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
