Willard stared into space. “I think one of us ought to run off with the circus.”
FOR ISHMAEL, THE nights and days at Maggie Bassett’s house in San Antonio were not separated by the rising and the setting of the sun but by changes in the chemistry of his body and brain. Fatigue gave way to sleep and a moment’s rest, then a sudden awakening on the Marne, where he found himself running through artillery fire, his legs caught in wet cement, the air bursts illuminating flooded shell holes stained yellow on the rims with mustard gas, dead men floating in them, their bodies bloated, their uniforms splitting on their backs.
The sunrise brought with it a pressure band along the side of his head, as though he were wearing a hat, and a third eye in his vision where ordinary images became part of an alternate universe, one that could easily suck him into its confines if he were not careful. A wrong thought was not a minor concern. One slip and he could find himself inside his third eye, where all bets were off and reason held no sway. He wondered if his brain were no longer attached to his skull.
Maggie brought him breakfast on a tray and opened the curtains so he could look out on the rolling countryside and the gray ruins of a Spanish mission and its two bell towers and the birds that rose from them in the morning and descended in droves at sunset. She washed him and medicated his wounds and changed his bandages. She read to him when he couldn’t sleep, and put an Edison Amberola next to his bed so he could listen to recorded music on a cylinder. She also fixed him ice cream with crushed pineapple on it and insisted on hand-feeding it to him. When his skin burned for no reason, she took a very small pill from a vial and placed it in his mouth and lay by his side and held his hand in hers.
It was the other thing she did for him that he knew he could not live without. To deny his need was foolish; to deny the pleasure he derived from satisfying that need was even more foolish, somewhat like a man on the edge of orgasm telling himself he could be sexually abstemious if he so desired.
He didn’t know what the hypodermic needle contained. She swore it was not morphine, just a harmless powder, a mild antidote to relieve the pain in his legs and the night sweats that soaked his sheets and left him depressed and trembling with cold in the morning, like a child who had wet his bed. She prepared the hypodermic needle twice a day in the kitchen, beyond his line of vision, but he could hear her drag the match across the striker on the box, then he would smell the pleasant odor of burning candle wax and another odor, one that seemed out of context, like someone splashing fireside bourbon into a tumbler.
In preparation for the procedure, she washed her hands with soap and water and disinfectant and always cleaned his skin with rubbing alcohol and a cotton swab before she pricked the vein, the blood rising through the needle into the glass barrel. Then she pushed down the plunger, looking kindly into his face as his mouth opened and his viscera melted.
“Why do I smell whiskey when you load the syringe?” he asked on their third day in San Antonio. He was sitting by the window in a wheelchair woven from straw, thirty minutes after an injection, the sky hung with warm colors that dissolved into one another.
“You don’t like it?”
“I’m just not sure what we’re doing.”
“You’re not a drinker. So I give it to you this way. A little wine for the stomach.”
“How do you know I’m not a drinker?”
“Because you’re nothing like your father.”
“I remember him being a good father when I was little. I never understood why he left us or why he didn’t visit or get in touch.”
“He left you because he’s a selfish, mean, murderous man. That’s not an insult. It’s what he is. Maybe it’s not even his fault.”
“He must have hurt you pretty bad.”
“Your father made me have an abortion. He’s a shit. What else can I tell you about him?”
“My mother said he liked children.”
“Believe what you want.”
“Maybe he didn’t like me,” Ishmael said.
She went into the kitchen and came back with a folded newspaper. She dropped it into his lap. “See what he’s been up to.”
The article about the shooting in the brothel was on the front page. The headline read: WAR HERO KILLED BY EX–TEXAS RANGER. The lead paragraph identified the dead man as a union organizer and a recipient of the Purple Heart and the Medal of Honor who had been horribly burned and disfigured during the Filipino Insurrection. It made no mention of the victim’s arrest record. The shooter was a retired Texas Ranger and former city marshal who had been fired from his job for public drunkenness. His name was Hackberry Morgan Holland. A pistol had been found near the body of the deceased. The investigation was continuing.
“The sheriff will protect your father, so don’t waste your time feeling sorry for him,” Maggie said.
“How do you know?”
“They’re corrupt.”
“Not all of them.”
“When I was a working girl, we had to give free ones. Want some names?”
“No.”
She took the newspaper from his hands and dropped it into a wastebasket. “Would you like to go down to your office today?”
“Which office?”