show horse and shouldn’t be ridden into barbed-wire fences, and laughed good-naturedly with the two committee men at their locker-room jokes. People came and left, the sun started to set beyond the line of trees on the horizon, and the bartender moved among the groups with a tray of cool drinks, and at dusk Cappie served plates of barbecued links and chicken and potato salad. My head was drumming with the heat, the whiskey, and the endless conversation. Verisa stood next to me with her hand on my arm, accepting invitations to homes that I would not enter unless I was drugged and chained. Finally, at nine o’clock, when the party moved inside out of sheer exhaustion, I took a bottle of whiskey from the bar and drove down the back road to one of the ponds that I’d had stocked with bass. One of Cappie’s cane poles was leaned against a willow tree, and I dug some worms out of the wet dirt by the bank and drank whiskey and bottom-fished in the dark until I saw the last headlights wind down my front lane to the blacktop.
During the next ten days I spoke at a free Democratic barbecue in Austin (it was crowded with university students and working people, most of whom stayed at the beer kegs and didn’t know or care who was giving the barbecue), addressed two businessmen’s luncheons in San Antonio (the American and Texas flags on each side of me, the plastic plants forever green on the linen-covered tables, the rows of intent faces like expressions caught in a waxworks), talked informally at a private club in Houston (“Well, Mr. Holland, regardless of the mistake we made in Vietnam, don’t you think we have an obligation to support the fighting men?” “Granted that colored people have a grievance, do you believe that the answer lies in destruction of property?” “Frankly, what
The appeal came through at the close of the second week since I had seen Art. The judge who had reviewed the trial record, a hard old man with forty years on the bench, wrote in his decision that “the conduct of the local court was repugnant, a throwback to frontier barbarism,” and he ordered Art’s release from the state penitentiary on appeals bond pending a new trial. I set down the telephone, took a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and a glass from my desk drawer, and poured a large drink. On my second swallow, with a fresh cigar in my mouth, Bailey walked through the door and hit the broken air conditioner with his fist.
“Why don’t you turn the goddamn thing off so the building can stop vibrating a few minutes?” he said. It had been a bad two weeks for Bailey. The heat bothered him much worse than it did me, and we had lost one of our big accounts, which he blamed on me. He believed that he was developing an ulcer, and each morning he drank a half bottle of some chalky white medicine that left him nauseated for two hours.
“Just turn the knob, Bailey, or you can hit it some more.”
“I see you’re getting launched early this afternoon.”
“No, only one drink. Do you know where I can buy a beer truck?”
“What?” A drop of perspiration rolled down from his hairline like a thick, clear vein.
“I tell you what, buddy. Let’s lock up the office in about an hour, and I’ll take you on a three-day visit to all the Mexican beer joints in San Antonio.”
“Put up the whiskey.”
“Come on. For one time in forty years of Baptist living, close the office early and tie on a real happy one.”
“Did you look at our calendar for this afternoon between drinks?”
“Yeah, R. C. Richardson is about to get burned again, and he needs us to clean up his shit.”
“You accepted him as a client. I don’t like the sonofabitch in the office.”
“You don’t understand that old country boy, Bailey. He’s not a bad guy, as far as sons of bitches go. Anyway, his ass can burn until Monday. Get a glass and sit down. The only ulcer you have is in the head, and you’re going to have a few dozen more there unless you let some cool air into that squeezed mind of yours.”
“If you want to get into the bottle and blow half our practice, do it, but shut off that patronizing crap. I’ve pretty well reached my level of tolerance in the last two weeks.”
“Look, I won appeal today on Art Gomez and the judge has set bond, and you have to admit that we haven’t sprung many of our clients from the state pen. So take a drink and lower your blood rate, and I’ll pick up Richardson’s case early Monday morning.”
“I can’t get it through to you, Hack. You’ve got cement around your head. The office isn’t a tennis club where you play between drinks.”
“All right, forget it,” I said, and picked up the telephone and dialed the number of a bondsman we dealt with. I turned my eyes away from Bailey’s vexed face and waited in the hot stillness for him to leave the room.
The bondsman was named Bobo Dietz. He was a dark, fat man, who always wore purple shirts and patent- leather shoes and a gold ring on his little finger. He had moved to Austin from New Jersey ten years ago, set up a shabby office next to the county jail, and in the time since then he had bought two pawnshops and three grocery stores in the Negro slum. He considered avarice a natural part of man’s chemistry, and you were a sucker if you believed otherwise; but he was always efficient and you could count on him to have bail posted and the client on the street a half hour after you set him in motion.
He assured me over the phone, in his hard Camden accent and bad grammar, that the ten-thousand-dollar bond would be made before five o’clock and Art would be released by tomorrow morning. For some reason Bobo liked me, and as always, when I went bail for a client on my own, he wouldn’t charge me for anything except expenses. Many times I wondered if there was some strange scar in my personality that attracted people like Bobo Dietz and R. C. Richardson to me.
I turned off the air conditioner and opened all the office windows. The stale afternoon heat and noise from the street rose off the yellow awnings below me. My shirt stuck to my skin, and the odor of gasoline exhaust and hot tar made my eyes water. In the middle of the intersection a big Negro in an undershirt was driving an air- hammer into the concrete. The broken street surfacing shaled back from the bit, and the compressor pumped like a throbbing headache. I sipped another straight drink in the windowsill, sweating in the humidity and the heat of the whiskey, then I decided to give Bailey and his fundamentalist mentality another try. I took a second glass from the drawer, poured a small shot in the bottom, and walked into his office.
He was dictating to our secretary, his eyes focused on the wall, and I could see in the nervous flick of his fingers on his knee that he expected an angry exchange, profanity (which he hated in front of women), or a quick thrust into one of his sensitive areas (such as his impoverished bachelorhood, the empty weekends in his four- hundred-dollar-a-month apartment). I leaned against the doorjamb, smoking a cigar, with a glass in each hand. He faltered in his dictation, and his eyes moved erratically over the wall.
“Hack, I’ll talk to you later.”
“No, we have to shut it down today. It’s Friday afternoon and R. C. Richardson will appreciate us a lot more Monday morning. Mrs. McFarland, my brother needs to direct me into the cocktail hour today, so you can leave early if you like.”
The secretary rested her pencil on her pad, her eyes smiling. Her hair was gray, streaked with iron, and her face was cheerful and bright as she waited for the proper moment either to stop work or resume the dictation.
I set Bailey’s drink down before him.
“I’d like to finish if—”
“Sorry, you’re unplugged for the day, brother,” I said. “Go ahead, Mrs. McFarland. There’s a slop chute down the road where I need a warden.”
Bailey saw that I had the first edge of a high on, and he let the secretary go with an apology. (He was the only southerner I ever knew who could have been a character in a Margaret Mitchell novel.)
“That’s too goddamn much,” he said. “I’ve had it with this type of irresponsible college-boy shit around the office. When you’re not loaded you’re coming off a drunk, or you’re spending your time on a union agitator’s appeal while our biggest account gets picked up by a couple of New York Jews. You’ve insulted everybody who’s tried to help you in the election, you got yourself put in jail because you were too drunk to know what universe you were in, and you had the balls to file a civil rights complaint against the man who arrested you.”
“Bailey—”
“Just shut up a minute. Senator Dowling kept that story off the wire services, but since you felt so outraged that you had to file a complaint with the F.B.I. we should have some real fine stuff in the newspapers before November. In the meantime you haven’t been in a courtroom in three months, and I’m tired of carrying your load. If you want out of the partnership, I’ll sign my name to a check and you can fill in the amount.”
