House of the Rising Sun: A Novel (34 page)

“You got yourself in the honeypot, boy,” he said. “The drunk wagon might be along directly. That’s as good as it’s gonna get.” It was the man whose nose was bulbous and mottled purple and still dripping blood. “Got nothing to say?”

Ishmael lifted his cheek from the floor. “I’m Captain Ishmael Holland, United States Army,” he whispered.

“No, you’re my property and a liar on top of it,” the man replied, unbuttoning his fly. “Relax. This is nothing. Wait till the two of us are alone.” He cupped his phallus in his palm and arched a gold stream of urine on Ishmael’s head and mouth and eyes. “Here’s your canes. My name is Fred. I’m gonna have a hot dog, then I’ll be back.” He pressed an ax handle into Ishmael’s thigh and twisted it. “Want anything?”

Ishmael passed out and went to a place and a particular evening in his childhood he had always associated with disappointment, an evening he had thought he would never want to revisit.

Big Bud had come to their home up a dark valley outside Trinidad, Colorado, with flowers and chocolate for his mother and a whirligig for him. And a promise to take Ishmael on the train to Elitch Gardens in Denver. Not only would he have ridden the roller coaster and pedaled a boat across a lake churning with bronze-backed carp; he would have seen moving pictures filled with Indians trailing feathered bonnets and stagecoaches caroming through clouds of dust, the driver and shotgun guard hanging on for dear life, the passengers firing black-powder weapons out the windows at their pursuers.

He would have been in a theater crowded with children whose mothers and fathers sat next to them, just as he would have been sitting next to his mother and father, the way families did.

But Big Bud and his mother had argued, and Big Bud did not keep his promise and instead went back to Texas on the train and never saw his son again. Now, inside the cage, inside the reek of feces that someone had tried to scrub out of the wood floor with ammonia, he began to create and superimpose a fantasy on his young life.

The sounds and activity outside the cage became the visit to the magical place where the train should have taken him and his father and mother. He saw the three of them spinning in a big teacup mounted on a stanchion that rose and fell against the sky; he saw them eating frozen custard with tiny wooden spoons out of paper cups, and ice cream wrapped inside a waffle, and sausages that were split open and stuffed with cheese and chives and rolled inside a chunk of warm French bread. He saw the three of them walking down the midway, his mother holding one of his hands, his father the other, swinging him over the electric cables that powered the rides. He knew that as long as they held on to each other, nothing in the world would ever be able to harm him.

Where’s that fine-looking little chap?
he heard his father say.

Right here, Big Bud,
he answered.

I cain’t find you, son. Where are you hiding?

I’ve fallen into a dark place. Why did you leave me?

Just hold on. I’ll be there. I promise.

You promised before and left us. Why would any father do that to his family?

There was no answer.

Tell me where you are, Big Bud. I know you’re out there. Can’t you hear me?

Ishmael saw a work boot close by the corner of his eye. “Told you I’d be back,” said Fred. He squatted down, a hot dog balanced in one hand. He tilted his head so he could look directly into Ishmael’s eyes, and pulled up a chair. “Doesn’t look like the drunk wagon is gonna be back. I told the Missing Link he could relax for a while. Look what I got you. A half-pint of white lightning. Open wide. You might have a future here.”

R
UBY WENT TO
a café down the street from the hotel where she was staying, and ordered a cup of tea and a plate of black bread with butter and a dish of apricots, and wondered how long her money would last, even if she starved herself.

A day of reckoning was probably at hand, and not the kind the IWW had hoped for. Wilson’s imprisonment of pacifists and draft resisters and critics of the war, along with the jailing of union organizers in the western states and the execution of Joe Hill, had fed the agenda of the anarchists and produced a level of violence and fear that was a gift from a divine hand to corporate America.

Ruby finished eating and left a ten-cent tip for the waiter and went outside. In the next two blocks, she could see bars on both sides of the street, a tattoo parlor, pawnshops, stairs on the side of a decrepit building leading to a taxi dance hall upstairs, the windows open, filled with yellow light, the dancers moving like shadows. Again she thought she heard a calliope. She saw a glow beyond a copse of trees on the edge of the city, and a spotlight shining on a hot-air balloon, someone throwing Chinese firecrackers from the gondola, the electric flashes and strings of smoke out of sync with the staccato popping that was like rain clicking on lily pads.

A policeman was standing on the corner. He wore a high-collared brass-buttoned blue jacket and a lacquered helmet, the kind a British bobby might wear.

“Pardon me, is that a circus over there?” she asked.

“No, ma’am, that’s the sideshow and the carnival that travels with the circus.”

“I see,” she said. She watched the balloon rise higher in the sky, the spotlight hitting on its silvery skin like hundreds of mirrors.

The policeman wore a short club and handcuffs on his belt and had a brush mustache and a merry smile. “Would you like to go there?” he asked.

“I was looking for my son. He loved to go to fairs and the circus when he was a little boy. I took him as often as I could.”

“Your son lives in San Antonio?”

“You could say he’s visiting. He was wounded on the Marne. His name is Ishmael Holland. Is there a jitney or a carriage that could take me to the carnival?”

“Yes, on the next block. You said your son’s name is Holland?”

“You know him?”

“Is he related to a former Texas Ranger?”

“Yes, his father is Hackberry Holland.”

The policeman’s eyes met hers, this time in a different way.

“You know Mr. Holland?” she said.

“Not personally.”

“My son shouldn’t be walking about. His wounds are probably bleeding.”

“That’s a peculiar situation you describe, ma’am. I’m having a bit of trouble understanding what’s going on here.”

“My son fought in a war to help make the crown princes of Europe and Britain richer. The oil reserves in the Arabian deserts weren’t a minor issue, either. Now he’s impaired.”

“Words such as those aren’t much welcomed around here.”

“That’s too bad.” She looked again at his eyes. “Was there something you were going to say about Mr. Holland?”

“He shot and killed a man in a colored house of ill repute. The man he shot was a syndicalist. At least that’s what they’re called hereabouts. Are you feeling all right, ma’am?”

“Yes,” she answered, an army of needles marching down her neck and spine.

“You’re a socialist?” he said.

“Yes, I am. I’m also a friend of Elizabeth Flynn and Emma Goldman.”

“I don’t know who those people are. Do you still want to go to the carnival?”

“I don’t know if I have enough money for a jitney. Is there public transportation?” she said, the sound of her words unfamiliar, uttered by someone else, like soap bubbles rising one at a time in her throat, her mind unable to shut down the image of Hack Holland killing a union organizer in a brothel.

The policeman reached out and placed his hand lightly on her upper arm. “Steady there.”

“I’m quite all right. I spent a long time on the train. I’m a bit tired, that’s all. Why did Mr. Holland shoot the union man?”

“I don’t know the details. The victim had been in prison for syndicalism. The radicals are upset because he was a war hero and that sort of thing.” He waited for her to speak, but she didn’t. “My fellow police officer parked down the street owes me a favor,” he said. “I’ll ask him to drive you to the carnival. Ma’am, did you hear me? Would you like my friend to drive you?”

“Yes. Please. That’s very gracious of you.”

“This isn’t a city to have trouble in.” The policeman gazed across the street, where two other policemen were dragging a man in a slug cap and disheveled suit out of an alleyway, through the garbage cans, throwing him onto the sidewalk. “I keep my own counsel about various things. You might do the same.”

F
OR HACKBERRY, THE
end of the day had become a harbinger of death, not simply a gathering of the light on the horizon but a shrinking of it, a compression whereby darkness prevailed over goodness and drew the vestiges of the sun over the earth’s edge, obviating the prospect of another sunrise, another spring, one of bluebonnets and buttercups and Indian paintbrush, another chance at undoing the past and reassembling the broken elements of his life.

His father, Sam Morgan Holland, had been a drover and a Confederate soldier and a violent and drunken man with a homicidal temper who had watched his entire herd, two thousand head, spook in dry lightning and turn in to a brown river flowing over the Flint Hills outside Wichita, Kansas. He had cursed God for his bad fortune and stayed drunk all the way back to Texas, and joined those who sat on the mourners’ bench at the New Hebron Baptist Church, in despair and beyond the pale.

The terminology depended on a person’s education, but the characterization of hopelessness and irrevocable loss was always the same. Women who killed themselves in sod houses in the dead of winter had “cabin fever.” Those who studied the mystics called it “the long night of the soul” or “a time in the Garden.” Others were simply called self-pitying drunks who were “weak” and would trade their souls for a half cup of whiskey.

Supposedly, Sam Holland found peace when he hung his guns on a peg in a brick jail on the border, and locked the iron door behind him, and rode away to become a saddle preacher on the Chisholm Trail. Hackberry had his doubts about the story. Blood didn’t rinse easily from a man’s dreams. Nor did memories of irreparable injury done to others.

Hackberry had experienced “spells” since he was a child. A spell could last fifteen minutes or days. The experience was the equivalent of weevil worms eating a hole through his heart while he watched a sky as blue and flawless as silk turn into a giant sheet of carbon paper.

Voices in his head. Night sweats in the middle of the day. Inability to breathe, as though someone had sifted a tablespoon of sand in each of his lungs. A sensation above the left ear that was like a banjo string being tightened around the scalp. People wondered why a man sat down on a stump and upended his shotgun and propped his chin on both barrels?

When he’d found Beatrice DeMolay’s bordello in the high desert of central Mexico, he had thought a deliverance was at hand. Instead, he was tortured by fire and in other ways he could not completely remember; he also littered the landscape with the bodies of his tormentors. Then the cup had come into his possession. Was it an accident? Or was there purpose in his discovering it ironically in a hearse filled with ordnance?

As the light died on the horizon and the air cooled and grew dense with a smell like old leaves in a rain barrel, he walked down to the river and sat once again by the tangle of rusted cables where he had buried the cup.

He had read in his encyclopedias about the Arthurian search for the Grail and the stories of Knights Templar who supposedly returned from the Crusades with the shroud and pieces of the cross. He set little store by any of it. The one reference that wouldn’t go away, however, was the name of the Grand Master of the Knights Templar. It was Jacques de Molay, burned at the stake in front of Notre Dame Cathedral at the close of the thirteenth century. With a minor contraction of the spelling, the name was the same as Beatrice DeMolay’s.

Maybe it was another coincidence. That wasn’t a word Hackberry’s murderous saddle preacher of a father had much tolerance for. He called coincidence “the Lord acting with anonymity.”

Could the cup be real, the one Jesus not only drank from but probably dipped bread in and gave to his disciples? The thought frightened Hackberry, not because the cup had been held by Jesus but because it had been entrusted to
him
, Hackberry Holland, whose record of chaos and mayhem and womanizing and bloodshed was legendary in the worst sense.

According to what he had read, Jacques de Molay had returned from the Holy Land with the shroud that had covered Jesus’ body and, some believed, the Holy Grail. He and his fellow knights were arrested en masse on Friday the thirteenth, tortured unmercifully for days and weeks, and sent to their death as idolaters.

Hackberry looked at the evening star winking just above the hill on the far side of the river. He pared his fingernails with a knife and tried to create a blank space in the center of his mind where he could hide and think about absolutely nothing.

Forget about all the great mysteries,
he told himself. If anyone ever figured them out, he hadn’t seen the instance. What were the real problems confronting him? He had been lured into shooting and killing a man who was probably mentally impaired, someone who had been burned so badly he resembled a mannequin. Second, the issue with the cup was not about the cup but the fact that Arnold Beckman wanted it. And if Arnold Beckman wanted something, it was to make the earth a much worse place than it already was.