House of the Rising Sun

by James Lee Burke

“I thought you were my son. I was dreaming. I took him to the circus when he was three.”

  “You weren’t dreaming, ma’am. That was the circus out there. Every kind of wild animal you can think of.”

  She tried to see beyond the caboose of the train, her breath fogging the glass. When she looked back at the soldier, she realized one of his sleeves was pinned to the shoulder. “Were you over there?”

  “Yes, ma’am, I sure as heck was.”

  “Did you know Captain Ishmael Holland? He commanded colored troops.”

  “No, ma’am, I didn’t. But I heard they done right well.”

  “How far are we from San Antonio?”

  “We’re fixing to pull into the station any time now. Are you all right?”

  “Why, yes, I am.”

  “You were having a bad dream. That’s what the cold will do to you. You cain’t be getting that Spanish influenza, either. It can flat put you in a box.”

  “You’ve been very kind,” she said.

  “The Harlem Hellfighters, that was their name. Did your son come home okay?”

  “No, he was wounded badly in both legs.”

  “I’m sorry. I hope things work out for y’all.”

  “I hate to ask you such a personal question, but maybe you can help me. When you were recovering from your injury, did you have trouble with any of the drugs you had to take?”

  His eyes went away from hers. “I didn’t learn anything over there but one lesson, ma’am: You get shut of the war as soon as you’re able.”

  He retook his seat at the head of the car with two other enlisted men. One was asleep; one was reading a newspaper. The man who was asleep had a pair of crutches propped next to him; the man with the newspaper wore a rubber mask painted with flesh tones and a neat mustache.

  ISHMAEL COULD NOT remember with exactitude how he got to the carnival. Maybe in a jitney or maybe a driver in a Model T picked him up on the side of the road. He remembered the loud ticking sound the engine gave off, like a clock mechanism working against itself, gnashing its own cogs and teeth into filings. He remembered the driver placing him in the front seat, sticking his canes snugly by his side. He remembered unstoppering the bottle of brandy again and working on the second half of its contents, his voice too loud inside the confines of the car, his allusions to Mexico and France and pulling a mule uphill loaded with two wounded men lost on his benefactor.

  He saw the carnival through a brightly lit haze of dust, the Ferris wheel printed in multicolored electric dots against black clouds. “There,” he said.

  “You sure?” the driver said. “I think maybe you better go to a hospital. You were a soldier?”

  Ishmael studied the driver’s profile. “I didn’t get your name. Do I know you?”

  The driver looked at him and seemed to smile, not wanting to injure or offend. “I’m the fellow who picked you up.”

  Ishmael nodded as though a profound truth had been told him. “By that patch of weeds. That’ll be good.”

  “Don’t let the police get you, buddy. They can give you a hard time. I’d throw the bottle away.”

  The Model T stopped and Ishmael got out on the road, supporting himself with his canes. He stared back through the window. “Were you at Carrizal?”

  The driver shook his head, his eyes sad, and drove away.

  Ishmael walked through a pine grove, the needles as soft as a sponge under his canes, the brandy swinging in his coat pocket. He entered a clearing and passed horse trailers and tents and trucks held together with wire, and people cooking on hot stones and sheets of tin, their faces firelit, as supple and impassive as warm tallow, shadows leaping behind them.

  He stopped and rested, leaning against a tree, and drank from the bottle, closing his eyes as the brandy slid down his throat and seeped like an elixir through his system and touched all the nerve endings in his legs with magical fingers. He worked his way up a path and across a railroad spur to the fairgrounds, sure that he was smiling, because the skin of his face was as tight as the stitching on a shrunken head. He could also smell his odor, similar to a horse blanket that had soured in a tack room, or the pot liquor in a jar of spoiled fruit.

  He moved as stiffly as a straw man down the midway, surrounded by the popping of .22 rounds in the shooting gallery, calliope music, a barker describing the freaks on display in his tent, aerial rockets bursting into pink foam, the hand-carved facial starkness of the carousel horses rotating round and round, the squealing of the children, the smells of hot dogs and candied apples and buttered corn, the ventriloquists and magicians and hypnotists on the stages, fire-eaters blowing flame and the stench of burning kerosene into the night, the rattling of the mesh on the geek cage.

  Ishmael stepped between two tents and leaned against a pole and drank again from the bottle, then entered the midway afresh, metabolically sealed and protected from the crowds of people parting in front of him like waves against a ship’s bow. A frightened mother pulled her child from his path. A man flipping meat patties with a spatula looked up from his grill and said in a Down Under accent, “You’re about to run aground, mate. Better find a dry dock.”

  The Ferris wheel was at the end of the midway, the gondolas painted with polka dots, lines of people with cotton candy waiting to board. That’s where he would go, he told himself. He had more than eight dollars in his pocket. He would seat himself in a gondola and be subsumed into the sky, the heat and pain in his legs evaporating, the canes resting across his thighs in a dignified fashion, the last few swallows in the bottle available whenever he wanted them. He would remain in the gondola until his money was gone, rising again and again into gold-veined black clouds of which he had no fear.

  That was when he tripped on a rubber power cord and fell headlong into a puddle formed by the overflow of a dunking machine on which a Negro sat dressed in the striped jumper and cord-tied pants and sockless work boots of a convict, his hair bejeweled with drops of water, his grin as self-abasing as the slice of watermelon and the Little Black Sambo painted on a sign above his head.

  Somebody helped Ishmael to his feet and even fitted his palms on the canes. Ishmael gazed at the black man and at the onlookers and at the concessionaires and family people bunching up to see what was happening in front of the machine that allowed people to throw a baseball at a metal disk welded to a lever, sending the Negro plummeting into a horse tank.

  “Men like this fought for our country,” Ishmael said.

  The onlookers made no response. Their faces were ovals, the eyes and mouths and noses little more than hash marks, neither good nor bad. The young boys wore slug caps, vests, knickers, dress shirts, ties, and Buster Brown shoes. There was nothing mean about any of them. Why couldn’t they understand what he was saying? “You’ve been taught to disrespect the colored man. Don’t let others use you like this,” he said.

  “You don’t like it, go back where you came from!” someone at the back of the crowd said.

  “All of you are better than you think you are,” Ishmael said. “This is a poor man. He should be your friend.”

  “Nigger lover!” another man shouted.

  “A colored man can’t fight back. You let others make cowards and bullies of you.”

  A dirt clod flew out of the darkness and hit Ishmael in the eye. He raised his forearm in front of him, squinting into the brilliance of a spotlight a carnie worker had turned on his face. Inside the glare, he saw the silhouettes of three hatted men heading for him. One held a club; all three had badges pinned to their shirts. They grabbed him by the arms and led him behind the tents. He heard someone spear a baseball into the metal disk on the dunking machine and, a second later, the sound of mechanical release, like the heavy wood-and-steel trapdoor on a scaffold dropping, followed by a loud splash and the laughter of the crowd.

  Ishmael freed one arm and ripped his elbow into the nose of the man holding him, cleaning the glasses off his face. The injured man cupped his nose, blood leaking through his fingers, inadv
ertently crunching his glasses under his boot. He removed his hand, his lower face smeared as though a burst tomato had been rubbed on it. “Bad choice, shitbird.”

  Another man pushed him to the ground; or maybe he just fell. One man stripped off his coat and searched it. He shone a flashlight on Ishmael’s arms. “He’s a dope addict.”

  Ishmael tried to get up and fell down again.

  “What’s wrong with your legs?” another said.

  “Shrapnel,” Ishmael said.

  “Where?”

  “On both legs, up to my hip.”

  “Here?” the man with the bloody nose said. “Or here? Sorry. How about here?”

  Ishmael felt a sensation like a series of knife thrusts work its way up his thighs into his groin and turn his rectum to jelly.

  “Where y’all want to put him?” one of his warders said.

  “Good question. I don’t want to babysit him till the drunk wagon comes by.”

  “I saw the Missing Link passed out behind the jakes.”

  “Put him in the cage?”

  “He’s a stewbum. Let him sit in his own shit. Maybe he’s selling dope or white-slaving for the Cantonese.”

  “Is that right, you’re on the hip?” the man with the ruined nose said. “That’s what they call opium smokers these days. Chinamen that smoke it do it on their hip.”

  For the first time in his life, Ishmael knew what a black man felt when he listened to the rhetoric of the men uncoiling a rope, knotting it neatly, enjoying the oily pull of it through their palms.

  THAT SAME EVENING Ruby Dansen took a jitney from her hotel to the address of Maggie Bassett, just outside the city limits, not far from a Spanish mission whose glassless windows had become red eyes in the last remnants of the sun. Maggie Bassett’s house was built of purple and brown brick and gray river stone, with dormers and walls thick enough to ensure the house was cool in the summer and warm in winter. There were chairs and a table on the porch, chimes on the eaves, a garage with a motorcar inside, a Dutch oven in the side yard, a two-seat bicycle under the porte-cochere, a vine-threaded gazebo inside a grove of pomegranate and orange trees. It was the kind of home that advertised its excess and told others that necessity and need were never factors in the lives of those who resided there.

  Ruby twisted the handle on the doorbell. She fingered her cloth purse and gazed at the mission and the tall grass blowing on the slope below it and wondered how much blood had been mixed in the earth here, how many Indians and Spaniards and Mexicans and white colonists and missionaries were buried anonymously in these hills, voiceless, their stories untold, their deaths not worth an asterisk, their last thoughts known only to themselves.

  She also wondered what she should say to Maggie Bassett. What did you say to someone you quietly and dispassionately despised? She knew there must be words that were appropriate, perhaps created especially for this type of situation, maybe vituperative, maybe rigidly formal. Unfortunately, she didn’t know what they were. The working girls she had tried to help over the years came from mill towns and skid-road logging camps where the timber beasts slid the logs down a mud-slick gulley lined on either side by brothels and saloons. The girls who worked in the cribs had grown up poor and unwanted, and most of them had been molested or raped by age fifteen, usually by a relative or a friend of the family.

  But how could anyone explain Maggie Bassett? Educated at a boarding school. A schoolteacher. Heartbreakingly beautiful in the eyes of any man or woman. Her family rich. Yet she rented her body to scum like Butch Cassidy’s gang, a collection of throwbacks who convinced themselves they robbed trains and murdered people because they represented the oppressed. If that weren’t enough, she had been the consort of Dr. Romulus Atwood, who thought he was a shootist of world importance until Hackberry blew him out of his socks.

  Then Ruby realized she was thinking in a proud way about Hackberry, and she forced herself to remember his abandonment of her and their son when they needed him most.

  Maggie Bassett opened the door, her eyes full of daggers. “What do you want?”

  “I’m Ruby Dansen.”

  “I know who you are. I said, what do you want?”

  “I’m looking for my son, Ishmael Holland. May I come in and speak with you?”

  “Yes, you may speak to me. No, you may not come in.”

  “I’m sorry you feel that way.”

  “How did you know where I live?”

  “I suspect I could answer your question in several ways. Perhaps I asked others if they knew a local woman who was the town pump for the Hole-in-the-Wall Gang. Instead, I looked in the city directory, which is what most people do when they want to find someone’s address.”

  Maggie Bassett’s face never changed expression. “I don’t know where Ishmael is. He went for a walk. He’s rather moody sometimes. I suspect it has to do with his upbringing.”

  “You kidnapped a disabled man from a hospital and took him a thousand miles away on a train, and now you have no idea where he might have gone? Does that sound convincing to you?”

  “He left earlier this evening. I didn’t want him to, but that was his choice.”

  “Left with whom?”

  Maggie’s eyes were as unreadable as a cat’s. “With whom? Your grammar is so impressive. I imagine that’s a great source of pride for you.”

  “Why did you go to Denver to see him?” Ruby said. “Why did you take him out of the hospital? The orderly you bribed was fired.”

  “I didn’t bribe anyone. I tipped an orderly who helped us.”

  “Why did you bring him to San Antonio?”

  “To offer him an executive position with an international company,” Maggie said. “To make up for the childhood that was denied him.”

  “He had the best childhood I could give him. He’s also a friend to the working people of the world, something I don’t think you could teach him.”

  Even before Ruby had finished speaking, she knew how foolish and self-righteous she sounded. Maggie had led her into a rhetorical trap.

  “I forgot. Your friend Bill Haywood blew up the governor of Idaho,” Maggie said.

  “Those were false charges.”

  “If Bill Haywood and your greasy cohorts aren’t the ones planting bombs in mailboxes, then who is? John D. Rockefeller?

  J. P. Morgan? The pope?” Maggie Bassett waited, her head cocked. “Cat got your tongue?”

  “I’d like to slap you.”

  “I suspect you would. When people of low intelligence run out of words and can’t think very fast, their first option is usually to hit someone. It must be a terrible way to live.”

  Ruby felt small and cold on the porch, shrunken by the long train ride and the fatigue of the day, the pitiful amount of money in her purse and the fact that she hadn’t eaten supper, all of it like a great iron chain weighing on her shoulders. “I started going to a Dutch reformed church for a while.”

  “I’m so happy to know that.”

  “I listened to this minister talk about our need to forgive others. He said we don’t get any rest until we forgive. So I said under my breath that I forgave you for whatever you may have done to us, even though I really didn’t mean it.”

  “So you’re not true to your own religion?”

  “That’s correct. This time I’m going to say it to you and mean it. I forgive you. But that also means you don’t exist anymore.”

  “What did you say? Say that again. What did you—”

  “Before I go, can I ask you a question? Does the name Hole-in-the-Wall Gang have sexual overtones? I’ve always been puzzled by the name. I thought someone with your background might know the answer.”

  Ruby began walking back down the dirt road toward a country store where she could use a phone to call a taxi. The sun was a flickering scarlet diamond that somehow had created a patch of blue on the horizon. When the wind changed, she thought she heard the music of a calliope but knew her imagination was playing tricks on her.

&nb
sp; ONE OF ISHMAEL’S warders held him by the arms and another by the legs. They swung him back and forth to gain momentum, then flung him through the back door of a darkened cage that faced the midway. When he landed on his spine, on a floor made from railroad ties, his mouth shot open and a ball of light exploded inside his head and turned his eyelids to tissue paper. He rolled over, groaning, urine and excrement matting in his hair and painting the side of his face. His warders were looking at him through the doorway. They wore peaked hats probably purchased from an army surplus store and long-sleeved cotton shirts and scrap-metal badges, and he knew he was in the hands of men whose fear was in direct proportion to the level of cruelty they visited on others. One of them released the rolled-up canvas at the top of the bars and dropped it to the floor.

  “You got yourself in the honeypot, boy,” he said. “The drunk wagon might be along directly. That’s as good as it’s gonna get.” It was the man whose nose was bulbous and mottled purple and still dripping blood. “Got nothing to say?”

  Ishmael lifted his cheek from the floor. “I’m Captain Ishmael Holland, United States Army,” he whispered.

  “No, you’re my property and a liar on top of it,” the man replied, unbuttoning his fly. “Relax. This is nothing. Wait till the two of us are alone.” He cupped his phallus in his palm and arched a gold stream of urine on Ishmael’s head and mouth and eyes. “Here’s your canes. My name is Fred. I’m gonna have a hot dog, then I’ll be back.” He pressed an ax handle into Ishmael’s thigh and twisted it. “Want anything?”

  Ishmael passed out and went to a place and a particular evening in his childhood he had always associated with disappointment, an evening he had thought he would never want to revisit.

  Big Bud had come to their home up a dark valley outside Trinidad, Colorado, with flowers and chocolate for his mother and a whirligig for him. And a promise to take Ishmael on the train to Elitch Gardens in Denver. Not only would he have ridden the roller coaster and pedaled a boat across a lake churning with bronze-backed carp; he would have seen moving pictures filled with Indians trailing feathered bonnets and stagecoaches caroming through clouds of dust, the driver and shotgun guard hanging on for dear life, the passengers firing black-powder weapons out the windows at their pursuers.