breasts as she pushed the package back in her pocket.
“You’re pretty sure I’ve got a loser, aren’t you?” I said.
“I just don’t think you know very much about the county you’re working in.”
“So you’re up against some cotton growers who don’t want to pay union scale, and a few part-time Klansmen. And you’ve met a redneck deputy sheriff who probably rents his brains by the week. That doesn’t change the law or trial procedure.”
“Wow. You must walk into court with a copy of the
“I’ve had eight years of law practice, babe, and I haven’t lost many cases.”
“I don’t believe you’ve dealt very much with union farmworkers, either.”
“I’ve spent all my life in Texas. I don’t expect to find out anything very new about it in this case.”
“Don’t you realize the rules in your court don’t apply to us? Art’s jury brought in a guilty verdict in fifteen minutes, and later the foreman said it took them that long because they sent out for some cold drinks.”
“All right, I can use things just like that in the appeal.”
“I’m not kidding you, man; lose some of those comic-book attitudes if you want to do anything for him,” she said.
“You really know how to turn on the burner, don’t you?”
“I’m just telling you about the bag you’re trying to pick up.”
“You’re a hard girl.”
“Do I get that free with the ride home?” The sunlight through the window was bright on the burned ends of her hair. She had her arm back on the seat while she smoked, and I could see the whiteness at the top of her breasts.
“You’re not from Texas. What are you doing here, anyway?”
“Would you like to flip through the celluloid windows in my wallet?”
“It’s just a question.”
“It seems like an expensive trip home.”
“Maybe I should put on my chauffeur’s cap, and you can sit in the backseat and I’ll close the glass behind me.”
“I was a graduate student in social work at Berkeley. I got tired of writing abstract papers about hungry people so I joined the Third World and came out to your lovely state.”
I hit a chuckhole in the road and felt the car slam down on its springs. The dust was so heavy that it had started to filter through the air-conditioning system. Two Negro children were running along the edge of a ditch, throwing stones at an emaciated dog scabbed over with mange. The road reached a dead end in front of a converted general store with a sign above the door that read UNITED FARM WORKERS LOCAL 476. The glass display windows were yellow and pocked with BB holes, and filmed with dirt on the inside and outside. Strips of Montgomery Ward brick had been nailed over the rotted boards in the walls, the steps had collapsed, cinder blocks were propped under one side of the building to keep it from sagging, and I could almost hear the flies humming around the outhouse in back. A boy of about nineteen, barefoot and without a shirt, sat on the front porch playing a twelve-string Gibson guitar.
“Don’t wrinkle your eyes at it, man,” she said. “We’re lucky we could rent anything in this town.”
“I didn’t say a thing.”
“I could hear the tumblers click over in your head. You’ve got the middle-class hygiene thing. Anything except green lawns and red brick sends you running up the street.”
“That’s a lot of shit.”
“Okay. Thanks for the ride.”
She closed the door and walked down the dusty path to the building. I watched the motion of her hips and her full thighs as she stepped up on the porch, then I turned the Cadillac in a circle and headed back toward town.
I went to Mr. Cecil Wayne Posey’s office and was told by his junior partner that I could find him at home. His ranch was all blackland, lined with rows of cotton and corn and orange trees. A dozen Mexicans and Negroes were hoeing in the cotton, and horses stood in the groves of live oak trees on the low hills. The large, one-story house had new white paint and a wide screened-in porch, and poplar trees were planted along the front lane. There were two great red barns in back with lightning rods and weather vanes on the peaks, a windmill pumping water into a trough, and rolls of barbed wire and cords of cedar posts stacked against a tractor shed.
As I walked up the lane I heard a woodpecker rattling against a dead limb in the heat. Mr. Posey rose from his round-backed wicker chair on the porch and shook hands. The lower portion of his stomach was swollen all the way across the front of his pants. His skin was soft, pudgy to the touch, and his head was almost completely bald except for a few short gray hairs. His eyes were colorless, and his voice had the bland quality of oatmeal. He reminded me of a miniature, upended white whale. When he sat down the watch in his pocket bulged against the cloth like a hard biscuit.
A Negro maid in a lace-trimmed apron served us iced tea with mint leaves and slices of lemon on a silver service, then I began quietly to press Mr. Posey for his reasons in not filing an appeal for Art. Actually, my questions, or even my presence there, would probably be considered a violation of professionalism among attorneys, since I was indirectly implying that he had been negligent in the case; but the flicker of insult never showed in his eyes, and if his tone or the pale expression around his mouth indicated anything, it was simply that I was an idealistic young lawyer who had embarked on a fool’s errand. He lowered his face into the tea glass when he drank, and momentarily the moisture gave his lips a streak of color.
“I didn’t feel there was basis for appeal, Mr. Holland,” he said. “I originally advised Art to plead guilty in hopes of a reduced charge, but he refused, and I doubt if the Court of Criminal Appeals will consider the case of a man who was convicted on the testimony of four Texas Rangers and two bystanders. He did hit the officer twice before he was restrained, and that’s the essential and inalterable fact of the case.”
“Who were these bystanders?”
“Two county workmen who were operating a grading machine on the road when the arrests were made.”
I looked at him incredulously.
“Did you feel these men were objective witnesses?” I said.
“They had no interest in the issue. They merely stated what they saw.”
“I understand that most of the people on the picket line testified, also.”
“Unfortunately, most of them have been in local court before, and I’m afraid that their statements were overly familiar to the jury. One young man admitted to the district attorney that he’d been three hundred yards away from the arrest, but he was sure that Art hadn’t struck the officer. It’s difficult to contest a conviction on evidence of that sort, Mr. Holland.”
His face bent into the iced tea glass again, and a drop of perspiration rolled off his temple down his fat cheek. He shifted his buttocks in the wicker chair and crossed his legs. His massive, soft thighs stretched the crease in his slacks flat.
“Art’s been organizing a farmworkers’ union in this county for the past year. Do you believe any members of the jury had preconceived feelings toward him?”
“None that would affect the indictment against him. He was tried for assaulting a Texas Ranger, not for his involvement in a Mexican union.”
I borrowed a match from Mr. Posey and lit a cigar. I looked at him through the curl of flame and smoke and wondered if he had any conception of his irresponsibility in allowing his client to be sentenced to five years in a case that would be considered laughable by a law school moot court.
He put his empty pipe in the center of his teeth, drew in with a wet rattling sound, and farted softly in the back of the chair. I finished my tea, shook hands and thanked him for his help, and walked down the gravel path to my automobile under the trees. Behind me I heard him snap the metal latch into place on the screen door.
I drove back to town and had lunch and two beers at the cafe, then spent an hour in the clerk of records office while an aged secretary made a Xerox copy of the trial transcript for me. There was no breeze through the windows, my sunglasses filmed with moisture in the humidity, and the electric fans did nothing but blow drafts of hot air across the room. The deputy sheriff came in once to drop a pile of his penciled reports on the clerk’s desk,
