exploded barrel, and a Chinese bugle. A deputy in a khaki uniform sat behind an army surplus desk, filling out forms with a short pencil. He was lean all over, tall, and his crew-cut, glistening head was pale from wearing a hat in the sun. His fingers were crimped over the pencil as he worked out each sentence in printed and longhand letters. His shirt was damp around the shoulders, and his long arms were burned brown and wrinkled with veins.
“Can I help you?” he said without looking up.
“I’d like to see Arturo Gomez.”
He put the pencil down and turned his face up at me. His green, yellow-flecked eyes were flat, his face expressionless.
“Who are you?”
“My name’s Hackberry Holland. I’m a lawyer.”
“You ain’t his.”
“He’s a friend of mine from the service.”
“Well, visiting hour is at two o’clock.”
“I have to go back to Austin this morning. I’d appreciate it if I could talk with him a few minutes.”
The deputy turned the pencil in a circle on the desktop with his finger. There was a hard knot of muscle in the back of his arm.
“You working with these Mexican union people?”
“No.”
“You just drove down from Austin to see a friend in jail?”
“That’s right.”
“It won’t help him none. He’s going up to the state farm Wednesday. And I expect there might be a few more with him soon.”
“I wouldn’t know about that.” I bent over and tipped my cigar ashes into the spittoon, then waited for the deputy to continue the statement which he had prepared long ago for strangers, slick lawyers, and nigger and Mexican lovers.
“You can take it for what it’s worth, Mr. Holland, but these Mexicans was stirred up by agitators from the outside. They can make fair wages in the field any time they want to work, but they stay drunk on wine half the time or sit in the welfare office.” His yellow-flecked eyes looked into my face. “Then those union organizers started telling them they could get twice as much money by shutting down the harvest. Just let the cotton and grapefruit rot and they’re all going to be nigger-rich. People around here is pretty fed up with it, and it’s lucky that a couple of them California Mexicans haven’t been drug behind a car yet.”
“As I said, I’m not representing anyone.”
“It’s against the rule, but I’ll take you down to see Gomez a minute. I just thought you ought to know we ain’t pushing these people into a corner they didn’t build for themselves.”
I followed him down a staircase into the basement of the building. The rigid angles in his body, the rolled khaki sleeves, and the flush of anger in his neck reminded me of several drill instructors whom I had met at Parris Island. They all had the same intense dedication to perverse abstractions that had been created for them by someone else.
The basement of the courthouse, the jail, had been constructed with large blocks of limestone, sawed and chiseled and set with mortar in uneven squares. The corridor was lighted by two bulbs screwed into sockets on the ceiling, and the cells looked like caves cut back into the rock with iron doors on them. The stone was damp with humidity, and the air was rank with disinfectant, D.D.T., urine, and tobacco smoke. Each of the iron doors had a row of holes perforated in the top, and a slit and apron for a food tray. At the end of the corridor was a large room, with two wide barred doors that swung open like gates, and overhead on the rock in broken white letters were the words
“Wait in here and I’ll bring him out,” he said. He walked back down the corridor and slipped the bolt on one of the cells. He had to use both hands to pull the door open.
Art stepped out into the light, his pupils contracted to small black dots. His denim jail issue was too big for him and his hair hung down over his ears. He was barefoot, his shirt and trousers were unbuttoned, and his thin frame was stooped as he walked toward the cage, as though the rock ceiling was crushing down on him. He had a cigarette in an empty space where a tooth had been, and there was a cobweb scar on the edge of one eye. He had started to get jailhouse pallor, and the two pachuco tattoos on his hands looked like they had just been cut into the skin with brilliant purple ink. I hadn’t seen him in five years, when he was contracting tomato harvests in DeWitt County, but it seemed that everything in him had shrunken inward, hard and brittle as bone. The deputy closed the cage door on us and locked it.
“You can talk ten minutes,” he said, and walked back down the corridor. The light gleamed on his shaved head.
“What about it, Hack? You want to play Russian roulette with me?” Art said, and smiled with the cigarette in his teeth. His long fingers were spread out on the tabletop.
“How in the hell did you go up for assault because of a picket-line arrest?”
“What happened and what I got tried for ain’t the same thing. The Texas Rangers moved in on our picket line because they said we wasn’t fifty feet apart. They knocked a couple of our people down, and when I yelled about it they put the arm on me. I pushed this one fat bastard on his ass, and he got up and beat the shit out of me with a blackjack. Man, they’re real bad people when they turn loose. I can still see that guy swinging down on me. His eyes was sticking out of his head. He must have saved it up for a long time.”
“What did your lawyer do in the trial?”
“He was appointed by the court. He lives right here in the county and he wanted me to plead guilty. I told him to go fuck himself, so he chewed on his pipe for three days, cross-examined one witness, and shook hands with me after the judge gave me five years.
“Look, Hack, I know I’m leaning on you for a favor, but I want to beat this shit. Our union’s got a chance if we don’t get broke up. We got a few people in Austin on our side, and some of the locals are afraid enough of the Chicano vote that they might come around if we stay solid. But our treasury’s broke and I got nobody but kids to organize the pickets and boycotts while I’m in the pen. And I’ll tell you straight I don’t want to build no five years. Four cents a day chopping cotton ain’t good pay.” He smiled again, and took the cigarette from his lips and put it out on the bottom of the table.
“All right, I’ll try to file an appeal. It takes time, but maybe with luck I can spring you on bond.”
He took another cigarette from his shirt pocket, popped a kitchen match on his thumbnail, and lit it. The scar tissue around his eye was yellow in the flame. “A year ago I was ready to charge the hill with a bayonet in my teeth. Corporal Gomez going over the top like gangbusters with a flamethrower. I was ready to build life in the pen for our union, but three months in lockdown here, man, it leaves a dent. Every night when that bastard sticks a plate of grits and fried baloney through the slit I say hello to his fingernails.”
“You know what you’re doing is crazy, don’t you?”
“Why? Because we’re tired of getting shit on?”
“These people have lived one way for a hundred and fifty years,” I said. “You can’t make them change with a picket sign.”
His face sharpened, and his yellow-stained fingers pressed down on the cigarette.
“Yeah, we been eating their shit for just about that long. But we ain’t going that route no more. We got more people than the Anglos, and this land belonged to us before their white ass ever got on it.”
“You can’t alter historical injustice in the present. You’re only putting yourself and your people up against an executioner’s wall.”
“You can jive about all that college bullshit you want, but we been picking your cotton for six cents a pound. You ever do stoop labor? Your back feels like a ball of fire by noon, and at night you got to sleep on the floor to iron out your spine. All you Anglos are so fucking innocent. You got the answers counted out in your palm like pennies. You march off every Christmas and hand out food baskets to the niggers and greaseballs, and then for the next twelve months you congratulate yourself on your Christianity.”
He drew in on the cigarette and pushed his long black hair out of his face. He looked at the table and breathed the smoke out between his lips. “Okay, man, I’m sorry. I sit in my cell all day and think, and I don’t get to
