in the half-light and put her arms around my shoulders, and I pressed my face into her neck and felt her smooth stomach and breasts curve against me.
That evening we drove over to the Gulf in the fading, lilac twilight, and just before the highway turned out of the citrus fields onto the coast we could smell the salt in the air and the dead seaweed at the edge of the surf. The water was slate-green, and the whitecaps crashed against the sand and boiled in deep pools, and then sucked out again with the undertow. Brown pelicans and seagulls, like fat white cigars, dipped out of the sky over the water, picking small fish from the crest of the waves with their beaks, and in the distance we could see the gas flares and strings of lights on offshore oil rigs and quarter boats. The red sun was as big as a planet on the horizon, and the light broke across the water in long bands of scarlet. The stretch of brown beach and the palm trees were covered with a dark, crimson glow, and then the sun moved deeper into the Gulf, with a strip of black cloud across its flaming edge, and the moon began to rise behind us over the land.
I bought another bottle of cold duck and some chicken sandwiches in a restaurant, and a Mexican family camped on the beach sold us two salt-water cane poles with treble hooks and a carton of live shrimp. The sand was still warm from the sun, and we sat behind a dune out of the wind and ate the sandwiches and drank half the bottle of wine, then I baited the three-pronged hooks with the shrimp, slipped the lead sinkers close to the bottom of the line, and waded with Rie into the surf to fish the bottom for catfish and flounder. The tide began to come in, and the waves broke across the rotted wooden pilings in the jetties, and when the wind shifted across the water we could smell the dead shellfish and baked scales and salt in the pilings. Rie held her cane pole under her arm, with both hands raised in front of her, while the waves swelled against her breasts. The water was splintered with moonlight, and the salt spray in her hair looked like drops of crystal. Then the tip of her pole arched into the water and went all the way to the bottom.
“What do I do now, Lone Ranger?” she shouted.
“Keep his head up or he’ll break it.”
She leaned backward and strained with both hands, and a cloud of sand rose in the swell at the end of her pole. Then the line pulled out at an angle, quivering, and the pole went down again. She looked at me helplessly, her face shining with water and moonlight.
“Walk him into the shore,” I said.
A large wave crested in front of her and broke across her shoulders.
“Hack, you bastard.”
“You have to learn these things to overcome your Yankee childhood,” I said.
She tried to slip the pole back under her arm and raise it again, but the fish had turned into the waves and was pulling hard for the bottom. I waded over to her and picked up the line with both hands at the water and walked backward with it toward the beach. The line tightened around my knuckles and cut into the skin, and when I reached the shallows I could see the long blue outline of the catfish shaking his head against the three hooks caught in his mouth. I dragged him up on the sand and placed my fingers carefully around his spiked ventral fins and made one cut with my pocketknife through his gill and across the spine. He flipped quietly in the sand and then lay still.
“God, the things you southerners do for kicks,” she said.
But I could see the excitement in her face at having caught a large and beautiful blue-black fish under the moon in waves up to her shoulders.
“It’s against Texas law to keep this kind,” I said. “Maybe we’d better flip him back in.”
She stepped down on the top of my bare foot and pinched my arm with her fingernails. I held her close to me and kissed her wet hair and dried her face against my shirt. I could taste the salt on her skin and smell the Gulf wind in her hair, and she put her arms inside my shirt and ran her hands over my back.
We gave the fish, the poles, and the remaining shrimp to the Mexican family, and built a fire on the sand out of dried wood and dead palm fronds. The wind caught the flames and sent sparks twisting into the sky, and the fronds, coated with sand, and the polished twists of wood snapped in the fire and burst apart in a yellow blaze. We drank the rest of the wine and sat inside the heat with our clothes steaming. On the southern horizon dark storm clouds were building over the water. The moon was high, and I could see the clouds rolling in a heavy wind off the Mexican coast, and a few large whitecaps were hitting the pilings around the oil derricks. The air had become cooler, and there was a wet smell of electricity in the air. I lit a cigar, stuck the cork in the wine bottle, and threw it end over end into the surf.
“We really get it on tomorrow, don’t we, babe?” I said.
She ticked the top of my hand with her finger and looked into the fire.
The wind was blowing in gusts the next morning when we arrived at the cannery and loading platform where the union was setting up its main picket. The sun was brown in the swirling clouds of dust from the fields, and I could still smell the wet electric odor of a storm. Dozens of junker cars and pickup trucks with crude wood shelters on the back were parked along the railway tracks, and Negro and Mexican field workers had formed a long line in front of the platform where the harvest trucks would unload. Their picket signs flopped and bent in the wind, and the sand blew in their faces, while a man in slacks and a tie walked back and forth above them, waving his arms, and told them to get off the company’s property. His tie was blown over his shoulder and his glasses were filmed with grit, and after he was ignored by everyone on the picket he went into his office and came back with a camera and began taking pictures. Two Texas Rangers in sunglasses and Stetson hats leaned against a state car, watching with their tanned, expressionless faces. Their uniforms were ironed as stiff as tin. The priest, in Roman collar, stood in the back of a stake truck, with his sleeves rolled over his thick arms, handing out picket signs to the people who had just arrived, and I saw one of the Rangers raise his finger, aim at the priest, and say something to his partner.
“I didn’t think this was your kind of scene, whiskey brother.”
It was the Negro from the union headquarters, and he was still drunk. His slick face was covered with dust, and he had a wad of snuff under his lip.
“What the hell is your name, anyway?” I said.
“What’s a name, man?” He took a bottle of port wine from his back pocket and unscrewed the cap. “Sam, Tom, You. People give me a lot of them. But I like Mojo Hand the best. That’s a name with shine. It feels good in your mouth just like all these sweet grapes.”
“Put the wine away till later,” Rie said.
“Those dicks ain’t going to bother me. They know a nigger can’t change nothing around here. They want to strum some white heads.” He drank from the bottle and coughed on the tobacco juice in his mouth.
“They’ll use anything they can for the newspapers,” Rie said.
“You know it don’t make any difference what we do out here today. It’s going to read the same way tomorrow morning. Ain’t that right, whiskey brother? They could bust up Jesus with them billy clubs and the people would find out how He started a riot.”
“Let’s hang a good one on later,” I said.
“Where you been, man? There ain’t going to be no later. These dudes have just been practicing so far.”
“Everything is cool now, isn’t it?” I said.
He pulled on the bottle again and laughed, spilling the wine over his lip. “Out of sight. But you’re right. You got to keep thinking cool, cousin. You got to keep a little shine in your name.”
“We don’t want a bust this early,” Rie said. “Stay in the car until the rest of our people get here.”
But he wasn’t looking at us any longer. His red eyes stared over my shoulder in the direction of the county road, and I turned around and saw the two black and white sheriff’s cars, followed by three carloads of townspeople, rolling toward us in the dust. The whip aerials sprang back and forth on their springs, and muscular, shirt-sleeved arms hung out the windows of the other cars, beating against the door sides. The wind flattened the clouds of dust across the road, and a moment later two Texas Ranger cars closed the distance with the rest of the caravan.
“It ain’t cool no more, whiskey brother,” the Negro said.
The line of cars pulled into the gravel bedding along the railway track, and the Rangers and deputy sheriffs walked casually toward the two Rangers in sunglasses who were leaning against their automobile and looking at the priest. The other men stayed behind and formed in a group by a boxcar, their hands in their back pockets, their faces tight, spitting tobacco juice into the rocks, and glaring at the Mexicans and the Negroes. They had crew cuts and faces put together out of shingles, and they wore T-shirts or blue jean jackets with the sleeves cut off at the
