House of the Rising Sun

by James Lee Burke

  “No, I don’t.”

  Her arm lay across his bare chest. “You’re not interested in me?”

  “How could I not be?”

  “Then why do you stare at the ceiling?”

  “I’m too old for you. I took advantage of your situation when you lost your job. You’re poor and I’m prosperous.”

  “You get those notions out of your head.”

  “That I’m older than you? That I didn’t make overtures to you when you were in a desperate situation?”

  “That I’m a charity case.”

  “I said no such thing.”

  “There’s a revolver sticking out from under your pillow.”

  “That’s where I keep it when I sleep.”

  “What for?”

  “My conscience bothers me. The men I’ve slain visit my bedside. Most of them are still in a bad mood.”

  “Don’t make up stories that hurt you,” she said.

  “A man with a hole in his forehead standing by your bed is hardly a story. You haven’t lived long enough. The dead don’t let go of the world. That’s why we put big stones on their graves. To hold them down.”

  “I think I should get back to my room.”

  He turned on his side and held his eyes on hers. “A girl like you is a gift. A rowdy man such as me is not. A few years with me and your youth would be gone. Not in a good way, either.”

  “Worry about yourself,” she replied. She got up on her knees. “Look the other way a minute.”

  “What for?”

  “Because I told you to.”

  When she took down her hair, it sifted across her face and shoulders. Her nipples were pink, the color and shade of the roses on the wallpaper.

  “I told you not to look.”

  “I’m only human,” he said. “Okay, whatever you say.”

  He turned his head and gazed out the window at the rain blowing across the yard. She spread her knees on his thighs and leaned down and kissed him on the mouth. She lifted his hand and placed it on her breast. “Feel that?”

  “It’s your heart.”

  “No, it’s the way I feel about you.”

  “Let me up,” he said.

  “What’s wrong?”

  He sat on the side of the bed, in a male state, his hands propped on his knees. “I won’t allow this of myself. You’re a good girl. If we’re going to be together, it’ll be as man and wife. I’ll go before the court and straighten out my marital status. I’ll do the proper thing.”

  He was speaking with his back to her. She came around the side of the bed and stood in front of him. “You don’t have to make promises or protect me.”

  “I certainly do, missy.”

  “I told you not to talk to me like that,” she said.

  “I never slept with a woman and went my own way in the morning. At least not when sober.”

  She placed her hand on his forehead and tilted his face up toward hers.

  “I’m not a cow with a brand on it. You think I’d give myself to any man?”

  “No.”

  “Then shut up.”

  She mounted him and placed him inside her, her eyes closing, her mouth opening in a large “O.” The shadow of the rain on the window glass resembled ink running down her skin.

  “Oh, Hack,” she said. “Hack, Hack, Hack.”

  Even though the countryside looked as cold as pewter in the dark, he could smell the sun’s warmth in her skin and hear her labored breathing on the top of his head and the blood whirring in her breasts.

  NINE MONTHS AND eight days later, Ishmael Morgan Holland was delivered by a midwife on a cold winter morning that combined a flawless blue sky and sunshine blazing on the fields with a blanket of fog so thick on the river, Hackberry couldn’t see the water or the giant boulders in the center of the stream. The midwife was a half-black and half-Mexican conjurer who blew the fire out of burns and cured snakebites in cattle by tying a piece of red string above the bone joint on the stricken limb. She had only one eye and was probably the ugliest woman Hackberry had ever seen. She told him she had seen Ishmael in the womb a week before the delivery, and a voice had told her he would be a king one day, unless he was betrayed by a man he dearly loved.

  “Who’s this betrayer you’re talking about?” Hackberry said.

  Her good eye bore into his face, vitriolic, glimmering in its socket. Her breath was as dense and fetid as a cave full of bats. “Eres un Judas hacia tus hijos.”

  “Ride your broom out of here,” he said.

  After she left, he thought better of his words and tried to catch her and apologize, but she was gone.

  “Why did you talk to her like that?” Ruby said.

  “She said I was a Judas unto my children.”

  “Why would she say a thing like that?”

  “How would I know? She’s a crazy woman.”

  “Somebody is in a bad mood,” Ruby said.

  Four years later, he sued his estranged wife, Maggie Bassett, for divorce on grounds of infidelity. Not her infidelity. His. The inside of the courtroom smelled of cigars and unemptied cuspidors. The judge wore a gray-streaked black chin beard and had a large, deeply pitted, veined nose on which his spectacles perched like magnifying glasses on an owl. Hackberry could not stop staring at the strange optical effect created by the magnification. The judge’s eyes reminded Hackberry of giant bugs trying to swim underwater.

  “In the state of Texas, you cannot petition the court for the dissolution of your marriage because you, the plaintiff, have committed adultery,” the judge said.

  “I was trying to be gentlemanly,” Hackberry said. “Discussion about marital congress is not something I normally engage in.”

  “Would you address the court in formal fashion, please?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “The point is you cannot sue yourself. Is that too difficult to understand?”

  Hackberry gazed out the window as though perplexed, unsure of the right answer.

  “You’ve submitted a list of your infidelities,” the judge said, his finger pinched on a sheet of paper in his hand. “I cain’t believe you’ve gotten this mess on the docket. What the hell is the matter with you?”

  “Can I change the nature of my suit?”

  “Can you what?”

  Hackberry looked across the room at Maggie Bassett and her male companion, who had a shock of white hair like John Brown’s in a windstorm, and a profile that matched, snipped out of tin, his eyes lead-colored. He wore button shoes and a bloodred silk vest and a tall collar and a black rain slicker he hadn’t bothered to remove, glazed with sleet melting on the floor.

  “By change my suit, I mean I would like to request a divorce from Maggie Bassett, also known as Maggie Holland, on the basis of the adultery she committed by sleeping with me,” Hackberry said.

  “Are you still a Texas Ranger, Mr. Holland?”

  “When I’m not on leave and marshaling at the county seat.”

  “Then why don’t you act like one? And stop addressing the court as though you’re in a saloon.”

  “There is evidence that I was married to another woman, if not two, when I met Maggie Bassett, Your Honor. She was knowledgeable about both. That means she made a conscious decision to commit adultery as well as participate in bigamy. By anybody’s measure, that’s moral turpitude.”

  “The simple fact is she doesn’t want to grant you a divorce,” the judge said. “Nor does the court see any reason to grant you one. That said, I cannot for the life of me understand why a sane woman would want to keep a man like you around.”

  “It could be she wants my ranch and anything else of mine she can get her hands on.”

  “Mr. Holland, I’m not going to warn you again about your obvious disrespect for the court and this proceeding.”

  “I think it very likely that Maggie Bassett wants my assets, Your Honor. Her greedy nature and her addiction to laudanum seem to go hand in hand, although I’m not an expert in these matters.
”

  “You’re telling me your wife is addicted to opiates?”

  “I’m just saying her marital habits are a bit unusual. I’m sorry, I meant to add ‘Your Honor.’ I’ll start over. Your Honor—”

  “You’re about to find yourself in a jail cell, Mr. Holland.”

  “Judge, my poor skills with language are not allowing me to adequately convey my history with Maggie Bassett. Allow me to illustrate, Your Honor. I realized Maggie had eccentric tendencies when I found her in our bed with the Chinaman who was her opium supplier. When I expressed my puzzlement, she introduced me to the Chinaman and asked me to fix them a sandwich, since she was not disposed to go into the kitchen and do it her own self.”

  The judge touched his forehead like a man teetering on an aneurysm. “Mrs. Holland, would you care to address some of the statements your husband has made?”

  She rose demurely from her chair. She was wearing a dark green velvet dress with a bustle and a fur collar, and boots that laced up to the knee. She had pale skin and soft brown hair she wore in swirls piled under a wide-brimmed straw hat. Her fingers were clamped on a small black cloth purse she held in front of her. Who would have believed her background? Not even Hackberry did.

  “For a short time, I used a medication to control a nervous condition,” she said. “The gentleman with me is Dr. Romulus Atwood, a specialist in these matters. He will testify that I consume no sedative stronger than warm milk.”

  “Romulus Atwood implants people with animal glands, Judge,” Hackberry said. “He’s sewn goat testicles on impotent men. The ones who have survived his procedures don’t know whether to bleat or yodel.”

  “Be quiet, Mr. Holland,” the judge said. He studied Atwood. “Were you ever a resident of El Paso?”

  “Briefly.”

  “Rise when you address the court.”

  “Yes, sir, Your Honor.”

  “Were you ever known as ‘the Undertaker’?”

  “On occasion.”

  “For the four or five men you killed?”

  “Those shootings were in self-defense and adjudicated as such, Judge.”

  “You were an associate of John Wesley Hardin?”

  “I played cards with him. I wouldn’t call him an associate.”

  “You wouldn’t? What would you call him?”

  “I’d call him dead.”

  “You think that’s witty?”

  “No, I would not try to be witty, Your Honor. I think Mr. Holland has sullied this lady’s name. I think she’s a good Christian woman, not an addict, and certainly not a miscegenationist.”

  “I don’t like you,” the judge said.

  “Sir?”

  “A killer carries his stink everywhere he goes. I want you out of my courtroom,” the judge said. “As for you, Mr. Holland, I find against you. I think you’re a dangerous, incorrigible man who has outlived his time and has no business carrying a badge and will probably come to a bad end. That said, I’ve heard you’re a good father to your son. For that reason and that reason only, I’m not locking you in jail. I recommend that you care for your son and raise him right and forget all this silliness.”

  “I don’t quite know how to take all that in, Judge.”

  “You can take it any goddamn way you want.”

  “Can I buy you a drink?”

  “Not at gunpoint,” the judge replied.

  Hackberry went outside and stood a long time under a dripping mulberry tree. Across the dirt street, Maggie and the gunfighter who called himself a doctor entered a brightly lit café that glowed with warmth. The light had gone from the sky, and the sleet running down Hackberry’s skin and bare head was cold and viscous and left a dirty purple smear on his face when he tried to wipe it off. Where was his hat? Had he left it in the courtroom? No, it was in his buggy. With his 1860 Army Colt revolver that had been converted for modern ammunition. How could he be so forgetful?

  Those were the thoughts he was thinking when he retrieved his hat and wiped his face and hair with a clean rag and put on his hat and strapped the Army Colt on his hip and dropped his coat flap over the revolver’s frame and the tiny notches filed in the wood grips. Then he crossed the street, never glancing down at the puddles he stepped in, the sleet hitting his face, his right hand opening and closing against his thigh.

  HE SAT AT a table covered with a checkered cloth and ordered a pot of coffee and a plate of hash browns and two fried eggs on top of a pork chop. While he cut his meat and speared it with pieces of egg into his mouth, his gaze stayed locked on Maggie and her companion, both of whom were sitting at a wooden booth no more than fifteen feet away, both trying to ignore him. Romulus Atwood had hung up his slicker, exposing his white dress shirt with balloon sleeves and a neckerchief a dandy might wear and a vest as bright as a freshly sliced pomegranate. Atwood glanced sideways just briefly, no longer than it takes to blink, and pulled the cuff of his right shirtsleeve down to the knuckle on his thumb.

  When Hackberry finished eating, he wiped his mouth with his napkin and let the napkin drop to his plate. He got up from his chair and walked to Maggie and Atwood’s booth, his Stetson hanging by the brim from his left hand. “You’re looking mighty squirrel, Maggie,” he said.

  She set down her teacup. The color of her eyes changed from dark green to brown with the light and seemed to have no white areas. “Thank you,” she said. “Are you doing all right, Hack? I worry about you sometimes.”

  “You know me. I try to stay out of the rain and not step on the cat’s tail.”

  “Have you been introduced formally to Dr. Atwood?”

  “Oh, yes, the Undertaker. That’s quite a nickname. I heard you used to carry a cut-down under your duster.”

  Atwood grinned. “Not so, but pleased to know you just the same. Wes Hardin made mention of you on a number of occasions.”

  “What did you think of Wesley, Dr. Atwood?”

  “People said he could read people’s thoughts. That’s why I never let my thoughts wander too far when I was around him.”

  “Did you know he headed up a lynch mob in Florida that burned a colored man alive?”

  “Yes, I believe he referred to some hijinks in his youth. You and he had a go at it yourselves, didn’t you?”

  “I didn’t quite get that.”

  “I think he said you spooked his horse while he was drunk. Then you put the boots to him before he could get off the ground.”

  “It went a little bit beyond that. I stomped his face in and broke his ribs and chained him in a wagon and nailed the chains to the floor. I busted him across the face with a rifle butt and took great pleasure in doing it. I guess you could say I flat tore him up before I came to my senses. I’ve always regretted that.”

  “We all get religion at some point in our lives,” Atwood said.

  “I wish I’d shot him. I wish I had shot a few of his friends, too. The world would be a better place for it.”

  Maggie Bassett’s apprehension was obviously growing. She tried to signal the waiter for the check. Atwood began eating a slice of apple pie with a wood-handled fork, filling his jaw as a chipmunk would, a gleam in his eyes, as though injurious words had no effect on him.

  Across the street, steam was rising from the back doors of a Chinese laundry. “You know why Chinamen get ahead of most white men?” Hackberry asked.

  “Hack—” Maggie began.

  “No, why is it that Chinamen are superior to the white race, Marshal Holland?” Atwood said.

  “Because they work from cain’t see to cain’t see and take in stride all the abuse that white trash heap on them.”

  “I’m not following you.”

  “They’re not human tapeworms. They don’t sell ignorant people fraudulent medicines. They don’t graft goat parts on a poor fool who cain’t get his pole up.”

  “Hack, don’t do this,” Maggie said.

  “Let him talk,” Atwood said. “He’s the law. And it looks like I might be his huckleberry.”

&nb
sp; “You know there’s an ordinance against carrying a firearm inside the city limits?” Hackberry said.

  “You’re the only person I see carrying a gun, Marshal.”

  “Put your weapon on the table and stand up.”

  “I don’t have one.”

  “Maybe it’s my eyesight. Or I imagine things. Can I have a taste of that pie? I’ve always loved apple pie.”

  “Hack, please,” Maggie said.

  “He’s all right,” Atwood said. He set down the fork and pushed the plate to the edge of the table. “Here, let me wipe off the fork for you.”

  “You ever shoot a man in a poker game?” Hackberry said. “When he was raking in his winnings and about to head for the cribs upstairs? If you want to park one in a man’s brisket, that’s the time to do it. But you’ve got to have the right rig to pull it off.”

  “I don’t do things like that.”

  “I bet you love your mother, too,” Hackberry said. He pulled the fork from Atwood’s hand and drove the tines through the man’s knuckles into the tablecloth and wood. Then he ripped Atwood’s sleeve to the elbow and removed the single-barrel .32 hideaway strapped under his forearm. Atwood’s face was white, blood trickling through his fingers, his mouth quivering with shock, his hand impaled like a monkey’s paw.

  SOMETIMES IT WAS hard to turn it off. Hackberry pushed Atwood ahead of him into the street. The sky was laden with clouds that resembled smoke from an ironworks, swirling, unpredictable. “Walk to the jail,” he said. “Don’t look at me, either.”

  He pushed Atwood again. When Atwood stumbled, Hackberry hit him across the head with the revolver and sent him sprawling in the mud.

  “He’s no match for you, Hack. Please, this isn’t necessary,” he heard Maggie say. He felt her hands dig into his upper arm.

  “I always thought you had pretty good taste in men. When did you take up with yellow-bellied back-shooters?” Atwood started to get up, but Hackberry kicked him again. “You stay where you’re at.”

  “Hack,” Maggie said, shaking him. “Hack! Did you hear me? Get out of it. Look at me. I’m Maggie. I know you. I know every thought you have. You’re jealous and possessive. Now, stop what you’re doing.”