Rain Gods

by James Lee Burke

Still no response.

  Pete reached for the bottle of beer on top of the rocks, then approached the burrow. The adult armadillo and both babies scurried back inside.

  “I tell you what,” he said, squatting down, a bottle in each hand. “Anybody that can live out here in this heat probably needs a couple of brews a lot worse than I do. These are on me, fellows.”

  He poured the first beer down the hole, then popped off the cap on the second one and did the same, the foam running in long fingers down the burrow’s incline. “You guys all right in there?” he asked, twisting his head sideways to see inside the burrow. “I’ll take that as an affirmative. Roger that and keep your steel pots on and your butts down.”

  He shook the last drops out of both bottles, stuck the empties in his pockets, and hiked back to town, telling himself that perhaps he had just walked through a door into a new day, maybe even a new life.

  At ten A.M. exactly, he went down to the motel office just as the mailman was leaving. “Did you have anything for Gaddis or Flores?” he said.

  The mailman grinned awkwardly. “I’m not supposed to say. There was a bunch of mail for the motel this morning. Ask inside.”

  Pete opened the door and closed it behind him, an electronic ding going off in back somewhere. The clerk came through a curtained doorway. “How you doing?” he said.

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Sorry, I didn’t see nothing in there for y’all.”

  “It’s got to be here.”

  “I looked, believe me.”

  “Look again.”

  “It’s not there. I wish it was, but it’s not.” The clerk studied Pete’s face. “Your rent is paid up for four more nights. It cain’t be all that bad, can it?”

  THAT NIGHT VIKKI took her sunburst Gibson to work with her and played and sang three songs with the band. The next morning there was no mail addressed to her or Pete at the motel office. Pete used the pay phone at the steak house to call Junior Vogel at his home.

  “You promised Vikki you were gonna pick up my check and send it to us,” he said.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “You damn liar, what’d you do with my check? You just left it in the box? Tell me.”

  “Don’t call here again,” Junior said, and hung up.

  AT TWO A.M. Nick Dolan watched his remaining patrons leave the club. He used to wonder where they went after hours of drinking and viewing half-naked women perform inches away from their grasp. Did their fantasies cause them to rise throbbing and hard in the morning, unsated, vaguely ashamed, perhaps angry at the source of their dependency and desperation, perhaps ready to try an excursion into the dark side?

  Was there a connection between what he did and violence against women? A female street person had been raped and beaten by two men six blocks from his club, fifteen minutes after closing time. The culprits were never caught.

  But eventually, out of his own ennui with the subject, Nick had stopped thinking about his patrons or worrying about their deeds past or present, in the same way a butcher does not think about the origins and history of the gutted and frozen white shapes hanging from meat hooks in his subzero locker. Nick’s favorite admonition to himself remained intact and unchallenged: Nick Dolan didn’t invent the world.

  Nick drank a glass of milk at the bar while his girls and barmaids and bartenders and bouncers and janitors said good night and one by one went outside to their cars and their private lives, which he suspected were little different from anyone else’s, except for the narcotics his girls often relied upon.

  He locked the back door, set the alarm, and locked the front door as he went out. He paused in front of the club and surveyed the parking lot, the occasional car passing on the four-lane, the great star-strewn bowl of sky overhead. The wind was balmy blowing through the trees, the clouds moonlit; there was even a promise of rain in the air. The .25 auto he had taken from his desk rested comfortably in his trousers pocket. The only vehicle in the parking lot was his. For some reason the night struck him as more like spring than late summer, a time of new beginnings, a season of tropical showers and farmers’ markets and baseball training camps and a carpet of bluebonnets and Indian paintbrush just over the rise on the highway.

  But for Nick, spring was special for another reason: No matter how jaded he had become, spring still reminded him of his youthful innocence and the innocence his children had shared with him.

  He thought of the great green willow tree bending over the Comal River behind his property, and the way his children had loved to swim through its leafy tendrils, hanging on to a branch just at the edge of the current, challenging Nick to dive in with them, their faces full of respect and affection for the father who kept them safe from the world.

  If only Nick could undo the fate of the Thai women. What did the voice of Yahweh say? “I am the alpha and omega. I am the beginning and the end. I am He who maketh all things new.” But Nick doubted that the nine women and girls whose mouths had been packed with dirt would give him absolution so easily.

  He walked across the parking lot to his car, watching the tops of the trees bend in the wind, the moon like silver plate behind a cloud, his thoughts a tangled web he couldn’t sort out. Behind him, he heard an engine roar to life and tires ripping through gravel down to a harder surface. Before he could turn around, Hugo’s SUV was abreast of him, Hugo in the passenger seat, a kid in a top hat behind the wheel.

  “Get in, Nick. Eat breakfast with us,” Hugo said, rolling down the window.

  A man Nick didn’t know sat in the backseat, a pair of crutches propped next to him.

  “No, thanks,” Nick replied.

  “You need to hop in with us, you really do,” Hugo said, getting out of the vehicle and opening the back door.

  The man who sat in back against the far door was watching Nick in tently now. His hair was greased, the part a neat gray line through the scalp, the way an actor from the 1940s might wear his hair. His head was narrow, his nose long, his mouth small and compressed. A newspaper was folded neatly in his lap; his right hand rested just inside the fold. “I’d appreciate you talking to me,” the man said.

  The wind had dropped, and the rustling sounds in the trees had stopped. The air seemed close, humid, like damp wool on the skin. Nick could hear his pulse beating in his ears.

  “Mr. Dolan, do not place your hand in your pocket,” the man said.

  “You’re the one they call Preacher?” Nick asked.

  “Some people do.”

  “I don’t owe you any money.”

  “Who said you did?”

  “Hugo.”

  “That’s Hugo, not me. What are you carrying in your pocket, Mr. Dolan?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Don’t lie.”

  “What?”

  “Don’t be disingenuous, either.”

  “I don’t know what that word means.”

  “You’ll either talk to me now, or you’ll see me or Bobby Lee later.”

  “Who’s Bobby Lee?”

  “That’s Bobby Lee there,” Preacher said, indicating the driver. “He may be a descendant of the general. You told Hugo you wanted to meet me. Don’t demean yourself by pretending you didn’t.”

  Nick could hear a brass band marching through his head. “So now I’ve met you. I’m satisfied. I’m going home now.”

  “I’m afraid not,” Preacher said.

  Nick felt as though a garrote were tightening around his chest, squeezing the blood from his heart. Face it now, when Esther and the kids aren’t with you, a voice inside him said.

  “You say something?” Preacher asked.

  “Yeah, I have friends. Some of them are cops. They come here sometimes. They eat free at my restaurant.”

  “So where does that leave us?”

  Nick didn’t have an answer. In fact, he couldn’t keep track of anything he had said. “I’m not a criminal. I don’t belong in this.”

  “Maybe we can be friends. But you have to talk to me first,” Preacher said.

  Nick set his jaw and stepped inside the SUV, then heard th
e door slam behind him. The kid in the top hat floored the SUV onto the service road. The surge of power in the engine caused Nick to sway against the seat and lose control of the safety strap he was trying to snap into place. Preacher continued to look at him, his hazel eyes curious, like someone studying a gerbil in a wire cage. Nick’s hand brushed the stiff outline of the .25 auto in his side pocket.

  Preacher knocked on his cast with his knuckles. “I got careless,” he said.

  “Yeah?” Nick said. “Careless about what?”

  “I underestimated a young woman. She looked like a schoolgirl, but she taught me a lesson in humility,” Preacher said. “Why’d you want to meet me?”

  “Y’all are trying to take over my businesses.”

  “I look like a restaurateur or the operator of a strip joint?”

  “There’s worse things.”

  Preacher watched the countryside sweeping by. He closed his eyes as though temporarily resting them. A moment later, he reopened them and leaned forward, perhaps studying a landmark. He scratched his cheek with one finger and studied Nick again. Then he seemed to make a decision about something and tapped on the back of the driver’s seat. “The road on the left,” he said. “Go through the cattle guard and follow the dirt track. You’ll see a barn and a pond and a clapboard house. The house will be empty. If you see a car or any lights on, turn around.”

  “You got it, Jack,” the driver said.

  “What’s going on?” Nick said.

  “You wanted a sit-down, you got your sit-down,” Hugo said from the front passenger seat.

  “Take the pistol out of your pocket with two fingers and put it on the seat,” Preacher said. Half of his right hand remained inside the fold of the newspaper on his lap. His mouth was slightly parted, his eyes unblinking, his nose tilted down.

  “I don’t have a gun. But if I did, I wouldn’t give it to you.”

  “You’re not a listener?” Preacher said.

  “Yeah, I am, or I wouldn’t be here.”

  “You were planning to shoot both me and Hugo if you could catch us unawares. You treated me with disrespect. You treated me as though I’m an ignorant man.”

  “I never saw you before. How could I disrespect you?” Nick replied, avoiding Preacher’s initial premise.

  Preacher sucked on a tooth. “You attached to your family, Mr. Dolan?”

  “What do you think?”

  “Answer my question.”

  “I have a good family. I work hard to provide for them. That’s why I don’t need this kind of shit.”

  “You true to your vows?”

  “This is nuts.”

  “I believe you’re a family man. I believe you planned to take out me and Hugo even if you had to eat a bullet. You’d eat a bullet for your family, wouldn’t you?”

  Nick felt he was being led into a trap, but he didn’t know how. Preacher saw the confusion in his face.

  “That makes you a dangerous man,” Preacher said. “You’ve put me in a bad spot. You shouldn’t have done that. You shouldn’t have patronized me, either.”

  Nick, with his heart sinking, saw the driver’s eyes look at him in the rearview mirror. The tips of his fingers inched away from the outline of the .25 to the edge of his pocket. He glanced at Preacher’s right hand, partially inserted inside the folded newspaper. The paper was turned at an angle, pointed directly at Nick’s rib cage.

  The SUV turned off the service road and passed through a break in a row of slash pines and thumped across a cattle guard onto farmland spiked with weeds and cedar fence posts that had no wire on them. Nick could see moonlight glowing on a pond, and beyond the pond, a darkened house with cattle standing in the yard. He folded his arms on his chest, burying his hands in his armpits to stop them from shaking. The driver, Bobby Lee, looked at Nick in the mirror again, a dent in each of his cheeks, as though he were sucking the saliva out of his mouth.

  “I knew it’d come to this,” Nick said.

  “I don’t follow you,” Preacher said.

  “I knew one of you bastards would eventually blindside me. You’re all the same—black pukes from the Desire, Italian punks from Uptown. Now it’s an Irish psychopath who’s a hump for Hugo Cistranos. None of y’all got talent or brains of your own. Every one of you is a pack animal, always figuring out a way to steal what another man has worked for.”

  “Do you believe this guy?” the driver said to Hugo.

  “I don’t steal, Mr. Dolan,” Preacher said. “But you do. You steal and market the innocence of young women. You create a venue that makes money off the lust of depraved men. You’re a festering sore in the eyes of God, did you know that, Mr. Dolan? For that matter, you’re an abomination in the eyes of your own race.”

  “Judaism isn’t a race, it’s a religion. That’s what I’m talking about. All of you are ignorant. That’s your common denominator.”

  Bobby Lee had already cut the headlights and was slowing to a stop by the pond. The open end of the newspaper in Preacher’s lap was still pointed at Nick’s side. Nick thought he was going to be sick. Hugo pulled open the back door and ran his hand along Nick’s legs. His face was so close that Nick could feel Hugo’s breath on his skin. Hugo slipped the .25 auto from Nick’s pocket and aimed it at the pond.

  “This is a nice piece,” he said. He released the magazine and worked the slide. “Afraid to carry one in the chamber, Nicholas?”

  “It wouldn’t have done me any good,” Nick said.

  “Want to show him?” Hugo said to Preacher.

  “Show me what?” Nick said.

  Preacher tossed the newspaper to the floor and got out on the other side of the vehicle, pulling his crutches after him. The newspaper had fallen open on the floor. There was nothing inside it.

  “Tough luck, Nicholas,” Hugo said. “How’s it feel to lose to a guy holding a handful of nothing?”

  “Bobby Lee, open up the back. Hugo, give me his piece,” Preacher said.

  “I can take care of this,” Hugo said.

  “Like you did behind that church?”

  “Take it easy, Jack,” Hugo said.

  “I said give me the piece.”

  Nick could feel a wave of nausea permeate the entirety of his metabolism, as though he had been systemically poisoned and all his blood had settled in his stomach and every muscle in him had turned flaccid and pliant. For just a moment he saw himself through the eyes of his tormentors—a small, pitiful fat man whose skin had become as gray as cardboard and whose hair glowed with sweat, a little man whose corpulence gave off the vinegary stink of fear.

  “Walk with me,” Preacher said.

  “No,” Nick said.

  “Yes,” Bobby Lee said, pressing a .45 hard between Nick’s shoulder blades, screwing it into the softness of his muscles.

  The cows in the yard of the farmhouse had strung shiny green lines of feces around the pond. In the moonlight Nick could see the cows watching him, their eyes luminous, their heads haloed with gnats. An unmilked cow, its swollen udder straining like a veined balloon, bawled with its discomfort.

  “Go toward the house, Mr. Dolan,” Preacher said.

  “It ends here, doesn’t it?” Nick said.

  But no one spoke in reply. He heard Hugo doing something in the luggage area of the SUV, shaking out a couple of large vinyl garbage bags and spreading them on the carpet.

  “My family won’t know what happened to me,” Nick said. “They’ll think I deserted them.”

  “Shut up,” Bobby Lee said.

  “Don’t talk to him that way,” Preacher said.

  “He keeps sassing you, Jack.”

  “Mr. Dolan is a brave man. Don’t treat him as less. That’s far enough, Mr. Dolan.”

  Nick felt the skin on his face shrink, the backs of his legs begin to tremble uncontrollably, his sphincter start to give way. In the distance he could see a bank of poplars at the edge of an unplowed field, wind flowing through Johnson grass that had turned yellow with drought, the brief tracings of a star falling across the sky. How did he, a kid from New Orleans, end up here, in this remote, godforsaken piece of fallow land in South Texas? He closed
his eyes and for just a second saw his wife standing under the colonnade at the corner of St. Charles and Canal, raindrops in her hair, the milky whiteness of her complexion backlit by the old iron green-painted streetcar that stood motionless on the tracks.

  “Esther,” he heard himself whisper.

  He waited for the gunshot that would ricochet a .25-caliber round back and forth inside his brainpan. Instead, all he heard was the cow bawling in the dark.

  “What did you say?” Preacher asked.