Thunder and Rain

by Charles Martin

  “I see a strong, beautiful woman who’s struggled a lot and come out the other side still smiling, still laughing, still fighting. I judge a tree by its fruit and your daughter is about the… well, she’s good fruit.”

  She turned away. A whip-poor-will whistled off to my left. “If you ask Hope what she’s dreaming, she can’t answer you.” Several seconds passed. “That’s the toughest thing of all.” I clicked my mouth twice and Cinch headed down the bank. May followed. Sam brought her up alongside me. Our thighs touching every few seconds with the amble of the horses.

  The horses made the river and sunk their muzzles in, sucking deeply. I let them drink. I hopped down, helped Sam off May and we walked along the bank beneath the scrub oaks and weeping willows. A few cottonwoods spiraled above us. I looked at her, letting my eyes walk up and down her. “I’ve seen what a train wreck looks like and you’re not.”

  She leaned against me. “Thank you.” We walked a while. She looped her arm inside mine. It was casual, comfortable. “Any regrets?”

  “Sure. Lots.”

  “Like?”

  A shrug. “By the time I clued in to the fact that Andie had spiraled downward, it was too late. She’d tried to get my attention and I hadn’t given it. So, she found it first in an activity that gave her a sense of value, i.e., spending money like it grew on trees, and then someone.” I tried to laugh. “Every now and then I get a notice telling me I owe money someplace else. Someplace I knew nothing about. Got one last month for a hotel, limo, and bar tab in Manhattan. It’s been two years and they tracked me down. Three thousand and twenty-three dollars. That must have been one heck of a martini.” I shook my head. “Nowadays, I look at the mailbox through one eye, never quite sure what’s inside.”

  She was wearing a button-up white oxford—unbuttoned to the second button. Sweat trickled down. She glanced at my 1911. “Have you shot men with that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are they dead?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you regret that?”

  “No. They were trying to kill me. A few were trying to kill Brodie.”

  “Do you only shoot people to kill them?”

  “No. I shoot them to stop them from threatening me or others. If they die, that’s their problem. If they don’t want to die… well, they should have thought about that before they started being a threat.”

  “It’s simple for you, isn’t it?”

  “Some things.”

  She put her hands on her hips and raised one eyebrow. Her shoulders often moved in unison with the corner of her mouth. A puppeteer controlled both. “Georgia told me you taught her how to shoot.”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, a single woman. Rough past. Running her own business, leaving at night with cash on her. Spending a lot of time afraid. Lots of reasons, I guess.”

  “Will you teach me?”

  I scratched my chin and tried to make light of it. “Given your choice of male companionship, it might be a good idea.”

  She laughed and punched me in the shoulder. “I thought you said you weren’t judging me.”

  “My dad taught me a long time ago that there’s a big difference between being judgmental, and making a judgment.”

  She nodded and tried not to smile. “True.” Her wall was crumbling. “So, you’ll teach me?”

  I turned to her. She was smiling. Sort of bouncing on her toes. “Yes, I’ll teach you.”

  She smiled. “Good.”

  And while I believed she would do well to learn, that it would give her peace of mind and help her take care of herself and protect her daughter, I cannot say with all honesty that is the sole reason I agreed.

  When we got back to the house, Brodie and Hope were sacked out on the couch. Shoulders touching. Finding Nemo was finishing up in the DVD player. I carried Hope to the truck and Sam drove out the drive while I struggled to carry Brodie to his bed. I was tucking the covers around his shoulders when he said, “Daddy?”

  “Yeah, big guy.”

  “Momma called.”

  That would have been the first time in almost a month. I swallowed. “What’d she say?”

  “She was real quiet at first. I think she was crying. She wanted to know how I’d been. Wanted to know how I was doing in school and if I’d grown.” I pushed the hair off his forehead. “Daddy?”

  “Yeah…”

  “I told her you sold the herd and… the Corvette.” He swallowed. “She started crying real hard then. And… I cried, too.”

  “Nothing wrong with crying.”

  He sat up. “I asked her if she was coming home and she said she was moving back to Rock Basin at the end of the month but didn’t know where. Daddy?”

  My voice cracked. “Yes.”

  “Do you cry?” A tear puddled in the corner of my eye, trickled down alongside my nose, around my lips, and hung on my chin. I tried to stop it, but—

  He reached up and it fell into the palm of his hand. He stared at it. Hurt was written all over him. I gritted my teeth. I can protect total strangers from would-be abductors but not my own son. His voice cracked. “You don’t always talk about it but I was wondering if sometimes your insides hurt ’cause sometimes I think they do and you don’t say nothing ’cause you don’t want me to be sad, but if they do then, you can tell me. Okay?”

  I nodded, kissed him and turned out the light. He stopped me at the door. “Daddy?”

  “Yeah, big guy.”

  “I think Momma hurts, too. I heard it in her voice.”

  “I know, son. I know.”

  I walked outside, letting the air fill me and reminded myself how his mother was an addict, that she’d wrecked me financially, that she’d slept with the town doctor, taken from me most everything I held dear, and never once said she was sorry.

  It didn’t help much.

  PART THREE

  Él es muy bueno para cabalgar el río.

  —One Texas Ranger describing another

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Daylight found me outside, hovering over a steaming mug, and staring at the wind vane. I needed to grease it. The wind was coming out of the east, but the vane was angling north. The barn doors were open. A grease spot stared back at me. My car was gone. Goodyear tire tracks were all that remained. I scratched my chest but it didn’t satisfy me.

  Andie was never much of a gardener save one thing: tomatoes. She grew them, and lots of them, with a vengeance. They were an addiction. Out behind the barn, I helped her till an area of ground that was ten rows wide. In it, she staked a hundred tomato plants. I ran PVC pipe from the water tank and put an individual sprayer on each plant. A hundred heads. We even put four plastic owls on stakes at each corner to scare off the crows. For about nine years, we had tomatoes coming out our ears. She gave them to everybody and everybody wanted them. They were sweet, tasted like fruit, and I cannot count on both hands and feet the number of time I’ve seen her pick one, bite into it, and then smile as the juice ran off her chin.

  I walked through the garden. The weeds had taken over. The plants were long gone. The owls had fallen off the stakes. I scratched my head. Scanned what once had been so healthy.

  It was a good picture of us.

  By 9:00 a.m. I’d worked up a pretty good sweat so I did one of the things I love most in this world. I took a shower beneath the windmill. The windmill stands some forty feet in the air and draws water up from over six hundred feet. It’s cold, sweet, and clear. It pumps it up into a holding tank where we use it for irrigation and to water the horses. We used to water cows with it. It stands out from the barn, surrounded in scrub mesquite and shrubs that conceal it. You have to walk around the back to get in through the trees. If you do, and someone is standing under the water, you get a pretty good view of them. Which is exactly what Sam did just moments after I stripped down to my birthday suit and stood below the water. She walked around the corner, put her hand to her chuckling mouth, and stood there st
aring—the other hand on her hip, a big smile across her face. I was rinsing the soap out of my eyes. When I opened them, I found her enjoying the picture of me. Which, incidentally, is not something a woman had done with me for some time. I started looking for my hat. I tried to get a few words out of my mouth but stuttered and stumbled my way through nothing. She crossed her arms and laughed. “I’ll wait. Take your time.”

  I grabbed my hat and held it over my privates. “Don’t you know—”

  “Know what?”

  The water dripped off me. “That you’re not supposed to spy on people when they’re showering.”

  “I’m here for my lesson but this is better, so go ahead. I’ll wait.”

  “Get! Go! I’ll be ’long directly.”

  She eyed the scar on my left leg, leaned in, looked closer. She stood maybe five feet away. “Is that where the guy shot you?”

  I pointed toward the house.

  She turned, took two steps, then looked back over her shoulder with a sneaky grin. “I’m glad to know that the fire didn’t burn everything.”

  She saw my embarrassment, walked right up to me, and patted my shoulder, the water splattering us both. “It’s okay. I know the water’s cold.”

  I shook my head. “You are killing me.”

  She walked off laughing. I shook the water off my hat and found myself mumbling, “Well, it is cold.”

  The range is a few acres on the backside of my property where a dry riverbed runs between two bluffs some twenty feet high. Thirty to forty yards stand between them and they make good berms for a pistol range. I parked the truck, grabbed my bags, and we walked into the middle. I helped her thread a Milt Sparks belt through the loops of her jeans then a BN55, which may be the best holster ever made. I pulled a Les Baer 1911 out of my bag, press-checked it to make sure it was clear, and held it so she could eyeball the empty chamber. “If you ever do this with anyone else, if you ever pick up a weapon, make sure you visually confirm the condition of it. If it’s dark, use your finger.” I lifted her arm out of the way, and slid the pistol into the holster. Then I snapped a magazine holster on her left hip. To her credit, she had quit cracking jokes, which is needed when you start working with guns. I pushed my hat back. “A couple of rules before we get started.” She nodded. “They govern how we do what we do and keep us safe.” She nodded again. The weapon hung high on her hip. “This thing breathes fire, and the second we take it for granted or treat it with less respect than it deserves, it’ll change our lives and not for the better. The two worst sounds in the world are ‘click’ when we’re expecting ‘boom,’ and ‘boom’ when we’re expecting ‘click.’ ” She thought about that and smiled. “So, first, set it in your mind right now that you will treat all guns as if they’re loaded. And I mean all of them. Even if you know they’re not.”

  “Got it.”

  “Two. Never point it at anything you aren’t willing to destroy.”

  She considered this, then another nod.

  I held her hand, separating her index finger from the others. “Three. Do not put your finger on that trigger until you’re on target and ready to fire. In short—on target, on trigger. Off target, off trigger.”

  “Got it.”

  “Lastly, make sure of your target and backstop. Meaning, bullets are made to go through stuff, so if Hope is standing behind the bad man, don’t shoot the bad man. Least, not yet.”

  A final nod.

  “Now, you repeat those back to me.” She did, not word for word, but she got the general idea.

  “What I’m about to teach you are the fundamentals, and fundamentals win fights. ’Cause that’s what you’re doing. You’re learning to fight for your life. These are the ‘X’s and ‘O’s. I operate on the fundamental assumption that if a bad man down the hall has your daughter with a knife to her throat, you’re going to fight. And you’ll fight with a spoon if you have to, but that’s why we’re here. So you don’t have to. If you choose to fight back—and you will—you better do so with more than just a pencil sharpener. A handgun is not the best fighting tool, but it works. So, we’ll learn it. If I know I’m going to a fight, I’m taking a rifle, or a grenade, or a tank, or a nuclear bomb, or a… you get the picture, but for now, let’s stick with handguns. And, lastly, all of this is not a license to become someone else. It’s simply an equipping. But, and here’s where the rubber meets the road, if you do have to use it, then you get mad-dog mean and fight with all you’ve got. Clear?”

  “Clear.”

  “Let’s start with the basics.” I pulled a magazine out of my back pocket and thumbed off a .45 ACP round. “This is what’s called a .45. There are dissertations written about what cartridge is best: 9 millimeter, .40 caliber.” I shook my head. “I’m not getting into all that. This is what you’re shooting today. When you leave here you can choose for yourself. This is what I use.” I explained to her how a cartridge works. Percussion. Combustion. And what happens when the bullet cuts into the rifling of the barrel. Then I explained how the weapon worked. The safety. Trigger. The magazine. Recoil. How the recoil expelled an empty cartridge then loaded a new one off the top of the magazine. She listened intently. Finally, I explained the sights, sight picture—what it should look like, trigger control, and trigger reset.

  I stood next to her, waving my hands over her getup. “I don’t expect you to walk down the hall at three a.m. looking like this but since we’re on a range and we’ve got to figure out how to run a safe range, I have you wearing a holster. That means I’ve got to teach you how to get from holstered to on target.” So, I took her through stance, then the draw stroke. How it works. What it looks like. What a firm final firing grip feels like. How much of her finger actually touches the trigger. Where her left hand should fall in relation to the right.

  Once she’d come to understand, we practiced dry firing several times. I let her draw to the ready, acquire a sight picture, press the trigger, acquire a follow-up sight picture, then I’d cycle the slide—mimicking recoil—then she’d return to ready. She did this several times. With an empty magazine and chamber, the weapon didn’t recoil when she pulled the trigger so I stood to her right, perpendicular to her, put my left hand on her right shoulder and racked the slide with my right hand to simulate recoil.

  An hour in and she began to get comfortable. I gave her a set of ear muffs, loaded several magazines, then taught her how to load and make ready. “Keeping the barrel pointed in a safe direction, which is downrange, and with your trigger finger straight, insert a magazine with your left hand. Flat of the magazine against the flat of the magazine well. Insert vigorously. Roll your left hand over, grabbing the slide between the meet of your thumb and three fingers, careful not to cover up the ejection port, then rack the slide. And this thing is not your friend. Tenderness will get you nowhere here. Rack that thing. Throw it in the parking lot behind you. Then, because your elbow is designed to work in a circular motion, roll your hand back under, reacquire a shooting grip and click the safety up with your right thumb.” She did this. And, as she was not afraid of it, she manipulated it well.

  “Now…” I pointed at the target seven yards away. “Acquire a good sight picture, focus on your front sight, and press the trigger. And listen to me carefully… this is not the movies and neither you nor I are what we see on the movies so don’t slap this thing. Press it. Think about squeezing one drop from an eye dropper. Recoil should be a surprise.” She did. The bullet cut a hole two inches from the center, high left. “Do it again.” She did. An inch from the first, still two inches from the bull. We did this nine times until the slide locked back.

  When it did, she squeezed the trigger but when it didn’t go bang, she spoke out of the corner of her mouth, “What do I do now?”

  “All weapons, no matter how they are fed, will go empty at some point. It’s not bad luck. It’s a function of having been in a fight. So, don’t crap a brick.” She smiled. “Depress the magazine release button right there with your right thumb.�
�� She did. “The old magazine will fall to the ground. Let it. It’s empty.” It did. “With your left hand, insert a magazine out of your pocket, careful to index the top bullet with your left index finger. That way you know which way the magazine is oriented, and since sixty percent of all altercations occur in low, altered, or failing light, you might have to do this in the dark. So, don’t look. Not to mention the fact that you may be in a dog-stomping fight which means you’ve got something to look at so keep your eyes downrange and chin up so you don’t block off your airway.” She took her eyes off it, lifted her chin and stared downrange at the target. She was sweating now and I could smell both her and her perfume. “Then replicate how I taught you to load. Insert it vigorously. Roll your left hand over. Rack it. Then reacquire your grip and get back to work. In short, that sequence is called ‘tap, rack, and attempt to fire.’ ” This she did.

  We ran through seven magazines that way. Not fast, but slow. Focusing each round, each sight picture, each trigger pull independent of the last. After almost a hundred rounds, I told her, “Finger straight, safety on, and return to holster.” She did. “Now shake it out and take a bunch of deep breaths.” She smiled and let out a deep breath that she’d seemed to have been holding since she stepped out of the truck.

  We continued this way throughout the morning. Soon, her target had one giant hole in the center with several strays peppered within a few inches of what was once the center. “Don’t get lazy. Focus each round. It may be your last. You have no guarantee of the next. The last visual control you have is that front sight. Take your time. Focus on it. The last physical control you have is the trigger. Say it out loud if you have to: ‘Front sight. Front sight. Preeeeeessssss.’ Once you send this thing downrange, you can’t take it back. It’s a lot like a word spoken—you better make sure it’s what you want the receiver to hear ’cause once it’s out of your mouth—” I smiled and shook my head.