“I started off to have a drink with you, brother, but since you’ve brought the conversation down to the bloodletting stage, let’s look at a couple of things closely. Number one, the criminal cases we’ve won in court have been handled by me, and our largest paying accounts, keeping Richardson and his kind out of the pen for stealing millions from the state, have been successful because I know how to bend oil regulation laws around a telephone pole. Number two, you haven’t been pumping my candidacy for Congress just because you want to see your brother’s sweet ass winking at you from Washington, D.C. I don’t like to put it rough to you like that, Bailey, but you don’t understand anything unless it comes at you like a freight train between the eyes. You have all these respectable attitudes and you heap them out on everybody else’s head and ask them to like you for it. You better learn that you have a real load of pig flop in that wheelbarrow.”
On that note of vicious rapport I received the call from Bobo Dietz. Bailey’s face was white, the veins swollen in his neck, his eyes hot as he raised the whiskey to his mouth and I picked up the receiver.
“I don’t know what kind of deal this is, Mr. Holland,” Dietz said.
“What are you talking about?”
“That man’s dead.”
“Look, Dietz—”
“I called the warden. He said a couple of boons chopped him up with bush axes yesterday afternoon.”
CHAPTER 7
It took me a half hour to get the warden on the phone. He didn’t want to talk with me, but after I threatened to see him in his home that night he read me the guard’s report about Art’s death and added his own explanations about the unavoidable violence between the Negro and Mexican inmates.
Two Negroes had hidden a paper bag full of Benzedrex inhalers in the tractor shed, and they had been drinking bottles of codeine stolen from the pharmacy and chewing the cotton Benzedrine rings from at least two dozen inhalers when Art went inside the shed to get a lug wrench. A few minutes passed; a mounted guard working a gang in the cotton field heard a single cry, and by the time he rode to the shed and threw open the door the Negroes had disemboweled Art, torn the flesh from his back like whale meat, and severed one arm from his body.
There wasn’t much more to the report. Art had probably been killed with the second or third blow. The Negroes were so incoherent they couldn’t talk, and the guard had no idea why they had attacked Art instead of a half-dozen other men who had been in and out of the shed earlier, although the warden added that “a doped-up nigger isn’t a human being no longer.” The Negroes had been put in solitary confinement and refused to talk about killing Art, if they even remembered doing it, and Art’s body was to be buried in the prison cemetery unless his family was willing to pay for shipment back to Rio Grande City.
I hung up the receiver and sat numbly in the chair with my eyes closed and my fingers trembling on my forehead. So that was it. Just like that. Two crazed men single out another man, for no reason other than the fact that he walked into their bent, angry minds at the wrong time, and then they tear all the thirty-six years of life and soul from his body in seconds. My right hand was still sweating from the heat of the phone receiver and my ears burned with the casual language of the guard’s report and the warden’s footnotes. I couldn’t shut out the vision of the two Negroes dismembering a man who had nothing to do with their lives, their brains boiling in a furnace of satisfaction, just as sometime in the future several other madmen would seat them in a wooden chair fitted with leather straps and buckles and metal hood and place a cotton gag in their mouths and burst every cell in their bodies with thousands of volts of electricity. Bailey poured a drink in a glass and placed it in my hand. I watched the brown light shimmering in the whiskey. My arm felt too weak and lifeless to raise the glass to my mouth.
“I’m sorry, Hack,” Bailey said.
I stood up and set the glass on the desk. My movements seemed wooden, disconnected from one another, as though I had just awoke in the center of a vacuum. I could feel the beat of my pulse swelling into my eardrums. For just a moment the room looked unfamiliar, the ordered arrangement of chairs and desk and file cabinets foreign to anything that was me. I began putting on my coat.
“Where are you going?” Bailey said.
“I’m going to try to explain how a—”
“Sit down a minute and finish your drink.”
“I said I’m going down to the Valley and try to explain how a good man was murdered in a prison where he shouldn’t have been in the first place. And then I’ll explain how I won appeal on a man twenty-four hours after he was dead.”
“Don’t let it take you like this, Hack.”
“How should we take it, Bailey? Maybe if I go to work fast I can arrange to have his body shipped home before he’s buried in a prison cemetery with a wood marker. And if I’m too late to prevent that, I can always work on a court order to have the body exhumed. And while we’re doing all that we can consider that a lynch court had this in mind for him when he was first charged.”
“Here, drink it, and I’ll go with you.”
“You wouldn’t like it.”
“I’ll rent a plane and we’ll fly down tonight.”
I drank from the glass, but the whiskey had no taste. I had started to perspire under my coat, and the shapes and late afternoon shadows in the room were as strange as the distorted lines in a dream. Outside, the air-hammer thudded into the asphalt. I felt the sweat dripping off my hair down the back of my neck. The glass was empty in my hand.
“They wouldn’t like you, either,” I said.
“Goddamn it, Hack, you can’t drive like this.”
“They don’t buy that work-with-the-system stuff. And I don’t feel like telling them the system is all right, except for those twenty-four-hour differences that you have to take into allowance. And I don’t like to tell them that I was having drinks with the D.A.R. ladies and shaking hands with the paraplegics while Art’s clock was one day behind the court’s. Give me another one.”
He put his arm on my elbow and tried to turn me toward the chair.
“Just get the bottle, Bailey. Pour yourself a super one while you’re at it.”
He went to the desk and came back with the bottle of Jack Daniel’s. He held the stopper in one hand.
“All right, sit down, and I’ll call the airport.”
“Would you listen to me just for one goddamn time?” I said. “I’m not going down to meet with a Rotarian luncheon, and number two I’m not a fucking lunatic who needs his older brother to strap a control harness on his back.”
I took the bottle out of his hand and drank from the neck. I swallowed until the muscles in my throat closed and the whiskey backed up in my mouth.
“There, goddamn. That glues everything a little tighter,” I said.
“Hack.”
I left him standing in the open door with the bottle in his hand, his lined face covered with pinpoints of moisture.
On the four-lane highway west of town I opened up the Cadillac, lowered the windows, and passed long strings of late afternoon traffic, hitting the shoulders and showering gravel over the asphalt. The red sun burned across the tops of the hills and lighted the dark edges of the post oaks and blackjack, and the shadows of the cedar-post fences along the road broke silently against my fenders like a blinking eye. Although I had driven that same highway hundreds of times, the sunset gave a different cast and color to the land than anything I had seen there before. The windmills were motionless in the static air; the cattle in the fields were covered with scarlet, their heads stationary in the short grass, and the neat white ranch houses seemed as devoid of life and movement as an abandoned film set; the irrigation ditches were dry and cracked with drought, the thickets of mesquite like burned scratches against the hillsides, and the few horses in the pastures looked as though they had been misplaced.
The shadows deepened over the hills, the traffic thinned, and I kept the accelerator to the floor for the next fifty miles. The signboards, the oil rigs, and the three-dollar Okie motels sped past me in the twilight, but none of it
