Lay Down My Sword and Shield hh-1

by James Lee Burke

  “Well, that’s the first time I ever seen you turn one down,” he said, and he drank from the bottle as though it contained soda water.

  The county road that led to the cannery had collapsed in places along the edges from the overflow of ditch water, and the rows in the fields had been beaten almost flat by the rain or washed into humps of mud. The gusts of wind covered the brown water with curls and lines like puckered skin, and the torn cotton and leaves turned in eddies around the cedar fence posts. In the distance I saw a cow trying to lift her flanks out of the mud.

  A great section of the cannery roof had been blown away in the storm. The metal was ripped upward in a ragged slash, like a row of twisted knives, and there was a huge black hole where the rest of the roof had been. Picket signs were strewn over the ground by my automobile, and the rain drummed down in a roar on the tin building, the loading platform, and the freight cars. R.C. parked as close as he could to the Cadillac and went around to Rie’s side with the umbrella. His western pants were splattered with mud up to the knees, and drops of water ran down his soft face. He closed the door after her and walked around to the driver’s side with me, the rain thudding on the umbrella.

  “Look, Hack, it’s going to take some money to beat this thing,” he said. “I know you got plenty of it, but if you need any more you only got to call. Another thing. You take care of that girl, hear?”

  “All right, R.C.”

  “One more thing, by God. I think you flushed your political career down the hole, but I felt right proud of you out there. That boy looked like he had muscles in his shit till you come off the ground. I always told Bailey you was crazy but you’re still a goddamn good man.”

  He slammed the door and splashed through the mud to his automobile, his face bent downward against the rain. We followed him out through the cannery gate onto the county road, and I saw the empty whiskey bottle sail from his window into the irrigation ditch. Then he floored the Mercedes and sped away from us in a shower of mud and brown water.

  “He’s a wonderful man,” Rie said.

  “I believe he liked you a little bit, too.”

  “Where’s he going?”

  “Back to his motel room and get sentimentally drunk in his underwear. Then about dark he’ll drive across the border and try to buy a whole brothel.”

  “Couldn’t we ask him over?”

  “He’d feel better with the morning intact the way it is. In fact, it would hurt him if he had to continue.”

  The collapsed places along the edges of the road were beaded with gravel, and cut back into deepening sinkholes in the center. I could feel the soft ground break under my wheels.

  “Was he straight about nobody from your family going to the penitentiary?” she said.

  “The deputy already has my civil rights charge against him, and if those camera boys were any good they filmed his knee in my eye, and I can make a hard case against the cops. But there’s a good chance I’ll get disbarred.”

  “Oh, Hack.”

  I put my arm around her wet shoulders and pulled her close to me.

  “Stop worrying about it, babe. My grandfather knocked John Wesley Hardin on his ass with a rifle stock, and Hardin was a lot tougher than the Texas Bar Association.”

  “I kept making fun of you about picket lines and the union, and now you might get burned worse than any of us.”

  Her back was cold under my arm. I kissed the corner of her eye and squeezed her into me.

  “Don’t you know that real gunfighters never lose?” I said.

  She put her hand on my chest, and I could feel my heart beat against her palm. She looked up at me once, then pressed her cheek against my shoulder the rest of the way back to town.

  The dirt yards in the poor district were covered with water up to the front porches, and the waves from my automobile washed through the chicken-wire fences and rolled against the houses. Tin cans, garbage, and half-submerged tree limbs floated in the ditches, and a dead dog, its skin scalded pink by the rain, lay entangled in an island of trash around the base of a telephone pole. Some of the shingles had been stripped by the wind from the union headquarters roof, and the building itself leaned at an angle on the foundation. I took off my boots, and we waded through the water to the porch.

  Mojo and a Mexican man were sitting at the table in the front room with a half-gallon bottle of yellow wine between them. They had melted a candle to the table, and Mojo was heating his glass of wine over the flame. The smoke curled in a black scorch around the glass. His eyes were small and red in the light.

  “My brother here is teaching me how to put some fire in that spodiodi,” he said. “You can see it climb up right inside the color. That’s what I been doing wrong all these years. Drinking without no style.”

  He drank the glass down slowly, and poured it full again. I could smell the wine all the way across the room.

  “This telegram was in the door when I got back from the jail, and a man come by in a taxicab looking for you,” he said. “He didn’t leave no name, but he looked just like you. Except for a minute I thought he had to go to the bathroom real bad.”

  I tore open the envelope and read the telegram, dated late last night.

  I don’t know if you will receive this. I guess I don’t care whether you do or not. Call Verisa if you feel like it. Or simply tear this up.

  Bailey didn’t bother to sign his name.

  “What did the man say?” I said.

  “He was going up to the café, and then he was coming back,” Mojo said. “He give me a dollar so I’d be sure to tell you.”

  Good old perceptive Bailey, I thought.

  “I think we ought to buy that man a glass of this mellow heat when he comes back. He needs it,” Mojo said.

  “He needs a new mind,” I said.

  Rie went into the back to change clothes. I looked in the icebox for a beer, and then drove the Cadillac down to the tavern and bought a dozen bottles of Jax and a block of ice. I found a tin bucket in the kitchen, and chipped the ice over the bottles. Rie came out of the bedroom dressed in a pair of white ducks, sandals, and a flowered shirt. She had brushed back her gold-tipped hair and had put on her hoop earrings and an Indian bead necklace.

  “Hey, good-looking,” I said, and put my arms around her. She pressed her whole body against me, with her arms around my neck, and I kissed her on the mouth, then along her cheek and ear. I could smell the rain in her hair.

  “Do you have to leave with him?” she said.

  “No.”

  “Are you sure, Hack?”

  “We’ll give him some of Mojo’s sneaky pete. That’s all he needs.”

  She ran her fingertips over the back of my neck and pressed her head hard against my chest.

  “Don’t feel that way, babe,” I said. “I just have to talk to him.”

  She breathed through her mouth and held me tightly against her. I kissed her hair and turned her face up toward me. Her soldier’s discipline was gone.

  “I couldn’t ever leave you, Rie,” I said. “Bailey is down here out of his own compulsion. That’s all there is to it.”

  I hadn’t lied to her before, and it didn’t feel good. I picked up the bucket of beer and cracked ice by the bail, and we walked onto the porch and sat in two wicker chairs away from the rain slanting under the eaves. The solid gray of the sky had broken into drifting clouds, and I could see the faint, brown outline of the hills in the distance. The Rio Grande was high and swirling with mud, the surface dimpled with rain, and the tall bank on the Mexican side of the river had started to crumble into the water. I opened two beers and raked the ice off the bottles with my palm.

  It had been a long time since I had enjoyed the rain so much. The wind was cool and smelled of the wet land and the dripping trees, and I remembered the times as a boy when I used to sit on the back porch and watch the rain fall on the short cotton. In the distance I could see Cappie’s gray cabin framed in the mist by the river, and even though I couldn’t
see the river itself I knew the bass were rising to the surface to feed on the caterpillars that had been washed out of the willows.

  “Is he really like you describe him?” Rie said.

  “I don’t know. Maybe I’m unfair to him. After our father died he had to take care of the practical things while I played baseball at Baylor, and then I quit college to join the Navy, and he had to finish law school and run the ranch at the same time. He can’t think in any terms now except finances and safe people, and he usually makes bad choices with both of them. Sometimes I’m afraid that if he ever finds out where he’s invested most of his life he’ll shoot himself.”

  I drank out of the beer and leaned my chair back against the porch wall. Inside, I could hear Mojo singing, “Hey, hey, baby, take a whiff on me.”

  “Do you think that’s why people shoot themselves?” she said.

  “I never thought there was anything so bad that it could make a man take his life in seconds. But I do know there are other ways to do it to yourself over long periods of time.”

  “Bailey sounds like a sad man.”

  “He gets some satisfaction from his tragic view. His comparison of himself with me lets him feel correct all the time.”

  “Hey, hey, everybody take a whiff on me,” Mojo sang inside.

  I saw a taxicab turn into the flooded street and drive toward us, the yellow sides splattered with mud. The floating garbage and tin cans rolled in the car’s wake.

  “Do you want me to go for a drive?” she said.

  “No. I want you to meet him. It will be the best thing that’s happened to him in a long time.”

  “I feel like I shouldn’t be here, Hack.”

  “Who the hell lives here, anyway? He doesn’t, and I sure didn’t ask him down.”

  I squeezed her hand, but I saw it made her uncomfortable. The waves from the taxi washed up through the yard and hit against the porch steps. Bailey paid the driver and stepped out the back door into the water. His brown windbreaker was spotted with rain, and the lines in his brow and around his eyes had deepened with lack of sleep. The rims of his eyes were red. In fact, his whole face looked middle-aged, as though he had worked hard to make it that way. He walked up through the water with his head lowered slightly and his mouth in a tight line.

  “How you doing, brother?” I said, and took a sip out of the beer.

  “I have a plane at the county airport,” he said. He looked straight at me and never turned his head toward Rie.

  “Get out of the rain and meet someone and have a beer.”

  “We’ll leave your car there. You can fly back and get it later,” he said. His voice had a quiet and determined righteousness to it, the kind of tone that he reserved for particularly tragic occasions, and it had always infuriated me. But I was resolved this time.

  “It’s bad weather for a flight, Bailey. You should have waited a day or so,” I said. I was surprised that he had flown at all, because he was terrified of airplanes.

  “Do you have anything inside?” he said.

  “Not a thing.”

  “Then we can be going.”

  He was making it hard.

  “Would you sit down a minute, for God’s sake?” I said. “Or at least not stand under the eave with rain dripping on your head.”

  He stepped up on the porch and wiped his forehead with his palm. He still refused to recognize Rie. I carried a chair over from the other side of the porch and pulled another beer from the ice bucket.

  “There. Sit,” I said. “This is Rie Velasquez. She’s the coordinator for the union.”

  “How do you do, ma’am?” He looked at her for the first time, and his eyes lingered longer on her face than he had probably wanted them to. She smiled at him, and momentarily he forgot that he was supposed to be a somber man with a purpose.

  I opened the bottle of beer and handed it to him. The chips of ice slid down the neck. He started to put the bottle on the porch railing.

  “Drink the beer, Bailey. If you had some more of that stuff, you wouldn’t have ulcers.”

  “The Senator and John Williams are at the house.”

  “John Williams. What’s that bastard doing in my home?”

  “He was spending the weekend with the Senator, and he drove down with him this morning.”

  “You know the old man wouldn’t let an asshole like that in our back door.”

  “He told me he would still like to contribute money to the campaign.”

  “You’d better get him out of my house.”

  “Why don’t you take care of it yourself? This is my last errand.”

  “Do you think we could get that in writing?” I said.

  “You don’t know the lengths other people go to for your benefit. The Senator is going to stay with you, and so is Verisa, and I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t feel an obligation to her.”

  “What obligation is that, Bailey?” I said.

  “I’m going to fix lunch,” Rie said.

  “No, stay. I want to hear about this feeling of obligation. What is it exactly, brother?”

  His eyes looked quickly at Rie, and he drank out of the beer.

  “Don’t worry about decorum or people’s feelings,” I said. “Dump it out on the porch and let’s look at it. You’re doing a swell job so far.”

  “I’ll be inside, Hack,” Rie said.

  “No, goddamn. Let Bailey finish. He’s saved this up in his head through every air pocket between here and Austin.”

  “All right,” he said. “For the seven years of disappointment you’ve given her and the alcoholism and the apologies she’s had to make to people all over the state. A lesser woman would have taken you into court years ago and pulled out your fingernails. Right now she’s under sedation, but that will probably slide past you like everything else in your life does.”

  “What do you mean, sedation?” I said.

  “She called me up drunk an hour after the television broadcast, and I had to go over to the house with a doctor from Yoakum.”

  Rie lit a cigarette and looked out into the rain. Her suntanned cheeks were pale and her eyes bright. I didn’t know why I had forced her to sit through it, and it was too late to change anything now. The wind blew the rain against the bottom of Bailey’s chair.

  “How is she now?” I said.

  “What do you think? She drank a half bottle of your whiskey, and the doctor had to give her an injection to get her in bed.”

  The bottle of beer felt thick in my hand. I wondered what doctor would give anyone an intravenous sedative on top of alcohol.

  “She threw away her pills this morning and tried to fix breakfast for the Senator and Williams,” Bailey said. “She almost fell down in the kitchen and I put her to bed again and refilled her prescription.”

  “Don’t you know better than to give drugs to people with alcohol in their system?” I said. But he didn’t. His face was a confession of moral earnestness with no awareness of its consequence.

  “Go back with him, Hack,” Rie said.

  “Bailey, why in the bloody hell do you bring on things like this?” I said.

  “Don’t you have it confused?” he said.

  “No. You have this talent for turning the simple into a derelict’s hangover.”

  “I think you’re shouting at the wrong person.”

  “You’ve always got all kinds of cool when you do it, too. Think about it. Isn’t it in moments like these that you’re happiest?”

  “I don’t need to listen to this.”

  “Hell, no, you don’t. You just dump the hand grenades out on the porch and let other people kick them around.”

  “I told you I’m through with this crap, Hack.”

  “You’ve been peddling my ass by the chunk to all buyers and bitching about it at the same time, and now you’re through. Is that right, buddy? Frankly, you make me so goddamn mad I could knock you flat out into the yard.”

  “Stop it, Hack. Go on back with him,” Rie said. Her face was
flushed, and her fingers were trembling on the arm of the wicker chair.

  “Should I run a footrace with him down to the airport? Or maybe Bailey can import the whole bunch down here and we can sit on the porch and find out what a sonofabitch I am.”

  Rie put her fingers on her brow and dropped her eyes, but I could see the wetness on her eyelashes. None of us spoke. The rain drummed flatly on the shingled roof and ran off the eaves, swinging into the wind. My face was perspiring, and I wiped my forehead on my sleeve and drank the foam out of the bottle. I looked at her again and I felt miserable.

  “I’m sorry, babe,” I said.

  She turned her head away from Bailey and put an unlit cigarette in her mouth.

  “Call me tonight at the beer joint. Somebody will come down for me,” she said.

  The wind blew the curls on the back of her neck, and I could see her shoulders shaking. But there was nothing to do or say with Bailey there, and I went inside the screen and asked Mojo to stay with her until I called. When I came back out Bailey was still on the porch.

  “I didn’t get out the back door on you,” I said.

  But he didn’t understand; he stood against the railing, with the rain blowing across his slacks, as though his physical proximity was necessary to draw me into the automobile. I started to tell him to get in the car and read a road map and not raise his eyes until he heard me open the door, but he would have had something to say about that and we would start back into it all over again. When we drove away Rie was still looking out into the rain with the unlit cigarette in her fingers.

  We didn’t speak on the way to the airport. The air conditioner stopped working, and the windows fogged with humidity and the sweat rolled down my face and neck into my shirt. I felt a black anger toward Bailey that you can only feel toward someone you grew up with, and as the heat became more intense in the car I resented every motion that he made. He opened the window and let the rain blow across the leather seats, then he closed it and tried to pull off his windbreaker by the cuffs and hit me against the arm. I turned on the radio and we both listened to a Christian crusade evangelist rant about the communist Antichrist in Vietnam.