House of the Rising Sun: A Novel (20 page)

Up and down the line, Ishmael’s men waited at the foot of the fire steps and ladders that led to the top of the trench, their long, slender bayonets like the tips of lances on their rifles. He pressed his eyes against the viewing slit of the periscope. A cold ribbon of light, the color of blue ice, had just broken on the eastern horizon. Behind him, he heard the sound of bagpipes rising and fading and then trilling inside a gust of wind.

He glanced at his watch. 0507. “Slam the doors one more time,” he heard himself say under his breath, his chest rising and falling, his stomach churning.
Keep Fritz down in his trench just three more minutes. Make him crawl and defecate in his underwear. Make his glands bleed with fear. Make him become as we are.

But the 75s were done for the day. His men were cloaked in shadow against the trench wall, some of them shaking visibly, their chin straps pulled tight so their teeth didn’t rattle. At exactly 0510 the entire line erupted with the blowing of whistles, the grinding of telephone boxes, the clatter of equipment, the labored sounds of men lifting themselves over the top as though loads of brick were strapped to their backs, the first ones over already dropping as the Maxims came to life beyond the German wire.

Ishmael held his breath and went up the steps behind Amidee Labiche. His face was slick with sweat, the wind like ice water inside his shirt. He could see the muzzles of the Maxims flashing in the gloom, the rounds thropping into the bodies of men on either side. How could so many of the enemy have survived the eight-hour barrage of the French 75s? They had even established a salient, jutting out of their lines like the point of a ship equipped with automatic weapons, mortars, flamethrowers, and gas pumped through funnels from compressors in the rear. He had never felt this cold or naked. No, “naked” was the wrong word. He felt a sensation that could be compared only to having his skin stripped away with pliers.

The salient contained sharpshooters with scoped rifles and machine gunners who had positioned the barrels of their Maxims across sandbags so the rounds would spray the field chest-high. There would be a sound like a wet slap, and the man next to him would grunt as though he had stepped on a sharp stone, then he would go straight down on his knees, his ability to breathe gone.

Ishmael wondered how he could have been so cavalier about the corporal’s preoccupation with the coldness of the countryside. Amidee Labiche’s perception was not imaginary. The unseasonal temperature was only a precursor of what lay on the other side of the Great Shade, a landscape where the rain did not fall and the sun did not shine, and where love and human warmth and charity and the bonds of one’s family held no sway, where regret was a constant and sorrow for one’s foolish mistakes abided forever. In seconds an illiterate farm worker, probably with the face of a goat, wearing a cloth-covered piked helmet, would squeeze a trigger a quarter of an inch and stitch Ishmael’s chest and leave him gasping on the ground.

The corporal was running beside him, his bayonet-fixed rifle pointed in front of him. Either pistol or trip flares were descending above them, burning as brightly as a welder’s torch inside the smoke and dust. Somebody on the right, perhaps a British noncommissioned officer, was yelling, “Form it up, boys! Form it up! We’ll break their fucking line! Follow me! Follow me!”

What madness,
Ishmael thought.
At the behest of strangers, we charge with pistols and bolt-action rifles into machine guns. Where are the kings, the generals, the lords of the parliament, the senators and congressmen? Where are those who would not allow us into their clubs? Would they like to gaze upon their work? Would they be willing to change places with those they have sent to transform Eden into hell?

Then he realized that his anticipation of death at the hands of a Saxon pig farmer was unfounded. He did not know where the artillery barrage came from. They were sixty yards from the German salient now, too close for the gifts of the Krupp family to lob shells without killing their own. But that was exactly what happened, although the barrage came at a forty-five-degree angle, perhaps from enormous cannons mounted on railway cars. The shells were not spread out; they detonated one after another in a straight line, blowing holes so deep that the earth geysering into the air was as dry as baked sand.

Ishmael felt that his legs were locked in concrete. Three men trying to run to the rear were vaporized into a bloody mist. He saw Amidee Labiche turn and stare into his face, as though an unfair trick had been played on them, waiting for Ishmael to tell him what to do.

Then the earth seemed to explode under his feet and lift him inside a windstorm that blinded his eyes and deafened his ears and stopped his mouth with dirt. He struck the ground with such force that his brain seemed to disconnect from its fastenings, his eyes bulging from his head. A smell like rotten eggs rose from the hole he was lying in while dirt clouds rained down on his face. He was sure that Amidee Labiche was sitting next to him, on the incline of the slope, his face powdered with dust, his Adrian helmet still on his head, his lips arterial red when he tried to speak.

What is it?
Ishmael said.

Mail my letter.

My legs are gone. You have to mail it yourself.

I’m dead.

Sorry, Amidee. I didn’t know that. Is it bad being dead?

Amidee held out the letter to him. His fingerprints were stenciled in blood on the flap.
Take it, suh. Please.

I
SHMAEL AWOKE ON
a cot in a tent billowing with wind, the sky beyond the tent flap marbled with maroon and black clouds that could have come from a fire or just the setting of the sun. Someone had removed his shirt and placed a catheter on his penis and draped a blood-speckled cloth on his hip and rib cage. His skin looked white and rubbery and seemed to glow with an iridescence not unlike that of the bodies in a charnel house. He reached down to touch his legs.

“I wouldn’t move around too much. There’s still shrapnel in your side,” said a French colonel sitting next to his cot, one leg crossed on his knee. He wore a mustache and the red cap of a grenadier and a dirty khaki jacket without insignia or epaulettes and rumpled trousers tucked inside riding boots. He also wore one of the new mechanical hands, with flexible metal fingers that were oiled and bright and tapered and shiny, and a metal sheath that fitted over the forearm, like a knight’s armor.

“I can’t feel my legs,” Ishmael said.

“You’ve had a spinal injection.”

“My legs weren’t amputated?”

“We thought you might want to keep them. There’s shrapnel in your side, though, perhaps close to an organ or two. You must not take any more morphine. There’s an ‘M’ painted on your forehead. Do you understand what I’m saying to you?”

“I had a dream.”

“You’ll probably have many, most of them bad.” The colonel picked up a metal bedpan and rattled it. “This is what they’ve taken out of you so far.”

“Where is Labiche?”

The colonel shook his head.

“The corporal. He was next to me when the shells started coming in.”

“You were by yourself when the litter-bearers dug you out.”

“No, he was sitting a few feet from me. Inside the shell hole.”

The colonel patted him tenderly on the arm. “When your men broke the German salient, the first thing they did was look for you.”

“What’s that odor?”

“That’s the fellow on the next cot. He was loading a phosphorus shell when it blew up.”

“I saw Labiche. Before the explosion and after. He talked to me.”

“You were buried alive. Only your hand was sticking out.”

“He told me he was dead.”

The colonel stood up and gazed into Ishmael’s face. “Are you cold? I can put a blanket over you.”

“He wanted to give me a letter. It was for his family in New York.”

“This happens when you are gravely wounded. You feel there are things you must take care of. Sometimes you feel a terrible obligation to people you haven’t thought about in years.” The colonel picked up a box from under the bed and sorted through it with his mechanical fingers. “Here are the things from your dugout and your pockets. I suspect this is the letter you’re talking about. See, it was here all the time. The address on it is in New York City.” The envelope was creased and smudged with dirt, stenciled with blood.

“There was another letter. One I was supposed to take care of. I can’t think clearly.”

“Rest. You’ll be going back to America soon. There is nothing to worry about. Listen. The guns are quiet. Look at the sunset. It’s a grand finish to a grand day. We broke the spine of the Boche and hammered them into the dirt. They’ll never invade France again.”

Ishmael felt himself slipping loose from the conversation, his vision blurring, the smells of urine and medicinal salve and trench foot and gangrenous flesh growing more and more distant.
I will never forgive my father, never answer his letters, never be undone by his guile,
he thought.
He left his family to founder by the wayside. Would that I could drain his blood from my veins.

Later, Ishmael could not be sure if he spoke these words aloud or to himself, or if they would have made any sense to his friend the colonel. When he awoke in the middle of the night, the sky was totally black except for a flickering of either cannon fire or electricity on the horizon. The man who had been burned by a phosphorus shell was carried away on a litter like a lump of bandaged charcoal, replaced with a man who had neither arms nor legs.

Top of the bloody evening to you,
Ishmael thought.
Would you call this a grand end to a grand day? How about a game of checkers?

I
T WAS A
dry September, the kind that brought no relief from summer’s heat and left the rocks in the streambeds white and dusty and printed with the scales of insects that normally lived below the water’s surface. Hackberry was determined to bring in a prize crop of pumpkins from the three acres down by the river where he grew vegetables that were for his personal use. Each morning he hoed out the weeds in the rows, and each evening he hauled water in barrels from the river and walked down the long lines of pumpkins, stringing water from perforated syrup cans that hung from a yoke stretched across his shoulders.

The sun had just dipped behind the bluffs on the far side of the river, splintering like a red diamond inside the cottonwoods, the river riffling slate-green through the shadows, when Hackberry heard a motorcar—actually, a touring vehicle that resembled a tank—coming up the dirt road, its heavy chassis and spoked wheels churning up huge amounts of dust, most of it drifting across his field and into his face.

The driver wore goggles and a duster and a cap. Not so the passenger in back. The latter stepped down on the ground like royalty from a carriage, dressed in a sky-blue silk shirt, a gray flop hat with an oxblood fur band, laced boots, and skintight striped trousers hitched high up on his hips so they accentuated his heart-shaped butt. The man removed his hat and pushed back his silvery blond hair, then unbuttoned his fly and cupped his phallus in his right palm and urinated in the middle of the road.

Two years previous Hackberry had seen the same man through a spyglass, in the early dawn at the base of a sunlit mesa, and in that moment had known he was looking at a man who had no category. Hackberry set down his water buckets and walked toward the touring car as the visitor stuffed his phallus back in his fly and buttoned up.

“I have indoor plumbing if you’d like to use it,” Hackberry said.

“Don’t need it,” the man said. He extended his hand. “I’m Arnold Beckman. You may have heard of me.”

Hackberry kept his eyes on Beckman’s and did not raise his hand. “You have business with me?”

Beckman took a handkerchief from his pocket and blew his nose in it. “I understand you’re looking for your son. I think I’ve found him.”

The accent was European, with a tinge of Cockney, as though Beckman had gone to the wrong source to learn English; the aquiline profile was marred by a chain of pitted scars that went down the cheek and onto the neck and into the shirt collar. His skin looked untouched by the sun, a pallid hue in it that was more green than white.

“How would you know anything about my boy?”

“I heard of your situation through your neighbor.”

“You’re a friend of Cod Bishop?”

“I made an inquiry with a United States senator. Your son is in the Fitzsimmons army hospital near Denver. Is it true you were a Texas Ranger?”

“At various times.”

“I’ve been looking for one Ranger in particular. He killed several Mexican soldiers in a bordello, including a general. Splattered them all over the rocks. He also burned a hearse loaded with some merchandise of mine.”

“I hope you find him. This man sounds like a dangerous character. Probably of low morals, too. This happened in a bordello?”

“Are you familiar with the bordello I’m talking about?”

“I try to stay out of them. I already know my son’s whereabouts, Mr. Beckman. I have recently written to him and hope to hear back soon. Thank you for the information regardless.”