Lay Down My Sword and Shield hh-1

by James Lee Burke

  But I couldn’t stand his bigotry, his illiterate confidence in the reasons for his success, and his simplistic and sometimes brutal solutions for the world’s problems. Also, I resented the influence he’d had on Verisa’s mind, that early period when he had infected her with the stupidity of his class. As she grew older I knew she would become more like him, much more sophisticated and intelligent, but nevertheless marked with the rigid social attitudes of the new rich. Worse, as my dislike for him became more open and his weekly visits turned into embarrassing periods of silence in the living room and then finally stopped altogether, I pushed her closer to him and she began to make comparisons between her father and other men who had been given everything. Sometime later, after I had come in drunk from a duck-hunting trip, she commented that heavy drinking was a symptom of the weak who couldn’t stand up under competition.

  I paid my bill at the steak house and took two cans of Jax with me for the drive home. Evidently, I was confused about Verisa’s schedule for the week, because one of her afternoon lawn parties was under way when I arrived. The Negro bartender was shaving ice for mint juleps on the screened porch, and blue-haired ladies in sundresses sat around tables on the lawn under the oak trees. Here we go, I thought. Two men from the state Democratic committee were there, neither of whom I wanted to see, and somebody had ridden Sailor Boy and had left him thirsty in the lot with the saddle still on. I went around the far side of the house and entered the library through the side door, but an insurance executive from Victoria and his wife were there, staring at my gun case with drinks in their hands. They turned their flushed faces at me, smiling. “Hello. Good to see you,” I said, and went straight through and into the kitchen. Cappie, an old Negro who lived on the back of my property and sometimes barbecued for us, was chopping green onions and peppers with a cleaver on the drainboard. His gray hair was curled in the thick furrows on the back of his neck.

  “Cap, get that saddle off of Sailor Boy and turn him out.”

  “There some young ladies been riding him, Mr. Holland.”

  “Yeah, I know. Nobody thinks he drinks water, either.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  I started up the staircase to the bedroom, and then one of the Democratic committee men called from behind me and I was caught in the center of it. I drank mint juleps under the oaks with the blue-haired ladies, listened with interest to their compliments about my wife and ranch, explained politely to a mindless coed that Sailor Boy was a show horse and shouldn’t be ridden into barbed-wire fences, and laughed good-naturedly with the two committee men at their locker-room jokes. People came and left, the sun started to set beyond the line of trees on the horizon, and the bartender moved among the groups with a tray of cool drinks, and at dusk Cappie served plates of barbecued links and chicken and potato salad. My head was drumming with the heat, the whiskey, and the endless conversation. Verisa stood next to me with her hand on my arm, accepting invitations to homes that I would not enter unless I was drugged and chained. Finally, at nine o’clock, when the party moved inside out of sheer exhaustion, I took a bottle of whiskey from the bar and drove down the back road to one of the ponds that I’d had stocked with bass. One of Cappie’s cane poles was leaned against a willow tree, and I dug some worms out of the wet dirt by the bank and drank whiskey and bottom-fished in the dark until I saw the last headlights wind down my front lane to the blacktop.

  During the next ten days I spoke at a free Democratic barbecue in Austin (it was crowded with university students and working people, most of whom stayed at the beer kegs and didn’t know or care who was giving the barbecue), addressed two businessmen’s luncheons in San Antonio (the American and Texas flags on each side of me, the plastic plants forever green on the linen-covered tables, the rows of intent faces like expressions caught in a waxworks), talked informally at a private club in Houston (“Well, Mr. Holland, regardless of the mistake we made in Vietnam, don’t you think we have an obligation to support the fighting men?” “Granted that colored people have a grievance, do you believe that the answer lies in destruction of property?” “Frankly, what is your position on the oil depletion allowance?”), and spent one roaring drunk afternoon in a tavern with two dozen oil-field roughnecks and pipeliners who all promised to vote for me, although almost none of them came from the district.

  The appeal came through at the close of the second week since I had seen Art. The judge who had reviewed the trial record, a hard old man with forty years on the bench, wrote in his decision that “the conduct of the local court was repugnant, a throwback to frontier barbarism,” and he ordered Art’s release from the state penitentiary on appeals bond pending a new trial. I set down the telephone, took a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and a glass from my desk drawer, and poured a large drink. On my second swallow, with a fresh cigar in my mouth, Bailey walked through the door and hit the broken air conditioner with his fist.

  “Why don’t you turn the goddamn thing off so the building can stop vibrating a few minutes?” he said. It had been a bad two weeks for Bailey. The heat bothered him much worse than it did me, and we had lost one of our big accounts, which he blamed on me. He believed that he was developing an ulcer, and each morning he drank a half bottle of some chalky white medicine that left him nauseated for two hours.

  “Just turn the knob, Bailey, or you can hit it some more.”

  “I see you’re getting launched early this afternoon.”

  “No, only one drink. Do you know where I can buy a beer truck?”

  “What?” A drop of perspiration rolled down from his hairline like a thick, clear vein.

  “I tell you what, buddy. Let’s lock up the office in about an hour, and I’ll take you on a three-day visit to all the Mexican beer joints in San Antonio.”

  “Put up the whiskey.”

  “Come on. For one time in forty years of Baptist living, close the office early and tie on a real happy one.”

  “Did you look at our calendar for this afternoon between drinks?”

  “Yeah, R. C. Richardson is about to get burned again, and he needs us to clean up his shit.”

  “You accepted him as a client. I don’t like the sonofabitch in the office.”

  “You don’t understand that old country boy, Bailey. He’s not a bad guy, as far as sons of bitches go. Anyway, his ass can burn until Monday. Get a glass and sit down. The only ulcer you have is in the head, and you’re going to have a few dozen more there unless you let some cool air into that squeezed mind of yours.”

  “If you want to get into the bottle and blow half our practice, do it, but shut off that patronizing crap. I’ve pretty well reached my level of tolerance in the last two weeks.”

  “Look, I won appeal today on Art Gomez and the judge has set bond, and you have to admit that we haven’t sprung many of our clients from the state pen. So take a drink and lower your blood rate, and I’ll pick up Richardson’s case early Monday morning.”

  “I can’t get it through to you, Hack. You’ve got cement around your head. The office isn’t a tennis club where you play between drinks.”

  “All right, forget it,” I said, and picked up the telephone and dialed the number of a bondsman we dealt with. I turned my eyes away from Bailey’s vexed face and waited in the hot stillness for him to leave the room.

  The bondsman was named Bobo Dietz. He was a dark, fat man, who always wore purple shirts and patent-leather shoes and a gold ring on his little finger. He had moved to Austin from New Jersey ten years ago, set up a shabby office next to the county jail, and in the time since then he had bought two pawnshops and three grocery stores in the Negro slum. He considered avarice a natural part of man’s chemistry, and you were a sucker if you believed otherwise; but he was always efficient and you could count on him to have bail posted and the client on the street a half hour after you set him in motion.

  He assured me over the phone, in his hard Camden accent and bad grammar, that the ten-thousand-dollar bond would be made before five o’clock
and Art would be released by tomorrow morning. For some reason Bobo liked me, and as always, when I went bail for a client on my own, he wouldn’t charge me for anything except expenses. Many times I wondered if there was some strange scar in my personality that attracted people like Bobo Dietz and R. C. Richardson to me.

  I turned off the air conditioner and opened all the office windows. The stale afternoon heat and noise from the street rose off the yellow awnings below me. My shirt stuck to my skin, and the odor of gasoline exhaust and hot tar made my eyes water. In the middle of the intersection a big Negro in an undershirt was driving an air-hammer into the concrete. The broken street surfacing shaled back from the bit, and the compressor pumped like a throbbing headache. I sipped another straight drink in the windowsill, sweating in the humidity and the heat of the whiskey, then I decided to give Bailey and his fundamentalist mentality another try. I took a second glass from the drawer, poured a small shot in the bottom, and walked into his office.

  He was dictating to our secretary, his eyes focused on the wall, and I could see in the nervous flick of his fingers on his knee that he expected an angry exchange, profanity (which he hated in front of women), or a quick thrust into one of his sensitive areas (such as his impoverished bachelorhood, the empty weekends in his four-hundred-dollar-a-month apartment). I leaned against the doorjamb, smoking a cigar, with a glass in each hand. He faltered in his dictation, and his eyes moved erratically over the wall.

  “Hack, I’ll talk to you later.”

  “No, we have to shut it down today. It’s Friday afternoon and R. C. Richardson will appreciate us a lot more Monday morning. Mrs. McFarland, my brother needs to direct me into the cocktail hour today, so you can leave early if you like.”

  The secretary rested her pencil on her pad, her eyes smiling. Her hair was gray, streaked with iron, and her face was cheerful and bright as she waited for the proper moment either to stop work or resume the dictation.

  I set Bailey’s drink down before him.

  “I’d like to finish if—”

  “Sorry, you’re unplugged for the day, brother,” I said. “Go ahead, Mrs. McFarland. There’s a slop chute down the road where I need a warden.”

  Bailey saw that I had the first edge of a high on, and he let the secretary go with an apology. (He was the only southerner I ever knew who could have been a character in a Margaret Mitchell novel.)

  “That’s too goddamn much,” he said. “I’ve had it with this type of irresponsible college-boy shit around the office. When you’re not loaded you’re coming off a drunk, or you’re spending your time on a union agitator’s appeal while our biggest account gets picked up by a couple of New York Jews. You’ve insulted everybody who’s tried to help you in the election, you got yourself put in jail because you were too drunk to know what universe you were in, and you had the balls to file a civil rights complaint against the man who arrested you.”

  “Bailey—”

  “Just shut up a minute. Senator Dowling kept that story off the wire services, but since you felt so outraged that you had to file a complaint with the F.B.I. we should have some real fine stuff in the newspapers before November. In the meantime you haven’t been in a courtroom in three months, and I’m tired of carrying your load. If you want out of the partnership, I’ll sign my name to a check and you can fill in the amount.”

  “I started off to have a drink with you, brother, but since you’ve brought the conversation down to the bloodletting stage, let’s look at a couple of things closely. Number one, the criminal cases we’ve won in court have been handled by me, and our largest paying accounts, keeping Richardson and his kind out of the pen for stealing millions from the state, have been successful because I know how to bend oil regulation laws around a telephone pole. Number two, you haven’t been pumping my candidacy for Congress just because you want to see your brother’s sweet ass winking at you from Washington, D.C. I don’t like to put it rough to you like that, Bailey, but you don’t understand anything unless it comes at you like a freight train between the eyes. You have all these respectable attitudes and you heap them out on everybody else’s head and ask them to like you for it. You better learn that you have a real load of pig flop in that wheelbarrow.”

  On that note of vicious rapport I received the call from Bobo Dietz. Bailey’s face was white, the veins swollen in his neck, his eyes hot as he raised the whiskey to his mouth and I picked up the receiver.

  “I don’t know what kind of deal this is, Mr. Holland,” Dietz said.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “That man’s dead.”

  “Look, Dietz—”

  “I called the warden. He said a couple of boons chopped him up with bush axes yesterday afternoon.”

  CHAPTER 7

  It took me a half hour to get the warden on the phone. He didn’t want to talk with me, but after I threatened to see him in his home that night he read me the guard’s report about Art’s death and added his own explanations about the unavoidable violence between the Negro and Mexican inmates.

  Two Negroes had hidden a paper bag full of Benzedrex inhalers in the tractor shed, and they had been drinking bottles of codeine stolen from the pharmacy and chewing the cotton Benzedrine rings from at least two dozen inhalers when Art went inside the shed to get a lug wrench. A few minutes passed; a mounted guard working a gang in the cotton field heard a single cry, and by the time he rode to the shed and threw open the door the Negroes had disemboweled Art, torn the flesh from his back like whale meat, and severed one arm from his body.

  There wasn’t much more to the report. Art had probably been killed with the second or third blow. The Negroes were so incoherent they couldn’t talk, and the guard had no idea why they had attacked Art instead of a half-dozen other men who had been in and out of the shed earlier, although the warden added that “a doped-up nigger isn’t a human being no longer.” The Negroes had been put in solitary confinement and refused to talk about killing Art, if they even remembered doing it, and Art’s body was to be buried in the prison cemetery unless his family was willing to pay for shipment back to Rio Grande City.

  I hung up the receiver and sat numbly in the chair with my eyes closed and my fingers trembling on my forehead. So that was it. Just like that. Two crazed men single out another man, for no reason other than the fact that he walked into their bent, angry minds at the wrong time, and then they tear all the thirty-six years of life and soul from his body in seconds. My right hand was still sweating from the heat of the phone receiver and my ears burned with the casual language of the guard’s report and the warden’s footnotes. I couldn’t shut out the vision of the two Negroes dismembering a man who had nothing to do with their lives, their brains boiling in a furnace of satisfaction, just as sometime in the future several other madmen would seat them in a wooden chair fitted with leather straps and buckles and metal hood and place a cotton gag in their mouths and burst every cell in their bodies with thousands of volts of electricity. Bailey poured a drink in a glass and placed it in my hand. I watched the brown light shimmering in the whiskey. My arm felt too weak and lifeless to raise the glass to my mouth.

  “I’m sorry, Hack,” Bailey said.

  I stood up and set the glass on the desk. My movements seemed wooden, disconnected from one another, as though I had just awoke in the center of a vacuum. I could feel the beat of my pulse swelling into my eardrums. For just a moment the room looked unfamiliar, the ordered arrangement of chairs and desk and file cabinets foreign to anything that was me. I began putting on my coat.

  “Where are you going?” Bailey said.

  “I’m going to try to explain how a—”

  “Sit down a minute and finish your drink.”

  “I said I’m going down to the Valley and try to explain how a good man was murdered in a prison where he shouldn’t have been in the first place. And then I’ll explain how I won appeal on a man twenty-four hours after he was dead.”

  “Don’t let it take
you like this, Hack.”

  “How should we take it, Bailey? Maybe if I go to work fast I can arrange to have his body shipped home before he’s buried in a prison cemetery with a wood marker. And if I’m too late to prevent that, I can always work on a court order to have the body exhumed. And while we’re doing all that we can consider that a lynch court had this in mind for him when he was first charged.”

  “Here, drink it, and I’ll go with you.”

  “You wouldn’t like it.”

  “I’ll rent a plane and we’ll fly down tonight.”

  I drank from the glass, but the whiskey had no taste. I had started to perspire under my coat, and the shapes and late afternoon shadows in the room were as strange as the distorted lines in a dream. Outside, the air-hammer thudded into the asphalt. I felt the sweat dripping off my hair down the back of my neck. The glass was empty in my hand.

  “They wouldn’t like you, either,” I said.

  “Goddamn it, Hack, you can’t drive like this.”

  “They don’t buy that work-with-the-system stuff. And I don’t feel like telling them the system is all right, except for those twenty-four-hour differences that you have to take into allowance. And I don’t like to tell them that I was having drinks with the D.A.R. ladies and shaking hands with the paraplegics while Art’s clock was one day behind the court’s. Give me another one.”

  He put his arm on my elbow and tried to turn me toward the chair.

  “Just get the bottle, Bailey. Pour yourself a super one while you’re at it.”

  He went to the desk and came back with the bottle of Jack Daniel’s. He held the stopper in one hand.

  “All right, sit down, and I’ll call the airport.”

  “Would you listen to me just for one goddamn time?” I said. “I’m not going down to meet with a Rotarian luncheon, and number two I’m not a fucking lunatic who needs his older brother to strap a control harness on his back.”