Lay Down My Sword and Shield by James Lee Burke Page B

brown and wrinkled with veins.
    “Can I help you?” he said without looking up.
    “I’d like to see Arturo Gomez.”
    He put the pencil down and turned his face up at me. His green, yellow-flecked eyes were flat, his face expressionless.
    “Who are you?”
    “My name’s Hackberry Holland. I’m a lawyer.”
    “You ain’t his.”
    “He’s a friend of mine from the service.”
    “Well, visiting hour is at two o’clock.”
    “I have to go back to Austin this morning. I’d appreciate it if I could talk with him a few minutes.”
    The deputy turned the pencil in a circle on the desktop with his finger. There was a hard knot of muscle in the back of his arm.
    “You working with these Mexican union people?”
    “No.”
    “You just drove down from Austin to see a friend in jail?”
    “That’s right.”
    “It won’t help him none. He’s going up to the state farm Wednesday. And I expect there might be a few more with him soon.”
    “I wouldn’t know about that.” I bent over and tipped my cigar ashes into the spittoon, then waited for the deputy to continue the statement which he had prepared long ago for strangers, slick lawyers, and nigger and Mexican lovers.
    “You can take it for what it’s worth, Mr. Holland, but these Mexicans was stirred up by agitators from the outside. They can make fair wages in the field any time they want to work, but they stay drunk on wine half the time or sit in the welfare office.” His yellow-flecked eyes looked into my face. “Then those union organizers started telling them they could get twice as much money by shutting down the harvest. Just let the cotton and grapefruit rot and they’re all going to be nigger-rich. People around here is pretty fed up with it, and it’s lucky that a couple of them California Mexicans haven’t been drug behind a car yet.”
    “As I said, I’m not representing anyone.”
    “It’s against the rule, but I’ll take you down to see Gomez a minute. I just thought you ought to know we ain’t pushing these people into a corner they didn’t build for themselves.”
    I followed him down a staircase into the basement of the building. The rigid angles in his body, the rolled khaki sleeves, and the flush of anger in his neck reminded me of several drill instructors whom I had met at Parris Island. They all had the same intense dedication to perverse abstractions that had been created for them by someone else.
    The basement of the courthouse, the jail, had been constructed with large blocks of limestone, sawed and chiseled and set with mortar in uneven squares. The corridor was lighted by two bulbs screwed into sockets on the ceiling, and the cells looked like caves cut back into the rock with iron doors on them. The stone was damp with humidity, and the air was rank with disinfectant, D.D.T., urine, and tobacco smoke. Each of the iron doors had a row of holes perforated in the top, and a slit and apron for a food tray. At the end of the corridor was a large room, with two wide barred doors that swung open like gates, and overhead on the rock in broken white letters were the words Negro Male. I could see the spark of hand-rolled cigarettes in the dark, and smell the odor of stale sweat and synthetic wine. There was a wire-screen cage built against one wall, with a small table and two wooden chairs inside. The deputy unlocked the door and opened it.
    “Wait in here and I’ll bring him out,” he said. He walked back down the corridor and slipped the bolt on one of the cells. He had to use both hands to pull the door open.
    Art stepped out into the light, his pupils contracted to small black dots. His denim jail issue was too big for him and his hair hung down over his ears. He was barefoot, his shirt and trousers were unbuttoned, and his thin frame was stooped as he walked toward the cage, as though the rock ceiling was crushing down on him. He had a cigarette in an empty space where a tooth had been, and there was a cobweb scar on the edge