House of the Rising Sun

by James Lee Burke

  The driver was gone. Through the entranceway, she saw a pair of headlights drive up the rutted road and disappear.

  She got to her feet and began pulling the pallet closer to the wall, away from the flow of traffic through the hallway, the splinters tearing her flesh. She got on her knees and pushed, working the pallet an inch at a time into the shadows, between two other patients, away from the faces of frightened children in the flashlight beams, a nurse trying to squeeze through with an overflowing bedpan.

  “There,” Ruby said to Ishmael, even though his eyes were closed. “That will do for the time being. I promise I’ll get us out of this. There are patients on either side of us. No one can step on us now. Can you hear me, Ishmael? Open your eyes. Please. Say something.”

  He did neither. She shook the person on the pallet next to Ishmael’s. “Who’s in charge here? Give me a name. I don’t speak Spanish. Can you understand me? What is the name of the man in charge? I’m sorry to bother you, but you must wake up. Does no one here speak English?”

  Then she realized she was addressing herself to a Mexican woman whose facial wrinkles were dissolving into the bloodless and pale and featureless anonymity of the dead. For a moment she thought she would weep.

  Someone shone a light on Ruby’s head. “Who are you? How did you get in here?” a man’s voice said. He was bald and potbellied and wore a white smock stippled with blood. “Who gave you permission to put that man here?”

  “No one did. He’s my son. He needs help.”

  “What’s wrong with him?”

  “He has shrapnel wounds all over his legs. Maybe they’re infected. Maybe something is broken. He was beaten at the carnival.”

  “Move out of the way,” the physician said, shining the light on Ishmael’s face. “You shouldn’t have put him here. All these people are contagious. Hold this.”

  He stuck the flashlight in Ruby’s hand and knelt down and felt Ishmael’s throat and lifted one of his arms, rolling back the sleeve. Then he unbuttoned Ishmael’s shirt and trousers and felt his ribs and pulled the trousers lower and probed his abdomen and examined the bandages on his thighs. He took the flashlight back. “He smells like a distillery.”

  “Don’t you dare talk about him like that. Half of Texas smells like a distillery. The half made up of Baptist hypocrites.”

  “You brought him to the wrong place. Get him out of here.”

  “He was wounded fighting for his country.”

  “This entire neighborhood will probably be quarantined. Do you want to spend the next six months inside this clinic?”

  “We’re already here. You have to help him. We have no other place to go.”

  “If you don’t get him out of here, I will.”

  “No, you won’t. If you try to eject him, I’ll gouge your eyes out, and you’ll have to perform your next surgery by touch. I pulled murdered children out of the cellar at Ludlow. Don’t tell me your troubles.”

  The physician stood up and clicked off the light. She stood up also, her face no more than a foot from his. A nurse jostled against him and kept going. The physician didn’t take his eyes off Ruby’s. He removed a pair of scissors from a pocket in his smock. “Start with the bandages. I’ll bring you a pan and a washcloth and some alcohol and iodine. Who beat him?”

  “Ginks with badges. They said he started a fight. That’s not true. He’s a gentle boy. One of the ginks had an ax handle.”

  “I’ll be back shortly. Don’t touch the woman lying next to you. She may have had typhoid. I believe you’re a brave woman, madam. But every night is Ludlow here.”

  For the next half hour, Ruby peeled strips of adhesive and gauze, yellow and stiff and crusted with salve, from Ishmael’s wounds. Surprisingly, they were free of blood. She washed him all over as best she could in the semidarkness, stroking his brow, rebuttoning his shirt, reassuring him even though he seemed unconscious. The smells of ether and carbolic and iodine and an odor like woolen clothes that hadn’t been hung in the sun for months began to feel natural, the way fog was, the way the hospital tent at Ludlow had been, the way the huddled masses carried with them a level of suffering and courage that few understood.

  She had been self-righteous and too hard on the doctor, and she knew that if it were not for his kindness, the world would be much worse off. Still, she could not free herself of the collective face of the crowd who had watched her son’s degradation inside the cage at the carnival. Didn’t they understand who the enemy was, the ones who gave them bread and circuses and kept their attention directed elsewhere while they despoiled the earth and cheated and robbed the treasury and kept working people poor and uneducated? Why did the human race band together to participate in its own victimization?

  Sometimes she wanted to dash her fists on the faces of the people she served. Was she more of an elitist than she thought? There were moments when she believed her social causes were manufactured, that her anger had more to do with her abandonment by Hackberry Holland than the suffering of masses. What a joke that would be. Years of devotion to a self-manufactured illusion, all because of a man. What would Emma Goldman have to say about that?

  But as always, when she fell into self-destructive introspection, she had to remember an old lesson she had taught herself. People were not what they said. They were not what they thought. They were not what they promised. People were what they did. When the final tally was done, nothing else mattered.

  Three feet away, a small boy was crying and holding on to his mother, who lay on a pallet, her lips congealed with a dry, gelatinous film. The mother was moaning, her eyes bright with fever, straw clinging to her hair and clothes.

  “What’s wrong with your mother?” Ruby asked the boy.

  “She don’t have water,” he said. “There ain’t no water.”

  “That’s silly. Of course there’s water. I’ll watch your mother. You go ask the nurse for water.”

  “There’s a big line at the faucet in the back. I ain’t got a can.” In spite of his tears, his face was dry, like a baked apple. He wore shoes without socks and a man’s cap and two long-sleeved shirts instead of a coat.

  “You stay right here and watch your mother. I’ll be right back,” she said. “That’s my son, Ishmael. You have to watch him for me. Can you do that?”

  He looked at her, uncertain. He started to speak, then stopped, as though he couldn’t remember what he should say. His face started to crumble. “Is she going to die?”

  Ruby bent over, eye-level with him. “No, we’re not going to let that happen. Don’t be afraid. Never be afraid and never be sad. Not for any reason. That’s how we win. We never give up and we’re never sad.”

  “I heard the doctor tell the nurse she might die. He was talking about moving her body. Why would the doctor say that if she’s going to be all right?”

  Ruby hugged the boy’s head against her stomach, then worked her way to the rear of the building and out the back door, where she discovered what had happened to the water supply. The water line to the neighborhood had been cut in the train accident, and because the clinic had a cistern, everyone in the neighborhood had come to draw water from it. The only light in the backyard came from a metal barrel filled with burning scrap wood. A long line of people with buckets and tin cans and glass jars was strung from the faucet through the dirt yard into the alley, the firelight and shadows dancing on their faces.

  She wondered if this were what hell was about. Not a place of punishment but of disparity. Those who had done nothing to earn their fate lived like this, while three miles away, others rode the Ferris wheel and children raised their hands joyfully to a hot-air balloon that rained down candy on their heads.

  She bought a syrup can for a dime from an old man and waited her turn at the spigot. Between the buildings, she saw the headlights of two black four-door motorcars going up the street and circling back. The cars were too big, the paint too shiny and new, for the neighborhood. One of the cars had a bell with a clapper attached to
the driver’s door, the kind of bell police vehicles carried.

  Five minutes later, she filled the syrup can and went back into the building. She almost collided with the little boy who thought his mother might die. “The doctor gave her some medicine,” he said. “They’re moving her to a bed.” He reached out to take the syrup can from her hands.

  “How’s my son?” she asked.

  The boy’s face went blank. “They took him away. They must have found him a bed.”

  “Who’s ‘they’?”

  “Two men. They picked him up from the floor and carried him out.”

  “Out where?”

  “I don’t know. They said everything was all right. I told them I was supposed to watch him. They said I did a good job. They work here, don’t they?”

  He caught the syrup can before it could hit the ground.

  IN ISHMAEL’S DREAM, he revisited a scene that had less to do with war than with the aberrations it produced, images that were literally unimaginable because they had no precedent and their probability was nil and a witness had no way of possessing the empirical information or scientific knowledge that would allow him to understand what his eyes told him.

  Ishmael had heard of experiments with phosphorous artillery shells but had never seen one fired. A rumor spread that the Brits on their flank were throwing a new type of grenade into Fritz’s wire, with devastating effect. But what could be worse than a flamethrower or mustard gas or a direct hit on a field hospital by Big Bertha, a mortar that could blow a barn-size hole in the earth?

  He saw an event that proved to him once and for all man’s limitless ingenuity in manufacturing weaponry that canceled the laws of physics and created situations for which no one, particularly the victim, could have prepared himself.

  The Germans had attacked before dawn, dressed in their green-gray uniforms that blended with the fog and the ruined landscape, wearing their bucket helmets and goggled gas masks, like space aliens, the wands on their flamethrowers flaring alight in two-second bursts.

  The Brits began heaving grenades in their midst, throwing them like baseballs. The explosions took on the shape of giant furry spiders, the legs white and puffy and broken, thick as a man’s thigh in one moment, spindly in the next, arching up and trailing down, all in an incandescent second.

  Ishmael expected the screams to follow, as they always did when they were trapped inside a burning tank or when flames roared from the gun slits in a concrete pillbox. That wasn’t what happened. The Germans who survived the initial explosion dropped their rifles and kept moving toward the British wire, their uniforms rent with pockets of the most intense, purest white light Ishmael had ever seen. The Germans made no sound, as though the trauma were of such magnitude that the human voice could not do it justice. The phosphorous burned its way through their bodies, punching holes that seemed to open on to infinity. And still no sound came from their throats. Only after someone began spraying them with a Lewis did they crumple and disappear inside the ground fog.

  Later, Ishmael always referred to them as “the light bearers,” and not in an ironic or cynical fashion. He saw them in his dreams with regularity and had come to think of them as friends who had seen the reality of war and knew the limits of human endurance, with whom he would never have to argue about the insanity of the modern era.

  As he lay on the floor of the clinic, he felt someone lifting him to his feet and placing a blanket over his shoulders. His eyes were leaden, his head on his chest, but he was sure he was once again in the hands of friends, and they would take him to a safe place where he would never have to worry about anything.

  HACKBERRY AND HIS fellow deputy, Darl Pickins, could not find Ruby or Ishmael anywhere in San Antonio. Maggie Bassett’s house was dark and locked and the motorcar gone. The clerk at Ruby’s hotel said she had put her key in the box earlier in the evening, and he had not seen her since. Hackberry left a note.

  “There’s one other place,” Darl said. “Across the river. A shantytown. The clinic there is sort of a dumping ground.”

  “For what?”

  “Whatever the county won’t treat.” Darl put a piece of gum in his mouth and chewed while he drove and gazed out the side window at a cervecería hung with lights, the girls leaning against the wall outside, smoking cigarillos. One of the front tires slammed down hard in a rocky hole.

  “I’m not in a good mood, Darl.”

  “They handle just about anything except dogs with rabies. Most of the wets go there. The hookers go there because the county would report them to the state health department, and they wouldn’t be able to work. Can I ask you a question, Mr. Holland?”

  “My title is Deputy.”

  “It don’t seem respectful.”

  “What is it you need to know, Darl?”

  “Did something happen while I was at the café and you was over at the fairgrounds?”

  “Nothing of world importance, I’d say.”

  “Because this guy went walking past the café real fast, saying a crazy person tore the hell out of the three guys with an ax handle. More or less jumped up and down on their faces, too.”

  “Probably a Bolshevik agitator of some kind. I mean the man spreading rumors. That’s how the Reds work. Always stirring up people’s imagination. Would you drive us across the river now?”

  “Yes, sir. Deputy Holland, we’re on the same side, ain’t we?”

  “That’s a funny question to ask.”

  “No, sir, it ain’t,” Darl replied, looking straight ahead.

  They rumbled across the river on a wooden bridge and parked in front of the clinic. It was two-fifteen A.M. The electricity in the neighborhood was off, the building dark, the oil lamps in the foyer extinguished. A Mexican woman working by a battery-powered lamp in the small admissions office said no one by the name of Holland had been formally admitted to the clinic the previous night or that morning.

  “He’s big, like me. His legs are bad,” Hackberry said. “He may have been beaten.”

  The woman shook her head.

  “The lady who would have brought him here is named Ruby Dansen. She’s a handsome woman. She looks like a Swede. Talks like a Yankee.”

  “No, I don’t remember anybody like that.”

  “I do,” a nurse said from the doorway. “She and a jitney operator brought the man in. They didn’t stop at the desk. They put him on a pallet. She went out back and got in line to fill a water can for an influenza patient.”

  “Where is she?” Hackberry said, his heart pressing against his side.

  “She and her friends took the man away,” the nurse replied. “No, wait a minute. Some men in a black car came inside and lifted him up. Maybe she helped them carry him out, I don’t remember. I know she was close by. We were terribly busy. I remember a little boy thanking her for helping his mother.”

  “Where did they take my son?” Hackberry said. “Who were the men in the black car?”

  “I don’t know. I’m sorry,” the nurse said.

  Hackberry felt Darl’s hand on his shoulder. “We cain’t do no good here, Mr. Holland. Let’s go. We’ll find him. I promise.”

  But they didn’t find him. And when Hackberry returned home at six that morning, the sun looked like a broken egg yolk on the horizon, the fog on the river as toxic as the haze on the Styx.

  HE SLEPT ON the living room couch so he could hear the telephone if it rang. When he woke, he fixed coffee and eggs and a slice of ham on his woodstove, then ate and washed his face and brushed his teeth and shaved and put on fresh clothes. Through the front window, he saw a raccoon walking along the porch railing, his fat ringed tail flicking back and forth like a spring. Hackberry filled a bowl with fish scraps from the icebox, and a second bowl with water, and took them out on the porch and set them down not far from the raccoon. “Here you go, Poindexter. Chomp it down.”

  Then he saw a sight he wouldn’t have believed he would ever see. Cod Bishop was coming up his lane on a groomed long-legged re
d gelding, sitting on an English saddle, wearing immaculate white jodhpurs and black knee-high boots and a riding cap strapped tightly under his chin. In his right hand, he held a tissue-wrapped box with blue ribbon tied around it. His face had the solemnity of a prune.

  “Good morning, Mr. Holland,” he said. “Looks like you have a fat little friend there.”

  “That’s Poindexter. What are you after, Cod?”

  “A word. May I get down?”

  “I’m running behind on my chores at the moment.”

  “Do me the courtesy, sir.”

  Hackberry pulled his gold watch from his pocket and opened the cover and looked at it. Then he looked at the river and the bluffs and the fields but not at Bishop. “Get down if you like.”

  “Thank you.” Bishop stepped as gracefully from the stirrup as a man half his age, his lips pursed. It was not Bishop’s patrician airs that bothered Hackberry, or the way his long back bowed inward like a buggy whip, or the imperious cut of his profile; it was the meanness of spirit he disguised under any number of banners. There was no war he did not like, no cheap idea he did not support, no uncharitable, self-righteous cause aimed at the defenseless that he did not make his own. In moments like these, Hackberry sometimes wondered why anyone should object to a three-day open season on people in order to clean up most of the world’s problems.

  “I brought you some bonbons,” Bishop said.

  “You brought me candy?”

  “I know we haven’t been the best of neighbors. I’d like to make that right.”

  “Not on my account.”

  “Would you accept this gift?”

  “Would you tell me what this is about, please?”

  Bishop set the tissue-wrapped box on the top step. “I’ve formally broken off my association with Mr. Beckman.” His words had held together until the mention of Beckman’s name. Then an inflection like a loose electric wire crept into his voice.

  “Why would you be ending your friendship with Beckman at this particular time, Cod?”