House of the Rising Sun

by James Lee Burke

  Beckman listened with one arm placed stiffly on the table, his face lifted, his smile frozen, as though praise made him uncomfortable. Then the master of ceremonies gave him the podium. The bones in his face were like a bird’s, perhaps a hawk’s, but they seemed too small, too delicate, for the martial precision in his speech. A tooth would show when he paused, his expression softening, as though he were suppressing a memory from the war out of courtesy. The blueness in his eyes deepened as he looked into their faces, bonding with them, drawing his energy from the goodness they all shared. His silvery-blond hair hung in strands on his cheeks, as it would on a careless schoolgirl’s. His listeners were enthralled. He was an imp, a hawk sailing on the breeze, an androgynous mix that was unthreatening and reassuring, like a mythic creature rising from an illustration in a book of fairy tales.

  The Great War was not over, he said. It was just beginning. When he used the word “war,” his chin had a way of lifting, exposing the chain of scars that dripped down inside his collar. The time to act was now. Do not listen to Wilson about a League of Nations. The Reds were spreading from Mexico into the American West. The federal prison at Yuma was already full of them.

  The waiter put a teacup and saucer in front of Hackberry. Beckman finished, and the audience stood and applauded for almost a minute, the floor shaking. Hackberry looked around. Were these people out of their minds?

  A few moments later he walked to the dais. Beckman was eating a steak, his elbows out, his wrists bent like hooks when he sliced his meat. He was talking to a woman on either side of him, his gaze never registering Hackberry’s presence.

  “How’d you get your scars?” Hackberry asked.

  Beckman looked at him. “What scars?”

  “The ones you kept reminding us you have.”

  “Mustard gas.”

  “You manufacture it?”

  “Did you bring me something or not, Mr. Holland?”

  “I was cooking up a meal in this cave I use as a fresh-air office when two of your fellows tried to give me a bad time. Have they checked in yet? Maybe they found what you’re looking for. By the way, I had to take their guns from them and throw them in the river.”

  Beckman wiped his mouth with his napkin. “Did you, now? Your escapades seem to have no end. Would you like to join us?”

  “I think not.” Hackberry was wearing a powder-blue sport coat and dark slacks and a plum-colored tie and shined needle-nose boots. “Forgive me, ladies, for disturbing your dinner. Mr. Beckman thinks I have something that belongs to him. He’s not only an arms dealer; he sells to both sides. He also steals from both sides. You know the Spanish expression sin Dios, sin verguenza? It means ‘without God or shame.’ Can y’all tell me why a man like him would lay claim to a religious artifact, what he calls a sacramental cup?”

  The two women gazed around the room, their faces like dough pans. Beckman dipped his cup in the dredges of the punch bowl and filled it with pink champagne and melting sherbet. He snapped his fingers for one of the black servers to refill the bowl. “Do you want to be escorted out, Mr. Holland?”

  “Thanks for the offer. I’ll try to hobble out on my own.”

  “You’re a public fool, sir. An object of pity.”

  “I cain’t deny it. My boy got blown up on the Marne.”

  “Yes?”

  “I was told the surgeons took a shovel load of shrapnel out of his legs and side.”

  “If you’re telling us the world is a charnel house, you’ve arrived a bit late with the news.”

  “What’d you do to the woman at the brothel?”

  “I know everything about you, sir. You destroyed your family and ruined your career as a lawman. Take your tattered mantle somewhere else.”

  “If I find out you hurt her—”

  “Good night, Mr. Holland.”

  Beckman resumed talking to the two women as though Hackberry were not there.

  HACKBERRY WALKED BACK through the kitchen and into the street and stood in an alcove where a horse-drawn carriage was parked. The paving stones were as brown and shiny and humped in the rain as loaves of bread. Along the wall was a row of paint and thinner cans. Over his shoulder he could see the empty bowl the waiter had taken from Beckman’s table. One of the horses stretched forward, spreading his legs, and urinated on the stones. Hackberry grabbed a half-empty can of paint thinner and filled it up.

  He went to the kitchen door. The waiter was chopping strawberries for the punch. Hackberry came up behind him and placed a dollar bill in his hand. “There’s a lady with two children who needs he’p crossing the street. Would you take an umbrella to her, please?”

  “Yes, suh.”

  “I’ll watch the bowl.”

  “Where’s she at?”

  He hadn’t lied. “Right on the corner.”

  He couldn’t go through with it. He went back outside and poured the can in the gutter, then began walking toward a saloon, fog rising in sour flumes from the sewers.

  No, he wasn’t done with Arnold Beckman, just as he had never been done with Harvey Logan. He turned around and walked back through the hotel kitchen and into the dining room. In Hackberry’s absence, the waiter had refilled the punch bowl and set it by Beckman’s elbow.

  “What’s the expression about a bad penny?” Beckman said.

  “You like the punch?”

  “You did something to it?”

  “Don’t make enemies with people who have access to your food.”

  “Really?” Beckman drank from his cup, licking a piece of strawberry off his lip. “Have breakfast with me in the morning. Great fortunes are made only twice in a nation’s history. During its rise and during its fall.”

  “I had an experience with Harvey Logan that I’ve drug around like a corpse on a chain. It happened when I was so drunk I couldn’t stand up. Ole Harvey treated me like spit on the sidewalk. Harry Longabaugh had to intercede on my behalf. That was a special kind of humiliation. Logan topped it off when he threw me a dollar and told me to take a bath and buy myself a can of crab lice powder.”

  Beckman worked a piece of food from his teeth with his thumbnail, then sucked the spot clean. He laughed without making any sound.

  “I deserved his scorn,” Hackberry said. “That’s what makes it so bad. I tried to catch up with him and even the score, but he killed himself after he got shot in a train robbery.”

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  “Because I never thought I’d meet a bucket of shit that would equal Logan’s standards. Then you came along.”

  “I see. So now you can have a second run at it?”

  “No, I’ve pretty well shot my wad, and I don’t consider myself a threat to nobody. But if I find out you hurt Miz DeMolay, I’ll probably forget my Christian upbringing.”

  Beckman hooked his arm over the back of the chair. “ ‘Before me, every knee shall bend.’”

  “You’re Jesus?”

  “I was just borrowing some of his rhetoric,” Beckman said.

  “Enjoy your punch. Cross my heart, I didn’t put paint thinner and horse urine in it. You can ask the waiter over there, the one I sent outside while I guarded the bowl.”

  THE SHERIFF’S NAME was Willard Posey. Some thought him ill suited for the job, with his sunken cheeks and firehouse suspenders and peaked forester’s hat and clothes hanging straight down on his emaciated frame. People would have laughed at him except for a spark in one eye that seemed to say, Do you really want to do that?

  Early in the morning, four days after his return from San Antonio, Hackberry heard a knock on his front door. He looked through the small window in the top of the door but could see no one. He unlocked and opened the door. “Mind telling me why you’re squatting down on my porch?”

  Willard squinted at him from under his hat brim. “I was trying to see that cave up on the bluff where you go for your meditation or afternoon nap or whatever unusual activity you’re up to.”

  “Why are you interested in my
cave?”

  “Because your friend and neighbor Cod Bishop says that’s where he saw you throw a couple of rifles into the river.”

  “Cod Bishop is a pea brain.”

  “You didn’t throw two rifles in the river?”

  “It was a rifle and a shotgun.”

  “Any particular reason you’d be throwing firearms in the river?”

  “A couple of vagabonds threatened me.”

  “Know their names?”

  “I didn’t ask.”

  Willard stood up, straightening his back. He wore a shoulder holster without a coat, his badge on his belt. The shoulder holster was black and contained a nickel-plated revolver with white handles. “How you like my new motorcar?”

  “It’s an eye-catcher.”

  “I got it for a song.”

  “What happened to the top?”

  “The previous owner cut it off with a hacksaw. Come on, let’s take a ride.”

  “What’s going on, Willard?”

  “I hope you already ate.”

  TWO MAILBAGS, THE drawstrings pulled tight at the bottom of each sack and tied to a rock, had bobbed down the river, finally swinging into a pebble-bottomed green pool by the bank, oscillating on their tethers. A black child who was the first to see the sacks walked to the pool and smelled an odor that made him gag, then he ran to find his father. One hour later, a deputy used a boat hook to pull the sacks onto a grassy stretch by the water’s edge. He and another deputy loosed the drawstrings and worked the canvas off the two bodies inside, both of which were blue and naked, the wrists bound in back with baling wire. One of the deputies vomited.

  Willard parked his car in the shade. When he opened the door, it screeched like a tin roof being prized up with a crowbar. “Coming?”

  “I can see from here.”

  “Will you get out of the motorcar, please?”

  Hackberry walked within a few feet of the bodies. He cleared his throat. “That’s the pair.”

  “It looks like they went out pretty hard. Ever seen that done to somebody?”

  “Close to it. In Mexico.”

  “Why would anyone do that?”

  “For purposes of information, obviously. Is this why you brought me out here? To ask unintelligent questions?”

  “They didn’t tell you what they were after? Why they followed you to the cave?”

  “No, they didn’t. The split in that fellow’s head? I put it there with a running iron. I poked the other one in the jewels. The iron was right warm when I did it. That’s the only mark I put on them.”

  “That sure clears it all up. Out of nowhere, you bust one man in the head and burn the genitalia on another? Seems like ordinary, reasonable, everyday kind of behavior.”

  “The one with the split head threw my pistol across the cave. I believed they were about to put the boots to me. I took it to them first.”

  “What did they want?”

  “Food, money, whatever they didn’t have to work for.”

  “Did anyone ever tell you it’s rude not to look at people when you talk to them?”

  “I had an indirect run-in with Arnold Beckman down in Mexico a couple of years back. I think he sicced these two on me.”

  “Who is Arnold Beckman?”

  “An arms dealer. He’s fixing to bring a lot of business to the state.”

  “What does that have to do with you?”

  “Nothing. There was a woman down in Mexico. She ran a brothel. She saved my life. Maybe he did her in.”

  “Put your handkerchief over your nose. I want to show you something.”

  “I’m going back home.”

  “You’re not going anywhere.” Willard squatted on his haunches, the back of his neck tan and leathery in the sunlight, wadding a bandana in his fist and pressing it to the lower half of his face. He pointed with a pencil. “Look at their wrists. The wire is almost to the bone. They were probably alive when they went into the water. They drowned an inch at a time. Whoever did this wasn’t satisfied with tormenting them from head to foot.”

  “Spend a little time with Beckman. You’ll have a better sense of things.”

  Willard stood up and stuffed the bandana in his back pocket. He turned to the wind, his face clearing. “You’re withholding information in a criminal investigation, Hack.”

  “About what?”

  “If Beckman is after revenge, why didn’t he have you killed? Why would he torture these two?”

  Hackberry gazed at the horizon. “Looks like another storm is blowing up. See the dust climbing in the air? This time of year it turns purple against the sun. I love Texas.”

  “You have something that belongs to him, don’t you?”

  “The only thing any of us owns is six feet of dirt. You know who said that? Leo Tolstoy.”

  “Where’s this Beckman live at?”

  “I don’t know. The last time I saw him, he was staying at the Driskill in Austin. For some reason he had the impression I contaminated the punch bowl he and his lady friends were drinking from.”

  Willard chewed on the corner of his lip and looked sideways at the clouds of rain on the horizon. “You’re a vexatious man.”

  “Vexatious?”

  “Yes, there are times when I’d like to shoot you.”

  “I feel the same way. Toward my own self, I mean.”

  “Get in the motorcar. I’ll drive you home.”

  “No, sir,” Hackberry said.

  He began walking on the deer trail that paralleled the river, his shadow moving upstream against the current, the gaseous autumnal smell of the woods enticing him into its embrace, the coldness of the shade not so much a prelude to winter as a respite from the evil that men did unto one another.

  HIS PROBLEMS WITH the sheriff weren’t over. After he arrived back home, the rain strong enough to sting his face, he saw the bucket he had lowered into the well with a hatbox and bricks inside. It was lying on the grass, its contents spilled out. Just then Willard drove up and parked by the rose bed in the side yard. His car door screeched like a shard of glass shoved into Hackberry’s eardrum.

  “I thought we were done,” Hackberry said.

  “Not hardly. A Mexican woman on the river found a pair of bloody britches buried in her cornfield. In the pocket was a drawing of what looks like your property and the cave up on the bluff. There was also a drawing of your house with a question mark over it. Somebody wrote down the word ‘gold’ with another question mark. Want to explain all that?”

  “Maybe the fellow read too many books.”

  “What’s in the cave?”

  “Bones and bat shit.”

  “What are the bucket and bricks and cardboard box about?”

  “I’ve been picking up trash and such.”

  “With a bucket tied to the winch on your well?”

  “I was fixing to untie it.”

  “You figured if Beckman’s people came on your property, they’d look in the well first. Even if they didn’t try to get in the house, you’d know they were here.”

  “Anything on this property is mine. They got no right to it. That’s the issue, at least as I see it.”

  “The issue is a double homicide.”

  “Their kind always end the same way. If not here, somewhere else. They dealt the hand.”

  “No, they didn’t. You engineered this.”

  Hackberry took off his hat and blotted his face on his sleeve. “That’s a goddamn lie.”

  “You’re not going to talk to me like that, Hack.”

  “Well, you’ll just have to live with it.”

  “You’re going to end up in my jail, partner.”

  Hackberry put his hat back on. “It won’t be the first time.”

  “That’s the first truthful thing you’ve said today.”

  Hackberry watched Willard drive away. He remained in the yard and stared at the sky and the way the lightning bloomed silently in the clouds. How could so much force and power exist in the natural world wit
hout leaving a trace of its presence? It began as a flicker and then spread through thousands of miles of firmament in seconds and died inside an ocean of purple smoke. The magnificence of the moment could have been borrowed from Genesis. But what, if anything, did it portend? Was he simply another fool who wanted to believe he saw meaning in the skies when others did not? Was a terrible or grand event in the offing? The Great War had cost more than twenty million lives. Maybe peace would finally come to the world and the lion would lie down with the lamb. Maybe that was what the magnificence in the heavens indicated, like Yahweh hanging the archer’s bow above a flooded world.

  In a pig’s eye.

  Hackberry picked up the bucket and bricks and hatbox from the ground and threw them inside the barn, then went in the house and fell into a deep sleep on his couch while the rain danced on the roof.

  WHEN HE WOKE, he felt so rested he thought he was still dreaming. The storm had passed, and the house was cool and dark and filled with kaleidoscopic fragments of light generated by the clouds in a blue-black sky, the dripping of the rain as musical as chimes outside a window he had failed to close. Had he slept through the day into the night or into the next morning? It didn’t seem possible.

  He saw headlights on the road. The lights turned up his lane and shone directly into his living room and then went black, filling his eyes with rings of color. He opened his front door, unable to believe what he was seeing, the coolness of the late evening ballooning inside the doorway.

  The car was big and heavy and bright blue, a REO with four doors and a collapsible top and whitewall wood-spoked tires; the hood ticked with heat. A uniformed chauffeur got out and opened the back door, and a woman stepped out on the gravel and opened a parasol over her head. Hackberry clicked on the porch light.

  “Are you shocked?” the woman said.

  “I thought you were dead,” he said.

  “Why would you think that?”

  “I heard the Communists had found their puritan selves and were shooting people right and left down there.”

  “Do I look dead?”

  “You look wonderful, Miss Beatrice. Would you come in?”