House of the Rising Sun: A Novel (21 page)

“The man who burned my merchandise also stole a religious relic from me.”

“Bones and such?”

“No, a sacramental cup. The woman who ran the bordello claimed to have no knowledge about it. Her name was Beatrice DeMolay.”

Beckman’s eyes seemed to be six inches from Hackberry’s, although the two men were standing three feet apart.

“You said ‘was’?”

“Yes, I did. Does that upset you?”

“I’ve known men like you. You’re cut out of different cloth.”

“Could you back up on that? I missed the allusion,” Beckman said.

Hackberry leaned to the side and spat. “I’ve seen your handiwork. Flies are usually buzzing over it. Like a trademark.”

“I’m opening up an arms company in San Antonio and Houston and New Orleans. I’m currently buying up captured and surplus infantry weapons from all over Europe, maybe the Orient, too. I could use a man like you. Do you think you could get my relic back?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about. What did you do to the woman at the bordello in Mexico?”

“What does any man do with an attractive whore? I fucked her until her brains were running out her ears.”

“I got to tend to my pumpkins.”

Beckman stuck a piece of paper in Hackberry’s pocket. “I’m staying in Austin. You have two days.”

I
N THE EARLY-MORNING
hours he woke to rumbling sounds he associated with dry thunder or a herd spooking on an unfenced stretch of hardpan. He looked at his bedside clock. It was 4:16. He went to the living room and stepped barefoot out on the porch. In the distance he could see a light burning in his neighbor’s house. The sky was black. A solitary bolt of lightning quivered whitely on the horizon, then disappeared. Inside the wind he could hear cattle lowing and the sweep of the trees by the river. He went back to sleep.

When he got up to fix breakfast, he glanced through the kitchen window at his pumpkin field. He stared at it for a long time, and at the slat fence on his hog pen and the barbed wire on the south end of his pasture. He poured a cup of black coffee and sat down at the kitchen table and drank it without sugar, then washed the cup under the hand pump in the sink and set it in the dry rack. Without bothering to shave, he put on his Stetson and saddled his horse and rode to the home of Cod Bishop.

He tapped on the door and waited. He could see the partially grassed-over area down by the river where, years ago, Bishop had burned the cabins of the black people living on his property, the scorched bricks and boards and sunken piles of ash still visible, as though the soil under the fire was incapable of restoring itself.

Bishop was wearing a Japanese robe when he opened the door, a monogrammed handkerchief in the breast pocket. “Why are you on my porch, Holland?”

“Arnold Beckman says you’re a friend of his.”

“He’s a business associate.”

“I never could understand the word ‘associate.’ It seems to cover everything.”

“If you’re drinking again, seek help from a physician or the temperance people. But leave.”

“Somebody cut my wire and let out my Brahmas and busted down my hog pen last night. Most of my pumpkins are ruined. I’m going to spend most of the day rounding up my stock.”

“Why are you telling me about it?”

“You hear or see anything unusual early this morning?”

“No, I did not.”

“Your light was on at about four-twenty. It was a warm night. You must have had your windows open.”

“I was in my office. I heard thunder. I don’t know anything about your pumpkins. Now go home.”

“Arnold Beckman has been making inquiries about my son. Did you tell him about my boy?”

“The one you drove from your home? How dare you speak to me like this?”

“You once said I was going to get my comeuppance.”

“If I said something like that, I was probably justified. But I don’t remember doing so. Regardless, I’m not the issue. You’re a violent and primitive man, pitied by your neighbors and, by all accounts, an embarrassment to the Texas Rangers. There’s a foul odor about you that you’re not even aware of. Be gone, sir. You gave up your claim to membership in decent society many years ago.”

“Cod, I’m convinced God sent you here to show us the fallacy of white superiority. Don’t hide your light under a basket. Many are called, but few are chosen.”

Bishop slammed the door in his face.

D
URING THE MORNING
and early afternoon, Hackberry and three of his Mexican workers salvaged a wagonload of his pumpkins and mended the hog pen and the barbed wire in the pasture and rounded up most of his stock. While he drove his cattle back into the pasture, he never took his eyes completely off the bluffs along the river or the dirt road that led to his house, or the deep green arbor of oak trees on the far end of his property. At three o’clock he left his horse saddled in the lot and went into the house and shaved and bathed and put on fresh clothes. Then he put a jar of lemonade and a jar of mustard and a loaf of bread and a chunk of uncooked roast and a whole onion and a fresh tomato in a canvas bag, along with a box that contained his stationery and fountain pen and postage stamps. He also picked up his holstered .44 Army Colt, the loops on the belt stuffed with cartridges, and hung it on the pommel of his horse, along with the canvas bag. He went into the barn and picked up an iron rod that had a wood handle on one end and on the other a hooked tip, blackened by fire.

The river was so low he could ride his horse across it on a sandbar. He came up on a stretch of beach shadowed by cypress whose lacy branches were turning gold with the season. Above him were gray limestone bluffs carpeted on top by lichen and moss and hollowed with depressions Tonkawa Indians had ground corn in. He rode up a sandy path lined on either side with fallen stone, and dismounted in front of a cave and tethered his horse to the limb of a willow tree. Down below, under the riffle flowing between two giant bounders, a shaft of sunlight had pierced the trees and lit the pebbled bottom as brightly as a rainbow.

A folding canvas chair was propped against the cave wall. He built a fire and cut strips from the uncooked roast with the bowie knife he had taken off the Mexican soldier he had killed two years earlier, and hung them on the iron rod and propped the rod across the rocks that ringed his fire. The smoke flattened against the roof, then corkscrewed through a crevice that formed a natural chimney into the top of the bluff. He sat down in the canvas chair and began a letter on top of his stationery box.

Dear Ishmael,
it read.

I hope you received my earlier correspondence. Whether you have the opportunity to answer my letter is not important at the moment. I am writing to warn you about a man named Arnold Beckman. He has taken an interest in me for reasons I won’t go into now. He has also used his contacts, all of which I suspect are nefarious in nature, to find out the name of the hospital where you are recuperating from your wounds.

Have nothing to do with this man or his minions. He’s an arms dealer, and like most arms dealers, he sells to both sides. I also believe him to be a sadist. In a word, he’s evil.

I love you, son. I let you and your mother down. One day I hope to make it up to you.

Write when you have time.

Your father,

Big Bud

A shadow fell across his handwriting. He began to write a postscript, not looking up. “You’re standing in my light,” he said.

“Saw your smoke. We were hunting down below,” a voice replied.

The speaker was rail-thin, over six feet, his shirt unbuttoned on a bony chest, his hair streaked with gray and soggy with sweat, tied up on his head. He propped his long rifle butt-down in front of him and leaned on it. It was a Mauser, one with a straight bolt. He grinned. “Sir? Are you there?”

“All the property from here on down to the river is mine. I don’t allow hunters on it.”

The second man was smaller, hatchet-faced, his sleeves cut off at the armpits, both of his arms tattooed with blue ink that had started to fade. He had black hair that grew like snakes, and a lazy eye that drifted back and forth in the socket the way a marble would. He carried a double-barrel shotgun crooked over his arm, the breech open, both chambers loaded. His body odor seemed to hang like an invisible curtain over the cave’s entrance. “What’s the good of a big ranch if you cain’t hunt on it?”

“I don’t believe in hurting animals unnecessarily.”

“A rancher who sends his cattle to the packer but don’t hurt them? That’s a challenge to my thinking powers.”

Hackberry capped his fountain pen and put it and his letter inside his stationery box and replaced the top on the box. “I’d figured y’all would be along.”

“What’s that you say?”

“If you dog somebody, don’t silhouette on the crest of a hill. Don’t aim your binoculars into the sun, either.”

“Why would we be dogging
you
?”

“You got me. Why not make a clean breast of it? Dip your soul in the Jordan, know what I mean? I think it was y’all cut my wire and busted up my hog pen and trampled my pumpkins.”

“My opinion is you’ve got your head up your ass.”

“Cod Bishop and Arnold Beckman will leave you twisting in the wind. You take the risk, they take the profits. Sound like a good deal to you?”

“We’ll be going. We didn’t mean to bother you,” said the man with the rifle. He grinned again, as though he could hardly contain his goodwill.

“I got a question,” said the man with the lazy eye. “Is that a cap and ball?”

Hackberry’s revolver lay on a flat rock on the other side of the fire, its belt coiled around the holster. “I had it converted for cartridges many years ago. I hardly shoot it these days. Want to shoot it?”

“You can leave it where it’s at.”

Hackberry propped his hands on his thighs and stared into the fire.

“Got yourself in a bind?” said the man with the lazy eye.

“That’s what age does. Your judgment goes. You want to believe in your fellow man, but you end up in sackcloth and ashes, wondering how you could be such a fool. Doesn’t seem fair, does it? You boys hungry? I got plenty.”

The man with the rifle smelled himself. “Thank you. Maybe later. We got a job to do.”

“You don’t get it, do you, son?”

“Get what?”

“You shouldn’t try to outsmart your betters.”

“Our betters?” said the man with the rifle.

“That’s right. Somebody hired you to follow me around, then report back to them. Instead, you got ambitious and decided to find out what was in this cave. Unfortunately, there’s nothing here except cougar bones and bat shit. So now you’ve made enemies with a man who in his youth put a number of people on the wrong side of the grass, and in the meantime you got yourself crossways with Arnold Beckman.”

It was silent in the cave. Hackberry leaned over and removed the onion and tomato and jar of lemonade and loaf of bread from the bag and set them on a flat rock. He sliced open the bread longways with the bowie and bladed mustard on it, then began halving the onion.

“Say all that again,” said the man with the rifle.

“I was trying to say I feel sorry for you.”

“Sorry for
us
?”

“You were probably unwanted at birth and had parents that were either poor-white trash or one step this side of feral. There’s no fix for it. The seed goes from generation to generation like congenital clap. I’ve heard Bedouins are warned not to shake hands with Southern poor whites. You sniff your armpits and blow your nose on your napkin and spit on the floor and wonder why nobody likes you. On top of it, pert’ near every one of you was beat on with an ugly stick. That’s what I mean about life not being fair.”

“I think you got rabies from these bats,” said the man with the lazy eye.

“Son, have you looked in the mirror lately?”

Hackberry squatted by the fire and began picking the strips of cooked roast off the iron rod with the tip of his bowie, laying them out on the bread.

“I’ve had all of you as I can take,” said the man with the lazy eye. He shut the breech of his shotgun. “Lay the knife down.” The man with the rifle reached over and picked up Hackberry’s revolver and tossed it behind a rock.

“I wish you hadn’t done that,” Hackberry said.

“That old revolver is the least of your problems,” said the man with the lazy eye.

“You trespass on my property, you lie to my face, you disturb my meal, and now you treat my possessions with contempt. You boys really piss me off. I hate stupid people. It’s a character defect I have never overcome. I work on it and work on it, and then a pair like you comes along and all my efforts go down the drain.” Hackberry’s face pained as he got to his feet, his joints creaking.

“You better close your mouth,” said the man with the lazy eye.

“That’s what I mean. Stupid to the core,” Hackberry said. “Your mother must have been impregnated by a yeast infection.”

He fitted his hand around the wood handle on the iron rod and rammed the heated tip into the scrotum of the man with the lazy eye, then swung it across the face of his partner. The man with the lazy eye dropped his shotgun and grabbed his genitalia, his mouth wide open, as though his jawbone were broken. Hackberry hit the other man again, splitting open his forehead, knocking him into the cave wall. He picked up the weapons of both men and flung them end over end into the river.

“Who paid you?” he said.

“Nobody,” said the man with the lazy eye.

“This running iron I’m holding is of historical importance,” Hackberry said. He held the tip of the iron over the fire. “I took it off the man who figured out how to change the XIT brand into a star with a cross inside it. The owners of the XIT let him off for showing them how he did it. I can show you how to do it, too. On your back or on your chest.”

“Then do it, you nasty old crock,” said the man with the lazy eye.

“I’m glad to hear you say that.”

The man with the lazy eye blanched, his jaw tightening.

“That’s not what I mean,” Hackberry said. “I’m glad to see you’re not totally worthless. Here’s the reality of our situation. If you torture a man, he’ll tell you whatever you want to hear. It’s a waste of everybody’s time, including the victim’s. Besides, it’s not something I do. So that’s it.
Adi
ó
s
.”