House of the Rising Sun: A Novel (43 page)

“Be done with this?” Ruby said. “You kidnap my wounded son and say ‘be done with this’?”

“Madam, you have invaded my apartment, and you refuse to leave. I think you may be impaired.”

“Something is burning,” Ruby said.

“No, nothing is burning. Nothing here needs your attention,” he said. “There is only one duty you have to perform here, and that is to leave. Can you understand that? I look upon your son as a brother-in-arms. I can make him rich. Instead of thanking me, you come to my home and call me a pimp. Do normal people do that sort of thing? Would you please leave before you shame yourself and Captain Holland any worse than you have already?”

Ruby sniffed at the air again. “You could burn your building down. Is that the door to the kitchen?”

“What do you think you’re doing?” Beckman said. “Did you hear me? Where are you going?”

“Checking out your digs. What a grand place,” she said. “The building looks like a constipated circus elephant, but your apartment is elegant. You have all the new appliances and cookware? I was right, it’s a bit smoky in here. Maggie should take better care of you. What a lovely stove.”

“Get on the phone,” Beckman said to Maggie.

Maggie didn’t move.

Ruby dragged the heavy skillet off the stove. She dumped the sandwich on the floor and went back into the living room. “This is for the miners at Ludlow and Cripple Creek and the boys who didn’t come back from the Marne.”

She swung the skillet at Beckman’s head just as he raised his forearm to protect himself. The blow caught him on the cusp of his forehead, cutting a red star in the skin, scraping a layer off his nose, knocking him into the wall. His face went white with shock. The next blow caught him on the elbow, the next squarely across the face, slamming him into the wall again.

He cupped his hand to his nose, strings of blood hanging from his fingers. She kicked his shins, forcing him to drop his hands and bend forward, then swung the skillet sideways against his ear, flattening it into his scalp. “Tell me where he is or your brains will be on the carpet,” she said.

Beckman was half-collapsed against the wall, holding one hand to his nose, lifting the other for her to stop. He removed his hand from his nose so he could speak. “You could break a man on the wheel, woman, I’ll grant you that. But you’re stupid and ignorant. I am not the source of your problem. Your former common-law husband is.”

Ruby raised the skillet again.

“Don’t do it,” Maggie said. “Please. This will not get your son back. You’ve seen Arnold’s scars. He’s not afraid of pain. Talk to Hackberry. He’ll not listen to me, but he will to you.”

Beckman picked up a candlestick phone from a table by the bathroom door and dialed the operator.

“Ruby, please,” Maggie said. “We can work this out.”

“With a man like this?”

“Hackberry’s stubbornness brought all this about,” Maggie said.

“I should have hit you with this skillet instead of him.”

Beckman had the police on the line.

Ruby dropped the skillet on the rug and wiped her hands on her sides. She looked at Maggie. “You betrayed Ishmael and handed him over to this piece of scum,” she said. “I think you’re the most treacherous person I’ve ever known.”

“Say what you want. What you’re doing is stupid.”

“Unless you give back my son, I’ll follow you and this man to the grave.”

The whites of Maggie’s eyes were threaded with tiny broken blood vessels, as though she were on the verge of crying. Ruby walked out the door onto the landing. She thought it was over. Then she heard Maggie behind her.

“You don’t know what you’ve done,” Maggie said.

“Then tell me.”

“He has Ishmael. With a snap of his fingers, he can turn your son’s life into the death of a thousand cuts.”

T
HE REO BROKE
down twice on the way to San Antonio, and it was evening before Hackberry and Andre arrived at the city limits.

“Where do you want me to drive Miss Beatrice’s destroyed motorcar now?” Andre asked.

Hackberry gave Andre the directions to Ruby’s hotel. Hackberry went inside and was told that Miss Dansen was not in her room and had not left a message. He got back in the motorcar and tried to think clearly. “Do you know where Beckman lives?”

“Out by one of the old missions,” Andre replied. “I don’t think it is advisable to go there.”

“Why shouldn’t we?”

“Because you do not go into your enemy’s lair. You catch him when he is outside it. Then you isolate him and do what you wish.”

Hackberry studied Andre’s profile against the sunset. “Sometimes you can give a fellow a chill.”

“Members of the army came to our village and told me to close my church and the school I helped build. I told them I would not. So they stole my children. These men were whoremongers and did not have families and cared nothing about innocent children who did not understand the nature of evil and thought all men were good.”

Hackberry looked through the windshield at the men in unironed clothes on the sidewalk and a fire burning in a trash barrel and the lights coming on in the cafés and bars along the street. A Salvation Army band was playing on the corner. “Go on,” he said.

“They would not give my children back. One night I caught three of the kidnappers. I trussed them with rope and gagged them and hid them in a cart, under the feces of my pigs and cattle, and took them into the jungle. By sunrise, they had given up their former way of life. There was no good deed they would not grant me, no information they would not gladly share. I was no longer a priest then, except for the love and sorrow I carried in my heart for my children. No one can understand the nature of loss until he has lost a child. But the loss is far worse when others have stolen your children and done things that even they will never tell anyone.”

“What did you do to them?”

“I showed them that it was possible for them to become children again. They reached a point where nothing of the adult remained. The adult had died during the night. They looked shrunken, even in size. They made mewing sounds rather than words.”

“What happened to your children?”

“I don’t know. The three kidnappers had given them to others. The villagers said they were eaten by the Tonton Macoute. This is not true. I am certain they are in heaven, and sometimes I think they speak to me. But I do not know the manner in which they died, and I am filled with a great sadness when I imagine what may have been their fate.”

It took Hackberry a moment to speak. “Go by Beckman’s place.”

“I think this is a bad choice,” Andre said.

“It’s not up for a vote.”

T
HEY DROVE UP
a dirt road lined with poplars, then saw a building that was dark except for one light in an upstairs window. Andre pulled the REO into the deep shade of the poplars and cut the engine. “Once or twice a week he has visitors about this time of the evening.”

“What kind of visitors?”

“A procurer delivers Mexican girls. The procurer is also a trafficker in opium. He works for a Cantonese man associated with the Tongs in San Francisco.”

“Beckman has only Mexican girls brought to him?”

“They are the ones who are most available. The supplier of girls may be more than a procurer and vendor of opium.”

“Would you please just spit it out?”

“He hangs up the girls on a hook in a doorway and puts on a pair of tight yellow gloves that he keeps in a special drawer. The bodies of Mexican girls have been found in the garbage dump, badly beaten.”

“Who told you this?”

“Mexican families across the river. They know nothing about Mr. Beckman. They don’t even know his name. They simply say there is a man with hair like a woman who lives by one of the old missions and that he will pay large amounts of money for a pretty girl who is a burden to her family.”

“That’s hard to believe.”

“They do not go to the police because they are afraid they will be sent back to Mexico. Will you answer a puzzle for me? We all know that starving people will eat members of their own family. Knowing this, why should we be surprised at anything they do?”

“You’re a grim fellow, Andre.”

“You avoid the problem. Tell me now, do you want to knock on Mr. Beckman’s door? Maybe we will save a young girl’s life. Or maybe not. Maybe after we leave, he will pick up his telephone and have your son killed. Do you want me to park in front? I’m waiting.”

A red spark still burned in the hills beneath a patch of blue sky. Hackberry picked up his saddlebags from the backseat and set them on his lap. “Head down to those Spanish ruins,” he said, removing a spyglass from one of the bags. “We’ll see what Mr. Beckman is up to. Maybe he’ll take us to my son.”

“He is not a stupid man.”

“Like me?”

“Why would you say such a thing about yourself?”

“Because I made a mess of my life and hurt many people in the process. The one I hurt the most was my son, and I cain’t forgive myself for it.”

Andre looked straight ahead and said nothing until they arrived at the ruins, then it was only to ask if Hackberry wanted him to go to town for food.

“That’s a good idea,” Hackberry replied. “Maybe get something for the night air, too.”

“You mean brandy?”

Hackberry thought about it, his hands dry and rough as he rubbed one on top of the other. “I could sure use one of those Cherry Mash candy bars. They’re a treat, aren’t they?”

A
S ANDRE DROVE
away, Hackberry spread his slicker on the ground by a crumbling stone wall and used his saddlebags as a cushion for his back, then draped his blanket over his shoulders and pulled the segments of his spyglass into a long tube. He could see shadows moving on the shades of the lighted second-story windows, but there was nothing out of the ordinary about them. He gazed through the spyglass until his eye became tired and watery, and the sky filled with bats and swallows.

He could not get Andre’s story of the kidnapped children out of his mind, and he wondered how Andre had not gone mad. He also wondered if he was soon to join the ranks of those who carried images in their heads that were the equivalent of hot coals.

The moon resembled a wafer broken crookedly in half from top to bottom. Beneath it, the sun had refused to die, creating a bowl of light between the hills that dimmed and grew in intensity and then dimmed again, like the refraction of candles on the inside of a gold cup.

Not far away was the site where 188 men and boys were killed on the thirteenth day of a siege that had left Mexican soldiers piled to the top of the walls surrounding the mission known as the Alamo. On the last night of their lives, did the moon rise in the same fashion, signaling that an ancient event of enormous significance was about to repeat itself? The buglers behind the Mexican ramparts were blowing “El Degüello,” black flags flapping on the regimental staffs, signaling no quarter. Did the men and boys defending the mission’s walls hold hands and tremble as they assembled for a final prayer? Did their fear suck the moisture from their throats and mouths and leave them with a thirst that could never be slaked? Surely the dust blowing from the plains in clouds that looked like swarms of insects wouldn’t conspire to clog their nostrils and mix with their sweat and turn their faces into death masks before their time? This could not happen to
them
, could it?

An even more troubling thought confronted him. Was the cruciform shape of the ruins where he sat a coincidence or a suggestion of the fate about to be imposed on his son?

Hackberry untied one of his saddle bags and removed his Peacemaker and the bowie knife that was honed with an edge like a barber’s razor and sheathed in a double-layer deerskin scabbard. At what point could a man justifiably go to the dark side and take on the characteristics and deeds of his enemies? He knew stories from old Rangers about the raids on Indian encampments, and the denial of mercy to even the smallest or the oldest in the tribe. The rationalization was always the same: The Indians, particularly the Comanche, had committed atrocities against innocent farm families and missionaries or sometimes a lone trader whose wagon was loaded with pots and pans and machine-made clothes and whiskey. But Hackberry always had the sense that the thundering charges upon the wickiups and the storm of bullets and the burning of the Indians’ food and blankets and buffalo robes were intended to be repeated until there was not one Indian left alive south of the Red River.

He felt very weary, in the way he had felt weary when he had committed himself to a dissolute life, and no sooner had he closed his eyes than his head nodded on his chest. He felt his pistol slip from his grip and his bowie knife slide off his thigh. In his dream he saw Ishmael as a little boy in a suit and tie and short pants and shoes with buckles, an Easter basket on his forearm, a pet rabbit inside it. Ishmael looked up into his face.
Why did you leave us, Big Bud?

I didn’t aim to.

That’s what you did.

It just happened. I didn’t have a lot of smarts back then. I walked off without knowing the awful mistake I’d made.