“You know you ain’t going to get any time. Why you let this girl worry?”
“Order some beers.”
“You really think they’re going to put somebody from your family in the penitentiary?”
“Would you shut up, R.C.?”
His face was hurt and embarrassed, and Rie touched my hand under the table.
“You’re giving away all his secrets,” she said. “He hates to admit that he’s anything but a left-handed country lawyer.”
He looked at her eyes, and his face mended as though a breeze had blown across it. He was in love with her, and if I hadn’t been at the table his performance would have grown to absurd proportions.
We finished eating, and R.C. paid the check and left a three-dollar tip on the table. We walked across the flooded street in the rain to his Mercedes, and he opened the car door for Rie and held the umbrella over her head while she got in. The inside panels were covered with yellow rolled leather, and the black seats were stitched with a gold longhorn design, and on top of the dashboard there was an empty whiskey glass and a compass inside a plastic bubble. We drove slowly out of town while the water washed back in waves over the curbs, and R.C. pulled a pint of Four Roses from his coat pocket and offered it to us.
“Well, that’s the first time I ever seen you turn one down,” he said, and he drank from the bottle as though it contained soda water.
The county road that led to the cannery had collapsed in places along the edges from the overflow of ditch water, and the rows in the fields had been beaten almost flat by the rain or washed into humps of mud. The gusts of wind covered the brown water with curls and lines like puckered skin, and the torn cotton and leaves turned in eddies around the cedar fence posts. In the distance I saw a cow trying to lift her flanks out of the mud.
A great section of the cannery roof had been blown away in the storm. The metal was ripped upward in a ragged slash, like a row of twisted knives, and there was a huge black hole where the rest of the roof had been. Picket signs were strewn over the ground by my automobile, and the rain drummed down in a roar on the tin building, the loading platform, and the freight cars. R.C. parked as close as he could to the Cadillac and went around to Rie’s side with the umbrella. His western pants were splattered with mud up to the knees, and drops of water ran down his soft face. He closed the door after her and walked around to the driver’s side with me, the rain thudding on the umbrella.
“Look, Hack, it’s going to take some money to beat this thing,” he said. “I know you got plenty of it, but if you need any more you only got to call. Another thing. You take care of that girl, hear?”
“All right, R.C.”
“One more thing, by God. I think you flushed your political career down the hole, but I felt right proud of you out there. That boy looked like he had muscles in his shit till you come off the ground. I always told Bailey you was crazy but you’re still a goddamn good man.”
He slammed the door and splashed through the mud to his automobile, his face bent downward against the rain. We followed him out through the cannery gate onto the county road, and I saw the empty whiskey bottle sail from his window into the irrigation ditch. Then he floored the Mercedes and sped away from us in a shower of mud and brown water.
“He’s a wonderful man,” Rie said.
“I believe he liked you a little bit, too.”
“Where’s he going?”
“Back to his motel room and get sentimentally drunk in his underwear. Then about dark he’ll drive across the border and try to buy a whole brothel.”
“Couldn’t we ask him over?”
“He’d feel better with the morning intact the way it is. In fact, it would hurt him if he had to continue.”
The collapsed places along the edges of the road were beaded with gravel, and cut back into deepening sinkholes in the center. I could feel the soft ground break under my wheels.
“Was he straight about nobody from your family going to the penitentiary?” she said.
“The deputy already has my civil rights charge against him, and if those camera boys were any good they filmed his knee in my eye, and I can make a hard case against the cops. But there’s a good chance I’ll get disbarred.”
“Oh, Hack.”
I put my arm around her wet shoulders and pulled her close to me.
“Stop worrying about it, babe. My grandfather knocked John Wesley Hardin on his ass with a rifle stock, and Hardin was a lot tougher than the Texas Bar Association.”
“I kept making fun of you about picket lines and the union, and now you might get burned worse than any of us.”
Her back was cold under my arm. I kissed the corner of her eye and squeezed her into me.
“Don’t you know that real gunfighters never lose?” I said.
She put her hand on my chest, and I could feel my heart beat against her palm. She looked up at me once, then pressed her cheek against my shoulder the rest of the way back to town.
The dirt yards in the poor district were covered with water up to the front porches, and the waves from my automobile washed through the chicken-wire fences and rolled against the houses. Tin cans, garbage, and half- submerged tree limbs floated in the ditches, and a dead dog, its skin scalded pink by the rain, lay entangled in an island of trash around the base of a telephone pole. Some of the shingles had been stripped by the wind from the union headquarters roof, and the building itself leaned at an angle on the foundation. I took off my boots, and we waded through the water to the porch.
Mojo and a Mexican man were sitting at the table in the front room with a half-gallon bottle of yellow wine between them. They had melted a candle to the table, and Mojo was heating his glass of wine over the flame. The smoke curled in a black scorch around the glass. His eyes were small and red in the light.
“My brother here is teaching me how to put some fire in that spodiodi,” he said. “You can see it climb up right inside the color. That’s what I been doing wrong all these years. Drinking without no style.”
He drank the glass down slowly, and poured it full again. I could smell the wine all the way across the room.
“This telegram was in the door when I got back from the jail, and a man come by in a taxicab looking for you,” he said. “He didn’t leave no name, but he looked just like you. Except for a minute I thought he had to go to the bathroom real bad.”
I tore open the envelope and read the telegram, dated late last night.
I don’t know if you will receive this. I guess I don’t care whether you do or not. Call Verisa if you feel like it. Or simply tear this up.
Bailey didn’t bother to sign his name.
“What did the man say?” I said.
“He was going up to the cafe, and then he was coming back,” Mojo said. “He give me a dollar so I’d be sure to tell you.”
Good old perceptive Bailey, I thought.
“I think we ought to buy that man a glass of this mellow heat when he comes back. He needs it,” Mojo said.
“He needs a new mind,” I said.
Rie went into the back to change clothes. I looked in the icebox for a beer, and then drove the Cadillac down to the tavern and bought a dozen bottles of Jax and a block of ice. I found a tin bucket in the kitchen, and chipped the ice over the bottles. Rie came out of the bedroom dressed in a pair of white ducks, sandals, and a flowered shirt. She had brushed back her gold-tipped hair and had put on her hoop earrings and an Indian bead necklace.
“Hey, good-looking,” I said, and put my arms around her. She pressed her whole body against me, with her arms around my neck, and I kissed her on the mouth, then along her cheek and ear. I could smell the rain in her hair.
“Do you have to leave with him?” she said.
