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

months ago, I think. In El Paso.”
    “That’s funny, ’cause he died in January. This is November.”
    “That’s probably why the nights are getting right chilly.”
    “I think you’d better get out of here, gringo.”
    “I appreciate your advice. I just wondered about the man you brought in. I think I’ve talked to him before. He seemed like an ordinary fellow to me, not a bandito .”
    “He’s an informer.” The soldier closed the bolt and snapped the firing pin on an empty chamber. He returned the rifle, staring into Hackberry’s face. “An informer for the gringos is what he is, gringos like you.”
    “The man lives in a cave and eats insects. I doubt he’s taken a bath since Noie’s flood. Why be harsh on an afflicted man?”
    The soldier stood up from his chair and stretched. “Maybe we can arrange for you to take his place,” he said.
    H ACKBERRY REMOUNTED HIS horse and crossed the river on a wood bridge that was roped together in sections and seemed about to break apart in the swollen current. The trail was lined with cactus that bloomed with red and yellow flowers; he tried to concentrate on the flowers and the grass growing from the humps of sand and not look back at the village. What good could he do there? He was not the Creator. When you ventured south of the Rio Grande, you learned to accept people as they were or you would be quickly undone by them. Mexico was not a country; it was a state of mind that never changed and was responsible for the blood on many a stone altar. The man who blinded himself to that fact deserved whatever happened to him.
    He was willing to share his food with you, as paltry and stomach-churning as it was.
    “Shut up,” he said to himself.
    His captors are jackals. You know what they’re capable of.
    “They’ll probably turn him loose. He’s of no value to them.”
    You know better.
    “Have it your way,” he said to whomever.
    He turned off the trail and tethered his horse inside a grove of cottonwoods. The morning was cold and smelled of sage and pinyon trees and creosote and the fresh scat of wild animals. He removed the spyglass from his saddlebags and sighted across the top of a sandstone rock at the back of the jail. A man with shackles on his ankles was emptying two buckets of feces into an open ditch. Hackberry focused the spyglass on the barred window in the back wall but could not see into the shadows. He collapsed the spyglass and sat down with his back against the rock and shut his eyes. Then he opened them and looked at the sky. What the hell am I supposed to do?
    His question remained unanswered. A tiny stream ran through the cottonwoods. He drank from it and sat back in the shade and listened to the wind rustling in the leaves overhead. What a grand day it was. He wanted to shed his life as a snake sheds its skin. Of all the iniquity of which human beings were capable, was not betrayal the one hardest to undo? When he experienced these thoughts, he wanted to weep.
    Instead, he again aimed the spyglass at the jail. This time he had no doubt what was taking place with the prisoners. Five of them had filed out of the building, their hands bound behind them. A soldier with a hammer was clanging a large iron bell by the side of the jail to bring the villagers into the street. The last prisoner in the line was Huachinango. The prisoners were motionless, staring at the adobe wall pocked with gunfire, almost all the holes roughly at the same height.
    The priest from the mud-walled church was talking with the soldier Hackberry had let examine his rifle. The priest was obviously pleading. The soldier lifted up a horse quirt and poked him in the chest with it, pushing him backward, jabbing him in the ribs and spine, herding him as he would a hog.
    Hackberry swung up on his horse and leaned forward in the saddle, bringing the heels of his boots hard into the horse’s ribs, the Mauser balanced across the pommel. Just as he turned down the main street, his