House of the Rising Sun (Hackberry Holland 4)

“You’re a handsome woman, but half a dozen like you could have men taking vows of celibacy all over the Western Hemisphere.”

“Go out to the bathhouse and take off your clothes. The girls will heat water. I’ll tell them not to look at you. No one deserves a fate like that.”

“I thought my first wife might be the Antichrist. Shows how wrong a man can be.”

“What did you say?”

“Not a thing. I’m done. I don’t want no more trouble.”

“You don’t think you’re in trouble now?”

“I’ve seen worse. Wes Hardin killed forty-five men. He said he was going to make me number forty-six when he got out of Huntsville.”

“Why didn’t he?”

“A lawman named John Selman put a ball through his eye at the Acme Saloon in El Paso. Hardin had just rolled the poker dice out of the cup. He said, ‘You got four sixes to beat.’ That’s when Selman came up behind him and busted a cap on him. That was the only way he could get him.”

“You wouldn’t have done it that way?” she said.

“No, ma’am, I surely wouldn’t.” He let his eyes hold on hers.

“Go out back and get in the tub,” she said. “We’ll burn your clothes. I have other clothes you can take with you.”

“Who unharnessed the white horses?”

“They were hungry and thirsty.”

“You did?” She didn’t answer. “I didn’t mean that about the Antichrist,” he said.

“Don’t lie.”

Through the front window he could see rain and lighting and dust devils rising off the hardpan, probably harbingers of a monsoon that would cause the desert to bloom and the creeks to swell with mud and driftwood and the willows to lift wetly in the wind like the hair of mermaids. Ishmael, Ishmael, where have you gone? Where is my loving little boy when your father needs you most?

Then he felt ashamed at his self-pity and went outside and did as the woman had told him.

THE GIRLS HEATED the water in buckets on a woodstove next to the tub and poured it gently over his shoulders and head while he lathered himself in the tub with a bar of Pears soap. They seemed to take no notice of his nudity, and he felt no sense of discomfort in front of them. “Do any of y’all speak English?” he asked.

They shook their heads.

“It’s just as well,” he said. “I have nothing of value to impart. My life has been dedicated to Pandemonium. That’s a place in hell John Milton wrote about. That also means I’m an authority on chaos and confusion and messing things up. I am also guilty of the kind of prurient behavior ladies such as yourselves are secretly disgusted by. That said, would one of y’all get me a drink of whiskey or rum, and roll me a tortilla with jerky and peppers in it?”

One of the girls patted him on the head and looked him in the eye. “You sure you don’t want nothing else, viejo?” she said.

“You ladies are full of surprises. Oh, Lordy, yes, I do want something else,” he replied. “I declare, I’d like to take two or three of y’all to a dance hall and hire a band that would serenade you all night. That’s the kinds of thoughts a poor, tattered, wayfaring stranger such as myself is always having. But I’m not going to succumb to temptation, no matter how beautiful and young you are. Plus, I don’t have any money, even though I know that subject would not be of importance in our relationship.”

The girls were laughing among themselves, splashing water on his face and back, pouring more of it over his head. In the distance he could see the sky growing darker and a twister dropping out of a cloud and wobbling like a giant spring across the desert floor in sunlight that was as bright as gold. There was a fatal beauty at work in this cursed land that he would never be able to recapture or describe to others. Mexico was a necropolis where the quick and the dead were inextricably linked on opposite sides of the soil, one always aware of the other. It was a place where killing was lauded, and where peasants wore depressions with their knees in the stone steps of seventeenth-century cathedrals, and where the light was harsher and brighter than it should have been and the colors were so vivid they jittered when you looked at them too long.

The girls brought him unpasteurized milk and tortillas stuffed with green peppers and onions and the pork the Mexicans had cooked. As he gazed at the shade and the rain advancing across the hardpan, cooling and cleansing the land, he felt years of rage and violence seep from his body into the bottom of the tub. He closed his eyes and let the wind touch his face and anoint his brow as though he were reliving his baptism by immersion in the Guadalupe River. He heard a rumble of thunder that could have been mistaken for cannon fire. In truth, he didn’t care if it was. The earth abideth forever, he thought.

He opened his eyes and realized the dust had transformed the sun into a reddish-purple melt, and the bathwater that rose to his chin looked as dark and thick as blood, so sticky in texture he would never be able to wipe it from his skin.

HE DRESSED IN a cotton shirt and denim trousers and a canvas coat and a straw sombrero the woman sent down to the bathhouse, pulled a saddle off a dead Mexican’s horse, and saddled his own. Hail was clicking on his hat when he went to the hearse and opened the side door and looked inside. He saw two Maxim machine guns and crates of Mauser rifles and ammunition. The woman was watching him from the gallery, the wind flattening her long dress against her legs. He closed the door on the hearse and walked up to the veranda.

“I’m fixing to light it up. The bullets will be popping in the heat, but they’re not going anywhere. I’d keep the girls inside nevertheless.”

“Beckman considers that his property. You’re going to burn it?”

“The Huns are arming the Mexicans to stir up trouble so we keep our mind off Europe. I don’t want my boy dying from a gun that’s in that hearse.”