House of the Rising Sun (Hackberry Holland 4)

“There is no end of problems with you.”

“Tell Mr. Beckman I’m sorry I missed him. If he wants to come looking for me, I’ll get directions to him.”

This time she had nothing to say. He was discovering that her silence had a greater effect on him than her insults, and he found that thought deeply troubling. He took off his hat, even though hail was still dancing in a white haze on the ground. “For whatever reason, you took mercy on me, Miss Beatrice. I hope the Mexicans don’t hold you accountable for the men I had to kill or the ordnance I’m fixing to set afire. You’re a beautiful woman.” He turned and walked toward the hearse.

“Stop,” she said. She approached him, her hair flecked with ice crystals, her face sharpened by the wind. “Beckman is the most evil man I’ve ever known.”

“All the bad ones seem that way until you punch their ticket.”

“You’ll always be welcome here,” she said, and went back into the house.

If that woman doesn’t know how to set the hook, he thought.

FROM A GULCH he snaked tangles of broken tree limbs that were as hard and smooth and pointy as deer antlers. He crushed them under his boot and stuffed them beneath the hearse, then ripped the curtains and the felt headliner from the interior and packed them inside the branches. He searched under the driver’s seat for a flint striker or the matches needed to light the carriage lamps, and found a box of lucifers. As an afterthought, he decided to make use of a grease-smeared blanket he had seen wedged between a crate of rifles and the side of the hearse. When he tried to lift it, he realized it contained objects that were heavy and metallic and probably ill-suited for carrying in a makeshift sack.

He squatted down and unfolded the blanket and spread it on the ground. Inside it were seven brass candlestick holders and two candelabras and a leather bag of low-denomination Mexican coins and a hinged rosewood box. He opened the box and stared mutely. An artifact lay pressed into a hard cushion of green silk; it resembled a chalice, perhaps one stolen from a church. The impression, however, was illusory. The chalice was actually two goblets that looked made from onyx, both inverted, each base fused to the other. They were encased by a framework of gold bands encrusted with jewels that could have been glass or emeralds and sapphire. The shades of color in the goblets were the strangest he had ever seen in a mineral: dark brown with tinges of black and a subdued yellow luminosity that seemed to have no source. The top goblet was inset with a gold cup.

He picked up the artifact and turned it over in his hands but could see no markings that indicated its origins. He replaced it in the deep pocket that had been formed in the silk cushion and closed the top. On the bottom of the box, someone had carved a small cross and the word “Leon.”

He knew the Mausers in the crates would be coated in packing grease and in need of thorough cleaning before being fired, so he set down the rosewood box and returned to the canyon and picked up a Mauser dropped by one of the dead Mexicans; he also stripped the bandoliers from the body. In the saddlebags of the junior officer he found a spyglass and a bowie knife in a beaded deerskin scabbard and photographs of women in corsets and bloomers, their hair piled on their heads. He found a clutch of letters probably writte

n by family members. He threw the letters and the photographs on the ground and searched the general’s body for the ammunition that went with the Merwin Hulbert. Then he slung the Mauser on his shoulder and put the bowie knife and the spyglass and the Merwin Hulbert and the ammunition and the bandoliers in the saddlebags and walked back to the hearse.

The hail had turned to rain, and the sun had slipped into a layer of cold white clouds that resembled a mythic lake. He slid the wood box and the bag of Mexican coins in the saddlebags, and tied the bags onto his saddle, and set fire to the fuel he had stuffed under the hearse.

As he rode away, he heard bullets popping like strings of Chinese firecrackers in the flames and wondered if the woman was watching him from a window. When he turned in the saddle, the windows in the house were as glossy and impenetrable as obsidian. Maybe in the morning he would find his son’s encampment. Or maybe he would be found by Beckman. Or maybe neither of those events would happen and he would ride all the way to Texas by himself, left to the mercy of his thoughts, a hapless and cynical pilgrim who could neither correct the past nor live with its consequences.

THREE DAYS LATER, at dawn, he and his horse were camped on a ridge overlooking a bowl-like desert glistening with moisture from the monsoon that had swept across the countryside during the night. Hackberry peered through his spyglass at a single column of smoke rising from a campfire at the foot of a mesa where a group of eight or nine men had picketed their horses and slept under their slickers and were now boiling coffee and cooking strips of meat on the ends of sticks. As the blueness went out of the morning and the mesa grew pink around the edges, he could make out the face of each man in the group. He recognized none, but he knew their kind. They were exported from Texas on passenger cars and put to work in the Johnson County War. They ran “wets” across the border and ran them home when they were no longer needed. They were “regulators” or sometimes “range detectives.” In Ludlow, Colorado, they fired machine guns from an armored vehicle into striking miners and asphyxiated women and children in a root cellar for John D. Rockefeller. A professionally charitable person might say their real enemy was modernity. The West had shut down and the party was over. Regardless, the best of them would cut you from your liver to your lights for a bottle of busthead or a roll in the hay with a black girl.

Through the glass Hackberry could see one man who was unlike the others. He was hatless, his hair silvery blond and as long as Bill Cody’s, his features delicate and aquiline, his skin the color of a plant that had been systemically denied light. While the others ate, he seemed to study the outlines of the buttes and mesas and canyons that surrounded the ancient lake bed on which he had camped.

Beckman, Hackberry thought.

His identification of the Austrian arms merchant had nothing to do with a rational process. There were those among us who were made different in the womb, and you knew it the moment you looked into their eyes. They showed no remorse and had no last words before their horse was whipped out from under them beneath a cottonwood tree. They would challenge a mere boy into a saloon duel and gun him down for no other purpose than personal amusement. Their upbringing had nothing to do with the men they became. They loved evil for evil’s sake, and any animal or woman or man or child who ventured into their ken was grist for the mill.

Hackberry heard a skitter in the rocks farther up the ridge. “Who’s up there?” he said.

There was no sound except the wind. He set down the spyglass and walked up the incline to a cluster of boulders below a cave. “You deaf?” he said. He picked up a handful of sharp-edged rocks and began flinging them into the cave, hard, one after another.

“That hurts!” a voice said.

“Come out here and I’ll stop.”

A man appeared in the mouth of the cave, wearing sandals and a nappy black duster without sleeves, his eyes hollow, his head out of round and his face curved inward, like a muskmelon that had gone soft in the field. Hackberry could not remember seeing a more woebegone creature. “Mind telling me who you are and why you’re spying on me?”

“I used to be Howard Glick, of San Angelo, Texas. Now I don’t go by a name. Unless you count the one the Indians give me.”

“What might that be?”

“Huachinango. It’s not complimentary.”

“They call you a redfish?”

“It’s what I look like when I drink. I haven’t figured out what to do about it. You want some grub?”

“What do you have?”

“Grasshoppers. I fry them in oil. I got some fresh diamondback, too.” He looked at Hackberry. “I say something wrong? You’re a mite pale.”