“No.”
“You sold my ass all over the state and you never guessed what it was about.”
“I didn’t know, Hack.”
“Well, you saw me coming, Senator,” I said.
“Are we going to enjoy a melodrama about it now?” Verisa said.
“No, I think I just finished the ninth inning, and you can have the whole goddamn ballpark.”
“I believe you’re being overly serious about this. The oil-depletion allowance is in the interest of the state,” the Senator said. “Also, every holder of office pays some kind of personal price to represent his constituency.”
“I’d call that boy in Gonzales. Let me have a beer, Bailey.”
“Maybe you should tell Mr. Holland about the rest of his alternative now,” Williams said. He raised his drink slowly to his mouth.
“I thought you’d been saving something special out,” I said. Bailey handed me the beer in a glass, and I took a cigar from the oakwood box on the coffee table. The Senator sat down in the deer-hide chair and crossed his legs with his highball in his hand, but his eyes didn’t look at me.
“I don’t like to do this, but there’s a man named Lester Dixon in Kansas City and he’s made a deposition about the time he spent with you in a North Korean prison camp,” he said. His eyes looked at the end of his shoe, thoughtful, as though he were considering a delicate premise before he spoke again.
Verisa took a cigarette from her pack and put it in her mouth. Her arm lay back against the couch, and her breasts swelled against her sundress when she breathed.
I lit my cigar and stared into the Senator’s face.
“What did Airman First Class Dixon have to say?” I said.
“I don’t believe we have to talk about all of it here,” he said.
“I think you should, Senator. I imagine that Lester’s deposition was very expensive.”
“Two men from your shack were executed after they were informed upon.” He raised his eyes into my face and tried to hold them there, but I stared back hard at him and he took a drink from his glass.
“Did he tell you how it was done?” I said.
“I never met him.”
“He’s an interesting person. I helped send him to prison for five years.”
“The statement is twenty pages long, and it’s witnessed by two attorneys,” he said. “It’s been compared for accuracy with the transcript from his court-martial, and I don’t think you’ll be able to contest what he says about your complicity in the deaths of two defenseless men.”
“The telephone is in the hall, Senator. Next to it is a list of numbers, one of which is The Austin American. No, instead finish your drink and let Verisa get the city desk for you.”
“It will be done more subtly than that. Possibly a leak from someone on the state committee, a small rumor at first, and then a reporter will be given the whole thing.”
“You probably have ways I’ve never dreamed about.”
“That’s true, but the outcome will be the same in this case.”
“Then I guess we can all say good day to each other.”
“No, there’s one more thing,” he said, and his eyes took on the same expression they had before he drove the tennis ball into my nose. “Right now you’re enjoying your virtue. With an impetuous decision you’ve become a Spartan lying on his shield, and I’m sure you’ll need this image for yourself during the next few weeks. But I want to correct a couple of your ideas about integrity in political office. Negotiation and compromise are part of any politician’s career, and your father learned that lesson his first term in Congress.”
“What do you mean?”
“He accepted a fifteen-thousand-dollar contribution to sponsor the sale of public land to a wildcat company in Dallas. The land sold for fifty dollars an acre.”
“Bailey, do you want to tell these men to get out, or you want to wait on me?”
He looked down at the bar, his forehead white.
“Bailey,” I said.
The balding spot on his head was perspiring, and I could see the raised veins in the back of his hands.
“Just look at me,” I said.
“I’m sorry, Hack. I didn’t know they were going to do this.”
“Then you tell them to get out.”
He leaned on his arms, his face still turned downward, and I felt my head begin to grow light, as though there were no oxygen in my blood.
“Goddamn it, you’re not going to bring these men into my home to do this, and then stare at the bar,” I said.
“He was going to lose the ranch, Hack. He knew heart disease was killing him, and he was afraid he’d die and leave us nothing.”
The rain blew against the windows, and I could hear the oak branches sweeping heavily back and forth on the roof. Outside, the light was gray in the trees, and the stripped leaves stuck wetly against the trunks. My dead cigar felt like a stick between my fingers.
“You and this man will leave now, Senator,” I said.
“Thank you for the drink, Mr. Holland,” Williams said, and set his glass on the bar. “You have a nice home here.”
“Thank you, too, Verisa,” the Senator said. “I’m sorry if we’ve made the day a little hard for you.”
The three of them rose and walked together to the front hall. They could have been people saying good-bye after a Sunday dinner. Verisa’s sundress fit tightly against her smooth back, and she had a way of holding herself at a door that made her look like a little girl. Williams raised his hand once to me, backward, the way a European would, and smiled again somewhere behind those black-green glasses.
“Good-bye, Hack,” the Senator said.
I lit my cigar and didn’t look back at him, then I heard the door click shut as I stared down into the flame.
“I’m sorry,” Bailey said.
“Forget it and give me one hard one.”
“I wouldn’t have brought you back for this.”
“I know that. Just make it about three inches and a little water.”
He poured into a tall shot glass and let the whiskey run over the edge. He started to wipe off the counter with a towel, and then knocked the glass into the sink.
“Christ, Hack,” he said.
“I’m all right,” I said, and poured the shot glass full myself and drank it down neat.
“You goddamn fool,” Verisa said.
“Leave him alone,” Bailey said.
“You’re going to pay for it with every stick and nail in this house,” she said.
I walked away from them toward the hall. The hum of the air conditioners and the heavy sweep of the oaks against the eaves were loud in my head, and the boards in the floor seemed to bend under my boots. I could feel something important begin to roll loose inside, in the way that you pull out a brick from the bottom of a wall. I opened the door to my library and took the cigar out of my mouth. The pilot still sat in my leather chair with the half-empty bottle of Jack Daniel’s in his lap. His face was colorless, and he had dropped a lighted cigarette on the rug.
“Do you think you can get it up again today?” I said.
“Yeah, buddy, if you don’t mind flying drunk,” he said.
We walked out into the rain, crossed the lawn, and climbed over the fence to the plane. The air was sweet with the smell of the wet land and the dripping trees and the ruined tomatoes that had been pounded into the furrows. The chain on the windmill had broken and the water was spilling white over the lip of the trough into the horse lot. I could see the willows on the riverbank bending against the sky, and the deep cut of the drainages on the distant hills and the thin line of sunlight on the horizon’s edge. My two oil wells glistened blackly in the rain, pumping up and down with their obscene motion, and the weathered shacks of the Negro and Mexican farmworkers stood out against the washed land like matchboxes that had been dropped from the sky at an odd angle.
The pilot wiped the plane’s windows clean of mud and grass with his windbreaker, and we took off across
the pasture in a shower of water from the backdraft of the propellers. Just before we reached the river the pilot pulled back on the stick and gave the engines everything they would take, and we lifted over the trees into the sky and turned into the wind. The river, the willows, the post oaks, and Cappie’s cabin dropped away below us, and then the house and the deep tire imprints of the Senator’s limousine on my gravel lane, and finally the small whitewashed markers in the Holland family cemetery.
EPILOGUE
NO ONE WON the strike, not the growers or the farm companies or the field workers, because the storm didn’t leave anything to win. After the water had drained from the fields, the ruined citrus lay on the ground and rotted under the humid sun until the air was heavy with the smell of the cantaloupe, watermelon, and grapefruit that dried into cysts and then burst apart. The cotton rows were washed flat and the sweep of mud through the fields baked out hard and smooth in the late August heat as though nothing had ever been planted there.
I withdrew from the election, and one of the Senator’s aides released Lester Dixon’s deposition to a state news service, but no one was particularly interested in it. A reporter from The Austin American telephoned me and asked if I had seen it, would I like him to read it to me over the phone, and I answered that I wouldn’t and would he do several things with it of his choosing, and I never heard about it again. Since then I’ve come to believe that one’s crimes and private guilt, those obsessions that we hide like that ugly black diamond in the soft tissue of the mind, are really not very important to other people.
Bailey acted as my defense lawyer at my hearing in Pueblo Verde, and had the assault charge dropped after he promised the district attorney we would file our own charges against the sheriff’s department (there were several lovely frames
in the news film that showed the deputy’s khaki knee bending upward into my eye). I was even proud of Bailey. He was a better criminal lawyer than I had thought, or at least he was that day, and even though the court was hostile to us and the judge stared hotly at Bailey when he addressed the bench, he was determined that I wouldn’t get any time and he made the county prosecutor stumble in his wording and contradict himself. I was given a year’s probation for resisting arrest and disturbing the peace, and we went across the street to an outdoor barbecue stand and drank beer for three hours in the warm shade of an oak tree. Two weeks later I received a letter of reprimand from someone in the Texas Bar Association, and I refolded it in the envelope and returned it with a pass to the Houston livestock show.
Verisa divorced me and took the Cadillac, eighty acres I owned up in Comal County, and the two natural gas wells, but I held on to the ranch and the house and my thoroughbred horses. She went to Europe for six months, and occasionally her name was mentioned on the society pages of The New York Times (a reception at the American embassy in London, dancing with a member of the Kennedy entourage in a Paris nightclub), then she returned to Dallas, where she had been born, and bought a penthouse apartment overlooking the city’s skyline and the green hills beyond. She entertained everyone, and from time to time I heard stories about what a radiant hostess she was and how many unusual and interesting people she managed to have at her parties. She sent me an invitation to her wedding, and at first I didn’t recognize the groom’s name, then I remembered meeting him once at a Democratic cocktail party in San Antonio. He had inherited the controlling stock in a newspaper, and he had turned the paper’s editorial page into a right-wing invective against everything liberal in the state. But I remembered him most for the fact that he didn’t drink and that his clean-cut chin was always at an upward angle when he turned his profile to you. I sent them a silver service with a one-line note of best wishes on a card inside. Four months later he was killed with another woman in an automobile accident on the Fort Worth highway. Verisa inherited the newspaper, and after a period of mourning the parties began again at the penthouse and her picture appeared regularly on the society pages with a young district attorney who rumor said might run for governor in two years.
Rie and I were married right after the divorce, and the next fall we had twin boys. They were both big for twins, and I named one Sam for my father and the other Hackberry, since I felt there should always be one gunfighter in the Holland family. Bailey bought out my half of the law practice, although he argued against it in his emotional way and wanted to continue the partnership, but I was through with the R. C. Richardson account and dealing with oil company executives. I didn’t practice for seven months, and spent the winter and early spring working on the ranch. I dug fence holes and strung new wire on the pasture, reshingled the barn roof that had been stripped by the storm, put a new water well down, and plowed and seeded sixty-five acres of corn and tomatoes. And each time I twisted the posthole digger in the ground or drove a six-penny nail down flat in the wood, I could feel the last drops of Jack Daniel’s sweat out through my pores and dry in the wind, and a new resilience in my body that I hadn’t felt since I pitched at Baylor. I worked hard each morning, with the sun low over the willows on the riverbank, and through the day until late evening when the shadow from the tractor fell out across the rows and the purple light drew away over the horizon. And when I had pulled the seed drill over the last furrows against the back fence I could already smell the land beginning to take hold of new life, and after the next shower small green plants would bud one morning in long, even lines.
Rie and I took my best three-year-old up to Lexington that spring and raced him at Keeneland. Each afternoon we sat in the sun with mint juleps and watched the horses break from the starting gate on the far side of the field, with the jockeys like toy men on their backs, and move in a tight formation down the backstretch, the lead horses pushing hard for the rail, then into the far turn as the roar of their hooves grew louder, their bodies glistening with sweat, and Rie would be on her feet with her arms wrapped tightly in mine, the quirts whipping down into the horses’ flanks and the sod flying into the air, and then there was that heart-beating rush when they came down the homestretch with the jockeys pouring it into them, and the thunder against the turf was louder than the shouting of the crowd. We won a thirty-five-hundred-dollar purse in one race, and placed in two others, and the evening before we left for Texas I took Rie on a long drive through the bluegrass and the Cumberland Mountains. The limestone cliffs rose straight up out of the hollows, and the tops of the white oaks and beech trees were covered with the sun’s last light. I was tired and quiet inside after the two weeks of racing, and the rolling hills stretched away toward Virginia in a violet haze, but a sense of time and its ephemeral quality began to weigh on me, as when you give yourself too long a period of restoring things that you hurt through indifference or cynicism in the first place.
Two days after we returned home I drove to San Antonio and became a trial lawyer for the A.C.L.U.
It’s summer again now, and the corn is green against the brown rows in the fields, and I irrigated my cotton acreage from the water well I put down and the bolls have started to come out white in the leaves. In the evening I can smell the dampness of the earth in the breeze off the river, and the wet sweetness of the Bermuda grass in the horse pasture, and just before dusk the wind flattens out the smoke from Cappie’s cabin and there’s just a hint in the warm air of oak logs burning in a woodstove. I built a large, circular crib around a chinaberry tree in the side yard for the boys to play in, and every afternoon while I sit on the verandah and try to outline a defense for impossible cases, I’m distracted by the spangle of sunlight and shade on their tan bodies. They’re both strong boys and they don’t like being inside the crib, and they show me their disapproval by throwing their stuffed animals out on the grass. Sometimes after their nap they shake the side of the crib so violently that Rie has to bring them up on the verandah and let them play in all the wadded paper at my feet. When I look at them I can see my father and Old Hack in their faces, and I try not to look over at the white markers in the cemetery or I would hav
e to grieve just a little on that old problem of time and loss and the failure of history to atone in its own sequence.
Turn the page
to meet Texas sheriff Hackberry Holland,
the hero of James Lee Burke’s
newest heart-stopping mystery
RAIN GODS
Now available
from Simon & Schuster
ON THE BURNT-OUT end of a July day in Southwest Texas, in a crossroads community whose only economic importance had depended on its relationship to a roach paste factory the EPA had shut down twenty years before, a young man driving a car without window glass stopped by an abandoned blue-and-white stucco filling station that had once sold Pure gas during the Depression and was now home to bats and clusters of tumbleweed. Next to the filling station was a mechanic’s shed whose desiccated boards lay collapsed upon a rusted pickup truck with four flat bald tires. At the intersection a stoplight hung from a horizontal cable strung between two power poles, its plastic covers shot out by .22 rifles.
The young man entered a phone booth and wiped his face slick with the flat of his hand. His denim shirt was stiff with salt and open on his chest, his hair mowed into the scalp, GI-style. He pulled an unlabeled pint bottle from the front of his jeans and unscrewed the cap. Down the right side of his face was a swollen pink scar that was as bright and shiny as plastic and looked pasted onto the skin rather than part of it. The mescal in the bottle was yellow and thick with threadworms that seemed to light against the sunset when he tipped the neck to his mouth. Inside the booth, he could feel his heart quickening and lines of sweat running down from his armpits into the waistband of his undershorts. His index finger trembled as he punched in the numbers on the phone’s console.
“What’s your emergency?” a woman dispatcher asked.
The rolling countryside was the color of a browned biscuit, stretching away endlessly, the monotony of rocks and creosote brush and grit and mesquite trees interrupted only by an occasional windmill rattling in the breeze.