The Senator shook hands cheerfully from bed to bed, and each time he found a man from Texas he made several banal remarks while the cameras whirred away. A few of the men were bored or irritated at seeing another politician, but the majority of them grinned with their boyish, old men’s faces, propped themselves up on their elbows with cigarettes between their fingers, and listened to the Senator’s thanks about the job they were doing. Only one time did he have trouble, and that was with a Negro Marine who’d had an arm amputated at the shoulder. The Negro’s eyes were bloodshot, and I saw a bottle of paregoric sticking out from under his pillow.
“Don’t thank me for nothing, man,” he said. “When I get out of here you better hide that pink ass behind a wall.”
The cameras stopped whirring, and the Senator smiled and walked to the next bed as though the Negro and his anger were there only as the result of some chance accident not worth considering seriously. Then the cameras started working again, the two newsmen were back to their coverage, and the Marine pulled out his bottle of paregoric and unscrewed the cap by flipping it around with one thumb. His bloodshot eyes continued to stare into the Senator’s back.
At the end of each ward the Senator made a speech, and I wondered how many times he had made it in the same wards during World War II and the Korean War. He had probably changed some of the language to suit the particular cause and geographic conquest involved, but the content must have been the same: The people at home support you boys. We’re proud of the American fighting man and the sacrifices he’s made to defend democracy against Communist aggression. You’ve taken up the standard that can only be held by the brave, and we’re not going to let anyone dishonor that standard. It’s been bought at too dear a price…
And on and on.
As I watched him I remembered sitting in a similar ward in 1953 after the last pieces of splintered lead had been removed from my legs, and listening to a state representative make almost the same speech. I didn’t remember his name, or even what he looked like, but he and the Senator were much alike, because in the intense emotional moment of their delivery they believed they had fought the same battles as the men lying before them, felt the same aching lung-rushing gasp when they were hit, bled into the same dark soil, and had fallen through the same endless morphine deliriums in a battalion aid station.
But the Senator had one better. After all the hackneyed patriotic justifications for losing part of one’s life, he outdid himself:
“I bet you boys aren’t burning your draft cards!”
And they replied in unison, one hundred strong:
“NO SIR!”
The Senator went through the doorway with the three hospital administrators, who all the time had been smiling as though they were showing off a nursery of hothouse plants, and one of the newsmen turned his camera on me.
“Get that goddamn thing out of my face,” I said.
He didn’t hear me over the electric noise of his machine, or he didn’t believe what he’d heard, and he kept the lens pointed at the center of my forehead.
“I mean it, pal. I’ll break it against the wall.”
He lowered his camera slowly with his mouth partly open and stared at me. He didn’t know what he had done wrong, and all the reasons for his presence there in the hospital were evaporating before him. I don’t know what my face looked like then, with the cut on my temple and my slightly swollen eye, but evidently it was enough to make a graduate of the Texas University School of Journalism wince. He dropped his eyes to the camera and began adjusting the lens as though the light had changed in the last ten seconds.
“I had a car accident this week and I don’t want any of the guys at the country club thinking my wife hit me in the head with a shoe,” I said. I laughed and touched him on the arm.
He smiled, and I saw that his pasteboard frame of reference was secure again. He walked into the next ward after the Senator, and I thought, I hope that thirty-thousand-dollar house in the Fort Worth suburbs will be worth it all, buddy.
Later, back in the Cadillac, with the sun steaming off the hood, I poured a half glass of straight bourbon and took two deep swallows. The yellow haze outside was worse now, and the air-conditioning vents were dripping with moisture.
“That Negro soldier should be brought to the attention of his commanding officer,” Williams said.
“He was a Marine,” I said.
“Regardless, there’s no excuse for a remark like that,” he said.
So you’re a propriety man as well, I thought.
“It’s nothing,” the Senator said. “His attitudes will change back to normal with time. I’ve seen many others like him.”
“I didn’t like it,” Williams said.
“Maybe he doesn’t care to be part of the science of prosthesis,” I said. “Provided they can fit something on that stub.”
Williams looked at me steadily with his opaque, pale face. For just a second his fingertips ticked on his thigh. I knew that if I could have looked into his eyes I would have seen flames and grotesque mouths wide with silent screams.
“Do you like that brand of bourbon, Mr. Holland? I’d like to send you a case of it,” he said.
“Thanks. I’m a Jack Daniel’s man myself, and I get it on order straight from Lynchburg.”
“You must have a very good relationship with the whiskey manufacturers, then.”
I smoked a cigar and finished my drink in silence while we moved through the late traffic toward the downtown district. When I noticed that Williams was irritated by the smoke I made a point of leaving the cigar butt only partly extinguished in the ashtray. Originally, the Senator had planned for the three of us to have dinner together, one of those charcoal steak and white linen and pleasant conversation affairs that the Senator was fond of; but now it was understood between us that Williams should be dropped off at the Hilton, where he kept a permanent suite.
He stepped out of the car onto the sidewalk and bent over to shake hands with me through the open door. In the hot air there was a tinge of his perspiration mixed with the scent of talcum and cologne. The shadow of the building made his skin look synthetic and dead. His sunglasses tipped forward a moment, and I caught a flash of color like burned iron.
“Another time, Mr. Holland.”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
We drove to the airport and I waited for the Senator to begin his subtle dissection. I was even looking forward to it. I felt the whiskey in my head now, and I would have liked an extension of last week’s tennis match. But he surprised me completely. His attack came down an entirely different street, and I realized then that he probably disliked Williams even more than I did, although for different reasons.
“You weren’t in a car accident last week, Hack. You were put in jail with several members of that Mexican farm union.”
I had to wait a moment on that one.
“The sheriff could have charged you with attempted assault on a law officer.”
“Your office reaches much farther than I thought, Senator.”
“You might also know that I made sure the story wouldn’t reach the wire services.”
“As a longtime friend of our family you probably also know that I’ve had other adventures of this sort.”
“Another one like it could end your career in Texas.”
“I don’t think either one of us believes that, Senator.”
“I’m not talking about a drunken escapade. If you involve yourself with a radical movement, you’ll find yourself on the ticket as an independent. The party won’t support you. I don’t think your father would enjoy the idea of your associating yourself with people who are trying to destroy our society, either.”
He was after the vulnerable parts now.
“It always seemed to me that my father’s work with the New Deal was considered pretty radical at the time,” I said. “However, I don’t have any connection with the United Farm Workers. I was trying to help a friend from the service.”
&nb
sp; The sun was starting to set among the purple clouds on the horizon, and through the car window I could see airplanes approaching Dulles with their landing lights on.
“I think you should turn over your friend’s case to someone else.”
“Well, in eight years of practice I haven’t lost a criminal case, Senator, and I’m usually a pretty good judge about what clients our firm should handle.”
“I hope you are, Hack, and I hope that we don’t have this same kind of discussion again.”
The chauffeur pulled into the terminal drive, and I went into the restaurant and had a dozen steak sandwiches made up while the Senator waited for me at the passenger gate. His plane taxied out of the hangar and rolled along the apron of the runway toward us, and in minutes we were back aboard and roaring toward the end of the field.
We lifted off sharply into the sun, the city sparkling below us in the twilight, and the interior of the plane was filled with a diffused red glow. My glass of bourbon and ice rattled on the table with the engines’ vibration.
“Who is he, anyway?” I said.
“John Williams? He owns the controlling stock in two of the government’s largest missile suppliers.”
CHAPTER 6
I SPENT THE NEXT week working on Art’s appeal while the July days grew hotter and my broken air conditioner cranked and rattled in the window. The temperature went to one hundred degrees every afternoon, and the sky stayed cloudless and brilliant with sun. The sidewalks and buildings were alive with heat, and sometimes when the air conditioner gave out altogether I’d open the window and the wind would blow into my face like a torch. In the street below, people walked under the hot shade of the awnings away from the sun’s glare, their faces squinted against the light and their clothes wet with perspiration. The humidity made your skin feel as though it were crawling with spiders, and when you stepped off a curb into the sun the air suddenly had the taste of an electric scorch.
In the evening, when the day had started to cool, I would drive out into the surrounding hills with the windows of the car down. (I had taken a hotel room in town so I could come to the office early each morning, and also Verisa was holding two cocktail parties at the house that week, and I wasn’t up to another round of drinking, and the disaster that always followed, with empty-headed people.)
In the mauve twilight the oak trees and blackjack took on a deeper green, and deer broke through the underbrush and ran frightened across the blacktop road in front of my car, their eyes like frozen brown glass. The air was sweet with the smell of the hills and woods, and jackrabbits and cottontails sat in the short grass with their ears folded back along their flanks. I remembered as a boy how I used to flush them out of a thicket and then whistle shrilly through my teeth and wait for them to stop and look back at me, their ears turned upward in an exact V. A slight breeze blew through the willows growing along the riverbank, and I could see the bass and bream breaking the water among the reeds and lily pads. Fishermen in rowboats with fly rods glided silently by the willows, casting popping bugs into the shadows, then the water would explode and a largemouth bass would climb into the air, shaking the hook in the side of his mouth, and the sun’s last rays would flash off his green-silver sides like tinted gold.
One evening, after a flaming day and a one-hour harangue from Bailey about all my deficiencies, I drove down to the Devil’s Backbone, a geological fault where the land folded sharply away and you could see fifty miles of Texas all at once. On the top of the ridge was a Mexican beer tavern built entirely of flat stones, and as I looked out over the hills at the baked land, the miniature oak trees in the distance, the darkening light in the valleys, and the broken line of fire on the horizon, I felt the breath go out of me and the ground move under my feet. In the wind I could smell the shallow water holes, the hot odor of the mesquite, the carcass of a lost cow that was being pulled apart by buzzards, the wild poppies and bluebonnets, the snakes and the lizards and the dry sand, the moist deer dung in the thickets of blackjack, and the head-reeling resilience of the land itself. I knew that if I stood there long enough, with the shadows spreading across the hills, I would see the ghosts of Apache and Comanche warriors riding their painted horses in single file, their naked bodies hung with scalps and necklaces of human fingers. Or maybe the others who came later, like Bowie and Crockett and Fannin and Milam, with deerskin clothes and powder horn and musket and the self-destructive fury that led them to war against the entire Mexican army.
The stone tavern was cool inside, and the cigarette-burned floor, the yellow mirror behind the bar, the shuffleboard table, and the jukebox with the changing colored lights inside the plastic casing were right out of the 1940s. Cedar-cutters and Mexican farmhands sat at the wooden tables with frosted schooners of beer in their hands, the bartender set down free plates of tortillas, cheese, and hot peppers, and the long-dead voice of Hank Williams rose from the jukebox. The last cinder of the sun faded outside, bugs beat against the screen door, and a brown moon sat low over the hills. I ordered a plate of tacos and a draft beer and watched two cedar-cutters sliding the metal puck through the powdered wax on the shuffleboard. For some reason the Mexican farmhands kept toasting me with their glasses every time they drank, so I bought a round for three tables, and that was the beginning of a good beer drunk.
The next morning I drove to the state penitentiary with my head still full of beer and jukebox music. The blacktop highway stretched through the rolling hills of red clay and cotton and pine trees, and my tires left long lines in the soft tar surfacing. The piney smell of the woods was sharp in the heat, and thin cattle grazed in the fields of burned grass. The rivers were almost dry, the sandbars like strips of bleached bone, and flocks of buzzards turned in slow circles over the treetops. The corn had started to burn on the edges, and in two more weeks, with no rain, the stalks would wither and the ears would lie rotting in the rows.
As I approached the city limits I saw all the familiar warning signs for this world and the next posted along the roadside:
DO NOT PICK UP HITCHHIKERS
STATE PENITENTIARY NEARBY
PREPARE TO MEET THY GOD
SAVE AMERICA AND IMPEACH EARL WARREN
JESUS DIED FOR YOU HAVE YOU BEEN SAVED
DON’T WORRY
THEY’RE ONLY NINETY MILES AWAY
And farther on, in a happier mood,
DON’T FAIL TO SEE THE HOME OF SAM HOUSTON
AND JACK’S SNAKE FARM
I stopped at the main gate of the prison and showed my identification to the guard. He wore a khaki uniform and a lacquered straw hat, and his hands and face were tanned the color of old leather. One jaw was swollen with chewing tobacco, and after he had looked at my Texas Bar Association card he spat a stream of brown juice through the rails of the cattleguard, wiped the stain off the corner of his mouth, and handed me a cardboard visitor’s pass with the date punched at the bottom.
“Don’t try to drive back out till the gate man goes through your car,” he said.
The main complex of buildings was at the end of a yellow gravel road that wound through acres of cotton and string beans. The inmates, in white uniforms, were chopping in the rows, their hoes rising and flashing in the sun, while the guards sat on horseback above them with rifles or shotguns balanced across their saddles. The sun was straight up in the sky, and I could see the dark areas of sweat in the guards’ clothes and the flush of heat in the inmates’ faces. Except for the motion of the hoes, or a horse slashing his tail against the green flies on his flanks, they all seemed frozen, removed, in the private ritual that exists between jailer and prisoner. Sometimes a trusty, sharpening tools in the shade of the cedar trees at the edge of the field, would carry a water bucket out to the men in the rows, and they would drink from the dipper with the water spilling over their throats and chests, or a guard would dismount and stand in the shade of his horse while the men sat on the ground and smoked for five minutes; but otherwise the static labor of their workday was unrelieved. r />
The dust clouds from my car blew back across the fields, and occasionally an inmate would raise his head from his concentration on the end of his hoe and look at me, one of the free people who drove with magic on the way to distant places. And as one of the free people I was the enemy, unable to understand even in part what his microcosm was like. From under his beaded forehead his eyes hated me, and at that moment, looking at my air-conditioned car and the acrid cloud of dust that blew into his face, he could have chopped me up with his hoe simply for the way I took the things of the free world for granted—the women, the cold beer, the lazy Saturday mornings, the endless streets I could walk down without ever stopping.
But I did know his world, maybe even better than he did. I knew the sick feeling of hearing a cage door bolted behind you, the fear of returning to solitary confinement and the nightmares it left you with, the caution you used around the violent and the insane, the shame of masturbation and the temptation toward homosexuality, the terror you had when a cocked gun was aimed in your face, the months and years pointed at no conclusion, the jealousy over a guard’s favor, and the constant press of bodies around you and the fact that your most base physical functions were always witnessed by dozens of eyes. I knew how the weapons were made and where they were hidden: a nail sharpened on stone and driven through a small block of wood; a double-edged razor wedged in a toothbrush handle; barbed wire wrapped around the end of a club; spoons and strips of tin that could open up wrists and jugular veins; and all of it remained unseen, taped between the thighs, carried inside a bandage, tied on a string down a plumbing pipe, or even pushed into the excrement in the latrine.