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“Stop the presses.”
He wiped his nose and scratched his arms. “You have some brandy?”
“In the cabinet,” she said.
“I feel sick, Maggie. I can’t help it.”
He stared at the back of her neck, waiting for her to reply, his heart rate increasing, his breath growing more ragged. The Brits called it the black monkey. But it didn’t just climb on your back. It turned its fleas loose on your skin and crawled inside you and clawed at your connective tissue, spreading a pervasive itch over your entire body, inside and out, even on your tongue. He wanted to scrub himself with a wire brush.
He went back into the living room and sat on the couch, a hot coal eating its way through his stomach. “Maggie?” he called.
She came to the kitchen doorway, steak fork in hand. “Decide what you’re going to do?”
“I don’t have any memory of leaving the hospital. I feel like I have holes drilled in my memory.”
“Count yourself lucky. You should have seen the basket cases in the open ward.”
“I didn’t have to see them. I soldiered with them.”
She went back into the kitchen. He squeezed his wrists, first one, then the other, as though trying to shut down the malaria-like sickness flowing through his veins. A moment later, he heard her sigh and the tinkle of the steak fork striking the bottom of the sink. He felt her weight on the couch, smelled the odor of cooking in her clothes.
“There’s a price for everything,” she said.
“Price of what?”
“You became an army officer and enjoyed the pleasures of your rank. You paid the cost in France. I was nineteen and treated like the queen at Miss Porter’s whorehouse. I enjoyed it, too. Now I dream about every degenerate I helped degrade my body. You and I let others use us because we had no power. Once you accept that, you make a choice. You use your intelligence and never let
anyone hurt you again. You also get even.”
“What’s Beckman after?”
“Control of the world, probably. How would I know? People are driven by their vices, not their virtues, Ishmael. Why climb up on a cross about it?”
“I’m going to have a brandy.”
“You can do it that way if you want.”
“What other way is there?”
“I used opium and laudanum for years. Now I don’t. When you don’t need it anymore, you put it aside. You think you can’t go without it now, but I think you can.”
“Does Beckman’s interest in me have something to do with an arms deal in Mexico? With the lynching of my men?”
“Arnold’s only interest is making money. Forget about Mexico and whatever happened there. They were killing each other on stone altars before the Spaniards ever arrived.”
“I’m coming apart, Maggie.”
“Tell me what you want to do. You want to lie down with me? You want me to do anything for you? Think of me as your movable feast.”
“I don’t know what I want,” he said, his voice strange, removed from the person he thought he was. “I don’t know who I am. I want a drink of brandy. Just a little. To take the edge off.”
“With soda or ice or straight up?” she said.
RUBY DANSEN WOKE at dawn in the chair car and looked out the window and saw zebras and giraffes and white horses and at least four elephants in a field, down by a smoking river, men in rolled shirtsleeves flinging armloads of hay from a flatbed wagon. Was she dreaming? The train rounded a bend and passed a grove of bare cottonwoods. The animals slipped out of view, clouds of white fog thicker than ever on the fields and river.
A soldier wearing a peaked campaign hat was standing in the aisle, close by her chair. He bent down and pulled a blanket up to her chin. “I put this on you,” he said. “It’s right chilly. You can sleep some more, and I’ll bring you some coffee.”
“Ishmael?” she said.
