House of the Rising Sun

by James Lee Burke

  Through the glass Hackberry could see one man who was unlike the others. He was hatless, his hair silvery blond and as long as Bill Cody’s, his features delicate and aquiline, his skin the color of a plant that had been systemically denied light. While the others ate, he seemed to study the outlines of the buttes and mesas and canyons that surrounded the ancient lake bed on which he had camped.

  Beckman, Hackberry thought.

  His identification of the Austrian arms merchant had nothing to do with a rational process. There were those among us who were made different in the womb, and you knew it the moment you looked into their eyes. They showed no remorse and had no last words before their horse was whipped out from under them beneath a cottonwood tree. They would challenge a mere boy into a saloon duel and gun him down for no other purpose than personal amusement. Their upbringing had nothing to do with the men they became. They loved evil for evil’s sake, and any animal or woman or man or child who ventured into their ken was grist for the mill.

  Hackberry heard a skitter in the rocks farther up the ridge. “Who’s up there?” he said.

  There was no sound except the wind. He set down the spyglass and walked up the incline to a cluster of boulders below a cave. “You deaf?” he said. He picked up a handful of sharp-edged rocks and began flinging them into the cave, hard, one after another.

  “That hurts!” a voice said.

  “Come out here and I’ll stop.”

  A man appeared in the mouth of the cave, wearing sandals and a nappy black duster without sleeves, his eyes hollow, his head out of round and his face curved inward, like a muskmelon that had gone soft in the field. Hackberry could not remember seeing a more woebegone creature. “Mind telling me who you are and why you’re spying on me?”

  “I used to be Howard Glick, of San Angelo, Texas. Now I don’t go by a name. Unless you count the one the Indians give me.”

  “What might that be?”

  “Huachinango. It’s not complimentary.”

  “They call you a redfish?”

  “It’s what I look like when I drink. I haven’t figured out what to do about it. You want some grub?”

  “What do you have?”

  “Grasshoppers. I fry them in oil. I got some fresh diamondback, too.” He looked at Hackberry. “I say something wrong? You’re a mite pale.”

  “Have you been out here very long, Mr. Glick?”

  “A while. I was in the Philippines, then I looked for gold in the Sierra Madre.”

  “Why did you quit using your name?”

  “I was in the Philippines from ’99 to ’03. You ever hear stories about what went on there?”

  “One or two. I’m not sure I believe them.”

  “Most people don’t. That’s why I don’t bother telling them about the things we did in their name.” Glick walked past Hackberry and raised his head just above the boulders and looked out at the mesa and the campsite that lay in its shadow. “You’re aware that bunch is trailing you, aren’t you?”

  “How do you know it’s me they’re trailing?”

  “They staked out an Indian yesterday and made his family watch it. They thought you’d been at his hut. They were looking for a Texan over six and a half feet. Know what their kind can do with a wadded-up shirt and a bucket of dirty water?”

  “I don’t study on other people’s grief. Have you seen any colored cavalry? The Tenth in particular?”

  “I’ve met up with some white soldiers, mechanized infantry and such. I’d say they were right nice boys. Why’s that bunch down yonder after you?”

  “I burned up a load of their guns and ammunition. What happened to the Indian?”

  “He hid in the hills when they got through with him. People say Indians are savages. I’ll put my money on a white man anytime.”

  “You’re not making my morning any better, Mr. Glick.”

  “I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t use that name. You want some grasshoppers?”

  “Not right now. What’d you do in the Philippines that made you give up your name?”

  “It’s what all of us did. In their villages, along the river where the women washed clothes, on the roads and in the fields, anyplace we found them. We wouldn’t leave a stone upon a stone. It gets inside you. I woke up thirsting for it. Worse than that. I’d wake up in a male condition thinking about it.”

  “Does the name ‘Beckman’ mean anything to you?”

  The man in the duster fixed his eyes on Hackberry’s. “That’s Beckman out there?”

  “Beckman is the man whose property I destroyed,” Hackberry said. “There’s a fellow down below who might be him, but I couldn’t swear to it. You know him?”

  The man sat down on a rock, his hands cupped over the rips in the knees of his trousers. His eyes were swimming.

  “I didn’t mean to upset you,” Hackberry said.

  “There’s no hiding from it.”

  “From what?”

  “When you do certain things to others that humans aren’t supposed to do, somebody is assigned to find you out. The worse you are, the worse the man that gets sent after you.”

  “You offered me food after I threw rocks in your cave. Not many would do that. My opinion is you’re a good fellow.”

  The man lifted his gaze, either at the sky or at nothing. The sun was shining directly in his face; his eyes seemed as bright and empty as crystal. “Out here in the desert, I don’t have to think about what I don’t have. Out here, I don’t have a past. I’d like to keep it that way. I’ve been fooling myself.”

  “I hate to tell you this, sir, but your words have a way of zooming right past me.”

  “They find you. No, it finds you. Always. You haven’t learned that? It’s out there.”

  “What is?”

  “It.”

  HACKBERRY SADDLED HIS horse and rode down the far side of the ridge, leaving behind the man who had no name. Within hours, he found himself talking to his horse, a habit he had seen only among prospectors and solitary travelers in the Great American Desert, many of the latter longing for a saloon or a straddle house or the tinkling sounds of a piano to forget that Cain’s mark did not go away easily.

  By sunset, when he saw a village on the edge of a milky-brown river, he was light-headed with hunger and aching from his injuries and the wood-slat military saddle he’d pulled off a Mexican soldier’s horse. He dismounted and walked into the village, his Mauser rifle slung upside down on his shoulder. Then he realized he was witnessing one of those moments that caused people to call Mexico a magical land. The sun had dipped below the hills, but the bottom of the sky remained blue, and the rest of it was mauve-colored and sprinkled with stars. As he entered the main street, he saw people beating drums and dancing with bells on their ankles and wrists and singing in a language he didn’t understand. The children carried baskets of marigolds and chrysanthemums and placed them on an altar by a stone well where the dirt streets of the village converged. Some of the adults wore death masks; others carried poles hung with skeletons made from carved sticks that were painted white and clicked like bones. The air was filled with smoke and the smell of firecrackers and hissing pinwheels and bottle rockets popping in the sky.

  The Day of the Dead, he thought. Is it that late in the season? Do I face the close of another year without the touch of my son’s hand, without the forgiveness that I’ve purchased with years of bitterness and remorse?

  Once again, his thoughts had shifted to himself. He wanted to hide himself in a bottle of busthead and sleep for a week.

  In the torchlight he saw an adobe wall pockmarked by gunfire, a jail where two uniformed soldiers with rifles lounged in a breezeway, a blind woman roasting unshucked corn in a fire, children running through pooled rainwater, a priest in a cassock watching the revelers from the entrance of a mud-walled church, a five-seat merry-go-round pulled in a slow circle by a donkey. Hackberry tilted his hat low on his brow and walked his horse past the jail, trying to keep the dancers between the so
ldiers and the Mexican cavalry rig on his horse.

  He went down an alley and tethered his horse by an outhouse behind a cantina and untied his saddlebags from the horse’s rump and entered the cantina through the back door, the rifle still on his shoulder. The light from the oil lamps was greasy and yellow, the cuspidors splattered with tobacco juice, the towels in the rings under the bar’s apron grimed almost black. The prostitutes were either middle-aged fat women or teenage girls whose teeth had already gone bad and who sat demurely by the small dance floor as though they were not sure why they were there. The fat women were garrulous and loud and obscene and drunk or deranged, and openly grabbed or fondled men’s genitalia as part of the entertainment. Hackberry took the leather coin pouch from his saddlebags and set it on the bar. The bartender pointed to a sign on the wall. It read NO SE PERMITEN ARMAS.

  Hackberry handed the bartender his rifle. “Whiskey con una cerveza, por favor,” he said.

  “Un bebedor serio,” the bartender said. He had the face of a funeral director and wore a starched white shirt buttoned at the throat without a tie and a black coat that could have been stripped from a scarecrow.

  “También quiero un filete,” Hackberry said.

  “Como usted desee. ¿Quiere una chica?”

  Hackberry ignored the question and gazed at the three guitarists playing in the shadows.

  “¿No le gustan chicas, hombre?” the bartender said.

  “I came here for the philosophic discussion.”

  “¿Que dijo?”

  “¿Quienes son los soldados en la cárcel?”

  “Son los protectores del país. Son los soldados de Huerta. Son los guardianes de los prisioneros.”

  “Huerta’s jackals?”

  The bartender shook his head in warning. “No hables asi aquí. Los prisioneros son comunistas.”

  “You’ve got Karl Marx in the jail, have you?”

  The bartender’s eyes were pools of black ink. He set a glass of beer on the bar and poured whiskey in another. Hackberry counted out his coins and pushed four of them toward the bartender with the heel of his hand. “Salud,” he said.

  He sat at a table and waited on his steak. As at all saloons and brothels and gambling houses he had ever visited, the mind-set and conduct of the clientele changed only in terms of degree. The meretricious nature of the enterprise and the self-delusion of the victims made him wonder at the inexhaustibility of human folly. Gandy dancers, drovers, saddle tramps, gunmen for hire, prospectors, wranglers, drummers from the East walked through the door of their own volition and allowed themselves to be fleeced until they were broke or until “old red-eye,” as they called the early sun, broke on the horizon.

  But what of his own history? Somehow he had always translated his sybaritic past into memories of beer gardens with brass bands and strings of Japanese lanterns under the stars, or Kansas dance halls and hurdy-gurdy saloons where the girls were young and as fresh as flowers, where a young cowboy could be forgiven for temporarily forgetting his upbringing. The alcohol that boiled in his blood was simply a means of satisfying the pagan that lived in everyone. The men who died in front of his guns were part of an Arthurian tale, not the result of a besotted and childish man’s self-glorification.

  Paradoxically, this kind of introspection took him to one place, a whiskey-soaked excursion into a long black tunnel lit by the fires burning inside him, where he never knew what lay beyond the next bend, where the viscera governed all his thoughts, and violence and enmity always had their way. True, his adversaries were deserving of their fate and their loss was the world’s gain. That was not the problem. The problem was the secret knowledge about himself that Hackberry carried in his breast and never confessed to anyone: Had he not worn a badge, he would have ended his days like the Daltons and the Youngers and Black Jack Ketchum and Bill Kilpatrick and Frank James and all the other bad men who closed down their act on the scaffold or in a weed patch or as caricatures in sideshows.

  He remembered eating the steak in the cantina, the blood mixing with the darkness of the gravy as he sliced it from the bone. He remembered draining a whole bottle of whiskey, and he remembered a girl sitting on his lap while she filled her mouth with his beer and pushed it into his. Maybe he went into a crib with her, maybe not. When he awoke in the middle of the night, he was lying in a pole shed full of manure and moldy hay, his saddlebags under his head, the Mauser rifle cradled in his arms, his throat flaming. He cupped water out of a trough and vomited, the stars blazing coldly in a black sky. He went back into the shed and passed out, too weak and sick to check or even care about the contents of his saddlebags, his coat pulled over his head.

  He had a dream of a kind he had never experienced. In it, he saw the woman named Beatrice DeMolay standing outside the shed, still wearing the dark blue dress with the ruffled white collar. She knelt beside him, placing her palm on his forehead. He tried to get up, but she held him down, her eyes never leaving his.

  Why are you here? he asked.

  Her lips moved silently.

  I don’t know what you’re saying. Are you in trouble?

  She leaned down and placed her mouth on his. He could feel his manhood rising.

  Did the army or Beckman’s men hurt you? I should have driven the hearse away and not burned it in front of your house.

  His words had no more influence on her than confetti blowing on her face. She stroked his hair and eyes and kissed his hand. You’re chosen, she said.

  Chosen for what? You’re saying I’m a Hebrew? She didn’t answer, and her silence frightened him. What’s wrong with you, woman?

  He waited, but she refused to speak.

  This is a dream. I’ll wake from it and you’ll be gone. I won’t forgive myself if someone has hurt you on my account. Brothel madam be damned, there’s something mighty good in you.

  See? You’re kind. That’s why you’ve been chosen. Don’t be afraid.

  Don’t you be calling me that.

  Mi amor, she said.

  He sat straight up, shaking with cold in spite of his coat, the eastern sky ribbed with pink clouds. He called out her name, convinced that her lips and body were only inches from his.

  He untied the flaps on his saddlebags. Everything he had placed there was undisturbed. He opened the wood box that contained the fused goblets. Were the jewels real? They could be. The chalice could have been looted from a cathedral in Monterrey, in the Mexican state of Nuevo León. Or from the home of an aristocrat who discovered that peons possessing the importance of barnyard animals were about to take everything he owned, including his life.

  He stared at the sunrise, sick and nauseated, his head throbbing, the smell of beer and whiskey rising from his clothes. He had already mortgaged the day, and he had a choice of living through it dry or drinking again and mortgaging tomorrow. He rode his horse through the alleyway. The street was totally quiet, the pools of rainwater wrinkling in the wind. Four soldiers were riding their horses in single file toward the jail. The last rider was leading a prisoner on foot by a rope knotted around his neck. The prisoner wore sandals and a black duster that had no sleeves; his eyes seemed lidless, half-rolled in his head, not unlike those inside a severed head upon a platter.

  “What have you got yourself into, partner?” Hack said under his breath. He didn’t know if his words were addressed to himself or the unfortunate eater of fried grasshoppers.

  HACKBERRY DISMOUNTED IN front of the jail. The soldiers had locked their prisoner in a cell with several other prisoners and were drinking coffee from fruit jars and eating with their fingers from tin plates in the breezeway. Hackberry’s hat was slanted over his brow, his eyes downcast, the way he would approach a horse in order to avoid personal challenge. “Muy buenas,” he said.

  The soldiers looked sleepy and irritable and didn’t bother to answer.

  “¿Qué pasa con el hombre que no tiene mangas?” he said.

  “No te metas, viejo,” replied a soldier who was leaning forward in a str
aw chair so he would not drop crumbs on his uniform.

  “No creo que soy viejo.”

  “Either your Spanish or your hearing is not too good, gringo,” the same soldier said.

  “Probably both. I think I’m still pretty boracho.”

  “That could be the problem, man. Where did you get the rifle?”

  “From General Huerta. He’s a friend of mine.”

  “That’s pretty nice of him. Can I look at it?”

  “He’p yourself.”

  The man in the straw chair was bigger than the others, his cuffs rolled neatly on his upper arms, his skin as smooth as clay, his nose thin, one nostril smaller than the other, a delicate scar at the edge of one eye, like a piece of white string. He partially opened the bolt and squinted at the empty chamber and the rounds pressed into the magazine. He ran the balls of his fingers along the bolt and rubbed them with his thumb. “It’s still got what-you-call-it on it.”

  “Cosmoline?”

  “That’s the word. When did General Huerta give you this?”

  “Two or three months ago, I think. In El Paso.”

  “That’s funny, ’cause he died in January. This is November.”

  “That’s probably why the nights are getting right chilly.”

  “I think you’d better get out of here, gringo.”

  “I appreciate your advice. I just wondered about the man you brought in. I think I’ve talked to him before. He seemed like an ordinary fellow to me, not a bandito.”

  “He’s an informer.” The soldier closed the bolt and snapped the firing pin on an empty chamber. He returned the rifle, staring into Hackberry’s face. “An informer for the gringos is what he is, gringos like you.”

  “The man lives in a cave and eats insects. I doubt he’s taken a bath since Noie’s flood. Why be harsh on an afflicted man?”