in her blue jeans and lit it. She pinched the end between her lips as she drew in on the smoke.

  “What type of bag do you think we operate out of, man?” she said. “Did you see any kerosene rags and coal oil hidden under the porch? You believe we all came down here because of your tourist brochures about the scenic loveliness of the Texas desert?”

  “I just don’t buy that revolution shit.”

  “Why don’t you read something about the United Farm Workers? They don’t have anything to do with revolution. They’re tired of being niggers in somebody’s watermelon patch.”

  “Yow!” the Negro yelled, as he kicked open the screen door with a case of beer on one shoulder and a block of ice wrapped in newspaper on the other. “Man, we got it. Spodiodi and brew. We’re in tall cotton tonight, brothers.”

  The college boy carried the second case of beer, and the boy with the guitar had already cut the seal on the bottle of Jack Daniel’s. They put the two cases on the old grocery counter, and the Negro chopped up the ice with a butcher knife and spread it over the bottles. He opened the first bottle by putting the cap against the edge of the counter and striking downward quickly with the flat of his hand. The white foam showered up over his head and splattered on the floor. He covered the lip of the bottle with his mouth and drank until it was almost empty. The beer streamed down his chin into the matted black hair on his chest.

  “Lord, you can’t beat that,” he said.

  I took the whiskey and poured three inches into my glass.

  “You’ll drive nails through your stomach like that. Put a little brew on top of it,” the Negro said. He slapped another cap off on the edge of the counter and handed the bottle to me.

  “Use this and avoid the slashed hand shot,” Rie said, and threw an opener to the college boy.

  Eight Mexican field hands, all dressed in faded denim clothes, overalls, straw hats, and work shoes, came through the screen door in single file as though they had been lined up at a bus stop. They were potbellied and short, thin and stooped, tattooed with pachuco crosses and hung with religious medals, scarred and stitched, some of them missing fingers, sunburned almost black, with trousers bagging in the rear and their Indian hair wet and combed straight back over the head.

  They had a pint of Old Stag and a gallon milk bottle filled with blackberry wine. The Negro began passing out the Jax, and an hour later the room roared with mariachi songs and Apache screams.

  “Let me try that guitar, buddy,” I said to the boy from the front porch. He sat on the floor with his back against the wall and a glass of wine and whiskey between his legs. His face was bloodless and his eyes couldn’t fix on my face. I put the strap of the twelve-string around my neck and tried to pick out “The Wreck of Old ’97,” but my fingers felt as though a needle and thread had been drawn through all my knuckles. Then I tried “The Wildwood Flower” and “John Hardy,” and each time I began over again I hit more wrong notes or came up on the wrong fret. I smoked somebody’s cigarette out of an ashtray, finished my drink, and then started an easy Jimmie Rodgers run that I had learned to pick when I was sixteen. It was worse than before, and I laid the guitar facedown on the counter among the scores of empty beer bottles.

  “I bet you blow a good one when you’re cool,” Rie said. She was sitting in the chair next to me with a small glass of wine in her hand. Her legs were crossed, and the indention across her stomach and the white line of skin above her blue jeans made something drop inside me.

  “Give me an hour and I’ll boil them cabbages down,” I said.

  “Do it tomorrow morning.”

  “I’m going to streak out of here like the fireball mail tomorrow morning. My Cadillac and I are going to melt the asphalt between here and Austin.” Someone put the whiskey bottle in my hand, and I took two large swallows and chased it with beer.

  “You must have a real dragon inside,” Rie said.

  “No, I deal with Captain Hyde. That bastard and I have been together almost fifteen years. However, when he starts acting like an asshole I unscrew my head and throw it in the Rio Grande a couple of times.”

  “No kidding, pull it back in, man,” she said.

  “I thought you were a hip girl. You’re giving me the concerned eye of a Baptist reformer now.”

  “I think you’re probably a madman.”

  “You ought to see me and John Wesley Hardin drunk in the streets of Yoakum. He rides on the fender of my Cadillac, busting parking meters and stoplights with a revolver in each hand.”

  The noise became louder. All the beer, whiskey, and wine were gone, and I gave one of the Mexican field hands another twenty dollars to go to the tavern. The twelve-string guitar was passed from hand to hand, tuned in a half dozen discords, two strings broken, and finally dropped in a corner. Someone suggested a knife-throwing contest, and a bread cutter, two bowies, a rippled-bladed Italian stiletto, my pocketknife, a hand ax, and a meat cleaver were flung into the wall until the boards were split and shattered and knocked through on the ground outside.

  The room was beginning to tip and blur in front of my eyes. I was smoking a dead cigar butt that I had frayed under my boot heel a few minutes earlier.

  “Spodiodi, man. It’s the only thing. You got to put them snakes back in the basket,” the Negro said in my face. His eyes were red, and his breath was sour with wine.

  “I don’t deal in snakes.”

  “Man, they’re crawling through your face.”

  I knew that I had an answer for him, but the words wouldn’t rise out of the echoes and flashes of light in my head.

  “Let’s go down to the river. This place is hotter than a brick kiln,” I said.

  “It’s all that corn,” the Negro said.

  “Come on, Judge Roy Bean is holding court in his inner tube,” I said, and pulled Rie up from her chair by the hand.

  “Hey, man,” she said.

  I carried the bottle of whiskey by the neck and pulled her through the hallway into the kitchen. The Negro followed us with a beer in each hand and a half-dozen bottles stuck down in his trousers.

  We walked down the bare slope toward the mudflat. The moon was full and white as ivory in a breathless sky. A rusted Ford coupe with no glass in the windows sat half-submerged in the river. The current eddied and swirled through the gaping window in back and coursed over the top of the seats and the steering wheel. The moon’s reflection rippled across the water’s brown surface, and I could see the sharp backs of garfish turning by the sandbars. Behind us the Mexican field hands were still singing. The Negro finished one beer and threw the bottle arching high over the river.

  “Yow!” he yelled.

  “Look at it. There’s Mexico,” I said. “Fifty yards and you can drop right through the bottom of the twentieth century.”

  Rie sat down on a rotted log with her bare feet in the w
ater. The moonlight turned the burned tips of her hair to points of silver.

  “A whole land full of bandit ghosts and Indian legends,” I said. “You just step through the hole in the hedge, and there’s Pancho Villa splashing across the river with pistols and bandoliers hanging all over him. Zapata cutting down federales with his machete. Illiterate peasants executing French kings. Cortez destroying an entire culture.”

  “There’s diphtheria in the well water of those adobe huts, too,” Rie said.

  “You’re like every Marxist I ever met. No humor or sense of romance.”

  “Quit shouting.”

  “Isn’t that straight?” I said. “It’s the revolutionary mind. You can’t realize that man is more a clown than a Satan. You approach everything with a sullen mind and try to convert buffoons into Machiavelli.”

  “Oh for God’s sake, man.”

  I took a drink out of the bottle. The whiskey splashed over my mouth.

  “You goddamn people don’t know what human evil is. One of these days you and I are going to have some Chinese tea and talk about the Bean Camp together. I’ll also give you a couple of footnotes on Pak’s Palace and No Name Valley.”

  I felt the ground shift under my feet, and I thought I was going to fall. I put my arm on her shoulder to keep my balance.

  “There’s mudcat nesting in that car. I know how to get them, too,” the Negro said. He took off his shirt and shoes, and laid the remaining bottles of beer in an even line on the bank. “You just swim your hand under the water and back that shovel-mouth into a corner and catch him real fast inside the gill. Come on, brother. I’m going to teach you how to fish like black people.”

  He waded out into the river up to his hips and pulled open the rusted car door with both hands. The moon’s reflection off the water made his black body glow.

  “He does this when he gets drunk,” Rie said. “You can do it, too, if you want me to take both of you down to the county hospital tonight.”