House of the Rising Sun

by James Lee Burke

  “What’s a barracoon?” Darl said.

  “A holding place used by slavers,” Andre said.

  “I never heard of a barracoon here’bouts,” Hackberry said.

  “Maybe because you did not want to hear about it,” Andre said.

  “You ever read Cotton Mather, Andre? You should. If ever a colored man inherited Mather’s great talents, it’s you.”

  “What do you want to do, Mr. Holland?” Darl asked, twisting around in the seat.

  “Turn on to the property and cut the engine.”

  “They’ll see us.”

  “Never tether your horse where you cain’t get to it.”

  “Here we go,” Darl said. He angled the car up the driveway and stopped. There was no movement or show of light inside the house. Darl turned off the engine. “What about the cup?” he said.

  “It stays in the car,” Hackberry said.

  “This don’t feel right.”

  “What doesn’t?” Hackberry said.

  “Everything. What if we don’t make it out of here and these guys get the cup? What do you aim to do with that bowie knife?”

  “Cut off Beckman’s fingers and make him eat them one at a time.”

  Darl’s face went white.

  “That’s a joke,” Hackberry said. “Trust me, everything will be all right. Let’s get out of the car and find out where they’ve got my boy.”

  “I don’t believe you,” Darl said, opening the door. “Look yonder. There’s a red light shining through that mission. What have we got ourselves into, Mr. Holland?”

  “JUST PUT ONE foot after another,” Jeff said, leading Ishmael along a stone wall, his eyes still taped. “Now turn left into this little room. There you go, buddy. Sit down in the chair. Let’s take off those eye pads so we can talk while I fix some grub. Well, lookie there.”

  “Look at what?” Ishmael said.

  Jeff pulled the adhesive tape from Ishmael’s brow and cheeks and the bridge of his nose and lifted the pads from his eyes. “See? It’s kind of like the Northern Lights. Nature doesn’t follow its own rules sometimes. Here, stand up and take a look.”

  “Can you take off the manacles?”

  “That’s up to Mr. Beckman. Stand up.”

  There was one window in the room, ground-level and narrow, like a slit in a machine-gun bunker. Ishmael could see a massive bank of black clouds in the west and, at the bottom of the sky, a red ember burning inside a blue patch behind the Spanish ruins.

  “It’ll go away directly,” Jeff said. “Those kinds of sunsets give me the willies. I cain’t tell you exactly why. They put me in mind of my father for some reason. He’d start preaching while he was whaling the tar out of us. I flat hated that son of a bitch. Even after one of my brothers pushed him off a cliff, I’d dream about him and have these funny feelings, like time had run out and the whole earth was fixing to be consumed in a fire. Know what I mean?”

  “No, not at all.”

  “You probably had a different kind of upbringing. Why you got that look on your face?”

  “I didn’t know what you looked like.”

  The walls were plastered and painted white. A wood cookstove stood in one corner, a tin pipe leading up through the ceiling. Jeff began stuffing kindling and newspaper into the hob. His beard was rust-colored and as stiff as wire, his eyes many-faceted, undefinable, as impervious as agate.

  “When are you going to do it, Jeff?” Ishmael said.

  “Do what?” Jeff said, concentrating on his work, a grin at the corner of his mouth.

  “Kill me.”

  “I wouldn’t do that. I like you.”

  “You’re full of it, bub.”

  “Wish you wouldn’t talk to me like that.”

  “My father will hang your hide on a nail.”

  Jeff swung his fist backward across Ishmael’s face, knocking him into the chair, Ishmael’s wrists hooked to the leather restraining belt. Jeff opened and closed his hand and shook it in the air, as though slinging water off his fingers. “Sorry about that. I got triggers in me people shouldn’t mess with. You all right?”

  “No.”

  “It’s the breaks of the game, kid. None of this is personal. We each got a job. One guy wins, one guys loses. Down the track everybody ends up in the same place, with a shovel-load of dirt raining down in his face.”

  “I’ve already done that. On the Marne, buried alive. I told you about calling me ‘kid.’ Jeff, I hate to tell you this, but you piss me off.”

  Jeff struck a match and dropped it in the hob. He tried to fan the kindling alight, then gave up and closed the hob and watched a single puff of white smoke rise from one of the stove lids. “Let’s go.”

  “Where to?”

  “Back to your cot and the blindfold. On your feet.”

  Ishmael bent forward, his head hanging down, his arms stretched behind him. “I don’t think I can do it.”

  “Get up!” Jeff said, grabbing Ishmael under one arm. “Did you hear me? You get your goddamn ass out of that chair.”

  Ishmael ran his body into Jeff’s and knocked him on the floor, then kicked him in the face, breaking his lips against his teeth. Then he stomped Jeff’s head with the sole of his shoe, again and again, bouncing it off the bricks, until Jeff’s eyes rolled. Ishmael fell back against the wall, the room spinning, his legs aflame. Outside, thousands of tree frogs were singing. He heard the trapdoor drop heavily from the ceiling in the tunnel and smack against solid stone, shaking the walls in the room.

  “Jeff, get up here! Bring the Lewis!” Arnold Beckman shouted.

  HACKBERRY GOT OUT of the motorcar first and went through the breezeway to the back of the building and cut the telephone wires with his bowie knife. With the butt of the knife, he broke out a pane in the French doors on Beckman’s office and unlocked the dead bolt and stepped inside, over the broken glass. Darl and Andre followed.

  Hackberry pulled his revolver and worked his way through the furniture to a door in the rear wall and turned the handle slowly and let the door swing back on its own. The room was too dark for him to see inside, but he was sure he heard someone go out another door and slam it behind him. He was sweating inside his clothes now. Even though the air outside was almost wintry, the room seemed as hot as a closed barn in July, the air pressurized, the walls damp, the silence like fingernails on a blackboard.

  He felt Andre bump against him. They had made a mistake. They had gone in together and bunched up in the process. His father had been with the Fourth Texas at Petersburg and seen the Yankees, many of them black, pour into the breach known as the Crater, piling on top of one another, slipping helplessly down the clay slopes into the mire, while the Confederates regrouped and slaughtered them en masse. Hackberry turned around and motioned Andre and Darl out the door. “Go around back,” he whispered. “Three minutes from now, break a window. With something big. A brick.”

  “Why?” Andre said.

  “Do it,” Hackberry said, pressing his hand against Andre’s shoulder, feeling the man’s body tense. “We don’t herd up. Three minutes.”

  Andre nodded, and he and Darl went back out the door into Beckman’s office. Hackberry felt his way through the room, tripping on a table that had a typewriter on it. He pulled open the door to the next room. There was no glimmer of electricity in the clouds, no moonrise, no red spark at the bottom of the sky, no sound of tree frogs drumming, nothing but darkness and a heady, sweet odor that made him think of San Francisco and Chinamen and alleyways that led to subterranean dens.

  You make a dollar where you can, don’t you, Mr. Beckman? he thought.

  But his discussion was a distraction and a luxury he couldn’t afford. He had no way of knowing how many men were in the building or if his son was there or somewhere else. Worse, he didn’t know if Ishmael was even alive. David had cried out, Absalom, Absalom, my son Absalom, would God I had died for thee. But Absalom was a traitor unto his father, and Ishmael was nothing of the sort. Ishmael had been cas
t out, betrayed by Hackberry, left to grow up in poverty while his father lived on a magnificent ranch on the Guadalupe in the arms of a Jezebel. How does a man rid himself of memories like those? Answer: He doesn’t.

  Hackberry realized his palm was sweating on the grips of the Peacemaker. Think, he told himself. Don’t mess this one up. Pay any price, sustain any injury, any disfigurement, eat your pain, willingly give your life without regret, get your son back, and if you cannot get him back, make the men who did this suffer the torment of the damned.

  He was breathing so hard that he was starting to hyperventilate. He felt along the line of stacked boxes and found a knob on the next door. As he eased it open, he looked into the face of a man almost his height, wearing a coat and a broad-brimmed slouch hat, a man with wide shoulders and a white shirt and an odor like sweat and detergent that had dried in his clothes. Hackberry swung the barrel and cylinder of the Colt .45 across the side of the man’s head, then hit him again, this time raking it across his nose. The man went down hard, trying to hold on to Hackberry’s slicker. Hackberry kicked at him and heard him cry out as he struck a piece of furniture in the dark.

  Hackberry knelt beside him and felt for his face, then inserted the point of his bowie knife in one of the man’s nostrils. “Where’s Ishmael Holland?” he said. “Where is my son?”

  The man on the floor didn’t respond.

  “I’ll make a slit-nose out of you,” Hackberry said. “The way the Indians did it. You’ll never want to look in a mirror again.” He pushed the knife deeper. The tall man didn’t move. Hackberry set down the knife and grabbed him by the shirt and shook him. “Did you hear me?”

  He fished in his coat pocket for a box of matches and scratched one across the striker and held it aloft. One of the man’s eyes was almost shut; the other had eight-balled. A single rivulet of blood ran from a triangular-shaped wound in his temple where he had probably struck the corner of a desk. Hackberry had seen the man’s face before. It belonged to one of the three who had put Ishmael in the geek cage at the carnival. Hackberry dropped the dead match on the man’s face.

  He got to his feet and walked to the next door. It was partially open, and he could see light glowing from under a rug on the floor. He stood outside the door with his back against the wall, the Colt Peacemaker hanging from his hand. “Can you hear me, Beckman?”

  Hackberry’s breath was coming hard in his chest, his eyes stinging with moisture, his nose itching miserably. He counted to five and felt his heart quiet, his breathing slow. “Your telephone lines are cut. We have all your exits covered. We control the access to your road. If the right things don’t happen here, I’ll set fire to the building and make sure you don’t get out. You don’t have to speak. If you’re hearing me, just tap twice on a hard surface.”

  In the silence that followed, Hackberry pulled off his slicker as quietly as he could. “Turn to stone? I figured as much,” he said. “For a rich man, you don’t seem to have much smarts. Like maybe you were taking a leak behind a cloud when God passed out the brains. You’re going to give my boy back or you’re going to die, and maybe in pieces. I’ve got a Haitian out there who scares the doo-doo out of me.”

  There was no reply.

  Hackberry felt for a lamp on a desk and pushed the door open with his boot and threw the lamp into the room. He heard the lamp break apart.

  “I guess I’ll have to come in after you,” he said. “I hate to do that. You don’t want to catch a ball from a Peacemaker. How about it? Let’s shut this whole business down and get a drink.”

  He thought he could hear sounds under the floor, a door opening and shutting, a muffled voice. He hung his slicker on the tip of his pistol and extended it past the opening in the door, rustling its folds. Three rounds popped in the darkness like small firecrackers, from either a .22 or a .32, flapping the slicker. Just as Hackberry jumped back from the frame, flinging the slicker off his gun barrel, someone kicked the door shut and bolted it, and he realized there was more than one man in the room. Maybe the whole building was a beehive.

  Then he heard a sound like a great mechanical weight crashing loose from its fastenings and slamming into a hard surface beneath the building, shaking the walls. Someone shouted down a stairway. He tried to picture what was happening but couldn’t.

  He looked back over his shoulder through the series of doors he had opened, and saw that the moon had broken out of the clouds and was shining on the front yard and the motorcar. He worked his way back toward Beckman’s office and thought he saw Darl in the shadows of the live oak, trying to position himself, aiming one of his blue-black double-action revolvers. What or whom had he seen?

  Hackberry had not anticipated the next few moments. But neither had the young men of Europe and Great Britain the first time they went over the top and charged into an invention that operated as efficiently and thoroughly as a scythe cutting wheat, nubbing it down to the dirt with one clean sweep.

  THE FIRST BURSTS came from a downstairs window, the tracer rounds floating like strips of molten steel across the landscape. But either the angle was bad or the shooter’s position was vulnerable or the shooter decided to take the high ground and command the entire area. Hackberry heard him run up a stairway and cross the floor and begin firing from a window in front, the rounds whanging into the motorcar, blowing the glass out of the windows and headlights, stenciling the radiator, exploding the tires on the rims. When the shooter released the trigger, the motorcar was pocked with holes as bright as newly minted quarters.

  Hackberry pressed his back against the side wall of Beckman’s office and tried to see around the window frame. Had Andre and Darl taken cover behind the motorcar or inside it? Were they wounded or dead? The shooter began firing again from a window that was not directly overhead but somewhere close to it, the empty casings bouncing and rolling across the floor. He was obviously trying to divide his fire between the live oak and the motorcar, the tracer rounds burning inside the tree trunk. The rate of fire was too rapid and too long to be a Browning. It had to be a Lewis. What was the rate of fire? Five hundred rounds a minute? Hackberry couldn’t remember. Where were Darl and Andre? And what about the cup? Had it been blown apart after almost two thousand years of wandering?

  He moved across Beckman’s office and positioned himself against the side wall, staring up at the ceiling, holding the Colt with both hands, the hammer cocked. When the shooter let off his next burst, Hackberry began shooting through the floor, cocking the hammer with his thumb as fast as he could, the recoil jerking both his elbows like a jackhammer. Plaster and paint and bits of wood drifted down into his face; his right ear felt like cement had been poured in it.

  He shucked his spent shells out of the cylinder with the ejector rod and reloaded. There was no sound from upstairs. He went to the outside door and pushed it open with his foot. He saw Darl under the live oak, a .38 revolver in each hand. Andre was nowhere in sight. How many feet was it to the motorcar? Maybe seventy. The night air was as dank as a cistern, the oak tree dripping, the moon little more than vapor, the blue patch on the horizon now purple with rain. A cup was just a cup. It was made of smelted minerals or carved stone. You didn’t lose your life for a drinking vessel. The Creator would not require that of him. But what if Andre had gone after it and lost his life? Could Hackberry do less? What was the value of honor if it could be negotiated? What value was life if you surrendered your beliefs in order to sustain it? Make your choice, Holland, he told himself. Take the easy way, then see how you like living with it.

  He who dies this year is quit for the next, he thought. He opened the French doors. “Pour it on, Darl!”

  “Yes, sir, you got it!” Darl said.

  Darl began firing with both revolvers at the shooter’s window. Hackberry ran for the motorcar. He heard one burst from the machine gun and saw the rounds blow leaves out of the branches and chew into the trunk; he saw the streaks of flame from Darl’s revolvers and heard the rounds smack against the building
and break glass above his head. He felt shards of glass hit his hat and shoulders; his face was sweaty and cold at the same time, his breath as ragged as a broken razor blade in his windpipe. Then he was out of the building’s lee, in the open and within the shooter’s angle of fire.

  The Lewis was momentarily silent, then the shooter shifted his position, forcing Darl to shift his, and zeroed in on Hackberry.

  Hackberry saw the rounds hitting the ground in front of him and realized the shooter was leading him, now in full command of the situation, the burst of .303 rounds almost seamless. Hackberry had no cover. He leaped over a garden hose, a broken ceramic pot that contained a root-bound Spanish dagger plant, and splashed through puddles of water thick with yellow and black leaves. A spray of rounds hit the motorcar’s bumper and tore the headlights out of their sockets, and in an instant, the back of Hackberry’s head felt as bare and cold and soggy with sweat as that of a French convict waiting for the guillotine’s blade to roar down on his neck.

  So this is how it ends, he thought. One more burst from the Lewis and your back will be tunneled with holes, your breath ripped from your lungs, your brainpan emptied on your shirt. All of it for naught.

  Except it didn’t happen. The upstairs went silent. Hackberry turned and fired his Colt at the window. The sky flickered with electricity, and he saw the aluminum cooling tube of the Lewis and the flash suppressor on the barrel and the pistol-grip stock and the ammunition drum and the hand of the shooter frantically trying to clear the bolt.

  The Lewis had jammed, even though Lewis guns never jammed, even in sandstorms or when they were caked with mud or snow or had been fired so long the rifling was eaten out and the barrel was so hot it was almost translucent.

  Hackberry dove into the back of the motorcar while Darl opened up on the shooter again. Hackberry grabbed the cup, still bundled in the slicker, and ran for the far side of the building, where he saw Andre waiting for him, smiling ear to ear, blood leaking from a rip in his trousers across the top of his thigh.