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“No, you shouldn’t have those kinds of feelings. I had a good life as a child.”
She leaned down and kissed him on the mouth. One of her tresses fell on his cheek. He thought he smelled lilacs in her hair.
“Did you enjoy that?”
“What am I supposed to say?”
She kissed him on the mouth again, then gazed into his face. “Let me.”
“Let you what?”
“Let me do what I can for you.”
He shook his head on the pillow. “You don’t need to worry about me.”
She stroked his hair. “You’re big and you’re handsome, yet you’re like a little boy.”
“I wish you wouldn’t say things like that.”
“Am I too old?”
“No, ma’am, I don’t think that at all.”
“Then you mustn’t refuse me. I’ll
be deeply hurt.”
“What are you doing?”
“Closing the door.”
“It’s almost lunchtime,” he said. “Look, I’m being processed out of the army. At my request. When I’m well and released from the hospital, we’ll get to know each other.”
“I told the orderly I’d brought you something. He won’t be back until much later.” She moved the chair in front of the door and pulled the curtain on the window, dropping the room into shadow.
“Miss Bassett, I prefer you not do this.”
She sat in the chair and removed her high-heeled boots, then stood up and undressed with her back to him. She lay down on the bed and pulled the sheet up to her shoulders; she kissed him on the cheek. She slid her hand down his stomach. “Look me in the face and tell me you don’t want me here.” When he didn’t speak, she teased his lips with her finger and touched his teeth. “You resemble both your parents.”
“Miss Bassett—”
“Do this for me, not for you. That will make it all right. You’re a gentleman. That has special meaning for a woman of my background.” She got up on her knees and placed him inside her, her eyes closing, her mouth parting. “Tell me I’m not a bad girl. Tell me I’ve done something good for you, something no one else could do as well. But tell me that only if it’s true.”
It is, he thought. Then he shut his eyes and felt himself nodding off, floating out of the room to a place where the snow was blowing like cotton candy, where the cigarette trees and lemonade springs beckoned, where childhood and adult love and all the gifts of this world seemed to crest and fold inside him and then burst achingly in a fountain of colored light.
Vaguely, he remembered her placing either her breast or a soft pear in his mouth. Was that what happened? Could you confuse those two images? He drifted into a sleep that was as deep and warm and secure as the sleep of an unborn child suspended inside its mother’s fluids. He wondered if someone had injected him with morphine. As if she read his thoughts, she stroked his forehead to reassure him that no harm would come to him. She was so quiet when she closed the door behind her that he hardly knew she was gone.
When he woke, a half-eaten pear lay on his nightstand.
HACKBERRY TRIED TO put his mind inside Beckman’s but knew it was a waste of time. Beckman traveled across international boundaries at will, hiring and using and discarding people as convenience demanded. If he sent more men onto Hackberry’s property, they wouldn’t be white trash hired out of a saloon. If he used guile, it would be of an intricate kind, the sort that no one saw coming and left people bereft of their dignity and resenting themselves the rest of their lives.
Hackberry had not shown anyone the chalice, if that was what it was. The inlay in the top of the cup, and the metal framework securing it, were obviously gold. The jewels were anybody’s guess. How valuable could it be? Beckman was a businessman about to embark on a new venture, one that involved the sale of arms all over the world. Would he bog himself down in Southwest Texas over a religious artifact, one he was not sure Hackberry had in his possession? It didn’t fit.
And what had happened to the woman at the bordello where the black soldiers had been lynched? She might have been a brothel operator, but Beatrice DeMolay had character, the kind you didn’t acquire by simply sitting in a church house.
Hackberry rolled back the rug in his office and opened the trapdoor that gave access to the underside of the house. The house had been built in 1854, when mounted bands of comancheros showed up unexpectedly in front yards, wearing army coats with no shirts, their silence more piercing than a scream, their deeds of the next few minutes involving flame and prickly-pear cactus and leather thongs and levels of pain an unsuspecting pioneer family previously considered unimaginable. Hackberry reached down and lifted the rosewood box he had wrapped in a piece of canvas, and laid it on top of his desk. He opened the box and stared at the chalice, pressed tightly inside the green satin padding that lined the bottom of the box.
The stars were bright over the hills, the river shining in the darkness. He touched the tips of his fingers to the onyx goblet that held the golden cup. The lines in his fingers seemed to glow on its surface. For some reason he could not explain, he knew that Arnold Beckman represented something much larger than himself, and that Beckman’s mission had somehow intersected with Hackberry’s life for a reason, and that neither of them would ever be the same again.
