I steeled my jaw. Jim Dirkson wasn’t going to cut it, and I found inside myself a hard man, a stone-cold antihero from one of those 1970s black revenge pictures, from Jim Blackmon’s Slaveland Vengeance or one of its many sequels.
“Drop the weapon, shitheel,” I said. My voice was down half an octave. I was cold and keen-eyed and hard in my shell.
“Or what?”
“Or I’ll wrap it around your fat white neck.”
This was dialogue, I was doing lines, but goddamn if I didn’t mean it. This bearded sack of crap dropped into some kind of firing-range stance, but man, I was just one step too close and he didn’t know what I was and I had gravel in my hand and I was flinging it in his piggy eyes and then I was leaping at him, one big panther leap. I had him by the hair and the gun on the ground and I slapped him with my big open hand—once, twice, then three times, slapped his face back and forth like a cruel father hitting his boy because he hates himself.
The mechanic was down on the ground, his hands feebly defending himself against my superior strength, the rifle at his feet in the gravel. I heard movement on the porch and without turning, still holding fat boy, I said: “Stay where you are, Slim.”
“Hey,” said the mechanic, and I kicked him in the face and his mouth blew open with blood and he turned and started to curl away. I grabbed the gun and wheeled around and was glad to see Slim rooted to his place as instructed. A drool of tobacco spit ran from the corner of his mouth. I came at him now with the rifle, one step, two steps.
“You seen my friend?”
“I seen no black men.”
I fired. The glass behind Slim shattered, and the whole door jumped and shuddered in the jamb. Slim’s old coyote face convulsed with fear. It felt good; it all felt good. I took another step forward and raised the muzzle to his eyes.
“You seen him?”
“No.” He kept his hands where I could see them, raised them slowly and laced his fingers behind his head, like a man who’d been trained. The interrogation was over. I believed him. He hadn’t seen Maris or anybody else. But I—I don’t know. I wasn’t done.
“You military, Slim?”
“What?”
“Were you in the army?”
“Yes.”
“You see action?”
“Yes. In the gulf. In Texas.”
“Oh, yeah? What side?”
He stopped talking. He stared at me. “America. Our side.”
“So what were you fighting for?” His eyes went down to the gun, then back to my face; my face was set and cruel. He knew where I was going. So did I. I couldn’t stop. “I said, what were you fighting for, Slim?”
“For—for America. For the Union.”
“Yeah, but Texas didn’t want none of the Union. Right? They didn’t want nothing to do with it. With us. With slavery. They just wanted to be done with it. Remember?” He tried to move his head, but I had the gun pressed between his eyes, really grinding in hard between his eyes. “But you went and fought to keep the Union together.”
“I got drafted.”
“Coulda run. Plenty ran. They still up there.”
“I was fighting for my country.”
“Bullshit.”
“All right.”
He closed his eyes. He thought I was gonna kill him right there. I was glad. I was tight with rage. My rib cage was a fist clenched around my heart. The sun had gone down. There were no lights in the parking lot. The moon was coming up, pale and disinterested.
“What were you fighting for, Slim?”
He looked down. Mustache drooping down. He whispered. “Slavery.”
I shot him in the knee. While he wailed, while the fat one moaned, I wiped my prints off the rifle with the sleeve of my shirt and threw it in the dirt and drove away.
16.
I drove away trembling.
What the hell was I doing?
What did I care?
Texas was the Lone Star miracle, the success story of early-twentieth-century activist abolitionism: in an orchestrated campaign, migrant manumissionists from all over the country flooded in, along with tens of thousands of Catholic-abolitionist Mexicans, drawn by the come one, come all immigration policy shortsightedly enacted by a state eager for oil-field hands. Hence the miracle, el milagro: the largest state in the union, free by statute in 1939. It wasn’t till twenty-five years later, under the first Mexican-American governor in that or any other state, that they went further, declared their intention to secede, and Washington said, the fuck you will. There was a Texan in the White House by then, one who’d been a schoolteacher, who’d had some of these Mexican sumbitches in his classroom. He took it personally. These folks needs to read their history books, said President Johnson. Secession is illegal under the Constitution—and by the way, that’s American oil under all that sand.
Eleven years of fighting. Battleships in the Gulf of Mexico, swift boats on the Rio Grande. Mexican partisans fighting hicks like Slim on the shores of Corpus Christi.