and as he walked past me he stared into my face without speaking.
I spent the rest of the afternoon in the hotel, with my feet propped in the window, reading the transcript and sipping whiskey poured over ice. The flies droned dully in the stillness, and occasionally I would hear the hillbilly music from the beer tavern. Across the square the sun slanted on the rows of watermelons and cantaloupes in the open-air fruit market.
The transcript was an incredible record to read. The trial might have been constructed out of mismatched parts from an absurd movie script about legal procedure. There had been no challenge of the jurors, each of the Texas Rangers contradicted the others, a Baptist minister testified that many of the union members were Communists, and the two county workmen said they had seen a Mexican attack a Ranger, although they had been eating their lunch in the back of a truck a half mile down the road at the time. The three witnesses for the defense were sliced to pieces by the district attorney. They were led into discrediting statements about their own testimony, forced into stumbling admissions about their involvement in revolution, and referred to sixteen times as outside agitators. And Cecil Wayne Posey never raised an objection. Normally, any two pages torn at random from such a comic scenario would be grounds for appeal, but under Texas law the appeal has to be made in local court within ten days of sentencing, unless good cause is shown for an extension, and since Mr. Posey’s refusal to continue the case had virtually guaranteed that his client would go to prison, I would have to start the whole process over again in Austin.
It was dusk outside now. I threw the transcript in my suitcase, took a cold bath, and shaved, with a glass of whiskey on top of the lavatory. As a rule I didn’t try to correct the inadequacies inherent in any system, but in this case I thought I would send a letter to the Texas Bar Association about Mr. Posey. Yes, Mr. Posey should receive some official recognition for his work, I thought, as I drew the razor blade down in a clean swath through the shaving cream on my cheek.
I ate a steak for supper and drove back to the union headquarters in the Mexican district. There were thunderclouds and heat lightning in the west, an electric flash all the way across the horizon, and then a distant, dry rumble. The air tasted like brass in my mouth. Parts of the dirt road had been sprinkled with garden hoses to wet down the dust, and the cicadas in the trees were deafening with their late evening noise. Fireflies glowed like points of flame in the gathering dusk, and across the river in old Mexico the adobe huts on the mudflat wavered in the light of outdoor cook fires. High up in the sky, caught in the sun’s last afterglow, a buzzard floated motionlessly like a black scratch on a tin surface.
I parked the car in front of the union headquarters and walked up the path to the wooden steps. The boy with the Gibson twelve-string still sat on the porch. He had three steel picks on his fingers and a half-gallon bottle of dago red next to him. His bare feet were covered with dust, and there were tattoos on each arm. He chorded the guitar and didn’t turn his head toward me.
“She’s inside, man,” he said.
“Do I knock or let myself in?”
“Just do it.”
I tapped with my knuckle on the screen door and waited. I heard dishes rattling in a pan in the back of the building.
“Hey, Rie, that guy’s back,” the boy shouted over his shoulder.
A moment later the girl walked through a back hallway toward me. Her arms were wet up to the elbow. She had splashed water on her blouse, and her breasts stood out against the cloth.
“Man, like you really want to meet us, don’t you?” she said, pushing open the screen with the back of her wrist.
“I decided against watching television in the hotel lobby this evening.”
“Come in the kitchen. I have to finish the dishes.”
The flowered wallpaper in the main room was yellowed and peeling in rotted strips, coated with mold and glue. United Farm Workers signs, pop art posters of Che Guevara and Lyndon Johnson on a motorcycle, and underground newspapers were thumbtacked over the exposed sections of boarding in the walls. A store-window mannequin lay on top of the old grocery counter with an empty wine bottle balanced on her stomach. A mobile made of beer-bottle necks clinked in the breeze from an oscillating fan that rattled against the wire guard each time it completed a turn. The single lightbulb suspended from the ceiling gave the whole room a hard yellow cast that hurt the eyes.
I followed her through the hallway into the kitchen. Her brown hips moved as smoothly as water turning in the current. Two young girls, a college boy, and a Negro man were scraping dishes into a garbage can and rinsing them under an iron pump. Through the back window I could see the last red touch of the sun on a sandbar in the middle of the Rio Grande.
“We had a neighborhood dinner tonight,” the girl from Berkeley said. “There’s some tortillas and beans in the icebox or you can get a dish towel.”
“You have a charge account with the supermarket?”
“We get the day-old stuff from the Mexican produce stands,” she said.
“I think I’ll just have a whiskey and water if you’ll give me a glass.” I took my silver flask from my coat pocket.
“Help yourself,” she said.
I offered the flask to the others.
“You got it, brother,” the Negro said.
He picked up a tin cup from the sideboard and held it in front of me. His bald, creased head and round black face shone in the half-light. Four of his front teeth were missing, and the others were yellow with snuff. I poured a shot in his cup and then splashed some water in my glass from the pump. I could taste the rust in it.
“So what would you like to find out about the United Farm Workers?” the girl said.
“Nothing. I read the trial transcript and talked with Mr. Posey this afternoon. The conviction won’t hold.”
The Negro laughed with the cup held before his lips. The college boy straightened up from the garbage can and looked at me as though I had dropped through a hole in the ceiling.
“You believe that?” the Negro said. He was still smiling.
“Yes.”
“I mean, you ain’t bullshitting? You’re coming on for real?” the college boy said. He wore blue jeans and a faded yellow and white University of Texas T-shirt.
“That’s right, pal,” I said.
The Negro laughed again and went back to work scraping plates. The two young girls were also smiling.
“Who you working for, man?” the boy said.
“Judge Roy Bean. I float up and down the Pecos River for him on an inner tube.”
“Don’t get strung out,” the girl said.
“What am I, the visiting straight man around here?”
The girl dried her hands on a towel and took a bottle of Jax out of the icebox. “Come on out front,” she said.
“We wasn’t trying to give you no truck. We ain’t got bad things here,” the Negro said. He grinned at me with his broken, yellow teeth.
In the front room the girl sat in a straight-backed chair, with one leg pulled up on the seat, her arm propped across her knee, and drank out of the beer bottle. Behind her on the wall was a poster with a rectangular, outspread bird on it and the single word HUELGA.
“They’re kids, and they don’t know if you’re putting them on or if you’re a private detective working for their parents,” she said. “The black guy has been in the movement since the Progressive Labor Party days, and he’s heard a lot of jiveass lawyers talk about appeals.”
“I guess I just don’t like people to work out their problems on my head.”
“I told you this afternoon about coming down here.”
“Maybe I should have worn my steel pot and flak jacket.”
“They don’t have any bad will toward you. They’re good people.”
“I’m paranoid and suspicious by nature.”
“That’s part of the middle-class syndrome, too. It goes along with the hygiene thing.”
“I picked a hell of a ball game to relieve in. Between you, Cecil Wayne Posey, and that deputy at the jail I feel
