House of the Rising Sun

by James Lee Burke

  “I’m not sure I heard you right. Married a what?”

  “A jenny-barner. A whore. The challenge is to find one that don’t have clap or the rale. The homeliest ones are the best. They’re certainly the most grateful.”

  “I never thought about it in those terms. Would you call my wife homely, Mr. Logan?”

  “I wouldn’t call her anything. It was Sundance who wanted to visit your place,” Logan said. He lifted his empty beer mug to the bartender and held up two fingers.

  “One for me, too,” Hackberry said, raising a finger. “Somebody burned my wife’s chest with a cigar.”

  Longabaugh began stacking dominoes, steadying them with one finger when he thought they were about to fall. “Sometimes people who use opiates see unicorns eating the tulips in their gardens.”

  “My wife is no longer a user of narcotics. But if she were, she wouldn’t know she had been burned with a cigar?”

  “Maybe she has ringworm,” Longabaugh said.

  Hackberry’s right hand rested under the table. “Maggie says you’re fast.”

  “At what?”

  “Putting pennies on a man’s eyes.”

  Longabaugh knocked over a stack of dominoes. “I never shot anybody. Don’t plan to, either. Somebody has been selling you fairy tales.”

  “Why did y’all hurt her?”

  Longabaugh was hunched forward, his eyes unfocused, his coat pinched against his narrow shoulders. He wore an unbuttoned checkered vest under his coat, with a watch and fob and chain pinned to it. He rubbed one hand on top of the other, his calluses whispering across his knuckles. “Neither me or Harvey has ever hurt a woman. Don’t be saying we did.”

  The bartender set down three mugs of beer on the felt and went away.

  “Let’s stop this serious talk,” Longabaugh said, his eyes brightening. “It’s about as pleasant as a sermon in a church house that doesn’t have windows.”

  He tipped the bottle to the rims of the three mugs. Hackberry’s gaze never left Longabaugh’s face. The whiskey bloomed in an amber cloud inside the beer and ran with the foam over the side of Hackberry’s mug, dripping onto his knuckles.

  “Life is short. Isn’t that right, Harvey?” Longabaugh said, clinking Logan’s mug.

  “Who did she claim did it?” Logan asked.

  “Who burned her?”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “That would be you, Mr. Logan.”

  Logan’s gaze wandered up the wall, his eyelids fluttering.

  “She said you were drunk.”

  “Drunk or not, I didn’t do it. If I did, I’d tell you. Then one or both of us would probably commit a rash act. But I don’t get in gunfights over a damn lie.”

  “Believe what he says, Mr. Holland. Harvey keeps the lines simple. With Harvey, what you see and hear is what you get.”

  Hackberry searched the faces of both men, the clicking of the faro wheel growing louder inside his head. Neither man blinked.

  “If you’re holding something under the table, it had better be your dick,” Logan said.

  “I’m afraid you’re a little late, partner. There’s a .44 Army Colt pointed at your scrotum. I cut an ‘X’ in the nose of each round in the chambers. It makes an exit hole the size of a plug in a watermelon.”

  For just a moment Logan and Longabaugh seemed frozen inside a sepia-tinted photograph, their affectation of modernity a poor anodyne for the shabbiness of their lives. Hackberry waited for a tic in one of their faces, the movement of a finger on top of the felt, the flex of a jawbone, a quiver around one eye. The faro wheel stopped; the moment passed.

  Hackberry raised his hands above the table and pointed his index fingers at the two men and cocked his thumbs. “Had you going.”

  “You think that’s cute?” Logan said.

  “You wet your pants?”

  “Fuck you I did,” Logan said.

  “Your language is unseemly, Mr. Logan.”

  “Look up on the balcony,” Logan said. “See the woman on the end? That’s my wife. One signal from me and she’d stuff a porcupine up your ass. Or put a cupful of bird shot in the back of your head, whichever you prefer.”

  The woman upstairs pulled up her dress, exposing her bloomers and a cut-down single-barrel .410 shotgun strapped to her thigh. She smiled.

  “Harvey doesn’t mean anything,” Longabaugh said, resting his hand on Logan’s forearm. “We’re not armed. Tell Maggie I hold her in the highest regard. She was always a charmer.”

  “Tell her I said she’s a snake and a lying whore and full-time bitch on top of it,” Logan said. “There’s nothing wrong with her a bullet in the mouth wouldn’t cure.”

  “See you down the road,” Hackberry said.

  “You’d better pray you don’t,” Logan said.

  Hackberry heard someone laugh behind him. He got up from the table and slung his saddlebags on his shoulder and drank his beer mug empty, then set it on the bar and walked out of the saloon into the street, trying to pretend he had not made a fool of himself and been bested by a homicidal moron.

  The woman he lived and slept with was a manipulator. The only joy he could take from his situation was that he was no longer in her debt. Whether the court granted him a divorce or not, his moral obligation was over. He went to the telegrapher’s window at the train station and sent the following message to Ruby Dansen:

  We can be a family again full-time. Say yes and I will be there. Love to you and that little fellow,

  Big Bud

  The only problem he had now was a level of thirst normal people would never understand. A brush fire raged and withered into ash. A thirst for whiskey did not. The rain was spinning like glass out of the sky. He went into the middle of the street and began turning in a circle, his arms stuck out by his sides, his face lifted to the clouds, his mouth wide. The calliope was still playing, although its operator was nowhere in sight. Hackberry knew an ocean of beer and Jack Daniel’s would never quench the flame inside him. But a man could try.

  HE WOKE UNDER a freight wagon. The rain had stopped and was dripping off the eaves of the shacks that lined the alleyway where he had passed out. His gold watch was still in his pocket, his saddlebags in a puddle of water, his .44 in his hand. He rotated the cylinder and counted the rounds in the chambers. None of them had been fired. He opened the cover on his watch and looked at the time. Only five hours had elapsed since he’d confronted Longabaugh and Logan. The calliope was still playing, the lights burning in several buildings along the street. A man wearing rubber pants and suspenders and a long-sleeved striped shirt, his hair parted down the middle, came out of a saloon’s back door, his arm around a Mexican girl. “You gonna make it, sailor?” he said.

  “What was that?” Hackberry said.

  “You’re listing, bud.”

  “What day is it?”

  “Same day it was when you pissed out the window of the gambling hall,” the man in rubber pants said.

  “Pobrecito,” the girl said.

  “Who you talking about, girl?” Hackberry said. “Who are you people?”

  The man and the girl dropped their eyes and didn’t answer. Hackberry walked unsteadily down the alley into the street, knocking against a trash can and a rain barrel, the ground tilting as dramatically as a seesaw. A wagon splashed through a deep hole and splattered him with mud. The horses and wagons and buggies and water troughs and buildings on the street were whirling around him as though he were standing in the midst of a funnel. He stepped up on a wooden walkway in front of a barbershop and sat down on a chair someone had left outside. He folded his hands between his knees and hung his head as though in mourning, hoping he wouldn’t get sick. Would his alcoholic misery never end? Dawn was a few hours away, and his entire day was already a bed of nails. In spite of his condition, he now had a chance at a new life, with a family and the simple pleasures whiskey had stolen from him.

  He looked up and down the walkway. He could smell coffee boiling and meat and
hash browns and eggs cooking on a griddle. Then Harry Longabaugh and Harvey Logan came out of a café, backlit by the electric lights. They were admiring a palomino gelding with a gold and silver tail tethered to a hitching rail. Neither man looked in his direction. Logan was puffing on a cigar that looked like a stick protruding from his thick mustache. Longabaugh stretched and gazed at the eastern sky, as though in anticipation of another fine day.

  What a joke, Hackberry thought. Men for whom he had nothing but contempt had extricated him from a problem he had thought unsolvable. Here’s to you, boys, he thought. May you find a shady place when you get to the big blaze below.

  Then he watched Harvey Logan some more and realized he had been slickered by a man who had the psychological complexity of a centipede. Logan had taken the cigar from his mouth and was blowing on the tip, heating it into a red coal. A winged cockroach, as thick as a man’s thumb, was crawling up one of the wood posts that supported the colonnade. Logan blew softly on the cigar’s tip one more time and touched it to the roach’s head and watched the roach sizzle and fall to the walkway. He ground the roach into paste under his boot, then rocked on his heels and resumed smoking the cigar.

  “She was telling the truth, wasn’t she?” Hackberry said behind him.

  Logan sniffed at the air and didn’t turn around. “You smell puke?” he said.

  “He can’t hardly stand up, Harvey. Let it go,” Longabaugh said.

  Logan yawned. “Yes, time to hit the mattress.” He fished in his pocket and flipped a silver dollar over his shoulder onto the walkway. “There’s a bathhouse run by a Chinaman down the street. He sells powders for crab lice, too.”

  Logan and Longabaugh walked toward the livery, chatting about a baseball game that was to be played that morning. Hackberry hooked one arm around the wood post, barely able to keep from falling into the street, his thirst so great he would have swallowed a quart of kerosene if it were handy.

  MAGGIE COULD FEEL the days starting to dwindle down. The nights were cool and damp, the autumnal change stealing across the land, bleeding the sky of its summer light and drying up the water in the creeks and burning the bloom on the flowers. For Maggie, it was a bit like watching the world come to an end. Since she was seven years old, she had experienced moments like these, and rather than achieve understanding of them, she’d discovered they grew worse as the years passed. They always occurred when she was alone and the house played tricks on her mind and whispered words to her that were unintelligible. Her breath would suddenly come short, as though someone had pressed his thumb against her throat, and a sensation as gray as winter would foul her blood and invade her glands and turn her skin to sandpaper.

  She looked at the scorched chunks of limestone in the fireplace and the ashes and twists of burned paper that had been there since spring. She wondered if she should build a fire. Her body longed for the comfort of a warm hearth and the cheery petals of flame on a big log. But she knew the house would be overheated in minutes, and if her husband walked in, he would have one more tool to use against her, to take power from her, to reassert himself as head of the household.

  You have a hard edge, Maggie, her father had said when she was fourteen, just before he put her on the train for New Mexico. You don’t give quarter. You need to learn mercy, girl. I guarantee you’ll like the boarding school. You’ll find kind and genteel folk there, people who’ll set a better example than I have. God be with you.

  Benedict Arnold, she had thought. Weakling and scapegoater of your daughter.

  When she was seven, he had given her a puppy named Napoleon. He told her not to leave Napoleon alone in the yard or coyotes would get him. Then, after infecting her with the cruel image of her puppy being torn apart, he went to town and told her to help her mother, who was eight months pregnant.

  Maggie was playing jacks in the barn when she heard her mother call from the bedroom window. She started out the door, then stopped. Napoleon had climbed up on a stack of hay bales and was chasing his tail in a circle. “Come down here, you bad dog. I have to see what Mommy wants,” she said.

  Napoleon tumbled backward, wedging himself between two bales.

  “See what you’ve gone and done, you silly puppy,” she said.

  She heard her mother call again, louder this time, a thread of pain in her voice. Maggie climbed up on a bale, trying to reach down and catch her pup by the neck. Finally, she was able to get her hand under his stomach and lift him over the bale and skid down on the barn floor with Napoleon held against her chest. She brushed the straw off his face and set him on a folded tarpaulin and looked for a piece of twine to tie through his collar. “I’ll be there in a minute, Mommy,” she called through the barn door.

  There was no reply. Napoleon took off running deeper into the barn. “Napoleon, you’re going to get a spanking with a newspaper,” she said.

  But she didn’t spank him. Nor did she go in the house. She listened to the silence a moment, then sat down and resumed her game, bouncing the rubber ball off the plank floor and scooping up as many jacks as she could while the ball was in the air.

  Her father returned from town a half hour later. She heard him cry out from inside the house, then he was at the barn door, his face like a collapsed balloon, both of his hands shiny with blood.

  “Where have you been?” he said.

  “Here, in the barn.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Guarding Napoleon, like you told me.”

  “I told you to watch your mother.”

  “No, you said not to leave Napoleon alone. You said the coyotes would eat him.”

  “Your mother didn’t call you?”

  “Napoleon fell between the hay bales.”

  “You helped the dog but not your mother?”

  “She didn’t call me anymore. What’s wrong, Daddy?”

  “Your mother is dead.” He squeezed his temples with his thumb and the tips of his fingers, his face riven with either sorrow or wrath. “Oh, Maggie.”

  She realized he was weeping, his back shaking. He put his hand down to hers. She stared at her jacks and rubber ball on the floor, and at Napoleon chasing a butterfly in the sunlight. She wanted her father to pick her up and hold her against him. She wanted to smell the warm odor of his skin, the cologne he put on his jaw and neck.

  “Come inside,” he said. “The baby is stillborn. We need to wrap him in a sheet. Your mother needs to be washed, too. No one must see her like this.”

  “Like what?”

  “What do you think, girl?”

  “She called me twice and—”

  “Twice?”

  She tried to think what she should say next. “It got quiet. Napoleon was whimpering. I thought Mommy was all right.”

  He released her hand. “You thought?” He looked at her as though he didn’t know who she was. “Go on with you, now. Get the sponges and a pan of water from the kitchen. Get two sheets out of the closet.”

  She began to sob, hiccupping, her shoulders jerking.

  “It’s not your fault,” he said.

  She lifted her face to his. She felt a breeze on her skin, a coolness around her eyes.

  Then he said, “I should have known better. You were born selfish, just like your grandmother.”

  He never spoke again of her failure, but sometimes he would look at her as though gazing at an instrument of the Creator’s punishment rather than a daughter. Never again did he set her on his knees, or play games with her, or take her with him to his land office in town. There was an unrelieved weariness in his face, like that of a man with a stone bruise forever inside his shoe.

  He didn’t visit her on Christmas or Thanksgiving at the boarding school, and he didn’t attend her graduation when she was sixteen. His excuse was his lack of funds and the probability that his investment in cattle futures was about to send him into bankruptcy. When she was called to his deathbed, she refused to hold his hand or kiss his brow or acknowledge his attempt at an apology. The minister and p
hysician in attendance were appalled. Maggie Bassett, age seventeen, could not have cared less about their condemnation.

  THAT MORNING THE mail carrier had delivered an envelope postmarked in Denver and addressed to Hackberry. The bright blue calligraphy obviously belonged to that poseur Ruby Dansen. Maggie steamed open the envelope and removed a single piece of folded paper. A lock of blond hair fell out. The note read, “Ishmael just had his first real haircut. He thought Big Bud might like this.”

  The note was unsigned. Maggie picked up the lock of hair from the floor and replaced it inside the sheet of paper and stuck the paper back inside the envelope and resealed the envelope with paste. Then she propped it against a flower vase on the dining room table, wondering what she should do next. Unfortunately, when it came to future events, she had a trait that sometimes frightened even her. She did not make decisions based on the results of a conscious process. Instead, her decisions seemed made for her by someone else, perhaps a little girl who lived in a dark place inside her, a place where Maggie the adult would never go by herself.

  Where was Hackberry? He had been gone over two days. Did he get into it with Harvey Logan? She touched the burn on her chest. Had she made herself a widow? Maybe that prospect wasn’t entirely bad. She saw herself standing by an ornate coffin in the Holland family cemetery, bereaved, the mourners passing in review, squeezing her hand or patting her cheek. No, she must rid herself of thoughts like these. It was not her intention to have them or see these images. No, no, no, that was not she. The images were just a trick of the mind.

  So much for that.

  In the morning a boy on a mule delivered a telegram from the telegrapher’s office at the depot. The name “Holland” and the rural route number were written in pencil on the envelope. “Where might this come from?” Maggie asked, smiling at the boy.

  “I wouldn’t know, ma’am.”

  “You don’t think it’s bad news, do you? People always say wire messages contain notices of accidents and deaths and such.”

  “The telegrapher listened to the tapping on the key and wrote out the message. He didn’t seem to give it much mind, if that he’ps you at all.”