Rain Gods

by James Lee Burke

  “What are you looking at?” Pete asked.

  “I thought I saw a reflection behind that boulder up there.”

  “What kind of reflection?”

  “Like sunlight hitting glass.”

  “I don’t see anything.”

  “I don’t, either. At least not now,” she said.

  “In Afghanistan, I’d pray for wind.”

  “Why?”

  “If there were a lot of trees and the wind started to blow and one thing in the trees didn’t move with the wind, that’s where the next RPG was coming from.”

  “Pete?”

  The change in her voice made him turn his head and forget about the reflection on the hillside or his story about Afghanistan.

  “I’m afraid,” she said.

  “You’ve never been afraid of anything. You’re braver than I am.”

  “I think you’re right about Montana or British Columbia. I think we’re about to turn over our lives to people we don’t know and shouldn’t trust.”

  “Sheriff Holland seems to be on the square.”

  “He’s a county sheriff in a place nobody cares about. He’s an elderly man whose back is coming off his bones.”

  “Don’t let him hear you say that.”

  “It’s the goodness in you that hurts you most, Pete.”

  “Nothing hurts me when you’re around.”

  He put his arm over her shoulders, and the two of them walked past the last fence on Hackberry Holland’s property and followed a trail between two hills that led to a creek and the back lot of an African-American church where the congregation had assembled in the shade of three giant cottonwoods. The creek was of a sandy-red color and had been dammed up with bricks and chunks of concrete, forming a pool that swelled out into the roots of the trees.

  The men were dressed in worn suits and white shirts and ties that didn’t match the color of their coats, the women in either white dresses or dark colors that absorbed heat as quickly as wool might.

  “Will you look at that,” Vikki said.

  “You didn’t get dunked when you were baptized?”

  “There’re no white people there at all. I think we’re intruding.”

  “They’re not paying us any mind. It’s worse if we walk away and make noise. There’s a willow tree yonder. Let’s sit under it a minute or two.”

  The minister escorted a huge woman into the pool, the immersion gown she wore ballooning up like white gauze around her knees. The minister cupped one hand behind her neck and lowered her backward into the pool. Her breasts were as taut and dark and heavy as watermelons under her gown. The surface of the pool closed over her hair and eyes and nose and mouth, and she grasped the minister’s arm with a rigidity that indicated the level of her fear. On the bank, the leaves of the cottonwoods seemed to flicker in the wind with a green-gold kinetic light.

  The minister raised his eyes to his congregants. “Jesus told the apostles to go not unto the Gentiles. He sent them first unto the oppressed and the forlorn. And that’s how our shackles have been broken, my brothers and sisters. I now baptize Sister Dorothea in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. And we welcome our white brethren who are watching us now from the other side of our little Jordan.”

  Vikki and Pete were sitting in the shade on a pad of grass under the willow tree. Pete plucked a long, thin blade of grass and put it in his mouth. “So much for anonymity,” he said.

  She brushed at a fly on the side of his face, then looked in a peculiar way at the back of her hand. “What’s that?” she said.

  “What’s what?” Pete said. His arms were locked around his knees, his attention fixed on the baptism.

  “There was a red dot on my hand.”

  “Just then?”

  “Yes, it moved across my hand. I saw it when I touched your face.”

  He got to his feet and pulled her erect, looking up through the leaves at the side of the hill. He pushed her behind him, deeper into the shade, under the cover of the tree.

  “Give me your hand,” he said.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Looking for an insect bite.”

  “I wasn’t bitten by an insect.”

  He looked out again from under the tree’s canopy at the hillside, his eyes sweeping over the scattered rocks, the pińon and juniper spiked into soil that was little more than gravel, the shadows inside an arroyo and the scrub brush that grew along its rim, the shale that had avalanched down from a collapsed fire road. Then he saw a glassy reflection at the top of a ridge and, for under a second, an electric red pinpoint racing past his feet.

  “It’s a laser sight,” he said, stepping backward. “Get behind the tree trunk. They don’t have the angle yet.”

  “Who? What angle?”

  “That bastard Hugo or whoever works for him. That’s what Collins said, right? Hugo wanted to do both of us? They cain’t get a clear shot yet.”

  “There’s a sniper up there?”

  “Somebody with a laser sight, that’s for sure.”

  She took a deep breath and blew it out. She opened her cell phone and stared at it. Her blue-green eyes were bright in the shade, locked on his. “No bars,” she said.

  “We don’t have a lot of time. A nine-one-one call wouldn’t he’p us.”

  “What do you want to do?”

  The fact that her question indicated options seemed testimony to the quality he admired most in her, namely her refusal to let others control her life, regardless of the risk she had to incur. He wanted to hold her against his chest. “Wait them out,” he said.

  “What if they work their way down the hill?”

  His head was hammering. If he yelled out to the congregants, they would scatter and run, and the rifleman on the hill would have no reason not to fire round after round through the branches of the willow.

  “Pete, I’d rather die than live like this.”

  “Live like how?”

  “Hiding, being afraid all the time. Nothing is worth that.”

  “Sometimes you have to live to fight another day.”

  “But we don’t fight another day. We hide. We’re hiding now.”

  “You told Jack Collins to go to hell. You spit on him.”

  “I told him to rape me if he wanted. I told him I wouldn’t resist.”

  Pete rubbed his palm across his mouth. His hand was dry and callused and made a grating sound on his skin. “You didn’t tell me that.”

  “Because I didn’t want to hurt you.”

  “I think I’m going to kill that fellow if I catch up with him. You don’t think I’ll do it, but there’s a part of me you don’t know about.”

  “Don’t talk like that.”

  “You stay here. Don’t move for any reason. I need your word on that.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “I’m gonna take it to them.”

  “That’s insane.”

  “It’s the last thing that guy up there expects.”

  “No, you’re not going out there by yourself.”

  “Let go of me, Vikki.”

  “We do it together, Pete.”

  He tried to pry her hands from his arm. “I can make that boulder over yonder, then head up the arroyo.”

  “I’ll follow you if you do.”

  There was nothing for it. “We cross the creek and get into the cottonwoods. Then we go through the back door of the church and out the front.”

  “What about the black people?” she said.

  “We’re out of choices,” he replied.

  THE TWO MEN had followed the couple down below by first climbing the hill and then walking the ridgeline, peeking over the summit when necessary, threading their way through rocks and twisted juniper trunks that had been bleached gray by the sun. One of the men carried a bolt-action rifle on a leather sling. A large telescopic sight was mounted above the chamber, the front lens capped with a dustcover. Both men were breathing hard and sweating heavily and trying to avoid looking directly into the western sun.

  They couldn’t believe their bad luck when they crawled up to the edge of the summit and saw the couple walking under a willow tree. />
  “We stumbled into a colored baptism,” the man with the rifle said.

  “Keep the larger picture in mind, T-Bone. Let the coloreds take care of themselves,” the other man said.

  T-Bone peered through his telescopic sight and saw a flash of skin through the branches. He activated his laser and moved it across the leaves until it lit upon the side of someone’s face. Then the wind gusted and the target disappeared. He paused and tried again, but all he could see was the pale green uniformity of the tree’s canopy. “I’d scrub this one, Hugo,” he said.

  “You’re not me,” Hugo said. His browned skin was powdered with dust so that the whites of his eyes looked stark and theatrical in his face. He folded a handkerchief in a square and positioned it on a rock so he could kneel without causing himself more discomfort than necessary. He drummed his fingers on a piece of slag and took the measure of the man he was with, his impatience and irritability barely restrained. “Keep your head down, T-Bone.”

  “That’s what we’ve been doing. My back feels like the spring on a jack-in-the-box.”

  “Don’t silhouette on a hill, and don’t let the sunlight reflect on your face. It’s like looking up at an airplane. You might as well be a signal mirror. Another basic infantry lesson—you shouldn’t have all that civilian jewelry on you.”

  “Thanks for passing that on, Hugo. But I say we wait till dark and start over at the house.”

  Hugo didn’t reply. He was wondering if they could work their way down the arroyo for at least two clear shots, then get back over the ridge and down to their vehicle before the black people realized what had happened in their midst.

  “Did you hear what I said?” T-Bone asked.

  “Yes, I did. We take them now.”

  “I just don’t get what’s going on. Why’d Preacher and Bobby Lee turn on us? Why didn’t they pop the kid and his girl when they had the chance?”

  “Because Preacher is a maniac, and Bobby Lee is a treacherous little shit.”

  “So we’re doing this for Arthur Rooney?”

  “Don’t fret yourself about it.”

  “Those bikers Preacher hosed down?”

  “What about them?”

  “They worked for Josef Sholokoff?”

  “Could be, but they’re not our concern,” Hugo said, cupping his hand on T-Bone’s shoulder. T-Bone had sweated through his clothes, and his shirt felt as soggy as a wet washcloth. Hugo wiped his palm on his trousers. He looked down at the top of the willow tree and at the sandy-red stream and at the black minister and his congregants, who seemed distracted by something the white couple were doing.

  “Get ready,” Hugo said.

  “For what?”

  “Our friends are about to make their move. Put a little more of your heart in it. That boy down there made a fool out of you, didn’t he?”

  “I never said that. I said Bobby Lee double-crossed us. I never said anybody made a fool out of me. People don’t make a fool out of me.”

  “Sorry, I just misspoke.”

  “I don’t like this. This whole gig is wrong.”

  “We take them now. Concentrate on your shot. The priority is the boy. Take the girl if you can. Do it, T-Bone. This is one thing you’re really good at. I’m proud of you.”

  T-Bone wrapped the rifle sling around his left forearm and clicked off the safety. He moved into a more comfortable position, his left elbow anchored in a sandy spot free of sharp rocks, the steel toes of his hobnailed work shoes dug into the hillside, his scrotum tingling against the ground.

  “There they go. Take the shot,” Hugo said.

  “The minister is walking a little girl into the creek.”

  “Take the shot.”

  “Flores and the girl are holding hands. I cain’t see for a clear shot.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The minister and a little girl are right behind them.”

  “Take the shot.”

  “Stop yelling.”

  “You want me to do it? Take the shot.”

  “There’s colored people everywhere. You whack them and it’s a hate crime.”

  “They can afford to lose a few. Take the shot.”

  “I’m trying.”

  “Give me the rifle.”

  “I’ll do it. Let them get clear.” T-Bone raised the barrel slightly, leading his target, his unshaved jaw pressed into the stock, his left eye squinted shut. “Ah, beautiful. Yes, yes, yes. So long, alligator boy.”

  But he didn’t pull the trigger.

  “What happened?” Hugo said.

  T-Bone pulled back from the crest, his face glistening and empty, like that of a starving man who had just been denied access to the table. “They went up the steps into the back of the church. I lost them in the gloom. I didn’t have anything but a slop shot.”

  Hugo hit the flat of his fist on the ground, his teeth gritted.

  “It’s not my fault,” T-Bone said.

  “Whose is it?”

  T-Bone worked the bolt on his rifle and opened the breech, ejecting the unfired round. It was a soft-nosed .30-06, its brass case a dull gold in the twilight. He fitted it back into the magazine with his thumb and eased the bolt back into place and locked it down so the chamber was empty. He rolled on his back and squinted up at Hugo, his eyelashes damp with perspiration. “You bother me.”

  “I bother you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You care to tell me why?”

  “’Cause I never saw you scared before. Has ole Jack Collins got you in his sights? ’Cause if you ask me, somebody has got you plumb scared to death.”

  25

  WHEN HACKBERRY GOT back home from the grocery store in town, the sun had melted into a brassy pool somewhere behind the hills far to the west of his property. The blades on his windmill were unchained and ginning rapidly in the evening breeze, and inside the shadows on his south pasture, he could see well water gushing from a pipe into the horse tank. Once again he thought he smelled an odor of chrysanthemums or leakage from a gas well on the wind, or perhaps it was lichen or toadstools, the kind that grew carpetlike inside perennial shade, often on graves.

  For many years Saturday nights had not boded well for him. After sunset he became acutely aware of his wife’s absence, the lack of sound and light she had always created in the kitchen while she prepared a meal they would eat on the backyard picnic table. Their pleasures had always been simple ones: time with their children; the movies they saw every Saturday night in town, no matter what was playing, at a theater where Lash La Rue had once performed onstage with his coach whip; attending Mass at a rural church where the homily was always in Spanish; weeding their flower beds together and, in the spring, planting veg etables from seed packets, staking the empty packets, crisp and stiff, at the end of each seeded row.

  When he thought too long on any of these things, he was filled with such an unrelieved sense of loss that he would call out in the silence, sharply and without shame, lest he commit an act that was more than foolish. Or he would telephone his son the boat skipper in Key West or the other twin, the oncologist, in Phoenix, and pretend he was checking up on them. Did they need help buying a new home? What about starting up a college fund for the grandchildren? Were the kingfish running? Would the grandkids like to go look for the Lost Dutchman’s mine in the Superstitions?

  They were good sons and invited him to their homes and visited him whenever they could, but Saturday night alone was still Saturday night alone, and the silence in the house could be louder than echoes in a tomb.

  Hackberry hefted the grocery sacks and two boxed hot pizzas from his truck and carried them through the back door of the house into the kitchen.

  Pete Flores and Vikki Gaddis were waiting for him at the breakfast table, both of them obviously tense, their mouths and cheeks soft, as though they were rehearsing unspoken words on their tongues. In fact, inside the ambience of scrubbed Formica and plastic-topped and porcelain perfection that was Hackberry’s kitchen, they had the manner of people who had wandered in off the highway and had to explain their presence. If they had been smoker
s, an ashtray full of cigarette butts would have been smoldering close by; their hands would have been busy lighting fresh cigarettes, snapping lighters shut; they would have blown streams of smoke out the sides of their mouths and feigned indifference to the trouble they had gotten themselves into. Instead, their forearms were pressed flat on the yellow table, and there was a glitter in their eyes that made him think of children who were about to be ordered by a cruel parent to cut their own switch.