House of the Rising Sun (Hackberry Holland 4)

“It’s just a question. You don’t have to act smart.”

“My name is Hackberry Holland and this is my horse, Traveler. I’m a Texas Ranger. He’s not. I’m a citizen. He is not. Is there a town up there where we can get something to eat?”

“Yes, sir, about three miles.”

“Can I come inside my country now?”

“It’s nothing personal, Mr. Holland, but maybe somebody ought to tell you.”

“What’s that?”

“You don’t look half human.”

“That’s because I’m not,” Hackberry replied.

1891

HER NAME WAS Ruby Dansen. Some said her parents came from Amsterdam and died in a circus fire set by the mother. Others said she was a foundling left in a shoe box on a sidewalk in Houston. Hackberry met her in 1890 at a Texas Ranger gathering in a deluxe hotel on Galveston Island, where a drunken United States congressman tried to feel her up and she threw a cherry pie in his face.

“Do you know who that man is, dutchie?” Hackberry asked.

“A potbellied old gink who just cost me my job. Call me ‘dutchie’ again and I’ll give you some of the same.”

He looked her up and down. “Doing anything later?”

That was how it began. She was twenty-two, she said. Then she confessed she was only nineteen. After dinner in the restaurant of the massive hotel on the beach, she changed her mind again and said she wasn’t sure how old she was. She was from either Germany or Denmark. She had been a waitress and a laundress since at least age thirteen. She also cleaned fish in the open-air market by the pier. What else did he want to know?

“You don’t remember where you grew up?” he said.

“What difference does it make? I don’t sell my cuny on Post Office Street, like some others I know.”

“You’re a pretty girl. Why do you want to talk rough like that?”

“What’s being pretty got to do with it? Don’t put on airs. You’re not in Galveston to milk through the fence?”

He gazed out the window at the green waves cresting and breaking on the beach, the foam sliding back into the surf. “I have a ranch up on the Guadalupe. I live there by myself.”

“You’re not married?”

“It depends on who you talk to.”

She looked sideways, then back at him. The room was filled with diners, most of them in evening dress, candles burning inside glass chimneys on their tables. “I’m sure what you just said makes sense to somebody, but it’s lost on me.”

“I jumped the broomstick with an Indian girl up on the Staked Plains when I was seventeen. I think I got married once in Juárez. That was about the same time I discovered peyote and talking in tongues. I also entered into a couple of common-law situations the state of Texas may not recognize. My last marriage was in front of a preacher, but later my wife said it wasn’t legal because of my other marriages. I got tired of trying to sort it out and wrote the whole mess off.”

“All those marriages, you wrote them off?”

“Thinking about it hurts my head. Let’s go out on the beach.”

“What for?”

“To talk about our possibilities. You got something else to do?”

“I don’t like the way you’re talking to me.”

“What’s wrong with it?”

“There’s no ‘our’ between us. I’m not a possession.”