When he got up to fix breakfast, he glanced through the kitchen window at his pumpkin field. He stared at it for a long time, and at the slat fence on his hog pen and the barbed wire on the south end of his pasture. He poured a cup of black coffee and sat down at the kitchen table and drank it without sugar, then washed the cup under the hand pump in the sink and set it in the dry rack. Without bothering to shave, he put on his Stetson and saddled his horse and rode to the home of Cod Bishop.
He tapped on the door and waited. He could see the partially grassed-over area down by the river where, years ago, Bishop had burned the cabins of the black people living on his property, the scorched bricks and boards and sunken piles of ash still visible, as though the soil under the fire was incapable of restoring itself.
Bishop was wearing a Japanese robe when he opened the door, a monogrammed handkerchief in the breast pocket. “Why are you on my porch, Holland?”
“Arnold Beckman says you’re a friend of his.”
“He’s a business associate.”
“I never could understand the word ‘associate.’ It seems to cover everything.”
“If you’re drinking again, seek help from a physician or the temperance people. But leave.”
“Somebody cut my wire and let out my Brahmas and busted down my hog pen last night. Most of my pumpkins are ruined. I’m going to spend most of the day rounding up my stock.”
“Why are you telling me about it?”
“You hear or see anything unusual early this morning?”
“No, I did not.”
“Your light was on at about four-twenty. It was a warm night. You must have had your windows open.”
“I was in my office. I heard thunder. I don’t know anything about your pumpkins. Now go home.”
“Arnold Beckman has been making inquiries about my son. Did you tell him about my boy?”
“The one you drove from your home? How dare you speak to me like this?”
“You once said I was going to get my comeuppance.”
“If I said something like that, I was probably justified. But I don’t remember doing so. Regardless, I’m not the issue. You’re a violent and primitive man, pitied by your neighbors and, by all accounts, an embarrassment to the Texas Rangers. There’s a foul odor about you that you’re not even aware of. Be gone, sir. You gave up your claim to membership in decent society many years ago.”
“Cod, I’m convinced God sent you here to show us the fallacy of white superiority. Don’t hide your light under a basket. Many are called, but few are chosen.”
Bishop slammed the door in his face.
DURING THE MORNING and early afternoon, Hackberry and three of his Mexican workers salvaged a wagonload of his pumpkins and mended the hog pen and the barbed wire in the pasture and rounded up most of his stock. While he drove his cattle back into the pasture, he never took his eyes completely off the bluffs along the river or the dirt road that led to his house, or the deep green arbor of oak trees on the far end of his property. At three o’clock he left his horse saddled in the lot and went into the house and shaved and bathed and put on fresh clothes. Then he put a jar of lemonade and a jar of mustard and a loaf of bread and a chunk of uncooked roast and a whole onion and a fresh tomato in a canvas bag, along with a box that contained his stationery and fountain pen and postage stamps. He also picked up his holstered .44 Army Colt, the loops on the belt stuffed with cartridges, and hung it on the pommel of his horse, along with the canvas bag. He went into the barn and picked up an iron rod that had a wood handle on one end and on the other a hooked tip, blackened by fire.
The river was so low he could ride his horse across it on a sandbar. He came up on a stretch of beach shadowed by cypress whose lacy branches were turning gold with the season. Above him were gray limestone bluffs carpeted on top by lichen and moss and hollowed with depressions Tonkawa Indians had ground corn in. He rode up a sandy path lined on either side with fallen stone, and dismounted in front of a cave and tethered his horse to the limb of a willow tree. Down below, under the riffle flowing between two giant bounders, a shaft of sunlight had pierced the trees and lit the pebbled bottom as brightly as a rainbow.
A folding canvas chair was propped against the cave wall. He built a fire and cut strips from the uncooked roast with the bowie knife he had taken off the Mexican soldier he had killed two years earlier, and hung them on the iron rod and propped the rod across the rocks that ringed his fire. The smoke flattened against the roof, then corkscrewed through a crevice that formed a natural chimney into the top of the bluff. He sat down in the canvas chair and began a letter on top of his stationery box.
Dear Ishmael, it read.
I hope you received my earlier correspondence. Whether you have the opportunity to answer my letter is not important at the moment. I am writing to warn you about a man named Arnold Beckman. He has taken an interest in me for reasons I won’t go into now. He has also used his contacts, all of which I suspect are nefarious in nature, to find out the name of the hospital where you are recuperating from your wounds.
Have nothing to do with this man or his minions. He’s an arms dealer, and like most arms dealers, he sells to both sides. I also believe him to be a sadist. In a word, he’s evil.
I love you, son. I let you and your mother down. One day I hope to make it up to you.
Write when you have time.
Your father,
Big Bud
A shadow fell across his handwriting. He began to write a postscript, not looking up. “You’re standing in my light,” he said.
“Saw your smoke. We were hunting down below,” a voice replied.
The speaker was rail-thin, over six feet, his shirt unbuttoned on a bony chest, his hair streaked with gray and soggy with sweat, tied up on his head. He propped his long rifle butt-down in front of him and leaned on it. It was a Mauser, one with a straight bolt. He grinned. “Sir? Are you there?”
“All the property from here on down to the river is mine. I don’t allow hunters on it.”
The second man was smaller, hatchet-faced, his sleeves cut off at the armpits, both of his arms tattooed with blue ink that had started to fade. He had black hair that grew like snakes, and a lazy eye that drifted back and forth in the socket the way a marble would. He carried a double-barrel shotgun crooked over his arm, the breech open, both chambers loaded. His body odor seemed to hang like an invisible curtain over the cave’s entrance. “What’s the good of a big ranch if you cain’t hunt on it?”
“I don’t believe in hurting animals unnecessarily.”
“A rancher who sends his cattle to the packer but don’t hurt them? That’s a challenge to my thinking powers.”
Hackberry capped his fountain pen and put it and his letter inside his stationery box and replaced the top on the box. “I’d figured y’all would be along.”
“What’s that you say?”
“If you dog somebody, don’t silhouette on the crest of a hill. Don’t aim your binoculars into the sun, either.”
“Why would we be dogging you?”
“You got me. Why not make a clean breast of it? Dip your soul in the Jordan, know what I mean? I think it was y’all cut my wire and busted up my hog pen and trampled my pumpkins.”
“My opinion is you’ve got your head up your ass.”
“Cod Bishop and Arnold Beckman will leave you twisting in the wind. You take the risk, they take the profits. Sound like a good deal to you?”
“We’ll be going. We didn’t mean to bother you,” said the man with the rifle. He grinned again, as though he could hardly contain his goodwill.
“I got a question,” said the man with the lazy eye. “Is that a cap and ball?”
Hackberry’s revolver lay on a flat rock on the other side of the fire, its belt coiled around the holster. “I had it converted for cartridges many years ago. I hardly shoot it these days. Want to shoot it?”
“You can leave it where it’s at.”
Hackberry proppe
d his hands on his thighs and stared into the fire.
“Got yourself in a bind?” said the man with the lazy eye.
“That’s what age does. Your judgment goes. You want to believe in your fellow man, but you end up in sackcloth and ashes, wondering how you could be such a fool. Doesn’t seem fair, does it? You boys hungry? I got plenty.”
The man with the rifle smelled himself. “Thank you. Maybe later. We got a job to do.”
“You don’t get it, do you, son?”
“Get what?”
“You shouldn’t try to outsmart your betters.”
“Our betters?” said the man with the rifle.
“That’s right. Somebody hired you to follow me around, then report back to them. Instead, you got ambitious and decided to find out what was in this cave. Unfortunately, there’s nothing here except cougar bones and bat shit. So now you’ve made enemies with a man who in his youth put a number of people on the wrong side of the grass, and in the meantime you got yourself crossways with Arnold Beckman.”
It was silent in the cave. Hackberry leaned over and removed the onion and tomato and jar of lemonade and loaf of bread from the bag and set them on a flat rock. He sliced open the bread longways with the bowie and bladed mustard on it, then began halving the onion.
“Say all that again,” said the man with the rifle.
“I was trying to say I feel sorry for you.”
“Sorry for us?”
“You were probably unwanted at birth and had parents that were either poor-white trash or one step this side of feral. There’s no fix for it. The seed goes from generation to generation like congenital clap. I’ve heard Bedouins are warned not to shake hands with Southern poor whites. You sniff your armpits and blow your nose on your napkin and spit on the floor and wonder why nobody likes you. On top of it, pert’ near every one of you was beat on with an ugly stick. That’s what I mean about life not being fair.”
“I think you got rabies from these bats,” said the man with the lazy eye.
“Son, have you looked in the mirror lately?”
Hackberry squatted by the fire and began picking the strips of cooked roast off the iron rod with the tip of his bowie, laying them out on the bread.
“I’ve had all of you as I can take,” said the man with the lazy eye. He shut the breech of his shotgun. “Lay the knife down.” The man with the rifle reached over and picked up Hackberry’s revolver and tossed it behind a rock.
“I wish you hadn’t done that,” Hackberry said.
“That old revolver is the least of your problems,” said the man with the lazy eye.
“You trespass on my property, you lie to my face, you disturb my meal, and now you treat my possessions with contempt. You boys really piss me off. I hate stupid people. It’s a character defect I have never overcome. I work on it and work on it, and then a pair like you comes along and all my efforts go down the drain.” Hackberry’s face pained as he got to his feet, his joints creaking.
“You better close your mouth,” said the man with the lazy eye.
“That’s what I mean. Stupid to the core,” Hackberry said. “Your mother must have been impregnated by a yeast infection.”
He fitted his hand around the wood handle on the iron rod and rammed the heated tip into the scrotum of the man with the lazy eye, then swung it across the face of his partner. The man with the lazy eye dropped his shotgun and grabbed his genitalia, his mouth wide open, as though his jawbone were broken. Hackberry hit the other man again, splitting open his forehead, knocking him into the cave wall. He picked up the weapons of both men and flung them end over end into the river.
“Who paid you?” he said.
“Nobody,” said the man with the lazy eye.
“This running iron I’m holding is of historical importance,” Hackberry said. He held the tip of the iron over the fire. “I took it off the man who figured out how to change the XIT brand into a star with a cross inside it. The owners of the XIT let him off for showing them how he did it. I can show you how to do it, too. On your back or on your chest.”
“Then do it, you nasty old crock,” said the man with the lazy eye.
“I’m glad to hear you say that.”
The man with the lazy eye blanched, his jaw tightening.
“That’s not what I mean,” Hackberry said. “I’m glad to see you’re not totally worthless. Here’s the reality of our situation. If you torture a man, he’ll tell you whatever you want to hear. It’s a waste of everybody’s time, including the victim’s. Besides, it’s not something I do. So that’s it. Adiós.”
“What?” said the man with the split forehead.
“Git. Don’t come back. Next time out, I’ll hurt you.”
The man with the split head had pressed his hand to his wound and was staring at the bloody star on his palm. “What the hell you call this?”
“Practice,” Hackberry said.
He gathered up his revolver and holster and belt and sat back down in his chair, blowing out his breath, trying to catch a glimpse of the sky beyond the cave’s entrance. Then he set his stationery box on his lap and began to address an envelope to Ishmael. In seconds he was deep in thought about Ishmael. When he glanced up again, his visitors were gone.
THE HOSPITAL OUTSIDE Denver had been converted from a nineteenth-century army fort whose two-story buildings had the wide porches and stucco walls and red Spanish-tile roofs of army forts all over the burgeoning New American Empire. Ishmael had been placed in a ward with eight other officers, then moved to a private room, one that had a radiator and a private bathroom and a lovely view of the shade trees on the grounds and, in the distance, mountains whose peaks gusted with snow in the sunset.
“Why the special treatment?” Ishmael asked the orderly.
“You probably have friends in high places.”
“Must be a mistake,” Ishmael said.
“You need anything, Captain?”
“I didn’t sleep much last night. Could you give me a touch of something, nothing too strong?”
“Better talk to the doc.”
“I don’t want to bother him. Don’t worry about it.”
“I’ll see what I can do, Captain.”
“Thank you.”
He hadn’t lied. He seldom slept through the night without dreaming, and as the French colonel had warned him, his dreams were not good ones. Neither were they nightmares, at least not in the ordinary sense. They were not filled with gargoyles and improbable events; they were simply a replay of events he had witnessed or images he had seen. Maybe that was what made the dreams so disturbing: They weren’t creations of the mind; they were an accurate replication of the world. The bigger problem was he couldn’t shut them down, as he did during his waking hours. Also the images told a story that few wanted to hear and that he did not wish to impose upon others.
Some German infantry units were issued a bayonet that had sawteeth along the crest of the blade. When it was extracted from the victim, particularly when the entry wound was in the upper torso, the sawteeth ripped loose bone, cartilage, lungs, kidneys, liver, and entrails like viscera in a slaughterhouse. One way or another, the French sent a message to the Germans: Any soldier captured with a sawtooth bayonet not filed flat on the spine would suffer a fate that no civilized person would ever want to hear about. To Ishmael, the stories had seemed apocryphal, not unlike the accounts of women chained to machine guns or bottles of German schnapps laced with cyanide left in trenches for French soldiers to find. Anyway, why was dying on a sawtooth bayonet more inhumane than death by a flamethrower or mustard gas that boiled the eyes in their sockets and coated the inside of the lungs with blisters and pustules?
Ishmael and his men had gone over the top through six hundred yards of machine-gun fire and artillery rounds loaded with gas, the air so thick with smoke and dust that the sun had turned to an orange wafer, metal flying through the air with a dry spitting sound like someone blowing abruptly through a peashooter. Men were cru
mpling all around him; some were caught in the wire and trying to free themselves with their bare hands; some were atomized. In the background was the constant knocking of the Maxims, as dull and unrelenting as a woodpecker tapping on a telephone pole. Suddenly, Ishmael and ten others, all of them gray with dust, as featureless as aborigines, were standing on the lip of the enemy trench, firing point-blank into the Germans trapped below, then jumping into their midst, clubbing heads with rifle butts or pistols and double-edged trench knives with brass knuckles on the hand guard, impaling or beating to a bloody pulp every enemy soldier who didn’t surrender and sometimes those who did.
Both French soldiers and members of his regiment were leaping over the trench, driving deeper into the German line. Others were rounding up the Germans who had thrown down their weapons and raised their hands. Ishmael shucked the spent shells from his revolver and reloaded each chamber, his fingers shaking uncontrollably. On his left, he saw the French Legionnaires piling into the trench, some picking up German stick grenades and stuffing them in their belts. Something else was going on, too. A crowd had formed at a bend in the trench, each soldier trying to look over the shoulder of another. Someone was shouting in German.
Ishmael tore the wrapper off a candy bar and began eating, trying to close his mind to what may be happening farther down the trench. Then a man screamed. Ishmael could not tell if the voice belonged to the man who had been shouting in German. The scream contained no hope, only terror and pain.
He walked through the clutter of haversacks, ammunition boxes, gas masks, knee mortars, stretchers, pistol flares, telephone wires, shell casings, wire cutters, blood-caked bandages, first-aid kits, ration tins, rotted food, newspaper that someone had cleaned himself with, ammunition belts and boxes of potato mashers and rifle grenades fitted into their compartments like eggs in a carton, then pushed his way through the Legionnaires, who were bunched tightly together. He saw what they had done and tried to look away in the same way you would if you opened a bedroom door at the wrong moment.
House of the Rising Sun Page 16
