House of the Rising Sun (Hackberry Holland 4)

“If there is anyone to blame, it’s me, Mr. Holland.”

Hackberry’s eyes were dead, fixed on the minister’s. “Did I say anyone was to blame?”

“No, sir, you didn’t.”

“Hack, we’re going home now,” Ruby said. “Get in the buggy, Ishmael.”

Hackberry dismounted and lifted Ishmael in the air and set him on the saddle, then swung up behind him. He picked up the reins and stared at Ruby. “Think this is a peaceful stretch of country? Bill Dalton and his gang rode down that arroyo across the river not more than one year ago. They robbed the bank at Longview. How’d you like a bunch like that to get their hands on you?”

The blood had drained from around her mouth, to the point that she could hardly open her lips to speak. “Liar,” she said. “Bully and cheap fraud. Murderer with a badge.”

“I’m sorry for this, Mr. Holland,” Levi said.

“You don’t have anything to do with this, Reverend. I told you that,” Hackberry said. “Go back to your biblical studies.”

The minister sat back down at the picnic table, hanging his head, the back of his neck as red as sunburn. Hackberry felt Ishmael twist in the saddle. “Why’s Mommy running away, Big Bud?” he asked. “Why’s everybody mad?”

HACKBERRY’S BELLIGERENCE AND harsh words to the young minister were like an anchor chain he dragged with him through the rest of the day. He had another problem on top of it, one he hated to concede. Of the seven deadly sins, why was it he had to fall prey to the only one that had no trade-off? Unlike other sins, such as lust and gluttony and even sloth, jealousy brought no pleasure and instead, night and day, fed the fires of self-loathing and need and resentment of others. He could not get the minister’s youthful face out of his mind, nor forget the reverential glaze in Ruby’s eyes while the minister read aloud from his Bible.

The next night he rode into town under a sky veined with lightning that made no sound. The saloon was almost empty, its stamped tin ceiling pinging when the wind blew, the polished bar and the creosote-stained floor pooling with light that was the color of lead when trees of electricity exploded against the sky. A man was sleeping on his hands at a poker table in back. The bartender was eating a bowl of pinto beans with a spoon and reading a copy of the Police Gazette. A black man was cleaning the cuspidors with a rag. Dr. Romulus Atwood was standing at the bar, a shot glass of whiskey and a glass of beer in front of him, one pointy-tipped boot propped on the rail. His hand was wrapped with a fresh bandage.

Atwood touched his hat brim with one finger. His coat was pulled back over the pearl handle of a holstered revolver. “Just the man I wanted to see,” he said.

“Get away from me,” Hackberry said.

“I want to talk a business proposition. A smart man don’t let his anger get in the way of his betterment.”

“Who said I’m smart? Stay downwind from me, Atwood.”

Atwood raised his beer glass and stared over the top of it as he drank, his eyes smiling.

Hackberry stood at the end of the bar, by the bat-wing doors, and ordered four fingers of whiskey in a beer mug. The wind filled the room with the smells of rain and ozone. He tilted the mug to his mouth and swallowed until it was empty, his eyes closed, the warmth of the whiskey spreading from his stomach into his viscera and genitals and arms and hands, driving the shadows from his mind, lighting places in his soul that, for good or bad, he seldom visited.

He called the bartender back three times. Maybe he drank half a quart. He wasn’t sure. What did it matter? Was there any greater misery than living in the same home, in constant eye contact, with someone who had come to despise him? How had it happened? The answer wasn’t complex. A young woman might be in need of a father on occasion, but that was not whom she dreamed about. Ruby had found a kindred spirit in the young minister, his fingernails as clean and pink as seashells on the cover of his Bible, his hair tousling in the breeze, his clean-shaven cheeks bladed with color, while at home she had to contend with a man who slept with a gun and believed specters stood by his bedside.

“Looks like you got an edge on, Marshal,” Atwood said, pushing his glass along the bar as he approached Hackberry.

“You still here?” Hackberry said.

Atwood looked over his s

houlder. The bartender had gone to the outhouse. The man sleeping at the table had been taken home by two of his friends. The black man was sweeping the sidewalk outside the bat-wing doors. “I’ll keep it short,” Atwood said.

“Say it and be done, because right now I’m of a mind to shoot you.”

“Maggie’s got snakes in her garden. You know what I mean by that, don’t you?”

Hackberry glanced out the bat-wing doors at the rain blowing in the street. “You seem to be either a slow learner or you have a hearing impairment, Dr. Atwood.”

“I was a special deputy in the Johnson County War up in Wyoming. Two train carloads of us from Texas went up there and got things straightened out. You heard about it?”

“As I recall, you terrorized the countryside and put the small ranchers out of business.”

“What we did was hang cattle rustlers. One of them was named Cattle Kate. That’s where I got over my inhibition.”

“Which ‘inhibition’ is that?”

“About bringing justice to a woman who asked for it—who begged for it.”