House of the Rising Sun

  Lord, they got my boy. They want your cup, too, but they’ll have to kill me first and pry it out of my hands. I have to move us. I hope I am doing the right thing. I would like to drill a hole between the eyes of every one of those sons of bitches, but anger only clouds my reason and empowers my enemies. Be my light, my sword, and my shield.

  Sorry for swearing.

  For just a moment, he was certain he had taken leave of his senses. A voice outside himself, one he had never heard and loud enough to echo inside the cave, said, I think I’ll survive it.

  He stood up, the rosewood box still open in his hands. “Say again, please?”

  There was no response. He was sweating even in the dampness of the cave, his ears popping in the silence. He heard a noise behind him.

  “Did you want me, Mr. Holland?” Andre said.

  “No.”

  “I heard you talking.”

  “I’m getting old. I talk to myself sometimes.”

  The Haitian looked up at the ceiling of the cave and at the pale glow from the crevice that operated like a flume. “Who was the other person?”

  “What?”

  “I heard someone speak to you.”

  “That must have been an echo. I told you not to pay me no mind.”

  “Do you want me to wait outside?”

  “Yes. I’ll be along shortly,” Hackberry said, his hands cold and strangely dry on the box, his throat clotted with phlegm. “Come back here.”

  “What is it you want?” Andre said, frozen against the circle of blue beyond the cave’s entrance.

  “What did the voice say?”

  “I’m not sure,” Andre replied.

  “That’s what I thought. It was probably a rock tumbling down the hillside.”

  “Something about surviving.”

  Hackberry shook his head in denial. “That was me,” he said. “People my age are always studying on mortality. It makes you a little crazy. You talk to yourself and don’t remember what you said.”

  “Yes, sir,” Andre said. He turned to go.

  “We’re not on the plantation. You don’t have to call me ‘sir.’ I cain’t stand servility. We taught it to y’all, and now it’s the bane of your race and the disgrace of ours.”

  “Let me know if you need anything, Mr. Holland.”

  Hackberry watched Andre exit the cave, stooping slightly, his suit coat tightening across his back, his hands as big as frying pans. Hackberry lifted the cup from the green velvet cushion, wrapped it in the slicker, and replaced it inside the wall, then refitted the rock in the hole.

  Why do you fear me? a voice said.

  I didn’t mean to give that impression. Please he’p me get Ishmael back. I don’t care what happens to me. That boy has been paying my tab all his life. It bothers me something awful. I don’t get no rest.

  But the voice no longer had anything to say.

  Hackberry pulled the wood plug from the spout on the fuel can and poured a zigzag pattern of coal oil along the floor of the cave, sloshing it on his chair and writing table. He threw the empty can outside the cave and heard it clatter in the rocks. “Confuse, mislead, and mystify,” he repeated to himself. He latched the rosewood box and carried it outside and set it on top of a boulder, then rolled a newspaper into a cone and popped a match alight with his thumbnail and lit the paper and tilted the cone down until the flame almost touched his fingers. Then he tossed the paper into the cave.

  Black smoke corkscrewed along the ceiling through the crevice at the back of the cave, rising in curds through the natural chimney into the trees atop the bluffs. Hackberry’s chair and writing table crawled with fire, and the rats’ nests in the cave’s corners glowed and winked inside the smoke, but the flames on the floor were of low intensity and short duration, and other than blackening the walls, they had little appreciable effect.

  “Why have you done all this, Mr. Holland?” Andre said.

  “The men watching us are primitive people. As such, they believe that all other people act and think in the way they do. They think we’re done with the cave and whatever it contained.”

  “Mr. Beckman is not a primitive man.”

  “You’re wrong there, partner. Beckman is one cut above a man with a bone in his nose and a spear in his hand.”

  Andre didn’t reply. Hackberry picked up the rosewood box and tucked it under his arm. “Time to hit the trail.”

  “Where are your friends, Mr. Holland?” Andre said.

  “Pardon?”

  “Your son has been kidnapped by an evil man. I suspect these are the worst days in your life. Where are your friends? There should be many at your side. Have they all deserted you?”

  “I’ve driven the best people in my life from my door. That’s not an easy fact to live with.”

  “You are a man of great humility.”

  “I like you, Andre. But if you don’t shut up, I’m going to shoot you.”

  “Do as you wish.”

  Hackberry stared at the hillside where he had seen the sunlight flash on a reflective surface. But the only living thing he saw there was a cow walking out of the shade, a bell clanging under her neck.

  “Andre, I’m beset by a great fear,” he said. “No matter how this plays out, I think Beckman plans to kill my boy. A man like that never leaves a debt unpaid. That evil son of a bitch is going to kill my Ishmael.”

  “There are other ways to deal with this problem, Mr. Holland. You are a man of restraint. I am not.”

  Hackberry looked into the Haitian’s eyes. What he saw there made him blink.

  MAGGIE BASSETT DID not know what to do with her anger, or where to place it, or how to stop it from ulcerating her stomach. Ruby Dansen had punched her in the face and knocked her on her rump in her own house. Her puffed lip and the swelling in one nostril made her face look like it had been scissored in half and glued together unevenly. No man had ever done something like this to her, much less a woman.

  She sat in her kitchen and held a piece of ice wrapped in a towel to her face, and reveled in one revenge fantasy after another about Ruby Dansen. And in so doing, she transferred more and more power to Ruby, a busybody waitress who thought she knew more about economics than the owners of U.S. Steel.

  The thought of it made Maggie move the piece of ice from her mouth to her forehead. Again and again she saw Ruby’s fist coming unexpectedly out of nowhere, landing like a set of brass knuckles in the center of her face, jarring her eyes in their sockets, rendering her helpless as she fell backward on the floor, afraid that more blows were coming.

  Afraid? Of Ruby Dansen? She couldn’t believe she’d just had that thought. That was impossible. She must never have it again. It was absurd. She had dealt with the likes of Harvey Logan and spent a week in Denver’s Brown Palace Hotel with Harry Longabaugh. She’d even had a fling with Butch Cassidy. She knew that Butch was still alive, that he hadn’t died in the shoot-out down in Bolivia. She had been the consort of the most famous outlaws in America. How many people could say that? Afraid of Ruby Dansen? How silly.

  When she realized how foolish and revealing her thoughts were, she wanted to cry. Except no one was there to commiserate with her. She could almost hear Arnold’s mocking voice as she told him of Ruby’s visit. He would cherry-pick his way through every detail of her pain, stirring the pot, his eyes gleeful while he analyzed her weaknesses. When he tired of the game, he would offer to have someone visit Ruby at her hotel in the late hours, or escort her off the sidewalk into an alley. And after Arnold had dispatched the mess she had made, he would remind Maggie repeatedly of her ineptitude and her dependence upon him.

  No, that was not going to happen, she told herself. When Maggie Bassett got even, she got even. For Maggie, the word “restitution” was a misspelling of “retribution.” She did not believe in an eye for an eye, either; Maggie paid back with interest. And the beauty of her revenge was that she never told anyone about it, like a badge of honor you carried but never showed anyone. Her refusal
to comfort her father on his deathbed, to even touch him, was not an act of vengeance. It was simply how she felt. Why pretend? He was not a loving father and had blamed her for her mother’s death. She was supposed to get all weepy because he was dying? How stupid could people be? He didn’t need her when she needed him. What was wrong with letting him check out on his own?

  The real expression of her feelings toward her father came two years later, when she journeyed by train to the graveyard where he was entombed next to his wife under a huge slab of Italian marble, safely beyond her reach. It was sunset on a Sunday, the dogwood in bloom. A few families were picnicking on the grounds, the children flying kites against a magenta-tinted sky. Maggie removed a bottle of wine from a straw basket on her arm and sipped from it until the bottle was empty. Then she set it down and gathered up her skirts and urinated on the slab while the picnickers stared at her, aghast.

  But an exorcism of Ruby’s attack would require more than the price of a train ticket. And Ruby was not the only source of Maggie’s anger. Arnold was becoming more and more of a problem. His insinuations about her had become more common in their daily dealings, his disrespect for her and women in general more pronounced when a male audience was available.

  Plus the question she kept trying to shove to the edge of her mind: What had he done with Ishmael? Over the years she had piece by piece gotten rid of her conscience, the way a person got rid of a worrisome appendage. She believed the conscience was little more than a set of ideas installed by others; she felt it had little to do with right and wrong and instead served the interests of the installers.

  It was wrong to gas a soldier in the trenches but all right to burn him to death with a flamethrower? The railroads should be given every other section of land along the railroad track and regular people should get nothing? All men were brothers and equal in the sight of God unless they were dumb peons you could pay ten cents an hour? Every patriotic man should vote, but the woman who demanded the same right was branded a lesbian? Fornication was beyond the pale unless you did it in a city-sanctioned cathouse? Sometimes she wondered why she didn’t join forces with Ruby Dansen.

  Nonetheless, even in her anger, she could not stop thinking about Ishmael. Maybe that was why she kept her mind on Ruby in the first place. She had injected Ishmael, seduced him, and brought him to San Antonio so Arnold could satisfy his obsession over a religious artifact and get even with Hackberry Holland. But something had happened on the train ride down the southern Colorado plateau and through Ratón Pass. Lying next to Ishmael in the bed inside their private room, she had felt like both a mother and a lover, as though entering into an innocent form of incest and perhaps thereby restoring her youth. These were moments that others would not understand. Why should they? They hadn’t been abandoned by their fathers and forced to work in a bordello, or live on the bread crumbs paid to schoolteachers. She thought about the slow rocking of the train descending the Pass and Ishmael’s body molded to hers as they watched the pinyon trees and the great outcroppings of gray and yellow rock slide by the window, and for a second she thought she smelled the trace of shaving soap on Ishmael’s neck, and felt the heat of his skin on her lips.

  Maybe she was corrupt. But what she thought and what she did and what she felt were not necessarily part of one another. No one chose to be a prostitute. And once you became one, you either kept company with gunfighters and outlaws who protected you, or you ended up on the street at the mercy of pimps and Murphy artists and jackrollers and eventually went blind or insane with venereal disease of the brain.

  Arnold ridiculed the life she had led. He always began with a compliment but ended by degrading her. If she told him about her feelings for Ishmael, he would only show amusement, his eyes lighting mischievously, the tip of his tongue sliding along his bottom lip, his face smug with what he considered his secret insight into her soul. Because that was always the message. Maggie deceived herself, but her mentor and protector, Arnold Beckman, saw through it all and liked and admired her just the same.

  He had trained her how to think about herself, using flattery one moment and the threat of rejection the next. He was a master at it. The only thing he had not done to her was try to seduce her, and she was never sure why. Many men who visited bordellos feared intimacy; maybe he was one of them. Women were brought to his apartment by a pimp late at night, and he had a mistress in Galveston and perhaps one in Mexico City, but otherwise he rarely touched people, even to shake hands. She had never thought about that. He was cruel and allowed his men to do unthinkable acts to his enemies, but she could not remember the instance when he laid his hand on another man.

  What she did know was his talent for making people resent themselves, cajoling them into their own self-destruction. In spite of knowing these things about him, she had allowed herself to be his ongoing victim. She felt sick to her stomach.

  SHE DROVE HER motorcar to Arnold’s building. She not only drove it to the building, she parked partly on the walkway and partly in the flower bed. When she saw no one through the office window, she climbed the stairs in the breezeway and banged on the apartment door. When he didn’t answer, she shook the knob. “I know you’re in there, Arnold,” she said.

  “What the hell do you want?” he called out.

  “I want you to open the door.”

  “Come back another time, love.”

  “Want me to break a window? This flower pot should do nicely.”

  She heard his feet padding on the straw mat on the other side of the door. He slipped the bolt and opened the door partway, wearing a white bathrobe, his hair dripping. “Lost your mind, have you?”

  “I need to talk.”

  “About what?”

  “Ishmael.”

  “We did that this morning. What happened to your face?”

  “An accident.”

  “You should do something about it. You look like someone sawed a perpendicular line down your face.”

  “I didn’t come here to talk about myself.”

  “Of course not. You’re the soul of goodness. Was it an old boyfriend? Tell me who he is and I’ll take care of it. You can watch if you want.”

  The bathroom door was half open. She could see steam rising from a giant gold-plated tub submerged in the oak floor. “Bathing with a lady friend?”

  “Not unless you care to join me.”

  “There are times when I hate you, Arnold.”

  “I give up. Come in. I must have clap in my brain.” He walked toward the bathroom, jiggling his fingers over his shoulder for her to follow. He dropped his robe and descended the steps into the tub, easing into the water, resting his neck on a soggy velvet support between the faucets. He closed his eyes and sighed, his phallus rising to the water’s surface.

  “Do you have any embarrassment or shame at all?” she said.

  “We’re friends. The water is fine, in case you want to relax a bit,” he replied, his eyes still closed. “Do my scars bother you? I bet you didn’t know I had so many.”

  “I have an appendix scar. Does that count?”

  “You’d be surprised how many women like to touch them,” he said. “I’ve never understood that. I think women are more drawn to pain and violence than they realize.”

  “I’ll talk with Hack. We’ll get back the cup or whatever that thing is. I can do it. He listens to me.”

  “Tell me what’s really on your mind,” he said. “And don’t tell me it’s not about you. There’s nothing you do that’s not about you, Maggie. That’s why I love you. You’re feline from head to toe, and I mean every supple and sensuous curve in your glorious body. Come in here with me. It would be the greatest honor of my life.”

  “Don’t hurt him,” she said, surprised at the weakness in her voice.

  “The war hero?”

  “Stop pretending you don’t know what I’m talking about. I know you, Arnold. I’ve seen what you’ve done to others who have gotten in your way.”

  “I think you do
n’t know me well enough,” he said. He opened his eyes and winked. “I’ve always wondered what the objection was.”

  “I think you’re afraid of women.”

  He smiled to himself. “Test me.”

  “What’s that smell?” she said.

  “What smell?”

  “Something is burning,” she said.

  “It’s my sandwich. I was reheating it in the skillet. Turn off the stove for me, will you? People don’t know what it’s like to lose one of your senses. I’d give anything to smell a gardenia again. Why do you feel so sorry for Captain Holland? His legs are fine. He’s handsome and has his whole life ahead of him. Why do you think me such an ogre?”

  “You mock people. Me in particular.”

  “I do not. You intrigue me. I love to watch you when you look in the mirror. The way you touch a line here or there. You make me think of a little girl.” He looked past her and raised himself in the tub. “There’s smoke coming out of the kitchen. Would you get in there, please?”

  She went into the kitchen and turned off the stove. She returned to the bathroom and put down the cover on the toilet and sat on it. Through the window, she could see a solitary woman walking in the shade of the poplars that lined the road leading to Arnold’s building. “Say of me what you will. But let Ishmael go. You’ve seen the pain of war. Why not act with mercy to someone who’s shared your experience? He’s done you no harm.”

  “I’m not the one standing in the way.”

  “Are you talking about my former husband?”

  “He stole my goods. No one steals my goods, love.”

  “By ‘goods,’ you mean the cup?”

  “The Grail.”

  “I don’t believe that.”

  “You’re not a student of history. Beatrice DeMolay is the descendant of the Crusader knight who brought it back from the Holy Land, along with the Shroud of Turin.”

  “The what?”

  “The winding sheet of Christ.”

  “Why do you want a cup? What will you do with it?”