House of the Rising Sun (Hackberry Holland 4)

She was unable to speak.

“I’m just kidding,” he said. “Don’t be such a bloody prude. We’re cut out of the same cloth. We’re interlopers. That’s why the people who sit at my table and eat my food and drink my wine hate the pair of us.”

She lowered the receiver, widening her eyes, stretching her face, letting out her breath. She put the receiver to her ear again. “I forgive you for being obnoxious and vulgar, Arnold. I guess you came out of the womb that way. But you’ll never speak to me like that again.”

“That’s my girl. Hang their scrotums on the point of your knife. Now get out there and find your war hero. We have an empire to build, Maggie. I want you to be my queen. You’re an Amazon. Your thighs could span the Strait of Gibraltar.”

She didn’t say good-bye but simply hung the receiver back on the hook and looked at it as though his voice lived inside it. She was wondering if there was such a thing as the human soul. If so, how did one explain the existence of a man like Beckman? And if so, wasn’t her soul already forfeit? Wasn’t it better to believe in nothing than to make oneself miserable trying to solve mysteries the human mind couldn’t fathom? Was not all of mankind adrift on a dark sea, without hope, at the mercy of undercurrents and waves as high as mountains?

Outside, the light had gone out of the sky and a burst of rain-flecked wind blew open one of the French doors, scattering leaves and pine needles on the rug, filling her house with the tang of late autumn and the holiday season. She had never felt more alone in her life.

AFTER ISHMAEL HAD been refused admission at the hospital and the ambulance had left on another call, Ruby had asked a jitney driver to drive her to a different hospital.

“It’s the same all over town. More sick people than beds,” he said.

“What about the army posts?”

“Fort Sam Houston and Camp Travis are quarantined because of influenza. I wouldn’t get near either one of them.”

“There has to be someplace I can take him.”

“I know a clinic,” he said. “It’s not much, but they have medicine.”

He drove them across the river into a bowl-like area dotted with shacks and mud-walled hovels. A dirty haze from the stacks of a rendering plant hung like strips of gauze above the rooftops. The electricity was out on the street where the clinic was located,

and the glass on the oil lamps burning in the foyers was black with smoke; flashlights moved behind the windows.

She gazed at the litter in the open ditches, the privies that were nothing more than a chunk of concrete pipe screwed into a hole, the animal carcasses along the road, a corrugated shed by a stream where clothing was spread on the rocks to dry. “This is the Mexican district?” she said.

“Most of them are wets and don’t bother nobody,” the driver said. “They don’t want to get sent back across the river, if that’s what you’re asking.”

Women in shawls and men’s coats and work shoes, carrying children in their arms or holding them by the hand, were gathered in the foyers. None of them looked injured or sick, simply tired and afraid and confused, as though waiting to be told what to do.

“Why are all these people here?” she asked.

“One of those sleeping cars for gandy dancers got hit by a line of freight cars on the wrong spur. It was one of those three-deckers, about as solid as an orange crate. They’re still bringing them in.”

“Do you know anyone in there? I don’t speak Spanish.”

“Sorry, I got to get back to the depot. That’s where I get most of my fares.”

She rolled down the window. An odor struck her face like a fist.

“Better roll it back up, ma’am,” the driver said. “In back, they burn waste and bandages and things I won’t mention.”

“Pull up in front. You have to help me carry him in.”

“I’m sorry, I have to go.”

“No, you don’t. You brought me here, and you’re not leaving until my son is safely inside. Come around this side and help me lift him up.”

The driver fiddled with his cap.

“Did you hear me?” she said.

“Yes, ma’am,” he replied. “If you can pay me first, please.”

The two of them got Ishmael inside and laid him in a hallway on a wood pallet covered by a blanket and a stained mattress pad. Amid the shadows and the flashlight beams and the press of bodies and people tripping over the patients on the floor and the incessant sound of coughing, Ruby tried to get the attention of anyone who could help. She knelt by Ishmael and formed a tent over him by propping her arms on either side of his shoulders. She twisted her head and tried to speak to the driver. “I’ll stay here. You go find a doctor and tell him—”