House of the Rising Sun: A Novel (23 page)

“Then you mustn’t refuse me. I’ll be deeply hurt.”

“What are you doing?”

“Closing the door.”

“It’s almost lunchtime,” he said. “Look, I’m being processed out of the army. At my request. When I’m well and released from the hospital, we’ll get to know each other.”

“I told the orderly I’d brought you something. He won’t be back until much later.” She moved the chair in front of the door and pulled the curtain on the window, dropping the room into shadow.

“Miss Bassett, I prefer you not do this.”

She sat in the chair and removed her high-heeled boots, then stood up and undressed with her back to him. She lay down on the bed and pulled the sheet up to her shoulders; she kissed him on the cheek. She slid her hand down his stomach. “Look me in the face and tell me you don’t want me here.” When he didn’t speak, she teased his lips with her finger and touched his teeth. “You resemble both your parents.”

“Miss Bassett—”

“Do this for me, not for you. That will make it all right. You’re a gentleman. That has special meaning for a woman of my background.” She got up on her knees and placed him inside her, her eyes closing, her mouth parting. “Tell me I’m not a bad girl. Tell me I’ve done something good for you, something no one else could do as well. But tell me that only if it’s true.”

It is,
he thought. Then he shut his eyes and felt himself nodding off, floating out of the room to a place where the snow was blowing like cotton candy, where the cigarette trees and lemonade springs beckoned, where childhood and adult love and all the gifts of this world seemed to crest and fold inside him and then burst achingly in a fountain of colored light.

Vaguely, he remembered her placing either her breast or a soft pear in his mouth. Was that what happened? Could you confuse those two images? He drifted into a sleep that was as deep and warm and secure as the sleep of an unborn child suspended inside its mother’s fluids. He wondered if someone had injected him with morphine. As if she read his thoughts, she stroked his forehead to reassure him that no harm would come to him. She was so quiet when she closed the door behind her that he hardly knew she was gone.

When he woke, a half-eaten pear lay on his nightstand.

H
ACKBERRY TRIED TO
put his mind inside Beckman’s but knew it was a waste of time. Beckman traveled across international boundaries at will, hiring and using and discarding people as convenience demanded. If he sent more men onto Hackberry’s property, they wouldn’t be white trash hired out of a saloon. If he used guile, it would be of an intricate kind, the sort that no one saw coming and left people bereft of their dignity and resenting themselves the rest of their lives.

Hackberry had not shown anyone the chalice, if that was what it was. The inlay in the top of the cup, and the metal framework securing it, were obviously gold. The jewels were anybody’s guess. How valuable could it be? Beckman was a businessman about to embark on a new venture, one that involved the sale of arms all over the world. Would he bog himself down in Southwest Texas over a religious artifact, one he was not sure Hackberry had in his possession? It didn’t fit.

And what had happened to the woman at the bordello where the black soldiers had been lynched? She might have been a brothel operator, but Beatrice DeMolay had character, the kind you didn’t acquire by simply sitting in a church house.

Hackberry rolled back the rug in his office and opened the trapdoor that gave access to the underside of the house. The house had been built in 1854, when mounted bands of comancheros showed up unexpectedly in front yards, wearing army coats with no shirts, their silence more piercing than a scream, their deeds of the next few minutes involving flame and prickly-pear cactus and leather thongs and levels of pain an unsuspecting pioneer family previously considered unimaginable. Hackberry reached down and lifted the rosewood box he had wrapped in a piece of canvas, and laid it on top of his desk. He opened the box and stared at the chalice, pressed tightly inside the green satin padding that lined the bottom of the box.

The stars were bright over the hills, the river shining in the darkness. He touched the tips of his fingers to the onyx goblet that held the golden cup. The lines in his fingers seemed to glow on its surface. For some reason he could not explain, he knew that Arnold Beckman represented something much larger than himself, and that Beckman’s mission had somehow intersected with Hackberry’s life for a reason, and that neither of them would ever be the same again.

He closed the box and tilted it upward so he could see the small cross and “Leon” carved in the wood. What was the provenance of the artifact? Mexico was in chaos. Both sides hung trees with corpses; almost every village in the north and the south had an adobe wall scarred with a jagged line of rifle fire. Bolsheviks and American mercenaries down there were as happy as pigs in slop. He knew no one in Nuevo Leon who might know the story behind the rosewood box and its contents.

They were coming, though. He knew this in the same way he had known John Wesley Hardin was coming, that wildfire and dust storms would follow prolonged drought. No matter which way you ran at philosophy or religion, there was no denying that certain individuals would find each other. No matter what they did, there was a magnet that would draw them together, and in an instant they would recognize each other and realize they were more alike than different. They would also recognize that that knowledge would save neither from his fate.

All the lights were off in his house, the windows open, the curtains straightening in the breeze. He wrapped the box in the piece of canvas and took it upstairs and placed it under his bed. He stared through the window at the myrtle bushes in the yard and the heat lightning above the hills and was sure that someone on the hillside, on the far side of the river, was looking at him with binoculars. He took an empty hatbox from a closet and wrapped it in a blanket, then went out to the barn and placed the hatbox and blanket inside a big bucket, along with two bricks, and tied a long piece of clothesline to the bail and walked to the old water well his father had dug by hand in 1859. He lowered the bucket down the brick sides of the well until it swung just above the water’s surface, then cinched the clothesline to the winch.

When he walked back to the kitchen door, he didn’t look to the right or the left, as though confident that no one had been watching.

The next night, when he arrived in Austin, the drought had broken and rain was tumbling on the city like broken crystal from a black sky, the lamps burning brightly atop the bridge over the Colorado River. He wondered if this moment marked a new beginning in his life.

A
RNOLD BECKMAN WAS
staying at the Driskill, a grand hotel on the corner of Sixth Street and Congress. A fete of some kind was in progress, one that attracted hundreds of guests and onlookers who were bunched up at the entrance. Not far away were a magnificent railroad station and City Hospital, the latter remarkable in its own right for its twin spires and ceiling-high windows and ventilated shutters and first-and-second-story wraparound verandas, a Caribbean echo of a more genteel era. The stone-paved street at its back door shone with the dull coppery glow of a rain-streaked alleyway in an Edgar Allan Poe story, although there was little romantic about the two types of vehicles parked on it, namely, motorized ambulances that brought in new cases of Spanish influenza, and the mortuary carriages that transported them to the graveyards where convicts in shackles, with rags tied over their mouths and noses, were forced to bury them.

Not a time to brood,
Hackberry told himself. The Grim Reaper drew his scythe across all; why give him even a minute he had not earned? Time to join the revelers, to clatter the dice out of the cup, to have a talk in public with a man who funded slaughter and gloried in forcing submission on others. There was more than one way to bust a cap.

Hackberry went through the back door into the kitchen and on through a pair of swinging doors into a dining room hung with chandeliers and paneled with hand-carved mahogany. The tables were set with gold plates and silver bowls of water that had flowers floating in them. The men wore tuxedos; the women were dressed in gowns that probably came from New York or Paris. There were barrels of iced-down oysters lined against the wall; the serving tables were loaded with glazed hams, roast beef, smoked duck, pheasant, redfish and speckled trout, and every kind of side dish and dessert. White-jacketed black men worked feverishly at the bar to keep up with the orders. At the head table, up on a dais, sat the guest of honor, Arnold Beckman, dipping his cup into a bowl of champagne punch.

Hackberry sat down in an empty chair at a table in back. A waiter asked him for his order.

“Bourbon and water,” he said.

“Yes, suh. Be right back wit’ it.”

“Tell you what, a rainy evening warrants a cup of tea and a bit of lemon. Can you do that for me?”

“Yes, suh.”

The change of order surprised even him. Why had he done it? When it came to alcohol, he could not be accused of a halfway commitment.

Secretly, he knew. Every drunkard has many moments of shame that live like carpet tacks in his memory, but the one Hackberry could not deal with was his impotence when Harvey Logan had mocked him in front of the café in San Antonio’s brothel district, clattering a dollar on the plank sidewalk, telling him to take a bath. No, it was worse than that, so shameful he couldn’t think about all the details.

The master of ceremonies was introducing Beckman, who was wearing a white suit and a silk shirt as black and lustrous as oil, with tiny purple flowers stitched on the collar, which gave the impression of a man who had no label, no design, no need to be other than what he was. He had fled his own country rather than serve the imperialistic schemes of Kaiser Bill. He had fought the Turks alongside the Anzacs at Gallipoli and helped arm the Bedouins in the desert with T. E. Lawrence. He had been in Russia with the American Expeditionary Forces—with the marines, in fact—and had seen the bloody hand of the Bolsheviks at work, the same group that now threatened to infect the American workforce with their false doctrines.

Beckman listened with one arm placed stiffly on the table, his face lifted, his smile frozen, as though praise made him uncomfortable. Then the master of ceremonies gave him the podium. The bones in his face were like a bird’s, perhaps a hawk’s, but they seemed too small, too delicate, for the martial precision in his speech. A tooth would show when he paused, his expression softening, as though he were suppressing a memory from the war out of courtesy. The blueness in his eyes deepened as he looked into their faces, bonding with them, drawing his energy from the goodness they all shared. His silvery-blond hair hung in strands on his cheeks, as it would on a careless schoolgirl’s. His listeners were enthralled. He was an imp, a hawk sailing on the breeze, an androgynous mix that was unthreatening and reassuring, like a mythic creature rising from an illustration in a book of fairy tales.

The Great War was not over, he said. It was just beginning. When he used the word “war,” his chin had a way of lifting, exposing the chain of scars that dripped down inside his collar. The time to act was now. Do not listen to Wilson about a League of Nations. The Reds were spreading from Mexico into the American West. The federal prison at Yuma was already full of them.

The waiter put a teacup and saucer in front of Hackberry. Beckman finished, and the audience stood and applauded for almost a minute, the floor shaking. Hackberry looked around. Were these people out of their minds?

A few moments later he walked to the dais. Beckman was eating a steak, his elbows out, his wrists bent like hooks when he sliced his meat. He was talking to a woman on either side of him, his gaze never registering Hackberry’s presence.

“How’d you get your scars?” Hackberry asked.

Beckman looked at him. “What scars?”

“The ones you kept reminding us you have.”

“Mustard gas.”

“You manufacture it?”

“Did you bring me something or not, Mr. Holland?”

“I was cooking up a meal in this cave I use as a fresh-air office when two of your fellows tried to give me a bad time. Have they checked in yet? Maybe they found what you’re looking for. By the way, I had to take their guns from them and throw them in the river.”

Beckman wiped his mouth with his napkin. “Did you, now? Your escapades seem to have no end. Would you like to join us?”

“I think not.” Hackberry was wearing a powder-blue sport coat and dark slacks and a plum-colored tie and shined needle-nose boots. “Forgive me, ladies, for disturbing your dinner. Mr. Beckman thinks I have something that belongs to him. He’s not only an arms dealer; he sells to both sides. He also steals from both sides. You know the Spanish expression
sin Dios, sin verguenza
? It means ‘without God or shame.’ Can y’all tell me why a man like him would lay claim to a religious artifact, what he calls a sacramental cup?”

The two women gazed around the room, their faces like dough pans. Beckman dipped his cup in the dredges of the punch bowl and filled it with pink champagne and melting sherbet. He snapped his fingers for one of the black servers to refill the bowl. “Do you want to be escorted out, Mr. Holland?”

“Thanks for the offer. I’ll try to hobble out on my own.”

“You’re a public fool, sir. An object of pity.”

“I cain’t deny it. My boy got blown up on the Marne.”

“Yes?”

“I was told the surgeons took a shovel load of shrapnel out of his legs and side.”

“If you’re telling us the world is a charnel house, you’ve arrived a bit late with the news.”

“What’d you do to the woman at the brothel?”

“I know everything about you, sir. You destroyed your family and ruined your career as a lawman. Take your tattered mantle somewhere else.”

“If I find out you hurt her—”

“Good night, Mr. Holland.”

Beckman resumed talking to the two women as though Hackberry were not there.