Rain Gods

15

PREACHER JACK COLLINS lived at several residences, none of which carried his name on a deed or a rental agreement. One of them was located south of old Highway 90, within sight of the Del Norte Mountains, twenty miles deep into broken desert terrain that looked composed of crushed stone knitted together by the roots of scrub brush and mesquite and cactus that bloomed with bloodred flowers.

On the mountain behind his one-bedroom stucco house was a series of ancient telegraph poles whose wires hung on the ground like strands of black spaghetti. Behind the poles was the gaping opening of a rock-walled root cellar that had been shored up with wood posts and crossbeams that either had collapsed or that insects had reduced to the weightless density of cork.

One starlit night, Preacher had sat in the entrance and watched the desert take on the gray and blue and silver illumination that it seemed to draw down into itself from the sky, as though the sky and the earth worked together to both cool the desert and turn it into a pewter artwork. Then he had realized that a breeze was blowing into his face and flowing over his arms and shoulders and into the excavation at his back. The root cellar was not a root cellar after all. Nor was it a mine. It was a cave, deep and spiraling, one that had probably been formed by water millions of years ago, one that led to the other side of the mountain or a cavern far beneath it. Perhaps early settlers had framed up the walls and ceilings with timbered support, but Preacher was convinced no human hand had contributed to its creation.

He spent many evenings sitting on a metal chair in front of the cave, wondering if the wind echoing inside it spoke to him and if indeed the desert was not an ancient vineyard made sterile by man’s infidelity to Yahweh. Paradoxically, that thought comforted him. The sinfulness of the world somehow gave him a greater connection to it, made him more acceptable in his own eyes and simultaneously reduced the level of his own iniquity. Except Preacher had one problem he could not rid himself of: He had filled the ground with the bodies of Oriental women and watched while Hugo’s bulldozer had scalloped up the earth and pushed the backfill over them. He told himself he had been acting as an agent of God, purging the world of an abomination, perhaps even preempting the moral decay and diseases that had awaited them as prostitutes on the streets of a corrupt nation.

But Preacher was having little success with his rationalization for the mass execution of the helpless and terrified women who waited for him nightly in his sleep. When Bobby Lee Motree arrived at Preacher’s house in the desert, Jack was delighted by the distraction.

He set up two metal chairs in front of the cave and opened cold bottles of Coca-Cola for the two of them and watched while Bobby Lee drank his empty, his throat pumping, one eye fastened curiously on Preacher. Bobby Lee was wearing a muscle shirt and his top hat and his brown jeans that had yellow canvas squares stitched on the knees. He was full of confidence and cheer at being back in Preacher’s good graces; he unloaded his burden, telling Preacher how Liam got popped by the female deputy sheriff in the restaurant and how that rat bastard Artie Rooney had told Hugo to smoke everybody-the soldier and his girl, the Jewish guy and his wife and maybe even the Jewish guy’s kids, and finally, Preacher himself.

“If you cain’t trust Artie Rooney, who can you trust? The standards of our profession have seriously declined,” Preacher said.

“I was thinking the same thing,” Bobby Lee replied.

“That was a joke.”

“Yeah, I knew that. I can always tell when you’re joking.”

Preacher let the subject slide. “Tell me again how this Holland fellow spotted Liam. I didn’t quite get all that.”

“I guess he recognized him, that’s all.”

“Even though Liam had shaved off his beard and was sitting in a crowded restaurant and the sheriff had never seen him and had no reason to be looking for Liam there?”

“Search me. Weird stuff happens.”

“But the sheriff didn’t make you?”

“I was in the can, taking a dump.”

“How’d you get out during all that shooting if you were in the can?”

“It was a Chinese fire drill. I ran outside with the crowd.”

“And just strolled on off, a fellow with no car, a fellow everybody saw sitting with Liam just a few minutes earlier?”

“Most of them were pouring the wee-wee out of their shoes. Why should they worry about me?”

“Maybe you were just lucky.”

“I told you the way it was.”

“Young people believe they’re never going to die. So they’ve got confidence that old men like me don’t have. That’s where your luck comes from, Bobby Lee. Your luck is an illusion produced by an illusion.”

Bobby Lee’s obvious sense of discomfort was growing. He shifted in his chair and glanced at the stars and the sparkle of the desert and the greenish cast at the bottom of the sky. “Is that hole behind us one of those pioneer storage places where they kept preserves and shit?”

“Maybe it goes down to the center of the earth. I’m going to find out one day.”

“Sometimes I just can’t track what you’re saying, Jack.”

“My uncle was in the South Pacific. He said he dynamited a whole mountain on top of the Japs who wouldn’t surrender and were hiding in caves. He said you could hear them at night, like hundreds of bees buzzing under the ground. I bet if you put your ear to the ground, you might still hear them.”

“Why do you talk about stuff like that?”

“Because I’m doubting your truthfulness, and you’re starting to piss me off.”

“I wouldn’t try to put the glide on you. Give me some credit,” Bobby Lee said, his eyes round, unblinking, the pupils dilated like drops of ink in the dark.

“Bobby Lee, you either gave up Liam or this fellow Holland is a special kind of lawman, the kind who doesn’t quit till he staples your hide on the barn door. Which is it?”

“I didn’t give up Liam. He was my friend,” Bobby Lee replied, propping his hands on his knees, tilting his face up at the sky. His unshaved jaw looked as though grains of black pepper and salt had been rubbed into the pores. Preacher looked at him for a long time, until Bobby Lee’s face began to twitch and his eyes glistened. “You want to keep hurting and insulting me, go ahead and do it. I came out here to see you because you’re my friend. But all you do is run me down,” Bobby Lee said.

“I believe you, boy,” Preacher said.

Bobby Lee cleared his throat and spat. “Why do you do it?” he asked.

“Do what?”

“Our kind of work. We’re button men. We push people’s off button and shut down their motors. A pro does it for money. It’s not supposed to be personal. You’re a pro, Preacher, but with you, it’s not the money. It’s something nobody ever asks you about. Why do you do it?”

“Why are you asking me?”

“’Cause you’re the only man I could ever relate to.”

“You see the glow in the land? It’s the bone in the soil that does that. Inside all that alluvial soil and lava flow and sedimentary rock, there’s millions of dead things letting off energy, lighting the way for the rest of us.”

“Go on.”

Preacher picked a mosquito off his neck and squeezed it between his thumb and finger. He wiped the blood on a piece of Kleenex. “That’s all. You asked a question and I answered it.”

“I don’t get it. Lighting the way, what?”

“Don’t fret yourself, boy. I need to know everything about this fellow Holland. I want to know why he was down by Big Bend. I want to know how he recognized Liam.”

“I’m one guy. You got us into all this, Jack. How am I supposed to fix everything?”

Preacher didn’t respond. In the wind, his face looked as serene and transfixed as though it had been bathed in warm water, his lips parted slightly, his teeth showing. In his eyes was a black reflection that made even Bobby Lee swallow, as though Preacher saw a presence on the horizon that no one else did. “You’re not mad at me, are you?” Bobby Lee said, trying to smile.

“You? You’re like a son to me, Bobby Lee,” Preacher answered.

BOBBY LEE DROVE away from the stucco house before first light, and Preacher prepared breakfast for himself on a propane stove and ate from a tin plate on his back steps. As a red glow fingered its way across the plain from the east, Preacher mounted his crutches and worked his way down the incline toward a mesa that was still locked in shadow. He crossed the opening to an arroyo and stumped through a depression of soft baked clay that cracked and sank beneath his weight with each step he took. He thought he could see petroglyphs cut in the layered rock above his head, and he was convinced he was traversing an alluvial flume that probably had irrigated verdant fields when an agrarian society had lived in harmony with the animals and a knife blade hammered out of primitive iron drew no blood from them or the people who had been sent to dwell east of Eden.

But Preacher Jack’s thoughts about a riparian paradise brought him no peace. When he looked behind him, the funnel-shaped indentations of his crutches in the dried-out riverbed reminded him of coyote tracks. Even the drag of his footprints was serpentine and indistinct, as though his very essence were that of a transient and weightless creature not worthy of full creation.

He wished to think of himself as a figure emblazoned retroactively on biblical legend, but the truth was otherwise. He had been a burden to his mother the day he was born, as well as a voyeur to her trysts. Now he lusted for the woman who had bested him both physically and intellectually and, in addition, had managed to pump one.38 round into his calf and one through the top of his foot. The memory of her scent, the heat in her skin and hair, the smear of her saliva and lipstick on his skin caused a swelling in his loins that made him ashamed.

She had not only eluded him but indirectly had gotten Liam Eriksson killed and involved a sheriff named Holland in the case, probably the kind of rural hardhead a pro didn’t mess with or, if necessary, you paid somebody else to pop.

Preacher turned in a circle and began thudding his way back toward his house. The hills and mesas were pink in the sunrise, the air sweet, the leaves of the mesquite brushing wetly against his trousers and wrists and hands. He wanted to breathe the morning into his chest and cast out the funk and depression that seemed to screw him into the earth, but it was no use; he had never felt so alone in his life. When he closed his eyes, he thought he saw a boxcar on a rail siding, his mother sitting on a stool inside the open door, cutting carrots and onions into a pot in which she would make a soup that she would heat on an open fire that evening. In the dream, his mother lifted her face into the sunlight and smiled at him.

Maybe it was time to put aside doubt and self-recrimination. A man could always become captain of his soul if he tried. A man didn’t have to accept the hand fate had dealt him. Moses didn’t. Neither did David. Wasn’t it time to continue his journey into a biblical past and to become a son of whom his mother could be proud, regardless of deeds he had performed on behalf of Artie Rooney, regardless of the nightmares in which a line of Oriental women tried to hold up their palms against the weapon that jerked sideways in his grasp, almost as though it possessed a will stronger than his own?

The answer lay in the Book of Esther. The story had been written twenty-three hundred years before he was born, and it had waited all these centuries for him to step inside it and take on the role that should have been his, that was now being offered to him by an invisible hand. He drew the freshness of the morning into his lungs and felt a pang in his chest as sharp as a piece of broken glass.

AT FIVE A.M. Nick Dolan woke to the sound of raindrops striking the banana fronds below his bedroom window. Briefly, he thought he was at his grandfather’s house off Napoleon Avenue in New Orleans. His grandfather had lived in a shotgun house with a peaked tin roof and ceiling-high windows flanged by ventilated shutters that could be latched during the hurricane season. There was a pecan tree in the backyard with a rope swing, and the ground under its branches was soft and moldy and green with flattened pecan husks. Even in the hottest part of the day, the yard was breezy and stayed in deep shade and the neighborhood children gathered there each summer afternoon at three o’clock to await the arrival of the Sno-Ball truck.

The grandfather’s house was a safe place, far different from Nick’s neighborhood in the Ninth Ward, where Artie Rooney and his brothers and their friends had made life a daily torment for Nick.

Nick sat on the side of the bed and cupped his hand lightly on Esther’s hip. She was turned toward the wall, her dark hair and paleness touched with the shadows the moonlight created through the window. He slipped her nightgown up her thigh and hooked his finger over the elastic of her panties and pulled them down far enough so he could kiss her lightly on the rump, something he always did before congress with her. He could feel the nocturnal intensity of her body heat through her gown and hear the steady, undisturbed sound of her breathing against the wall. The touch of his hand or his lips seemed to neither awaken nor arouse her, and he wondered if her deep slumber was feigned or if indeed she had dreamed herself back into a time when Nick had not exchanged off their happiness for success in the skin trade.

He put on his slippers and robe and ate a bowl of Grape-Nuts and drank a glass of cold milk in the kitchen and, at six A.M., disarmed the burglar alarm and retrieved the newspaper from the front yard. The morning was cool and damp and smelled of water sprinklers and Nick’s closely cropped St. Augustine grass that his Mexican gardeners had mowed late yesterday and the night-blooming flowers Esther constantly fertilized with coffee grounds and bat guano and fish blood and black dirt bagged from a swamp outside Lake Charles, all of which created a fecund odor Nick associated with a Louisiana graveyard that lay so deep in shadow it was never penetrated by sunlight.

Enough with thoughts about graveyards, he told himself, and went back in the house, the rolled newspaper fat in his hand. Nor did he wish to dwell on thoughts about schoolyard bullies and personal failure and the slippage of his fortune onto the shoals of financial ruin. He wanted to be with Esther, inside her warm embrace, inside the glow of her thighs with the smell of her hair in his face and the rhythm of her breath on his cheek. It didn’t seem a lot to ask. Why had the Fates ganged up against him? He pulled the plastic rain sheath off the newspaper and unrolled the paper on the breakfast table. The lead story dealt with the murder of a young mother and her two children. The primary suspect was an estranged boyfriend. The woman’s face looked familiar. Had she worked in his club? Yeah, it was possible. But what if she had? What was worse, the daily drudgery and humiliation and penury of a welfare recipient or knocking down some quasi-serious bucks by cavorting a few hours on a pole for the titty-baby brigade?

Nick knew the secret source of his discontent. His money had been his validation and his protection from the world, his payback for every time he had been shoved down on line at school or at the movie theater or chased crying into his yard by the army of street rats who claimed they were avenging the death of Jesus. Now a large part of Nick’s income was gone, and some bad ventures in commodities and mortgage companies were about to wipe out the rest of it.

Nick had nail wounds in his wrists and hands for other reasons. Although Esther pretended differently, she would probably never forgive him for his involvement in the deaths of the Asian women, regardless of the fact that he was almost as much a victim as they were. At least that was the way he saw it.

A shadow moved across the breakfast table. Nick turned in his chair, startled, knocking over his glass of milk.

“You want oatmeal?” Esther said.

“I already ate,” he replied.

“Why are you up so early?”

“Restless, I guess.”

“Go on back to bed.”

“Do you want to?”

“Want to what?”

“Sleep some more?”

“I’m going to fix some tea.”

“Maybe neither one of us got enough sleep,” Nick said, stifling a yawn. “It’s only six-twenty. We could take a little nap. Later, we can go out for breakfast. Want to do that?”

“My aerobics class is at seven-thirty.”

“Better not miss the aerobics. That’s important. They let men in there? I could use that. Jumping up and down and sweatin’ to the golden oldies or whatever.” He stiffened his fingers and jabbed them against the softness of his stomach. Then he did it again, harder.

She gave him a curious look and filled a pan with water and placed it on the gas burner. “Sure you don’t want some oatmeal?”

“I’m starting a diet. I need to reform myself physically, maybe get plastic surgery while I’m at it.”

Nick went upstairs and shaved and brushed his teeth and got fully dressed, putting on a tie and a white shirt, more as a statement of independence from his sexual and emotional need than as preparation to go to work at his restaurant, which didn’t open until eleven. He went back downstairs, deliberately walking through the kitchen, pulling a carton of orange juice out of the refrigerator, sucking his teeth, whistling a tune, ignoring Esther’s presence.

“Where are you going?” she said.

“Downstairs and pay some bills. While there’s still money in the bank for me to pay the bills. Tell the kids I’ll drive them to the pool later.”

“What’s with the attitude?” she asked.

“The flower beds smell like litter boxes with fish buried in them. We need to load the weed sprayer with Lysol and douche all the beds.”

“Listen to you. You see the paper? A whole family is killed, and you’re talking about how the garden smells. Count your blessings. Why the dirty mouth in your own kitchen? Show a little respect.”

Nick squeezed the heels of his hands against his temples and went down the half-flight of stairs into the glacial coldness of his office. He sat behind his desk in the darkness and planted his forehead on the desk blotter, the gold tie hanging from his throat like an ear of boiled corn, his flaccid arms like rolls of bread dough at his sides. He banged his head up and down on the blotter.

“I couldn’t help but hear y’all talking. Maybe you could take a page from the papists. Celibacy probably has its moments,” a voice said from the darkness.

“Jesus Christ!” Nick said, his head jerking up.

“Thought we should go over a few things.”

“I had the alarm on. How’d you get in?” Nick said, focusing on the man who sat in the stuffed leather chair, a pair of walking canes propped across his shoe tops.

“Through the side door yonder. I came in before y’all went to bed. Fact is, I browsed two or three of your books and took a little nap here in the chair and used your bathroom. You need to tidy up in there. I had to dig clean hand towels out of the closet.”

Nick picked up the phone receiver, the dial tone filling the room.

“I came here to save your life and the lives of your wife and children,” Preacher said. “If I were here for another reason…Well, we don’t even need to talk about that. Put the phone down and stop making an ass of yourself.”

Nick replaced the receiver in the cradle. The back of his hand looked strangely white and soft, cupped around the blackness of the receiver. “Is it money?”

“I say something once, and I don’t repeat it. You’re not deaf, and you’re not lacking in intelligence. If you pretend to be either one, I’m going to leave. Then your family’s fate is on you, not me.”

Nick’s fingers were trembling on top of the desk blotter. “It’s about Artie Rooney and the Asian girls, isn’t it? Were you the shooter? Hugo said the shooter was a religious nutcase. That’s you, right?”

Preacher’s face remained impassive, his greased hair combed back neatly, his forehead shiny in the gloom. “Rooney is going to have you and Mrs. Dolan killed, and maybe your children, too. If the shooter can get in close, he wants your wife shot in the mouth. He also plans to have me killed. That gives us a lot of commonalities. But you say the word, and I’ll be gone.”

Nick felt his mouth drying up, his eyes watering, his rectum constricting with fear and angst.

“Are you going to get emotional on me?” Preacher asked.

“Why should you care about us?”

“I’ve been sent. I am the one who has been sent.” Preacher tilted his face up. He seemed to smile in a self-deprecating manner, in a way that was almost likable.

“What the hell are you talking about?” Nick wiped at his nose with the back of his wrist, not expecting an answer, not wanting to listen any more to a lunatic.

“You watch television shows about witness protection and that kind of thing?”

“Everybody does. That’s all that’s on TV.”

“Want to live in a box in Phoenix in summertime with sand and rocks for a yard and bikers with swastika tats for neighbors? Because outside of cooperating with me, that’s the only shot you’ve got. Artie Rooney has an on-again, off-again business relationship with a Russian by the name of Josef Sholokoff. His people come out of the worst prisons in Russia. Want me to tell you what they did to a Mexican family in Juárez, to the children in particular?”

“No, I don’t want to hear this.”

“Cain’t blame you. You know a man name of Hackberry Holland?”

“No…Who? Holland? No, I don’t know anybody by that name.”

“You recognize the name, though. You’ve seen it in the newspaper. He’s a sheriff. You read about the death of the ICE agent in San Antonio. Holland was there.”

“I told you, I don’t know this Holland guy. I’m a restaurateur. I got into the escort business, but I don’t do that anymore. I’m going broke. I’m not a criminal. Criminals don’t go broke. Criminals don’t file bankruptcy. They don’t see their families put on the street.”

“Were you interviewed by the ICE agent? Has Holland been to see you?”

“Me? No. I mean, maybe the man from Immigration and Customs came to my home. I don’t know anybody named Holland. You say something only once to other people, but other people got to say it ten times to you?”

“I think Sheriff Holland wants to do me injury. If he takes me off the board, you go off the board, too, because I’m the only person standing between you and Artie Rooney and his Russian business partners.”

“I made mistakes, but I’m not a thief. You stop dragging me into your life.”

“You’re telling me I’m a thief?”

“No, sir.”

“You have a pistol in your drawer, a Beretta nine-millimeter. Why don’t you take it out of the drawer and hold it in your hand and point it at me and call me dishonorable again?”

“If you found my gun, you took the bullets out.”

“Could be. Or maybe not. Open the drawer and pick it up. The weight should tell you something.”

“I apologize if I said something I shouldn’t.”

Preacher leaned forward in the chair. He was wearing a brown suit with light stripes in it, and the cast was gone from his leg. “You take Mrs. Dolan and your children out of town for a while. You pay cash everywhere you go. A credit card is an electronic footprint. You don’t call your restaurant or your lawyer or your friends. Artie Rooney may tap your phone lines. I’ll give you a cell phone number where you can contact me. But I’ll be the only person you’ll be talking to.”

“Are you crazy? Nobody is this arrogant.” Nick opened the side drawer to his desk and looked at the gun lying inside it.

“A crazy person is psychotic and has a distorted vision of the world. Which of us is the realist? The one who has survived among the predators or the one who pretends to be a family man while he lives off the earnings of whores and puts his family at mortal risk?”

Nick tried to hold his gaze on Preacher’s.

“You want to say something?” Preacher asked. “Pick up the gun.”

“Don’t tempt me.”

“Did you ever fire it?”

“No.”

“Pick it up and point it at me. Hold it with both hands. That way your fingers will stop trembling.”

“You don’t think I’ll pick it up?”

“Show me.”

Nick rested his hand in the drawer. The steel frame and checkered grips of the nine-millimeter felt solid and hard and reassuring as he curved his fingers around them. He lifted the gun out of the drawer. “It’s light. You took the clip out.”

“It’s called a magazine. It feels light because you’re scared and your adrenaline gives you strength you normally don’t have. The firing mechanism has a butterfly safety. The red dot means you’re on rock and roll. Pull back the hammer.”

“I don’t want to.”

“Do it, little fat man. Do it, little Jewish fat man.”

“What did you call me?”

“It’s not what I call you. It’s what Hugo calls you. He also calls you the Pillsbury Doughboy. Fit your thumb over the hammer and pull it back, then aim the front sight at my face.”

Nick set down the gun on the desk blotter and removed his hand from the grips. He was breathing audibly through his nostrils, his palms clammy, a taste like soured milk climbing into his mouth.

“Why cain’t you do it?” Preacher asked.

“Because it’s empty. Because I’m not here to entertain you.”

“That’s not why at all. Push the button by the trigger guard.”

Nick picked up the gun and squeezed the release on the magazine. The magazine fell from the frame and clunked on the desktop, the loading spring stacked tight with brass-jacketed shells.

“Pull back the slide. You’ll see a round in the chamber. The reason you didn’t point the gun at me is because you’re not a killer. But other men are, and they don’t think two seconds about the deeds they do. Those are the men I’m trying to protect your family from. Some of us are made different in the womb and are not to be underestimated. I’m one of them, but I think I’m different from the others. Is everything I say lost on you? Are you ignorant as well as corrupt?”

“No, you make me want to blow your fucking head off.”

The door to the upstairs opened, and light flooded down the staircase. “Who’s down there?” Esther said. Before anyone could answer her question, she descended the stairs, gripping an empty pot by the handle. She stared down at Preacher. “Who are you?”

“A friend.”

“How’d you get in my house?”

“The side door was open. I’ve explained this. Why don’t you sit down?”

“You’re one of them, aren’t you?”

“One of who?”

“The gangsters who have been plaguing our lives.”

“You’re wrong.”

“He’s about to leave, Esther,” Nick said.

“You’re one of those who abducted my husband,” she said.

“I wouldn’t call it that.”

“Don’t lie.”

“You shouldn’t use that term to me, madam.”

She stepped closer to him. “The Asian women, the prostitutes, the illegals or whatever they were, you’re here about them. You’re the one who did it.”

“Did what?”

“Killed them. It was you, wasn’t it?”

“Why do you say that?” Preacher’s mouth twitched slightly, his words catching in his throat.

“Your eyes are dead. Only one kind of man has eyes like that. Someone who murders the light behind his own eyes. Someone who has tried to scrub God’s fingerprint off his soul.”

“Don’t you talk to me like that, woman.”

“You call me ‘woman’? A dog turd off the sidewalk calls me ‘woman’ in my own house?”

“I came here to-”

“Shut up, you worthless gangster,” she said.

“By God, you won’t talk to me like-” he began.

She swung the stainless-steel pot, still caked with oatmeal, across his face. The sound reverberated like a brass cymbal inside the room. Before he could recover from the shock, she hit him again, this time on the head. When he tried to raise his arms, she rained down one blow after another on his neck, shoulders, and elbows, gripping the handle with both hands, chopping downward as though attacking a tree stump.

“Esther!” Nick said, coming from behind his desk.

When Preacher lowered his arms, she swung the pot again, catching him right above the ear. He got to his feet and stumbled to the side door, blood leaking out of his hair. He jerked open the door and climbed the short flight of concrete steps into the yard, grabbing the higher steps for support, his palms smearing with bird shit.

Esther picked up his walking canes and followed him into the yard, through the citrus and crepe myrtle trees and windmill palms and hibiscus. He headed for the street, trying to outdistance her, looking back over his shoulder, his hatchet face quivering, his broken movements like a land crab’s. She flung his walking canes at his head. “Just so you don’t have any reason to come back,” she said.

Preacher crashed through the hedge onto the sidewalk and saw Bobby Lee fire up his vehicle down the street, just as a water truck passed and splattered Preacher from head to foot. The eastern sky was the blue of a robin’s egg and ribbed at the bottom with strips of crimson and purple cloud. The colors were majestic, the royal colors of David and Solomon, as though the sky itself had conspired to mock his grandiosity and foolish pride and vain hope that salvation would ever be his.