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

drafts of hot air across the room. The deputy sheriff came in once to drop a pile of his penciled reports on the clerk’s desk, and as he walked past me he stared into my face without speaking.
    I spent the rest of the afternoon in the hotel, with my feet propped in the window, reading the transcript and sipping whiskey poured over ice. The flies droned dully in the stillness, and occasionally I would hear the hillbilly music from the beer tavern. Across the square the sun slanted on the rows of watermelons and cantaloupes in the open-air fruit market.
    The transcript was an incredible record to read. The trial might have been constructed out of mismatched parts from an absurd movie script about legal procedure. There had been no challenge of the jurors, each of the Texas Rangers contradicted the others, a Baptist minister testified that many of the union members were Communists, and the two county workmen said they had seen a Mexican attack a Ranger, although they had been eating their lunch in the back of a truck a half mile down the road at the time. The three witnesses for the defense were sliced to pieces by the district attorney. They were led into discrediting statements about their own testimony, forced into stumbling admissions about their involvement in revolution, and referred to sixteen times as outside agitators. And Cecil Wayne Posey never raised an objection. Normally, any two pages torn at random from such a comic scenario would be grounds for appeal, but under Texas law the appeal has to be made in local court within ten days of sentencing, unless good cause is shown for an extension, and since Mr. Posey’s refusal to continue the case had virtually guaranteed that his client would go to prison, I would have to start the whole process over again in Austin.
    It was dusk outside now. I threw the transcript in my suitcase, took a cold bath, and shaved, with a glass of whiskey on top of the lavatory. As a rule I didn’t try to correct the inadequacies inherent in any system, but in this case I thought I would send a letter to the Texas Bar Association about Mr. Posey. Yes, Mr. Posey should receive some official recognition for his work, I thought, as I drew the razor blade down in a clean swath through the shaving cream on my cheek.
    I ate a steak for supper and drove back to the union headquarters in the Mexican district. There were thunderclouds and heat lightning in the west, an electric flash all the way across the horizon, and then a distant, dry rumble. The air tasted like brass in my mouth. Parts of the dirt road had been sprinkled with garden hoses to wet down the dust, and the cicadas in the trees were deafening with their late evening noise. Fireflies glowed like points of flame in the gathering dusk, and across the river in old Mexico the adobe huts on the mudflat wavered in the light of outdoor cook fires. High up in the sky, caught in the sun’s last afterglow, a buzzard floated motionlessly like a black scratch on a tin surface.
    I parked the car in front of the union headquarters and walked up the path to the wooden steps. The boy with the Gibson twelve-string still sat on the porch. He had three steel picks on his fingers and a half-gallon bottle of dago red next to him. His bare feet were covered with dust, and there were tattoos on each arm. He chorded the guitar and didn’t turn his head toward me.
    “She’s inside, man,” he said.
    “Do I knock or let myself in?”
    “Just do it.”
    I tapped with my knuckle on the screen door and waited. I heard dishes rattling in a pan in the back of the building.
    “Hey, Rie, that guy’s back,” the boy shouted over his shoulder.
    A moment later the girl walked through a back hallway toward me. Her arms were wet up to the elbow. She had splashed water on her blouse, and her breasts stood out against the cloth.
    “Man, like you really want to meet us, don’t you?” she said, pushing open the screen with the back of her wrist.
    “I decided