House of the Rising Sun

by James Lee Burke

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

  HACKBERRY 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.

  THE 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.”

  While the soldier spoke, he held Hackberry’s rifle in one hand and gestured in the air with the other, his back to his men, clearly knowing they awaited his command. Hackberry watched them lead the remaining two prisoners to the wall. The American refused the blindfold.

  “Don’t do this,” Hackberry said.

  “What will you do for me if I stop it?”

  “I’m at your orders, señor.”

  “Then get down on your knees.”

  “Sir, we shouldn’t be discussing activities of a maricón nature here.”

  “Kneel down, gringo. You need to learn what it is like to be a Mexican in your country.”

  “I run off at the mouth sometimes. I promise Mr. Glick won’t be no more trouble.”

  “You can do it, hombre,” the soldier said. He shifted his stance and inserted his thumb inside his belt buckle so his fingers hung down on his fly. “It will improve your humility, your spiritual vision.”

  “I’ve got some money. I’ve got a couple of artifacts from a church. I’ve got a rare pistol in my saddlebags. I would like to make a present of them.”

  “You have been looting churches? You have been a very bad gringo. It’s time you show humility. What you will do down there will take less than a minute or two. Then everything will be as before. You can take the crazy one out in the hills and the people will call you a saint.”

  The soldier was smiling, the forked white scar at the corner of his eye as tiny and thin as a snake’s tongue. He began to unbutton his fly.

  “You don’t want me as an enemy,” Hackberry said.

  “You are very vain. It is too bad for your friend the crazy man.” Without taking his eyes off Hackberry, the soldier shouted, “¡Fuego!”

  The rifles fired in unison just as the soldier butt-stroked Hackberry with the Mauser, knocking him into the dirt. Then h
e raised the butt and drove it into Hackberry’s head. In his mind’s eye, Hackberry saw his horse bolting down the street, stirrups flying, the saddlebags flopping on its rump. A mariachi band began playing in front of the cantina, and a bottle rocket popped high overhead. The festival had resumed.

  HACKBERRY WOKE ON a wood pallet in a dank dirt-floor room that smelled of moldy hay and water that had seeped through the walls and candles that were burning in an adjacent room. The priest who had tried to intercede on behalf of the prisoners was sitting on a chair by the pallet. He removed a damp rag from Hackberry’s forehead. “We caught your horse for you, up the trail in the hills,” the priest said.

  “You’re American?”

  “I’m a Maryknoll missionary. You have to leave.”

  “Where’s my rifle?”

  “The soldier who struck you took it. His name is Miguel Ordoñez. He’s drunk and in the cantina now. Don’t let him get his hands on you again.”

  The priest couldn’t have been over twenty-five. His face was lean and unshaved, his hair over his collar, his breath heavy with the smell of alcohol and cigarettes.

  “What about my saddlebags?”

  “They’re with your horse. No one has opened them. Miguel has told the villagers you robbed a church. Is that true?”

  “No, sir. I’m a Texas Ranger.”

  “If Ordoñez finds that out, he’ll shoot you for fun.”

  When Hackberry sat up, he thought his head would fall in his lap. “Maybe he ought to be afraid of me.”

  “He isn’t. This is Mexico. You’re an outlaw and he’s the government.”

  “I’ve been rode hard and put away wet, Padre. Cain’t I hide here’bouts for a while?”

  “Believe it or not, I’d like to stay alive. So would my friend who hid your horse.”

  “I had that one coming, didn’t I?”

  The priest made a noncommittal expression.

  “On another subject, I’ve been looking for my son,” Hackberry said. “He’s a captain in command of colored cavalry. His name is Ishmael Holland. Has some nigra cavalry been through here?”

  “I don’t know. You use the term ‘nigra’?”

  “It’s a pronunciation. Yes, ‘nigra.’ It’s not like they wouldn’t stand out. Have you seen any?”

  “Aside from your bad sense of humor, you obviously don’t understand our situation. When Americans come into a village and the villagers feed them, the villagers pay for it. The government thinks all Americans are adventurers working for Villa. The price for the villagers is very high. In the United States, you don’t hear about these things. That makes it convenient for you but not for us.”

  “Can you give me some food to take with me?”

  “Of course. But you must go. We can’t bargain on that point.”

  “And a big canteen? I’ll pay you for it.”

  “I have a goatskin wine bag. Anything else you need?”

  “I didn’t mean to provoke you, Padre.”

  “I asked what else you needed.”

  “I could use a hatchet.”

  “For building a campfire? The dry washes are full of fuel.”

  “There’s nothing like splitting your own wood,” Hackberry said, rising to his feet, the room tilting sideways. “Oh, Lordy, I’m getting too old for this.”

  THE PRIEST PUT him in the back of a wagon full of corncobs and drove him up the trail to a shack in the hills where a goatherd lived. Hackberry retrieved his horse in back and thanked the priest and the goatherd and tried to give them money, which they refused.

  “It will be dark in two or three hours,” the priest said. “If I were you, I’d leave now, while Miguel and his friends are in the cantina, and not rest until sunrise.”

  “That’s good advice,” Hackberry said.

  “Why is it that you look away from me when you speak?”

  “Because I didn’t tell you the entire truth about something. I said I didn’t loot churches. I have some artifacts in my saddlebags that may have come from one.”

  “What do you plan to do with them?”

  “I haven’t thought about it. Sell them, maybe.”

  “They’re not yours.”

  “They’re not anybody else’s, either.”

  “I hope you have a good life, Mr. Holland.”

  “Your second meaning isn’t lost on me. I’ve asked the Man Upstairs for he’p in finding my son, but all I hear is silence. Maybe it’s different for you.”

  “Not entirely.”

  “I’ll have to study on that one,” Hackberry said.

  For the first time since they met, the priest smiled.

  HACKBERRY WENT NO more than five hundred yards farther up the incline, then turned the horse down an arroyo onto a flat bench that looked out upon the village and the milky-brown river and the low hills in the distance and a volcano from which a thin column of smoke rose into a turquoise sky. “You’ve been a loyal horse, and I know you’d like to skedaddle for Texas, but there’s a mean huckleberry down there in the cantina we just cain’t let slide. No, sir. What’s your opinion on that?”

  His horse looked at him, one ear forward and one ear back.

  “Those are exactly my thoughts,” Hackberry said. “It’s not honorable and it’s not Christian. You do not let the wicked become the example for the innocent and uninitiated. Is that the way you see it?” He patted the horse on the neck. “Forget my teasing. It’s about time we give you a name. How about Traveler? That was the name of Robert E. Lee’s horse. Look at that sunset, Traveler. The sky is on fire in the west, and the rest of it is as green and vast as the ocean. Don’t let anybody tell you there’s no God, old pal.”

  But he could not hold on to his ebullient mood. The curse of his family, the one that caused him to curve his palm around the grips of an imaginary revolver in his sleep, was always with him. Sometimes his eyes did not go with the rest of his face, and those who knew him well would separate themselves from him. His mother had been a loving woman, his father sometimes stern and inflexible but fair in his business dealings and protective of children. Some in the family had a bad seed, some didn’t. Those who had it found or created situations that allowed them to do things others preferred not to hear about.

  Hackberry hadn’t simply knocked John Wesley Hardin out of the saddle and stomped his face in. He’d nailed him to the bed of a wagon with chains and kicked him between the buttocks with the point of his boot and thrown him headlong into the sheriff’s office, hoping all the while that Hardin would fight back and get his hand on a weapon so Hackberry could finish the job and purge the earth of a man whose merciless glare reminded him of his own.

  As the sky turned from green to purple, he peered through his spyglass and saw the executioner, Miguel Ordoñez, and his five compatriots exit the cantina and ride single-file through the revelers and along the banks of the river, which they crossed on the wood bridge held together by rope. The executioner was slumped in the saddle, half asleep, a corked bottle of greenish liquid propped between his thigh and scrotum. The line of six horses disappeared from view, in the shadows of a hill. Hackberry closed the spyglass and followed.

  He watched them cross a dry lake bed that cracked under the horses’ feet and left a long line of serpentine tracks entwined like a braided scar across the landscape. They camped at the foot of a hill, among brush and cottonwoods, and built a fire around which they squatted as their simian ancestors might have. One man left the firelight and went into the bushes to defecate. His friends acknowledged the event by arching dirt clods down on his head.

  Hackberry tied his horse to a bush and pulled the .44 double-action revolver and the hatchet and the bowie knife from the saddlebags, and worked his way uphill in the dark, until he was above the campsite and could look down on it without silhouetting against the stars. Six to one, he thought. Well, it could be worse. Then he added, as he was wont with his thoughts, Not really.

  Two of the soldiers had gone to sleep on bedrolls. Three others w
ere listening to a joke Miguel the executioner was telling while he sat on a log, taking small sips from his bottle, the bottle lighting against the fire each time he raised it. The joke was not actually a joke but a story involving a prostitute and a donkey performing on a stage. The soldiers’ horses were tied in a remuda between two trees; the soldiers’ rifles were stacked.

  Hackberry’s sheathed bowie was stuck in his back pocket; he held the .44 in his left hand, the hatchet in his right.

  He stepped into the firelight, his coat open, his straw sombrero pushed up on his forehead. “Top of the evening to you, boys,” he said. “This is from my friend Mr. Glick.”

  The first two who died never knew what hit them, one of them falling into the fire. The men in the bedrolls ran for their rifles. Hackberry kept shooting, not counting rounds, hardly able to make out a target in the smoke and waving shadows, the .44 bucking in his palm. Then it snapped dryly on a fired shell. He let the revolver fall to the ground and pulled the bowie from his back pocket with his left hand and slung the scabbard from the blade and plunged his own body into the midst of those still standing. He felt the bowie embed to the hilt in a soldier’s side, felt him slide off the blade as another man shot at him with a Mauser, the bullet whining into the darkness like a whipsaw. He swung the hatchet blindly behind him and struck nothing, then caught a fleeing soldier between the shoulder blades.

  Just as quickly as his vendetta had begun, it ended, and he was standing in front of the executioner, who stared at him openmouthed, the bottle of mescal still in his hand, as though his possession of it could return him to that envelope of time and security just before his camp was attacked. Hackberry’s sleeves were red with splatter, his ears filled with a sound like wind echoing inside a cave.

  “I am only a soldier carrying out orders,” Miguel said.

  “Take my knife.”

  “No.”

  “I’ll give you the hatchet and keep the knife.”

  “No.”

  “Pick up one of the rifles.”

  “I’m only a functionary, little more than a clerk. I am not one who makes decisions.”