The room was beginning to tip and blur in front of my eyes. I was smoking a dead cigar butt that I had frayed under my boot heel a few minutes earlier.
“Spodiodi, man. It’s the only thing. You got to put them snakes back in the basket,” the Negro said in my face. His eyes were red, and his breath was sour with wine.
“I don’t deal in snakes.”
“Man, they’re crawling through your face.”
I knew that I had an answer for him, but the words wouldn’t rise out of the echoes and flashes of light in my head.
“Let’s go down to the river. This place is hotter than a brick kiln,” I said.
“It’s all that corn,” the Negro said.
“Come on, Judge Roy Bean is holding court in his inner tube,” I said, and pulled Rie up from her chair by the hand.
“Hey, man,” she said.
I carried the bottle of whiskey by the neck and pulled her through the hallway into the kitchen. The Negro followed us with a beer in each hand and a half-dozen bottles stuck down in his trousers.
We walked down the bare slope toward the mudflat. The moon was full and white as ivory in a breathless sky. A rusted Ford coupe with no glass in the windows sat half-submerged in the river. The current eddied and swirled through the gaping window in back and coursed over the top of the seats and the steering wheel. The moon’s reflection rippled across the water’s brown surface, and I could see the sharp backs of garfish turning by the sandbars. Behind us the Mexican field hands were still singing. The Negro finished one beer and threw the bottle arching high over the river.
“Yow!” he yelled.
“Look at it. There’s Mexico,” I said. “Fifty yards and you can drop right through the bottom of the twentieth century.”
Rie sat down on a rotted log with her bare feet in the water. The moonlight turned the burned tips of her hair to points of silver.
“A whole land full of bandit ghosts and Indian legends,” I said. “You just step through the hole in the hedge, and there’s Pancho Villa splashing across the river with pistols and bandoliers hanging all over him. Zapata cutting down federales with his machete. Illiterate peasants executing French kings. Cortez destroying an entire culture.”
“There’s diphtheria in the well water of those adobe huts, too,” Rie said.
“You’re like every Marxist I ever met. No humor or sense of romance.”
“Quit shouting.”
“Isn’t that straight?” I said. “It’s the revolutionary mind. You can’t realize that man is more a clown than a Satan. You approach everything with a sullen mind and try to convert buffoons into Machiavelli.”
“Oh for God’s sake, man.”
I took a drink out of the bottle. The whiskey splashed over my mouth.
“You goddamn people don’t know what human evil is. One of these days you and I are going to have some Chinese tea and talk about the Bean Camp together. I’ll also give you a couple of footnotes on Pak’s Palace and No Name Valley.”
I felt the ground shift under my feet, and I thought I was going to fall. I put my arm on her shoulder to keep my balance.
“There’s mudcat nesting in that car. I know how to get them, too,” the Negro said. He took off his shirt and shoes, and laid the remaining bottles of beer in an even line on the bank. “You just swim your hand under the water and back that shovel-mouth into a corner and catch him real fast inside the gill. Come on, brother. I’m going to teach you how to fish like black people.”
He waded out into the river up to his hips and pulled open the rusted car door with both hands. The moon’s reflection off the water made his black body glow.
“He does this when he gets drunk,” Rie said. “You can do it, too, if you want me to take both of you down to the county hospital tonight.”
“That’s just what a Yankee would say. Don’t you know that colored people catch fish when white people couldn’t bring them up with a telephone crank?”
I sat down on the mudflat and pulled off my boots. I felt the water soak through the seat of my trousers.
“He had eight stitches the last time he handfished in that car,” she said.
“I don’t believe it. That sounds like more Marxist-Yankee bullshit.”
I walked out into the river, and the warm, muddy current swirled around my waist and my feet sunk into the silt. The Negro was bent over the top of the front seat with both his arms submerged to the shoulder. His face was concentrated, his eyes looking into nothing, as though his fingers were touching some vital and delicate part of the universe.
“She’s backed up and fanning right next to the trunk. She’s got young ones under her,” he said.
“Watch her fins.”
“She’ll open up in a minute to get a piece of my finger, then I’ll grab a whole handful of meat inside her gill.”
He ducked forward, the surface of the water shook and quivered momentarily, and then he drew one hand back with a ragged cut between the thumb and forefinger. The drops of blood squeezed out through the bruised edges of the skin and ran down his wrist. He closed his eyes in pain and sucked the cut.
“I told you to—” Then I heard the sirens rolling in a low moan down the dusty street in front of the union building.
“Shit,” Rie said from the riverbank.
I turned around and saw the revolving blue and yellow lights on top of three police cars, winking and flashing in the dark.
“The Man done arrived,” the Negro said, with his cut hand still held before his mouth.
Sheriff’s deputies and city police went through the front door of the building, walked around the sides with flashlights, looked in the outhouse, and then focused two car spotlights on us in the river. The electric white glare made my eyes water.
“You people walk toward me with your hands on top of your head!” a voice shouted from behind the light.
“Them dudes can reach out from a long way, can’t they?” the Negro said. He flopped both his arms over his bald head and started wading out of the river. The light broke around his body as though he had been carved out of burnt iron.
For some drunk reason I closed the car door carefully in the current and lifted the handle upward into place.
“On your head, punk!” the voice shouted.
“Fuck you,” I said.
Suddenly, both of the arcs were turned directly into my face, and the Negro disappeared from my vision in one brilliant explosion of light.
“Don’t screw with them, Hack. Get out of there,” Rie said from the darkness.
I waded out of the shallows with one hand over my eyes. My face burned with the heat from the lights.
“I give you warning. Get them over your head.”
“I told you to go fuck yourself, too.” I tripped on the mud bank and fell on my elbows. My forearms and one side of my face were covered with wet sand. Rie tried to pick me up by the back of my shirt.
“They’ll kill you, Hack. Get up and walk. It’s just a disturbing the peace bust. We’ll be out in the morning,” she said.
A sheriff’s car, with both spotlights burning, drove down the embankment on the hard ground, bounced over a log, and turned to a stop in front of me. As the beams of light changed angle I saw the Mexican field hands lined up against the building, with their arms outstretched before them and their legs widespread, while two policemen shook them down.
The whip aerial on the car rocked back and forth, and the deputy from the jail opened the driver’s door and walked toward me. I stood up and put a wet cigar in my mouth. My clothes were filled with sand and mud, and my hair felt like paint on top of my head. His .357 Magnum and the cartridges in his leather belt glinted in the moonlight. There was a line of perspiration down the front of his shirt, and his package of cigarettes stuck up at an angle under the flap of his pocket, which struck me at the time as an odd thing for a military man. His jawbones were as tight as his crew-cut scalp.
“I figured that you was you, Mr. Holland, and I didn??
?t want nobody dropping the hammer on you for some wetback crossing the river,” he said.
“What have you got? Disturbing the peace? Disorderly conduct?”
“We got all kinds of things. I expect if we look around here a while we might find some dope.”
“Why don’t you let these people alone? There wasn’t any complaint from this neighborhood.”
“Get in the car, please, miss,” he said to Rie.
“Look, she was out here. She didn’t have anything to do with that drunk party.”
He opened the back door of the automobile and took Rie by the elbow.
“Just keep your peckerwood hands in your pockets a minute,” I said.
“What?”
“You heard me, motherfucker.”
“Mr. Holland, you can drive out of here tonight in that Cadillac of yours and I’ll forget about that. The next time you want to help out the niggers and the wetbacks you just write out a check to the Community Chest and stay out of this county.”
“I’ll be all right. Go to Austin tomorrow and put it in for Art,” she said. She sat in the backseat behind the wire-mesh screen.
“Let her out,” I said.
“You really want to push it, Mr. Holland?”
“Yeah, I do. From what I understand you have a b.c.d. from the Marine Corps and you do most of your law enforcement on helpless winos in a drunk tank. So why don’t you get off the badass act?”
“You’re under arrest. I don’t expect you’re going to get out of our jail very soon, either.”
“You’re fucking with the Lone Ranger, too, peckerwood,” I said.
He brought his billy out of his back pocket and caught me right above the temple. A shotgun shell exploded in my head, and I fell against the car door and hit the ground on my hands and knees. He kicked me once in the stomach, and my breath rushed out of me as though someone had opened a large hole in the middle of my chest. The inside of my mouth was coated with sand, my eyes bulged, and I started to vomit, then his boot cut across the back of my head with the easy swing of a football player kicking an extra point.
CHAPTER 4
SOMETIME IN THE early morning hours I woke up on the stone floor of a cell in the bottom of the courthouse. The cell was almost completely black, except for the dim circles of light through the row of holes in the top of the door. Moisture covered the walls, and the toilet in the corner had overflowed. I pulled myself up on the iron bunk and touched the huge swelling above my temple. It was as tight as a baseball, and the blood had congealed in my hair. My head was filled with distant bugles and claps of thunder, and I felt the cell tilt on its axis and try to pitch me off the bunk into the pool of water by the toilet. Then I vomited between my legs.
I raised my head slowly, my eyes throbbing and the sweat running down my face. I found a dry kitchen match in my shirt pocket and popped it on my thumbnail. I held the flame over my wristwatch and saw the smashed crystal and the hands frozen at five after one. My white pants were still wet and streaked with mud, and my shirt was torn off one shoulder. I stumbled against the door and leaned my face down to the food slit.
“Hey, one of you sons of bitches better—” But my voice broke with the effort of shouting. I tried again, and my words sounded foolish in the stillness.
“Cool that shit, man,” a Negro voice said from down the corridor.
I lay back on the tick mattress with my arm across my eyes. I could smell the urine and stale wine in the cloth, and I imagined that there were lice laying their strings of white eggs along the seams, but I was too sick to care. I slept in delirious intervals, never sure if I was really asleep or dreaming, and my nightmare monsters sat with spread cheeks on my feet and grinned at me with their obscene faces. They appeared in all shapes and sizes of deformity: hunched backs, slanted eyes, split tongues, and lipless mouths. Major Pak was there with his fanatical scream and the electrician’s pliers in his clenched hand, the guards in the Bean Camp who let our wounded freeze to death to save fuel, and then Sergeant Tien Kwong leaned over me and inserted the end of his burp gun into my mouth and said, smiling, “You suck. We give you boiled egg.”
A deputy slipped the bolt on my cell and pulled open the door. I winced in the light and turned my face toward his silhouette. His stomach hung over his cartridge belt. Behind him a Negro trusty was pushing a food cart stacked with tin plates and a tall stainless-steel container of grits.
“You can go now, Mr. Holland, but the sheriff wants to talk with you a few minutes first,” the deputy said.
“Where’s the man who brought me in?”
“He’s off duty.”
“What’s his name?” My head ached when I sat up on the bunk.
“You better talk with the sheriff.”
I got to my feet and stepped out into the corridor. The Negro trusty was ladling spoonfuls of grits and fried baloney into tin plates and setting them on the iron aprons of the cell doors. The uneven stone on the floor hurt my bare feet, and my right eye, which had started to stretch tight from the swelling in my temple, watered in the hard yellow light. The deputy and I went down the corridor and up the stairs to the sheriff’s office. The fat in his hips and stomach flopped inside his shirt each time he took a step. His black hair was oiled and pasted down flat across his balding pate, and he used the handrail on the staircase as though he were pulling a massive weight uphill.
The sheriff sat behind his desk with a hand-rolled cigarette between his lips, and my billfold, pocketknife, and muddy boots in front of him. He wore steel-rimmed glasses, and his ears peeled out from the sides of his head. His face was full of red knots and bumps, a large brown mole on his chin, and his gray hair was mowed right into the scalp, but his flat blue eyes cut through the rest of it like a welder’s torch. He put the cigarette out between his fingers in the wastebasket, and started to roll another one from a package of Virginia Extra in his pocket. The tips of his teeth were rotted with nicotine. He curved the cigarette paper under his forefinger and didn’t look at me when he spoke.
“My deputy wanted to charge you with attempted assault on a law officer, but I ain’t going to do that,” he said. He spread the tobacco evenly in the paper and licked down the edge. “I’m just going to ask you to go down the road, and that’ll be the end of it.”
“Your man is pretty good with his feet and a billy.”
“I reckon that’s what happens when you threaten a law officer, don’t it?” He put the cigarette in his mouth and turned toward me in his swivel chair.
“I don’t suppose that I could bring a charge against him here, but I have a feeling the F.B.I. might be interested in a civil rights violation.”
“You don’t seem to understand what I’m saying, Mr. Holland. I got my deputy’s report right here, cosigned by a city patrolman, and it says you were drunk, resisting arrest, and swinging at an officer with your fists. Now maybe you think that don’t mean anything because you’re an Austin lawyer, but that ain’t worth piss on a rock around here.”
“You’re not dealing with a wetback or a college kid, either.” My head felt as though it were filled with water. Through the window I could see the sun striking across the treetops.
“I know exactly what I’m dealing with. I been sheriff here seven years and I seen them like you by the truckload. You come in from the outside and walk around like your shit don’t stink. I don’t know what you’re doing with them union people, and I don’t really give a goddamn, but you better keep out of my jail. The deputy went easy with you last night, and that’s pretty hard for him to do when he runs up against your kind. But the next time I’m going to turn him loose.”
“You might also tell your trained sonofabitch that he won’t catch me drunk on my hands and knees again, and in the meantime he ought to contact a public defender because I have a notion that he’ll need one soon.”
The sheriff struck a match on the arm of the chair and lit his cigarette. He puffed on it several times and flicked the match toward the spittoon. The k
nots and bumps on his face had turned a deeper red.
“I’m just about to take you back to lockdown and leave you there till you find some other smart-ass lawyer to get you out.”
“No, you’re not, because you’ve already been through my wallet and you saw a couple of cards in there with names of men who could have a sheriff dropped right off the party ticket.”
“I’ll tell you something. Tonight I’m going out on patrol myself, and if I catch you anywhere in the county you’re going to get educated downstairs and piss blood before you’re through. Pick up your stuff and get out of here.”
“What’s the bail on the others?”
“Twenty-five dollars a head, and you can have all the niggers and pepper-bellies and hippies you want. Then I’ll get my trusties to hose down the cells.”
I picked up my billfold from his desk and put four one-hundred-dollar bills before him.
“That ought to cover it, and some of your water bill, too,” I said.
He figured on a scratch pad with a broken pencil for a moment, smoking the saliva-stained cigarette between his lips.
“No, we owe you fifty dollars, Mr. Holland, and we want to be sure you get everything coming to you.” He opened his desk drawer and counted out the money from a cashbox and handed it to me. “Just sign the receipt and you can collect the whole bunch of them and play sticky finger in that union hall till tonight, then I’ll be down there and we can talk it over again if you’re still around.”
“I don’t believe you’ll be that anxious to talk when you and your deputy and I meet again.”
“I’m going to let them people out myself. Don’t be here when I get back,” he said. He stood up and dropped his cigarette into the spittoon. His flat blue eyes, staring out of that red, knotted face, looked like whorls of swimming color without pupils. He stuck his shirt inside his trousers with the flat of his hand and walked past me with the khaki stiffness of a man who had once more restored structure to his universe.