House of the Rising Sun: A Novel (15 page)

H
E SET ISHMAEL
down and hefted up his suitcase, the stars still glimmering in a sky that was the color of gunmetal, while down below, at the bottom of Ratón Pass, the dawn was spreading in a yellow blaze across the plateau. “I understand the hotel here has a fine restaurant,” he said.

“We’ve heard,” she said.

Did she mean anything by that? No, he mustn’t have those kinds of thoughts, he told himself. He gazed at the brick-paved streets by the depot, the vapor rising from the storm drains, the wet sheen on the slate roofs, the aggregate effect of a city built out of rock quarried from the mountains in whose shadows it stood, a smell in the air that bespoke of factories and a new era, one that wasn’t all bad.
If you want to restart your life, could you find a better place than this one?
a voice whispered inside his head.

“I’m happy you told me where y’all were,” he said. “I hired a detective to find you. You’re a pretty good hider.”

“It wasn’t intentional.”

“I think about you often.”

“You do?”

“Well, of course. Why wouldn’t I?”

“The night Levi was hit by the car—” she began.

“Don’t give misfortune a second life, Ruby.”

“He was using morphine. He said it was for his consumption. That wasn’t true. He was in despair. He called himself an adulterer.”

“He was a widower, and you were a single woman who left the company of an older man, one who never acquired any wisdom about anything. Neither one of you was an adulterer.”

Nothing he said seemed to register in her eyes.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“I don’t know what I feel right now. I resolved in New York I would never cause harm to anyone again. I feel selfish. I don’t trust my instincts or my thoughts.”

“Water runs downhill whether you think about it or not.”

“Where did you get that?”

“Probably from somebody who cain’t tell bean dip from pig flop.”

He and Ruby crossed the street, each holding one of Ishmael’s hands, a trolley grinding past them. They sat by a window in the hotel restaurant where they could see the train pulling out of the station on its way to Walsenburg and the snowcapped roll of the Rocky Mountains.

“What can I order, Big Bud?” Ishmael asked.

“You can order whatever you want, little pal,” Hackberry said.

“A waffle?” he said.

“I think you need a stack of them. That’s a mighty nice suit you’re wearing.”

“It’s from the dry goods store where Momma works. We have to take it back later. She has to take her dress back, too.”

Ruby’s face turned red.

“I thought you worked for a miners’ organization,” Hackberry said.

“During the day I’m a secretary at the Western Federation of Miners. Sometimes I work at night or on the weekends at a milliner’s.”

“Who takes care of the boy?”

“We have a children’s room at the union hall.”

“You’re working two jobs? Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I felt guilty for leaving you. I wasn’t fair to you. Are you happy with Mrs. Holland?”

“What?” he said, unable to follow the change in subject.

“With Maggie.”

“I’m in her debt, as I am to you. In my earlier life, whiskey made most of my choices. Now I have to live with them.”

He signaled the waiter so he would not have to continue talking about Maggie. After they ordered, he went to the men’s room and washed his hands and cupped water on his face. Then he looked in the mirror. Who was he? The sum total of his deeds? He would have liked to scrub most of them out of his life. When he went to bed at night or took a nap in a shady hammock, the same images waited behind his eyelids: flashes of gunfire in a darkened alleyway lined with the cribs of working girls, a cowboy buckling over from a shotgun blast inside a pen filled with squealing hogs, a runaway horse stirrup-dragging a dead man past a bank he had just tried to rob.

Unfortunately, part of the problem was that those images were not altogether unpleasant, particularly when he had to deal with the restraints of what was already being called “the modern era.”

As Hackberry reentered the dining area, he looked at the tables and at the men in narrow-cut tailored suits and the ladies in hats holding their silverware the way easterners did, taking small bites of their food, chewing slowly before they swallowed. In their world he would never be more than a sojourner, a man for whom an incremental redemption could not take place.

He sat back down at the table and placed his hand on the back of Ishmael’s neck. The coolness of the boy’s skin and the flutter of his pulse made something inside Hackberry melt. “You’re a mighty fine little fellow, did you know that?” he said.

“I can already read. Without ever going to school. Momma taught me.”

“That’s because she’s a good mother. And she’s a good mother because she’s got a good son.”

“Are you gonna come live with us?”

“I’m probably just visiting right now.”

“Why can’t you live with us?”

“How about you come down to Texas and stay with me?”

“Without Momma?”

“We’ll work all that out.”

Hackberry could see the confusion growing in the boy’s face. He looked at Ruby.

“There’s the waiter with your waffle, Ishmael,” she said. “Let’s eat and talk later.”

“You said Big Bud might be staying.”

Her cheeks flushed again.

“I plan to stay as long as I can,” Hackberry said, patting the boy’s back. “Maybe we’ll take a train ride up to Denver and visit Elitch Gardens and see a moving picture show. Have you ever seen a moving picture?”

“No, sir.”

“I haven’t, either. We can do it together,” Hackberry said. “That’s the way you do things, see? Together. That makes everything more fun, doesn’t it?”

“You’re not going off, are you?” Ishmael said.

“No, not at all,” he said. “My schedule is just a little uncertain right now. I declare, this is a nice town.”

His head was pounding. He couldn’t eat his steak and eggs. He stood up from the table and removed his hat from the back of the chair. He put a ten-dollar gold piece by his plate. “I slept in a bad position last night. I’ll walk up and down a bit and meet y’all in the lobby,” he said.

“We need to get back home,” Ruby said. “I have to be at work by ten.”

“Tell them you’re sick and you’re not coming in. The unions are supposed to be sympathetic with women’s problems, aren’t they? You want me to talk to them?”

She gave him a look that was just short of a slap. He went out into the cold and walked around the block, then sat down in the lobby next to a potted palm. His hands were shaking, but not from the cold. When she entered the lobby with Ishmael in tow, he stood up, his Stetson hanging from his fingers against his trouser leg, his heart beating. “I say everything wrong,” he said. “I brought you a rose.”

“I need to go home before I go to work. Can you get us a carriage?”

“Sure. I’ll take care of Ishmael.”

“You don’t need to.”

“Where do you live?”

“That’s not important. Walk outside with me.”

They went out on the sidewalk. She put Ishmael inside a carriage and turned back to Hackberry, her face a few inches from his. She had buttoned the stem of the rose inside her shirt. The wind was feathering her hair around the edges of her hat. The curvature of her chest was like a dove’s. He had never seen a woman whose mouth was so inviting. “Do you love her?” she asked.

“She took care of me when I couldn’t get a saucer of coffee to my lips.”

“My question was an honest one. Will you answer it?”

“There’s different kinds of love.”

“Which kind did you have for me and Ishmael?”

“A kind that’s more than I can explain,” he said. “A kind that’s not in the past tense, either.”

Her eyes seemed to go inside his head. “I’ll be finished at the union hall at five o’clock if you want to see us.”

“Of course I want to see you. Why won’t you tell me where you live?”

“It’s not the best part of Trinidad. We’ll come to the hotel.”

“You don’t have to hide your circumstances from me.”

“Don’t ever tell me about the debt you think you owe someone else, Hack. You understand?”

“I do.”

Then she was gone and he was left standing alone on the elevated sidewalk, the stars fading into the harshness of the day as though they had never been in the sky.

S
HE SAID SHE
and Ishmael would meet him in front of the hotel at seven
P.M.
, but he thought it unseemly that she and his son should have to hide the whereabouts of their home and circumstances. He found out where they lived from a miner in the saloon next to the union hall, then went back to the hotel and dressed in a light blue coat and Confederate-gray trousers and a beige shirt and a black string tie. He brushed his Stetson and had his cordovan boots shined in the lobby, all the time wondering about the fleeting nature of life and the way one or two seemingly insignificant choices could open the door to a kingdom or sweep a man’s destiny into a dustbin.

He bought a whirligig for Ishmael and a bouquet and a box of candy for Ruby, and hired a carriage to take him up a canyon that seldom saw direct sunlight and probably had been worked by individual prospectors for float gold and abandoned when the mother lode was never found. The road wound along a stream lined with rocker boxes and desiccated sluices and houses that were hardly more than shacks; the stream was a trickle at the base of the canyon, its exposed rocks greasy with an unnatural shine.

Hackberry leaned forward in the seat and spoke through the viewing slit to the driver. “What kind of place is this?” he asked.

“One to stay out of,” the driver replied. His back was massive and humped like a turtle’s shell, his coat splitting at the shoulders, his neck thick and ridged with hair beneath his top hat. The accent was Cockney. “They drink out of the same creek they build their privies on. They live like animals. There’s an invalids’ home here, too. Not a pretty sight.”

Hackberry looked out the carriage’s side windows. The canyon was precipitous and rocky and unsuitable for habitation. The only flat ground where a shelter could be built was close to the stream. He leaned forward again just as the carriage jolted across a deep hole. “Tell me something,” he said.

“What might that be, sir?”

“Why would anyone want to live here?”

“That’s a good question.”

“It’s not a question.”

“I don’t get your meaning,” the driver said, raising his voice above the noise of the wheels on the road.

“Nobody
wants
to live in a place like this. They live here because they’re poor and they have no work. Nobody wants to be poor and without work.”

The driver turned around. He looked into Hackberry’s face as though seeing it for the first time. “Your destination is right ahead, sir,” he said. “Should I wait, or will you be having a jolly night with a lady friend in this splendid little spot?”

A
FTER THE CARRIAGE
driver rumbled back down the road, his whip and his crushed top hat lying in a puddle of dirty water, Hackberry knocked on the door of a paint-stripped, rotting frame house with a tiny porch and bare yard and a privy and wash line in back. What he could not get over was the absence of any distinguishable color in the canyon, as though the sky and earth had conspired to rob its inhabitants of hope or joy.

Ruby was obviously surprised when she opened the door. “I said we would meet you at your hotel. How did you know where we lived?” She looked around the disarray of her small living room, pushing her hair up, her face flustered. “How did you get here?”

“In a carriage.”

“Where is it?”

“I sent the driver on his way.”

“A top hat is floating in a mud hole.”

“I think he needed to check on his family, an emergency of some kind. Do you have a neighbor I could pay to drive us to town?”

“I never know what’s in your head. Or when you’re lying. No one does.”

“You don’t need to hide your situation from me, Ruby. I want to be your friend.”

“Come in.”

Their level of privation filled him with shame. Through the side windows he could see the backyards of the neighbors, house after house, the children in rags, grimed with dirt, some with rickets and others with runny noses.

“The driver told me there was a house for invalids here’bouts.”

“Up the road. Most of them have lost arms or legs or eyes to dynamite. Some have the consumption. They’re called ‘lungers.’”

“I think you should leave here.”

“And go where?”

“Wherever you want. I’m still a fairly well-to-do man.”

“And your wife will have no objection?”

“I control my own finances.”

“That’s not Maggie Bassett’s reputation.”

“Why do you badmouth me, Ruby?”

“Why did you ask about the invalids’ home?”

“It doesn’t seem right these men should be hidden away,” he said.

“Do you want to visit them?”

“Probably not.”

“No one else does, either.”

“Maybe they chose their lot,” he said before he could stop himself.

“They chose to blow up themselves for the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company?”