House of the Rising Sun

by James Lee Burke

  A German soldier in a dirty gray uniform was sitting with his back against the trench, his legs splayed, his bucket helmet lying beside him. He had a long face, like a horse’s, and bad teeth and flaxen hair and defensive wounds in his hands and a large wet area around his thighs where he had soiled himself. A sawtooth bayonet had been driven through his left eye socket, all the way to the hilt, pinning his head to the wall.

  They were Legionnaires, many of them criminals, Ishmael told himself later. If they hadn’t joined the Legion, they would have been on Devil’s Island. They were victims themselves, sent into the lines as cannon fodder. What they did is not their fault.

  But rationalizing the scene in the trench was not an easy job. These men had descended from the same tree and were made of the same flesh and blood as their victim. Their crime was not committed in hot blood, and their choice of a victim was arbitrary. Ishmael had seen three other German prisoners captured with rifles that had sawtooth bayonets. One had gotten a punch in the face; nothing was done to the other two. Later, the executioner of the German solider, a peasant from Brittany, made coffee and smoked cigarettes and chatted with his comrades a few feet from the body, as blithe as a bridegroom on his wedding day.

  Psychiatrists might assure their patients that dreams were only dreams and they disappeared into the daylight. But psychiatrists had no cure for the truth about man’s capacity for cruelty. The ancient Greeks understood that, and so did the growers of the opium poppy. The gift of Morpheus brought not only sleep but oblivion. You just had to be careful, a little touch now and then. You did not think of it in a self-serving or profligate way. You chewed the tablet gently, your eyes closed in a demonstration of gratitude and reverence. You let the granules slide down your throat with your saliva, and you swallowed with the words “thank you” on your lips. How could any gift from the natural world be bad? Morphine healed all wounds and lifted all burdens. The tranquillity it purchased was ethereal, if not holy.

  The orderly kept his word and placed a vial of pills under Ishmael’s pillow. That afternoon, when Ishmael woke from his slumber, he felt the wind blowing through the window like a cool burn on his skin. The snow on the peaks of the mountain was feathering against the sky. Then a figure stepped in front of the window, blocking out the sun. It took a moment for Ishmael’s eyes to adjust. He studied her face and the redness of her mouth and the trimness of her body and her elegant clothes and the thickness of her hair. Though she was an older woman, she was one of the loveliest women he had ever seen.

  “I’m Maggie Bassett. I used to be your father’s wife or animal trainer, take your choice,” she said. “My, you’ve grown into a big boy.”

  SHE WAS WEARING a purple dress with a silver and ivory brooch at her throat and high-heeled boots and a tall domed black hat with a floppy brim. She sat down in a chair by the widow and removed her hat and brushed her hair out on her shoulders. It was dark brown and looked freshly washed and dried, reflective of light, soft on her skin. “You don’t remember me?” she said.

  “I remember the name,” he said.

  “Probably not in the best way. Hack and I weren’t a good match. Was it bad over there?”

  “In the trenches? Not always. I wouldn’t believe all the stories you hear.”

  “Is your mother alive?”

  “Why wouldn’t she be?”

  “I heard she was involved with anarchists or something. In a mass killing.”

  “She was at the Ludlow Massacre, right down the road. The miners were on strike. They weren’t anarchists.”

  “You have unusual attitudes for a professional soldier.”

  “I’m a soldier, not a company gink. The Colorado militia was doing Rockefeller’s dirty work.”

  “You’re certainly your mother’s son. I always admired her. I think she and I have a lot in common.”

  “Nobody is like my mother.”

  “We both got involved with a man who has ten inches of penis and three of brain.”

  “You talk pretty rough.”

  “You don’t know the half of it, sweetie.”

  “Why are you here?”

  “I believe I helped deny you the home and family you should have had. I have a conscience, believe it or not.”

  “You came here to tell me that?”

  “No, to offer you a job with an export-import company.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “It’s a consortium. We have an office in San Antonio. Our warehouses are in Houston and New Orleans.” Her gaze went away from his, out the window. “See how the trees flutter in the wind? This is such a fine time of year. You lived here when you were a child?”

  “We lived in a sump outside of Trinidad. My mother worked two or three jobs to feed us.”

  “Where is she now?”

  “Wherever the union sends her. She went to see Joe Hill before he was executed by firing squad in Utah.”

  “Who?”

  “The songwriter. He was framed by the mine owners.”

  “I see,” she said. “But she’s not an anarchist or a Communist?”

  “I never asked her.”

  Maggie approached the bed. Her eyes moved over his face. “I rode two days on the train to be here.”

  “That’s very nice of you.”

  “I was a prostitute and helped rob a bank. But I never hurt a child. Except you.”

  “You don’t owe me anything.”

  She placed her hand on his forehead. “You’re hot.”

  “It’s the radiator. It’s got its own way. It turns itself on and off at the wrong times.” He tried to smile.

  “The radiator is cold. You have a fever.”

  “That’s why sick people go to hospitals. They have fevers and such.”

  “You talk like your father.”

  “I talk like the people in the mining and log camps where I grew up.”

  She unbuttoned the top of his pajamas and placed her hand on his breast. “Your heart is like a drum.”

  “You could fool me.”

  “I came here as a friend, not to embarrass you.”

  “I heard you were a schoolteacher. I don’t understand why an educated woman would marry my father.”

  “He’s far more intelligent than he pretends. That’s what his enemies never understand about him. Until it’s too late.”

  “I don’t like to talk about him,” Ishmael said.

  “Do you want anything? I brought you some fruit. I don’t know if you’re supposed to have it.”

  “That’s kind of you. Thank you.”

  “You’d better get used to me. We’re going to be seeing lots of each other.”

  She removed the sheet from his legs. His pajama bottoms were cut off at the tops of his thighs. His wounds were wrapped with medicated bandages all the way to the ankles. In places he had bled through. She put her hand on his lower abdomen and then on his thigh. “I can feel the heat through your skin. How many places were you hit?”

  “There are men in the ward you don’t want to look at. Their families cry when they see them.”

  “I want to do something for you,” she said.

  “No, you shouldn’t have those kinds of feelings. I had a good life as a child.”

  She leaned down and kissed him on the mouth. One of her tresses fell on his cheek. He thought he smelled lilacs in her hair.

  “Did you enjoy that?”

  “What am I supposed to say?”

  She kissed him on the mouth again, then gazed into his face. “Let me.”

  “Let you what?”

  “Let me do what I can for you.”

  He shook his head on the pillow. “You don’t need to worry about me.”

  She stroked his hair. “You’re big and you’re handsome, yet you’re like a little boy.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t say things like that.”

  “Am I too old?”

  “No, ma’am, I don’t think that at all.”

  “Then you mustn’t refuse me. I’ll
be deeply hurt.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Closing the door.”

  “It’s almost lunchtime,” he said. “Look, I’m being processed out of the army. At my request. When I’m well and released from the hospital, we’ll get to know each other.”

  “I told the orderly I’d brought you something. He won’t be back until much later.” She moved the chair in front of the door and pulled the curtain on the window, dropping the room into shadow.

  “Miss Bassett, I prefer you not do this.”

  She sat in the chair and removed her high-heeled boots, then stood up and undressed with her back to him. She lay down on the bed and pulled the sheet up to her shoulders; she kissed him on the cheek. She slid her hand down his stomach. “Look me in the face and tell me you don’t want me here.” When he didn’t speak, she teased his lips with her finger and touched his teeth. “You resemble both your parents.”

  “Miss Bassett—”

  “Do this for me, not for you. That will make it all right. You’re a gentleman. That has special meaning for a woman of my background.” She got up on her knees and placed him inside her, her eyes closing, her mouth parting. “Tell me I’m not a bad girl. Tell me I’ve done something good for you, something no one else could do as well. But tell me that only if it’s true.”

  It is, he thought. Then he shut his eyes and felt himself nodding off, floating out of the room to a place where the snow was blowing like cotton candy, where the cigarette trees and lemonade springs beckoned, where childhood and adult love and all the gifts of this world seemed to crest and fold inside him and then burst achingly in a fountain of colored light.

  Vaguely, he remembered her placing either her breast or a soft pear in his mouth. Was that what happened? Could you confuse those two images? He drifted into a sleep that was as deep and warm and secure as the sleep of an unborn child suspended inside its mother’s fluids. He wondered if someone had injected him with morphine. As if she read his thoughts, she stroked his forehead to reassure him that no harm would come to him. She was so quiet when she closed the door behind her that he hardly knew she was gone.

  When he woke, a half-eaten pear lay on his nightstand.

  HACKBERRY TRIED TO put his mind inside Beckman’s but knew it was a waste of time. Beckman traveled across international boundaries at will, hiring and using and discarding people as convenience demanded. If he sent more men onto Hackberry’s property, they wouldn’t be white trash hired out of a saloon. If he used guile, it would be of an intricate kind, the sort that no one saw coming and left people bereft of their dignity and resenting themselves the rest of their lives.

  Hackberry had not shown anyone the chalice, if that was what it was. The inlay in the top of the cup, and the metal framework securing it, were obviously gold. The jewels were anybody’s guess. How valuable could it be? Beckman was a businessman about to embark on a new venture, one that involved the sale of arms all over the world. Would he bog himself down in Southwest Texas over a religious artifact, one he was not sure Hackberry had in his possession? It didn’t fit.

  And what had happened to the woman at the bordello where the black soldiers had been lynched? She might have been a brothel operator, but Beatrice DeMolay had character, the kind you didn’t acquire by simply sitting in a church house.

  Hackberry rolled back the rug in his office and opened the trapdoor that gave access to the underside of the house. The house had been built in 1854, when mounted bands of comancheros showed up unexpectedly in front yards, wearing army coats with no shirts, their silence more piercing than a scream, their deeds of the next few minutes involving flame and prickly-pear cactus and leather thongs and levels of pain an unsuspecting pioneer family previously considered unimaginable. Hackberry reached down and lifted the rosewood box he had wrapped in a piece of canvas, and laid it on top of his desk. He opened the box and stared at the chalice, pressed tightly inside the green satin padding that lined the bottom of the box.

  The stars were bright over the hills, the river shining in the darkness. He touched the tips of his fingers to the onyx goblet that held the golden cup. The lines in his fingers seemed to glow on its surface. For some reason he could not explain, he knew that Arnold Beckman represented something much larger than himself, and that Beckman’s mission had somehow intersected with Hackberry’s life for a reason, and that neither of them would ever be the same again.

  He closed the box and tilted it upward so he could see the small cross and “Leon” carved in the wood. What was the provenance of the artifact? Mexico was in chaos. Both sides hung trees with corpses; almost every village in the north and the south had an adobe wall scarred with a jagged line of rifle fire. Bolsheviks and American mercenaries down there were as happy as pigs in slop. He knew no one in Nuevo Leon who might know the story behind the rosewood box and its contents.

  They were coming, though. He knew this in the same way he had known John Wesley Hardin was coming, that wildfire and dust storms would follow prolonged drought. No matter which way you ran at philosophy or religion, there was no denying that certain individuals would find each other. No matter what they did, there was a magnet that would draw them together, and in an instant they would recognize each other and realize they were more alike than different. They would also recognize that that knowledge would save neither from his fate.

  All the lights were off in his house, the windows open, the curtains straightening in the breeze. He wrapped the box in the piece of canvas and took it upstairs and placed it under his bed. He stared through the window at the myrtle bushes in the yard and the heat lightning above the hills and was sure that someone on the hillside, on the far side of the river, was looking at him with binoculars. He took an empty hatbox from a closet and wrapped it in a blanket, then went out to the barn and placed the hatbox and blanket inside a big bucket, along with two bricks, and tied a long piece of clothesline to the bail and walked to the old water well his father had dug by hand in 1859. He lowered the bucket down the brick sides of the well until it swung just above the water’s surface, then cinched the clothesline to the winch.

  When he walked back to the kitchen door, he didn’t look to the right or the left, as though confident that no one had been watching.

  The next night, when he arrived in Austin, the drought had broken and rain was tumbling on the city like broken crystal from a black sky, the lamps burning brightly atop the bridge over the Colorado River. He wondered if this moment marked a new beginning in his life.

  ARNOLD BECKMAN WAS staying at the Driskill, a grand hotel on the corner of Sixth Street and Congress. A fete of some kind was in progress, one that attracted hundreds of guests and onlookers who were bunched up at the entrance. Not far away were a magnificent railroad station and City Hospital, the latter remarkable in its own right for its twin spires and ceiling-high windows and ventilated shutters and first-and-second-story wraparound verandas, a Caribbean echo of a more genteel era. The stone-paved street at its back door shone with the dull coppery glow of a rain-streaked alleyway in an Edgar Allan Poe story, although there was little romantic about the two types of vehicles parked on it, namely, motorized ambulances that brought in new cases of Spanish influenza, and the mortuary carriages that transported them to the graveyards where convicts in shackles, with rags tied over their mouths and noses, were forced to bury them.

  Not a time to brood, Hackberry told himself. The Grim Reaper drew his scythe across all; why give him even a minute he had not earned? Time to join the revelers, to clatter the dice out of the cup, to have a talk in public with a man who funded slaughter and gloried in forcing submission on others. There was more than one way to bust a cap.

  Hackberry went through the back door into the kitchen and on through a pair of swinging doors into a dining room hung with chandeliers and paneled with hand-carved mahogany. The tables were set with gold plates and silver bowls of water that had flowers floating in them. The men wore tuxedos; the women were dressed in gow
ns that probably came from New York or Paris. There were barrels of iced-down oysters lined against the wall; the serving tables were loaded with glazed hams, roast beef, smoked duck, pheasant, redfish and speckled trout, and every kind of side dish and dessert. White-jacketed black men worked feverishly at the bar to keep up with the orders. At the head table, up on a dais, sat the guest of honor, Arnold Beckman, dipping his cup into a bowl of champagne punch.

  Hackberry sat down in an empty chair at a table in back. A waiter asked him for his order.

  “Bourbon and water,” he said.

  “Yes, suh. Be right back wit’ it.”

  “Tell you what, a rainy evening warrants a cup of tea and a bit of lemon. Can you do that for me?”

  “Yes, suh.”

  The change of order surprised even him. Why had he done it? When it came to alcohol, he could not be accused of a halfway commitment.

  Secretly, he knew. Every drunkard has many moments of shame that live like carpet tacks in his memory, but the one Hackberry could not deal with was his impotence when Harvey Logan had mocked him in front of the café in San Antonio’s brothel district, clattering a dollar on the plank sidewalk, telling him to take a bath. No, it was worse than that, so shameful he couldn’t think about all the details.

  The master of ceremonies was introducing Beckman, who was wearing a white suit and a silk shirt as black and lustrous as oil, with tiny purple flowers stitched on the collar, which gave the impression of a man who had no label, no design, no need to be other than what he was. He had fled his own country rather than serve the imperialistic schemes of Kaiser Bill. He had fought the Turks alongside the Anzacs at Gallipoli and helped arm the Bedouins in the desert with T. E. Lawrence. He had been in Russia with the American Expeditionary Forces—with the marines, in fact—and had seen the bloody hand of the Bolsheviks at work, the same group that now threatened to infect the American workforce with their false doctrines.