“Unless I figured that sheriff wrong, he’s already been to the hotel and my suitcase is waiting for me on the front step.”
“Your eye is starting to close.”
“I keep a couple of glass spares in my glove compartment.”
She put her arm through mine and moved toward the porch.
“All right, no protest,” I said.
“I thought he’d killed you.”
“I don’t believe you’re a hard girl after all.”
“Your eyelids turned blue. I even cried to make that asshole take you into emergency receiving, and he shot me the finger.”
“Don’t worry. I’m going to make this fellow’s life a little more interesting for him in the next few weeks.”
“I didn’t think you believed in charging the barricade.”
“I don’t. There’s always ten others like him who’ll crawl out of the woodwork to take his place, but you can’t fool with the Lone Ranger and Tonto and walk away from it.”
We went inside, and I sat in a chair while she washed the lump on my head with soap and water. The tips of her fingers were as light as wind on the bruised skin.
“There’s pieces of rock and dirt in the cut. I’ll have to get them out with the tweezers,” she said. “You should go to the hospital and get a couple of stitches.”
“Do you have a quart of milk in your icebox?”
She went into the kitchen and came back with a carton of buttermilk and a pair of tweezers in a glass of alcohol. I drank the carton half empty in one long chugging swallow, and for just a moment the thick cream felt like cool air and health and sunshine transfused into my body, then she started picking out the pieces of rock from the cut with the edge of the tweezers. Each alcohol nick made the skin around my eye flex and pucker.
“What are you doing? I don’t need a lobotomy.”
“You probably don’t need blood poisoning, either.” Her eyes were concentrated with each metallic scratch against my skin.
“Look, let me have the tweezers and give me a mirror. I used to be a pretty fair hospital corpsman.”
“Don’t move your head. I almost have it all out.” She bit her lip and squeezed out a splinter of rock from under the cut with her finger. “There.”
Then she rubbed a cotton pad soaked with alcohol over the lump.
“There are other ways to clean a cut. They ought to give first-aid courses in the Third World before you kill somebody with shock.”
“Wait a minute,” she said, and went into the kitchen again and returned with a piece of ice wrapped in a clean dish towel. She held it against my head, her almond eyes still fixed with a child’s concern.
“A cold compress can’t do any good after the first two hours,” I said.
“What was that Bean Camp stuff about last night?”
“Nothing. I create things in my head when I try to run up Jack Daniel’s stock a couple of points.”
“Were you in a prison camp during the war?”
“No.”
The whiskey edge was starting to wear off, and gray worms and spots of light swam before my eyes when I tried to stand up. She pressed her hand down on my shoulder.
“You ought to pull the fishhooks out. You’re all flames inside,” she said.
“I feel like I’ve been dismantled twice in three days, and I’m not up to psychoanalysis right now. It seems that every time my brain is bleeding someone starts boring into my skull with the brace and bit.”
“Okay, man, I’m sorry.”
“I’ve got a brother that can make you grind your teeth down to the nerve with that same type of morning-after insight. There’s nothing like it to send me right through the wall.”
“So I won’t say anything else,” she said.
I felt myself trembling inside, as though all the wheels and gears were starting to shear off against one another at once. My palms were sweating on my knees, and I realized that my real hangover was just beginning.
“Let me have one of your cigarettes,” I said.
She laid the ice compress down, lit a cigarette, and put it in my mouth. The smoke was raw in my throat, and a drop of sweat rolled off my lip onto the paper.
“Does it always take you like that?” she said.
“No, only when I’m stupid enough to get my head kicked in by a redneck cop.”
I smoked the cigarette and exhaled slowly, while my temple and eye beat with pain, then pushed the sweat back into my hair with one hand.
“Look, you’re not a drinker, so you don’t know the alcoholic syndrome,” I said. “I’m not a shithead all the time.”
“Sit down. Your cut is bleeding.”
“I’m going down the road. I’ll take a couple of those hot beers with me if you don’t mind.”
My legs were weak, and the blood seemed to drain downward in my body with the effort of standing.
“You can’t drive anywhere now.”
“Watch.”
“What you’re doing is really dumb.”
I started toward the counter where the remaining bottles of Jax stood, and a yellow wave of nausea went through me. The sour taste of buttermilk and last night’s whiskey came up in my throat, and I felt a great throbbing weight on my forehead. My cigarette was wet down to the ash from the sweat running off my face.
“I really got one this time,” I said.
“Come in the back,” she said, and put her arm around my waist. My shirt stuck wetly against my skin.
We went down the hallway through a side door into a small bedroom. The shade on the window was torn, and strips of broken sunlight struck across the floor. An old crucifix was nailed against one wall above a Catholic religious calendar with two withered palms stuck under the top edges. I drew in on the dead cigarette and gagged in the back of my throat. You’ve just about made the d.t.’s this time, I thought. Work on it again and you’ll really get there.
My body felt as rigid as a snapped twig. She pressed me down on the edge of the bed with her hands and turned on an electric fan. The current of air was like wind blowing over ice against my face.
“Lie down and I’ll put a dressing on your cut,” she said.
Something was rolling loose inside me, and my fingers were shaking on my knees.
“Look, you don’t need—”
“Lie down, Lone Ranger.” Then she leaned over me with her breasts heavy against her blouse, her brown face and wild curly hair a dark silhouette above me, and pressed me back into the pillow.
She rubbed ointment on the cut in a circular motion with her fingers and taped a piece of gauze over it. I could feel the heat of the sun in her skin and hair, and her eyes were filled with a dark shine. I touched the smoothness of her arm with my hand, then the light began to fade beyond the window shade, the fan blew cool over my chest and face, and somewhere out in the hills a train whistle echoed and beat thinly into a brass sky. I heard her close the door softly as on the edge of a dream.
It was afternoon when I awoke, and the wind was blowing hard against the building. The shade flapped back from the window, rattling against the woodwork, and dust devils spun in the air outside. The boards in the floor quivered from the gusts of wind under the building, and there were grains of sand on my skin. My head was dizzy when I stood up, my face tingling, and I could taste the hot dryness of the air in my mouth. I tripped over the fan and opened the door to the hallway. The sudden draft tore the religious calendar and withered palms from the wall, and the mobile made from beer bottles clattered and twisted in circles on the ceiling in the main room. I leaned against the doorjamb in the numbness of awaking from afternoon sleep. Through the front screen I could see the clouds of dust blowing along the street into the trees. I heard Rie walk out of the kitchen toward me. She held a tall glass of ice water in her hand, and she had put on a pair of white shorts and a navy denim shirt. There were freckles on the tops of her bare feet.
“How do you feel?” she said.
“I’ll let you know in a minute.�
�� I took the glass of ice water from her hand and drank it down to the bottom. I didn’t believe that I had ever been so thirsty. The coldness ached inside my empty stomach.
“You have bad dreams,” she said.
“Yeah, I’ve got a whole wheelbarrow full of them.” I walked past her into the kitchen and put my head under the iron pump. I worked the handle, and the water poured over my neck and shoulders and inside my shirt. I wiped my face slick with the palm of my hand. Down the slope the Rio Grande was rippled and dented by the wind. The brown current was turning white around the wreck of the submerged car.
“You can stay here. You don’t have to go back today,” she said.
“I’d better hit it.”
“Wait until the windstorm passes.”
“They don’t pass this time of year. That’s a three-day affair out there.” The water dripped off my clothes onto the floor.
“You can’t see out of your eye.”
“I sight with one eye over my Cadillac hood just like a pistol barrel,” I said.
“I’ll ride to the hotel with you.”
“No, the sheriff will probably be hanging around there somewhere. I think you’ve had enough innings with a left-handed pitcher for one day.”
The building shook in the wind, and pieces of newspaper blew by the window. Across the river two Mexican children were leading a flat-sided, mange-scarred cow off the mud bank into a shed. Her swollen red udder swung under her belly.
“I don’t want to see you get busted again,” Rie said.
“You take care, babe.” I put my hands on her shoulders and kissed her on the cheek. For just an instant the nipples of her breasts touched me and I turned to water inside. Her mouth and eyes made my heart race. “I expect I’ll be back here eventually and try to do something for that Yankee mind of yours.”
“Be careful with yourself, Hack.”
I walked out into the dust and drove to the hotel. Leaves were shredding from the trees on the courthouse lawn and blowing along the sidewalk. An empty tomato basket bounced end over end in the middle of the street, and the wood sign over the hotel slammed back and forth on its iron hooks. The fat deputy who had let me out of the cell that morning sat in the swing on the verandah with his feet propped against the railing. He looked off casually at the yellow sky when I passed him, his huge stomach bursting against his shirt buttons.
“Mr. Holland, we’ll be needing your room tonight,” the desk clerk said inside. His eyes were focused about three inches to the side of my face, then they would flick temporarily across the bridge of my nose and back again to a spot on the far wall.
“By God, that’s right, isn’t it?” I said. “The Cattlemen’s Association is holding its world convention here this week.”
My room had been cleaned, the bed made, the empty beer bottles carried out, as though I had never been there, and my suitcase was packed and closed and sitting just inside the door, ready to be picked up in one convenient motion. Someone had even put a Gideon Bible on the dresser top.
I paid my bill at the desk, and the clerk managed to show me nothing but the crown of his head while he marked off the ticket and counted out my change.
“You don’t sell cigars in here, do you?” I said.
He fumbled in the middle of his counting, his eyelids blinking nervously, and I thought I had him, but he regained his resolve and kept his eyes nailed to the counter. “No sir, but you can get them right next door,” he said, and turned away to the cash register.
I started down the steps to my car, then I heard the swing flop back empty on its chains and the boards of the porch bend under the deputy’s massive weight. What a time not to have a cigar, I thought.
“Mr. Holland, the sheriff wanted me to give you this road map,” he said, pulling it out of the back pocket of his khaki trousers. The paper was pressed into an arc from the curve of his buttocks. “He don’t want you to get lost nowhere on that highway construction before you get into the next county.”
“I guess that would be easy to do unless I had a map. Say, you don’t smoke cigars, do you?” I said. “Let me get a Camel from you, then.”
His eyes looked at me uncomprehendingly out of his white volleyball face. His greased black hair, combed over the balding pate, had grains of sand in it. He pulled a cigarette out of his shirt pocket with two fingers and handed it to me.
“This is nice of you and the sheriff, and I appreciate it.” I borrowed his lighter, which had a Confederate flag on the side of it, and lit the cigarette. “Look, I’ve got two lifetime World Rodeo Association passes that I never use. They’re good for box seats at any livestock show or ass-buster in the state. Here, you take them.”
I pulled the two thick cardboard passes from my billfold and stuck them in his shirt pocket.
“Well, thank you, Mr. Holland,” he said.
I went next door to the tavern, bought a box of cigars and a six-pack of cold Jax, and headed down the road in the blowing clouds of dust, the cornstalks rattling in the wind, the gold of the citrus exposed among the swelling green trees, and each time I made a curve between two hills at ninety miles an hour I felt the old omnipotence vibrate smoothly out of the engine through the steering column into my hands. The fields of cotton, watermelons, and tomatoes flashed by me, and the late sun splintered in shafts of light through the dust clouds and struck on the tops of the hills in soft areas of pale green and shadow. Then the country began to become more level, the twilight took on all the violent purple and yellow colors of an apocalypse, and I felt the wind driving with me eastward down a narrow blacktop highway that stretched endlessly across empty land toward the gathering darkness on the horizon.
CHAPTER 5
The poplar trees along my front lane were bent in the wind when I got back to the ranch that night. Under the full moon their shadows beat on the white gravel, and the air was full of swirling rose petals from Verisa’s gardens. Someone had forgotten to chain the windmill by the barn, and the blades were spinning in a circle of tinny light while the water overflowed from the trough onto the ground. I could see the dark shapes of ruined tomatoes lying in the rows, and some of the cotton had started to strip. Then I saw Sailor Boy, my Tennessee walking horse that I had bought from Spendthrift Farm for six thousand dollars, knocking against the rails in the lot. His nostrils were dilated, his black head shiny with moonlight and fear, and he was running in a broken gait against each of the rick fence corners, rearing his head and kicking dirt and manure in the air. I climbed into the lot with him, worked him back easy against the rails with both my arms outspread, and got a halter over his head. There was a four-inch cut in one flank, and he had thrown a shoe and splintered part of a hoof against the barn wall. I led him into a stall, slipped an oats bag over his ears, and dressed the ragged split in his skin. Then I went into the house, my blood roaring.
Verisa was reading a book under a lamp in the living room. She wore her nightgown, and she had two curlers set in the front of her hair. A cigarette had burned down to its filter in the ashtray. She had the nocturnal, isolated composure of a woman who might have lived by herself all her life.
“Question number one: who in the hell left Sailor Boy out in the lot?” I said.
She turned and looked at me, and her face whitened under the lamp.
“What—” I saw her eyes trying to adjust on the swollen side of my head.
“Who left Sailor Boy out in a windstorm?”
“Hack, what in God’s name have you done now?”
“I want to know which idiot or combination of idiots left my horse to tear himself up in the lot.”
“I don’t know. Why don’t you stay home and take care of him yourself?”
“The perfect non-think answer. If his gait is thrown off I’m going to set fire to somebody’s hair.”
“You’d better not be talking about me.”
“Read it like you want. It takes a special type of fool to do something that stupid to a fine horse.”
“Yo
u just stop your shouting at me.”
“I’ll crack the goddamn ceiling if I want. And as long as we’re on it, question number two: who forgot to chain the windmill? Which might strike you as a minor thing to consider between book pages, but right now our water table is almost dry and there are some crops that have a tendency to burn when they’re not irrigated.”
“I’m getting sick of this,” she said.
“I’m not asking you to walk around in the manure with a cattle prod in your hand. I’d just like you to stick your head out the door occasionally and make sure the whole goddamn place hasn’t blown away.”
“I don’t know where your present adventure took you, but you must have damaged some of the brain tissue. I’m going to bed. If you want to shout some more, either close the door or go down the road to your tavern.”
“Don’t you know what it means to hurt a horse like that?”
“Good night, Hack.”
She set her book down with a marker between the pages and walked past me in her best remote fashion. Her blue nightgown swirled around her legs in a whisper of silk, then she closed the door behind her. I had a drink out of the decanter on the bar, while my chest rose and fell with my breathing. Outside, the trees scratched against the house, and the door on the barn loft kept slamming like a tack hammer in the wind.
In the morning I went to the office in Austin and began work on Art’s appeal. I was supposed to help Bailey that week on two large insurance suits, but after he had recovered from staring at my bandaged head and the swollen corner of my eye under my sunglasses, I told him that he would have to carry it alone for a few days. He was still angry from the weekend, and now his exasperation with his younger brother almost made his eyes cross. He sat with one thigh over the corner of my desk, his hands folded, straining like a stoic to retain his patience, while each word tripped out like an expression from a peptic ulcer.
“This is a two-hundred-thousand-dollar deal, Hack,” he said. “We waited on it for six months.”
“So I’ll pick it up next week.”
“We’re going to try to settle next week.”
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