armpits. There were tattoos of Confederate flags and Easter crosses, Mother and the United States Marine Corps, inscriptions to Billy Sue and Norma Jean, and even the young ones had pot stomachs. They looked like everyone who was ever kicked out of a rural Texas high school.
Then I saw my friend from the sheriff’s office. He walked from behind the freight car with a filter-tipped cigar between his teeth, his khaki trousers tucked inside his half-top boots, and his wide leather cartridge belt pulled tight across his flat stomach. He spoke quietly to the men in T-shirts and denim jackets, smiling, his hands on his hips, and then he and the others turned their faces toward me at one time. His green, yellow-flecked eyes were filled with an intense delight, and his lips pressed down softly on the cigar tip.
“Let’s get into the picket before it starts,” Rie said.
I walked with her to the back of the stake truck, where the priest was still handing down signs. The wind whipped the dust in our faces, and swollen rain clouds were rolling over the horizon. The air was becoming cooler, and I heard the first dull rip of thunder in the distance. The priest wiped his face on his shirt sleeve and grinned at us.
“How are you, Mr. Holland? We can use a good man from the establishment,” he said.
“I know a two-word reply to that, Father,” I said.
“I believe I’ve heard it.”
“Mojo’s drunk. Try to get him into the truck,” Rie said.
“He’s not fond of listening to church people,” the priest said.
“There’s some badass types back by the freight car, and he’s been in a winehead mood since some kids tried to get it on with him the other night,” she said.
“I’ll watch him,” he said.
“Watch that bunch of assholes, too. One of the dicks was winding them up.”
The priest looked over at one of the Rangers who was talking into the microphone of his mobile radio.
“Get into the line. They’re going to start moving in a few minutes,” he said.
Rie picked up two cardboard signs tacked on laths and handed me one of them. A single, large drop of rain splattered on the black eagle over the word HUELGA.
“Come on,” she said.
“Can I get a cigar lit first, for God’s sake?” I said.
“We don’t want anybody arrested outside the picket, Hack.”
“All right, goddamn. Just a minute.”
For some reason I hadn’t yet accepted the fact that I would be walking on a picket line that Monday morning, or any morning, for that matter. The sign bent backward in my hands against the wind, flopping loudly, and my knees felt disjointed as I followed her into the slow line of Mexicans and Negroes in their faded work clothes, battered straw hats, and dresses splitting at the hips. Drops of rain made puckered dimples in the dust, and the wind blew cool inside my shirt, but I was perspiring under my arms, and my face was burning as though I had just done something obscene in public. I saw the eyes of the sheriff’s deputies, the Rangers, and the poolroom account watching me, and my head became light and my cigar tasted bitter and dry in my mouth. I felt as though I had walked naked in front of a comic audience. A fat Negro woman behind me held her child, in cutoff overalls, with one hand and her picket sign in the other. She wore a pair of rippled stockings over the varicose veins in her legs.
“You don’t worry about these children. They ain’t going to bother them,” she said.
I looked away from her brown eyes at the man in slacks and tie on the platform. He was still taking pictures, and his face was quivering at the outrage he had seen that day against the principle of private property. Storm clouds covered the sun, and the fields were suddenly darkened and the shadows leaped across the cannery, the freight cars, and the county road. The men in T-shirts and denim jackets were now pulling the caps on hot cans of beer and spilling the foam down their necks and chests.
“How you doing?” Rie said.
“I think my respect for the demonstrator just went up a couple of points.”
“Look, if those bastards move in on us, you have to take it. Okay?”
“That doesn’t sound cool.”
“No shit, Hack. They’re waiting for reasons to split heads.”
“All right, but when do we finish this?”
“We’ve only been on the picket ten minutes, babe.”
Then I saw a television news car pull into the gravel bedding by the railway track. Two young men got out with cameras attached to half-moon braces that fitted against the shoulder. They walked over to the group of law officers by the squad cars, their faces full of confident foreknowledge about their story, and for the first time it struck me that I had never seen a newsman begin a story any differently; without thinking, they went first to the official source before they considered the people on the other end of the equation.
One of them walked toward the picket and did a sweeping, random shot with his camera, the brace pulled tight against his shoulder. Then he lowered the camera and looked at me steadily, his face as bland and unembarrassed as a dough pan. I threw my cigar away and looked back at him with my meanest southpaw ninth- inning expression. He walked back to his friend and began talking, and the two of them stared in my direction.
“I believe a couple of kids just earned a pay raise,” I said.
“I bet you’re handsome on film,” Rie said.
“Well, here they come. You want to do my P.R. work?”
One of them already had his camera whirring before they were close enough to speak. They had forgotten the cops and the long line of migrant workers; they were both concentrated on the little piece of entrail they might carry back to the station.
“Are you widening your district, Mr. Holland?” His voice was good-natured, and he smiled at me in his best college fraternity fashion.
“No, no,” I said, in my best humorous fashion.
“Do you think your support of the union will affect your election?” He held the microphone toward me, but his eyes were looking at Rie.
“I couldn’t tell you that, buddy.”
“The farm corporations consider this an illegal strike. Do you have a comment on that?”
“I don’t know how it can be illegal to ask for a higher wage.”
“Does the union plan a strike in your area?” He was cocking the rifle now, but his face looked as sincerely inquisitive as a reverent schoolboy’s.
“Not that I know of.”
“Does that mean the conditions of the migrant farm-workers are better in your area?”
“No, it doesn’t,” I said. “But I tell you what, buddy. I need a cigar real bad right now, and it’s hell lighting up in this wind with one hand. So how about holding this sign for a minute, and I can get one of these awful things lit and we can talk all day. That’s right, just take it in your hand and fold your fingers around the stick.”
His face went blank, the lath straining in his palm, and his eyes flicked at his partner and the cops by the railway track. I used three matches to light my cigar while he blinked against the raindrops and shifted his feet in the dust.
“I appreciate that,” I said. “Say, did you interview any of those fellows over by the freight car? I bet that bunch of boys would give you some deathless lines.”
“We just do a job, Mr. Holland.”
“I bet you’ll get there with it, too,” I said.
“Would you like to say something else, sir?” His face was mean now, the eyes dirty.
“You’ve got a whole reel of good stuff there, pal.”
He turned away from me and put the microphone in front of Rie. The sky was almost completely dark, except for the thin line of yellow light on the distant hills. His partner moved around behind him so the lens would catch me in the same shot with Rie.
“Do you think the families in the farm camps will suffer because of the strike?”
“Why don’t you fuck off, man?” Rie said.
Then one of the men by the freight car threw an empty beer can at the picket line. It missed a Negro woman’s head and clattered across the loading platform. The two newsmen backed away from us with their cameras turning. A moment later three more carloads of townspeople arrived and swelled into the group by the
