Lay Down My Sword and Shield hh-1

by James Lee Burke

  “We don’t want a bust this early,” Rie said. “Stay in the car until the rest of our people get here.”

  But he wasn’t looking at us any longer. His red eyes stared over my shoulder in the direction of the county road, and I turned around and saw the two black and white sheriff’s cars, followed by three carloads of townspeople, rolling toward us in the dust. The whip aerials sprang back and forth on their springs, and muscular, shirt-sleeved arms hung out the windows of the other cars, beating against the door sides. The wind flattened the clouds of dust across the road, and a moment later two Texas Ranger cars closed the distance with the rest of the caravan.

  “It ain’t cool no more, whiskey brother,” the Negro said.

  The line of cars pulled into the gravel bedding along the railway track, and the Rangers and deputy sheriffs walked casually toward the two Rangers in sunglasses who were leaning against their automobile and looking at the priest. The other men stayed behind and formed in a group by a boxcar, their hands in their back pockets, their faces tight, spitting tobacco juice into the rocks, and glaring at the Mexicans and the Negroes. They had crew cuts and faces put together out of shingles, and they wore T-shirts or blue jean jackets with the sleeves cut off at the armpits. There were tattoos of Confederate flags and Easter crosses, Mother and the United States Marine Corps, inscriptions to Billy Sue and Norma Jean, and even the young ones had pot stomachs. They looked like everyone who was ever kicked out of a rural Texas high school.

  Then I saw my friend from the sheriff’s office. He walked from behind the freight car with a filter-tipped cigar between his teeth, his khaki trousers tucked inside his half-top boots, and his wide leather cartridge belt pulled tight across his flat stomach. He spoke quietly to the men in T-shirts and denim jackets, smiling, his hands on his hips, and then he and the others turned their faces toward me at one time. His green, yellow-flecked eyes were filled with an intense delight, and his lips pressed down softly on the cigar tip.

  “Let’s get into the picket before it starts,” Rie said.

  I walked with her to the back of the stake truck, where the priest was still handing down signs. The wind whipped the dust in our faces, and swollen rain clouds were rolling over the horizon. The air was becoming cooler, and I heard the first dull rip of thunder in the distance. The priest wiped his face on his shirt sleeve and grinned at us.

  “How are you, Mr. Holland? We can use a good man from the establishment,” he said.

  “I know a two-word reply to that, Father,” I said.

  “I believe I’ve heard it.”

  “Mojo’s drunk. Try to get him into the truck,” Rie said.

  “He’s not fond of listening to church people,” the priest said.

  “There’s some badass types back by the freight car, and he’s been in a winehead mood since some kids tried to get it on with him the other night,” she said.

  “I’ll watch him,” he said.

  “Watch that bunch of assholes, too. One of the dicks was winding them up.”

  The priest looked over at one of the Rangers who was talking into the microphone of his mobile radio.

  “Get into the line. They’re going to start moving in a few minutes,” he said.

  Rie picked up two cardboard signs tacked on laths and handed me one of them. A single, large drop of rain splattered on the black eagle over the word HUELGA.

  “Come on,” she said.

  “Can I get a cigar lit first, for God’s sake?” I said.

  “We don’t want anybody arrested outside the picket, Hack.”

  “All right, goddamn. Just a minute.”

  For some reason I hadn’t yet accepted the fact that I would be walking on a picket line that Monday morning, or any morning, for that matter. The sign bent backward in my hands against the wind, flopping loudly, and my knees felt disjointed as I followed her into the slow line of Mexicans and Negroes in their faded work clothes, battered straw hats, and dresses splitting at the hips. Drops of rain made puckered dimples in the dust, and the wind blew cool inside my shirt, but I was perspiring under my arms, and my face was burning as though I had just done something obscene in public. I saw the eyes of the sheriff’s deputies, the Rangers, and the poolroom account watching me, and my head became light and my cigar tasted bitter and dry in my mouth. I felt as though I had walked naked in front of a comic audience. A fat Negro woman behind me held her child, in cutoff overalls, with one hand and her picket sign in the other. She wore a pair of rippled stockings over the varicose veins in her legs.

  “You don’t worry about these children. They ain’t going to bother them,” she said.

  I looked away from her brown eyes at the man in slacks and tie on the platform. He was still taking pictures, and his face was quivering at the outrage he had seen that day against the principle of private property. Storm clouds covered the sun, and the fields were suddenly darkened and the shadows leaped across the cannery, the freight cars, and the county road. The men in T-shirts and denim jackets were now pulling the caps on hot cans of beer and spilling the foam down their necks and chests.

  “How you doing?” Rie said.

  “I think my respect for the demonstrator just went up a couple of points.”

  “Look, if those bastards move in on us, you have to take it. Okay?”

  “That doesn’t sound cool.”

  “No shit, Hack. They’re waiting for reasons to split heads.”

  “All right, but when do we finish this?”

  “We’ve only been on the picket ten minutes, babe.”

  Then I saw a television news car pull into the gravel bedding by the railway track. Two young men got out with cameras attached to half-moon braces that fitted against the shoulder. They walked over to the group of law officers by the squad cars, their faces full of confident foreknowledge about their story, and for the first time it struck me that I had never seen a newsman begin a story any differently; without thinking, they went first to the official source before they considered the people on the other end of the equation.

  One of them walked toward the picket and did a sweeping, random shot with his camera, the brace pulled tight against his shoulder. Then he lowered the camera and looked at me steadily, his face as bland and unembarrassed as a dough pan. I threw my cigar away and looked back at him with my meanest southpaw ninth-inning expression. He walked back to his friend and began talking, and the two of them stared in my direction.

  “I believe a couple of kids just earned a pay raise,” I said.

  “I bet you’re handsome on film,” Rie said.

  “Well, here they come. You want to do my P.R. work?”

  One of them already had his camera whirring before they were close enough to speak. They had forgotten the cops and the long line of migrant workers; they were both concentrated on the little piece of entrail they might carry back to the station.

  “Are you widening your district, Mr. Holland?” His voice was good-natured, and he smiled at me in his best college fraternity fashion.

  “No, no,” I said, in my best humorous fashion.

  “Do you think your support of the union will affect your election?” He held the microphone toward me, but his eyes were looking at Rie.

  “I couldn’t tell you that, buddy.”

  “The farm corporations consider this an illegal strike. Do you have a comment on that?”

  “I don’t know how it can be illegal to ask for a higher wage.”

  “Does the union plan a strike in your area?” He was cocking the rifle now, but his face looked as sincerely inquisitive as a reverent schoolboy’s.

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Does that mean the conditions of the migrant farm-workers are better in your area?”

  “No, it doesn’t,” I said. “But I tell you what, buddy. I need a cigar real bad right now, and it’s hell lighting up in this wind with one hand. So how about holding this sign for a minute, and I can get one of these awful things lit and we can talk all day
. That’s right, just take it in your hand and fold your fingers around the stick.”

  His face went blank, the lath straining in his palm, and his eyes flicked at his partner and the cops by the railway track. I used three matches to light my cigar while he blinked against the raindrops and shifted his feet in the dust.

  “I appreciate that,” I said. “Say, did you interview any of those fellows over by the freight car? I bet that bunch of boys would give you some deathless lines.”

  “We just do a job, Mr. Holland.”

  “I bet you’ll get there with it, too,” I said.

  “Would you like to say something else, sir?” His face was mean now, the eyes dirty.

  “You’ve got a whole reel of good stuff there, pal.”

  He turned away from me and put the microphone in front of Rie. The sky was almost completely dark, except for the thin line of yellow light on the distant hills. His partner moved around behind him so the lens would catch me in the same shot with Rie.

  “Do you think the families in the farm camps will suffer because of the strike?”

  “Why don’t you fuck off, man?” Rie said.

  Then one of the men by the freight car threw an empty beer can at the picket line. It missed a Negro woman’s head and clattered across the loading platform. The two newsmen backed away from us with their cameras turning. A moment later three more carloads of townspeople arrived and swelled into the group by the freight car, and then one man stepped out from them and started walking toward us, and the rest followed. He wore a tin construction hat back on his shaved head, steel-toed work boots, and denim clothes that were splattered with drilling mud from an oil rig. His eyes had a wet, yellow cast to them, and his front teeth were brown with chewing tobacco. His scrotum bulged in his blue jeans between his heavy thighs, and he stretched out his huge arms, his hands in fists, as though he were just awakening from sleep, and spat a stream of tobacco juice in the dirt.

  “Hey, buddy,” he said to me. “Do you eat Mexican pussy?”

  I looked straight ahead, my face burning.

  “You better get that chili off your mouth, then,” he said.

  “Leave that man alone, J.R. You know a lawyer don’t have to eat pussy,” another said.

  “This one does.”

  The looming outline of the cannery and the rusted freight cars in silhouette against the light rain seemed to shrink and expand before my eyes. My knuckles whitened on the sign lath, and my breath caught in my throat.

  “He might beat you to death with that cardboard, J.R.”

  “Do you get to try some of these nigger girls?” the oil-field worker said.

  My eyes watered and I felt myself leaping toward him before I had even moved or changed my line of vision, but several men behind him shouted and laughed at one time in a phlegmy roar, and he turned his wide back to me. Mojo had been sitting in the cab of the stake truck with his wine bottle until it was empty, and then had decided to join the picket. His shirt was unbuttoned to the waist, his socks were pulled down over his heels, and he walked toward the line as though his knees were connected with broken hinges. There was a patch of snuff on the corner of his lip, and the drops of rain slid over his cannonball head like streaks of black ivory. An unopened can of beer flew out of the crowd and hit him above the eye. He reeled backward, still standing, and pressed his hand like a fielder’s glove against his head, the blood dripping down from his dark palm. His uncovered eye was wide and rolling with pain and shock.

  “Goddamn,” I said.

  “Don’t, Hack,” Rie said.

  “They hurt him bad.”

  “Stay in the line,” she said.

  Mojo bent forward and let the blood run down his forearm onto the ground, then he started walking toward us again as though he were holding a cracked flowerpot delicately in place. A man in khaki clothes with a green cloth cap on and a Lima watch fob in his pocket stepped into his path and kicked his feet out from under him. Mojo struck the ground headlong, and his face was covered with strings of dust and blood.

  “This is too goddamn much, Rie,” I said.

  “Don’t get out of the line. They’ll kill him if you do,” she said.

  He pushed himself up from the ground and stood erect, the ragged cut on his head already swelling like a baseball. The wind blew his shirt straight out from his body, and his chest heaved and his nostrils dilated when he breathed.

  “You can bust me ’cause I’m winehead now, but you ain’t going to beat all these people,” he said. “They too many for you, and they’re going to stand all over this place when you all are long gone.”

  The oil-field worker moved toward him, his buttocks flexing inside his blue jeans, but two deputy sheriffs walked up behind Mojo and led him away by each arm toward their automobile. Before they put handcuffs on him, they stripped off his shirt and wrapped it in a twisted knot around his head.

  The car rolled off down the road, with Mojo in back behind the wire screen, his blood-soaked shirt like a dark smear against the closed glass.

  The priest was next, and they had a special dislike for him as a Catholic clergyman. The man in the khaki clothes shook up a hot beer and sprayed it on him, and the oil-field worker put his hot breath in the priest’s face and insulted him with every whorehouse statement he could make. Several women had joined the crowd, and they rasped at him with their contorted faces, their eyes shrunken inward at some terrible anger, and then one spat on him. She was small and stunted, her thin arms were puckered and wrinkled at the armpits, and her electric hair was scraped back in a tangle over the thinning places on her head, but she gathered all the energy and juice in her wasted body and spat it in an ugly string over his chest.

  He blinked his eyes against the spittle and obscenities, but he kept his face straight ahead, his big hands folded around the sign lath, and never broke his step in the line. His composure enraged the women to the point that they were shouting at him incoherently, their heads bent forward like snakes, the veins in their throats bursting against the skin. Then the deputy sheriff who had arrested me walked to the back of the crowd, put his hand on the oil-field worker’s shoulder, and motioned in my direction. Across the railway track I saw two large police vans with cage doors on the back turn off the county road into the cannery gate, and then the crowd came toward me.

  Their faces were tight with anger, the lips dry, the eyes hot and receded in the head, as though their own rage had dried out all the fluids in their bodies. In the gloom and swirling patterns of rain their skin looked white and stretched over the bone. Lightning struck against the hills, and the wind was beginning to strip the cotton in the fields.

  “We ain’t got a lot of time for you, lawyer. So you know what I’m going to do?” the oil-field worker said, and put a half plug of tobacco in his mouth. He pushed it into his jaw with his tongue and chewed it into pulp, then cleaned the juice off his lip with his finger. “I ain’t going to touch you with my hand. I’m just going to show you how we treat dipshit around here. Now, when you get tired of it, all you got to do is tear that sign up and walk to your car. There won’t nobody hurt you.”

  “I’ll tell you something, motherfucker,” I said. “You spit on me and I’ll take your head off.”

  The man in the khaki clothes with the green cap reached out with his fist, off balance, as though he were leaping at a departing train, and struck me in a downward swing across the nose. His ring peeled back the skin, and I felt the blood swell to the surface. I stared at them all stupidly, with the sign in my hands, while my eyes filmed and burned. The oil worker was grinning at me.

  “You want to cut bait, dipshit?” he said.

  The woman who had spat on the priest flicked a lighted cigarette at my face, then I was hit again, this time across the side of the head with something round and wooden. I felt it clack into the bone, and I tumbled sideways, the ocean roaring in my ears, and struck the ground on one knee and an elbow. My ear and the side of my head were on fire, and I looked up
through the unshaved legs and denims stained with grease and cow manure and saw a thin, muscular boy of about nineteen with a freight-door pin in his hand. Somebody pulled my shirt loose from my trousers and poured beer down my spine. I felt a cigar burn into my neck, and a woman slapped wildly at my head with a shoe. I tried to raise my arms in front of me, but someone stepped on my hand and the man in khakis tripped in the crowd and fell across my back. I heard Rie’s voice shouting outside the circle of people around me, then the deputy sheriff pulled my head up by the shirt collar and started to raise me to my feet, but before he did he flicked out his knee, in a quick, deft motion, and caught me in the eye. Half my vision exploded in dark red and purple circles, and I pressed my hand into the socket as though I had a piece of sandpaper under the lid. But in the swimming distortion I could still see his khaki trousers stuffed inside his low-topped boots, and his cartridge belt and holster welded against his flat stomach and narrow hips. I rose on one knee and put all my strength into a left-handed swing from the ground and hit him in the stomach an inch above the belt. I felt the muscles collapse under my fist, just like you kick open a door unexpectedly. He bent double, his face white and his mouth open in a wide O, and his breath clicked drily in his throat. His eyes were drowning, and when he fell forward on his knees in the mud, a line of spittle on his cheek, the crowd stepped backward in silence as though someone had thrown an unacceptable icon at their feet.

  Then the Rangers, the city police, and the sheriff’s department went to work. They arrested everybody in sight. They handcuffed my arms behind me while the television cameras whirred, gave artificial respiration to the deputy and strapped an oxygen mask to his face, pushed scores of people into the vans with nightsticks until there was no more room, commandeered the stake truck, and arrested the man with the camera on the loading platform by mistake. Two deputies led me by each arm to the van, squeezing tightly into my torn shirt, their faces like hard wax, and the television newsmen were still hard at work with their lenses zooming across my manacled hands and swollen face. The rain was coming down harder now, and the gravel road was covered with wet bolls of cotton and leaves stripped from the citrus orchards. The wind was rattling the tin roof on top of the cannery, and the ditches by the road were slick and brown on the sides with the runoff from the fields. I was the last man put in the second van. The deputies took the handcuffs off me, pushed me inside against the crowd of Mexicans and Negroes, and locked the wire cage doors. The engine started, and we bounced across the railway track and turned through the cannery gate onto the county road.