House of the Rising Sun (Hackberry Holland 4)

“I’ll talk to them.”

“You’ll talk to them? I have their scratches all over me. I can feel their breath on my skin. The one named Jack put his tongue on my appendix scar. Ask him, you son of a bitch, and see what he says.”

Then she hung up and began drawing her nails down her breasts and arms and shoulders and thighs, her eyes closed, her chin lifted, as though she were at prayer or offering up a sacrifice on an altar dedicated solely to her.

ISHMAEL LAY ON his side on the cot, his eyes still taped, the cool, damp, moldy odor of stone surrounding him, comforting and restorative in its way, a touch of a netherworld that contained no pain. Another blessing had come to him, one he had not anticipated. Either through fear or stress or physical exhaustion, or maybe surrender to his fate, his body seemed purged of the withdrawal symptoms that were the plague of every intravenous addict. The nausea and night sweats were gone, and so were the flashes of light behind the eyes, the heart palpitations, the shortness of breath, the vertigo, the ache in the joints and the fire in the connective tissue, the premonitions of doom, the conviction that a fissure was opening under one’s feet.

Maybe all these things would return. But at the moment, t

hey were gone, and he breathed the smell of the stone that reminded him of the cave across the river from his father’s ranch and a time in his life when spring was eternal and bluebonnets and Indian paintbrush covered the riverside. Something else had occurred that he could not explain, a dream or a moment on the edge of sleep that he associated with hope and a belief that he was not alone, no matter the degree of adversity imposed upon him.

During the rainstorm, he had drifted off, and inside the darkness, he saw himself as a little boy standing in front of a hill that was struck by lightning. But the lightning did not disappear with the strike. It gathered into a churning ball and rolled up a grassy slope and exploded on a tree that was cruciform in shape, setting it afire. The radiance it gave off was as bright as liquid gold and so intense it made his eyes water. Then he saw his father walk into the light and kneel in the grass and gather his son in his arms.

When Ishmael woke, he didn’t know where he was. “Big Bud?” he said to the darkness.

“Who?” Jeff replied.

“Didn’t mean to bother you,” Ishmael replied.

“Bother me? You’re the one with the problem, kid.”

That was no longer the case. The man named Jessie had gone away, then had returned to the basement, hardly able to speak, making gargling sounds and spitting into a tin bucket.

“What the hell happened to you?” Jeff said.

“She rammed a fucking hat pin down my throat, that’s what.”

“Who did?”

“That crazy Dansen bitch.”

“Why did you let her do that?”

“Let her? You think I let her? I swallowed a pint of blood. I’m lucky she didn’t put out my eyes.”

“You let her get away?”

“What’s with you? Are you listening? Have you ever got stabbed through the mouth? She tried to pack a hat pin down my throat. It had a knob on it big as a walnut.”

“You don’t look so bad. Quit whining.”

“Whining? You said whining?”

“She saw your face?”

Jessie gargled and spat again. Ishmael could smell whiskey and hear it slosh in the bottle.

“It was dark in the room,” Jessie said. “She couldn’t see my face. I’m sure of it. I knocked her on her ass, too.”

“What’s Mr. Beckman say?”

“Nothing. He didn’t say nothing.”

“Sounds like you messed up proper. Been good knowing you, Jess.”

Jessie gargled and spat again, his throat choking up. “You backstabbing son of a bitch.”

Ishmael closed his eyes behind the cotton pads, the animus of the two men no longer his concern, the image of his father embracing him amid the green softness of the hillside as real as the cool air he breathed into his lungs.