sweeping by me.
“Why did you say we were almost home free?” she said.
“I thought I could have him out with some more time.” I kept my eyes on the highway and didn’t look at her when I spoke. “It’s one of those things you can’t tell about. You do everything you can and wait for the court to act.”
I could hear her breathing in the dark.
“It could have gone in the other direction,” I said.
“Oh, Hack,” she said, and put her face against my chest with her hands clenched around my arm. Her tears wet the front of my shirt, and she held on to me tighter each time she tried to stop crying. I pulled her close into me and rubbed the back of her neck and her curly hair; her forehead felt feverish against my cheek and she trembled inside my arm like a frightened girl. I could smell the sun in her hair and the raw tequila on her breath, and I wanted to pull onto the side of the road and press her inside me.
Her face was as white and smooth as alabaster in the light from the dashboard, and when she had stopped crying and tried to sit up straight I held her close against me and pushed my fingers up through her hair. Her eyes were closed, her breasts stopped rising, and I felt the muscles in her back tense once more and then go loose under my palm. She breathed slowly into my neck, and by the time we reached the border she was asleep.
I rolled across the bridge over the Rio Grande, and an immigration official in a Stetson hat looked once at my Texas Bar Association card and waved me through. The hot night air was sweet with the ripe citrus and watermelon, and there was just a taste of salt in the wind from the Gulf. The moon had risen high above the hills now, and a strip of black storm cloud hung off of one yellow horn. I drove slowly over the ruts and chuckholes through the Mexican and Negro district and parked along the broken fence in front of the union headquarters. The light was still on in the front room, and a man was silhouetted behind the screen door with a bottle in his hand. I eased my arm from behind Rie’s neck and rested her head against the seat. Her eyelashes were still damp, her cool face caught the softness of the moon, and when she parted her lips slightly in her sleep I felt the blood sink in my heart. I leaned over and kissed her lightly on the mouth. The screen door slammed, and the Negro walked out on the porch. I went around to the other side of the car and picked Rie up carefully in my arms and carried her up the front path. Her eyes opened momentarily, then shut again, and she turned her face into my neck. The Negro held the door back for me, and I laid her down on the bed in the back room and switched on the electric fan. Her hair moved on the pillow in the breeze, and the alabaster color of her face was even more pale and cold in the half-light. I heard the Negro opening two bottles of beer in the front room, and I closed the door behind me and went back through the hallway.
“Sometimes people got to get high and boil it out,” the Negro said. He put a bottle of Jax in my hand.
“I’ll get some vitamin B and aspirin out of my car. Give it to her if she wakes up before you go to bed.”
“I been on that spodiodi route a long time, man. You ain’t got to tell me how to fight it.”
“I guess we went to the same school.”
“There you go,” he said. “Look, I’m glad you taken her out tonight. Some dudes come by and wanted to give us some shit. For a minute I thought they was really going to get it on.”
“What happened?”
“A couple of carloads of young studs come down the street throwing firecrackers at the houses. Then they parked out front, drinking wine and rolling them cherry bombs up on the porch. I figured they’d get tired of it after a while, but three of them come up to the door and said they wanted to skin out a nigger. Yeah, they said they ain’t hung a nigger up on a skinning hook in a long time. They was blowing wine in my face, and I could smell lynch all over them, just like piss on fire. One of them started to pull open the door, and then a dude in the car blew the horn and hollered out, ‘Don’t waste it on a jig. Let’s find them hippie freaks.’ Two of them cut, but this stud with the door in his hand wanted a pair of black balls. If the Chicanos hadn’t started coming out of their houses, the shit would have gone right through the fan, and I’d be up for icing a white kid. Because I tell you, whiskey brother, I give up on the days of letting white people shove a two-by-four up my ass until the splinters are coming out of my mouth.”
I drank from the beer and looked at the Negro’s face. For the first time since I had met him I saw the hard glass quality in his eyes, the flicker of humiliation in them, the thin raised scar, now as colorless as plastic, on his lower lip. His gleaming head was covered with drops of perspiration, and the lumps of cartilage behind his ears pulsed as though he were chewing angrily on something down inside himself.
“What the hell are you doing here, anyway?” I said.
“I got a bad habit, man. I picked it up in the army digging latrines all over Europe for sweet pink assholes. I figure a yard of white shit went into the ground for every shovelful of dirt I turned. When I got out I decided I paid my dues to Mr. Charlie’s bathroom and I ain’t applying at the back door no more for my mop and pail. You know what I mean, man?”
He licked his tongue over his bottom lip, and the scar glistened like a piece of glass. For the second time that day I felt I had nothing to say. Outside, the cicadas were singing in the stillness. I finished my beer and left him at the table, lighting one of my cigars.
I didn’t believe that I would be welcome again at the rooming house, so I drove thirty miles to the next town on the river and checked into a motel. I lay on the bed in the air-conditioned darkness with my arm over my eyes, and each time that I almost made it into sleep, broken images and voices would click together in my mind like the edges of a splintered windowpane, and I would be awake again with the veins drawing tight against my scalp. The highway rolled toward me out of the twilight, then the bush axes were raised high in the air once more, glinting redly in the gloom of the toolhouse, and a Chinese private leaned his face down to the sewer grate and spat a long stream of yellow saliva on my head. I sat on the edge of the bed in my underwear and drank half the bottle of Jack Daniel’s before I fell asleep in the deep whiskey quiet of my own breathing.
The next morning I dressed in a pair of khakis, my old cowboy boots, and a denim shirt (all of which I carried in a suitcase that always stayed in the trunk of the Cadillac), had my hangover breakfast of a steak with a fried egg on top and a slow cup of coffee and a cigar, then started down the road for Pueblo Verde. The sun was white on the horizon, and the washed-out blue sky hurt your eyes to look at it. The green of the citrus orchards, the fields of corn and cotton, and the sear hilltops floated in the humidity and heat. Watermelons lay fat in the rows, shimmering with light, and the cucumber vines were heavy with their own weight. Even with sunglasses on I had to squint against the glare. Hawks circled over the fields, and on some of the cedar fence posts farmers had nailed dead crows, salted and withered in the sun, to keep the live ones out of the corn. In the middle of an empty pasture, far from the roadside, a sun-faded billboard warned that THE COMING IS SOON, LISTEN TO BROTHER HAROLD’S NEW FAITH REVIVAL ON STATION XERF.
Outside Pueblo Verde I pulled into a clapboard country store shaded by a huge live oak. There was an old metal patent-medicine sign nailed to one wall, three pickup trucks parked on the gravel in front, and on the wood porch was a rusted Coca-Cola cooler with bottle caps spilling out of the opener box. The inside of the store was dark and cool and smelled of cheese and summer sausage and cracklings in quart jars. I bought a wicker picnic basket, a tablecloth, two bottles of California burgundy, some peppered German sausage, white cheese, a loaf of French bread, and six bottles of Jax pushed down in a bag of crushed ice. A small barefoot Negro boy, with blue jeans torn at the knees, helped me carry the sacks to the car. Then I turned back onto the highway into the white brilliance of the sun above the Rio Grande.
The high sidewalks in town were crowded with people, and the beer taverns and pool halls were filled with cowboys and cedar-cutters who had come into town to drink every piece of change in their blue jeans. I was always struck by the way that all small Texas towns looked alike on Saturday morning, whether you were in the Panhandle or the Piney Woods. The same battered cars and farm trucks were parked at an angle to the sidewalks; the same sun-browned old men spat their tobacco juice on the hot concrete; the young boys in crew cuts and Sears Roebuck straw hats with health and blond youth all over their faces stood on the street corners; and the girls with their hair in curlers and bandannas sat in the same cafes, drinking R.C. Cola and giggling about what Billy Bob or that crazy Lee Harper did at the drive-in movie last night.
I drove down the dusty street of the Mexican district with the lisping voice of a local hillbilly singer blaring from my radio:
