House of the Rising Sun: A Novel (22 page)

“What?” said the man with the split forehead.

“Git. Don’t come back. Next time out, I’ll hurt you.”

The man with the split head had pressed his hand to his wound and was staring at the bloody star on his palm. “What the hell you call this?”

“Practice,” Hackberry said.

He gathered up his revolver and holster and belt and sat back down in his chair, blowing out his breath, trying to catch a glimpse of the sky beyond the cave’s entrance. Then he set his stationery box on his lap and began to address an envelope to Ishmael. In seconds he was deep in thought about Ishmael. When he glanced up again, his visitors were gone.

T
HE HOSPITAL OUTSIDE
Denver had been converted from a nineteenth-century army fort whose two-story buildings had the wide porches and stucco walls and red Spanish-tile roofs of army forts all over the burgeoning New American Empire. Ishmael had been placed in a ward with eight other officers, then moved to a private room, one that had a radiator and a private bathroom and a lovely view of the shade trees on the grounds and, in the distance, mountains whose peaks gusted with snow in the sunset.

“Why the special treatment?” Ishmael asked the orderly.

“You probably have friends in high places.”

“Must be a mistake,” Ishmael said.

“You need anything, Captain?”

“I didn’t sleep much last night. Could you give me a touch of something, nothing too strong?”

“Better talk to the doc.”

“I don’t want to bother him. Don’t worry about it.”

“I’ll see what I can do, Captain.”

“Thank you.”

He hadn’t lied. He seldom slept through the night without dreaming, and as the French colonel had warned him, his dreams were not good ones. Neither were they nightmares, at least not in the ordinary sense. They were not filled with gargoyles and improbable events; they were simply a replay of events he had witnessed or images he had seen. Maybe that was what made the dreams so disturbing: They weren’t creations of the mind; they were an accurate replication of the world. The bigger problem was he couldn’t shut them down, as he did during his waking hours. Also the images told a story that few wanted to hear and that he did not wish to impose upon others.

Some German infantry units were issued a bayonet that had sawteeth along the crest of the blade. When it was extracted from the victim, particularly when the entry wound was in the upper torso, the sawteeth ripped loose bone, cartilage, lungs, kidneys, liver, and entrails like viscera in a slaughterhouse. One way or another, the French sent a message to the Germans: Any soldier captured with a sawtooth bayonet not filed flat on the spine would suffer a fate that no civilized person would ever want to hear about. To Ishmael, the stories had seemed apocryphal, not unlike the accounts of women chained to machine guns or bottles of German schnapps laced with cyanide left in trenches for French soldiers to find. Anyway, why was dying on a sawtooth bayonet more inhumane than death by a flamethrower or mustard gas that boiled the eyes in their sockets and coated the inside of the lungs with blisters and pustules?

Ishmael and his men had gone over the top through six hundred yards of machine-gun fire and artillery rounds loaded with gas, the air so thick with smoke and dust that the sun had turned to an orange wafer, metal flying through the air with a dry spitting sound like someone blowing abruptly through a peashooter. Men were crumpling all around him; some were caught in the wire and trying to free themselves with their bare hands; some were atomized. In the background was the constant knocking of the Maxims, as dull and unrelenting as a woodpecker tapping on a telephone pole. Suddenly, Ishmael and ten others, all of them gray with dust, as featureless as aborigines, were standing on the lip of the enemy trench, firing point-blank into the Germans trapped below, then jumping into their midst, clubbing heads with rifle butts or pistols and double-edged trench knives with brass knuckles on the hand guard, impaling or beating to a bloody pulp every enemy soldier who didn’t surrender and sometimes those who did.

Both French soldiers and members of his regiment were leaping over the trench, driving deeper into the German line. Others were rounding up the Germans who had thrown down their weapons and raised their hands. Ishmael shucked the spent shells from his revolver and reloaded each chamber, his fingers shaking uncontrollably. On his left, he saw the French Legionnaires piling into the trench, some picking up German stick grenades and stuffing them in their belts. Something else was going on, too. A crowd had formed at a bend in the trench, each soldier trying to look over the shoulder of another. Someone was shouting in German.

Ishmael tore the wrapper off a candy bar and began eating, trying to close his mind to what may be happening farther down the trench. Then a man screamed. Ishmael could not tell if the voice belonged to the man who had been shouting in German. The scream contained no hope, only terror and pain.

He walked through the clutter of haversacks, ammunition boxes, gas masks, knee mortars, stretchers, pistol flares, telephone wires, shell casings, wire cutters, blood-caked bandages, first-aid kits, ration tins, rotted food, newspaper that someone had cleaned himself with, ammunition belts and boxes of potato mashers and rifle grenades fitted into their compartments like eggs in a carton, then pushed his way through the Legionnaires, who were bunched tightly together. He saw what they had done and tried to look away in the same way you would if you opened a bedroom door at the wrong moment.

A German soldier in a dirty gray uniform was sitting with his back against the trench, his legs splayed, his bucket helmet lying beside him. He had a long face, like a horse’s, and bad teeth and flaxen hair and defensive wounds in his hands and a large wet area around his thighs where he had soiled himself. A sawtooth bayonet had been driven through his left eye socket, all the way to the hilt, pinning his head to the wall.

They were Legionnaires, many of them criminals,
Ishmael told himself later.
If they hadn’t joined the Legion, they would have been on Devil’s Island. They were victims themselves, sent into the lines as cannon fodder. What they did is not their fault.

But rationalizing the scene in the trench was not an easy job. These men had descended from the same tree and were made of the same flesh and blood as their victim. Their crime was not committed in hot blood, and their choice of a victim was arbitrary. Ishmael had seen three other German prisoners captured with rifles that had sawtooth bayonets. One had gotten a punch in the face; nothing was done to the other two. Later, the executioner of the German solider, a peasant from Brittany, made coffee and smoked cigarettes and chatted with his comrades a few feet from the body, as blithe as a bridegroom on his wedding day.

Psychiatrists might assure their patients that dreams were only dreams and they disappeared into the daylight. But psychiatrists had no cure for the truth about man’s capacity for cruelty. The ancient Greeks understood that, and so did the growers of the opium poppy. The gift of Morpheus brought not only sleep but oblivion. You just had to be careful, a little touch now and then. You did not think of it in a self-serving or profligate way. You chewed the tablet gently, your eyes closed in a demonstration of gratitude and reverence. You let the granules slide down your throat with your saliva, and you swallowed with the words “thank you” on your lips. How could any gift from the natural world be bad? Morphine healed all wounds and lifted all burdens. The tranquillity it purchased was ethereal, if not holy.

The orderly kept his word and placed a vial of pills under Ishmael’s pillow. That afternoon, when Ishmael woke from his slumber, he felt the wind blowing through the window like a cool burn on his skin. The snow on the peaks of the mountain was feathering against the sky. Then a figure stepped in front of the window, blocking out the sun. It took a moment for Ishmael’s eyes to adjust. He studied her face and the redness of her mouth and the trimness of her body and her elegant clothes and the thickness of her hair. Though she was an older woman, she was one of the loveliest women he had ever seen.

“I’m Maggie Bassett. I used to be your father’s wife or animal trainer, take your choice,” she said. “My, you’ve grown into a big boy.”

S
HE WAS WEARING
a purple dress with a silver and ivory brooch at her throat and high-heeled boots and a tall domed black hat with a floppy brim. She sat down in a chair by the widow and removed her hat and brushed her hair out on her shoulders. It was dark brown and looked freshly washed and dried, reflective of light, soft on her skin. “You don’t remember me?” she said.

“I remember the name,” he said.

“Probably not in the best way. Hack and I weren’t a good match. Was it bad over there?”

“In the trenches? Not always. I wouldn’t believe all the stories you hear.”

“Is your mother alive?”

“Why wouldn’t she be?”

“I heard she was involved with anarchists or something. In a mass killing.”

“She was at the Ludlow Massacre, right down the road. The miners were on strike. They weren’t anarchists.”

“You have unusual attitudes for a professional soldier.”

“I’m a soldier, not a company gink. The Colorado militia was doing Rockefeller’s dirty work.”

“You’re certainly your mother’s son. I always admired her. I think she and I have a lot in common.”

“Nobody is like my mother.”

“We both got involved with a man who has ten inches of penis and three of brain.”

“You talk pretty rough.”

“You don’t know the half of it, sweetie.”

“Why are you here?”

“I believe I helped deny you the home and family you should have had. I have a conscience, believe it or not.”

“You came here to tell me that?”

“No, to offer you a job with an export-import company.”

“Oh yeah?”

“It’s a consortium. We have an office in San Antonio. Our warehouses are in Houston and New Orleans.” Her gaze went away from his, out the window. “See how the trees flutter in the wind? This is such a fine time of year. You lived here when you were a child?”

“We lived in a sump outside of Trinidad. My mother worked two or three jobs to feed us.”

“Where is she now?”

“Wherever the union sends her. She went to see Joe Hill before he was executed by firing squad in Utah.”

“Who?”

“The songwriter. He was framed by the mine owners.”

“I see,” she said. “But she’s not an anarchist or a Communist?”

“I never asked her.”

Maggie approached the bed. Her eyes moved over his face. “I rode two days on the train to be here.”

“That’s very nice of you.”

“I was a prostitute and helped rob a bank. But I never hurt a child. Except you.”

“You don’t owe me anything.”

She placed her hand on his forehead. “You’re hot.”

“It’s the radiator. It’s got its own way. It turns itself on and off at the wrong times.” He tried to smile.

“The radiator is cold. You have a fever.”

“That’s why sick people go to hospitals. They have fevers and such.”

“You talk like your father.”

“I talk like the people in the mining and log camps where I grew up.”

She unbuttoned the top of his pajamas and placed her hand on his breast. “Your heart is like a drum.”

“You could fool me.”

“I came here as a friend, not to embarrass you.”

“I heard you were a schoolteacher. I don’t understand why an educated woman would marry my father.”

“He’s far more intelligent than he pretends. That’s what his enemies never understand about him. Until it’s too late.”

“I don’t like to talk about him,” Ishmael said.

“Do you want anything? I brought you some fruit. I don’t know if you’re supposed to have it.”

“That’s kind of you. Thank you.”

“You’d better get used to me. We’re going to be seeing lots of each other.”

She removed the sheet from his legs. His pajama bottoms were cut off at the tops of his thighs. His wounds were wrapped with medicated bandages all the way to the ankles. In places he had bled through. She put her hand on his lower abdomen and then on his thigh. “I can feel the heat through your skin. How many places were you hit?”

“There are men in the ward you don’t want to look at. Their families cry when they see them.”

“I want to do something for you,” she said.

“No, you shouldn’t have those kinds of feelings. I had a good life as a child.”

She leaned down and kissed him on the mouth. One of her tresses fell on his cheek. He thought he smelled lilacs in her hair.

“Did you enjoy that?”

“What am I supposed to say?”

She kissed him on the mouth again, then gazed into his face. “Let me.”

“Let you what?”

“Let me do what I can for you.”

He shook his head on the pillow. “You don’t need to worry about me.”

She stroked his hair. “You’re big and you’re handsome, yet you’re like a little boy.”

“I wish you wouldn’t say things like that.”

“Am I too old?”

“No, ma’am, I don’t think that at all.”