Rain Gods

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.

Hackberry pinched the fatigue out of his eyes and straightened his spine.

“You developed back trouble from your time as a POW?” Pam said.

“I guess you could say I didn’t have it when I went to Korea, but I did when I returned.”

“You draw disability?”

“I didn’t apply for it.”

“Why is it I knew you were going to say that?”

“Because you’re omniscient.”

He was grinning. She propped her knuckles under her chin and tried not to laugh, then gave it up, her eyes crinkling, holding on his, a smile spreading across her face.

The waitress brought their Mexican dinners to the table, gripping each plate with a damp dish towel, the heat and steam rising into her eyes. “Be careful. It’s real hot,” she said.

LIAM WAS ORDERING dessert, his eyes doing a breast inventory as the waitress leaned over and picked up his dirty dishes.

“Want a little R and R across the border tonight?” he said after the waitress was gone.

“What I can’t understand is why we haven’t been able to find the motel. It’s the Siesta motel, right?” Bobby Lee said, ignoring Liam’s suggestion.

“I looked on the Internet. There’s no such motel down here. You want to get laid tonight or not?”

“I want to find the soldier and his squeeze and do our job and go home.”

“That’s when we take care of Preacher?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Maybe it’s the smart move.”

“In what way?”

“He and Hugo always get the high end on payday. Why should a guy get extra pay because he’s crazy?”

“Preacher is smart in a different way. That doesn’t mean he’s crazy,” Bobby Lee said.

“Having second thoughts?”

“We’re soldiers. We do what we’re told,” Bobby Lee said, picking up the salt shaker and looking at it.

“You’re lots of things, Bobby Lee, but soldier isn’t one of them.”

“Want to explain that?”

“What did you say you’re studying? Interior design? I bet you’ll be good at it.”

Bobby Lee put a matchstick in his mouth. “I got to take a drain,” he said. He went into the restroom and soaped his hands and forearms and rinsed his skin clean and cupped cold water into his face with both hands. He had to swallow when he looked into the mirror. His bald spot seemed to be spreading outward. His eyebrows formed a single black line across his brow, giving his face a crunched look, as though a great weight were pressing down on his head. His throat was starting to sag under his chin; his unshaved jaw had specks of gray. He was twenty-eight years old.

This whole gig stank. Worse, he’d allied himself with Liam Eriksson, who had just mocked him to his face. Bobby Lee sat on the stool inside the toilet stall and checked the bars on his cell phone, then punched in Preacher’s number.

“Yeah?” Jack’s voice said.

“Jack, glad you’re there, man.”

“What’s going on, Bobby Lee?”

“Where are you?”

“Like the Beach Boys say, ‘I get-’”

“Yeah, I know, you get around.”

“Got some news for me?” Jack said, undisturbed by Bobby Lee’s impatience.

“Not exactly.”

“What did you call me for?”

“Just checking in.”

“Having trouble with Liam?”

“How’d you know?”

“You got a lot of talent, Bobby Lee. Of the seven deadly sins, envy is the only one that doesn’t have a trade-off.”

“You lost me.”

“Lust, hate, covetousness, pride, sloth, greed, and gluttony bring with them an appreciable degree of pleasure. But an envious man gets no relief. It’s like a guy drinking liquid Drano because another guy has wine on his table. One thing you can be sure about, though. The man who envies you will eventually blindside you proper.”

“Liam envies me?”

“What does a fellow like me know?”

“A lot. You know a lot, Jack.”

“Something going on, boy?”

“Nothing I can’t take care of.”

“That’s the way to talk.”

“See you, Jack.”

Bobby Lee closed his cell phone and stared at the back of the stall door. It was patinaed with drawings of genitalia that had been scratched into the paint. For just a moment he wondered if the drawings were not an accurate representation of the thoughts that went on inside Liam’s head. How could he have been willing to throw in his lot with a bozo like Liam and betray a pro like Jack? Jack might be a religious head case, but he was no Judas, and Hugo and Liam were. Taking off Artie Rooney’s finger seemed like an extreme measure, but at least with Jack, you always knew where you stood.

So where did that leave Bobby Lee?

Answer: playing it cool, gliding on that old-time R &B. A little time would pass and all this would be over and he’d be bone-fishing in the Keys, eating fried conch, drinking St. Pauli Girl beer, and watching a molten-red sun slip into the waters off Mallory Square.

As he started back toward the booth, he glanced through the latticework partition that separated him from the front of the restaurant. Suddenly, he realized he was looking at the couple Liam had told him to turn around and check out. The woman wore jeans and a khaki shirt and a badge on her breast. The tall man Liam had said looked like John Wayne was sitting across from her in the booth, his Stetson crown-down on the seat. He was cutting up his food, his profile silhouetted against the sunset. Bobby Lee could also see the holstered white-handled blue-black thumb-buster revolver that hung from his gun belt.

Bobby Lee also had no doubt who the tall man was. He had seen both him and the female deputy next to the diner where Vikki Gaddis had worked, with a guy who was probably a fed, maybe even the one Preacher capped later, all three of them talking to the owner of the diner, Junior Whatever in handcuffs. The tall guy’s name was Holland, that was it, Holland, the county sheriff, a big wheel in Dipshit, Texas, and the woman was his deputy, and now the two of them were right here, maybe forty feet from Bobby Lee and Liam’s booth.

Bobby Lee went straight back into the restroom, into the stall, and punched in Liam’s number.

“You fall in the commode?” Liam said.

“The guy in the booth, the one you said looked like John Wayne, that’s the sheriff.”

“Sheriff?”

“You couldn’t see his gun belt below the table. His name’s Holland. I saw him questioning Vikki Gaddis’s boss, the guy from the diner. The deputy was there, too. With a guy who looked like a fed. I think the fed was the guy Preacher smoked in that motel in San Antonio. I saw his picture in the paper.” Bobby Lee could hear Liam breathing into the cell phone.

“They haven’t made us,” Liam said. “We walk out together, calm and cool and collected.”

“The cash register is right by their fucking booth.”

“Create a distraction.”

“Hang my dick out the men’s room door?”

“You have matches?”

Bobby Lee pulled the wet kitchen match out of his mouth. “What about it?”

“Start a fire in the wastebasket.”

“Look, Liam-”

“Do it,” Liam said, and broke the connection.

Not good, Bobby Lee thought, his heart starting to seize up in his chest.

Another man came into the restroom and began relieving himself in the urinal, making a lot of noise. Bobby Lee combed his hair in the mirror until the man had finished and gone back outside. Bobby Lee looked at the wads of discarded paper towels overflowing from the wastebasket. The paper was damp and would smolder like leaves burning on a fall day.

But for what? To bring emergency vehicles and firemen and more cops to the restaurant while Liam and Bobby Lee tried to walk discreetly away, with no vehicle, no way to get out of town, carrying a gym bag, with half the people in the restaurant remembering they had seen Bobby Lee in the can before smoke started gushing through the door?

Right.

Bobby Lee went out the back exit into the warmth of the evening, into the smell of the cooling land, into the touch of a raindrop on his brow.

Liam was on his own, he told himself. Better that Liam pay the check and walk out quietly rather than the two of them try it together, doubling their chances of recognition. What was wrong with that? Only Liam would recommend starting a fire in a confined situation in order not to draw attention.

Bobby Lee walked around the side of the building, angling toward the mechanic’s shed across the street, glancing sideways through the window at the booth where the sheriff and his deputy were still eating. He saw the sheriff stand up, pick up his hat, then replace it on the seat. The sheriff said something to the deputy, his expression pleasant, unhurried. Then he walked behind a bunch of kids who were headed toward the restroom.

Bobby Lee didn’t think twice about the opportunity that had just been presented to him. He flipped open his cell phone and punched redial, the adrenaline pounding in his ears, his heart swelling against his ribs.

“What now?” Liam said.

“The sheriff just made you. He’s headed for your booth. Get the fuck out of there,” he said. Bobby Lee clicked off his cell phone, the chimes ringing in his closed palm. He crossed the road hurriedly in the shadow of a striated mesa, an acrid stench like the smell of a tar pot rising into his face.

AT LEAST EIGHT or nine boys had gotten up at once and headed toward the men’s room, walking ahead of Hackberry, causing him to pause between a booth and a table while a youth minister tried to form the boys into a line. Hackberry glanced back at his booth. Pam had gotten up from the seat and picked up the check and was computing the tip, counting out four dollar bills and some change on the tabletop. She looked pretty, framed against the window, the tips of her hair touched by the late sun, her shoulders muscular inside her khaki shirt, her bottom a little too wide for her jeans, her chrome-plated.357 high up on the right hip. When she realized he was staring at her, her cheeks colored and her expression took on an uncharacteristic vulnerability.

He winked and gave her the thumbs-up sign, but if asked, he couldn’t have explained why.

The events and the images of the next few moments were kaleidoscopic in nature and seemed to lack causality, coherence, or rational sequence. The young boys crowding into the men’s room were still unruly, but in the innocent way that all boys on a cross-country trip were unruly. An apple-cheeked bovine man in a western suit the color of tin was ladling meatballs off a platter onto the plates of his grandchildren. A workingman at the counter wiped beer foam off his chin and asked the waitress to change the television channel. A woman held up her water glass against the light and examined a dead fly floating in it. A minister in a lavender Roman collar was eating a steak, dipping each bite into a pool of ketchup that he had sprinkled with black pepper; his wife was telling him he was eating his food too fast. At the dessert bar, a teenage girl was upset because she had dropped and sunk the dipper in a container of hot fudge.

And Hackberry Holland, walking toward the restroom, squeezing between the diners, saw in the corner of his eye the man in the straw gardener’s hat wrestling open a gym bag by his foot, ripping a thirty-inch-long object loose from a tangle of underwear and shirts and socks. As Hackberry stared in disbelief, as though watching a slow-motion film that had nothing to do with reality, he saw that the object was a cut-down pump shotgun, the hacksawed steel still bright from the cut, loose shotgun shells spilling out of the gym bag onto the floor.

His next thoughts flashed across his mind in under a second, in the way that a BB arches into space and disappears:

Where had he seen the man’s face?

In a photo, maybe.

Except the face in the photo had an orange beard of the kind a Nordic seafarer might have.

Was this how it ended, with a flash from a shotgun muzzle and a burst of light inside the skull before the report ever reached his ears?

Hackberry tilted a table upward, spilling food and plates onto the floor, and flung it at the man in the gardener’s hat, who was raising the shotgun toward Hackberry’s chest. The first discharge blew a shower of splinters and shreds of red-and-white-checkered cloth all over Hackberry’s shoulder and left arm and down the side of his pants.

No one in the room moved. Instead, they looked stunned, shrunken, frozen inside clear plastic, as though a sonic boom had temporarily deafened them. Hackberry got his revolver free of its holster just as he heard the shooter jack another round into the chamber of his weapon. The second blast went high, over the top of the table. Glass caved out of the front window into the parking lot. Only then did people begin screaming, some trying to hide under tables or behind the booths. Someone kicked open a fire exit, setting off an alarm. The boys from the church bus had piled over one another into the men’s room, their faces stretched tight with fear.

Hackberry was crouched behind the table and a wood post, a bent fork or spoon biting through the cloth of his trousers into his knee. He pointed his revolver through a space between the table and the wood post and let off two rounds in the direction of the shooter, the.45’s frame kicking upward in his hand. He fired again and saw stuffing from a booth floating like chicken feathers in the gloom. He heard the shooter work the pump on his twelve-gauge and a spent shell casing clink and roll on a hard surface.

Hackberry hung on to the post and pulled himself erect, a tree of pain blooming in his back. He ran for the cover provided by the last booth in the shooter’s row, letting off one round blindly at the shooter, his boots as loud as stones striking a wood surface.

The room became absolutely quiet, as though the air had been sucked out of it. Hackberry rose in a half-crouch and pointed his revolver at the place where the shooter had been. The gym bag was still on the floor. The shooter and the shotgun shells he had spilled from the bag were gone.

Hackberry straightened his back, his weapon still pointed in front of him, the hammer on full cock, the sight on the tip of the barrel trembling slightly with the tension of his grip on the frame. He glanced over his shoulder. Where was Pam? The window behind her booth was blown out, one vinyl seat of the booth and the wedges of glass protrud ing from the window frame painted with red splatter. Hackberry wiped his mouth with his free hand and widened his eyes and tried to think clearly. What was the formal name for the situation? Barricaded suspect? The clinical language didn’t come close to describing the reality.

“Give it up, partner. Nobody has to die here,” he said.

Except for a cough, the muted crying of a woman, and a sound like somebody prizing open a stuck window, the room remained silent.

“He went in the girls’ bathroom,” a burr-headed boy in short pants said from under a table.

A latticework alcove had been built around the entrance to the women’s restroom, obscuring the doorway. Hackberry walked at an angle toward the door, silverware and broken glass crunching under his boots, his eyes locked on the door through the spaces in the latticework.

Had Pam been hit? The second shotgun blast had traveled right across the booth where she had been counting out the tip on the tabletop.

“He’s got a little girl in there. Don’t go in there,” a voice said from behind an overturned chair.

It was the minister in the lavender Roman collar. He was bleeding from his cheek and neck; the heel of one hand sparkled with ground glass. His wife was on her knees beside him, gripping his arm, her body rounded into a ball.

“You saw him?” Hackberry asked.

“He grabbed the girl by the neck and pulled her with him,” the minister said.

“Can you get to the front door?” Hackberry asked.

“Yes, sir,” the minister replied. “I can.”

“When I start into the women’s room, you stand up and take as many people with you as you can. Can you do that for me, sir?”

“You’re going in there?”

“We’ll bring the girl out of there safely. When you get out front, find my deputy. Her name is Pam Tibbs. Tell her exactly what you told me.”

“Who’s the man with the shotgun?”

“His name is Eriksson. My deputy will recognize the name. Better get going, Reverend.”

“You said ‘we.’”

“Sir?”

“You said ‘we’ll’ get the girl out. Who’s ‘we’?”

A moment later, Hackberry closed the distance between himself and the doorway while the minister and his wife began herding a group of twelve to fifteen people toward the front of the restaurant. Hackberry pressed his back against the wall, his revolver pointed upward. He could see the red sunset flowing through the destroyed front window and hear sirens in the distance. “Hear that sound, Eriksson?” he said.

There was a beat. “How’d you make me?”

“I didn’t. If you hadn’t shot at me, I would have walked past you.”

“You’re lying.”

“Why would I lie?”

Eriksson had no answer. Hackberry remembered that originally, a second man had been sitting in Eriksson’s booth, someone who had probably blown Dodge and left Eriksson to take the fall for both of them.

“Your partner screwed you, bub,” Hackberry said. “Why take his weight? Send the little girl out, and it’ll be taken into consideration. You did security work in Iraq. That’ll be a factor, too. Get a good defense lawyer, and with the right kind of post-traumatic-stress-disorder mambo, you might even skate. It beats eating a two-hundred-and-thirty-grain round from a forty-five.”

“You’re gonna drive me out of this county. You’re gonna get me into Mexico. Or I waste the girl.”

“Maybe I can arrange that.”

“No, you don’t arrange anything. You do it.”

“How do you want to work that? Want me to bring a vehicle around back and load you and the girl up?”

“No, you put your piece on the floor, slide it to me with your foot, then you walk in with your fingers laced on the back of your neck.”

“That doesn’t sound workable, Eriksson.”

“Maybe you’d like to see her brains floating in the toilet bowl.”

Hackberry heard the voice of a little girl crying. Or rather, the voice of a child whose fear had gone beyond crying into a series of hiccups and constrictions of air in the nostrils and throat, like someone having a seizure. “Be stand-up. Let her go, partner,” Hackberry said.

“You want her? No problem. Kick the piece inside and come in after it. Otherwise, all bets are off. Think I’m jerking your johnson? Stick your head in here.”

Hackberry could hear a dronelike whirring sound in his ears, one he associated with wind blowing out of a blue-black sky across miles of snowy hills and ice splintering under the weight of thousands of advancing Chinese infantry.

“I’ll make it easy for you,” Eriksson said. He opened the bathroom door slightly, allowing Hackberry a brief view of the restroom’s interior. Eriksson was holding the little girl by the neck of her T-shirt while he screwed the cut-down pump into her shoulder bone. “I got nothing to lose,” he said.

“I believe you,” Hackberry said. He stepped backward, opened the cylinder to his revolver, and dumped his four spent rounds and two unfired ones into his palm and threw them clattering across the floor. He squatted, placed his revolver on the floor, and shoved it with one foot into the restroom.

“Walk in behind it,” Eriksson said.

Then Hackberry was in the enclosure with him, staring into the muzzle of the shotgun.

“Go on, little girl,” Eriksson said. “I wasn’t gonna hurt you. I just had to say that.”

“Yes, you were. You hurt me bad,” she said, cupping her hand to one shoulder.

“Get out of here, you little skank,” Eriksson said. He bolted the door behind her, his attention never leaving Hackberry. “Slickered you, motherfucker.”

Hackberry let his eyes become dead and unseeing, let them drift off Eriksson’s face to a spot on the wall. Or perhaps to a patch of red sky that should not have been visible inside a women’s restroom.

“Did you hear me?” Eriksson asked.

“You’re a smart one,” Hackberry said.

“You got that right.”

Then Eriksson seemed to realize something was wrong in his environment, that he had not seen or taken note of something, that in spite of his years of vanquishing his enemies and shaving the odds and orchestrating events so that he always walked away a winner, something had gone terribly wrong. “Get on your cell,” he said.

“What for?”

“What do you mean, what for? Tell your people to stay away from the building. Tell them to bring a car to the back.”

“You’re not getting a car.”

“I’ll get a car or you’ll catch the bus, whichever you prefer.”

“You’re leaving here in cuffs.”

Eriksson took his own cell phone from his pocket and tossed it to Hackberry. It bounced off Hackberry’s chest and fell to the floor. “Pick it up and make the call, Sheriff,” Eriksson said.

“I said you’re a smart one. A smart man is a listener. Listen to what I say and don’t turn around. No, no, keep your eyes on me. You do not want to turn around.”

“Are you senile? I’m holding a shotgun in your face.”

“If you turn around, you’ll lose your head,” Hackberry said. “Look straight ahead. Kneel down and place your weapon on the floor.”

Eriksson’s lips parted. They were dry, caked slightly with mucus. His hands tightened on the twelve-gauge. He crimped his lips, wetting them before he spoke. “This has got a hair trigger. No matter what happens, you’re gonna have a throat full of bucks.”

“Believe what I tell you, Eriksson. Don’t move, don’t back away from me, don’t turn around. If you do any of those things, you will die. I give you my word on that. No one wants to see that happen to you. But it’s your choice. You lower your weapon by the barrel with your left hand and place it on the floor and step away from it.”

“I think you’re a mighty good actor, Sheriff, but I also think you’re full of shit.”

Eriksson stepped backward, out of Hackberry’s reach, turning his line of vision toward a frosted back window that had been wedged open with a tire tool. For just a moment, the aim of his shotgun angled away from Hackberry’s chest. Outside, a huge cloud of orange dust gusted across the sun.

Eriksson’s translucent blue eyes were charged with light. His face seemed to twitch just before he saw Pam Tibbs standing slightly beyond the window ledge, her khaki shirt speckled with taco sauce, her chrome-plated revolver aimed in front of her with both hands. That was when she squeezed the trigger, driving a soft-nosed.357 round through one side of his head and out the other.