Rain Gods

by James Lee Burke

  “I don’t get your point.”

  “My grandfather was an honest lawman. He did some things that bothered his conscience, but you don’t judge a person by one episode or event in his life, and you don’t judge people categorically, either. Ethan Riser is a good man.”

  “You really were an ACLU lawyer.”

  Hackberry removed his hat and ran a comb through his hair. He could feel his gun belt biting into his hips. “Put it on pause, will you, Pam?”

  “Say again?”

  “That must be the convenience store yonder,” he said.

  They parked and introduced themselves to the assistant manager. He had the manic look and behavioral manner of someone who might have spent his life inside a windstorm. His description of Bobby Lee Motree was not helpful. “You tend to forget what people look like when they’re waving a pistol in your face,” he said.

  “You don’t happen to have the surveillance tape, do you?” Hackberry said.

  “Them FBI people took it.”

  “Have you ever seen Pete Flores?”

  “Who?”

  “The kid who left the beer on your counter and took off. The one with the long scar on his face.”

  “No, sir. I can tell you one thing about him, though. That boy can flat haul ass.”

  “How’s that?”

  “After the weirdo with the gun drove off, I went out back looking for the kid with the scar. I saw him there on the other side of the road in the moonlight, his shirttail flying, heading due north. He went over the top of a rail fence like he had wings on.”

  “Did you get the weirdo’s tag number?” Hackberry asked.

  “There was mud smeared on it.” The assistant manager lifted up a baseball bat and dropped it on top of the counter. “The next time I see that guy, I’m gonna park his head over Yellow House Peak. Them FBI people are gonna be hauling off a man with no head.”

  Hackberry and Pam got back in the cruiser, the air conditioner running, the sun white and straight overhead. “Where to?” Pam asked.

  “Danny Boy Lorca said Pete told him he’d met a guy at an A.A. meeting who tried to kill him,” Hackberry said. “How many A.A. meetings are held on a given night in a rural area like this?”

  “Not many. Maybe one or two,” she said.

  “You ever attend one?”

  “My mother did.”

  “Let’s go back to that last town.”

  She pulled out on the road, blowing gravel off the back tires. “I’ve never seen you drink,” she said.

  “What about it?”

  “I thought maybe you went to A.A. meetings at one time or another.”

  “No, I just don’t drink anymore. When people ask about it, that’s what I tell them. ‘I used to drink, but I don’t anymore.’”

  She looked across the seat at him, her eyes unreadable behind her shades. “Why’d you quit?”

  There was a taste like pennies in his saliva. He rolled down the window and spat. He wiped his mouth and stared at the countryside sweeping by, the grass on the hillsides brown and bending in the wind, a cattle truck parked by a turnout where a historical marker stood, the cattle bawling in the heat. “I quit because I didn’t want to be like other members of my family.”

  “Alcoholism runs in your family?”

  “No, killing people does,” he said. “They killed Indians, Mexicans, gunmen, Kaiser Bill’s heinies—anyone they could get in their sights, they blew the hell out of them.”

  She concentrated on the road and was silent a long time.

  At the intersection of the county and state highways, Hackberry used a pay phone to call the regional hotline of Alcoholics Anonymous. The woman who answered said that only one meeting was available in the area on the night Hackberry asked about. It was held in a white frame church house just north of the intersection where Hackberry was calling from.

  “There’re some early-bird meetings. I also have a schedule for Terlingua and Marathon, if you don’t mind driving a piece,” she said.

  “No, I think the one at the church is the one I’m interested in. That’s the only one here’bouts on Tuesday nights, right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Who can I talk to there?”

  “Anybody at the meeting.”

  “No, I mean right now.”

  “You think you’re going to drink?”

  “I’m an officer of the law, and I’m investigating a multiple homicide Hello?”

  “I have to think about what you just told me.” There was a short pause. “I finished thinking about it. Thanks for calling the A.A. hotline. Goodbye.” The line went dead.

  Hackberry and Pam drove through town and found the church on the east side of the state highway. A rail of a man was hammering shingles on the roof, his denim shirt buttoned at the throat and neck against the heat, his armpits dark with sweat, his knees spread like a clamp on the roof’s spine. Pam and Hackberry got out of the cruiser and looked up at him, trying to shield their eyes from the glare.

  “You the pastor?” Hackberry called up.

  “I was when I got up this morning.”

  “I’m looking for a young man named Pete Flores. Maybe he attended an A.A. meeting here.”

  “I wouldn’t know,” the man said.

  “Why not?” Hackberry said.

  “They don’t use last names.”

  “I’ve got a picture of him. Mind if I come up?”

  “Doubt if it’ll do any good.”

  “Why not?”

  “I let them use the building, but I don’t go to their meetings, so I’m not real sure who attends them.”

  “Give me the picture, Hack. I’ll take it up,” Pam said.

  “I’m fine,” Hackberry said. He mounted the ladder and climbed steadily up the rungs, his neutral expression held carefully in place as a bright red fire blossomed in the small of his back. He worked the photo Ethan Riser had given him out of his pocket and handed it to the pastor. The pastor studied it, his uncut hair stuck like wet black points on the back of his neck.

  “No, sir, I never saw this fellow at my church. What’d he do?” said the pastor.

  “He’s a witness to a crime and may be in danger.”

  The pastor looked at the photo again, then handed it back to Hackberry without comment.

  “You said you never saw him at your church.”

  “No, sir, I haven’t.”

  “But maybe you saw him somewhere else.”

  The pastor took the photo back, his face starting to show the strain of squatting on the roof’s slant. “Maybe I saw a kid in a filling station or up at the café. He wasn’t in uniform, though. He had a scar on his face. It looked like a long drop of pink wax running down his skin. That’s why I remember him. But the soldier in this picture don’t have a scar.”

  “Think hard, Reverend. Where’d you see him?”

  “I just don’t recall. I’m sorry.”

  “You ever hear of a woman here’bouts who likes to sing country spirituals in nightclubs or beer joints?”

  “No, sir. But you must do mighty interesting work. Let me know if you ever want to trade jobs.”

  BOBBY LEE’S FRUSTRATION with events and with Liam’s weather-vane personality was starting to reach critical mass. It was Liam’s truck that had broken down on the state highway, forcing them to call for a tow to a shithole with one restaurant and one mechanic’s shop. It was Liam who had left vinyl garbage bags spread all over the bottom of his camper shell, causing the mechanic to ask if they were trying to get a jump on deer season. It was Liam who had droned on and on about how Bobby Lee had screwed up at the convenience store, his eyes as self-righteous and mindless as a moron’s, his tombstone teeth too large for his mouth.

  They were in a booth at the back of the restaurant, Liam’s gym bag by his foot, a change of clothes and a shaving kit and the cut-down shotgun zipped inside. They were waiting for the mechanic’s brother-in-law to drive them forty-five miles to the motel where Bobby Lee’s SUV was parked under the porte cochere.

  “If you hadn’t pulled your piece on a nerd in a convenience store, we wouldn’t be having this problem,” Liam said. “We co
uld be using your vehicle instead of mine. I told you I had transmission trouble last week. You can’t get information out of a nerd without sticking a gun up his nose?”

  “I didn’t pull my piece. You got that? It fell out of my belt. But I didn’t pull it deliberately, Liam. How about giving it a rest?”

  The waitress brought their food and poured more water in their glasses. They stopped speaking while she tended to the table. She set a basket with packaged crackers between them, then retrieved salt and pepper shakers from another table and set them by the basket. Bobby Lee and Liam waited. She loomed over them, her big shoulders and wide hips and industrial-strength perfume somehow shrinking the space around them.

  “You guys want anything else?” she asked.

  “No, we’re good here,” Bobby Lee said.

  “I need some steak sauce,” Liam said.

  Bobby Lee smoldered in silence until the waitress brought a bottle of A.1. to the table and went away.

  “What are you so heated up about?” Liam asked.

  “Take off that hat.”

  “What for?”

  “It’s stupid. It looks like a woman’s.”

  Liam stuffed a complete slice of white bread in his mouth and chewed it with his mouth open.

  “We got to have an understanding, Liam. I trusted you when I told you maybe Preacher has got to go off the board. I got to know we’re on the same wavelength here. I can’t have you bitching me out all the time.”

  “You don’t like to hear the truth, that’s your problem.”

  Outside, the sun was red on the horizon, dust rising off the hills in a brown nimbus. Bobby Lee felt as though someone had stuck a metal key into the base of his neck and wound up his nerve endings as tightly as piano wire. He started to eat, then set down his fork and stared emptily at his plate.

  He had played the whole deal wrong. Liam was not to be trusted or confided in; he was a whiner who scapegoated his friends. But if Liam wasn’t a bud, who was? Who was the purist in their midst? Who was the guy who did the work less for the money than for the strange visions that seemed to crawl across the backs of his eyelids?

  “Looks like you’re doing some heavy thinking,” Liam said.

  “You think I blew it for us at the convenience store, that I should have handled it different, that I should have let the soldier take off on me and not even go inside.”

  “I thought you said to drop it.”

  “I just want you to put yourself in my place and tell me what you would have done, Liam.”

  “When this is over, we’ll both get laid. I got a couple of discount coupons from Screw magazine.” Liam waited, grinning idiotically.

  Bobby Lee looked into Liam’s eyes. They were a translucent blue, their moral vacuity creating its own kind of brilliance, the pupils like dead insects trapped under glass. They were the eyes of a man to whom there was no significant reality beyond the tips of his fingers.

  “When this is over, I’m going back to college. My sister has a house in Lauderdale. I’m gonna take her kids to Orlando,” Bobby Lee said.

  “Everybody says that, but it doesn’t work that way. Can you see yourself selling shoes to old guys in Miami Beach with smelly socks?”

  “I’m studying to be an interior decorator.”

  But Liam wasn’t listening. His attention had shifted to a man and woman who were sitting at a booth by the entrance to the restaurant.

  “Don’t turn around yet, but check out John Wayne over there,” he said. “I’m not kidding. From the side, he looks just like Wayne. He’s even got Calamity Jane with him. She must be his traveling punch. Who said western movies are dead?”

  14

  THE AIR-CONDITIONING WAS turned up full-blast in the restaurant, fogging the bottoms of the windows. Hackberry and Pam had taken a booth close to the front counter. Family people were eating dinner in the back section, which was separated from the front by a latticework partition decorated along the top with plastic flowers. A church bus pulled up in front, and a throng of preteens came in and piled into the empty booths. Workingmen were drinking beer at the counter and watching a baseball game on a flat-screen television high on the wall. As the sun set on the hills, the interior of the restaurant was lit with a warm red glow that did not subtract from its refrigerated coolness but only added to its atmosphere of goodwill and end-of-the-day familiality.

  Hackberry put his hand over his mouth and yawned and stared at the menu, the words on it swimming into a blur.

  “How’s your back?” Pam asked.

  “Who said anything about my back?”

  “Back pain saps a person’s energy. It shows in a person’s face.”

  “What shows in my face are too many birthdays.”

  “Do you know we covered a hundred square miles of Texas today?”

  “We might do twice that tonight.”

  “I think they’re in Mexico.”

  “Why?”

  “Because that’s what I would do.”

  “Vikki Gaddis might. Pete won’t.”

  The waitress returned to the table and took their order and went away. Pam sat stiffly in the booth, her shoulders pushed against the backrest. “Vikki will blow Dodge, but Pete will hang tough? Because that’s what swinging dicks do? Girls aren’t swinging dicks, you’re saying?”

  “Pete is one of those unfortunate guys who will never accept the possibility that their country will use them up and then spit them out like yesterday’s bubble gum. Can you stop using that language?”

  She scratched at a place between her eyes and looked out the window, her badge glinting on her khaki shirt.

  As they waited for their food, Hackberry felt the day catch up to him like a hungry animal released from its leash. He ate three aspirin for the pain in his back and gazed idly at the people in the restaurant. Except for the television set on the wall and the refrigerated air, the scene could have been lifted out of the year 1945. The people were the same, their fundamentalist religious views and abiding sense of patriotism unchanged, their blue-collar egalitarian instincts undefined and vague and sometimes bordering on nativism but immediately recognizable to an outsider as inveterately Jacksonian. It was the America of Whitman and Jack Kerouac, of Willa Cather and Sinclair Lewis, an improbable confluence of contradictions that had become Homeric without its participants realizing their importance to the world.

  If someone were to ask Hackberry Holland what his childhood had been like, he would answer the question with an image rather than an explanation. He would describe a Saturday-afternoon trip to town to watch a minor-league baseball game with his father the history professor. The courthouse square was bordered by elevated sidewalks inset with tethering rings that bled rust like a ship’s scuppers. A khaki-painted World War I howitzer stood in the shadows of a giant oak on the courthouse lawn. The dime store, a two-story brick building fronted with a wood colonnade, featured a popcorn machine that overflowed onto the concrete like puffed white grain swelling out of a silo. The adjacent residential neighborhood was lined with shade trees and bungalows and nineteenth-century white frame houses whose galleries were sunken in the middle and hung with porch swings, and each afternoon at five P.M. the paperboy whizzed down the sidewalk on a bicycle and smacked the newspaper against each set of steps with the eye of a marksman.

  But more important in the memory of that long-ago American moment was the texture of light after a sun shower. It was gold and soft and stained with the contagious deep green of the trees and lawns. The rainbow that seemed to dip out of the sky into the ball diamond somehow confirmed one’s foolish faith that both the season and one’s youth were eternal.

  Now Hackberry dipped a taco chip in a bowl of red sauce and put it in his mouth. He picked up his glass of iced tea and drank from it. A bunch of the kids from the church bus brushed by the table on their way to the restroom. Then they were gone, and he found himself looking through the latticework partition at the face of a man who seemed familiar but not to the degree that Hackberry could place him. The man wore a gardener’s hat, the wide brim shadowing his features
. The waitress working the back of the restaurant kept moving back and forth behind the latticework, further obstructing Hackberry’s view.