House of the Rising Sun

by James Lee Burke

  She got to her knees and pulled Ishmael partially erect. Then she worked herself onto a chair and got his weight across her thighs, so he lay spread across her lap, his arms hanging loose behind him, the bones in his chest as pronounced as barrel staves, his face puffed, his eyes half-lidded.

  The crowd stared at her, leering, fascinated.

  “What have you done to my son?” she asked. “What have you done to my darling son?”

  THE CLOCK ON the kitchen windowsill said 9:03 when Hackberry answered the telephone. Outside, the sky was black, grit blowing against the pane. “Will you accept a long-distance call from Ruby Dansen?” the operator asked.

  “Yes,” he said, a stone dropping inside him.

  “Go ahead,” the operator said to the caller, then went off the line.

  “Ruby?” Hackberry said.

  “Who else?”

  “Where are you?” he said.

  “San Antonio. Ishmael is hurt. In a cage at a carnival. It’s too much to explain. Can you come?”

  “Ishmael is in San Antonio?”

  “He’s been living with Maggie. He left her house on foot and ended up at a fairgrounds. Some ginks with badges got their hands on him. He has bruises all over him.”

  “Why would they want to hurt Ishmael?”

  “Their kind don’t need an excuse. They treated him like an animal. They put him on exhibit.”

  “They did what?”

  “I have to go. Can you come or not?”

  “I don’t have a car, and I don’t know how to drive. I’ll have to call somebody. Where are you now?”

  “At the café by the fairgrounds, waiting on an ambulance. I have little money.”

  She told him the name of the hotel where she was staying. He remembered it vaguely, a place for transients, single men at the end of the track.

  “Don’t worry about money. Where’s Maggie?” he asked.

  “How would I know? Why did she take Ishmael out of the army hospital? Why this sudden surge of charity?”

  “I quit trying to figure her out many years ago. Who put Ishmael in the cage?”

  “There were three of them. One said his name was Fred Beemer. Fred J. Beemer.”

  Hackberry wrote on a pad. “They’re deputies?”

  “No.”

  “How do you know they’re not?”

  “Do deputy sheriffs in San Antonio carry ax handles?”

  “I’ll do everything I can to get there as soon as possible,” he said.

  “Maggie said she was arranging an executive position of some kind for Ishmael. Who is she working for, Hack?”

  “I’d like to say the devil. But it’s probably worse. The name Arnold Beckman comes to mind.”

  “Who?”

  “I want to see you, Ruby. I’ve been wanting to see you an awful long time.”

  “Hurry, please,” she said.

  He gave her the name of a hospital. “Make sure the ambulance takes him there. It’s the best. They’re all busting at the seams with influenza patients.”

  WILLARD POSEY SENT a deputy to pick up Hackberry. An hour and a half later, he was at the hospital in San Antonio where he was supposed to meet Ruby, except there was no sign of Ruby and no record of a patient named Ishmael Holland. “They were here,” Hackberry said to the woman at the admissions desk.

  “I’m afraid they were not,” she replied. “But I’ll tell you who is: all the influenza patients on the gurneys in the hallway.”

  He and the deputy drove to the fairgrounds. It was Saturday night, and except for the carousel, the rides and concessions were open late, the ragged popping of rifles and the smell of gunpowder drifting from the shooting gallery. The deputy was a tall redheaded boy named Darl Pickins who wore a knit sweater with his badge pinned to it. Up ahead, on the midway, Hackberry saw a dunking booth where a waterlogged man of color was wiping himself off with a towel, preparing to retake his place on the dunking stool. A little farther on was a cage with a sign over it that read THE MISSING LINK.

  “Darl, why don’t you go back to the café across the street and have a cup of coffee?” Hackberry said. “I’ll be along directly.”

  “Sheriff Posey said I’m supposed to stick with you.”

  “I bet he did. But right now I’ve got everything covered. I need you at the café in case Miss Ruby shows up there. If you’re not there, she won’t know where we’re at.”

  “Yes, sir, I see what you mean.”

  “Then why aren’t you headed to the café?”

  “Sheriff Posey says you tend to get into things.”

  “The sheriff exaggerates and is a big kidder on top of it. Trust me on this.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Good-bye, now.”

  “I’ll be at the café.”

  “That’s the place to be,” Hackberry said.

  He walked to the cage. A man in rubber boots was hosing off the floor, skidding a gray froth of straw and water through the bars. Hackberry opened his coat, exposing his badge. “I’m looking for Fred Beemer and a couple of his colleagues.”

  “Down by the barbecue tent,” the man with the hose replied, not looking up. “Doin’ nothing, I suspect. They’re good at it.”

  Hackberry continued down the midway, past the Ferris wheel, into a poorly lighted area where a purple-and-white-striped canopy rippled in the wind and three men sat at a table in front of an empty stage, eating barbecued ribs with their fingers. No one else was in the tent. In their peaked hats and long-sleeved cotton shirts, with their flat stomachs and tightly belted trousers, they could have been mistaken for lawmen of years ago—except for their inability to hold their eyes steadily on his as he approached their table.

  “I heard y’all had some trouble.”

  “No, sir, no trouble here,” one said. “Indigestion, maybe.”

  Hackberry looked casually over his shoulder, back down the midway, then at the men again. “Something to do with the Missing Link act. It is an act, isn’t it? That’s not a real missing link in there?”

  “Search me,” said a man with a strip of tape across his nose. “Why are you interested?”

  “No reason. Is that an ax handle?”

  “Possums wander in at night and chew on the electric lines. Who are you?”

  “I’m a deputy sheriff over in Kerr County. I was looking for Mr. Beemer.”

  “What for?” the man with the taped nose asked.

  “He’s the fellow I’m supposed to see about the man y’all had to lock up.”

  “Why’s Kerr County interested in a drunk man and drug addict in San Antonio?” the tallest of the three men asked. His teeth were tiny, hardly bigger than a baby’s, his whiskers grayish brown, soft-looking, like winter fur on a squirrel.

  “The man you refer to as a drunk and drug addict is my son.”

  The tall man lifted his face, so the colored lights from the Ferris wheel fell across it. “A woman took him away. She said she was his mother. I’d say she was a pain in the ass.”

  “How’d she take him away?”

  “We didn’t pay it no mind,” the same man said.

  “My son got blown up in France. From my understanding, he had a pint of metal in his lower body. Why would y’all put my boy in a cage?”

  “Because he fell down in a puddle of water that had a power cable running through it,” Beemer said.

  “You put me in mind of the Sundance Kid,” Hackberry said. “The way you scrunch your shoulders and tilt up your chin. I knew him and Harvey Logan, both.”

  “I look like the Sundance Kid?”

  “Hand on the Bible. Logan was a dyed-in-the-wool killer and a five-star lamebrain. Sundance was just a lamebrain. Not even one-star.”

  “We were just doing our job,” Beemer said. “Did we mention your son was stirring up nigger trouble?”

  Hackberry pulled back his coat flap and hung it behind the butt of his holstered Peacemaker. “Could I see your ax handle?”

  “Let’s hold on there a minu
te,” the tall man said.

  “It’s a little late for that. Things get loose on you, and you look back and nobody can figure out how it went downhill so fast. It’s a dad-burned mystery.”

  “We can talk this thing out,” the tall man said, his face marbled with the glow from the Ferris wheel, the skin under one eye twitching.

  What Hackberry did next he did without a plan, without even heat or passion, except to ensure that Beemer received just due and the others were treated as adverbs rather than nouns. In reality, he went about the destruction of the three men as though chopping wood or breaking up old furniture or packing cases for burning. He beat them until they cowered on their knees, then he beat them some more, stomping their faces and heads into the soft dampness of the grass, spilling their half-eaten food on top of them. Then he pulled their wallets from their trousers and took a piece of identification from each man and tossed their wallets in their faces.

  All three men were carrying a business card with the name of Arnold Beckman’s company on it.

  “Try to make more trouble for us, and I’ll be looking you up,” Hackberry said.

  He wiped his hands on a towel, propped the ax handle neatly against a chair, and walked back down the midway to rejoin Darl Pickins at the café, the carousel coming to life for no reason, the wooden horses whirling without riders.

  MAGGIE BASSETT FOUND herself biting her lip in her living room, unable to gather her thoughts and rebuild her mental fortifications, staring out the window at the ruins of the Spanish mission to distract herself. How do you deliver bad news to a man who does not tolerate bad news but demands to hear it as soon as it happens? Better said, how do you report bad news to a man who requires full candor but is enraged by it?

  She had one of the new candlestick telephones, made of brass, with a dial on it. It always gave her pleasure to use it. Now it felt like a lump of ice as she dialed Arnold Beckman’s number.

  As always, he didn’t speak when he answered the phone, deliberately making his caller feel off guard, invasive, vaguely guilty.

  “Arnold?” she said.

  “It’s you, Maggie,” he said brightly. “What can I do for my favorite lass?”

  “I don’t know where Ishmael is.”

  “He ran off from your charms?”

  “I’m serious.”

  She waited in the silence, a creaking sound in her ears, as though she were slipping to the bottom of a lake, its weight about to crush her skull. “Arnold?”

  “How. Can. A. Crippled. Man. Disappear?”

  “We had an argument.”

  “You know I do not like to repeat myself.”

  “Maybe he took a jitney. He was walking with his canes. He couldn’t have gone far.”

  “Then why are you not out looking for the people who drive jitneys in your neighborhood? Or searching the ditches? Why are we having this conversation?”

  “I’ve done everything you’ve asked. Everything doesn’t always work out like we plan.”

  “When it doesn’t work out, you fix it. But instead of fixing it, you’ve called me. Our little girl wants her daddy to clean up her mess. Not a good attitude. What are we going to do about that, little Maggie?”

  She felt a flush in her cheeks, a fish bone in her throat, words forming that she dared not speak. “I felt my first obligation was to apprise you of the situation. I plan to drive around town to places where he might have gone. He was drinking when he left. He’s probably drinking now.”

  Before she had finished speaking, she felt weak, sycophantic, submissive to a man she secretly abhorred. She was breathing into the receiver, hoping he did not sense her fear and self-loathing. His words injured her in the same way her father’s had, like paper cuts that she hid and nursed and carried until he unleashed more damage on her. When would it end? Only when she was able to vanquish her father’s memory by either undoing Arnold Beckman or proving herself his equal. And the fact that she gave Arnold Beckman that kind of power only made her hate herself more. How sick could a person be?

  “Are you there?” she asked.

  “Indeed, my love.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “Just continue being the lovely piece you are. You are a lovely piece, you know. And I’ve had it on every continent, with every race and every age. You’re every man’s wet dream, Maggie.”

  She felt her breath coming harder in her chest, her left hand opening and closing spasmodically, the nails pressing into her palm. She tried to speak firmly, to pretend she had not heard what he’d just said. “I’ll take care of it. I shouldn’t have let this happen. It’s my fault.”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll send some men out. Did he hurt you or get out of hand, that sort of thing?”

  “No, he’s not like that.”

  “You still have the motherly touch. That’s good. That’s why I like you, Maggie. Having you in my stable is like having half a dozen women in one. I never know who I’m talking to. You’re an absolute delight. I’m glad you’re not a man. I might be afraid of you.”

  She heard a whirring sound in her ears, the same sound she had heard when she pressed her head against her mother’s breast as a child. Why did she have memories of this kind? Why couldn’t she catalog and compartmentalize her thoughts and deal with them one by one so they didn’t control her life? Why couldn’t she understand the tangled web that comprised her mind?

  “I never know what to say to you,” she said.

  “Look on the light side of it. Maybe you spent too much time on your back. A touch of the wrong lad, and it shows up in the brain years later. Let’s face it, you knew some scruffy characters. Hello?”

  She was unable to speak.

  “I’m just kidding,” he said. “Don’t be such a bloody prude. We’re cut out of the same cloth. We’re interlopers. That’s why the people who sit at my table and eat my food and drink my wine hate the pair of us.”

  She lowered the receiver, widening her eyes, stretching her face, letting out her breath. She put the receiver to her ear again. “I forgive you for being obnoxious and vulgar, Arnold. I guess you came out of the womb that way. But you’ll never speak to me like that again.”

  “That’s my girl. Hang their scrotums on the point of your knife. Now get out there and find your war hero. We have an empire to build, Maggie. I want you to be my queen. You’re an Amazon. Your thighs could span the Strait of Gibraltar.”

  She didn’t say good-bye but simply hung the receiver back on the hook and looked at it as though his voice lived inside it. She was wondering if there was such a thing as the human soul. If so, how did one explain the existence of a man like Beckman? And if so, wasn’t her soul already forfeit? Wasn’t it better to believe in nothing than to make oneself miserable trying to solve mysteries the human mind couldn’t fathom? Was not all of mankind adrift on a dark sea, without hope, at the mercy of undercurrents and waves as high as mountains?

  Outside, the light had gone out of the sky and a burst of rain-flecked wind blew open one of the French doors, scattering leaves and pine needles on the rug, filling her house with the tang of late autumn and the holiday season. She had never felt more alone in her life.

  AFTER ISHMAEL HAD been refused admission at the hospital and the ambulance had left on another call, Ruby had asked a jitney driver to drive her to a different hospital.

  “It’s the same all over town. More sick people than beds,” he said.

  “What about the army posts?”

  “Fort Sam Houston and Camp Travis are quarantined because of influenza. I wouldn’t get near either one of them.”

  “There has to be someplace I can take him.”

  “I know a clinic,” he said. “It’s not much, but they have medicine.”

  He drove them across the river into a bowl-like area dotted with shacks and mud-walled hovels. A dirty haze from the stacks of a rendering plant hung like strips of gauze above the rooftops. The electricity was out on the street where the clinic was located,
and the glass on the oil lamps burning in the foyers was black with smoke; flashlights moved behind the windows.

  She gazed at the litter in the open ditches, the privies that were nothing more than a chunk of concrete pipe screwed into a hole, the animal carcasses along the road, a corrugated shed by a stream where clothing was spread on the rocks to dry. “This is the Mexican district?” she said.

  “Most of them are wets and don’t bother nobody,” the driver said. “They don’t want to get sent back across the river, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  Women in shawls and men’s coats and work shoes, carrying children in their arms or holding them by the hand, were gathered in the foyers. None of them looked injured or sick, simply tired and afraid and confused, as though waiting to be told what to do.

  “Why are all these people here?” she asked.

  “One of those sleeping cars for gandy dancers got hit by a line of freight cars on the wrong spur. It was one of those three-deckers, about as solid as an orange crate. They’re still bringing them in.”

  “Do you know anyone in there? I don’t speak Spanish.”

  “Sorry, I got to get back to the depot. That’s where I get most of my fares.”

  She rolled down the window. An odor struck her face like a fist.

  “Better roll it back up, ma’am,” the driver said. “In back, they burn waste and bandages and things I won’t mention.”

  “Pull up in front. You have to help me carry him in.”

  “I’m sorry, I have to go.”

  “No, you don’t. You brought me here, and you’re not leaving until my son is safely inside. Come around this side and help me lift him up.”

  The driver fiddled with his cap.

  “Did you hear me?” she said.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he replied. “If you can pay me first, please.”

  The two of them got Ishmael inside and laid him in a hallway on a wood pallet covered by a blanket and a stained mattress pad. Amid the shadows and the flashlight beams and the press of bodies and people tripping over the patients on the floor and the incessant sound of coughing, Ruby tried to get the attention of anyone who could help. She knelt by Ishmael and formed a tent over him by propping her arms on either side of his shoulders. She twisted her head and tried to speak to the driver. “I’ll stay here. You go find a doctor and tell him—”