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

not married?”
    “It depends on who you talk to.”
    She looked sideways, then back at him. The room was filled with diners, most of them in evening dress, candles burning inside glass chimneys on their tables. “I’m sure what you just said makes sense to somebody, but it’s lost on me.”
    “I jumped the broomstick with an Indian girl up on the Staked Plains when I was seventeen. I think I got married once in Juárez. That was about the same time I discovered peyote and talking in tongues. I also entered into a couple of common-law situations the state of Texas may not recognize. My last marriage was in front of a preacher, but later my wife said it wasn’t legal because of my other marriages. I got tired of trying to sort it out and wrote the whole mess off.”
    “All those marriages, you wrote them off?”
    “Thinking about it hurts my head. Let’s go out on the beach.”
    “What for?”
    “To talk about our possibilities. You got something else to do?”
    “I don’t like the way you’re talking to me.”
    “What’s wrong with it?”
    “There’s no ‘our’ between us. I’m not a possession.”
    “I bet you could pick up a hog and throw it over a fence. Men rate physical strength in a woman a lot higher than we let on.”
    She looked around at the other tables. “I think someone put you up to this.”
    “If I make a mess, it’s usually of my own doing, Miss Ruby. Let me be honest with you. What you’re looking at is what you get. Unfortunately that means you won’t be getting too much.”
    She put down her fork, blinking. “You behave like you’re not right in the head.”
    “That’s a matter of perspective,” he said. “I never use profanity in front of a woman. I don’t smoke or chew tobacco in the house. What’s mine, I share with the woman who can abide a pitiful wretch such as myself. On occasion I attend services at the New Hebron Baptist Church. I was baptized by immersion in the Comal River on September 8, 1879, by a minister who fought at the Battle of San Jacinto. I was friends with Susanna Dickinson, the only adult white survivor of the Alamo. I read the encyclopedia for one hour every night.”
    “Do you always wear a gun inside your coat?”
    “No, I usually wear it on my hip, at least when I work. I’m not a full-time Ranger anymore. I’m city-marshaling right now. I suspect one day I’ll go back to full-time rangering.”
    “Rangering? Have you killed anyone?”
    “Nobody who didn’t deserve it.”
    “I know a horny old bastard when I see one.”
    “Number one, I’m not old, and number two, I’m not a bastard. I cain’t deny the other part. It’s how human beings get born,” he said. He stood up and removed several bills from his wallet and dropped them on the table. “Are you coming or not? You’re one of the most beautiful creatures I ever saw, Miss Ruby. That’s not a compliment. It’s a natural fact.”
    “A ‘creature’?” she said.
    T HEY WALKED OUT on the beach. She was an erect and tall girl, wearing a full-length dress, sleeves to the wrist, and a short-brim, flat-topped straw hat with cloth flowers sewn on it. She didn’t have a coat but seemed to take no notice of the chill in the wind or the sand that stuck to her shoes and stockings. The sky was maroon and ink-stained, the waves crashing five feet high on the beach, filled with seaweed and tiny crabs and the bluish-pink sacs of Portuguese man-of-wars. In his boots, he could hardly keep up with her.
    “I’d get you your own buggy and horse,” he said. “We can visit San Antonio. Or take a boat to Veracruz and see Mexico.”
    “What would be my obligations?”
    “He’p me run the ranch. Take care of the books. Shoo varmints out of the yard.”
    “Anything else?”
    “I’d like your company. It’s no fun living by myself.”
    “Then why didn’t you keep one of your wives around?”
    He seemed to study the question. “I think the problem is I’ve never had high regard for