House of the Rising Sun

by James Lee Burke

Her chauffeur stood behind her. His uniform was gray and stiff, as if it had just been ironed, his skin so black it had a purple sheen, his cobalt-blue eyes incongruous in their intensity and color.

  “My driver hasn’t eaten. Would you mind?” she said.

  “Whatever is in the icebox.”

  The chauffeur followed her through the door, removing his cap and placing it under his arm.

  “Sit down, Miss B.,” Hackberry said. He turned to the chauffeur. “I didn’t get your name.”

  “Andre.”

  “Andre, your supper ware is in the far left-hand cupboard. Reckon you can find it?”

  The chauffeur blinked to show he understood and went into the kitchen. He had not bothered to say “yes” or “yes, sir” or “thank you.”

  “Does he have a speech defect?” Hackberry said.

  “He’s aware of what you just indicated to him.”

  “Pardon?”

  “You instructed him to use the tableware reserved for the servants. The tin plates and jelly glasses, the ceramics that are cracked or chipped. You reminded him he’s a man of color.”

  “I’ll feel bad about that the rest of the night,” Hackberry said, then thought, Why did I just say that?

  “I came here for two reasons. I won’t take up much of your time.”

  “Take all you want. You didn’t come here to fight with me, did you?” He tried to smile.

  She was sitting on the couch, her folded parasol propped against her thigh. She wore a dark dress and a short blue velvet coat and a brooch that resembled a white rose at the top of her blouse. Her face was unlined and seemed to have no makeup on it. The lamp was bright behind her hair, which she wore in a curl at the back of her neck. “I spoke to you harshly in Mexico.”

  “I don’t remember it that way. It looks like you’re doing mighty well. You’re visiting here?”

  “I bought a vaudeville and motion picture house and an apartment building in San Antonio. I’m also buying a restaurant and amusement pier in Galveston.”

  He sat down in a deerskin chair by the fireplace. “You didn’t hit oil somewhere, did you?”

  “On land I bought at Goose Creek.”

  “You’re making that up?”

  She smiled.

  “Good heavens,” he said. He was uncertain what he should say next, even more uncomfortable about broaching the question that had been with him since Arnold Beckman’s visit. The fireplace smelled of soot and the coldness in the stone. “I was going to ask you something rather personal.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “It’s of a delicate nature.”

  “Mr. Holland, would you please stop acting like this?”

  “Let me get a fire started.”

  “I’m going to leave.”

  “Arnold Beckman came by in his motorcar and introduced himself. He said something about you and him that was a little more than I could study on, if you follow me.”

  “No, I don’t follow you at all.”

  “He said y’all were intimate.”

  His face burned in the silence.

  “Why would that bother you?”

  “Because I respect you. Because you saved my life. You were a friend to my son. The thought of that man with you makes my stomach turn.”

  “It didn’t happen.”

  “I knew it didn’t. I knew you wouldn’t allow that. Knew it all along,” he said, patting his knees. “Yes, ma’am, I surely did.”

  “My second purpose in coming here has to do with your welfare,” she said. “Before you burned the hearse, did you take something out of it?”

  “A few coins and currency, as I recall. Some candlesticks that turned out to be brass.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Maybe a papist artifact came into my possession. That’s the least of my troubles.”

  “What other troubles do you have?” she asked.

  “The blood of innocent people on my hands. Sometimes I feel as if I’m living in a dream. I never drew down on a man who didn’t draw on me first. Then I went down to Mexico and killed women and children and old people on a train loaded with Villa’s soldiers. I’d give anything in the world if I could draw a big ‘X’ through that terrible day in my life.”

  He didn’t want to look at her eyes. But he did. They were moist, the pity in them unmistakable.

  “Miss Beatrice, I’d appreciate it if you didn’t look at me like that.”

  “Has Beckman sent people to your house?” she said.

  “A couple of them. They got greedy. He put them in mail sacks and dumped them in the river, still alive, with their hands bound behind them. He did some other things to them that are better not talked about.”

  “Where’s the cup?”

  He shook his head. “I didn’t say I had a cup. I said I had an artifact. It was probably stolen from a chapel in a ranch the revolutionists occupied.”

  “Beckman won’t rest until he gets it back.”

  “Is it the gold or the jewels? Why does Beckman want it so bad? He’s probably one of the richest men in the state.”

  “You haven’t guessed?”

  “I’m not that smart.”

  “Andre, come in here,” she said.

  The chauffeur appeared in the doorway, holding a tin plate with a ham-and-onion sandwich on it. His eyes looked like they had been transplanted from a zombie. “Oui, mademoiselle?”

  “Andre is from Haiti,” she said. “He used to be a voodoo priest. He was defrocked for killing a man. I think he actually killed several men. Now he works for me. Why does Arnold Beckman want the cup, Andre?”

  “Because he drank from it.”

  “Who is ‘he,’ Andre?”

  “Our Lord, mademoiselle.”

  “See? Simple,” she said.

  LATER THAT NIGHT he wrote in his journal, I have the feeling a burden has come out of nowhere and been set squarely upon my shoulders. I am not sure what the burden is. I know I do not want it.

  As he reread his words, he felt a level of fear in his stomach that made sweat break on his forehead. He slowly tore the page from the binding and continued tearing it into tiny pieces until it no longer existed.

  MAGGIE BASSETT WAS a believer in extreme measures. In every situation there was a winner and a loser. Those who pretended otherwise not only invited their fate but deserved it. Ask the animals whose heads ended up stuffed and stupid-looking on a den wall, while down below their killers shook the ice in their drinks and adjusted their scrotums and talked about the gas wells they were drilling in a pristine lake. Ask the Mexican girls who delivered on their knees behind a saloon for pocket change. The peons who had their land stolen for five cents an acre. The poor Negro wiping out a cuspidor with his bare hand, grateful for his job.

  At Fannie Porter’s place, she got to meet all the pilgrims in The Canterbury Tales, stringing in one door and out the other, each more hungry and base and self-deluded than the next. The setting of the sun didn’t hide iniquity; it revealed it, as with kicking over a rotted log. City councilmen brought their mistresses to the cock- and dogfights down the street. People with syphilis of the brain had arguments with the moon to the delight of the spectators on the sidewalks. She serviced prison administrators who worked convicts to death and fed them weevil-infested food while they did it.

  The sexual menu was wide open. Politicians showed up with gift certificates that had a six and a nine printed on them. There were private arrangements for clergy and men who wore hundred-dollar suits and freshly laundered white shirts as soft and smooth as ice cream, gold tie pins the size of an elk’s tooth. No girl was too young, no man too old. When the men smiled, their faces turned into Halloween masks.

  This was the milk of human kindness she read about?

  In the American South, you fucked down and married up. Her bed smelled like a seagull’s nest.

  Twenty million dead in the war, and in the final weeks they were still killing so they could go back home and resume cleaning chimneys
and breathing coal dust and textile lint and licking the boots of the swells. Maggie wondered what the girls leaping like balls of flame from the roof of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory would have to say.

  There was no way to reach Ishmael’s room without traversing the entire length of the open ward. She tried not to look into the eyes buried inside the swaths of bandages or see the tubes running from the catheters into drip jars, the stumps crisscrossed with stitches like trussed hams, a man with a cotton pad and a strip of tape across his face where his nose used to be, the sputum buckets by the bedsides of those who had been gassed. The astringency of the mops and pails used to scrub the ward barely hid the stench of the unemptied bedpans and the yellow-streaked bed linen piled in the corners.

  She collided with a skeletal man on crutches whose pajama bottoms exposed his pubic hair. When he apologized, his face inches from hers, his mouth a ragged hole, she drowned in his breath.

  She went into Ishmael’s room and shut the door. Safe, she thought, then wondered why she’d chosen to think that particular word.

  He was propped up on the pillows, his smile as big as a slice of watermelon.

  “Are you ready?” she asked.

  “For what?”

  “For our train trip.”

  “I’m a little fuzzy on that.”

  “We’re going to San Antonio. I’ve reserved a compartment on the Pullman car. You’re being discharged from the hospital. Like we talked about.”

  He frowned. “I’m confused.”

  “Everything is taken care of. What a nice day for a train ride.”

  “I thought my mother was coming here this week. Or maybe next. I know she was here.”

  He looked at Maggie uncertainly, as though she held answers to questions he couldn’t formulate. He took a pill from a vial and broke it between his teeth and drank from a glass on the nightstand. “Sometimes I feel like a balloon bumping along the ceiling.”

  “Your mother was here last week. She left to go back to her job in New Mexico.”

  “I remember. That’s true. Tell me again why we’re going to San Antonio.”

  “You have an executive position waiting for you. Whenever you’re able to start work. It’s stuffy in here.” She tugged open a window, hitting the frame with the heel of her hand, her jaw flexing. “There. Someone is burning leaves. Smell the chrysanthemums and the snow up in the hills. Don’t you want to be outside again?”

  “Did you talk to my mother?”

  “I think she bears me a grudge. I don’t blame her.”

  He sat up and hung his legs off the side of the bed. He picked up two walking canes that were hooked on the nightstand. “I can walk by myself to the bathroom now. I’ve tried to ease off the pink lady, too.”

  “What’s the pink lady?”

  He rattled the vial of pills. “The orderly is named Mike. He’s a good fellow. The physicians can be hard-nosed. Did you bring another fruit basket?”

  “No. Do you feel tension or nausea at all?” she said.

  “Not now. I wake up at night. It passes, though.”

  “What passes?”

  “The dreams. I read awhile and maybe crush a half pill in water, and then I’m all right. There’s a man in the ward who has to wear a plastic face. He drinks absinthe. I’ve heard it’s made from wormwood and destroys the brain.”

  “Don’t talk about these things. You’ll be throwing away all your medications soon.”

  “Watch this.” He got to his feet and walked slowly toward the bathroom, his upper arms ridging. His back was tapered like an inverted triangle, his waist narrow, his buttocks small. She felt her nipples harden, a flush prickle her throat.

  “Hurry up. We have things to do,” she said.

  “I’ll have to be in the bathroom a while. Then we’ll talk about my mother. You’re going a little fast for me.”

  “Your mother is going to be fine. If you want, I’ll get in touch with her. Everything is taken care of.”

  She heard him clatter his walking canes against the bathtub, then sit heavily on the toilet.

  “Close the door for me. Don’t look, either,” he said.

  “I’m going to take good care of you,” she said, pulling the door shut, averting her eyes.

  For a moment she actually meant it. No, it went deeper than that. She did want to take care of him. There was no doubt about the way she felt when she widened her knees and placed him inside her, like a wand that electrified her and made her go weak all over. His body was a massive sculpture carved from rose-colored alabaster, his chest flat, his nipples small, his breath sweet. When she came, she had to fight to suppress the sound that rose from her throat.

  Why was he taking so long? She looked around the room. The fruit, she thought. Get rid of the fruit.

  She dumped the basket into the trash can by the bed, then glanced outside and saw a skinned-up motorcar canted on its frame, driving through the parking area, the back bumper wired in place, a side window that looked like it had two bullet holes in it. The driver wore a slug cap and had the tight face of a boxer or someone who had been worked over with a slapjack or a sock full of sand. The woman in the passenger seat wore a lavender and yellow dress and a bandana over her hair. She seemed to look straight at Maggie, although the sun was obviously in her eyes. Maggie stepped back from the window. She could not believe her bad luck. It didn’t matter if she had been recognized or not. Within minutes, Ruby Dansen would be inside the hospital.

  Maggie’s head was spinning, her heart rising into her throat. Do not be at the mercy of fate. Passivity and mediocrity ensure failure and belong on the same daisy chain. When challenged, there is no such thing as excess. Turn their viscera into a tangle of oily snakes.

  The Gospel according to Maggie Bassett.

  As though her thoughts could redirect her destiny, she caught a break. Ruby’s driver had driven through the parking area twice, drawing the attention of a uniformed policeman, a fat Irish dolt with a florid face and a mustache like rope who had cloves and whiskey on his breath by ten A.M. He had stopped Ruby’s driver and apparently told him to get out of the motorcar and explain the pocked holes in the side window, tapping it with his nightstick, his mustache flattening in the wind, his lips moving rapidly, the driver probably sassing him, fists balled.

  Little miracles have a way of happening, don’t they, you German cunt or whatever you are.

  Maggie found the orderly in the hall. “Come with me,” she said.

  “And do what?” he replied, half smiling.

  “You’re Mike, aren’t you? Captain Holland’s friend?”

  “I don’t call him ‘nigger lover.’”

  “Pardon?”

  “They say that’s why he’s getting out of the army. The army didn’t treat his outfit right. He says the French gave them the credit they deserve. It’s not what people like to hear.”

  Mike had a high forehead and mousy hair and thin shoulders and a nicotine odor that made her hold her breath. She pulled him into a windowless alcove that contained two chairs used by visitors; unresisting, his arm was boneless and flaccid in her grasp. She pushed him down in one chair and sat in the other, taking his hand in hers.

  “What’s going on?” he said.

  “There’s a woman outside named Ruby Dansen. She claims to be Captain Holland’s mother. She’s not. She’s an aunt by marriage who treated him brutally when he was a child. She’s also a Communist and has been committed twice to an asylum.”

  The smile left his face. “What’s she doing here?”

  “Causing trouble.” Maggie leaned forward, her gaze fixed on his, rotating her thumb inside his palm. “You have to help me. We need to move Captain Holland now.”

  “What for?”

  “She’ll cause a scene. She’ll convince somebody at admissions that she’s his mother. He’s being discharged today. He doesn’t need a crazy woman screaming at him. He also doesn’t need to revisit his miserable childhood.”

  “I don’t kno
w, ma’am. I don’t like the sound of this.”

  She tightened her hand on his and leaned forward, her other hand settling on his thigh, the thumb working into the muscle. “Please.”

  His gaze broke. “Tell me what you want me to do.”

  “Put Captain Holland in a wheelchair and take him to the side door. My car and driver will be waiting. Hurry up.”

  “You think we might meet up later? You and me?”

  “It’s a possibility. But there’s something else you have to help me with.”

  “Have to?”

  She ignored the challenge. “You’re already aware Captain Holland has needs for certain medications the hospital doesn’t always provide.”

  “No, I’m a blank on that.”

  She opened her purse so he could see inside it. “I have to give him this. It’s perfectly safe. It will quiet his nerves.”

  “Hypodermic needles are way above my skills, ma’am.”

  She laid a twenty-dollar bill across his palm. “No, they’re not.”

  “And we’re gonna see each other a little later, maybe tonight?”

  “Yes, I would like that.”

  “Even though you’ve got a driver and a motorcar and you’re probably going away somewhere?” His eyes crinkled at the corners.

  “We’re staying close by,” she said, breathing audibly through her nose.

  “I bet you forgot your fruit basket. You wouldn’t want to leave that behind, would you? The captain was sure fond of it. A couple of bites and I would have sworn he’d been on an opium pipe.”

  “Well, you’re certainly an observant and enterprising little fellow, aren’t you?” she said. She took another twenty-dollar bill from her purse. “If this doesn’t work out, you’ll be visited by people who will do things to you that you thought happened only in nightmares.”

  HACKBERRY WAS FIXING dinner on his wood cookstove when he heard the screech of Willard Posey’s car door out in the yard. He waited for the knock on the door; it didn’t happen. He flipped the two boned pork chops in the skillet with a fork and watched them sizzle. He cut two huge slices of bread from a loaf and browned them in butter and stuffed the pork chops between them with a layer of ketchup and skillet gravy and onions and tomatoes and mayonnaise on top; then he filled a glass with buttermilk and sprinkled hot sauce in it. He looked out the front door. The car, absent the roof that had been hacksawed off, was parked on the edge of the lawn. No Willard.