Read House of the Rising Sun: A Novel for Free Online Page B

have a past. I’d like to keep it that way. I’ve been fooling myself.”
    “I hate to tell you this, sir, but your words have a way of zooming right past me.”
    “They find you. No, it finds you. Always. You haven’t learned that? It’s out there.”
    “What is?”
    “ It. ”
    H ACKBERRY SADDLED HIS horse and rode down the far side of the ridge, leaving behind the man who had no name. Within hours, he found himself talking to his horse, a habit he had seen only among prospectors and solitary travelers in the Great American Desert, many of the latter longing for a saloon or a straddle house or the tinkling sounds of a piano to forget that Cain’s mark did not go away easily.
    By sunset, when he saw a village on the edge of a milky-brown river, he was light-headed with hunger and aching from his injuries and the wood-slat military saddle he’d pulled off a Mexican soldier’s horse. He dismounted and walked into the village, his Mauser rifle slung upside down on his shoulder. Then he realized he was witnessing one of those moments that caused people to call Mexico a magical land. The sun had dipped below the hills, but the bottom of the sky remained blue, and the rest of it was mauve-colored and sprinkled with stars. As he entered the main street, he saw people beating drums and dancing with bells on their ankles and wrists and singing in a language he didn’t understand. The children carried baskets of marigolds and chrysanthemums and placed them on an altar by a stone well where the dirt streets of the village converged. Some of the adults wore death masks; others carried poles hung with skeletons made from carved sticks that were painted white and clicked like bones. The air was filled with smoke and the smell of firecrackers and hissing pinwheels and bottle rockets popping in the sky.
    The Day of the Dead, he thought. Is it that late in the season? Do I face the close of another year without the touch of my son’s hand, without the forgiveness that I’ve purchased with years of bitterness and remorse?
    Once again, his thoughts had shifted to himself. He wanted to hide himself in a bottle of busthead and sleep for a week.
    In the torchlight he saw an adobe wall pockmarked by gunfire, a jail where two uniformed soldiers with rifles lounged in a breezeway, a blind woman roasting unshucked corn in a fire, children running through pooled rainwater, a priest in a cassock watching the revelers from the entrance of a mud-walled church, a five-seat merry-go-round pulled in a slow circle by a donkey. Hackberry tilted his hat low on his brow and walked his horse past the jail, trying to keep the dancers between the soldiers and the Mexican cavalry rig on his horse.
    He went down an alley and tethered his horse by an outhouse behind a cantina and untied his saddlebags from the horse’s rump and entered the cantina through the back door, the rifle still on his shoulder. The light from the oil lamps was greasy and yellow, the cuspidors splattered with tobacco juice, the towels in the rings under the bar’s apron grimed almost black. The prostitutes were either middle-aged fat women or teenage girls whose teeth had already gone bad and who sat demurely by the small dance floor as though they were not sure why they were there. The fat women were garrulous and loud and obscene and drunk or deranged, and openly grabbed or fondled men’s genitalia as part of the entertainment. Hackberry took the leather coin pouch from his saddlebags and set it on the bar. The bartender pointed to a sign on the wall. It read NO SE PERMITEN ARMAS .
    Hackberry handed the bartender his rifle. “Whiskey con una cerveza, por favor, ” he said.
    “ Un bebedor serio, ” the bartender said. He had the face of a funeral director and wore a starched white shirt buttoned at the throat without a tie and a black coat that could have been stripped from a scarecrow.
    “ También quiero un filete ,” Hackberry said.
    “ Como usted desee. ¿Quiere una