Charlie Hustmyre: House of the Rising Sun

In the bedroom, she sat on the bed and stared at the telephone on the nightstand. Only then did she realize she didn’t even know how to get in touch with Ray. Someone had told her he was living out by the marina, in one of those boathouse apartments, but she didn’t know his telephone number, or even if he had a telephone. It would be just like him not to have a phone. He wasn’t exactly a people person.

She called the House just for the hell of it and was surprised when someone answered. It was one of the bartenders, stuck there waiting for a delivery. After a few minutes he managed to find Ray’s cell number. She wrote it down on a notepad beside her telephone. She hung up and looked at her alarm clock. It was 8:15. Her eyes shifted from the clock to the notepad. Then to the cordless phone in her hand. Then back to the clock.

It was too early to call Ray. He was probably just getting to bed. She needed sleep, too. Noon, she decided. She would wake up and call him at noon. It wasn’t that urgent. Tony had probably been talking just to hear his own voice.

When Jenny woke up, the first thought she had was that last night had been a bad dream. Just another nightmare. Then she remembered. Everything had been real. Gunmen had taken down the Rising Sun. One of them had bashed Ray in the head and nearly put a bullet in his skull. Tony had knocked Ray around. Then a cop had knocked Ray around. And Tony was blaming everything on Ray.

Jenny sat up. She had to call him. The glowing green numbers on the clock showed 12:05 PM. She picked up the telephone, glanced at the scratchpad on the nightstand, then dialed Ray’s number.

The shrill ring of his cell phone jerked Ray out of a nightmare. He had been tied up, hanging from the ceiling in a meat locker, a couple of goons about to go to work on him with carving knives. He had no idea why it was happening or what he had done to piss them off. The goons wouldn’t say. They couldn’t say. Neither had a face, just blank skin pulled over bone.

For a few seconds after the first ring, Ray was caught in that gray area between sleep and wakefulness, but was still conscious enough to realize he was home in bed and not hanging from the ceiling of a meat locker. He was glad for that.

The cell phone shrieked again. Ray looked for it. He couldn’t find it. Then it screamed again. He spotted it on the overturned beer crate he used for a bedside table. He fumbled for it and knocked it on the floor just as it rang again.

Finally, he got the phone in his hand. For a moment he was disoriented, not sure how to answer it. He didn’t get many calls. The only reason he even had a phone was so he could order pizza.

The phone rang again.

Ray punched the green send button. He jammed the phone against his ear. “Yeah?”

Nothing.

He was about to hang up when Jenny Porter’s voice said, “Ray?”

Ray’s head was pounding. “What do you want?”

“How are you feeling?”

“I was asleep until you called.” He didn’t tell her about the dream, about how he was glad the phone had woken him up.

“I thought you’d be awake by now.”

He looked at his watch. It was just past noon. “I am now.”

Several seconds of silence. Then Jenny said, “When did you get in?”

He eased his throbbing head back onto the pillow and closed his eyes. “Ten o’clock.”

“Why so late?”

Ray rested his free hand on his forehead. The pounding was so loud he thought Jenny could hear it through the phone. “Why do you think?”

Again, silence on the other end. Then Jenny said, “That’s what I need to talk to you about.”

“I don’t want to talk.”

“But, Ray-”

“Jen, I’m tired and my head hurts. I’ve got to work tonight and I need some sleep.”

“I’ve got work, too, goddamn it. I called because I need to tell you something.”

“I work on my feet. You work on your back.”

The telephone clicked in his ear as she hung up.

Ray reached toward the overturned crate and grabbed his half-empty pack of Lucky Strikes and his Zippo. He shook out a cigarette and stuck it between his lips. It took four flicks before he got the lighter to work. He had to remember to get a new wick. As he touched the sputtering flame to the end of the cigarette and sucked in a lungful of smoke, Ray closed his eyes and waited for the rush. He started coughing instead.

It took a minute for his hacking to subside enough so he could catch his breath, and when he finally pulled some fresh air into his lungs, they felt like they were on fire. Eventually, he managed to suck in enough air to spit a glob of phlegm into the wastebasket next to the bed. Then he took another deep drag on the Lucky Strike. It was always good to get that first coughing fit out of the way.

What the hell did Jenny want? Why was she always trying to talk to him? Whatever it was, he didn’t want to talk about it. He had nothing to say to her, and he didn’t want to hear anything she had to say to him. The past was the past. It didn’t have any effect on the future unless you let it.

Sitting quietly in his manmade darkness, smoking his cigarette, Ray heard the sound of rain striking the tin roof of the boathouse just outside. He crawled out of bed and treaded across the room. He flicked his ashes on the bare wooden floor on his way to the window. Since he worked at night and slept during the day, one of the few changes Ray had made to the boathouse apartment had been to pull down the gossamer-thin curtains and nail up a thick blanket in their place. He needed darkness to sleep.

Ray pulled the blanket aside and looked out the window. A hard rain was falling. He glanced out at the choppy brown water of Lake Pontchartrain. Then at the gray sky. Far away on the horizon, the two melded so seamlessly it was impossible to tell where one ended and the other began. When he had gone to bed, the sun had been out and the storm clouds were just beginning to roll in. He thought about how his father had been right-Red sky at morning, sailor take warning.

Just below the window was the back half of the boathouse. The tin roof stretched out fifteen feet toward the lake and had a slight downward slope. Ray stared at the rain as it pounded the corrugated tin. The water ran down the slope in evenly spaced rivulets, then shot off the edge of the roof, plunging ten feet into the New Orleans Yacht Club marina below.

In the kitchenette, Ray pulled a glass from the cabinet. He tossed in some ice, then filled it from a half-empty bottle of Jameson that stood on the counter. He had seen the clock, it was after twelve, and by anyone’s standards it was a decent hour to start drinking.

He took a sip and felt the Irish whiskey burn the back of his throat as it slid down. Two hours wasn’t nearly enough sleep, but he didn’t have to work until ten o’clock tonight. Plenty of time to watch a football game, have a few drinks, then take a nap. Things would probably be tense at the House for a while, but eventually they would cool down. Some of the mob’s tough guys would figure out who took the place down, and they would play catch-up. You didn’t rob the fucking Mafia and get away with it. It just wasn’t done.

Ray had more immediate problems. His TV remote was missing. After crawling around for a few minutes, he found it under the bed. Even though his apartment was more or less a dump, he had a nice television. A thirty-two-inch plasma with a built-in DVD player. It sat on two beer crates next to the door. He didn’t believe in TV stands. You watched the TV, not the stand.

Working for wiseguys had advantages. He had gotten the television brand-new, in the box, for a hundred bucks. One of those items that fell off the back of a truck. Cable was something else. Ray couldn’t afford it, but his neighbor could. A buddy who used to work at Radio Shack had hooked Ray up with a homemade digital converter. All Ray had to do was cut into his neighbor’s cable and splice in a signal splitter, and he had all the channels in digital hi-def. Including the premium movie package.