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It wasn’t over. Sick and hungover, he followed her outside as she and Ishmael got into her hired carriage. Unable to control his despair, repelled by the funk in his clothes and the stink of his breath, he waved his arms lunatically in the middle of the road. Inside the dust, he saw Ishmael looking back at him from the carriage seat, his mouth forming an “O” that made no sound.
Nor was Hackberry done two hours later when he saddled his horse and rode to the train depot and saw the locomotive and string of boxcars and two Pullman sleepers and a caboose head out of the station into a wide bend by a river where cottonwoods shaded the tracks. Like the pitiful fool he was, he spurred
his horse along the tracks, whipping it with the reins, ignoring the wheeze in the animal’s lungs, the labored effort over rocks as sharp as knives. He didn’t give it up until he had blown out his horse, one he loved, and was left standing by the tracks, his horse heaving on its side, its tongue out, the train disappearing between hills in the middle of which a rainbow arched out of the sky, as though heaven and earth were mocking him in his defeat.
He pulled loose the marshal’s badge from his shirt and flung it into the deepest part of the river, then sat down on a rock and wept.
HIS INSOMNIA AND depression and lassitude and devotion to whiskey went on for a year. Ruby sent him a postcard from New York City. On the postcard was an artist’s sketch of a Ferris wheel and the pier at Coney Island. The card read, “It’s not your fault, Hack. A leopard cannot change its spots. I hope you are well—Ruby.” At Christmas she mailed him a photograph of her and Ishmael, who was sitting on her knee in a sailor suit. There was no inscription on the photo and no note in the envelope. Nor was there a return address. The minister had left town three weeks after Ruby did, destination unknown. A parishioner said, “I never saw a man go downhill so fast. You’d think Old Nick was riding on his shoulder.” Hackberry contracted a private investigation agency in Brooklyn. The investigative report read:
A woman named Ruby Dansen worked briefly as a cook in a foundling home located in the Five Points area. Her companion, name unknown, was apparently a consumptive who sold bread rolls door-to-door. He claimed to be a minister but was asked not to visit the foundling home, lest he infect the children with his illness. Ruby Dansen often had a child with her. Supposedly Irish hooligans in her building tried to extort her wages and she beat one of them nearly to death with a piece of iron pipe.
Three months ago she did not show up for work. Neither she nor her companion nor her child has been seen since.
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Hackberry got put in jail twice on drunk and disorderly charges and sank into all the solipsistic pleasures of dipsomania, a state of moral insanity that allowed him to become a spectator rather than a participant in the deconstruction of his life. Also, if he wished, he could visit the path up Golgotha without ever leaving his home. Who needed nails and wooden crosses and the Roman flagella and the spittle of the crowd when an uncorked bottle of mescal or busthead whiskey was close by? The normalcy of the elements, a restful night’s sleep, rising to meet a new day, the journey of the sun from east to west, all of these were replaced by delirium tremens, flashes of light behind the eyes, blackouts, obscene memories, and a thirst in the morning as big as Texas.
Abnormality became his norm. The man he once knew as Hackberry Holland mounted his horse, bade the world a fond farewell, and went somewhere else. The wretch he left behind was hardly recognizable. The aforesaid were the words he used to describe his own descent into the abyss, as though he took solace in being the architect of his own destruction.
That was when Maggie Bassett came back into his life. She threw out his whiskey and cleaned and scrubbed his house and washed his clothes and put his employees on a regular schedule and balanced his books and wrote letters of goodwill to friends he thought he had lost. She cooked for a bunkhouse full of men, broke hardpan prairie with a single-tree plow, bucked bales and gelded and branded his livestock, and in calving season shoved her hand up to the armpit in a cow’s uterus with the best of them. She took credit for little and did not demean or judge, and when his mind finally cleared, he admitted she had probably saved him from the asylum or drowning facedown in a mud puddle behind a saloon.
There was only one problem about living with Maggie Bassett: In his wildest imaginings, he could not guess what went on in her head. He suspected it would take two or three centuries to decipher who she was—in large part because she didn’t know, either.
Seven months after Maggie moved into the house, Hackberry received a letter from Ruby Dansen. He read it, put it back in the envelope, and set it on a table in the living room. He said nothing of the letter to Maggie. That evening, at dinner, Maggie said, “I have a confession to make.”
“What’s that?”
“I helped rob a bank.”
“You were bored and the Dalton gang needed an extra hand?”
“You know who Harry Longabaugh is?”
“A tall, self-important pissant with a lopsided head who never had a job other than slopping hogs? Calls himself the Sundance Kid?”
“Harry is handsome and a gentleman. I had the good fortune to know him several years ago. ‘Know’ in the biblical sense,” she said. “How do you like that?”
His pale blue eyes were flat, his mouth dry. “At Fannie Porter’s cathouse in San Antonio?”
“No, Harry and I went to the opera together, then to a very elegant restaurant, Mr. Smarty-Pants. He asked if I’d ever stopped a train or a held up a bank. He said you really hadn’t lived till you’d stuck a gun in a bank president’s face or blown open a safe full of John D. Rockefeller’s money.”
“You did not rob a bank, Maggie. Do not mention robbing banks to me again. Do you understand me?”
“I was trying to be honest with you. I saw Harry on the street yesterday. I don’t think he saw me. I just wanted you to know.”
He set down his knife and fork. “You saw him here?”
“His back was to me. Harvey Logan was with him. Believe me, it was Harvey. Nobody ever forgets Harvey Logan.”
He picked up his knife and fork again, his forearms resting on the edge of the table. “I don’t believe you.”
“I don’t care if you do or not.”
“You think I’m jealous of a man like Longabaugh? I wouldn’t cross the street to watch a rabid dog rip out his throat.”
“Did you know your knuckles are turning white?”
“Because I’m wondering if I’m married to a crazy woman. Have you heard what cowpokes say about the women at Fannie Porter’s brothel? ‘Their homeliness is never held against them.’ You take pride in knowing the clientele of a place like that?”
