House of the Rising Sun

  She went upstairs and put on her coat and her sweater and a long coat and a hat that had a four-inch pin with a purple glass knob shaped like a lily.

  Don’t go by yourself, a voice said.

  And do what? Wait on Hack? she answered herself. Or call the police officers who kidnapped Ishmael from the clinic?

  A tree of lightning burst in the clouds as she ran for the open door of the jitney, a newspaper over her head.

  HACKBERRY COULDN’T BELIEVE the change in the weather when he came out of Beckman’s building. The sky was dark, the sidewalks spotting with raindrops, thunder echoing like cannon beyond the hills. He wondered if it signaled a change in his life, the deliverance that had been denied him the day he led a stolen horse up the incline to Beatrice DeMolay’s brothel in Old Mexico.

  On the corner, the two black prostitutes had stepped beneath an overhang. He walked toward them and touched the brim of his hat. “I wonder if you ladies could tell me where I can hire a taxi.”

  “On the main street, maybe,” one said. “They ain’t none down here.”

  “It’s fixing to cut loose,” he said, squinting at the sky.

  “The crib is up the alley. If you got the money, we got the time,” said the same woman. “Ain’t no rain in there.”

  “I appreciate the offer, but I have someone waiting on me. You know Mr. Beckman very well?”

  Both women looked straight ahead, the wind ruffling their hair, their faces impassive, as smooth and dark as chocolate.

  “I hear he’s rough on working girls,” Hackberry said.

  “You ain’t heard it from us,” said the same woman.

  “I heard he hangs them up and beats them with his fists. Mostly Mexican girls. I suspect some black ones, too.”

  “Why you telling us that?”

  “Maybe you can do a good deed. Stop another girl from getting hurt.”

  The spokeswoman for the two looked at the clouds. She was missing a front tooth; a scar like a piece of white string ran horizontally through one eye. “My charge for good deeds is ten dol’ars,” she said.

  He took a gold piece from his pocket and opened his palm so she could see it.

  “He brung a colored girl to a basement. Not in this part of town. I ain’t said who brung her. I just said ‘he’ brung her. He left her alone and she got out a window. She came back here to get her pimp, and the two of them took off, traveling light.”

  “What’s her name? Where did she go?”

  The woman took the gold piece from Hackberry’s hand. “Don’t know. Don’t care.”

  “Where’s the basement?”

  “Don’t know that, either.”

  “Beckman has my son.”

  She put the gold piece in her purse and showed no reaction.

  “I’m talking about my son,” he said.

  The woman seemed to be drifting off to sleep. Hackberry looked back at the entrance to Beckman’s building and at the broken wood crates stacked on the sidewalk for pickup. “You ever see any Chinamen down here?”

  “They don’t kill nobody,” the woman said, opening her eyes.

  “I don’t follow you.”

  “We know who you are. You the one killed Eddy Diamond.”

  “I didn’t mean to.”

  “You done it just the same.”

  “Maybe it was more complicated than you think.”

  “You want some jelly roll, baby? If not, beat feet. Ain’t nothing free.”

  He began walking toward the main street of the brothel district, his head bent against the wind, the raindrops cold and hard as bird shot.

  THE SIDEWALKS WERE empty, the gutters running fast, when she stepped out of the jitney in front of an alleyway that yawned like a ravenous mouth. Ruby heard the streetcar clang behind her, then the sound of its wheels diminishing on the tracks. The alleyway was brick-paved, channeled with runoff in the center, lined on either side with trash cans and wet paper bags splitting with garbage. At the far end was a green wood door with a rope for a handle. She began walking toward it.

  Above, rainwater was sluicing off the roofs and twirling down on her head, running into her eyes. She looked over her shoulder, hoping to see someone on the sidewalk, perhaps a happy group of soldiers on pass from the army base. A vagabond stared back at her, his clothes as soaked as tissue paper. He walked away.

  The door was ajar. She cupped her hand around the rope that served as a handle. “Ishmael?” she said.

  The only sound she heard was a strip of gutter swinging from an eave high above. She pulled back the door, scraping it across a concrete bib. There was a glow from another door down a hallway. The interior of the room smelled of malt and mold and wood barrels.

  “Ishmael?” she repeated.

  As her eyes adjusted, she saw the back of a wheelchair and a figure sitting in it, wearing a tall-crowned, wide-brimmed hat, a blanket draped over the shoulders. “Oh, Ishmael,” she said, running toward the wheelchair.

  The door slammed shut behind her; a man stepped out of the shadows and locked it with a steel bolt. He wore a goatee and had a triangular face and a weak mouth and hands with long fingers that made her think of an amphibian.

  “You’re sure a dumb bitch,” he said.

  He hit her in the middle of the face with his fist, knocking her into the wheelchair. A manikin with hinges on the arms and legs toppled from the wheelchair onto the floor. Ruby stared up at the man. He wore steel-toed boots and canvas pants and a wide belt with an antler-handled knife on it. “My name is Jessie. I’m gonna teach you how to yodel.”

  She pushed herself on her hands against a barrel, her hat crooked on her head. “Where’s my son?”

  “I’ll take you to him. You’re gonna have to do me a favor first. You’re gonna be a good girl. You know what being a good girl means, don’t you?” He stepped closer to her. “Don’t look at the door. There ain’t no cavalry coming. You’re in the hands of the J Boys. I’m the gentle one. You don’t want to meet Jim or Jack or Jeff. They don’t got healthy urges.”

  His trouser cuffs and the tops of his boots were bluish green, smeared with a substance that looked like clay.

  “Don’t hit me again,” she said.

  “I wouldn’t dream of it, darlin’.”

  “Help me up, please.”

  “I think you’re doing fine right there.”

  “When will you take me to see Ishmael?”

  “Soon as we finish with the favor I mentioned.”

  “It was you who wrote the note?”

  “Maybe your son wrote it.”

  “My son wouldn’t lure me here.”

  “You cain’t tell what a man will do when his life is in danger, war hero or not.” He lowered his hand to his belt and hooked his thumb in it, his fingers hanging below the buckle. He smiled at her almost kindly.

  “I don’t think I can do what you’re asking me to,” she said.

  “Sure you can. You know, you’re cute when you say it like that. Come on, hon. Time’s a-wasting. Let’s get with it.”

  “I hurt my back. You have to help me up. I’ll undress.”

  “It’s all right if you try to buy time. They all do. But you’re not leaving here until the right things happen. That’s the way it is.”

  “I understand.”

  “That’s a good girl. Now get them bloomers off.”

  She raised her arms to him and waited. He grasped her by the wrists and pulled her to her feet. He was grinning, his teeth like kernels of corn, his breath rife with the smells of nicotine and fish. “You’re quite the little heifer.”

  She pulled the pin from her hat, gripping the glass knob tightly in her palm, and drove the point into his mouth. He gagged and tried to push her away, but she drove the point deeper, past his teeth into the cheek, scraping bone, piercing the skin behind the jaw, the glass knob wedging against the roof of his mouth.

  “Where is he? Tell me where my son is,” she said, kicking his shins, flailing at his head with her fists.
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  Whatever he tried to say was lost in the blood clogging his throat. She leaned down to pick up a loose brick and heard him grunt as he pulled the hat pin from his mouth. She lifted the brick above her shoulder and hit him just below the eye, caving in the cheekbone.

  But he wasn’t done. He ran at her with his full weight, swinging his fists, and knocked her to the floor again. A moment later, he was out the door and running down the alleyway into the storm. The manikin lay beside Ruby, its face turned toward her, as glossy and smooth and eyeless as a darning sock.

  RUBY SAT ON the side of the bed in her hotel room and told Hackberry everything that had happened behind the door in the alleyway. When she finished, he sat beside her and put his arm over her shoulder. “You didn’t want to wait on me?” he said.

  “I didn’t know when you’d be back,” she replied.

  “His name was Jessie? And you’ve never seen him?”

  “Would the police have a photograph of him?”

  “It’s unlikely. A man like Beckman doesn’t hire known criminals. Or he brings them in from somewhere else and then gets rid of them.”

  “What do we do now, Hack?”

  “I see only two choices. Maybe they’re not the best, but I don’t know a third one.”

  “What are they?” she asked.

  Through the window, the sky seemed unrelenting in its darkness, as though neither the moon nor the sun would ever be more than a vaporous smudge.

  “I want to use the telephone in my room,” he said.

  “Use it here.”

  “I need to have a conversation of a kind I’ve never had.”

  ————

  BACK IN HIS room, he asked the switchboard operator to dial Beatrice DeMolay’s number. She picked up the phone immediately. “Mr. Holland?”

  “How’d you know it was me?”

  “You want to know why I talked to you so angrily outside Arnold Beckman’s office.”

  “It crossed my mind.”

  “I’m entering into a business arrangement with him. You need to stay out of it,” she said.

  “I think you let me down.”

  “Do you, now?”

  “Call it what you like, Miss B. I had a world of respect for you. What the hell are you doing?”

  “What gives you the right to ask me that?”

  “You’ve got a point. So I won’t. That’s not why I called, anyway. I need your man Andre.”

  “Boy, if you don’t have nerve.”

  “I have nerve? You were Ishmael’s friend. I thought you were mine, too. Maybe you have a reason for being with Beckman. But seeing you there was hard to swallow.”

  “What do you want Andre for?”

  “He offered to he’p me. He’s the only one.”

  “Help you in what way?”

  “Ask him. Or don’t. You can hang up the telephone if you like. Ishmael’s mother was attacked by one of Beckman’s men. He wanted to violate her as well, except she shoved a hat pin halfway down his throat.”

  He waited and watched the rain sliding down the windows, the electricity flickering through the heavens. He wondered if the latter indicated a sign and decided it did not.

  “I’ll send him over,” she said. “He’s driving my new motorcar. As you are aware, my REO is undergoing massive repairs.”

  “I hope they do a good job on that,” he replied. “I hear there are some right good mechanics here’bouts.”

  “Good-bye, Mr. Holland. You never fail to distinguish yourself. I thought I had met every kind of man. I didn’t realize how vain I was.”

  Before he could reply, she hung up.

  He called Willard Posey in Kerrville. “It’s Hack. I need Deputy Pickins to bring a certain item to my hotel room in San Antonio.”

  “The Kerr County Sheriff’s Department is running a delivery service to San Antonio?”

  “Don’t be light about this.”

  “How could I be light about it? Are you talking about the item I think you’re talking about? I cain’t take any more of this craziness, Hack.”

  “I think that cup is the real thing.”

  “What are you going to do with it?”

  “What do you care?”

  “One of two things is going on here,” Willard said. “Either you’ve lost your mind, or you have in your possession an object a baptized person is going to have to think very seriously about.”

  “I’m not sure what I’m going to do. But if I don’t do something pretty soon, I’m going to lose my boy. What would you do in my stead? He’s in the hands of people who are worse than the convicts in Huntsville.”

  “You never ease up, Hack. You could squeeze blood from a rock.”

  “Get off the pot.”

  “I won’t forget that.”

  “I hope you don’t,” Hackberry said.

  “Tell me where the cup is and give me the directions to where you’re at.”

  A HALF HOUR LATER, a different desk clerk called Hackberry’s room. “There’s a peculiar nigger down here. He says you told him to come to the hotel.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “He didn’t give it.”

  “Then ask him.”

  The clerk went away from the phone and came back. “He says his name is Andre.”

  “Send him up.”

  “We cain’t do that, sir.”

  Hackberry took the elevator down to the lobby. Andre was standing by the side door, his hat in his hand, water dripping off his coat on the marble floor. Hackberry went to the desk. “I need the use of your office.”

  “The office is restricted to employees,” the clerk said.

  He was sorting the mail and didn’t look up when he spoke. Hackberry stared at him, but the clerk didn’t notice. He was tall and had slicked hair and a high, shiny forehead and wore a silver and red necktie and a white shirt with garters on the sleeves.

  “This man is my friend and associate,” Hackberry said. “I don’t like the way you’ve treated him. We’ll be using your office. If you don’t like it, call the owners. In the meantime, don’t disturb us.”

  He motioned for Andre to follow him into the office and closed the door behind them. The desk clerk was staring at them through the glass, his jaw flexing. Hackberry pointed a finger as he would a pistol. The clerk began stuffing mail into the key boxes, glancing back over his shoulder.

  “You are always very candid in your dealings with people, Mr. Holland,” Andre said. “I’m not sure that is necessarily wise.”

  “Rude pipsqueaks are rude pipsqueaks. So you treat them as pipsqueaks. The police knocked you around?”

  “They have done much worse to others. Miss Beatrice said I should talk with you. She also said you might make unreasonable demands of me and that I must use my own judgment in dealing with you.”

  “She tell you anything else?”

  “She said you have concrete for brains.”

  “I saw her at Arnold Beckman’s office in the brothel district. Another man was driving her.”

  “She knows what I think of Mr. Beckman. My feelings about him are not positive ones.”

  “If a rusty drainpipe could talk, I know what it would sound like,” Hackberry said.

  “I told you about the men who abducted my children and the fate that was theirs as a result,” Andre said. He had not sat down. He wiped the dampness from his face with a handkerchief. “I told you how I took these wicked men into the jungle at night and by dawn had relieved them of the evil presences blocking the light from their eyes. I think you want to know the details of an event that should be left in the jungle, except you are afraid to ask.”

  “What you tell me is up to you,” Hackberry said.

  “The trees and the foliage do not have eyes or ears, but men do. People in my village heard the sounds that came out of the jungle that night. Later, some of the villagers would not look into my eyes when we passed on the street. They no longer wanted to be my friend or my neighbor. They were ashamed that I h
ad ever been a priest in their church. I do not want that to happen to us, Mr. Holland. I do not want to lose you as my friend.”

  “Would you be willing to do to Beckman the same things you did to your children’s kidnappers?” Hackberry said.

  “That is not an honest question.”

  “I don’t comprendo.”

  “The question is whether you are willing to do these things, Mr. Holland. I think you are not. And for that reason, I cannot do them for you.”

  “I’ll do what it takes to get my son back.”

  “You will not be the same later.”

  “I fired my revolver into a cattle car loaded with Mexican peasants, including women and children.”

  “You did this deliberately?”

  “No, I fired inside the smoke and dust. Then I saw what I had done. I wouldn’t deliberately kill a woman or a child.”

  “That is the difference between us. That is why my voice is the way it is. On the night I delivered up these men from their evil deeds, I felt a bird fly out of my breast. It was as white as snow, and it glided over the ocean and died inside the darkness, and I was not the same when the sun rose in the morning.”

  “Do you want Beckman to end up with the cup?” Hackberry said.

  Andre didn’t reply.

  “What are you looking at?” Hackberry said.

  “We have made an enemy we did not need,” Andre replied.

  Hackberry turned around. The desk clerk was on the telephone, his back to them, hunched over, the receiver held tightly against his ear, as though his posture could hide the nature of his conversation.

  “Maybe he’s calling his wife,” Hackberry said.

  “Evil men are all born of the same seed and carry it with them wherever they go,” Andre said. “That is why many of them resemble gargoyles.”

  “You’ll never make a humanist, Andre.”

  FROM HIS WINDOW, Hackberry saw Deputy Darl Pickins park a Kerr County Sheriff’s Department motorcar in front of the hotel and run inside, an object wrapped in a slicker held against his chest. In less than two minutes, he was at Hackberry’s door, out of breath.

  “You must have put the spurs to it,” Hackberry said.

  “Elevator was broke.”

  “I meant between here and Kerrville.”