He would have been in a theater crowded with children whose mothers and fathers sat next to them, just as he would have been sitting next to his mother and father, the way families did.
But Big Bud and his mother had argued, and Big Bud did not keep his promise and instead went back to Texas on the train and never saw his son again. Now, inside the cage, inside the reek of feces that someone had tried to scrub out of the wood floor with ammonia, he began to create and superimpose a fantasy on his young life.
The sounds and activity outside the cage became the visit to the magical place where the train should have taken him and his father and mother. He saw the three of them spinning in a big teacup mounted on a stanchion that rose and fell against the sky; he saw them eating frozen custard with tiny wooden spoons out of paper cups, and ice cream wrapped inside a waffle, and sausages that were split open and stuffed with cheese and chives and rolled inside a chunk of warm French bread. He saw the three of them walking down the midway, his mother holding one of his hands, his father the other, swinging him over the electric cables that powered the rides. He knew that as long as they held on to each other, nothing in the world would ever be able to harm him.
Where’s that fine-looking little chap? he heard his father say.
Right here, Big Bud, he answered.
I cain’t find you, son. Where are you hiding?
I’ve fallen into a dark place. Why did you leave me?
Just hold on. I’ll be there. I promise.
You promised before and left us. Why would any father do that to his family?
There was no answer.
Tell me where you are, Big Bud. I know you’re out there. Can’t you hear me?
Ishmael saw a work boot close by the corner of his eye. “Told you I’d be back,” said Fred. He squatted down, a hot dog balanced in one hand. He tilted his head so he could look directly into Ishmael’s eyes, and pulled up a chair. “Doesn’t look like the drunk wagon is gonna be back. I told the Missing Link he could relax for a while. Look what I got you. A half-pint of white lightning. Open wide. You might have a future here.”
RUBY WENT TO a café down the street from the hotel where she was staying, and ordered a cup of tea and a plate of black bread with butter and a dish of apricots, and wondered how long her money would last, even if she starved herself.
A day of reckoning was probably at hand, and not the kind the IWW had hoped for. Wilson’s imprisonment of pacifists and draft resisters and critics of the war, along with the jailing of union organizers in the western states and the execution of Joe Hill, had fed the agenda of the anarchists and produced a level of violence and fear that was a gift from a divine hand to corporate America.
Ruby finished eating and left a ten-cent tip for the waiter and went outside. In the next two blocks, she could see bars on both sides of the street, a tattoo parlor, pawnshops, stairs on the side of a decrepit building leading to a taxi dance hall upstairs, the windows open, filled with yellow light, the dancers moving like shadows. Again she thought she heard a calliope. She saw a glow beyond a copse of trees on the edge of the city, and a spotlight shining on a hot-air balloon, someone throwing Chinese firecrackers from the gondola, the electric flashes and strings of smoke out of sync with the staccato popping that was like rain clicking on lily pads.
A policeman was standing on the corner. He wore a high-collared brass-buttoned blue jacket and a lacquered helmet, the kind a British bobby might wear.
“Pardon me, is that a circus over there?” she asked.
“No, ma’am, that’s the sideshow and the carnival that travels with the circus.”
“I see,” she said. She watched the balloon rise higher in the sky, the spotlight hitting on its silvery skin like hundreds of mirrors.
The policeman wore a short club and handcuffs on his belt and had a brush mustache and a merry smile. “Would you like to go there?” he asked.
“I was looking for my son. He loved to go to fairs and the circus when he was a little boy. I took him as often as I could.”
“Your son lives in San Antonio?”
“You could say he’s visiting. He was wounded on the Marne. His name is Ishmael Holland. Is there a jitney or a carriage that could take me to the carnival?”
“Yes, on the next block. You said your son’s name is Holland?”
“You know him?”
“Is he related to a former Texas Ranger?”
“Yes, his father is Hackberry Holland.”
The policeman’s eyes met hers, this time in a different way.
“You know Mr. Holland?” she said.
“Not personally.”
“My son shouldn’t be walking about. His wounds are probably bleeding.”
“That’s a peculiar situation you describe, ma’am. I’m having a bit of trouble understanding what’s going on here.”
“My son fought in a war to help make the crown princes of Europe and Britain richer. The oil reserves in the Arabian deserts weren’t a minor issue, either. Now he’s impaired.”
“Words such as those aren’t much welcomed around here.”
“That’s too bad.” She looked again at his eyes. “Was there something you were going to say about Mr. Holland?”
“He shot and killed a man in a colored house of ill repute. The man he shot was a syndicalist. At least that’s what they’re called hereabouts. Are you feeling all right, ma’am?”
“Yes,” she answered, an army of needles marching down her neck and spine.
“You’re a socialist?” he said.
“Yes, I am. I’m also a friend of Elizabeth Flynn and Emma Goldman.”
“I don’t know who those people are. Do you still want to go to the carnival?”
“I don’t know if I have enough money for a jitney. Is there public transportation?” she said, the sound of her words unfamiliar, uttered by someone else, like soap bubbles rising one at a time in her throat, her mind unable to shut down the image of Hack Holland killing a union organizer in a brothel.
The policeman reached out and placed his hand lightly on her upper arm. “Steady there.”
“I’m quite all right. I spent a long time on the train. I’m a bit tired, that’s all. Why did Mr. Holland shoot the union man?”
“I don’t know the details. The victim had been in prison for syndicalism. The radicals are upset because he was a war hero and that sort of thing.” He waited for her to speak, but she didn’t. “My fellow police officer parked down the street owes me a favor,” he said. “I’ll ask him to drive you to the carnival. Ma’am, did you hear me? Would you like my friend to drive you?”
“Yes. Please. That’s very gracious of you.”
“This isn’t a city to have trouble in.” The policeman gazed across the street, where two other policemen were dragging a man in a slug cap and disheveled suit out of an alleyway, through the garbage cans, throwing him onto the sidewalk. “I keep my own counsel about various things. You might do the same.”
FOR HACKBERRY, THE end of the day had become a harbinger of death, not simply a gathering of the light on the horizon but a shrinking of it, a compression whereby darkness prevailed over goodness and drew the vestiges of the sun over the earth’s edge, obviating the prospect of another sunrise, another spring, one of bluebonnets and buttercups and Indian paintbrush, another chance at undoing the past and reassembling the broken elements of his life.
His father, Sam Morgan Holland, had been a drover and a Confederate soldier and a violent and drunken man with a homicidal temper who had watched his entire herd, two thousand head, spook in dry lightning and turn in to a brown river flowing over the Flint Hills outside Wichita, Kansas. He had cursed God for his bad fortune and stayed drunk all the way back to Texas, and joined those who sat on the mourners’ bench at the New Hebron Baptist Church, in despair and beyond the pale.
The terminology depended on a person’s education, but the characterization of hopelessness and irrevocable loss was always the same. Women who
killed themselves in sod houses in the dead of winter had “cabin fever.” Those who studied the mystics called it “the long night of the soul” or “a time in the Garden.” Others were simply called self-pitying drunks who were “weak” and would trade their souls for a half cup of whiskey.
Supposedly, Sam Holland found peace when he hung his guns on a peg in a brick jail on the border, and locked the iron door behind him, and rode away to become a saddle preacher on the Chisholm Trail. Hackberry had his doubts about the story. Blood didn’t rinse easily from a man’s dreams. Nor did memories of irreparable injury done to others.
Hackberry had experienced “spells” since he was a child. A spell could last fifteen minutes or days. The experience was the equivalent of weevil worms eating a hole through his heart while he watched a sky as blue and flawless as silk turn into a giant sheet of carbon paper.
Voices in his head. Night sweats in the middle of the day. Inability to breathe, as though someone had sifted a tablespoon of sand in each of his lungs. A sensation above the left ear that was like a banjo string being tightened around the scalp. People wondered why a man sat down on a stump and upended his shotgun and propped his chin on both barrels?
When he’d found Beatrice DeMolay’s bordello in the high desert of central Mexico, he had thought a deliverance was at hand. Instead, he was tortured by fire and in other ways he could not completely remember; he also littered the landscape with the bodies of his tormentors. Then the cup had come into his possession. Was it an accident? Or was there purpose in his discovering it ironically in a hearse filled with ordnance?
As the light died on the horizon and the air cooled and grew dense with a smell like old leaves in a rain barrel, he walked down to the river and sat once again by the tangle of rusted cables where he had buried the cup.
He had read in his encyclopedias about the Arthurian search for the Grail and the stories of Knights Templar who supposedly returned from the Crusades with the shroud and pieces of the cross. He set little store by any of it. The one reference that wouldn’t go away, however, was the name of the Grand Master of the Knights Templar. It was Jacques de Molay, burned at the stake in front of Notre Dame Cathedral at the close of the thirteenth century. With a minor contraction of the spelling, the name was the same as Beatrice DeMolay’s.
Maybe it was another coincidence. That wasn’t a word Hackberry’s murderous saddle preacher of a father had much tolerance for. He called coincidence “the Lord acting with anonymity.”
Could the cup be real, the one Jesus not only drank from but probably dipped bread in and gave to his disciples? The thought frightened Hackberry, not because the cup had been held by Jesus but because it had been entrusted to him, Hackberry Holland, whose record of chaos and mayhem and womanizing and bloodshed was legendary in the worst sense.
According to what he had read, Jacques de Molay had returned from the Holy Land with the shroud that had covered Jesus’ body and, some believed, the Holy Grail. He and his fellow knights were arrested en masse on Friday the thirteenth, tortured unmercifully for days and weeks, and sent to their death as idolaters.
Hackberry looked at the evening star winking just above the hill on the far side of the river. He pared his fingernails with a knife and tried to create a blank space in the center of his mind where he could hide and think about absolutely nothing.
Forget about all the great mysteries, he told himself. If anyone ever figured them out, he hadn’t seen the instance. What were the real problems confronting him? He had been lured into shooting and killing a man who was probably mentally impaired, someone who had been burned so badly he resembled a mannequin. Second, the issue with the cup was not about the cup but the fact that Arnold Beckman wanted it. And if Arnold Beckman wanted something, it was to make the earth a much worse place than it already was.
Hackberry rested his hand by the rusty coils of cable. What an unsuitable place for the cup, covered by the industrial detritus of the twentieth century. Time to move it. But where?
How did a cottontail elude his pursuers? He ran in a circle, then went down a hole or crossed water and left his enemy chasing a scent that had no end. A Comanche Indian up on the Staked Plains did the same: In blazing heat, in the midst of summer drought, he would put a pebble under his tongue to cause his mouth to salivate, then wander in circles and figure eights until the canteens of his pursuers were empty, and attack them at the end of a burning day. Hackberry would hide the cup in a place where Arnold Beckman’s people had already been. The cave. Strange. According to the legends recounted in his encyclopedias, the cup had been hidden in a cave in southern France or perhaps western England, the last redoubt of the Celts.
He went back to the barn for a shovel. He thought he heard the phone ringing inside the house but paid no attention to it. He pulled on his gloves and stripped the tangle of cable free from the ground and threw it down the slope into the shallows. The ground was as loamy and soft as coffee grinds when he pressed down on the shovel blade and eased it under the box he had wrapped with a tarp and a rain slicker.
Then a phenomenon took place that had to be the result of natural causes. He was almost certain of this. The full moon had just broken through the clouds, as bright as silver plate. As he dumped the dirt off the blade of his shovel, the ground and air sparkled as though he had dug into a pocket of pollen. Pyrite, he told himself. The same false indicator that had sent James Bowie chasing after legends and silver and gold in San Saba County. Hackberry picked up the box and refilled the hole, stamping it down, ridding himself of thoughts about ancient myths and Crusader knights on the road to Roncesvalles or wherever they could bloody a sword in the name of Christianity.
Once again, he heard the phone ringing.
RUBY GOT OUT of the policeman’s car and walked up the midway of the carnival. The hot-air balloon was now directly overhead, anchored by a rope, a man in a straw boater and a candy-striped coat tossing buckets of confetti and paper-wrapped taffy to the children below. But something was wrong. The people in the midway had divided into two groups. The larger crowd had gathered directly under the balloon, the children’s hands outreached toward the gondola. Others had formed a crowd in front of a cage. When a child wandered away from the larger group toward the cage, a parent would rush over to him and immediately drag him back, fighting.
Ruby tried to see over the shoulders of the crowd gathered in front of the cage, one with wire mesh and bars. “What’s happening up there?” she said to the man in front of her.
His teeth were the size of an elk’s, his eyes as small as dimes. “The geek show. He’s supposed to be the Missing Link. More like a rummy making a few dollars and having some fun.”
Through the heads and hats and bonnets and thick necks and broad backs, Ruby saw a man trying to get to his feet inside the cage, then slipping on his buttocks, his clothes and skin streaked with filth. She felt her heart knock against her ribs, her breath rush out of her throat.
She tried to push her way through the crowd. The people around her smelled of sweat that had dried inside wool, onions and greasy meat, malt, unwashed hair, decayed teeth, and deodorant compounds smeared under their armpits. A man hit her in the breast with his elbow; a woman screwed her face into a knot and said, “Be careful who you’re pushing, Swede.”
Ruby went back through the crowd into the midway and circled behind the game booths until she found the door of the cage. Three men were sitting at a wood table outside it, drinking Coca-Cola and smoking. They wore badges and suspenders without coats and hats that shadowed their faces. One was short and wore a piece of tape across his nose; there was blood on his collar and the front of his shirt. An ax handle lay by his foot.
“Who are you?” she asked.
“The law. What can we do for you?” the short man said.
“No, you’re not. You’re ginks. That’s my son in that cage. Did you put him in there?”
The tallest of the three put out his cigarette on the sole of his boot and took
a sip from his Coca-Cola, gazing at nothing. “He was drunk and started a fight. We put him in there for his own protection. The city police are going to pick him up.”
“You’re a liar.”
“He shouldn’t have got drunk. If you want to take him home, be our guest,” the same man said.
“What are your names?”
“Eeny, Meany, Miny, Moe. As in catch a nigger by his toe,” the short man said. “Moe ain’t here.” The other two men tilted down their hat brims to hide their grins.
“My son was at the Marne. Where were you?” she said. “I promise you’ll be held accountable for this.”
“My name is Fred,” the short man said. “That man in yonder assaulted me. To make sure everything is on the table, I bought him a bottle of moonshine. I could’ve had him locked up for six months. If I was you, I’d tuck my lower lip back in my mouth.”
“What’s your last name?”
“Beemer. Fred J. Beemer.” He opened a pouch of string chewing tobacco and filled his jaw. He chewed it slowly and spat a long stream in the grass. “Nothing like a little Red Man.”
“My name is Ruby Dansen. I want you to remember it.”
“I’ll carve it on my heart,” Fred Beemer replied.
She pulled open the back door of the cage and stepped inside. The spotlights on the midway were iridescent, eye-watering, rimmed with humidity. Someone had cut Ishmael’s belt in half and his trousers and undershorts had slipped down on his buttocks. His palms were printed with peanut shells and wet cigarette butts. His skull seemed translucent and red against the brilliance of the light. The people watching him through the wire mesh had the faces an artist would paint on a medieval mob—lantern-jawed, beetle-browed, unshaved, hair growing from their ears and noses, teeth the color of urine. They were the kind of people who attended public executions and delighted in blood sports. Were these the people to whom she had devoted her life?
House of the Rising Sun Page 26
