“The perfect non-think answer. If his gait is thrown off I’m going to set fire to somebody’s hair.”
“You’d better not be talking about me.”
“Read it like you want. It takes a special type of fool to do something that stupid to a fine horse.”
“You just stop your shouting at me.”
“I’ll crack the goddamn ceiling if I want. And as long as we’re on it, question number two: who forgot to chain the windmill? Which might strike you as a minor thing to consider between book pages, but right now our water table is almost dry and there are some crops that have a tendency to burn when they’re not irrigated.”
“I’m getting sick of this,” she said.
“I’m not asking you to walk around in the manure with a cattle prod in your hand. I’d just like you to stick your head out the door occasionally and make sure the whole goddamn place hasn’t blown away.”
“I don’t know where your present adventure took you, but you must have damaged some of the brain tissue. I’m going to bed. If you want to shout some more, either close the door or go down the road to your tavern.”
“Don’t you know what it means to hurt a horse like that?”
“Good night, Hack.”
She set her book down with a marker between the pages and walked past me in her best remote fashion. Her blue nightgown swirled around her legs in a whisper of silk, then she closed the door behind her. I had a drink out of the decanter on the bar, while my chest rose and fell with my breathing. Outside, the trees scratched against the house, and the door on the barn loft kept slamming like a tack hammer in the wind.
In the morning I went to the office in Austin and began work on Art’s appeal. I was supposed to help Bailey that week on two large insurance suits, but after he had recovered from staring at my bandaged head and the swollen corner of my eye under my sunglasses, I told him that he would have to carry it alone for a few days. He was still angry from the weekend, and now his exasperation with his younger brother almost made his eyes cross. He sat with one thigh over the corner of my desk, his hands folded, straining like a stoic to retain his patience, while each word tripped out like an expression from a peptic ulcer.
“This is a two-hundred-thousand-dollar deal, Hack,” he said. “We waited on it for six months.”
“So I’ll pick it up next week.”
“We’re going to try to settle next week.”
“They’re not going to settle. Forget it. We’ll be in court a year.”
“Give that case to the A.C.L.U. They handle them all the time.”
“I just want three uninterrupted days.”
“Even if you win appeal, you won’t get him out of prison on bond.”
“I might if I can get some work done and be let alone for any random period of time.”
“What happened in Pueblo Verde?”
“You won’t buy a car accident, will you? All right, a peckerwood cop kicked the hell out of me and I spent a night in a drunk tank. I was also indirectly presented with a map from the sheriff so I could find my way out of the county. In the meantime I managed to get a dozen other people arrested. Lastly, I’m going to write off their bail on my expense account. Now you can worry about the wire services picking up a sweet piece of interesting journalism on a congressional candidate. Does that make your day any better?”
“I don’t believe you.”
“I have a receipt for the bail if you would like to look at it.”
His stomach swelled as he drew in on his dead pipe. It made a sound that hurt something in the inner ear. His vexed, almost desperate eyes focused out the window. Then his control began to slip, the anger and impotence rose in his face, and he ranted for fifteen minutes in cliches about responsibilities, major accounts, a judge who said that he never wanted me in his chambers again, my career in politics (and its profitable effects on our law practice), and my pending trip to Walter Reed Hospital with Senator Dowling.
“Oh, that’s right,” I said. “We view the Claymore mine and AK-47 cases this weekend. Why don’t you come along, Bailey? You missed the Korean show. These guys are a blast.”
He slammed the door behind him, and I lit a cigar and looked up at the picture of Old Hack and my father on the wall. In the faded photograph, now yellow around the edges, his black eyes still burned from his face, which had begun to grow soft and childlike in his old age. His eyes turned directly into mine as I moved the swivel chair in either direction. They were like shattered obsidian, filled with fire and the quiet intensity of a leveled rifle. His bobbed hair was as white as his starched shirt, and his stiff black coat looked as though a pistol ball would flatten out against it. Next to him, my father’s gentle face and straw skimmer and summer suit made me think of two strangers who had met in the middle of an empty field and had decided to have their picture taken together.
I worked the next three days on the appeal with an energy and freshness that I hadn’t felt in years. In fact, I even felt like a criminal lawyer again rather than an expensive manipulator for the R. C. Richardson account. My bottle of Jack Daniel’s stayed in the desk drawer, and I came to the office at seven in the morning and stayed until dusk. As I said before, the appeal should have been a foregone conclusion, but I began to wonder if any judge in the Austin court would believe that so many absurdities could have actually taken place in one trial. Moreover, each time I went through the transcript I didn’t believe it myself. Thursday afternoon, after I’d had the secretary in my office for five hours of dictation and typing, Bailey’s patience cracked apart again and he came suddenly through the door, his face stretched tight with anger. (The air conditioner was broken, and we had the windows over the street open. The hot air was like warm water in the room.)
“All right, you can let two hundred thousand dollars go to hell, but I’m still paying half the overhead around here,” he said.
“Bailey, look at this goddamn thing, then tell me that I ought to let this guy sit it out in the pen while some kid lawyer from the A.C.L.U. plays pocket pool with himself.”
“I don’t want to look at it. I have a desk covered with twice my ordinary load of work.”
“Then have a drink of water. You look hot.”
“Goddamn it, Hack, you’re putting me over the edge.”
“I just want you to glance at what can happen in a legal court without one voice being raised in protest.”
“What did you expect to find down there? Those union people knew the terms when they came in here.”
“I think I heard a deputy sheriff say about the same thing while he was pouring his mouth full of chewing tobacco.”
And once more Bailey slammed out the door, a furious man who would never understand the real reasons for his anger.
I spent Friday night in an Austin motel, and Saturday morning I met the Senator’s private plane at the airport. I stood on the hot concrete by the terminal in my white suit, and watched the plane tilt across the sky and approach the runway, its wings and propellers awash with sunlight. One wing lifted upward momentarily in the wind, then balanced again, and the wheels touched on the asphalt as smoothly as a soft slipper. The heat waves bounced off the fuselage, and the sun turned the front windows into mirrors exploding with light. At the end of the runway the pilot feathered one engine and taxied at an angle toward me, and I saw the Senator open the back door and wave one arm, his face smiling.
I walked to the plane, and the backdraft from the propeller blew the tail of my coat over my shoulders. The Senator was grinning in the roar, and he extended his hand and helped me into the compartment. I pulled the door shut after me, locked the handle down, and the plane began to taxi out on the main runway again. The Senator was dressed in slacks, a Hawaiian sports shirt, and calfskin loafers. There was fresh tan on his face and a few freckles along the hairline of his white, crew-cropped head. In the opposite seat, with a drink resting on his crossed knee, was a man I didn’t know, although I sensed at the time that I probably would never forget him. He wore a charcoal business suit, a silk shirt with cuff links, and a gray tie, and his face was pale and expressionless behind his sunglasses. The mouth was small and compressed, as though he never spoke except with a type of quiet finality, and his manicured, half-moon fingernails and confident reserve reminded me of a very successful corporate executive, but there was something about the hue of his skin and the trace of talcum powder on his neck that darkened the image.
“Hack, this is John Williams, an old friend from Los Angeles,” the Senator said.
We shook hands, and I felt the coldness in his palm from the highball glass.
“How do you do,” he said. Only the mouth moved when he spoke. The face remained as immobile as plastic. He pushed his smoky, metallic hair back on one temple with his fingertips.
