from the service.”
The sun was starting to set among the purple clouds on the horizon, and through the car window I could see airplanes approaching Dulles with their landing lights on.
“I think you should turn over your friend’s case to someone else.”
“Well, in eight years of practice I haven’t lost a criminal case, Senator, and I’m usually a pretty good judge about what clients our firm should handle.”
“I hope you are, Hack, and I hope that we don’t have this same kind of discussion again.”
The chauffeur pulled into the terminal drive, and I went into the restaurant and had a dozen steak sandwiches made up while the Senator waited for me at the passenger gate. His plane taxied out of the hangar and rolled along the apron of the runway toward us, and in minutes we were back aboard and roaring toward the end of the field.
We lifted off sharply into the sun, the city sparkling below us in the twilight, and the interior of the plane was filled with a diffused red glow. My glass of bourbon and ice rattled on the table with the engines’ vibration.
“Who is he, anyway?” I said.
“John Williams? He owns the controlling stock in two of the government’s largest missile suppliers.”
CHAPTER 6
I spent the next week working on Art’s appeal while the July days grew hotter and my broken air conditioner cranked and rattled in the window. The temperature went to one hundred degrees every afternoon, and the sky stayed cloudless and brilliant with sun. The sidewalks and buildings were alive with heat, and sometimes when the air conditioner gave out altogether I’d open the window and the wind would blow into my face like a torch. In the street below, people walked under the hot shade of the awnings away from the sun’s glare, their faces squinted against the light and their clothes wet with perspiration. The humidity made your skin feel as though it were crawling with spiders, and when you stepped off a curb into the sun the air suddenly had the taste of an electric scorch.
In the evening, when the day had started to cool, I would drive out into the surrounding hills with the windows of the car down. (I had taken a hotel room in town so I could come to the office early each morning, and also Verisa was holding two cocktail parties at the house that week, and I wasn’t up to another round of drinking, and the disaster that always followed, with empty-headed people.)
In the mauve twilight the oak trees and blackjack took on a deeper green, and deer broke through the underbrush and ran frightened across the blacktop road in front of my car, their eyes like frozen brown glass. The air was sweet with the smell of the hills and woods, and jackrabbits and cottontails sat in the short grass with their ears folded back along their flanks. I remembered as a boy how I used to flush them out of a thicket and then whistle shrilly through my teeth and wait for them to stop and look back at me, their ears turned upward in an exact V. A slight breeze blew through the willows growing along the riverbank, and I could see the bass and bream breaking the water among the reeds and lily pads. Fishermen in rowboats with fly rods glided silently by the willows, casting popping bugs into the shadows, then the water would explode and a largemouth bass would climb into the air, shaking the hook in the side of his mouth, and the sun’s last rays would flash off his green-silver sides like tinted gold.
One evening, after a flaming day and a one-hour harangue from Bailey about all my deficiencies, I drove down to the Devil’s Backbone, a geological fault where the land folded sharply away and you could see fifty miles of Texas all at once. On the top of the ridge was a Mexican beer tavern built entirely of flat stones, and as I looked out over the hills at the baked land, the miniature oak trees in the distance, the darkening light in the valleys, and the broken line of fire on the horizon, I felt the breath go out of me and the ground move under my feet. In the wind I could smell the shallow water holes, the hot odor of the mesquite, the carcass of a lost cow that was being pulled apart by buzzards, the wild poppies and bluebonnets, the snakes and the lizards and the dry sand, the moist deer dung in the thickets of blackjack, and the head-reeling resilience of the land itself. I knew that if I stood there long enough, with the shadows spreading across the hills, I would see the ghosts of Apache and Comanche warriors riding their painted horses in single file, their naked bodies hung with scalps and necklaces of human fingers. Or maybe the others who came later, like Bowie and Crockett and Fannin and Milam, with deerskin clothes and powder horn and musket and the self-destructive fury that led them to war against the entire Mexican army.
The stone tavern was cool inside, and the cigarette-burned floor, the yellow mirror behind the bar, the shuffleboard table, and the jukebox with the changing colored lights inside the plastic casing were right out of the 1940s. Cedar-cutters and Mexican farmhands sat at the wooden tables with frosted schooners of beer in their hands, the bartender set down free plates of tortillas, cheese, and hot peppers, and the long-dead voice of Hank Williams rose from the jukebox. The last cinder of the sun faded outside, bugs beat against the screen door, and a brown moon sat low over the hills. I ordered a plate of tacos and a draft beer and watched two cedar-cutters sliding the metal puck through the powdered wax on the shuffleboard. For some reason the Mexican farmhands kept toasting me with their glasses every time they drank, so I bought a round for three tables, and that was the beginning of a good beer drunk.
The next morning I drove to the state penitentiary with my head still full of beer and jukebox music. The blacktop highway stretched through the rolling hills of red clay and cotton and pine trees, and my tires left long lines in the soft tar surfacing. The piney smell of the woods was sharp in the heat, and thin cattle grazed in the fields of burned grass. The rivers were almost dry, the sandbars like strips of bleached bone, and flocks of buzzards turned in slow circles over the treetops. The corn had started to burn on the edges, and in two more weeks, with no rain, the stalks would wither and the ears would lie rotting in the rows.
As I approached the city limits I saw all the familiar warning signs for this world and the next posted along the roadside:
DO NOT PICK UP HITCHHIKERS
STATE PENITENTIARY NEARBY
PREPARE TO MEET THY GOD
SAVE AMERICA AND IMPEACH EARL WARREN
JESUS DIED FOR YOU HAVE YOU BEEN SAVED
DON’T WORRY
THEY’RE ONLY NINETY MILES AWAY
And farther on, in a happier mood,
DON’T FAIL TO SEE THE HOME OF SAM HOUSTON
AND JACK’S SNAKE FARM
I stopped at the main gate of the prison and showed my identification to the guard. He wore a khaki uniform and a lacquered straw hat, and his hands and face were tanned the color of old leather. One jaw was swollen with chewing tobacco, and after he had looked at my Texas Bar Association card he spat a stream of brown juice through the rails of the cattleguard, wiped the stain off the corner of his mouth, and handed me a cardboard visitor’s pass with the date punched at the bottom.
“Don’t try to drive back out till the gate man goes through your car,” he said.
