House of the Rising Sun: A Novel by James Lee Burke Read Free Book Online

chica? ”
    Hackberry ignored the question and gazed at the three guitarists playing in the shadows.
    “ ¿No le gustan chicas, hombre? ” the bartender said.
    “I came here for the philosophic discussion.”
    “ ¿Que dijo? ”
    “ ¿Quienes son los soldados en la cárcel? ”
    “ Son los protectores del país. Son los soldados de Huerta. Son los guardianes de los prisioneros. ”
    “Huerta’s jackals?”
    The bartender shook his head in warning. “ No hables asi aquí. Los prisioneros son comunistas. ”
    “You’ve got Karl Marx in the jail, have you?”
    The bartender’s eyes were pools of black ink. He set a glass of beer on the bar and poured whiskey in another. Hackberry counted out his coins and pushed four of them toward the bartender with the heel of his hand. “ Salud, ” he said.
    He sat at a table and waited on his steak. As at all saloons and brothels and gambling houses he had ever visited, the mind-set and conduct of the clientele changed only in terms of degree. The meretricious nature of the enterprise and the self-delusion of the victims made him wonder at the inexhaustibility of human folly. Gandy dancers, drovers, saddle tramps, gunmen for hire, prospectors, wranglers, drummers from the East walked through the door of their own volition and allowed themselves to be fleeced until they were broke or until “old red-eye,” as they called the early sun, broke on the horizon.
    But what of his own history? Somehow he had always translated his sybaritic past into memories of beer gardens with brass bands and strings of Japanese lanterns under the stars, or Kansas dance halls and hurdy-gurdy saloons where the girls were young and as fresh as flowers, where a young cowboy could be forgiven for temporarily forgetting his upbringing. The alcohol that boiled in his blood was simply a means of satisfying the pagan that lived in everyone. The men who died in front of his guns were part of an Arthurian tale, not the result of a besotted and childish man’s self-glorification.
    Paradoxically, this kind of introspection took him to one place, a whiskey-soaked excursion into a long black tunnel lit by the fires burning inside him, where he never knew what lay beyond the next bend, where the viscera governed all his thoughts, and violence and enmity always had their way. True, his adversaries were deserving of their fate and their loss was the world’s gain. That was not the problem. The problem was the secret knowledge about himself that Hackberry carried in his breast and never confessed to anyone: Had he not worn a badge, he would have ended his days like the Daltons and the Youngers and Black Jack Ketchum and Bill Kilpatrick and Frank James and all the other bad men who closed down their act on the scaffold or in a weed patch or as caricatures in sideshows.
    He remembered eating the steak in the cantina, the blood mixing with the darkness of the gravy as he sliced it from the bone. He remembered draining a whole bottle of whiskey, and he remembered a girl sitting on his lap while she filled her mouth with his beer and pushed it into his. Maybe he went into a crib with her, maybe not. When he awoke in the middle of the night, he was lying in a pole shed full of manure and moldy hay, his saddlebags under his head, the Mauser rifle cradled in his arms, his throat flaming. He cupped water out of a trough and vomited, the stars blazing coldly in a black sky. He went back into the shed and passed out, too weak and sick to check or even care about the contents of his saddlebags, his coat pulled over his head.
    He had a dream of a kind he had never experienced. In it, he saw the woman named Beatrice DeMolay standing outside the shed, still wearing the dark blue dress with the ruffled white collar. She knelt beside him, placing her palm on his forehead. He tried to get up, but she held him down, her eyes never leaving his.
    Why are you here? he asked.
    Her lips moved silently.
    I don’t know what you’re