House of the Rising Sun: A Novel (13 page)

“Maggie’s got snakes in her garden. You know what I mean by that, don’t you?”

Hackberry glanced out the bat-wing doors at the rain blowing in the street. “You seem to be either a slow learner or you have a hearing impairment, Dr. Atwood.”

“I was a special deputy in the Johnson County War up in Wyoming. Two train carloads of us from Texas went up there and got things straightened out. You heard about it?”

“As I recall, you terrorized the countryside and put the small ranchers out of business.”

“What we did was hang cattle rustlers. One of them was named Cattle Kate. That’s where I got over my inhibition.”

“Which ‘inhibition’ is that?”

“About bringing justice to a woman who asked for it—who begged for it.”

Hackberry let his gaze rove over Atwood’s face. It looked as hard and carved as knotty pine, the eyes shiny, floating in their own liquid, as though diseased.

“I’ll put it this way,” Atwood said. “I lost my virginity a second time. I got over the notion that a troublesome woman deserved special consideration because of her gender.”

“You lynched a woman?”

“It was a collective endeavor.”

Hackberry drank from his mug and looked in the mirror. “Tell me what’s on your mind or get out of my sight.”

“Five hundred dollars and you won’t see Maggie Bassett again. I’ll buy her a train ticket. The two of us will just go away. Probably out to San Francisco or up to Alaska. The gold fields are booming. She won’t be back. That’s guaranteed.”

“On the train? Maggie will just go away?”

“That’s it.”

Hackberry nodded. “She throw you out?”

“What do you care?”

“I was just speculating. Maggie was always good about taking in strays. She usually kept them around. You must have done something pretty rank.”

“You could say I wasn’t in accordance with her conjugal ways, if you get my drift.”

“I’m going to use the jakes,” Hackberry said. “Don’t be here when I come back.”

“It’s not me who has a woman problem, Marshal,” Atwood replied, rolling a cigarette. “I went looking for you at your ranch earlier today. That old nigress there said Miss Ruby and the boy went down the road to the Baptist church. She thought you might be joining them. When I got to the church, there wasn’t anybody around, not unless you count your son, who was playing by himself in the backyard of the parsonage.”

“Ishmael was by himself?” Hackberry said, not looking up from his drink.

“That’s what I said. I asked him where his mama was at. He said, ‘Inside making lemonade with the reverend.’ I took a look through the back bedroom window. Ruby and the preacher were going at it like two beavers chewing on a log.”

Atwood crimped the ends of a cigarette and stuck it into his mouth and lit it with a match he scraped along the underside of the bar.

“You tell quite a story,” Hackberry said.

“I’m just passing on information, one pilgrim to another.”

“That’s thoughtful of you, Dr. Atwood. Excuse me a minute.”

Hackberry walked through the saloon, past the billiard table, and out the back door into the wind and drizzle, his ears filled with sounds like an avalanche sliding down a mountainside. He went into the outhouse and closed the door and set the wood peg in the hasp and urinated through the worn, smooth-edged, beveled hole on which hundreds of men had squatted since the 1870s, depositing the only contribution to the earth they would ever make. That’s why they scratched their names on walls and carved them on trees and rocks, why they hung their bodies with weaponry and scalps and rode their horses along the edges of precipices in electrical storms. They wanted to deny the reality of their short duration from their mothers’ birth pains to the day someone placed pennies on their eyes, the insignificance of their daily preoccupations, the fact that the imprint of a leaf in an ancient riverbed had more permanence than they.

These were things he had learned not to speak about, in the way a blind man does not try to tell the sighted that vision has little to do with light. But who was he to think himself superior to others? Whatever wisdom he possessed always seemed to come from a bitter cup. The only real lesson he had learned in life was that a man’s greatest gift was his family. Now he was about to lose it.

Was Atwood lying? A man could conceal love, but a woman could not, no more than a tropical flower could refuse to bloom. Only a fool would deny the obvious effect the minister had on her. Hackberry had become a spectator in the hijacking of his wife’s affections. The image of the minister’s beardless face floated before his eyes.

He buttoned his fly and washed his hands in water he dripped from a wood bucket and dried them on a towel hanging on a nail by the back door. Then he sat down on the stoop and listened to the rain tinkling on the tin roof, his mind too tired to think. “Marshal Holland,” he heard a voice say.

The black man who had been sweeping the sidewalk was standing in the alley at the corner of the saloon, his hair beaded with raindrops, his trousers held up by rope.

“What is it, Markus?” Hackberry asked.

“The man in there with the bandage on his hand? He told Mr. Bill he’d work behind the bar so Mr. Bill could be with his sick wife.”

“Good for him.”

“He said something behind your back. He called you a bad name.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t like to speak them kind of words, suh.”

“Thank you for telling me, Markus.”

“Marshal Holland, you ain’t listening. I seen him put his hand under the bar like he was checking something.”

“Check what?”

“Suh, I don’t want to borrow trouble.”

“Go down to the sheriff’s office and tell him what you told me.”

“If it’s all right with you, I’d like to go home.”

“That would be fine, too. Is your family all right?”

“Yes, suh, they surely are.”

“I’m glad to hear that.”

Then the black man was gone and Hackberry was left alone with his thoughts and the sound of the rain on the roof, his holster creaking against his side when he straightened his leg to ease the discomfort from an old bullet wound, one that either the season or circumstance had a way of giving new life.

H
ACKBERRY REENTERED THE
saloon and stood with one foot on the rail at the back end of the bar, his left hand resting on top of it. As Markus the saloon swamper had said, Atwood was acting as a substitute bartender, reading the newspaper, disengaged, glancing up occasionally at the rain blowing on the front windows.

“Give me a beer and an egg,” Hackberry said.

Atwood filled a mug from the tap and broke a raw egg in it and set the mug on the bar. “You calling it a night?”

“Not quite. You got a clear look through the preacher’s window?”

“A show like that? What do you think?”

“Ruby has a tattoo on her shoulder.”

“Then she must have a twin sister, because the woman I saw had a body as pink and unmarked as a baby’s butt.”

“Thought I had you,” Hackberry said. He drank the beer to the bottom, swallowing the egg yolk, his eyes lingering on Atwood’s.

Atwood laughed to himself.

“Something funny?” Hackberry said.

“Maggie always said you were a smart man, the way you read Charles Darwin and encyclopedias and such.”

“She overestimated me.”

“You said it, I didn’t.”

“I’m slow on the uptake, Dr. Atwood. You have to he’p me here.”

“You’re right, the girl you live with—Miss Ruby, that is—has got a tattoo on her left shoulder. It’s a rose, I believe. Bright red.”

Hackberry rubbed his face with his palm. “I’m going over to my office and write up a report on your solicitation to commit murder. A warrant for your arrest will probably be issued by tomorrow afternoon.”

“You take a mean revenge on a man who merely offered to buy a lady a train ticket, Mr. Holland. I guess that’s the plight of a cuckold. If the woman strays, it’s usually because she’s not getting what she needs at home. Must be hard to live with.”

“Could I have one of those peppermints in that jar on the shelf?”

“Bill saves those for ragamuffins.”

“He doesn’t mind if I have one or two when I come in.”

Atwood picked up the jar and removed the glass cover. “He’p yourself.”

“You take one, too.”

“No, thanks. There’s something demeaning about a man sucking on candy. I think it’s got something to do with a desire for the mother’s teat.”

“Ride out. And not just out of town. Ride till you’re in a place I’ll never see you again.”

“It’s a free country.”

“Not for you.”

“Have another peppermint,” Atwood said, tilting the jar toward Hackberry. “Get you a shitpile of them.”

“Know why a diamondback rattles?”

“Because he’s fixing to strike you?”

“That’s what stupid people think. He rattles to let you know where he is so you won’t step on him. If you don’t step on him, then he’s not required to bite you.”

“A man learns something new every day,” Atwood said.

Hackberry began walking toward the bat-wing doors, his boots echoing in the cavernous room. A gambler playing solitaire at a felt table looked up, then shifted his gaze to the playing card he had just turned over. The saloon windows were black, running with humidity, a rainy cool smell like sulfur and fish drifting through the doors. He waited to hear Atwood replacing the glass top on the peppermint jar, but instead he heard a duckboard creak behind the bar and then a scraping sound like a heavy object being dragged from a shelf.

Hackberry turned with a fluidity age had not taken from him, and drew the Army Colt, crouching slightly, driving back the hammer with the heel of his left hand, angling the barrel up so the round would clear the top of the bar, squeezing the trigger less than a half second later. The Colt bucked against his palm, a twist of yellow and red flame leaping from the barrel.

But just before the hammer struck the base of the .44 brass cartridge, Hackberry knew the origins of his rage had little to do with Romulus Atwood. Atwood was not a noun, not an adverb, not an adjective, not even a symbol; he was a surrogate, and a piss-poor one at that. The target of Hackberry’s wrath was miles away, probably asleep in his parsonage, dreaming of Ruby and her countrywoman’s breasts and the allure of her thighs and the way she moaned when he entered her. Or tossing with guilt over his new role as an adulterer and a hypocrite and the wrecker of another man’s home.

The ball caught Atwood high up on the chest, just below the collarbone. He crashed against the bottles on the counter behind him but held on to the cut-down double-barrel ten-gauge he had pulled from under the bar. Hackberry fired twice more, splattering blood on the mirror, then shattering it, unsure where his rounds had hit Atwood. One barrel of the ten-gauge went off, pocking buckshot in the tin ceiling, raining down strings of termite-generated sawdust. Hackberry went around the end of the bar and saw Atwood on his back against an ice cooler, trying to lift the ten-gauge again. Hackberry cocked and fired his revolver until the hammer snapped on a spent cartridge. Atwood had lifted one foot in a futile attempt to protect himself; a round had torn through the sole of his boot and exited on the other side and blown away two of his fingers. But these were not the images Hackberry would remember when he thought about the systematic dismemberment of the Undertaker. Three feet in front of him, he swore he saw the minister’s disembodied face painted on the smoke, the blush of innocence on his cheeks, his eyes serene and undisturbed by the gunfire and shattered whiskey bottles and blood speckling the coolers.

Hackberry lifted the shotgun from Atwood’s grasp and broke it open with one hand and shook the fired shell and the unfired shell loose from the chambers, then tossed the shotgun over the bar.

The thumb of Atwood’s bandaged hand was pressed to a hole in his throat, his lips pursed like those of a man who had stepped barefoot on a rusty nail and whose pain was so intolerable he dared not move. Atwood pulled at Hackberry’s pants leg with his other hand.

“I cain’t he’p you,” Hackberry said.

Atwood’s voice gurgled in the back of his mouth. Hackberry holstered his revolver and squatted down, his knees popping. “You want a preacher to read over you?”

“How?” Atwood whispered.

“How what?”

“How did you—”

“How did I know you were about to back-shoot me? I didn’t hear you put the cover back on Mr. Bill’s peppermint jar and set it on the shelf, like you were supposed to. So I knew you were headed for the scatter gun.”

Atwood closed his eyes and then opened them again, as though losing consciousness or perhaps because he couldn’t accept the fact that such an insignificant choice had cost him his life.

“If you believe in perdition, this is your last chance to avoid it, Doctor. Want to tell me the truth about Ruby and the minister?” Hackberry said. His eyes were veiled as he waited and hoped that Atwood would not sense his desperation and terrible need to purge himself of the poison Atwood had planted in his soul.

A word seemed to form in Atwood’s throat, then die in a grin on the edge of his mouth. His eyes remained open, staring at nothing, while a spider crawled across his cheek.

Hackberry got to his feet, off balance, the blood draining from his head, his hand still tingling from the recoil of the revolver. He pulled the cork from a whiskey bottle and drank, then pushed through the bat-wing doors, tilting the bottle skyward, while the few onlookers in the street backed away from him as they would from a half-formed creature born before the Creator made light.