House of the Rising Sun: A Novel (30 page)

He felt his cane pole throb in his hand. His bobber had been pulled straight down in the eddy, the moisture squeezing from the tension in the line, the weight of the fish arching the pole to the point of breaking. He slipped his hands down the pole and grabbed the line and twisted it around his wrists and pulled the catfish clear of the eddy and the rotted cottonwood, through the reeds and onto the bank, its long, sleek, grayish-yellow sides and whiskers and spiked fins coating with sand.

He put his foot across the fish’s stomach and worked the treble hook free of its mouth, then picked it up by the tail, avoiding its spikes, and swung its head against a rock, slinging blood on the grass. He put the catfish in the bait bucket and squatted by the water’s edge and began washing the blood and fish slime from his hands. The water clouded and the blood disappeared inside it, but he could not get the smell of the fish and what it reminded him of off his hands.

He got on his knees and scrubbed his hands with sand, accidentally knocking over the bucket, spilling on his pants the blood from the piece of liver he had brought for bait. He walked up the incline and sat down next to the burial spot, his arms limp, his head on his chest.

Me again. Everything I touch comes to the same end. I got nowhere to go. I got nobody to cover my back. He’p my boy, please, wherever he is. And if you can, he’p me keep my aim true and my eye clear. This isn’t much of a prayer, but it’s all I got right now. Amen.

Later, he looked from his upstairs bedroom window at the spot where the rusted cable lay and thought he saw a white light, like moon glow, radiating from the ground rather than from the heavens. Then a cloud passed in front of the moon, and the light disappeared from the embankment, and he realized it had been an illusion.

H
E WOKE EARLY
to the smell of coffee boiling and bread baking. He put on his trousers and boots and hooked his suspenders over his undershirt and went downstairs into the unheated house and saw a man’s head go past the kitchen window. He opened the back door and saw a cook fire blazing by the edge of his flower garden, a piece of corrugated tin stretched across two rocks, the wind flattening the smoke on the lawn. Willard Posey was pouring water from a tin can into the coffeepot.

“I hate to ask,” Hackberry said.

“Ask what?”

“You cook biscuits in everybody’s yard?”

“Just yours,” Willard said. “I made the coffee a little too strong and added some more water. You have any butter?”

“What’s the problem of the day, Willard?”

“I figured you needed a friend.”

“About the trouble in San Antonio?”

“Get us some plates. You have such a fine place here. It’s one of the most peaceful spots I’ve ever seen. The envy of any normal man.”

“Is this going to take long?”

“I’ll try to keep it short,” Willard replied.

They sat in straight-back chairs and ate off tin plates on the back porch, the sunlight spreading across the hills, the willows on the riverbank the color of old brass.

“Why’d you do it?” Willard said.

“Shoot the man in the cathouse?”

“Go to San Antonio.”

“I owed Miz DeMolay.”

Willard nodded. “That’s not really why I’m here. I got a call from your former common-law wife. She didn’t ring you?”

Hackberry stopped eating. “You’re talking about Ruby?”

“Yes, sir, that’s the name she gave me. Miss Ruby Dansen.”

“Where is she?”

“She didn’t say. She wanted to know where her son has gone to.”

“He’s in the army hospital outside Denver.”

“She says your ex-legal-wife took him out of there. She said your ex-legal-wife is given to unscrupulous and devious activities. She also said your ex was the paramour of the Sundance Kid, although she didn’t use the word ‘paramour.’”

“Maggie Bassett took Ishmael out of the hospital?”

“On a train headed south. According to her, Maggie Bassett put your boy in a wheelchair and abducted him.”

“You didn’t get a callback number? You just dropped by and made breakfast in my yard and dumped all this in my lap without bothering to get a number?”

“She didn’t give it. I asked.”

“He was in a wheelchair?”

“That’s what she said.”

“What kind of shape?”

“I don’t know, Hack. I felt obliged to tell you this. I didn’t come out here to be your pincushion.”

Hackberry stepped into the yard and knocked the crumbs from his tin pan. “I didn’t mean to get crossways with you.”

“I worry about you.”

“So do I.”

“There’s people trying to mess you up. What bothers me is you seem to he’p them every chance you get.”

“Deputize me.”

“Wouldn’t that be a step downward for you?”

“Pay me a dollar a year. You’ll always know where I’m at. I won’t be able to sass you, either.”

“You still haven’t learned to drive a motorcar?”

“Haven’t had time to get a manual. Or whatever the directions are called.”

Willard stared into space. “I think one of us ought to run off with the circus.”

F
OR ISHMAEL, THE
nights and days at Maggie Bassett’s house in San Antonio were not separated by the rising and the setting of the sun but by changes in the chemistry of his body and brain. Fatigue gave way to sleep and a moment’s rest, then a sudden awakening on the Marne, where he found himself running through artillery fire, his legs caught in wet cement, the air bursts illuminating flooded shell holes stained yellow on the rims with mustard gas, dead men floating in them, their bodies bloated, their uniforms splitting on their backs.

The sunrise brought with it a pressure band along the side of his head, as though he were wearing a hat, and a third eye in his vision where ordinary images became part of an alternate universe, one that could easily suck him into its confines if he were not careful. A wrong thought was not a minor concern. One slip and he could find himself inside his third eye, where all bets were off and reason held no sway. He wondered if his brain were no longer attached to his skull.

Maggie brought him breakfast on a tray and opened the curtains so he could look out on the rolling countryside and the gray ruins of a Spanish mission and its two bell towers and the birds that rose from them in the morning and descended in droves at sunset. She washed him and medicated his wounds and changed his bandages. She read to him when he couldn’t sleep, and put an Edison Amberola next to his bed so he could listen to recorded music on a cylinder. She also fixed him ice cream with crushed pineapple on it and insisted on hand-feeding it to him. When his skin burned for no reason, she took a very small pill from a vial and placed it in his mouth and lay by his side and held his hand in hers.

It was the other thing she did for him that he knew he could not live without. To deny his need was foolish; to deny the pleasure he derived from satisfying that need was even more foolish, somewhat like a man on the edge of orgasm telling himself he could be sexually abstemious if he so desired.

He didn’t know what the hypodermic needle contained. She swore it was not morphine, just a harmless powder, a mild antidote to relieve the pain in his legs and the night sweats that soaked his sheets and left him depressed and trembling with cold in the morning, like a child who had wet his bed. She prepared the hypodermic needle twice a day in the kitchen, beyond his line of vision, but he could hear her drag the match across the striker on the box, then he would smell the pleasant odor of burning candle wax and another odor, one that seemed out of context, like someone splashing fireside bourbon into a tumbler.

In preparation for the procedure, she washed her hands with soap and water and disinfectant and always cleaned his skin with rubbing alcohol and a cotton swab before she pricked the vein, the blood rising through the needle into the glass barrel. Then she pushed down the plunger, looking kindly into his face as his mouth opened and his viscera melted.

“Why do I smell whiskey when you load the syringe?” he asked on their third day in San Antonio. He was sitting by the window in a wheelchair woven from straw, thirty minutes after an injection, the sky hung with warm colors that dissolved into one another.

“You don’t like it?”

“I’m just not sure what we’re doing.”

“You’re not a drinker. So I give it to you this way. A little wine for the stomach.”

“How do you know I’m not a drinker?”

“Because you’re nothing like your father.”

“I remember him being a good father when I was little. I never understood why he left us or why he didn’t visit or get in touch.”

“He left you because he’s a selfish, mean, murderous man. That’s not an insult. It’s what he is. Maybe it’s not even his fault.”

“He must have hurt you pretty bad.”

“Your father made me have an abortion. He’s a shit. What else can I tell you about him?”

“My mother said he liked children.”

“Believe what you want.”

“Maybe he didn’t like me,” Ishmael said.

She went into the kitchen and came back with a folded newspaper. She dropped it into his lap. “See what he’s been up to.”

The article about the shooting in the brothel was on the front page. The headline read:
WAR HERO KILLED BY EX–TEXAS RANGER.
The lead paragraph identified the dead man as a union organizer and a recipient of the Purple Heart and the Medal of Honor who had been horribly burned and disfigured during the Filipino Insurrection. It made no mention of the victim’s arrest record. The shooter was a retired Texas Ranger and former city marshal who had been fired from his job for public drunkenness. His name was Hackberry Morgan Holland. A pistol had been found near the body of the deceased. The investigation was continuing.

“The sheriff will protect your father, so don’t waste your time feeling sorry for him,” Maggie said.

“How do you know?”

“They’re corrupt.”

“Not all of them.”

“When I was a working girl, we had to give free ones. Want some names?”

“No.”

She took the newspaper from his hands and dropped it into a wastebasket. “Would you like to go down to your office today?”

“Which office?”

“The one where you’re going to work and make a great deal of money. Arnold wants to meet you. Tomorrow he’ll be off to Galveston and Juárez. When you’re better, you and I can go to Mexico with him. You can buy handmade lace and jewelry for the change in your pocket.”

“I need to talk to my mother, Maggie. I don’t know why she didn’t come back to the hospital. You left a message?”

“I told you that. I told the hospital administrators how to reach us, too. I called her union in Santa Fe.”

“I thought it was in Albuquerque.”

“Maybe she’s working in both places. Ishmael, your mother is probably under great stress right now. The U.S. Attorney’s Office is arresting radicals all over the country. You know, because of the Italians putting bombs in people’s mailboxes. I think somebody should drop a bomb on Ellis Island.”

He stood up from the chair, waiting for the momentary discomfort and pain to leave. “I want to walk today. I don’t care where we go.”

“You’re not ready. You need to sit down.”

“I’m tired of sitting. I’m tired of lying in bed. Tell me about Arnold Beckman again. I can’t keep some of these things straight in my head.”

“You’re still recovering. You were almost blown apart.”

“The ones who were blown apart are still in France. Why does Beckman want me? I don’t have much work experience outside the military.”

“People love a hero.”

“I’m not heroic.”

“I’ve seen your medals.”

“Most of them are French. Nobody cares about French medals,” he said.

“It doesn’t matter. People want appearances. I was a schoolteacher. Think anybody is interested in the history of a schoolteacher? But a reformed whore who still has her looks? Tell me men aren’t interested. Women, too, if they’re honest.”

Ishmael picked up both his canes and walked to his bed and sat down heavily. He rolled down his pajamas over his bandages and peeled them free of his ankles and pulled on his trousers. He walked to the dresser without the canes and took a fresh shirt from a drawer and put it on and tucked it in and tightened his belt. He straightened his back, smiling. “Not bad, huh?”

“We have to be back by four.”

“I thought we might eat in a restaurant.”

“No, we have to come home for your medication. We have to keep the regimen,” she said. “You need the right kind of food. Have you ever worked in a restaurant? If you saw the people who wash the dishes and prepare the food, you’d never eat out again.”

“I think I’ve got too many punctures in me. I just want to go outside. I want to be in the sunshine again.”

“I haven’t done bad by you, have I?”

“You were swell. In every way.”

“You used the past tense. There is no past tense between us.”

“That went by me.”

“Don’t worry about all these little things. Let little people worry about little things. That’s their job.” She kissed him on the cheek. “That’s a preview for when we come back. I want to give you the life you didn’t have.”

“My life has been fine.”

She rested her head on his shoulder and placed the flat of her hand on his heart. “I’ll make it finer. I’ll be your mother and your lover and your sister and all things to you.”

“Some might call you an unusual lady, Maggie.”

“You’re my big boy. Big all over. My big, lovely, delectable boy.” She unbuttoned the top of his shirt and kissed his chest. “Precious thing.”