the Jax, and an hour later the room roared with mariachi songs and Apache screams.
“Let me try that guitar, buddy,” I said to the boy from the front porch. He sat on the floor with his back against the wall and a glass of wine and whiskey between his legs. His face was bloodless and his eyes couldn’t fix on my face. I put the strap of the twelve-string around my neck and tried to pick out “The Wreck of Old ’97,” but my fingers felt as though a needle and thread had been drawn through all my knuckles. Then I tried “The Wildwood Flower” and “John Hardy,” and each time I began over again I hit more wrong notes or came up on the wrong fret. I smoked somebody’s cigarette out of an ashtray, finished my drink, and then started an easy Jimmie Rodgers run that I had learned to pick when I was sixteen. It was worse than before, and I laid the guitar facedown on the counter among the scores of empty beer bottles.
“I bet you blow a good one when you’re cool,” Rie said. She was sitting in the chair next to me with a small glass of wine in her hand. Her legs were crossed, and the indention across her stomach and the white line of skin above her blue jeans made something drop inside me.
“Give me an hour and I’ll boil them cabbages down,” I said.
“Do it tomorrow morning.”
“I’m going to streak out of here like the fireball mail tomorrow morning. My Cadillac and I are going to melt the asphalt between here and Austin.” Someone put the whiskey bottle in my hand, and I took two large swallows and chased it with beer.
“You must have a real dragon inside,” Rie said.
“No, I deal with Captain Hyde. That bastard and I have been together almost fifteen years. However, when he starts acting like an asshole I unscrew my head and throw it in the Rio Grande a couple of times.”
“No kidding, pull it back in, man,” she said.
“I thought you were a hip girl. You’re giving me the concerned eye of a Baptist reformer now.”
“I think you’re probably a madman.”
“You ought to see me and John Wesley Hardin drunk in the streets of Yoakum. He rides on the fender of my Cadillac, busting parking meters and stoplights with a revolver in each hand.”
The noise became louder. All the beer, whiskey, and wine were gone, and I gave one of the Mexican field hands another twenty dollars to go to the tavern. The twelve-string guitar was passed from hand to hand, tuned in a half dozen discords, two strings broken, and finally dropped in a corner. Someone suggested a knife-throwing contest, and a bread cutter, two bowies, a rippled-bladed Italian stiletto, my pocketknife, a hand ax, and a meat cleaver were flung into the wall until the boards were split and shattered and knocked through on the ground outside.
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
“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
