House of the Rising Sun

by James Lee Burke

He watched her go inside the apartment, then began walking toward his hotel, trying not to think too hard on the deception Mealy Lonetree had perpetrated on him, at least not until he could do something about it. He stopped at a package store and bought a pint of whiskey and drank it as he walked, a thick layer of white fog swirling around his knees, the whiskey flooding his throat with a golden airiness that could not be measured.

  ISHMAEL FELT THE train tilt and begin its abrupt descent down Ratón Pass, its wheels locked, screeching down the grade with such intensity that the inside of the Pullman room trembled and the closet doors swung open and shook on their hinges. He lay on his side in the bed, in his underwear, watching the pinyon trees and ponderosa and outcroppings of rock and the steep slope of the mountain slide past the window, the woman’s body molded against his, her breath on his neck, her hand resting on his hip.

  It was funny how he sometimes thought of her as “the woman” rather than as Maggie Bassett. Maybe that was what she intended. She made herself into all things woman. She was lover, caretaker, mother, and confidante. “Provider” might be another word. The injection she had given him before they left the hospital was more than a temporary flight from pain and worry that the Greek god Morpheus usually offered. The hit had traveled up his arm and spread through his body like the Red Sea, turning his eyelids to lead, filling him with a sense of pleasure and warmth that bordered on orgasm, taking him to a sunlit place where the earth jutted into infinity and the stars plummeted past him into a heavenly abyss.

  “Are you awake, sleepyhead?” she said.

  “I was watching the rocks and the trees. The grade is dropping so fast, I dreamed we’d fallen in a hole.”

  “We’ll be in New Mexico in a few minutes. In another hour we’ll be in Texas.”

  He tried to turn his head to see her face, but she was pressed too close. “I don’t remember getting on the train. How did I get to the station?”

  “You were sedated.”

  He closed his eyes and opened them again, the canyon dropping into shadow on a curve, the couplings jarring. “My mother was coming to see me. She didn’t show up?”

  “It’s the medicine. You have things turned around. I left a message and a phone number. If you like, we can call her when we reach San Antonio.”

  “How do you know where she is?”

  “The people we work for can find anyone, Ishmael. Did you know you might be in motion pictures?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “With your looks and physique? The man I work for, the man you’ll be working for, owns part of a film company in Pacific Palisades.”

  “I don’t know where that is. I feel strange. Like bees are buzzing under my skin.”

  “We’ll go out to the Palisades. I’ve been there. It’s right on the ocean. They say it’s the place where no one ever dies. The man I work for says that’s why people love motion pictures. They believe the actors in the film become immortal. If they can associate themselves with the actors, they become immortal, too.”

  “Maybe they should visit the Marne. It might cure them of their thoughts on immortality.”

  She spread her fingers on his stomach, then moved them down into his shorts and touched him. “We can pull the shade. The door is locked, and the porter won’t bother us. I told him not to come by unless we call him.”

  “I don’t feel too well right now.”

  “Would you like something to eat?”

  “Just some water. Or something with sugar in it. Anything sweet. I don’t know why I have this feeling inside me, this humming in my blood. What did the doctor say when I checked out?”

  “He said good-bye. Stop talking about the hospital. That’s all behind us now.”

  He turned on his back, forcing her to look into his face. “Maggie,” he said, not as a question.

  “Yes?” she replied.

  “You’re Maggie. That’s all. My head wasn’t working right for a while.”

  “It’s good to be silly sometimes,” she said. “When I was a little girl, I was punished for being silly. My father didn’t like little girls being little girls. His daughter was supposed to be serious and dutiful. If not, he’d find ways to hurt her without ever laying his hands on her.”

  “What kind of work was your father in?”

  “I don’t talk about him much. Or even think about him. Bad ole me. He’s been feeding the worms a long time now. I think he found the right role in life.”

  He raised himself on his elbow and looked into her eyes. He had no idea what thoughts she was thinking or if she had any idea how her words could frighten. “A French colonel warned me in a field hospital.”

  Maggie’s face darkened, as though the shadows on the canyons’ walls had moved across it. “Warned you about what?”

  “Morphine.”

  “That’s all bugaboo. It comes from a plant. It’s a gift of the earth.”

  “So is poison ivy.”

  “Don’t be clever. Cleverness is for people who have nothing to say.”

  “I feel like I have a fever. I can see flashes of light inside my head when I close my eyes.”

  “You have to forget the war. My grandfather was at Shiloh. He could never stop talking about it.”

  “Maybe we can go up to the dining car in a little while. Is it far?”

  “Just one car up. I’ll get the porter to help us. We’ll have a delightful meal, then we’ll be in Texas and you can leave all your bad memories behind.”

  “I don’t think it works like that. It’ll just take a little time. Then I’ll be fine.”

  “See? I told you. You’re a dear man. You make me twenty years younger.”

  “I remember my mother saying you were an outlaw woman.”

  “Do I look like an outlaw?”

  “Outlaw women are not beautiful?”

  She pressed his head against her breast and kissed his hair. “I just want one promise from you. It’s not a lot.”

  “I don’t think making promises to people is a good practice.”

  “Don’t ever turn your back on me. You’re young and you’ll make mistakes, and I’m talking about mistakes with other women, but it will only be temporary. Then you’ll come back home, and everything will be all right, and I’ll forgive you because you’re young. But you must never renounce me, or call me old, or say I’m not a part of your life anymore.”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “Because you’re young and you think you’ll stay that way. We’re out of the Pass now. We’re about to see a dead volcano and miles of prairie with antelope and deer on it. You should see the sunrise here in the fall. The hillsides are still green and look soaked in blood just as the sun breaks over the hills. Isn’t the natural world a grand place, Ishmael? Clear and pure and free of mankind’s evil. Hold me.”

  “Do you know you’re shaking?”

  “What a silly thing to say,” she said. She buried her face in his neck, her teeth biting tenderly into his throat.

  HACKBERRY RETURNED TO his hotel room and sat on the side of his bed and finished the pint of whiskey. Then he unsnapped his suitcase and removed a canvas U.S. cavalry water bucket, the soft, collapsible kind that could be dipped by hand in a stream or tied by a rope to the handle and cast out into the current, where the water was deeper and cleaner. He had bought it in a secondhand store after he heard Ishmael had joined the army and become an officer in the cavalry. He had never used it to draw water from a steam or well or pond; he had always kept it dry and brushed free of dust and on a peg in his tack room. Every time he looked at it, he thought of his son and pretended that in some fashion he was at his side.

  Its only utilitarian purpose was to carry the items associated with his trade: a set of brass knuckles he had never used; a pair of manacles whose spring mechanism and locking steel tongs he kept oiled and cleaned; two boxes of ammunition; his bowie knife in the beaded scabbard; his 1860 converted army revolver; a blackjack with two lead balls sewn in tandem ins
ide a hand-stitched leather sock mounted on a spring and wood handle; and a Peacemaker .45 single-action revolver presented to him in a ceremony by an officer of the Colt Company at the Brown Palace Hotel in Denver.

  Mealy Lonetree lived in an apartment above his office on the alleyway in the brothel district. He was packing a suitcase on his bed when Hackberry pushed open the door. Hackberry was wearing his slicker buttoned over his gun belt. The door had not been locked, and he wondered at the casualness of Mealy’s omission. Mealy looked over his shoulder at Hackberry, then folded a pair of trousers and pressed them inside the suitcase and smoothed them flat with his palms. He didn’t look up again.

  “I’m just one of the little people, Mr. Holland. I don’t got a choice about what I do a lot of the time,” he said.

  “Why didn’t you tell me Jimmy Belloc or No Lines or Whatever worked for you in New Orleans?”

  “He made collections, that’s all. It was numbers money. It was innocent. The Italians love lotteries. Don’t ask me why.”

  “Where is he?”

  “A rooming house one block down from Fannie Porter’s old place. He likes to be close to the colored cribs. Because of the way he looks. He can feel superior instead of being a freak.”

  “I wouldn’t have forced you to give me his name. Why did you give me his name and hold back on me at the same time?”

  “I got no answer.”

  “You’d better think of one.”

  “I’m nobody. All that stuff about sending out people to beat up other people with lead pipes and chew off their ears is crap. My clientele are pimps and working girls and thieves, all of them trying to screw each other. Look at where I live. How I look. How would you like to be me?”

  “You wouldn’t send me into a trap, would you?”

  Mealy faced him, his eyes askance, shiny with fear, his doughy hands curling and uncurling. In the poor light, the dandruff on the shoulders of his blue serge suit glowed like tiny snowflakes. “Jimmy No Lines is a throwaway guy. Why go after a throwaway guy? Somebody wants to hurt Miss Beatrice. Maybe somebody wants to hurt you. Why help them do that, Mr. Holland? Go back home.”

  “Arnold Beckman again?”

  “We have newspapers here. Those men who were pulled out of the Guadalupe inside mail sacks? They used to come to the cribs on this alley. They worked for Beckman down in Mexico, when he was supplying arms to Villa or Huerta or some of those other greasers they got there. The newspaper didn’t say this, but I’ll make you a bet: They went out hard.”

  “Give me the address of the rooming house,” Hackberry said.

  “Forget the rooming house. This time of night, check out Betty’s Vineyard. He uses the back stairs, even there. Don’t do this, Mr. Holland. Get out of town and give Mr. Beckman whatever he wants.”

  “What does he want?”

  “I got no idea,” Mealy replied, his expression miserable.

  THE MADAM’S NAME was not Betty, even though the house had been known for years as Betty’s Vineyard. Where the name came from, no one knew and no one cared. The house had been in existence since the days of the Chisholm Trail, which wended its way from Yoakum up through San Antonio and across the Red River into Oklahoma Territory to the railheads at Wichita and Abilene in Kansas. Betty’s Vineyard was like a tattered replica of Fannie Porter’s sporting house one block away. It was a termite-eaten Victorian, the paint curled into chicken feathers, slats broken from the veranda, the ventilated shutters cockeyed, the hinges bleeding rust, the carriage lanterns on the porch lit with blue bulbs.

  A girl who looked like a maid opened the front door. “Come in, suh,” she said.

  Hackberry removed his hat but remained where he was. “I’m looking for Jimmy Belloc.”

  “Suh?”

  He could see three men sitting on a couch in the living room. They looked white, but he wasn’t sure because they were wearing hats and their faces were covered with shadow and they made a point of bending forward as they talked among themselves, the smoke of their cigarettes rising from between their fingers. “Go get the lady you work for.”

  “You the law, suh?”

  “No.”

  “Miss Dora ain’t here.”

  “Yes, she is.” He stepped inside, his buttoned slicker suddenly too warm, the sleeves and shoulders too tight. He glanced up the stairway. A white man was walking up the stairs with a colored girl; their backs were to him. There was a light on in the kitchen. “Is that where she’s at?”

  “Yes, suh.”

  “Fetch her.”

  A moment later, a black woman emerged from the kitchen. She was big and wore a long-sleeved dark dress printed with flowers and buttoned at the throat, with a tasseled black silk sash and rough boots like a man’s and strings of beads around her neck and glass rings on her fingers. “What do you want?” she said.

  “A man named Jimmy Belloc. He’s white.”

  “There ain’t nobody here that goes by that name.”

  “Do you know where he is?”

  “I never heard of him. Who are you?”

  “A rancher from outside Kerrville. I’m a friend of Beatrice DeMolay.”

  “What’s that got to do with me?”

  “Nothing. I want Belloc.”

  “You didn’t hear me the first time?”

  “He’s a burn case. He was in a fire when he was a child.”

  Her eyes stayed on his, not blinking. “Don’t be giving me your truck.”

  “Can I have a drink?”

  “Drink of what?”

  “Whiskey. With a Mexican beer, if you have it.”

  “This ain’t no saloon.”

  “You didn’t blink.”

  “What?”

  “A liar blinks at the end of a lie. Or he doesn’t blink at all. A person telling the truth blinks in the middle of what he’s saying. Did you know that?”

  “We don’t have no trouble here. This is a good house. I pay the right people so it stay that way. We don’t allow no rounders or hoodlums.”

  “I used to be a Texas Ranger. I’m not now. But if I walk these three men on the couch outside, I’ll treat them as though I’m still a Ranger. They’ll never be back. Then I’ll go upstairs and talk to some of your other customers. I don’t care who you pay. They’re not friends of mine.”

  In the background a phonograph record was playing, the mountain instruments and adenoidal voices flat and mournful:

  Don’t forget me, Little Bessie,

  When I’m near or far away,

  Just remember, Little Bessie,

  None will love you as I do.

  “What you want him for?” the woman said.

  “To clear up a situation he’s involved with. One you want to stay out of.”

  She rested one hand on the banister. There was a tension under her left eye that had nothing to do with fear. It suggested a level of anger he didn’t want to think about.

  “Get out,” she said.

  He put his hat back on and unbuttoned his slicker. He looked up the stairs. “Which room?”

  “There ain’t no guns allowed here.”

  “Go in the kitchen. Take the maid with you. If there’s a phone back there, I’ll hear you.”

  “I cain’t go into y’all’s houses, but you can come into mine. You can fuck my girls, but a black man gets lynched if he fucks yours. Who you think you are?”

  He tried not to hear what she was saying, tried to ignore her presence and the distraction she represented. Something was wrong, but he couldn’t put his hand on it. He placed one boot on the stairs, the heel of his right hand resting on the ivory grip of the Peacemaker. He looked into the woman’s face. The hatred she felt for him was the kind that no one could confront in a rational manner; for her and her family, the injury probably began with birth in a dirt-floor shack and progressed to a lifetime of picking cotton until their fingers bled, watching a white overseer take any girl he wanted into the woods, being cheated of their wages, living with the daily awareness tha
t a rope or a whip or a prison farm could be their fate.

  The woman’s upper lip was damp with moisture. She was breathing through her nose, her nostrils swelling. What was her name? Dora?

  “I didn’t do it to you, Dora.”

  “Do what?”

  “Everything.”

  The record continued to play, the needle scratching on the surface.

  When your hair has turned to silver,

  When your eyes have faded, too,

  Just remember, Little Bessie,

  None will love you like I do.

  “I want the man who tried to blind Beatrice DeMolay,” he said. “I won’t leave till I get him.”

  “Ain’t nobody here thrown no acid in nobody’s face.”

  “I didn’t say anything about acid.”

  She curled one hand into a fist. “You didn’t have to. Everybody on this side of town know about it.”

  The three men on the couch were motionless, their cigarettes burning in the ashtray, their eyes fixed on the rug. Hackberry stepped back from the staircase. “You three,” he said.

  They lifted their faces.

  “Out,” he said.

  They didn’t argue. He pushed the door shut behind them and locked the bolt. “Go in the kitchen now,” he said to the woman. “If there’s somebody up there with a gun, you’ll be in trouble you won’t get out of. If not from me, from others.”

  “Why you doing this to me?”

  “I’m not your enemy. You’d like to believe I am, but I’m not. Now get in the kitchen. If you hear a gunshot, call the police.”

  He walked up the stairs slowly, each step creaking under his weight, his elbow holding back the flap of his slicker, his hand gripped tightly on the holstered Peacemaker. He could smell a sour odor rising from his armpits.

  When the shots and shells are screaming,

  When the bitter duty calls,

  Just remember, Little Bessie,

  None will love you like I do.

  Where had he heard the song? It was a soldier’s lament, one that went back to the Civil War, one his father used to sing. He thought of Ishmael in the trenches of France. He thought of his poor wounded boy and the fact that he might never learn his father loved him.