House of the Rising Sun (Hackberry Holland 4)

“You have the cruelest mouth of any man I’ve ever met.”

“I saw you looking through the mail this morning. I think you read Ruby’s letter. I think that’s what this Longabaugh thing is all about.”

“You left it open on the table. How could I not see it? She’s using the child to extort you.”

“I guess you didn’t read the whole letter. The preacher was hit by a tram. He’s dead. She’s a good young woman who doesn’t deserve the hardships of widowhood.”

“You concede I saved you from destitution, yet you sit at our table, eating the food I prepared for you, and praise the merits of a girl who deserted you when you needed her most. Does that strike you as a bit unusual?”

“Maybe it explains my problems with women. I’ve always been a poor judge of character.”

She threw her glass of sun tea in his face.

HE SLEPT LITTLE that night and woke at dawn and reread Ruby’s letter. She was in Trinidad, Colorado, with Ishmael, working for an organization he had never heard of. He shaved, put on a suit, strapped on a money belt, and wrote Maggie a note:

I hope to be back home in ten days. I have to ensure my son is provided for. I’m sorry about last night. The next time I act in a willful or vain manner, you have my permission to put poison in my food, if you are not already planning to do so. Were you actually involved in a bank robbery? I think one of us is crazy. It’s probably me. Take care.

Your loving husband,

Hack

He tilted his note into the light and reread it, wondering what his words actually meant. How could he communicate with a person who changed personalities the way other people changed their underwear? Sometimes during their most intimate moments, when he was convinced she was not acting, he would look into her eyes and take away only one conclusion: She could hold two contrary thoughts simultaneously with complete comfort. How many men could say that about their wives?

THE TRAIN RIDE to Trinidad took three days and required two ­transfers. It was a strange journey. At dawn, the train entered the Great American Desert, a pre-alluvial world of mesas and dry streambeds that antedated the dinosaurs and remained untainted by the Industrial Age. Far up the track, after sunset, he could see the glow of the firebox when the train arched around a bend, smoke and sparks blowing back from the locomotive, and men the conductor called “hoe boys,” for the grub hoes they carried, running along the tracks, trying to grab a boxcar on the fly. Where did they come from? Why weren’t they ­working and taking care of their families instead of racing on foot, grabbing on to a steel rung that could tear an arm from the socket?

Hackberry had seen mountains before, in Mexico and Southwest Texas, but they were little more than piles of crushed rock compared to the South Colorado Plateau. The peaks of the mountains disappeared into the clouds, their slopes so immense that the forests in the ravines resembled clusters of emerald-green lichen on gray stone. In the early morning, when he stepped down on the platform in Trinidad, the air was as cold and fresh as a block of ice, white strings of steam rising off the locomotive, baggage wagons rattling past him, the streets lit by gas lamps, and behind the city, a mountain as flat-sided and blue as a razor blade soaring straight up into the sky, touching the stars. He felt he had arrived at a place he might never want to leave.

He had telegraphed his arrival time to Ruby but had not asked that she meet him at the station. Regardless, there she was, in a frilly white dress that went to her ankles, a thin pink sash around the waist, a flat-topped, narrow-brimmed straw hat with a black band set squarely on her head. Ishmael was perched on a bench, wearing a suit and a matching cap and shiny black shoes with silver buckles. “There’s Big Bud!” he shouted.

“How you doin’ there, little pal?” Hackberry said. He scooped up Ishmael and bounced him up and down and whirled the two of them in a circle. “My heavens, what a powerful little fellow you are. I declare, you’re a grand little chap. Isn’t he, Ruby?”

She beamed at the two of them, as though a family picture that had broken on the floor had been picked up and glued together and replaced on the nail.

HE SET ISHMAEL down and hefted up his suitcase, the stars still glimmering in a sky that was the color of gunmetal, while down below, at the bottom of Ratón Pass, the dawn was spreading in a yellow blaze across the plateau. “I understand the hotel here has a fine restaurant,” he said.

“We’ve heard,” she said.

Did she mean anything by that? No, he mustn’t have those kinds of thoughts, he told himself. He gazed at the brick-paved streets

by the depot, the vapor rising from the storm drains, the wet sheen on the slate roofs, the aggregate effect of a city built out of rock quarried from the mountains in whose shadows it stood, a smell in the air that bespoke of factories and a new era, one that wasn’t all bad. If you want to restart your life, could you find a better place than this one? a voice whispered inside his head.

“I’m happy you told me where y’all were,” he said. “I hired a detective to find you. You’re a pretty good hider.”

“It wasn’t intentional.”

“I think about you often.”

“You do?”

“Well, of course. Why wouldn’t I?”

“The night Levi was hit by the car—” she began.

“Don’t give misfortune a second life, Ruby.”

“He was using morphine. He said it was for his consumption. That wasn’t true. He was in despair. He called himself an adulterer.”

“He was a widower, and you were a single woman who left the company of an older man, one who never acquired any wisdom about anything. Neither one of you was an adulterer.”