Rain Gods

by James Lee Burke

  Hackberry put on his hat and walked away, forming a pocket of air in one jaw.

  ACROSS THE HIGHWAY, at an open-air watermelon stand, a man wearing black jeans and unpolished black hobnailed boots and wideband suspenders and a Grateful Dead T-shirt, the fabric washed so many times it was ash-gray, sat at a plank table in ninety-six-degree shade, the wind popping the canvas tarp above his head. A top hat rested crown-down beside him on the bench. He carved the meat out of his watermelon rind with his pocketknife and slipped each chunk off the back of the blade into his mouth, watching the scene by the side of Isaac Clawson’s vehicle play itself out.

  When the people across the highway had gone their separate ways, he put on his hat and walked away from the watermelon stand to use his cell phone. His swollen lats and long upper torso and short legs gave him the appearance of a tree stump. A moment later, he returned to the table, wadded up his melon rinds in damp newspaper, and stuffed the newspaper and the rinds in a trash barrel. A cloud of blackflies swarmed out of the barrel into his face, but he seemed to give them little notice, as though perhaps they were old friends.

  8

  THE SALOON WAS old, built in the nineteenth century, the original stamped-tin ceiling still in place, the long railed bar where John Wesley Hardin and Wild Bill Longley drank still in use. Preacher Jack Collins sat in the back against a wall, behind the pool table, under a wood-bladed fan. Through a side window he could see a clump of banana trees, their fronds beaded with drops of moisture that looked as heavy and bright as mercury. He watched the waiter bring his food from a service window behind the bar. Then he shook ketchup and salt and pepper and Louisiana hot sauce on the fried beef patty and the instant mashed potatoes and the canned string beans that constituted his lunch.

  He raised his eyes slightly when the front door opened and Hugo Cistranos entered the saloon and walked out of the brilliant noonday glare toward Preacher’s table. But Preacher’s expression was impassive and showed no recognition of the events taking place around him, not even the arrival of his food at the table or the fact that Hugo had stopped at the bar and ordered two draft beers and was now setting them on the table.

  “Hot out there,” Hugo said, sitting down, sipping at his beer, pushing the second glass toward Preacher.

  “I don’t drink,” Preacher said.

  “Sorry, I forgot.”

  Preacher continued eating and did not ask Hugo if he wanted to order.

  “You eat here a lot?” Hugo said.

  “When they have the special.”

  “That’s the special you’re eating now?”

  “No.”

  Hugo didn’t try to sort it out. He looked at the empty pool table under a cone of light, the racked cues, a hard disk of pool chalk on a table, the cracked red vinyl in the booths, a wall calendar with a picture of the Alamo on it that was three years out of date, the day drinkers humped morosely over their beer glasses at the bar. “You’re an unusual kind of guy, Jack.”

  Preacher set his knife on the edge of his plate and let his eyes rove over Hugo’s face.

  “What I mean is, I’m glad you’re willing to work with me on this problem I’m having with Nick Dolan,” Hugo said.

  “I didn’t say I would.”

  “Nobody wants you to do anything you don’t want to, least of all me.”

  “A sit-down with the owner of a skin joint?”

  “Dolan wants to meet you. You’re the man, Jack.”

  “I have a hole in my foot and one in my calf. I’m a gimp. Sitting down with a gimp is going to make him pay the money he owes you? You cain’t handle that yourself?”

  “We’re gonna take fifty percent of his nightclub and his restaurant. Ten percent of it will be yours, Jack. That’s for the late payment I owed you. Later, we’ll talk about the escort services Nick owns in Dallas and Houston. Five minutes after we sit down, his signature is going to be on that reapportionment of title. He’s a sawed-off fat little Jew putting on a show for his wife. Believe me, you’ll make him shit his pants. Let’s face it, you know how to give a guy the heebie-jeebies, Jack.”

  Hugo salted his beer and drank from the foam. He wore a Rolex and a pressed sport shirt with a diamond design on it. His hair had just been barbered, and his cheeks were glowing with aftershave. He did not seem to notice the tightness around Preacher’s mouth.

  “Where’s the sit-down?” Preacher asked.

  “A quiet restaurant somewhere. Maybe in the park. Who cares?”

  Preacher cut a piece of meat and speared string beans onto the tines of his fork and rolled the meat and string beans in his mashed potatoes. Then he set down the fork without eating from it and looked at the row of men drinking at the bar, slumped on their stools, their silhouettes like warped clothespins on a line.

  “He plans to pop both of us,” Preacher said.

  “Nicholas Dolan? He’ll probably have to wear adult diapers for the sit-down.”

  “You got him scared, and you want him even more scared?”

  “With Nick Dolan, it’s not a big challenge.”

  “Why do cops use soft-nose ammunition?” Preacher asked.

  “How should I know?”

  “Because a wounded or scared enemy is the worst enemy you can have. The man who kills you is the one who’ll rip your throat out before you know he has his hand on you. The girl who blinded me with wasp spray and pumped two holes in me? Would you say that story speaks for itself?”

  “Thought I’d let you in on a good deal, Jack. But everything I say seems to be the wrong choice.”

  “We’re going to talk to Dolan, all right. But not when he’s expecting it, and not because you want to take control of his business interests. We’ll talk to Dolan because you screwed things up. I think you and Arthur Rooney have been running a scam of some kind.”

  “Scam? Me and Arthur? That’s great.” Hugo shook his head and sipped from his beer, his eyes lowered, his lashes long like a girl’s.

  “I paid him a visit,” Preacher said.

  A smile flickered on Hugo’s face, the skin whitening around the edges of his mouth. “No kidding?”

  “He’s got a new office there in Galveston, right on the water. You haven’t talked to him?” Preacher picked up his fork and slipped the combination of meat and string beans and potatoes into his mouth.

  “I broke off my connections with Artie a long time ago. He’s a welcher and a pimp, just like Dolan.”

  “I got the impression maybe you weren’t ’jacking the Asian women for Dolan. You just let Dolan think that way so you could blackmail him and take over his businesses. It was yours and Rooney’s gig from the jump.”

  “Jack, I’m trying to get your money to you. What do I have to do to win your faith? You’re really hurting my feelings here.”

  “What time does Dolan close his nightclub?”

  “Around two A.M.”

  “Take a nap. You look tired,” Preacher said. He started to eat again, but his food had gone cold, and he pushed his plate away. He picked up his crutches and began getting to his feet.

  “What did Artie tell you? Give me a chance to defend myself,” Hugo said.

  “Mr. Rooney was trying to find his finger on the floor. He didn’t have a lot to say at the time. Pick me up at one-fifteen A.M.”

  PETE FLORES DID not dream every night, or at least he did not have dreams every night that he could remember. Regardless, each dawn he was possessed by the feeling he had been the sole spectator in a movie theater where he had been forced to watch a film whose content he could not control and whose images would reappear later, in the full light of day, as unexpectedly as a windowpane exploding without cause.

  The participants in the film he was forced to watch were people he had known and others who were little more than ciphers behind a window, bearded perhaps, their heads wrapped with checkered cloths, cutouts that appeared like a tic on the edge of his vision and then disappeared behind a wall that was all at once just a wall, behind which a family might have been sitting down to a meal.

  Pete had read that the unconscious mind retains a memory of t
he birth experience—the exit from the womb, the delivering hands that pull it into a blinding light, the terror when it discovers it cannot breathe of its own accord, then the slap of life that allows oxygen to surge into its lungs.

  In Pete’s film, all of those things happened. Except the breech was the turret in an armored vehicle, the delivering hands those of a dust-powdered sergeant with a First Cav patch on his sleeve who pulled Pete from an inferno that was roasting him alive. Once more on the street, the sergeant leaned down, clasping Pete’s hand, trying to drag him away from the vehicle.

  But even as broken pieces of stone were cutting into Pete’s buttocks and back, and machine-gun belts were exploding inside his vehicle, he knew his and the sergeant’s ordeal was not over. The hajji in the window looked like he had burlap wrapped around the bottom half of his face. In his hands was an AK-47 with two jungle-clipped banana magazines protruding from the stock. The hajji hosed the street, lifting the stock above his head to get a better angle, the muzzle jerking wildly, whanging rounds off the vehicle, hitting the sergeant in at least three places, collapsing him on top of Pete, his hand still clasped inside Pete’s.

  When Pete woke from the dream the third day in the motel, the room was cold from the air conditioner, blue in the false dawn, quiet inside the hush of the desert. Vikki was still asleep, the sheet and bedspread pulled up to her cheek. He sat on the side of the bed, trying to focus on where he was, shivering in his skivvies, his hands clamped between his knees. He stared through the blinds at a distant brown mountain framed against a lavender sky. The mountain made him think of an extinct volcano, devoid of heat, dead to the touch, a geological formation that was solid and predictable and harmless. Gradually, the images of a third-world street strewn with chunks of yellow and gray stone and raw garbage and dead dogs and an armored vehicle funneling curds of black smoke faded from his vision and the room became the place where he was.

  Rather than touch her skin and wake her, he held the corner of Vikki’s pajama top between the ends of his fingers. He watched the way the air conditioner moved the hair on the back of her neck, the way she breathed through her mouth, the way color pooled in her cheeks while she was sleeping, as though the warmth of her heart were silently spreading its heat throughout her body.

  He did not want to drink. Or at least he did not want to drink that day. He shaved and brushed his teeth and combed his hair in the bath room with the door closed behind him. He dressed in a clean pair of jeans and a cotton print shirt and slipped on his boots and put on his straw hat and carried his thermos down to the café at the traffic light.

  He put four teaspoons of sugar in his coffee and ate an order of toast spread with six plastic containers of jelly. A Corona beer sign on the wall showed a Latin woman in a sombrero and a Spanish blouse reclining on a settee inside an Edenic garden, marble columns rising beside her, a purple mountain capped with snow in the background. Down the counter, a two-hundred-pound Mexican woman with a rear like a washtub was bent over the cooler, loading beer a bottle at a time, turning her face to one side, then the other, each time she lowered a bottle inside. She wiped her hands on a dish towel and removed Pete’s dirty plate from the counter and set it in a sink of greasy water.

  “Those bottles pop on you sometimes?” he asked.

  “If the delivery man leaves them in the sun or if they get shook up in the case, they will. It hasn’t happened to me, though. You want more coffee?”

  “No, thanks.”

  “There’s no charge for a warm-up.”

  “Yes, ma’am, I’ll take some. Thank you.”

  “You put a lot of sugar in there, huh?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “You want me to fill your thermos?”

  He’d forgotten he had brought it with him, even though it stood right by his elbow. “Thanks, I’m good,” he said.

  She tore a ticket off a pad and put it facedown by his cup. When she walked away, he felt strangely alone, as though a script had been pulled preemptively from his hands. He could hear the bottles clinking inside the cooler as she resumed her work. He paid the cashier for his coffee and toast, and gazed out the front door at the sun lighting the landscape, breaking over arid mountains that seemed transported from Central Asia and affixed to the southern rim of the United States.

  He walked back to the service counter. “It’s gonna be a hot one. I might need one of those singles with lunch,” he said.

  “I don’t have any cold ones,” the Mexican woman said.

  “I’ll put it on top of the air conditioner at the motel,” he said. “Fact is, better give me a couple.”

  She put two wet bottles in a paper bag and handed them to him. The top of Pete’s shirt was unbuttoned, and the woman’s eyes drifted to the shriveled tissue on his shoulder. “You was in Iraq?”

  “I was in Afghanistan, but only three weeks in Iraq.”

  “My son died in Iraq.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s six-thirty in the morning,” she said, looking at the bottles in his hand.

  “Yes, ma’am, it is.”

  She started to speak again but instead turned back to her work, her eyes veiled.

  He walked back to the motel and stopped by the desk. Outside, he heard an eighteen-wheeler shifting gears at the traffic light, metal grinding. “We got any mail?” he said to the clerk.

  “No, sir,” the clerk said.

  “What time does the mailman come?”

  “Same time as yesterday, ’bout ten.”

  “Guess I’ll check by later,” Pete said.

  “Yes, sir, he’ll sure be here by ten.”

  “Somebody else couldn’t have misplaced it, stuck it in the wrong box or something?”

  “Anything I find with y’all’s name on it, I promise I’ll bring it to your room.”

  “It’ll be from a man named Junior Vogel.”

  “Yes, sir, I got it.”

  Outside, Pete stood in the shadow of the motel and looked at the breathtaking sweep of the landscape, the red and orange and yellow coloration in the rocks, the gnarled trees and scrub brush whose root systems had to grow through slag to find moisture. He slapped a mosquito on the back of his neck and looked at it. The mosquito had been fat with blood and had left a smear on his palm the size of a dime. Pete wiped the blood on his jeans and began walking down the two-lane road that looked like a displaced piece of old Highway 66. He walked past the miniature golf course and angled through the abandoned drive-in theater, passing through the rows of iron poles that had no speakers on them, row after row of them, their function used up and forgotten, surrounded by the sounds of wind and tumbleweed blowing through their midst.

  He walked for perhaps twenty minutes, up a long sloping grade to a plateau on which three table sandstone rocks were set like browned biscuits one on top of another. He climbed the rocks and sat down, his legs hanging in space, and placed the bag with the two bottles of beer in it by his side. He watched a half-dozen buzzards turning in the sky, the feathers in their extended wings fluttering on the warm current of air rising from the hardpan. Down below, he watched an armadillo work its way toward its burrow amid the creosote brush, the weight of its armored shell swaying awkwardly above its tiny feet.

  He reached into his pocket and took out his Swiss Army knife. With his thumb and index finger, he pulled out the abbreviated blade that served as both a screwdriver and a bottle opener. He peeled the wet paper off the beer bottles and set one sweating with moisture and spangled with amber sunlight on the rock. He held the other in his left hand and fitted the opener on the cap. Below, the armadillo went into its burrow only to reappear with two babies beside it, all three of them peering out at the glare.

  “What are you guys up to?” Pete asked.

  No answer.

  He uncapped the bottle and let the cap tinkle down the side of the rocks onto the sand. He felt the foam rise over the lip of the bottle and slide down his fingers and the back of his hand and his wrist. He looked back over his shoulder and could make out the screen of the drive-in movie and, farthe
r down the street, the steak house and beer joint where Vikki had used another last name and taken a job as a waitress, the money under the table. He wiped his mouth with his hand and could taste the salt in his sweat.

  At the foot of the table rocks, the polished bronze beer cap seemed to glow hotter and hotter against the grayness of the sand. It was the only piece of litter as far as he could see. He climbed down from the rocks, his beer bottle in one hand, picked up the cap, and thumbed it into his pocket. The armadillos stared up at him, their eyes as intense and unrelenting as black pinheads.

  “Are you guys friendlies or Republican Guard? Identify yourself or get shot.”