House of the Rising Sun: A Novel (35 page)

Hackberry rested his hand by the rusty coils of cable. What an unsuitable place for the cup, covered by the industrial detritus of the twentieth century. Time to move it. But where?

How did a cottontail elude his pursuers? He ran in a circle, then went down a hole or crossed water and left his enemy chasing a scent that had no end. A Comanche Indian up on the Staked Plains did the same: In blazing heat, in the midst of summer drought, he would put a pebble under his tongue to cause his mouth to salivate, then wander in circles and figure eights until the canteens of his pursuers were empty, and attack them at the end of a burning day. Hackberry would hide the cup in a place where Arnold Beckman’s people had already been. The cave. Strange. According to the legends recounted in his encyclopedias, the cup had been hidden in a cave in southern France or perhaps western England, the last redoubt of the Celts.

He went back to the barn for a shovel. He thought he heard the phone ringing inside the house but paid no attention to it. He pulled on his gloves and stripped the tangle of cable free from the ground and threw it down the slope into the shallows. The ground was as loamy and soft as coffee grinds when he pressed down on the shovel blade and eased it under the box he had wrapped with a tarp and a rain slicker.

Then a phenomenon took place that had to be the result of natural causes. He was almost certain of this. The full moon had just broken through the clouds, as bright as silver plate. As he dumped the dirt off the blade of his shovel, the ground and air sparkled as though he had dug into a pocket of pollen.
Pyrite,
he told himself. The same false indicator that had sent James Bowie chasing after legends and silver and gold in San Saba County. Hackberry picked up the box and refilled the hole, stamping it down, ridding himself of thoughts about ancient myths and Crusader knights on the road to Roncesvalles or wherever they could bloody a sword in the name of Christianity.

Once again, he heard the phone ringing.

R
UBY GOT OUT
of the policeman’s car and walked up the midway of the carnival. The hot-air balloon was now directly overhead, anchored by a rope, a man in a straw boater and a candy-striped coat tossing buckets of confetti and paper-wrapped taffy to the children below. But something was wrong. The people in the midway had divided into two groups. The larger crowd had gathered directly under the balloon, the children’s hands outreached toward the gondola. Others had formed a crowd in front of a cage. When a child wandered away from the larger group toward the cage, a parent would rush over to him and immediately drag him back, fighting.

Ruby tried to see over the shoulders of the crowd gathered in front of the cage, one with wire mesh and bars. “What’s happening up there?” she said to the man in front of her.

His teeth were the size of an elk’s, his eyes as small as dimes. “The geek show. He’s supposed to be the Missing Link. More like a rummy making a few dollars and having some fun.”

Through the heads and hats and bonnets and thick necks and broad backs, Ruby saw a man trying to get to his feet inside the cage, then slipping on his buttocks, his clothes and skin streaked with filth. She felt her heart knock against her ribs, her breath rush out of her throat.

She tried to push her way through the crowd. The people around her smelled of sweat that had dried inside wool, onions and greasy meat, malt, unwashed hair, decayed teeth, and deodorant compounds smeared under their armpits. A man hit her in the breast with his elbow; a woman screwed her face into a knot and said, “Be careful who you’re pushing, Swede.”

Ruby went back through the crowd into the midway and circled behind the game booths until she found the door of the cage. Three men were sitting at a wood table outside it, drinking Coca-Cola and smoking. They wore badges and suspenders without coats and hats that shadowed their faces. One was short and wore a piece of tape across his nose; there was blood on his collar and the front of his shirt. An ax handle lay by his foot.

“Who are you?” she asked.

“The law. What can we do for you?” the short man said.

“No, you’re not. You’re ginks. That’s my son in that cage. Did you put him in there?”

The tallest of the three put out his cigarette on the sole of his boot and took a sip from his Coca-Cola, gazing at nothing. “He was drunk and started a fight. We put him in there for his own protection. The city police are going to pick him up.”

“You’re a liar.”

“He shouldn’t have got drunk. If you want to take him home, be our guest,” the same man said.

“What are your names?”

“Eeny, Meany, Miny, Moe. As in catch a nigger by his toe,” the short man said. “Moe ain’t here.” The other two men tilted down their hat brims to hide their grins.

“My son was at the Marne. Where were you?” she said. “I promise you’ll be held accountable for this.”

“My name is Fred,” the short man said. “That man in yonder assaulted me. To make sure everything is on the table, I bought him a bottle of moonshine. I could’ve had him locked up for six months. If I was you, I’d tuck my lower lip back in my mouth.”

“What’s your last name?”

“Beemer. Fred J. Beemer.” He opened a pouch of string chewing tobacco and filled his jaw. He chewed it slowly and spat a long stream in the grass. “Nothing like a little Red Man.”

“My name is Ruby Dansen. I want you to remember it.”

“I’ll carve it on my heart,” Fred Beemer replied.

She pulled open the back door of the cage and stepped inside. The spotlights on the midway were iridescent, eye-watering, rimmed with humidity. Someone had cut Ishmael’s belt in half and his trousers and undershorts had slipped down on his buttocks. His palms were printed with peanut shells and wet cigarette butts. His skull seemed translucent and red against the brilliance of the light. The people watching him through the wire mesh had the faces an artist would paint on a medieval mob—lantern-jawed, beetle-browed, unshaved, hair growing from their ears and noses, teeth the color of urine. They were the kind of people who attended public executions and delighted in blood sports. Were these the people to whom she had devoted her life?

She got to her knees and pulled Ishmael partially erect. Then she worked herself onto a chair and got his weight across her thighs, so he lay spread across her lap, his arms hanging loose behind him, the bones in his chest as pronounced as barrel staves, his face puffed, his eyes half-lidded.

The crowd stared at her, leering, fascinated.

“What have you done to my son?” she asked. “What have you done to my darling son?”

T
HE CLOCK ON
the kitchen windowsill said 9:03 when Hackberry answered the telephone. Outside, the sky was black, grit blowing against the pane. “Will you accept a long-distance call from Ruby Dansen?” the operator asked.

“Yes,” he said, a stone dropping inside him.

“Go ahead,” the operator said to the caller, then went off the line.

“Ruby?” Hackberry said.

“Who else?”

“Where are you?” he said.

“San Antonio. Ishmael is hurt. In a cage at a carnival. It’s too much to explain. Can you come?”

“Ishmael is in San Antonio?”

“He’s been living with Maggie. He left her house on foot and ended up at a fairgrounds. Some ginks with badges got their hands on him. He has bruises all over him.”

“Why would they want to hurt Ishmael?”

“Their kind don’t need an excuse. They treated him like an animal. They put him on exhibit.”

“They did
what
?”

“I have to go. Can you come or not?”

“I don’t have a car, and I don’t know how to drive. I’ll have to call somebody. Where are you now?”

“At the café by the fairgrounds, waiting on an ambulance. I have little money.”

She told him the name of the hotel where she was staying. He remembered it vaguely, a place for transients, single men at the end of the track.

“Don’t worry about money. Where’s Maggie?” he asked.

“How would I know? Why did she take Ishmael out of the army hospital? Why this sudden surge of charity?”

“I quit trying to figure her out many years ago. Who put Ishmael in the cage?”

“There were three of them. One said his name was Fred Beemer. Fred J. Beemer.”

Hackberry wrote on a pad. “They’re deputies?”

“No.”

“How do you know they’re not?”

“Do deputy sheriffs in San Antonio carry ax handles?”

“I’ll do everything I can to get there as soon as possible,” he said.

“Maggie said she was arranging an executive position of some kind for Ishmael. Who is she working for, Hack?”

“I’d like to say the devil. But it’s probably worse. The name Arnold Beckman comes to mind.”

“Who?”

“I want to see you, Ruby. I’ve been wanting to see you an awful long time.”

“Hurry, please,” she said.

He gave her the name of a hospital. “Make sure the ambulance takes him there. It’s the best. They’re all busting at the seams with influenza patients.”

W
ILLARD POSEY SENT
a deputy to pick up Hackberry. An hour and a half later, he was at the hospital in San Antonio where he was supposed to meet Ruby, except there was no sign of Ruby and no record of a patient named Ishmael Holland. “They were here,” Hackberry said to the woman at the admissions desk.

“I’m afraid they were not,” she replied. “But I’ll tell you who is: all the influenza patients on the gurneys in the hallway.”

He and the deputy drove to the fairgrounds. It was Saturday night, and except for the carousel, the rides and concessions were open late, the ragged popping of rifles and the smell of gunpowder drifting from the shooting gallery. The deputy was a tall redheaded boy named Darl Pickins who wore a knit sweater with his badge pinned to it. Up ahead, on the midway, Hackberry saw a dunking booth where a waterlogged man of color was wiping himself off with a towel, preparing to retake his place on the dunking stool. A little farther on was a cage with a sign over it that read
THE MISSING LINK
.

“Darl, why don’t you go back to the café across the street and have a cup of coffee?” Hackberry said. “I’ll be along directly.”

“Sheriff Posey said I’m supposed to stick with you.”

“I bet he did. But right now I’ve got everything covered. I need you at the café in case Miss Ruby shows up there. If you’re not there, she won’t know where we’re at.”

“Yes, sir, I see what you mean.”

“Then why aren’t you headed to the café?”

“Sheriff Posey says you tend to get into things.”

“The sheriff exaggerates and is a big kidder on top of it. Trust me on this.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good-bye, now.”

“I’ll be at the café.”

“That’s the place to be,” Hackberry said.

He walked to the cage. A man in rubber boots was hosing off the floor, skidding a gray froth of straw and water through the bars. Hackberry opened his coat, exposing his badge. “I’m looking for Fred Beemer and a couple of his colleagues.”

“Down by the barbecue tent,” the man with the hose replied, not looking up. “Doin’ nothing, I suspect. They’re good at it.”

Hackberry continued down the midway, past the Ferris wheel, into a poorly lighted area where a purple-and-white-striped canopy rippled in the wind and three men sat at a table in front of an empty stage, eating barbecued ribs with their fingers. No one else was in the tent. In their peaked hats and long-sleeved cotton shirts, with their flat stomachs and tightly belted trousers, they could have been mistaken for lawmen of years ago—except for their inability to hold their eyes steadily on his as he approached their table.

“I heard y’all had some trouble.”

“No, sir, no trouble here,” one said. “Indigestion, maybe.”

Hackberry looked casually over his shoulder, back down the midway, then at the men again. “Something to do with the Missing Link act. It is an act, isn’t it? That’s not a real missing link in there?”

“Search me,” said a man with a strip of tape across his nose. “Why are you interested?”

“No reason. Is that an ax handle?”

“Possums wander in at night and chew on the electric lines. Who are you?”

“I’m a deputy sheriff over in Kerr County. I was looking for Mr. Beemer.”

“What for?” the man with the taped nose asked.

“He’s the fellow I’m supposed to see about the man y’all had to lock up.”

“Why’s Kerr County interested in a drunk man and drug addict in San Antonio?” the tallest of the three men asked. His teeth were tiny, hardly bigger than a baby’s, his whiskers grayish brown, soft-looking, like winter fur on a squirrel.

“The man you refer to as a drunk and drug addict is my son.”

The tall man lifted his face, so the colored lights from the Ferris wheel fell across it. “A woman took him away. She said she was his mother. I’d say she was a pain in the ass.”

“How’d she take him away?”

“We didn’t pay it no mind,” the same man said.

“My son got blown up in France. From my understanding, he had a pint of metal in his lower body. Why would y’all put my boy in a cage?”

“Because he fell down in a puddle of water that had a power cable running through it,” Beemer said.