House of the Rising Sun

by James Lee Burke

  Abnormality became his norm. The man he once knew as Hackberry Holland mounted his horse, bade the world a fond farewell, and went somewhere else. The wretch he left behind was hardly recognizable. The aforesaid were the words he used to describe his own descent into the abyss, as though he took solace in being the architect of his own destruction.

  That was when Maggie Bassett came back into his life. She threw out his whiskey and cleaned and scrubbed his house and washed his clothes and put his employees on a regular schedule and balanced his books and wrote letters of goodwill to friends he thought he had lost. She cooked for a bunkhouse full of men, broke hardpan prairie with a single-tree plow, bucked bales and gelded and branded his livestock, and in calving season shoved her hand up to the armpit in a cow’s uterus with the best of them. She took credit for little and did not demean or judge, and when his mind finally cleared, he admitted she had probably saved him from the asylum or drowning facedown in a mud puddle behind a saloon.

  There was only one problem about living with Maggie Bassett: In his wildest imaginings, he could not guess what went on in her head. He suspected it would take two or three centuries to decipher who she was—in large part because she didn’t know, either.

  Seven months after Maggie moved into the house, Hackberry received a letter from Ruby Dansen. He read it, put it back in the envelope, and set it on a table in the living room. He said nothing of the letter to Maggie. That evening, at dinner, Maggie said, “I have a confession to make.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I helped rob a bank.”

  “You were bored and the Dalton gang needed an extra hand?”

  “You know who Harry Longabaugh is?”

  “A tall, self-important pissant with a lopsided head who never had a job other than slopping hogs? Calls himself the Sundance Kid?”

  “Harry is handsome and a gentleman. I had the good fortune to know him several years ago. ‘Know’ in the biblical sense,” she said. “How do you like that?”

  His pale blue eyes were flat, his mouth dry. “At Fannie Porter’s cathouse in San Antonio?”

  “No, Harry and I went to the opera together, then to a very elegant restaurant, Mr. Smarty-Pants. He asked if I’d ever stopped a train or a held up a bank. He said you really hadn’t lived till you’d stuck a gun in a bank president’s face or blown open a safe full of John D. Rockefeller’s money.”

  “You did not rob a bank, Maggie. Do not mention robbing banks to me again. Do you understand me?”

  “I was trying to be honest with you. I saw Harry on the street yesterday. I don’t think he saw me. I just wanted you to know.”

  He set down his knife and fork. “You saw him here?”

  “His back was to me. Harvey Logan was with him. Believe me, it was Harvey. Nobody ever forgets Harvey Logan.”

  He picked up his knife and fork again, his forearms resting on the edge of the table. “I don’t believe you.”

  “I don’t care if you do or not.”

  “You think I’m jealous of a man like Longabaugh? I wouldn’t cross the street to watch a rabid dog rip out his throat.”

  “Did you know your knuckles are turning white?”

  “Because I’m wondering if I’m married to a crazy woman. Have you heard what cowpokes say about the women at Fannie Porter’s brothel? ‘Their homeliness is never held against them.’ You take pride in knowing the clientele of a place like that?”

  “You have the cruelest mouth of any man I’ve ever met.”

  “I saw you looking through the mail this morning. I think you read Ruby’s letter. I think that’s what this Longabaugh thing is all about.”

  “You left it open on the table. How could I not see it? She’s using the child to extort you.”

  “I guess you didn’t read the whole letter. The preacher was hit by a tram. He’s dead. She’s a good young woman who doesn’t deserve the hardships of widowhood.”

  “You concede I saved you from destitution, yet you sit at our table, eating the food I prepared for you, and praise the merits of a girl who deserted you when you needed her most. Does that strike you as a bit unusual?”

  “Maybe it explains my problems with women. I’ve always been a poor judge of character.”

  She threw her glass of sun tea in his face.

  HE SLEPT LITTLE that night and woke at dawn and reread Ruby’s letter. She was in Trinidad, Colorado, with Ishmael, working for an organization he had never heard of. He shaved, put on a suit, strapped on a money belt, and wrote Maggie a note:

  I hope to be back home in ten days. I have to ensure my son is provided for. I’m sorry about last night. The next time I act in a willful or vain manner, you have my permission to put poison in my food, if you are not already planning to do so. Were you actually involved in a bank robbery? I think one of us is crazy. It’s probably me. Take care.

  Your loving husband,

  Hack

  He tilted his note into the light and reread it, wondering what his words actually meant. How could he communicate with a person who changed personalities the way other people changed their underwear? Sometimes during their most intimate moments, when he was convinced she was not acting, he would look into her eyes and take away only one conclusion: She could hold two contrary thoughts simultaneously with complete comfort. How many men could say that about their wives?

  THE TRAIN RIDE to Trinidad took three days and required two ­transfers. It was a strange journey. At dawn, the train entered the Great American Desert, a pre-alluvial world of mesas and dry streambeds that antedated the dinosaurs and remained untainted by the Industrial Age. Far up the track, after sunset, he could see the glow of the firebox when the train arched around a bend, smoke and sparks blowing back from the locomotive, and men the conductor called “hoe boys,” for the grub hoes they carried, running along the tracks, trying to grab a boxcar on the fly. Where did they come from? Why weren’t they ­working and taking care of their families instead of racing on foot, grabbing on to a steel rung that could tear an arm from the socket?

  Hackberry had seen mountains before, in Mexico and Southwest Texas, but they were little more than piles of crushed rock compared to the South Colorado Plateau. The peaks of the mountains disappeared into the clouds, their slopes so immense that the forests in the ravines resembled clusters of emerald-green lichen on gray stone. In the early morning, when he stepped down on the platform in Trinidad, the air was as cold and fresh as a block of ice, white strings of steam rising off the locomotive, baggage wagons rattling past him, the streets lit by gas lamps, and behind the city, a mountain as flat-sided and blue as a razor blade soaring straight up into the sky, touching the stars. He felt he had arrived at a place he might never want to leave.

  He had telegraphed his arrival time to Ruby but had not asked that she meet him at the station. Regardless, there she was, in a frilly white dress that went to her ankles, a thin pink sash around the waist, a flat-topped, narrow-brimmed straw hat with a black band set squarely on her head. Ishmael was perched on a bench, wearing a suit and a matching cap and shiny black shoes with silver buckles. “There’s Big Bud!” he shouted.

  “How you doin’ there, little pal?” Hackberry said. He scooped up Ishmael and bounced him up and down and whirled the two of them in a circle. “My heavens, what a powerful little fellow you are. I declare, you’re a grand little chap. Isn’t he, Ruby?”

  She beamed at the two of them, as though a family picture that had broken on the floor had been picked up and glued together and replaced on the nail.

  HE SET ISHMAEL down and hefted up his suitcase, the stars still glimmering in a sky that was the color of gunmetal, while down below, at the bottom of Ratón Pass, the dawn was spreading in a yellow blaze across the plateau. “I understand the hotel here has a fine restaurant,” he said.

  “We’ve heard,” she said.

  Did she mean anything by that? No, he mustn’t have those kinds of thoughts, he told himself. He gazed at the brick-paved streets
by the depot, the vapor rising from the storm drains, the wet sheen on the slate roofs, the aggregate effect of a city built out of rock quarried from the mountains in whose shadows it stood, a smell in the air that bespoke of factories and a new era, one that wasn’t all bad. If you want to restart your life, could you find a better place than this one? a voice whispered inside his head.

  “I’m happy you told me where y’all were,” he said. “I hired a detective to find you. You’re a pretty good hider.”

  “It wasn’t intentional.”

  “I think about you often.”

  “You do?”

  “Well, of course. Why wouldn’t I?”

  “The night Levi was hit by the car—” she began.

  “Don’t give misfortune a second life, Ruby.”

  “He was using morphine. He said it was for his consumption. That wasn’t true. He was in despair. He called himself an adulterer.”

  “He was a widower, and you were a single woman who left the company of an older man, one who never acquired any wisdom about anything. Neither one of you was an adulterer.”

  Nothing he said seemed to register in her eyes.

  “Are you all right?” he asked.

  “I don’t know what I feel right now. I resolved in New York I would never cause harm to anyone again. I feel selfish. I don’t trust my instincts or my thoughts.”

  “Water runs downhill whether you think about it or not.”

  “Where did you get that?”

  “Probably from somebody who cain’t tell bean dip from pig flop.”

  He and Ruby crossed the street, each holding one of Ishmael’s hands, a trolley grinding past them. They sat by a window in the hotel restaurant where they could see the train pulling out of the station on its way to Walsenburg and the snowcapped roll of the Rocky Mountains.

  “What can I order, Big Bud?” Ishmael asked.

  “You can order whatever you want, little pal,” Hackberry said.

  “A waffle?” he said.

  “I think you need a stack of them. That’s a mighty nice suit you’re wearing.”

  “It’s from the dry goods store where Momma works. We have to take it back later. She has to take her dress back, too.”

  Ruby’s face turned red.

  “I thought you worked for a miners’ organization,” Hackberry said.

  “During the day I’m a secretary at the Western Federation of Miners. Sometimes I work at night or on the weekends at a milliner’s.”

  “Who takes care of the boy?”

  “We have a children’s room at the union hall.”

  “You’re working two jobs? Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I felt guilty for leaving you. I wasn’t fair to you. Are you happy with Mrs. Holland?”

  “What?” he said, unable to follow the change in subject.

  “With Maggie.”

  “I’m in her debt, as I am to you. In my earlier life, whiskey made most of my choices. Now I have to live with them.”

  He signaled the waiter so he would not have to continue talking about Maggie. After they ordered, he went to the men’s room and washed his hands and cupped water on his face. Then he looked in the mirror. Who was he? The sum total of his deeds? He would have liked to scrub most of them out of his life. When he went to bed at night or took a nap in a shady hammock, the same images waited behind his eyelids: flashes of gunfire in a darkened alleyway lined with the cribs of working girls, a cowboy buckling over from a shotgun blast inside a pen filled with squealing hogs, a runaway horse stirrup-dragging a dead man past a bank he had just tried to rob.

  Unfortunately, part of the problem was that those images were not altogether unpleasant, particularly when he had to deal with the restraints of what was already being called “the modern era.”

  As Hackberry reentered the dining area, he looked at the tables and at the men in narrow-cut tailored suits and the ladies in hats holding their silverware the way easterners did, taking small bites of their food, chewing slowly before they swallowed. In their world he would never be more than a sojourner, a man for whom an incremental redemption could not take place.

  He sat back down at the table and placed his hand on the back of Ishmael’s neck. The coolness of the boy’s skin and the flutter of his pulse made something inside Hackberry melt. “You’re a mighty fine little fellow, did you know that?” he said.

  “I can already read. Without ever going to school. Momma taught me.”

  “That’s because she’s a good mother. And she’s a good mother because she’s got a good son.”

  “Are you gonna come live with us?”

  “I’m probably just visiting right now.”

  “Why can’t you live with us?”

  “How about you come down to Texas and stay with me?”

  “Without Momma?”

  “We’ll work all that out.”

  Hackberry could see the confusion growing in the boy’s face. He looked at Ruby.

  “There’s the waiter with your waffle, Ishmael,” she said. “Let’s eat and talk later.”

  “You said Big Bud might be staying.”

  Her cheeks flushed again.

  “I plan to stay as long as I can,” Hackberry said, patting the boy’s back. “Maybe we’ll take a train ride up to Denver and visit Elitch Gardens and see a moving picture show. Have you ever seen a moving picture?”

  “No, sir.”

  “I haven’t, either. We can do it together,” Hackberry said. “That’s the way you do things, see? Together. That makes everything more fun, doesn’t it?”

  “You’re not going off, are you?” Ishmael said.

  “No, not at all,” he said. “My schedule is just a little uncertain right now. I declare, this is a nice town.”

  His head was pounding. He couldn’t eat his steak and eggs. He stood up from the table and removed his hat from the back of the chair. He put a ten-dollar gold piece by his plate. “I slept in a bad position last night. I’ll walk up and down a bit and meet y’all in the lobby,” he said.

  “We need to get back home,” Ruby said. “I have to be at work by ten.”

  “Tell them you’re sick and you’re not coming in. The unions are supposed to be sympathetic with women’s problems, aren’t they? You want me to talk to them?”

  She gave him a look that was just short of a slap. He went out into the cold and walked around the block, then sat down in the lobby next to a potted palm. His hands were shaking, but not from the cold. When she entered the lobby with Ishmael in tow, he stood up, his Stetson hanging from his fingers against his trouser leg, his heart beating. “I say everything wrong,” he said. “I brought you a rose.”

  “I need to go home before I go to work. Can you get us a carriage?”

  “Sure. I’ll take care of Ishmael.”

  “You don’t need to.”

  “Where do you live?”

  “That’s not important. Walk outside with me.”

  They went out on the sidewalk. She put Ishmael inside a carriage and turned back to Hackberry, her face a few inches from his. She had buttoned the stem of the rose inside her shirt. The wind was feathering her hair around the edges of her hat. The curvature of her chest was like a dove’s. He had never seen a woman whose mouth was so inviting. “Do you love her?” she asked.

  “She took care of me when I couldn’t get a saucer of coffee to my lips.”

  “My question was an honest one. Will you answer it?”

  “There’s different kinds of love.”

  “Which kind did you have for me and Ishmael?”

  “A kind that’s more than I can explain,” he said. “A kind that’s not in the past tense, either.”

  Her eyes seemed to go inside his head. “I’ll be finished at the union hall at five o’clock if you want to see us.”

  “Of course I want to see you. Why won’t you tell me where you live?”

  “It’s not the best part of Trinidad. We’ll come to the hotel.”

&n
bsp; “You don’t have to hide your circumstances from me.”

  “Don’t ever tell me about the debt you think you owe someone else, Hack. You understand?”

  “I do.”

  Then she was gone and he was left standing alone on the elevated sidewalk, the stars fading into the harshness of the day as though they had never been in the sky.

  SHE SAID SHE and Ishmael would meet him in front of the hotel at seven P.M., but he thought it unseemly that she and his son should have to hide the whereabouts of their home and circumstances. He found out where they lived from a miner in the saloon next to the union hall, then went back to the hotel and dressed in a light blue coat and Confederate-gray trousers and a beige shirt and a black string tie. He brushed his Stetson and had his cordovan boots shined in the lobby, all the time wondering about the fleeting nature of life and the way one or two seemingly insignificant choices could open the door to a kingdom or sweep a man’s destiny into a dustbin.

  He bought a whirligig for Ishmael and a bouquet and a box of candy for Ruby, and hired a carriage to take him up a canyon that seldom saw direct sunlight and probably had been worked by individual prospectors for float gold and abandoned when the mother lode was never found. The road wound along a stream lined with rocker boxes and desiccated sluices and houses that were hardly more than shacks; the stream was a trickle at the base of the canyon, its exposed rocks greasy with an unnatural shine.

  Hackberry leaned forward in the seat and spoke through the viewing slit to the driver. “What kind of place is this?” he asked.

  “One to stay out of,” the driver replied. His back was massive and humped like a turtle’s shell, his coat splitting at the shoulders, his neck thick and ridged with hair beneath his top hat. The accent was Cockney. “They drink out of the same creek they build their privies on. They live like animals. There’s an invalids’ home here, too. Not a pretty sight.”