House of the Rising Sun: A Novel (6 page)

Paradoxically, this kind of introspection took him to one place, a whiskey-soaked excursion into a long black tunnel lit by the fires burning inside him, where he never knew what lay beyond the next bend, where the viscera governed all his thoughts, and violence and enmity always had their way. True, his adversaries were deserving of their fate and their loss was the world’s gain. That was not the problem. The problem was the secret knowledge about himself that Hackberry carried in his breast and never confessed to anyone: Had he not worn a badge, he would have ended his days like the Daltons and the Youngers and Black Jack Ketchum and Bill Kilpatrick and Frank James and all the other bad men who closed down their act on the scaffold or in a weed patch or as caricatures in sideshows.

He remembered eating the steak in the cantina, the blood mixing with the darkness of the gravy as he sliced it from the bone. He remembered draining a whole bottle of whiskey, and he remembered a girl sitting on his lap while she filled her mouth with his beer and pushed it into his. Maybe he went into a crib with her, maybe not. When he awoke in the middle of the night, he was lying in a pole shed full of manure and moldy hay, his saddlebags under his head, the Mauser rifle cradled in his arms, his throat flaming. He cupped water out of a trough and vomited, the stars blazing coldly in a black sky. He went back into the shed and passed out, too weak and sick to check or even care about the contents of his saddlebags, his coat pulled over his head.

He had a dream of a kind he had never experienced. In it, he saw the woman named Beatrice DeMolay standing outside the shed, still wearing the dark blue dress with the ruffled white collar. She knelt beside him, placing her palm on his forehead. He tried to get up, but she held him down, her eyes never leaving his.

Why are you here?
he asked.

Her lips moved silently.

I don’t know what you’re saying. Are you in trouble?

She leaned down and placed her mouth on his. He could feel his manhood rising.

Did the army or Beckman’s men hurt you? I should have driven the
hearse away and not burned it in front of your house.

His words had no more influence on her than confetti blowing on her face. She stroked his hair and eyes and kissed his hand.
You’re chosen,
she said.

Chosen for what? You’re saying I’m a Hebrew?
She didn’t answer, and her silence frightened him.
What’s wrong with you, woman?

He waited, but she refused to speak.

This is a dream. I’ll wake from it and you’ll be gone. I won’t forgive myself if someone has hurt you on my account. Brothel madam be damned, there’s something mighty good in you.

See? You’re kind. That’s why you’ve been chosen. Don’t be afraid.

Don’t you be calling me that.

Mi amor,
she said.

He sat straight up, shaking with cold in spite of his coat, the eastern sky ribbed with pink clouds. He called out her name, convinced that her lips and body were only inches from his.

He untied the flaps on his saddlebags. Everything he had placed there was undisturbed. He opened the wood box that contained the fused goblets. Were the jewels real? They could be. The chalice could have been looted from a cathedral in Monterrey, in the Mexican state of Nuevo León. Or from the home of an aristocrat who discovered that peons possessing the importance of barnyard animals were about to take everything he owned, including his life.

He stared at the sunrise, sick and nauseated, his head throbbing, the smell of beer and whiskey rising from his clothes. He had already mortgaged the day, and he had a choice of living through it dry or drinking again and mortgaging tomorrow. He rode his horse through the alleyway. The street was totally quiet, the pools of rainwater wrinkling in the wind. Four soldiers were riding their horses in single file toward the jail. The last rider was leading a prisoner on foot by a rope knotted around his neck. The prisoner wore sandals and a black duster that had no sleeves; his eyes seemed lidless, half-rolled in his head, not unlike those inside a severed head upon a platter.

“What have you got yourself into, partner?” Hack said under his breath. He didn’t know if his words were addressed to himself or the unfortunate eater of fried grasshoppers.

H
ACKBERRY DISMOUNTED IN
front of the jail. The soldiers had locked their prisoner in a cell with several other prisoners and were drinking coffee from fruit jars and eating with their fingers from tin plates in the breezeway. Hackberry’s hat was slanted over his brow, his eyes downcast, the way he would approach a horse in order to avoid personal challenge. “
Muy buenas,
” he said.

The soldiers looked sleepy and irritable and didn’t bother to answer.

“
¿Qué pasa con el hombre que no tiene mangas?
” he said.

“
No te metas, viejo,
” replied a soldier who was leaning forward in a straw chair so he would not drop crumbs on his uniform.

“
No creo que soy viejo.
”

“Either your Spanish or your hearing is not too good, gringo,” the same soldier said.

“Probably both. I think I’m still pretty
boracho
.”

“That could be the problem, man. Where did you get the rifle?”

“From General Huerta. He’s a friend of mine.”

“That’s pretty nice of him. Can I look at it?”

“He’p yourself.”

The man in the straw chair was bigger than the others, his cuffs rolled neatly on his upper arms, his skin as smooth as clay, his nose thin, one nostril smaller than the other, a delicate scar at the edge of one eye, like a piece of white string. He partially opened the bolt and squinted at the empty chamber and the rounds pressed into the magazine. He ran the balls of his fingers along the bolt and rubbed them with his thumb. “It’s still got what-you-call-it on it.”

“Cosmoline?”

“That’s the word. When did General Huerta give you this?”

“Two or three months ago, I think. In El Paso.”

“That’s funny, ’cause he died in January. This is November.”

“That’s probably why the nights are getting right chilly.”

“I think you’d better get out of here, gringo.”

“I appreciate your advice. I just wondered about the man you brought in. I think I’ve talked to him before. He seemed like an ordinary fellow to me, not a
bandito
.”

“He’s an informer.” The soldier closed the bolt and snapped the firing pin on an empty chamber. He returned the rifle, staring into Hackberry’s face. “An informer for the gringos is what he is, gringos like you.”

“The man lives in a cave and eats insects. I doubt he’s taken a bath since Noie’s flood. Why be harsh on an afflicted man?”

The soldier stood up from his chair and stretched. “Maybe we can arrange for you to take his place,” he said.

H
ACKBERRY REMOUNTED HIS
horse and crossed the river on a wood bridge that was roped together in sections and seemed about to break apart in the swollen current. The trail was lined with cactus that bloomed with red and yellow flowers; he tried to concentrate on the flowers and the grass growing from the humps of sand and not look back at the village. What good could he do there? He was not the Creator. When you ventured south of the Rio Grande, you learned to accept people as they were or you would be quickly undone by them. Mexico was not a country; it was a state of mind that never changed and was responsible for the blood on many a stone altar. The man who blinded himself to that fact deserved whatever happened to him.

He was willing to share his food with you, as paltry and stomach-churning as it was.

“Shut up,” he said to himself.

His captors are jackals. You know what they’re capable of.

“They’ll probably turn him loose. He’s of no value to them.”

You know better.

“Have it your way,” he said to whomever.

He turned off the trail and tethered his horse inside a grove of cottonwoods. The morning was cold and smelled of sage and pinyon trees and creosote and the fresh scat of wild animals. He removed the spyglass from his saddlebags and sighted across the top of a sandstone rock at the back of the jail. A man with shackles on his ankles was emptying two buckets of feces into an open ditch. Hackberry focused the spyglass on the barred window in the back wall but could not see into the shadows. He collapsed the spyglass and sat down with his back against the rock and shut his eyes. Then he opened them and looked at the sky.
What the hell am I supposed to do?

His question remained unanswered. A tiny stream ran through the cottonwoods. He drank from it and sat back in the shade and listened to the wind rustling in the leaves overhead. What a grand day it was. He wanted to shed his life as a snake sheds its skin. Of all the iniquity of which human beings were capable, was not betrayal the one hardest to undo? When he experienced these thoughts, he wanted to weep.

Instead, he again aimed the spyglass at the jail. This time he had no doubt what was taking place with the prisoners. Five of them had filed out of the building, their hands bound behind them. A soldier with a hammer was clanging a large iron bell by the side of the jail to bring the villagers into the street. The last prisoner in the line was Huachinango. The prisoners were motionless, staring at the adobe wall pocked with gunfire, almost all the holes roughly at the same height.

The priest from the mud-walled church was talking with the soldier Hackberry had let examine his rifle. The priest was obviously pleading. The soldier lifted up a horse quirt and poked him in the chest with it, pushing him backward, jabbing him in the ribs and spine, herding him as he would a hog.

Hackberry swung up on his horse and leaned forward in the saddle, bringing the heels of his boots hard into the horse’s ribs, the Mauser balanced across the pommel. Just as he turned down the main street, his horse heaving under him, he heard someone shout “
¡Fuego!
” and saw five Mexican soldiers fire their rifles chest-high into three prisoners who were standing blindfolded against the wall. Their faces seemed to shudder in the smoke, then they went straight down, like puppets whose strings had been cut.

T
HE VILLAGERS WERE
bunched across the street from the adobe wall, afraid to look at the dead and afraid to look away from the soldier conducting the executions. The men held their hats in their hands; the women had covered their heads with shawls, as though they were attending Mass. The villagers’ craggy, work-seamed faces resembled teakwood carvings. The soldier in charge was explaining to them why the executions were taking place and why the villagers must remember the event they were witnessing during the three-day Festival of the Dead.

The soldier assured them the prisoners were not loyal and good
campesinos
, as were the villagers; the prisoners were traitors and deserters and
marijuanistas
and informers and tools of the Americans. Had the villagers not heard of the gringo called Patton, the American officer who tied bodies on the fenders of his motorcar? The gringo about to die, Huachinango, was not a harmless drunk but a spy who spat on the cross and gave up the names of patriots to American killers. Today should be one of joy, not mourning, he said. Today these enemies of the Mexican people would be covered over in the anonymous graves they had earned.

Hackberry held his rifle aloft with one hand as he got down from the saddle. “I’m here on a peaceful mission. I have no quarrel with you,” he said. “The one you call Huachinango lives in the desert because he’s deranged. He’s a poor man, like the
campesinos
. The last thing this fellow wants to do is hurt anybody.” He repeated his statement in Spanish.

“You are a very troublesome man,” the soldier said. “Would you introduce yourself? I didn’t catch your name earlier.”

“I didn’t give it. Actually, I’m down here prospecting talent for William Cody’s Wild West show and would like to interview you and others about that possibility.”

“Then you are famous? A man of the people?”

“That’s why Mr. Bill gave me this job,” Hackberry said. “How about it, amigo? Cut this fellow loose, and you and me can talk business.”

“Let me see your rifle once more.”

“Yes, sir, just don’t snap the firing pin on an empty chamber, if you don’t mind. It tends to mess up the spring.”

“I will take care not to harm your rifle, even though I suspect it was taken off a Mexican soldier. You don’t have a pistol?”

“Not
on
me.”

“Why did you tell me you were a friend of General Huerta? Why did you tell me such a ridiculous lie?”

“I wouldn’t exactly call it a lie. I met the man. I met Emiliano Zapata, too. You can ask him.”

“You tell your lies to us because you think we’re stupid. You fuck our women, you buy our leaders, you take our minerals, you lay waste to our villages. You do all these things because Pancho Villa killed a handful of worthless people in New Mexico. I feel very much like killing you, gringo.”