House of the Rising Sun

by James Lee Burke

  “Texas Rangers fired blindly into the cars on the train. My son was sixteen. Your temper is your undoing, señor.”

  “Then we’d better get to it.”

  Hackberry saw one of the prostitutes lift her face to his, her eyes moist and full of sorrow, a tremble working in her cheek.

  It cain’t be that bad. It’s never as bad as you think, he told himself.

  They took him outside, close by the trees where the bodies of the black soldiers were suspended, close enough to the house for him to see the faces of the Mexican enlisted men who watched his visit to the Garden of Gethsemane with the impassivity of statues.

  PAIN WAS A slice of brassy light dancing off a mirror, a spray of blood flung across the tops of the grass, a smell like animal hair dissolving in an incinerator. Someone poured water into his face in order to revive him, then wrapped his head with a towel and flooded his throat and nostrils. When he passed out, he went to a place deep inside himself that he never wanted to leave, as though confirming the general’s prediction about Hackberry’s impending need for safe haven. It was a cool place that smelled of clover and sunshine on warm stone and rain blowing in the trees and flowers blooming in his mother’s window boxes; it smelled of spring and childhood innocence and was lit by a rainbow that arched into a green meadow. He thought he saw his mother smiling at him from the kitchen doorway.

  He felt himself picked up roughly by men who cared nothing for his person or his life or the dreams that took him back to his childhood. His newly acquired friends carried him inside, knocking him against a doorjamb, dropping him on a dirty mattress. Someone tied his wrists behind him with a rope, then looped the rope around his throat and ankles and snugged it tight and left the room. As the sun climbed in the sky, the room became an airless wood box that smelled of old wallpaper and mold and the activity that had taken place on the mattress. When he tried to straighten his legs, the rope cut off the flow of blood to his brain. He slipped back into a state of half-consciousness, one in which small brown men were stuffing divots of grass in his mouth and holding burning sticks to his armpits.

  Then the rope binding his wrists to his neck and ankles went slack, and he found himself staring into the face of the woman in the brocade dress. She held a short dull-colored knife in one hand. “It’s true Captain Holland is your son?”

  At first his eyes could not focus. His throat felt filled with rust, his words coated with phlegm. “Say that again.”

  “Ishmael is your son?”

  “Why would I lie?”

  “Because I think you’re a worthless man who lies with regularity.”

  “What is my son to you?”

  “I was attacked in my carriage by some of Huerta’s jackals. They accused me of working for the government. They were going to bury me alive.”

  “What did Ishmael do to Huerta’s men?”

  “He killed them. The general and his men are outside. They’re going to ambush him.”

  “They’re going to ambush my son?”

  “Yes, why do you think they’re still here? They’ve already slept with all my girls. Now they will kill your son.”

  “He’s a customer here?”

  “No, he is not. But he’ll come for his men when they don’t return to their camp.” She began sawing through the rope on his wrists. “There’s a gun under the mattress. I let one of the girls keep it there after she was beaten.”

  “Who are you?”

  “Why do you care?”

  “You have such anger toward me.”

  She reached into a pocket on her dress and took out a half-filled pint of whiskey. “Drink this.”

  He tried to get up. Then his knees caved and he sat down on the mattress, hard, his hands shaking. He drank from the bottle, then closed and opened his eyes, the room spinning. “Answer my question,” he said. “You’ve never seen me before. Yet you judge and condemn me.”

  “You smell of the blood you’ve shed. You’re a mercenary, no matter what you call yourself,” she said. “Get up from the bed and go. Do what you can for your son. But leave my house.”

  He felt under the mattress until his fingers touched a hard object. He retrieved a nickel-plated derringer and opened the breech. Two .41-caliber cartridges were inserted in the chambers, one on top of the other. He closed the breech and rested the derringer on his thigh. “This won’t cut it.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means do you have a rifle or a shotgun?”

  She seemed hardly able to control the animus that lived in her face. “There’s one in the closet. It belongs to the Austrian who beat the girl.”

  “What Austrian?”

  “One you do not want to meet. He’s coming today.”

  “You have a French accent. You look like a Creole. I think you’re from the Islands or New Orleans.”

  “Be glad I’ve saved your life.” She opened the closet door. A .30–40 Krag rifle was propped in the corner. “The Austrian shoots coyotes with it. The shells are in the leather pouch on the floor.”

  “I’ve got a feeling all this is about the hearse.”

  “That’s because your mind is always on personal gain. We may all be dead by the end of the day, but you think more about profit than your own survival. Your son told me what you did to him.”

  Hackberry felt himself swallow. “He still hates his father, does he?”

  “I don’t think he would go to the trouble of hating you. You’re a pitiful man, Mr. Holland.”

  “Are you Ishmael’s lover?”

  “I’m his friend.”

  “You’ve hauled his ashes, too.”

  She slapped his face.

  He waited before he spoke. “I’m sorry if I’ve brought my difficulties into your house. I was at the attack on the train, but I told the general the truth when I said my intention was to find my son. I’m in your debt for speaking up to the Mexicans on my behalf.”

  But she was looking at his feet and not listening, the disdain and anger in her face focusing on practical considerations. “They burned the soles of your feet. You won’t be able to walk. Stay here.”

  She went out in the hallway and returned with a pan of water and a pair of socks and sheep-lined boots. She knelt and bathed his feet and rubbed them with butter, then slipped the socks over his blisters and torn nails.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  She raised her hand, indicating for him to be silent. She stepped closer to the window, her body perfectly still. The curtains were puffing in the wind. She turned around, her eyes charged with light. “There’s a wagon on the trail. It’s them.”

  “Who?”

  “American soldiers.”

  “How do you know they’re Americans?”

  “Their wagons have iron rims on the wheels. Mexican wagons do not.”

  “Whose boots did you give me?”

  “A functionary of the government in Mexico City. I watched him executed out there among the trees. He was corrupt and served the rich and betrayed his people. They made him dig his own grave. He got on his knees and gave up the names of informers in their ranks. I suspect some of the names he gave were those of innocent men. I won’t say you are like him. But you serve the same masters. You ambush and kill illiterate people who go to bed hungry every night of their lives. Does that make you proud?”

  “Why is my son exempt from your scorn?”

  “He’s a soldier who carries out orders he doesn’t like. You kill for pleasure and money. Mexico is full of Texans like you.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Beatrice DeMolay.”

  “I guess that’s the worst thing anybody has ever said to me, Miz DeMolay. You’re not fooling me, are you?”

  “Fool you about what?”

  “I haven’t died and gone to hell, have I?”

  HE WENT OUT the back door, chambering a round in the .30–40 Krag, the derringer tucked in his back pocket. He circled behind the two cisterns that were mounted on stilts and
passed a pole shed stacked with cordwood and another shed with an iron bathtub and a wood-burning water heater inside, then cut through the trees where the bodies of the black soldiers hung as crooked-necked and featureless as wax figures that had melted in the heat.

  He worked his way into a circle of sandstone formations and boulders that formed a perfect sniper’s den above the general and his men, down the grade. He positioned himself between two boulders so he would not silhouette against the sky, and wrapped his right forearm in the leather sling of the Krag and aimed the iron sights at the general’s back. Perhaps one hundred yards out on the hardpan, he could see a mule-drawn wagon with two black soldiers in the wagon box and a third riding a buckskin in the rear. They wore wilted campaign hats and kept glancing up into the brilliance of the sun, shading their eyes, perhaps allowing themselves a desirous thought or two about the brothel, with no awareness of the danger they were in.

  Maybe Ishmael was riding behind them, Hackberry told himself, and even though the circumstances were perilous, he would see his long-lost son again. But he knew that was a lie. If Ishmael were with his men, he’d be out in front, regardless of military protocol. Even as a little boy, Ishmael never shirked a challenge; he’d swell out his chest and say, “I carry my own water, Big Bud,” using Hackberry’s nickname, as though the two of them were brothers-in-arms. Hackberry felt a sense of shame and remorse that was like a canker on his heart. How could he betray and fail the best little boy he had ever known? Worse, how could he betray him for a jealous woman whose only strength lay in her ability to manipulate her goddamn moral coward of a husband?

  “Hey, General! It’s me again,” he called down the grade.

  The general turned around. He was standing on crutches carved from tree limbs, the forks notched into his armpits, his round face bright with sweat. “Hey, mi amigo! I’m glad to see you’re feeling better,” he replied.

  “How about telling your muchachos to lay down their weapons?”

  “Are you joking, señor? We may be under attack soon.”

  “You have many more men in the hills. I wonder why they’re not with you.”

  “They are guarding the country.”

  “Are you conducting some business affairs you don’t want other people knowing about?”

  “Your voice is echoing, señor. The glare is very bad, too. Come down so we can talk as compañeros. Maybe you can have that bath and we can listen to music on the gramophone of the puta.”

  “Those buffalo soldiers were flashing a heliograph,” Hackberry said. “Those are General Pershing’s boys. He’s going to be pretty upset about what y’all have done here.”

  The general was straining to keep his weight off his wounded leg, the pain starting to take its toll. In the brilliance of the day, his face was shiny and yellowish-brown, like worn saddle leather, dented with scars; sweat was leaking from under his hat. “Watch and see what we can make happen with the gifts of the Germans.”

  He said something to a Mexican soldier squatting behind him. Then Hackberry saw the detonator box and the wire leading away from it on the hardpan. The soldier clasped the plunger with both hands and pushed it down.

  The wagon exploded in a mushroom of gray and orange dirt and splintered wood and tack and mules’ hooves and viscera and spoked wheels and wagon springs and shattered axles and pieces of uniform that floated down like detritus from an aerial fireworks exhibition.

  The rider on the buckskin was thrown to the ground. He got up and began running, trying to free his revolver from the holster. Just as he got to the top of a rise, a fusillade from the general’s soldiers seemed to freeze and impale him against the sky.

  The reverberations of the dynamite rolled through the canyon.

  “Now we can talk, amigo,” the general called. “You like a cigar? Come down. It is not good we shout at each other like this.”

  While the general offered his invitation, two enlisted men on one flank and two on the other began laboring their way through the boulders and slag toward Hackberry’s position. Hackberry tracked the soldier nearest him with the Krag’s iron sights and squeezed the trigger. The soldier grabbed his side as through his rib cage had been struck with a hammer; he sat down heavily in the rocks, breathing with his mouth open, staring woodenly at Hackberry as though he could not understand what had happened to him.

  Hackberry ejected the spent casing and sighted on the Mexican directly behind the wounded man. The Mexican was trying to aim his rifle into the glare, his eyes watering. The metal-jacketed .30–40 round cored through his forehead. His knees buckled and he went straight down, as they always did, their motors cut.

  The soldiers advancing on the opposite side of the canyon were obviously stunned by the fact that the man they’d tortured had acquired a high-powered rifle. They were caught on top of a great round rock with no cover, staring directly into the sun, when he shot one of them through the chest and the other one in the face.

  Hackberry swung his rifle on the general and sighted on the exposed skin between his throat and the white flash of long underwear showing at the top of his coat. Hackberry tightened his finger inside the Krag’s trigger guard.

  “Does this mean we’re not amigos anymore?” the general said. “Tell me, killer of my son. Tell me, man who kills the poor.”

  The general’s image seemed to blur inside the rifle’s iron sights. Was it the sweat in Hackberry’s eyes or the sun’s glaze on the rifle barrel? Or maybe the hunger in his stomach or the drain of his energies from the pain the Mexicans had inflicted upon him? Or was the problem in the sting of the general’s words?

  Hackberry pulled the trigger and saw the general’s coat collar jump. The general pressed his hand against the red stripe where the bullet had grazed his neck. He looked at his palm. “I think your aim is slipping, amigo. Bad for you but good for me, huh?”

  Hackberry fed five fresh needle-nosed rounds into the rolling magazine and worked the bolt. “The next one is coming down the pipe.”

  “Chinga tu madre, old maricón.”

  “I look like a nancy?”

  “Shoot me. I’m not afraid. I urinate on you. I urinate on your family. Me cago en la puta de tu madre.”

  The junior officer and the two surviving enlisted men had taken up a position behind a pile of rocks and dead cypress trees. The enlisted men carried bolt-action rifles, probably Mausers, and wore black leather bandoliers with pouches that looked stuffed with ammunition clips. Hackberry backed out of the crevice and crawled across a table rock in full sunlight, beyond the Mexicans’ line of vision. Then he ran for the canyon wall, squatting low, disappearing inside the shade and a clump of willow trees next to a sandy red pool, his head swelling with a thick roar like a kettledrum’s.

  He could see the general and the junior officer and the two enlisted men, but they could not see him. With the echo of the rounds, he could probably pot them one at a time before they figured out where he was. There was only one problem: He could not get the words “man who kills the poor” out of his ears.

  THE ATTACK ON the train was payback for Villa’s raid on Glenn Springs, in Brewster County, just across the Rio Grande, where a four-year-old boy was murdered. The train had been a military objective. The freight cars were filled with soldiers, some riding the spine, some in uniform, some wearing peaked straw sombreros and cartridge belts that glimmered like rows of brass teeth crisscrossed on their chests. There were .30-caliber machine guns set up behind sandbags on the flatcars. No one could say this was not a troop train, nor claim it was not under the command of Pancho Villa.

  But there were others on the train as well. Hackberry saw them when the Rangers first attacked, all of them riding hard out of an arroyo, the sun no more than a dying spark among hills bare of grass and trees, the sky a chemical green. He saw the faces of children and women in the open doors of the cattle cars and behind the slats in the sides, all of them seeming to stare directly at him. Hackberry felt trapped inside a macabre oil painting depicti
ng humanity at its worst. The air was cold and smelled of creosote and the soot and smoke blowing from the engine. The women and little girls wore scarves and blankets and coats that had no color, as though color were a luxury that had never been their due. He saw a fat woman holding her hands to her ears, as though self-imposed deafness could protect her and her children. Hackberry heard a machine gun begin firing from a flatcar, then the captain drew his Peacemaker and aimed it down the line and pulled the trigger. The flame that leaped from the barrel into the gloom somehow released the rest of them from the consequences of their deeds, and at that moment each convinced himself in the quickening of his pulse that bloodlust in the service of a higher cause was no longer bloodlust.

  Hackberry held his horse’s reins in his teeth, at a full gallop, and fired his pistols with both hands. He heard the rounds from the Rangers’ guns slapping into wood and metal, the labored huffing of the horses, the locomotive whistle screaming, the steel wheels screeching on the incline, the dull knocking of the machine gun. But those were not the sounds that would take up residence in his head for the rest of his life. The screams of the children and the women were like sounds one hears inside the wind. Or in a dream. Or in a burning building about to collapse. Or in a universe where you helped dim the stars and murder the voices of charity and pity that should have defined your soul.

  Man who kills the poor.

  He picked up a rock and flung it in a high arc so it struck the opposite wall of the canyon and clattered loudly down the grade. The Mexicans turned and stared at the place where the rock had landed. Hackberry stepped out on a stony plateau in the sunlight, the Krag cradled across his chest. “I’m still here,” he said.

  “You are a crazy man, but one who has cojones, hombre,” the general said.

  “Put away your guns and I’ll set down the Krag.”

  “Why do you make this strange offer, one that you know is silly and stupid?”

  “Because I don’t like a big, fat shit-hog thinking he’s my moral superior.”

  “You are not a killer of women and children? You did not fire indifferently into train cars filled with innocent people?”