House of the Rising Sun: A Novel (11 page)

“By change my suit, I mean I would like to request a divorce from Maggie Bassett, also known as Maggie Holland, on the basis of the adultery she committed by sleeping with me,” Hackberry said.

“Are you still a Texas Ranger, Mr. Holland?”

“When I’m not on leave and marshaling at the county seat.”

“Then why don’t you act like one? And stop addressing the court as though you’re in a saloon.”

“There is evidence that I was married to another woman, if not two, when I met Maggie Bassett, Your Honor. She was knowledgeable about both. That means she made a conscious decision to commit adultery as well as participate in bigamy. By anybody’s measure, that’s moral turpitude.”

“The simple fact is she doesn’t want to grant you a divorce,” the judge said. “Nor does the court see any reason to grant you one. That said, I cannot for the life of me understand why a sane woman would want to keep a man like you around.”

“It could be she wants my ranch and anything else of mine she can get her hands on.”

“Mr. Holland, I’m not going to warn you again about your obvious disrespect for the court and this proceeding.”

“I think it very likely that Maggie Bassett wants my assets, Your Honor. Her greedy nature and her addiction to laudanum seem to go hand in hand, although I’m not an expert in these matters.”

“You’re telling me your wife is addicted to opiates?”

“I’m just saying her marital habits are a bit unusual. I’m sorry, I meant to add ‘Your Honor.’ I’ll start over. Your Honor—”

“You’re about to find yourself in a jail cell, Mr. Holland.”

“Judge, my poor skills with language are not allowing me to adequately convey my history with Maggie Bassett. Allow me to illustrate, Your Honor. I realized Maggie had eccentric tendencies when I found her in our bed with the Chinaman who was her opium supplier. When I expressed my puzzlement, she introduced me to the Chinaman and asked me to fix them a sandwich, since she was not disposed to go into the kitchen and do it her own self.”

The judge touched his forehead like a man teetering on an aneurysm. “Mrs. Holland, would you care to address some of the statements your husband has made?”

She rose demurely from her chair. She was wearing a dark green velvet dress with a bustle and a fur collar, and boots that laced up to the knee. She had pale skin and soft brown hair she wore in swirls piled under a wide-brimmed straw hat. Her fingers were clamped on a small black cloth purse she held in front of her. Who would have believed her background? Not even Hackberry did.

“For a short time, I used a medication to control a nervous condition,” she said. “The gentleman with me is Dr. Romulus Atwood, a specialist in these matters. He will testify that I consume no sedative stronger than warm milk.”

“Romulus Atwood implants people with animal glands, Judge,” Hackberry said. “He’s sewn goat testicles on impotent men. The ones who have survived his procedures don’t know whether to bleat or yodel.”

“Be quiet, Mr. Holland,” the judge said. He studied Atwood. “Were you ever a resident of El Paso?”

“Briefly.”

“Rise when you address the court.”

“Yes, sir, Your Honor.”

“Were you ever known as ‘the Undertaker’?”

“On occasion.”

“For the four or five men you killed?”

“Those shootings were in self-defense and adjudicated as such, Judge.”

“You were an associate of John Wesley Hardin?”

“I played cards with him. I wouldn’t call him an associate.”

“You wouldn’t? What
would
you call him?”

“I’d call him dead.”

“You think that’s witty?”

“No, I would not try to be witty, Your Honor. I think Mr. Holland has sullied this lady’s name. I think she’s a good Christian woman, not an addict, and certainly not a miscegenationist.”

“I don’t like you,” the judge said.

“Sir?”

“A killer carries his stink everywhere he goes. I want you out of my courtroom,” the judge said. “As for you, Mr. Holland, I find against you. I think you’re a dangerous, incorrigible man who has outlived his time and has no business carrying a badge and will probably come to a bad end. That said, I’ve heard you’re a good father to your son. For that reason and that reason only, I’m not locking you in jail. I recommend that you care for your son and raise him right and forget all this silliness.”

“I don’t quite know how to take all that in, Judge.”

“You can take it any goddamn way you want.”

“Can I buy you a drink?”

“Not at gunpoint,” the judge replied.

Hackberry went outside and stood a long time under a dripping mulberry tree. Across the dirt street, Maggie and the gunfighter who called himself a doctor entered a brightly lit café that glowed with warmth. The light had gone from the sky, and the sleet running down Hackberry’s skin and bare head was cold and viscous and left a dirty purple smear on his face when he tried to wipe it off. Where was his hat? Had he left it in the courtroom? No, it was in his buggy. With his 1860 Army Colt revolver that had been converted for modern ammunition. How could he be so forgetful?

Those were the thoughts he was thinking when he retrieved his hat and wiped his face and hair with a clean rag and put on his hat and strapped the Army Colt on his hip and dropped his coat flap over the revolver’s frame and the tiny notches filed in the wood grips. Then he crossed the street, never glancing down at the puddles he stepped in, the sleet hitting his face, his right hand opening and closing against his thigh.

H
E SAT AT
a table covered with a checkered cloth and ordered a pot of coffee and a plate of hash browns and two fried eggs on top of a pork chop. While he cut his meat and speared it with pieces of egg into his mouth, his gaze stayed locked on Maggie and her companion, both of whom were sitting at a wooden booth no more than fifteen feet away, both trying to ignore him. Romulus Atwood had hung up his slicker, exposing his white dress shirt with balloon sleeves and a neckerchief a dandy might wear and a vest as bright as a freshly sliced pomegranate. Atwood glanced sideways just briefly, no longer than it takes to blink, and pulled the cuff of his right shirtsleeve down to the knuckle on his thumb.

When Hackberry finished eating, he wiped his mouth with his napkin and let the napkin drop to his plate. He got up from his chair and walked to Maggie and Atwood’s booth, his Stetson hanging by the brim from his left hand. “You’re looking mighty squirrel, Maggie,” he said.

She set down her teacup. The color of her eyes changed from dark green to brown with the light and seemed to have no white areas. “Thank you,” she said. “Are you doing all right, Hack? I worry about you sometimes.”

“You know me. I try to stay out of the rain and not step on the cat’s tail.”

“Have you been introduced formally to Dr. Atwood?”

“Oh, yes, the Undertaker. That’s quite a nickname. I heard you used to carry a cut-down under your duster.”

Atwood grinned. “Not so, but pleased to know you just the same. Wes Hardin made mention of you on a number of occasions.”

“What did you think of Wesley, Dr. Atwood?”

“People said he could read people’s thoughts. That’s why I never let my thoughts wander too far when I was around him.”

“Did you know he headed up a lynch mob in Florida that burned a colored man alive?”

“Yes, I believe he referred to some hijinks in his youth. You and he had a go at it yourselves, didn’t you?”

“I didn’t quite get that.”

“I think he said you spooked his horse while he was drunk. Then you put the boots to him before he could get off the ground.”

“It went a little bit beyond that. I stomped his face in and broke his ribs and chained him in a wagon and nailed the chains to the floor. I busted him across the face with a rifle butt and took great pleasure in doing it. I guess you could say I flat tore him up before I came to my senses. I’ve always regretted that.”

“We all get religion at some point in our lives,” Atwood said.

“I wish I’d shot him. I wish I had shot a few of his friends, too. The world would be a better place for it.”

Maggie Bassett’s apprehension was obviously growing. She tried to signal the waiter for the check. Atwood began eating a slice of apple pie with a wood-handled fork, filling his jaw as a chipmunk would, a gleam in his eyes, as though injurious words had no effect on him.

Across the street, steam was rising from the back doors of a Chinese laundry. “You know why Chinamen get ahead of most white men?” Hackberry asked.

“Hack—” Maggie began.

“No, why is it that Chinamen are superior to the white race, Marshal Holland?” Atwood said.

“Because they work from cain’t see to cain’t see and take in stride all the abuse that white trash heap on them.”

“I’m not following you.”

“They’re not human tapeworms. They don’t sell ignorant people fraudulent medicines. They don’t graft goat parts on a poor fool who cain’t get his pole up.”

“Hack, don’t do this,” Maggie said.

“Let him talk,” Atwood said. “He’s the law. And it looks like I might be his huckleberry.”

“You know there’s an ordinance against carrying a firearm inside the city limits?” Hackberry said.

“You’re the only person I see carrying a gun, Marshal.”

“Put your weapon on the table and stand up.”

“I don’t have one.”

“Maybe it’s my eyesight. Or I imagine things. Can I have a taste of that pie? I’ve always loved apple pie.”

“Hack, please,” Maggie said.

“He’s all right,” Atwood said. He set down the fork and pushed the plate to the edge of the table. “Here, let me wipe off the fork for you.”

“You ever shoot a man in a poker game?” Hackberry said. “When he was raking in his winnings and about to head for the cribs upstairs? If you want to park one in a man’s brisket, that’s the time to do it. But you’ve got to have the right rig to pull it off.”

“I don’t do things like that.”

“I bet you love your mother, too,” Hackberry said. He pulled the fork from Atwood’s hand and drove the tines through the man’s knuckles into the tablecloth and wood. Then he ripped Atwood’s sleeve to the elbow and removed the single-barrel .32 hideaway strapped under his forearm. Atwood’s face was white, blood trickling through his fingers, his mouth quivering with shock, his hand impaled like a monkey’s paw.

S
OMETIMES IT WAS
hard to turn it off. Hackberry pushed Atwood ahead of him into the street. The sky was laden with clouds that resembled smoke from an ironworks, swirling, unpredictable. “Walk to the jail,” he said. “Don’t look at me, either.”

He pushed Atwood again. When Atwood stumbled, Hackberry hit him across the head with the revolver and sent him sprawling in the mud.

“He’s no match for you, Hack. Please, this isn’t necessary,” he heard Maggie say. He felt her hands dig into his upper arm.

“I always thought you had pretty good taste in men. When did you take up with yellow-bellied back-shooters?” Atwood started to get up, but Hackberry kicked him again. “You stay where you’re at.”

“Hack,” Maggie said, shaking him. “Hack! Did you hear me? Get out of it. Look at me. I’m Maggie. I know you. I know every thought you have. You’re jealous and possessive. Now, stop what you’re doing.”

“Why are you with him?”

“Because I didn’t have any place to live. Because I don’t want to work in a whorehouse or teach children of ignorant cedar-cutters for thirty-five dollars a month in a mud-chink log house.”

“Sounds like the girl I used to know,” he said.

People had come out of the café and the saloon and the laundry, which always stayed open late, and were watching from the elevated concrete sidewalks inset with tethering rings. Hackberry picked up Atwood from a puddle and walked him off balance and stumbling to the jail. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Cod Bishop, dressed in a crisp suit and bowler hat and a vest that looked like a cluster of wet dimes. “I saw all this, Holland,” Bishop said. “One day you’ll get your comeuppance. Your niggers will be of no help to you, either.”

“Hold that thought. I’ll be out in a minute,” Hackberry said.

He locked Atwood in a cell in the rear of the jail. When he came back out on the street, Cod Bishop was gone. Maggie was not.

“Legally, I’m still your wife,” she said. “That won’t change.”

“So call yourself my wife. In the meantime, I’ll call myself the king of Prussia.”

“Under Texas law, I own half of everything in your name.”

“Then you should hire yourself a lawyer, one with better thinking skills than Romulus Atwood.”

“I’ll make you a proposal. I’ll come back and be a good wife. You know everything there is to know about me. If we resume our marriage, there would be no surprises.”

“Really? I heard only recently you worked in Fannie Porter’s cathouse in San Antonio. Didn’t you want to tell me that on our wedding night?”

“You never visited there or a place like it?”

“Working in a hot-pillow joint is not all you did, Maggie. You sewed me to a mattress when I was drunk and damn near killed me with a horse quirt. I don’t think I’m up for a repeat on that.”

“That’s my point. You’ve seen the worst in me. I also remember a couple of things you seemed to like.”

“Your wealth of experience in the erotic arts is undeniable.”

“I didn’t hear you complain.”

“You’re a handful.” He paused. “So is a boa constrictor.”

“Does Ruby’s eye ever wander?”

“Don’t be talking about Ruby. She’s got nothing to do with this.”

“She’s young. A serving girl wants a strong and prosperous man to take care of her. It’s nature’s way. Later on she starts to have doubts.”

He shook his head. “We’re doing just fine,” he said.

But Maggie had gotten to him. He remembered the times he had seen Ruby steal a look at the grocer’s son, a tall blond boy reading for the law in Austin, and the day he caught her watching the Mennonite boy from down the road, washing himself under the windmill.

“We could make quite a pair,” Maggie said. “I’m a good businesswoman. You know how to put the fear of God in the worst of men. We could write our names on the clouds.”