Lay Down My Sword and Shield Read Online Free PDF Page A

I had been closer to her I could have smelled the touch of perfume behind her ears, the powdered breasts, the hinted scent of her sex, a light taste of gin on her breath. She looked at me briefly, then turned her eyes away and lit a cigarette. The toe of the shoe flicked momentarily into a carved design in the side of the table. She was always able to hold her anger in well. She had learned part of that at Randolph-Macon and the rest from living with me. She could reduce flying rage to a hot cigarette ash or a few whispered and rushed words in the corner of a cocktail party, or maybe one burst of heat after we were home; but the pointed flick of the shoe was a fleshy bite into my genitals for seven years of marriage, broken young-girl dreams, her embarrassment when I brought oil-field workers or soldiers from Fort Sam Houston to the country club, my drunken discussions in the middle of the night about my Korean War guilt, and for the stoic and futile resignation she had adopted, out of all her social disappointments, in hopes of becoming the wife of a Texas congressman on his way to the Senate and that opulent world of power that goes far beyond any of the things you can buy or destroy with money.
    “Hack, don’t you give a goddamn?” she said quietly, still looking straight ahead.
    “What did I miss?”
    “A day of my making excuses for you, and right now I’m rather sick of it.”
    “Lunch by the pool with the Dallas aristocracy can’t be that awful.”
    “I’m not in a flippant mood, Hack. I don’t enjoy apologizing or lying for you, and I don’t like sitting three hours by myself with boorish businesspeople.”
    “Those are the cultured boys with the money. The fellows who oil all the wheels and make Frankenstein run properly.”
    I went to the bar and poured a double shot of whiskey over ice. It clicked pleasantly on the edge of the afternoon drunk, and I felt even more serene in the sexual confidence that I always had toward Verisa after whoring.
    “I don’t know where you’ve been, but I suspect it was one of your Okie motel affairs.”
    “I had to meet R. C. Richardson in Austin.”
    “How much do you pay them? Do they go down on you? That’s what they call it in the trade, isn’t it?”
    “It’s something like that.”
    “They must be lovely girls. Do they perform any other special things for you?”
    “Right now R.C.’s working on a deal to patent hoof-and-mouth disease. He has federal contracts for Vietnam that run in millions.”
    “Your girlfriends probably have had some nice diseases of their own.”
    “Let it go, Verisa.”
    “Oh, I shouldn’t say anything to you? Is that it? I should spend a day of congenial conversation with people who chew on toothpicks, and then meet you pleasantly at the door after you return from screwing a Mexican whore.”
    Something inside me flinched at her accuracy. I poured a short drink into the bottom of the glass.
    “I bet you’ve gone to bed with me, not knowing whether they had given you one of their diseases,” she said.
    She was really tightening the iron boot now.
    “Do you want a highball? I’m going to change clothes.”
    “Oh Christ, you’ve probably done it,” she said, and put her fingers over her mouth.
    “I never did that to you.”
    “You probably don’t even remember. You have to wait two weeks to know, don’t you?”
    “You’re letting it walk away with you.” But she was right. I didn’t remember.
    “It happened to a girl I knew in college, but she was a dumpy thing who did it in the backseats of cars with Marines and sailors. I didn’t believe it ever happened with your husband.”
    “You’re deliberately upsetting yourself,” I said.
    “I wonder that you didn’t give me sulfa tablets.”
    I fixed her a drink with a squeeze of lemon and set it on the table in front of her.
    “I’m sorry that you got strung out today,” I said. “I thought Bailey would take you to lunch if I didn’t make it.”
    “Tell me if