House of the Rising Sun: A Novel (36 page)

“You put me in mind of the Sundance Kid,” Hackberry said. “The way you scrunch your shoulders and tilt up your chin. I knew him and Harvey Logan, both.”

“
I
look like the Sundance Kid?”

“Hand on the Bible. Logan was a dyed-in-the-wool killer and a five-star lamebrain. Sundance was just a lamebrain. Not even one-star.”

“We were just doing our job,” Beemer said. “Did we mention your son was stirring up nigger trouble?”

Hackberry pulled back his coat flap and hung it behind the butt of his holstered Peacemaker. “Could I see your ax handle?”

“Let’s hold on there a minute,” the tall man said.

“It’s a little late for that. Things get loose on you, and you look back and nobody can figure out how it went downhill so fast. It’s a dad-burned mystery.”

“We can talk this thing out,” the tall man said, his face marbled with the glow from the Ferris wheel, the skin under one eye twitching.

What Hackberry did next he did without a plan, without even heat or passion, except to ensure that Beemer received just due and the others were treated as adverbs rather than nouns. In reality, he went about the destruction of the three men as though chopping wood or breaking up old furniture or packing cases for burning. He beat them until they cowered on their knees, then he beat them some more, stomping their faces and heads into the soft dampness of the grass, spilling their half-eaten food on top of them. Then he pulled their wallets from their trousers and took a piece of identification from each man and tossed their wallets in their faces.

All three men were carrying a business card with the name of Arnold Beckman’s company on it.

“Try to make more trouble for us, and I’ll be looking you up,” Hackberry said.

He wiped his hands on a towel, propped the ax handle neatly against a chair, and walked back down the midway to rejoin Darl Pickins at the café, the carousel coming to life for no reason, the wooden horses whirling without riders.

M
AGGIE BASSETT FOUND
herself biting her lip in her living room, unable to gather her thoughts and rebuild her mental fortifications, staring out the window at the ruins of the Spanish mission to distract herself. How do you deliver bad news to a man who does not tolerate bad news but demands to hear it as soon as it happens? Better said, how do you report bad news to a man who requires full candor but is enraged by it?

She had one of the new candlestick telephones, made of brass, with a dial on it. It always gave her pleasure to use it. Now it felt like a lump of ice as she dialed Arnold Beckman’s number.

As always, he didn’t speak when he answered the phone, deliberately making his caller feel off guard, invasive, vaguely guilty.

“Arnold?” she said.

“It’s you, Maggie,” he said brightly. “What can I do for my favorite lass?”

“I don’t know where Ishmael is.”

“He ran off from your charms?”

“I’m serious.”

She waited in the silence, a creaking sound in her ears, as though she were slipping to the bottom of a lake, its weight about to crush her skull. “Arnold?”

“How. Can. A. Crippled. Man. Disappear?”

“We had an argument.”

“You know I do not like to repeat myself.”

“Maybe he took a jitney. He was walking with his canes. He couldn’t have gone far.”

“Then why are you not out looking for the people who drive jitneys in your neighborhood? Or searching the ditches? Why are we having this conversation?”

“I’ve done everything you’ve asked. Everything doesn’t always work out like we plan.”

“When it doesn’t work out, you fix it. But instead of fixing it, you’ve called me. Our little girl wants her daddy to clean up her mess. Not a good attitude. What are we going to do about that, little Maggie?”

She felt a flush in her cheeks, a fish bone in her throat, words forming that she dared not speak. “I felt my first obligation was to apprise you of the situation. I plan to drive around town to places where he might have gone. He was drinking when he left. He’s probably drinking now.”

Before she had finished speaking, she felt weak, sycophantic, submissive to a man she secretly abhorred. She was breathing into the receiver, hoping he did not sense her fear and self-loathing. His words injured her in the same way her father’s had, like paper cuts that she hid and nursed and carried until he unleashed more damage on her. When would it end? Only when she was able to vanquish her father’s memory by either undoing Arnold Beckman or proving herself his equal. And the fact that she gave Arnold Beckman that kind of power only made her hate herself more. How sick could a person be?

“Are you there?” she asked.

“Indeed, my love.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Just continue being the lovely piece you are. You are a lovely piece, you know. And I’ve had it on every continent, with every race and every age. You’re every man’s wet dream, Maggie.”

She felt her breath coming harder in her chest, her left hand opening and closing spasmodically, the nails pressing into her palm. She tried to speak firmly, to pretend she had not heard what he’d just said. “I’ll take care of it. I shouldn’t have let this happen. It’s my fault.”

“Don’t worry. I’ll send some men out. Did he hurt you or get out of hand, that sort of thing?”

“No, he’s not like that.”

“You still have the motherly touch. That’s good. That’s why I like you, Maggie. Having you in my stable is like having half a dozen women in one. I never know who I’m talking to. You’re an absolute delight. I’m glad you’re not a man. I might be afraid of you.”

She heard a whirring sound in her ears, the same sound she had heard when she pressed her head against her mother’s breast as a child. Why did she have memories of this kind? Why couldn’t she catalog and compartmentalize her thoughts and deal with them one by one so they didn’t control her life? Why couldn’t she understand the tangled web that comprised her mind?

“I never know what to say to you,” she said.

“Look on the light side of it. Maybe you spent too much time on your back. A touch of the wrong lad, and it shows up in the brain years later. Let’s face it, you knew some scruffy characters. Hello?”

She was unable to speak.

“I’m just kidding,” he said. “Don’t be such a bloody prude. We’re cut out of the same cloth. We’re interlopers. That’s why the people who sit at my table and eat my food and drink my wine hate the pair of us.”

She lowered the receiver, widening her eyes, stretching her face, letting out her breath. She put the receiver to her ear again. “I forgive you for being obnoxious and vulgar, Arnold. I guess you came out of the womb that way. But you’ll never speak to me like that again.”

“That’s my girl. Hang their scrotums on the point of your knife. Now get out there and find your war hero. We have an empire to build, Maggie. I want you to be my queen. You’re an Amazon. Your thighs could span the Strait of Gibraltar.”

She didn’t say good-bye but simply hung the receiver back on the hook and looked at it as though his voice lived inside it. She was wondering if there was such a thing as the human soul. If so, how did one explain the existence of a man like Beckman? And if so, wasn’t her soul already forfeit? Wasn’t it better to believe in nothing than to make oneself miserable trying to solve mysteries the human mind couldn’t fathom? Was not all of mankind adrift on a dark sea, without hope, at the mercy of undercurrents and waves as high as mountains?

Outside, the light had gone out of the sky and a burst of rain-flecked wind blew open one of the French doors, scattering leaves and pine needles on the rug, filling her house with the tang of late autumn and the holiday season. She had never felt more alone in her life.

A
FTER ISHMAEL HAD
been refused admission at the hospital and the ambulance had left on another call, Ruby had asked a jitney driver to drive her to a different hospital.

“It’s the same all over town. More sick people than beds,” he said.

“What about the army posts?”

“Fort Sam Houston and Camp Travis are quarantined because of influenza. I wouldn’t get near either one of them.”

“There has to be someplace I can take him.”

“I know a clinic,” he said. “It’s not much, but they have medicine.”

He drove them across the river into a bowl-like area dotted with shacks and mud-walled hovels. A dirty haze from the stacks of a rendering plant hung like strips of gauze above the rooftops. The electricity was out on the street where the clinic was located, and the glass on the oil lamps burning in the foyers was black with smoke; flashlights moved behind the windows.

She gazed at the litter in the open ditches, the privies that were nothing more than a chunk of concrete pipe screwed into a hole, the animal carcasses along the road, a corrugated shed by a stream where clothing was spread on the rocks to dry. “This is the Mexican district?” she said.

“Most of them are wets and don’t bother nobody,” the driver said. “They don’t want to get sent back across the river, if that’s what you’re asking.”

Women in shawls and men’s coats and work shoes, carrying children in their arms or holding them by the hand, were gathered in the foyers. None of them looked injured or sick, simply tired and afraid and confused, as though waiting to be told what to do.

“Why are all these people here?” she asked.

“One of those sleeping cars for gandy dancers got hit by a line of freight cars on the wrong spur. It was one of those three-deckers, about as solid as an orange crate. They’re still bringing them in.”

“Do you know anyone in there? I don’t speak Spanish.”

“Sorry, I got to get back to the depot. That’s where I get most of my fares.”

She rolled down the window. An odor struck her face like a fist.

“Better roll it back up, ma’am,” the driver said. “In back, they burn waste and bandages and things I won’t mention.”

“Pull up in front. You have to help me carry him in.”

“I’m sorry, I have to go.”

“No, you don’t. You brought me here, and you’re not leaving until my son is safely inside. Come around this side and help me lift him up.”

The driver fiddled with his cap.

“Did you hear me?” she said.

“Yes, ma’am,” he replied. “If you can pay me first, please.”

The two of them got Ishmael inside and laid him in a hallway on a wood pallet covered by a blanket and a stained mattress pad. Amid the shadows and the flashlight beams and the press of bodies and people tripping over the patients on the floor and the incessant sound of coughing, Ruby tried to get the attention of anyone who could help. She knelt by Ishmael and formed a tent over him by propping her arms on either side of his shoulders. She twisted her head and tried to speak to the driver. “I’ll stay here. You go find a doctor and tell him—”

The driver was gone. Through the entranceway, she saw a pair of headlights drive up the rutted road and disappear.

She got to her feet and began pulling the pallet closer to the wall, away from the flow of traffic through the hallway, the splinters tearing her flesh. She got on her knees and pushed, working the pallet an inch at a time into the shadows, between two other patients, away from the faces of frightened children in the flashlight beams, a nurse trying to squeeze through with an overflowing bedpan.

“There,” Ruby said to Ishmael, even though his eyes were closed. “That will do for the time being. I promise I’ll get us out of this. There are patients on either side of us. No one can step on us now. Can you hear me, Ishmael? Open your eyes. Please. Say something.”

He did neither. She shook the person on the pallet next to Ishmael’s. “Who’s in charge here? Give me a name. I don’t speak Spanish. Can you understand me? What is the name of the man in charge? I’m sorry to bother you, but you must wake up. Does no one here speak English?”

Then she realized she was addressing herself to a Mexican woman whose facial wrinkles were dissolving into the bloodless and pale and featureless anonymity of the dead. For a moment she thought she would weep.

Someone shone a light on Ruby’s head. “Who are you? How did you get in here?” a man’s voice said. He was bald and potbellied and wore a white smock stippled with blood. “Who gave you permission to put that man here?”

“No one did. He’s my son. He needs help.”

“What’s wrong with him?”

“He has shrapnel wounds all over his legs. Maybe they’re infected. Maybe something is broken. He was beaten at the carnival.”

“Move out of the way,” the physician said, shining the light on Ishmael’s face. “You shouldn’t have put him here. All these people are contagious. Hold this.”

He stuck the flashlight in Ruby’s hand and knelt down and felt Ishmael’s throat and lifted one of his arms, rolling back the sleeve. Then he unbuttoned Ishmael’s shirt and trousers and felt his ribs and pulled the trousers lower and probed his abdomen and examined the bandages on his thighs. He took the flashlight back. “He smells like a distillery.”

“Don’t you dare talk about him like that. Half of Texas smells like a distillery. The half made up of Baptist hypocrites.”

“You brought him to the wrong place. Get him out of here.”

“He was wounded fighting for his country.”

“This entire neighborhood will probably be quarantined. Do you want to spend the next six months inside this clinic?”

“We’re already here. You have to help him. We have no other place to go.”

“If you don’t get him out of here, I will.”

“No, you won’t. If you try to eject him, I’ll gouge your eyes out, and you’ll have to perform your next surgery by touch. I pulled murdered children out of the cellar at Ludlow. Don’t tell me your troubles.”

The physician stood up and clicked off the light. She stood up also, her face no more than a foot from his. A nurse jostled against him and kept going. The physician didn’t take his eyes off Ruby’s. He removed a pair of scissors from a pocket in his smock. “Start with the bandages. I’ll bring you a pan and a washcloth and some alcohol and iodine. Who beat him?”

“Ginks with badges. They said he started a fight. That’s not true. He’s a gentle boy. One of the ginks had an ax handle.”