House of the Rising Sun

  “He’s in the army hospital outside Denver.”

  “She says your ex-legal-wife took him out of there. She said your ex-legal-wife is given to unscrupulous and devious activities. She also said your ex was the paramour of the Sundance Kid, although she didn’t use the word ‘paramour.’”

  “Maggie Bassett took Ishmael out of the hospital?”

  “On a train headed south. According to her, Maggie Bassett put your boy in a wheelchair and abducted him.”

  “You didn’t get a callback number? You just dropped by and made breakfast in my yard and dumped all this in my lap without bothering to get a number?”

  “She didn’t give it. I asked.”

  “He was in a wheelchair?”

  “That’s what she said.”

  “What kind of shape?”

  “I don’t know, Hack. I felt obliged to tell you this. I didn’t come out here to be your pincushion.”

  Hackberry stepped into the yard and knocked the crumbs from his tin pan. “I didn’t mean to get crossways with you.”

  “I worry about you.”

  “So do I.”

  “There’s people trying to mess you up. What bothers me is you seem to he’p them every chance you get.”

  “Deputize me.”

  “Wouldn’t that be a step downward for you?”

  “Pay me a dollar a year. You’ll always know where I’m at. I won’t be able to sass you, either.”

  “You still haven’t learned to drive a motorcar?”

  “Haven’t had time to get a manual. Or whatever the directions are called.”

  Willard stared into space. “I think one of us ought to run off with the circus.”

  FOR ISHMAEL, THE nights and days at Maggie Bassett’s house in San Antonio were not separated by the rising and the setting of the sun but by changes in the chemistry of his body and brain. Fatigue gave way to sleep and a moment’s rest, then a sudden awakening on the Marne, where he found himself running through artillery fire, his legs caught in wet cement, the air bursts illuminating flooded shell holes stained yellow on the rims with mustard gas, dead men floating in them, their bodies bloated, their uniforms splitting on their backs.

  The sunrise brought with it a pressure band along the side of his head, as though he were wearing a hat, and a third eye in his vision where ordinary images became part of an alternate universe, one that could easily suck him into its confines if he were not careful. A wrong thought was not a minor concern. One slip and he could find himself inside his third eye, where all bets were off and reason held no sway. He wondered if his brain were no longer attached to his skull.

  Maggie brought him breakfast on a tray and opened the curtains so he could look out on the rolling countryside and the gray ruins of a Spanish mission and its two bell towers and the birds that rose from them in the morning and descended in droves at sunset. She washed him and medicated his wounds and changed his bandages. She read to him when he couldn’t sleep, and put an Edison Amberola next to his bed so he could listen to recorded music on a cylinder. She also fixed him ice cream with crushed pineapple on it and insisted on hand-feeding it to him. When his skin burned for no reason, she took a very small pill from a vial and placed it in his mouth and lay by his side and held his hand in hers.

  It was the other thing she did for him that he knew he could not live without. To deny his need was foolish; to deny the pleasure he derived from satisfying that need was even more foolish, somewhat like a man on the edge of orgasm telling himself he could be sexually abstemious if he so desired.

  He didn’t know what the hypodermic needle contained. She swore it was not morphine, just a harmless powder, a mild antidote to relieve the pain in his legs and the night sweats that soaked his sheets and left him depressed and trembling with cold in the morning, like a child who had wet his bed. She prepared the hypodermic needle twice a day in the kitchen, beyond his line of vision, but he could hear her drag the match across the striker on the box, then he would smell the pleasant odor of burning candle wax and another odor, one that seemed out of context, like someone splashing fireside bourbon into a tumbler.

  In preparation for the procedure, she washed her hands with soap and water and disinfectant and always cleaned his skin with rubbing alcohol and a cotton swab before she pricked the vein, the blood rising through the needle into the glass barrel. Then she pushed down the plunger, looking kindly into his face as his mouth opened and his viscera melted.

  “Why do I smell whiskey when you load the syringe?” he asked on their third day in San Antonio. He was sitting by the window in a wheelchair woven from straw, thirty minutes after an injection, the sky hung with warm colors that dissolved into one another.

  “You don’t like it?”

  “I’m just not sure what we’re doing.”

  “You’re not a drinker. So I give it to you this way. A little wine for the stomach.”

  “How do you know I’m not a drinker?”

  “Because you’re nothing like your father.”

  “I remember him being a good father when I was little. I never understood why he left us or why he didn’t visit or get in touch.”

  “He left you because he’s a selfish, mean, murderous man. That’s not an insult. It’s what he is. Maybe it’s not even his fault.”

  “He must have hurt you pretty bad.”

  “Your father made me have an abortion. He’s a shit. What else can I tell you about him?”

  “My mother said he liked children.”

  “Believe what you want.”

  “Maybe he didn’t like me,” Ishmael said.

  She went into the kitchen and came back with a folded newspaper. She dropped it into his lap. “See what he’s been up to.”

  The article about the shooting in the brothel was on the front page. The headline read: WAR HERO KILLED BY EX–TEXAS RANGER. The lead paragraph identified the dead man as a union organizer and a recipient of the Purple Heart and the Medal of Honor who had been horribly burned and disfigured during the Filipino Insurrection. It made no mention of the victim’s arrest record. The shooter was a retired Texas Ranger and former city marshal who had been fired from his job for public drunkenness. His name was Hackberry Morgan Holland. A pistol had been found near the body of the deceased. The investigation was continuing.

  “The sheriff will protect your father, so don’t waste your time feeling sorry for him,” Maggie said.

  “How do you know?”

  “They’re corrupt.”

  “Not all of them.”

  “When I was a working girl, we had to give free ones. Want some names?”

  “No.”

  She took the newspaper from his hands and dropped it into a wastebasket. “Would you like to go down to your office today?”

  “Which office?”

  “The one where you’re going to work and make a great deal of money. Arnold wants to meet you. Tomorrow he’ll be off to Galveston and Juárez. When you’re better, you and I can go to Mexico with him. You can buy handmade lace and jewelry for the change in your pocket.”

  “I need to talk to my mother, Maggie. I don’t know why she didn’t come back to the hospital. You left a message?”

  “I told you that. I told the hospital administrators how to reach us, too. I called her union in Santa Fe.”

  “I thought it was in Albuquerque.”

  “Maybe she’s working in both places. Ishmael, your mother is probably under great stress right now. The U.S. Attorney’s Office is arresting radicals all over the country. You know, because of the Italians putting bombs in people’s mailboxes. I think somebody should drop a bomb on Ellis Island.”

  He stood up from the chair, waiting for the momentary discomfort and pain to leave. “I want to walk today. I don’t care where we go.”

  “You’re not ready. You need to sit down.”

  “I’m tired of sitting. I’m tired of lying in bed. Tell me about Arnold Beckman again. I can’t keep some of these things stra
ight in my head.”

  “You’re still recovering. You were almost blown apart.”

  “The ones who were blown apart are still in France. Why does Beckman want me? I don’t have much work experience outside the military.”

  “People love a hero.”

  “I’m not heroic.”

  “I’ve seen your medals.”

  “Most of them are French. Nobody cares about French medals,” he said.

  “It doesn’t matter. People want appearances. I was a schoolteacher. Think anybody is interested in the history of a schoolteacher? But a reformed whore who still has her looks? Tell me men aren’t interested. Women, too, if they’re honest.”

  Ishmael picked up both his canes and walked to his bed and sat down heavily. He rolled down his pajamas over his bandages and peeled them free of his ankles and pulled on his trousers. He walked to the dresser without the canes and took a fresh shirt from a drawer and put it on and tucked it in and tightened his belt. He straightened his back, smiling. “Not bad, huh?”

  “We have to be back by four.”

  “I thought we might eat in a restaurant.”

  “No, we have to come home for your medication. We have to keep the regimen,” she said. “You need the right kind of food. Have you ever worked in a restaurant? If you saw the people who wash the dishes and prepare the food, you’d never eat out again.”

  “I think I’ve got too many punctures in me. I just want to go outside. I want to be in the sunshine again.”

  “I haven’t done bad by you, have I?”

  “You were swell. In every way.”

  “You used the past tense. There is no past tense between us.”

  “That went by me.”

  “Don’t worry about all these little things. Let little people worry about little things. That’s their job.” She kissed him on the cheek. “That’s a preview for when we come back. I want to give you the life you didn’t have.”

  “My life has been fine.”

  She rested her head on his shoulder and placed the flat of her hand on his heart. “I’ll make it finer. I’ll be your mother and your lover and your sister and all things to you.”

  “Some might call you an unusual lady, Maggie.”

  “You’re my big boy. Big all over. My big, lovely, delectable boy.” She unbuttoned the top of his shirt and kissed his chest. “Precious thing.”

  ARNOLD BECKMAN’S OFFICE building and the apartment he kept in it were not far away, on a green plain north of the city, in sight of both the San Antonio River and the ruins of the Spanish mission. The building was white stucco, with blue trim and a gray slate roof and balconies from which orange trumpet vine hung in thick clusters. But there was something wrong with its architectural design and ambiance. The colors were too bright, the windows too small, the flower beds unplanted and humped with manure that hadn’t been worked into the soil. A solitary live oak hung with Spanish moss stood in front, half of the branches withered by lightning or blight. The adjacent lot was stacked with construction debris powdering in the wind. When Ishmael approached the building with Maggie Bassett, its symmetry made him think of a man about to sneeze.

  Beckman’s office had the same sense of ambiguity. It was filled with potted plants that had wilted, the drain dishes curlicued with grit. Most of the furniture was made of antlers and curved and debarked and shellacked wood that resembled bones, with rawhide and animal pelts stretched across it. High on the wall, behind the massive desk, was an oil painting of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson at an encampment, the men staring in opposite directions, the brushwork flawed in a way that made both appear cross-eyed.

  “Drink?” Beckman said.

  “No, sir. Thank you,” Ishmael said.

  “Have a seat.”

  “You’ll have to excuse me. If I sit down, I have trouble getting up.”

  “You’re a polite young man, Mr. Holland. I could use a few more like you.”

  Beckman’s chair was pushed back from his desk. He wore an open shirt and a silk bandana tied around his neck; his legs were extended in front of him, crossed at the ankles. His face seemed possessed by levels of energy that his skin could hardly constrain. His movements were not movements but jerks, muscular spasms, twitches; his hands kept opening and closing. His eyes were a brilliant blue, constantly roving over Ishmael’s person. He squeezed his scrotum. “You were at the Battle of the Marne?”

  “Yes, sir, one of the battles, the last one.”

  “What did you think of the French machine gun, the Chauchat? What do they call it? The ‘sho-sho’?”

  “My men thought it was junk.”

  “What about the Lewis?”

  “There’s none better.”

  “Why not the Maxim or the Vickers?”

  “They’re too heavy and take too many men to operate. The Lewis is light. One man can run thousands of rounds through it without a misfire.”

  “I have a firing range in back. I’d like for you to demonstrate a few weapons for me.”

  “Why do you need me to demonstrate them?”

  “I don’t. I need to see how you’ll demonstrate them to our clients.”

  “Who are your clients?”

  “Let’s go outside. I’ll explain a few things to you. Maggie, will you fix me a vodka and orange juice with a couple of cherries and a sprig of mint?”

  She looked at Beckman blankly. He had not asked her to sit down; he had hardly acknowledged her presence. “Sorry, I was daydreaming. What did you want?” she said.

  He repeated his request and said, “Have you ever seen a more beautiful woman? Look at her. Ageless, not a wrinkle in her skin. Tell us how you do it, Maggie.”

  She went to the foyer and called to the maid and told her to fix Beckman’s drink and bring it out to the gun range.

  “See that?” Beckman said. “She stays young by not letting men boss her around.”

  “Refer to me again as though I’m a ventriloquist’s dummy, and you’ll wish you hadn’t,” she said.

  Beckman smiled with his eyes and led the way to the range, the dimple in his chin glistening with aftershave lotion. The targets were all the same: the black silhouette of a man printed on paper that was mounted on a board forty yards out. The shooting tables and canvas chairs were arranged uniformly under a striped awning. In the distance, to the left of the range, Ishmael could see the bell towers of the mission. A cloud moved across the sun, dropping the countryside into shadow, lowering the temperature precipitously. He thought he saw men, maybe stonemasons, working on the mission. On the shooting tables were rifles and pistols and field boxes of ammunition.

  Beckman gestured at the closest table. “Recognize these?”

  “The Lee-Enfield, the ’03 Springfield, the Mauser, the Mannlicher-Carcano, the .30-40 Krag.”

  “Let’s see what you can do with them.”

  “I don’t fire at that kind of target anymore.”

  The maid brought Beckman his drink. He drank from it. His lips looked cold and red and glossy, as though they had been freshly lipsticked. “You don’t shoot at a target that resembles a man?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “Inside you asked me whom I sell to. I could tell you the world. But that’s not accurate. I sell weapons to collectors, and I sell them to people who need them to defend themselves. I also supply them to motion picture companies.”

  “But your big purchasers are nations?”

  “Not any nation. The ones in danger. Do you know who those happen to be?”

  “I haven’t thought about it.”

  “As soon as the Bolsheviks get things tamped down in Moscow, they’ll be after East Europe. The Japanese want China’s resources. They also want Southeast Asia. North Africa is up for grabs. The Arabs thought they were going to win their independence from the Ottoman Empire. Instead, they got royally screwed. You look uncomfortable.”

  “I need to sit down.”

  “Are you in pain?”

  “It passe
s,” Ishmael said, easing himself into a chair.

  “You don’t look well, Mr. Holland. Let me get you a drink.”

  Ishmael shook his head. The countryside was going out of focus, the birds from the bell towers freckling the sky. “I apologize. My knees get weak if I stand too long.”

  “That’s understandable. I took one through the kneecap at Gallipoli. A Turk got me from one mile out. I had to hand it to the nasty bugger. It was a magnificent shot.”

  “I remember hearing of an arms dealer in Mexico. I never saw him, but I was told he was German or Austrian,” Ishmael said.

  “There were many. I was one of them.”

  “This one was in business with General Lupa. The Wolf.”

  “Lupa’s nickname was a compliment. He was a swine.”

  “He lynched four of my men at a bordello. He lured others into a trap.”

  Beckman raised his eyebrows as though being forced to speak on an unpleasant subject. “Lupa was a bastard. I heard he was killed, maybe by his own men. I didn’t do business with him, so I’m not well informed as to his fate.”

  “Did you know Huerta or Villa?”

  “No, I supplied Emiliano Zapata, a true man of the people. He was pure of heart and wanted nothing for himself. He’ll probably be assassinated. No Mexican story has a happy ending.”

  “I thought that was the Irish.”

  “They both get a regular fucking. It’s the nature of the beast. Why grieve on it?”

  “What kind of salary goes with the job, Mr. Beckman?” Ishmael said.

  “Eight thousand dollars a year. To start. At some point, your commissions will be greater than your salary, and eight thousand dollars will seem a pauper’s salary. Which of these rifles do you favor?”

  “The .30-40 Krag. For its smooth action and the way you can keep loading while you’re firing and never be empty.”

  “Shoot it for me.”

  “The angle of your range isn’t good. I think there’re some trucks down by that old mission. I don’t want to use your targets, either, sir.”

  “That mission has been deserted for years,” Beckman said.

  “They’re restoring it, Arnold,” Maggie said.

  “It’s Sunday. Why would anyone be working on it today? I’m a bit tired of that bunch, anyway. They used the power of the church to challenge the title to my land. I had to cede them fifty acres along the riverside to keep what was already mine. Tell me the clerics don’t know how to make the eagle scream.”