Rain Gods

16

EARLY SATURDAY MORNING, Hackberry walked down to his barn and skimmed the bugs from the secondary tank he kept for his registered Missouri foxtrotters, a chestnut named Missy’s Playboy and a palomino named Love That Santa Fe. Then he turned on the spigot full blast and let the water run until it overflowed the aluminum sides and was clean of insects and dust and cold to the touch and tinted a light green from the pieces of hay floating in it. Both foxtrotters were still colts and gave themselves the liberty of nuzzling him and poking at his pockets for treats, their breath heavy and warm and grassy on the side of his face. Sometimes they pulled a glove from his pocket or grabbed the hat from his head and ran away with it. But this morning they were not playful and instead kept staring down the pasture, motionless, ears back, nostrils dilating in the wind that blew out of the north.

“What’s wrong, boys? A cougar been around?” Hackberry said. “You guys are too big to be bothered by such critters as that.”

He heard his cell phone chime in his khakis. He opened it, looking toward the railed fence at the north end of the pasture, seeing nothing but a solitary oak framed against the sunrise and an abandoned clap board shack his neighbor kept hay in. He placed the phone against his ear. “You up, Hack?” a voice said.

“What’s going on, Maydeen?”

“I just got a weird call. Some guy says he has to talk with you but won’t give his name.”

“What’s he want?”

“He said you’re in danger. I asked him in danger of what. He said I didn’t want to know. He said he’s using a cell phone he bought off a street person, so I could forget about tracing the call.”

“What’d you tell him?”

“That I’d deliver the message. If he calls again, you want me to give him your number?”

“Yeah, go ahead.”

“There’s something else. I asked him if he’d been drinking. He said, ‘I wish I was just having the DTs. I wish this was all a dream. But those Asian women didn’t shoot themselves.’”

A half hour later, while Hackberry was watering his flower beds, his cell phone chimed in his pocket again. “Hello?” he said. There was no reply. “Is this the same man who called my office earlier?”

“Yes.”

Hackberry leaned over and turned off the water faucet. “You wanted to warn me about something?”

“Yes.”

“Want to tell me what it is?”

“Jack Collins, that’s his name. People call him Preacher.”

“What about him?”

“He thinks you’re after him. He thinks you and me have met.”

“What’s your name?”

“Collins killed the Thai women. He’s hooked up with Hugo Cistranos and Arthur Rooney. He thinks he’s a character out of the Bible.”

“Are you telling me you’re in danger, sir?”

“I don’t care about me.”

“Collins is trying to hurt your family?”

“You’ve got it all wrong. He thinks he’s protecting us. Collins says Arthur Rooney plans to kill us.”

“Let us help you. Meet me someplace.”

“No. I made this call because-”

“Because what?”

“I don’t want your blood on me. I don’t want the Asian women’s blood on me. I don’t want that soldier and his girlfriend hurt, either. I didn’t plan any of this.”

Nobody does, bud, Hackberry thought.

“Did you make a nine-one-one call about this some time ago and try to warn the FBI about Vikki Gaddis and her boyfriend?”

“No.”

“I think you did. I heard your voice on the tape. I think you’re probably a good man. You shouldn’t be afraid of us.”

“Artie Rooney says he wants my wife shot in the mouth. I’m not a good man. I let all this happen. I said what I had to say. You’re never gonna hear from me again.”

The signal went dead.

Hackberry called Maydeen. “Get ahold of Ethan Riser. Tell him I think we’ve got a solid lead on Jack Collins.”

“Ethan who?”

“The FBI agent. Tell him to call me at the house.”

“Is there somebody out to get you, Hack?”

“Why should I be a threat to anybody?”

“Because you’re stubborn as a cinder block and you don’t give up and all the shitbags know it.”

“Maydeen, would you please-” He shook his head and closed his phone.

Throughout the day, Hackberry waited for Ethan Riser to call back. At the office, he cleaned out the paperwork in his in-basket, drove a sick female inmate from the jail to the hospital, ate lunch, shot a game of pool in the saloon, placed an ad for a road-gang guard in the newspaper (eight dollars an hour, no benefits, must not be an ex-felon), and returned home for supper.

Still no call from Ethan Riser.

He washed his dishes and dried them and put them away, then sat on the porch as the evening cooled and plumes of dust rose off the land and a purple haze formed in the sky. Occasionally, he sensed a hint of rain in the air, a touch of ozone, a shift in the breeze that was ten degrees cooler, a ripping sound in a bank of black clouds on the horizon. When he strained his eyes, he thought he saw lightning on a distant hill, like gold wires sparking against the darkness.

From where he sat, he could see both the southern and northern borders of his property, the railed pastures he watered with wheel lines, the machine shed where he parked his tractor and his four-stall barn and his tack room filled with bridles and snaffle bits and saddles and hackamores and head stalls and three-inch-diameter braided rope leads and horsefly spray and worming syringes and hoof clippers and wood rasps, the poplar trees he had planted as windbreaks, his pale, closely clipped lawn that looked like a putting green in a desert, his flower beds that he constantly weeded and mulched and fertilized and watered by hand every morning. He could see every inch of the world he had created to compensate for his solitude and to convince himself the world was a grand place and well worth fighting for and, in so doing, had found himself without someone to enjoy it beside in equal measure.

But maybe it was presumptuous of him to conclude that his ownership of the ranch was more than transitory. Tolstoy had said the only piece of earth a person owned was the six feet he claimed with his death. The gospel of Matthew said He makes His sun rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the just and the unjust. Just across the border was a moral insane asylum where drug dealers did drive-bys in SUVs on entire families, where coyotes stole the life savings of peasants who simply wanted to work in the United States, and where any freshly created hump in the countryside could contain a multiple burial.

Wasn’t the potential for devolvement back into a simian society always extant within? Hackberry had seen American soldiers sell out their own in a prison camp south of the Yalu. The purchase price had been a warm shack to sleep in, an extra ball of rice, and a quilted coat with lice eggs in the seams. A trip into any border town gave one little doubt that hunger was the greatest aphrodisiac. It wouldn’t take much to create the same kind of society here, Hackberry thought. The collapse of the economy, the systemic spread of fear, the threat of imagined foreign adversaries would probably be enough to pull it off. But one way or another, his home and his ranch and the animals on it and he himself would become dust blowing in the wind.

He stood up from his wicker chair and leaned his shoulder against one of the lathe-turned wood posts on the porch. The sun had burned into a red spark between two hills, and again he thought he smelled impending rain in the south. He wondered if all old men secretly searched for nature’s rejuvenation in every tree of lightning pulsing silently inside a storm cloud, in every raindrop that struck a warm surface and reminded one of how good summer could be, of how valuable each day was.

The chime of his cell phone interrupted his reverie.

“Hello?” he said.

“It’s Ethan. I hear you’re having problems with anonymous callers.”

“Remember the guy who called in the nine-one-one warning about Vikki Gaddis? My bet is he’s from around New Orleans.”

“You a dialectical linguist?”

“On the tape, the caller sounded like he had a pencil between his teeth. The guy who called me had an accent like the Bronx or Brooklyn, except not quite. You only hear that accent in New Orleans or close by. I think this is the same guy who called while he was drunk.”

“Your dispatcher said this guy gave you a lead on Jack Collins.”

“The caller said Collins has taken an undue interest in me. I don’t give a lot of credence to that, but I do think the caller is obsessed with guilt and is hooked up with Arthur Rooney.”

“I think you’re underestimating Collins’s potential, Sheriff. From everything we know about him, he believes he’s the victim, not the perpetrator. You know the story of Lester Gillis?”

“Who?”

“Baby Face Nelson, a member of the Dillinger gang. He carried the photos and addresses and tag numbers of cops and FBI agents everywhere he went. He passed two agents in their car and made a U-turn and ran them off the road and killed both of them with seventeen bullet holes in him. I think Collins is the same kind of guy, except probably crazier. Get this: Baby Face Nelson had the last rites of the Catholic Church and had his wife wrap his body in a blanket and leave him in front of a cathedral because he didn’t want to be cold.” Riser started laughing.

“Arthur Rooney is originally from New Orleans, isn’t he?” Hackberry said.

“The Ninth Ward, the area that got hit hardest by Katrina.”

“Can you get me the names of his old business associates?”

“Yeah, I guess I could do that.”

“Guess?”

“I’ve got certain parameters I have to abide by.”

“Your colleagues still want to use Jack Collins to get to the Russian, what’s-his-name?”

“Josef Sholokoff.”

“So I have limited access to your information, even though I may be the target of the guy your colleagues want to cut a deal with?”

“I wouldn’t put it that way.”

“I would. Tell your colleagues that if Jack Collins comes around here, they’re going to be interviewing his corpse. See you, Mr. Riser.” Hackberry clicked off his cell phone and had to restrain himself from sailing it over the top of his windmill.

One hour later, he looked out the window and saw Pam Tibbs turn off the state road and drive under his arch and park her pickup in front of the house. She got out and seemed to hesitate before coming up the flagstones that led through his yard. She wore earrings and designer jeans and boots and a magenta silk shirt that was full of lights.

He stepped out on the porch. “Come in,” he said.

“I didn’t want to bother you,” she said.

“You didn’t necessarily catch me in the middle of inventing the wheel.”

“Maydeen gave me two tickets to the rodeo. We can probably still catch the last hour or so, or just go to the fair.”

“Is everything okay?”

“Sure. No problems.”

He walked into the yard, the spray from his sprinklers iridescent in the glow of the porch light. She looked up into his face, an expectation there that he couldn’t quite define. He scratched at the top of his fore head. “I had dreams about Korea for a long time,” he said. “Once in a while I still go back there. It’s the way we’re made. If certain things we do or witness don’t leave a stone bruise on the soul, there’s something wrong with our humanity.”

“I’m all right, Hack.”

“It doesn’t work that way, kiddo.”

“Don’t assign me patronizing names.” When he didn’t reply, she put her hands on her hips and stared into the darkness, her eyes fighting with an emotion she didn’t plan to discuss or perhaps even recognize. “Eriksson looked into my face just before I shot him. He knew what was about to happen. I’ve always heard the term ‘mortal fear’ used to describe moments like that. But that wasn’t it. He saw the other side.”

“Of what?”

“The grave, judgment, eternity, whatever people want to call it. It was like he was thinking the words ‘It’s forever too late.’”

“Eriksson dealt the play and got what he deserved. You saved my life, Pam. Don’t let a sonofabitch like that rob you of your life.”

“You can be pretty hard-edged, Hack.”

“No, I’m not. Eriksson was a killer for hire.” He cupped his palm around the back of her neck. “He preyed on the defenseless and used what was best in people to turn them into his victims. We’re the children of light. That’s not a hyperbole.”

Her eyes wandered over his face as though she feared mockery or insincerity in his words. “I’m not a child of light, not at all.”

“You are to me,” he said. He saw her swallow and her lips part. His palm felt warm and moist on the back of her neck. He removed it and hooked his thumbs in his pockets. “I’d really like to go to that rodeo. I’d like to buy some candied apples and caramel corn at the fair, too. Anybody who doesn’t like rodeos and county fairs has something wrong with him.”

“Get mad at me if you want,” she said. She put her arms around him and hugged herself against him and pressed her face against his chest and her body against his loins. He could smell the perfume behind her ears and the strawberry shampoo in her hair and the fragrance of her skin. He saw the windmill’s blades ginning in the starlight, the disen gaged rotary shaft turning impotently, the cast-iron pipe dry and hard-looking above the aluminum tank. He rested his cheek on top of Pam’s head, his eyes tightly shut.

She stepped away from him. “Is it because you feel certain people shouldn’t be together? Because they’re the wrong age or color or gender or their bloodline is too close? Is that how you think, Hack?”

“No,” he replied.

“Then what is it? Is it because you’re my boss? Or is it just me?”

It’s because it’s dishonorable for an old man to sleep with a young woman who is looking for her father, he thought.

“What did you say?”

“I said nothing. I said let me buy you a late supper. I said I’m happy you came by. I said let’s go to the fair.”

“All right, Hack. If you say so. I won’t-”

“Won’t what?”

She smiled and shrugged.

“You won’t what?” he repeated.

She continued to smile, her feigned cheerfulness concealing her resignation. “I’ll drive,” she said.

THAT NIGHT AFTER she dropped him off, he sat for a long time in his bedroom with the lights turned off. Then he lay down on top of the bedcovers in his clothes and stared at the ceiling, the heat lightning flickering on his body. Outside, he heard his horses running in the pasture, their hooves heavy-sounding, swallowed by the wind, as though they were wrapped in flannel. He heard his garbage-can lid rattle on the driveway, blown by the wind or pulled loose from the bungee cord by an animal. He heard the trees thrashing and wild animals walking through the yard and the twang of his smooth wire when a deer went through his back fence. Then he heard a noise that shouldn’t have been there, a car engine in closer proximity to his house than the state road would allow.

He sat up and slipped his boots on and went out on the porch. A car had pulled off the asphalt and driven onto the dirt track beyond the northern border of his property. The car’s lights were off, but the engine was still running. Hackberry went back into the bedroom and removed his holstered revolver from under his bed and unsnapped the strap from the hammer and let the holster slide off the barrel onto the bedspread. He walked back outside and crossed the yard to the horse lot. Missy’s Playboy and Love That Santa Fe were standing by their water tank, frozen, looking to the north, the wind drifting a cloud of dust across them.

“It’s okay, fellows. We’re just going to check this guy out,” Hackberry said, walking between them, the white-handled.45 hanging from his left hand.

As Hackberry approached the north fence on the pasture, the driver of the car shifted into gear without apparent urgency, the lights still off, and turned in a circle, dead tree branches and uncropped Johnson grass raking under the car’s frame. Then he drove in a leisurely fashion onto the asphalt and continued down the road, clicking on his headlights when he passed a clump of oaks on the bend.

Hackberry went back to the house, set his revolver on the nightstand, and gradually fell asleep. He dreamed of a rodeo bull exploding out of a bucking chute. The rider’s bones seemed to be breaking apart inside his skin as the bull reared and corkscrewed between his thighs. Suddenly, the rider was in the air, his wrist still tied down with a suicide wrap, his body over the side, whipped and dirt-dragged and flung into the boards and finally horned.

Without ever quite waking from the dream, Hackberry reached for his revolver and clenched its white handles in his palm.

PREACHER CONSIDERED HIMSELF a tolerant man. But Bobby Lee Motree could be a challenge.

“Holland is an old man,” Bobby Lee said over the cell phone. “When he was running for Congress, he was known as a drunk and a gash hound. He got religion after he started representing a Mexican farmworkers’ union, probably because he’d already screwed up everything else he touched. His first wife dumped him and cleaned out his bank account. His second wife was a Communist organizer of some kind. She died of cancer. The guy’s a loser, Jack.”

Preacher was sitting at a card table in the shade behind his stucco house, watching a lizard crawl across the top of a big gray rock while he talked. The table was spread with a clean cloth. On top of the cloth, Preacher had disassembled his Thompson machine gun. Next to the disassembled parts were a can of lubricant and a bore brush and a white rag stained yellow with a fresh application of oil. While he talked, Preacher touched the oiled surface of the Thompson’s barrel and studied the wispy tracings his fingerprints left on the steel.

“Listen, Jack, if it’s not broken, you don’t fix it,” Bobby Lee said. “The guy couldn’t even save his own grits. Liam would have capped him if that cunt of a deputy hadn’t shown up.”

“Don’t use that term around me.”

“We’re talking about popping a Texas sheriff, and you’re worried about language?”

Preacher wiped his fingertips on the gun cloth and studied a hawk flying above the mountainside, its shadow racing across the slope.

“You there?” Bobby Lee said.

“Where else would I be?”

“I’m just saying Holland is a retread and a rural schmuck who surrounds himself with other losers. Why borrow trouble?” Bobby Lee said.

“The man has the Navy Cross.”

“So, rah-rah, he’s a swinging dick. Maybe he ran in the wrong direction.”

“You have a serious problem, Bobby Lee.”

“What’s that?”

“You come to conclusions without looking at the evidence. Then you find reasons to justify your shoddy conclusions. It’s like inventing a square wheel and trying to convince yourself you like your wagon to ride a little rough.”

“Jack, you smoked a federal agent. You want to add another cop to your tally? They not only execute in this state, they have beer parties at the prison gates when they do it. I’m risking my life throwing in with you. We’ve got Hugo and Artie Rooney to deal with. Then there’s Vikki Gaddis and the soldier boy. What’s next, dropping a hydrogen bomb on Iran?”

“I’ll handle Artie Rooney.”

“You ought to get laid. You know what Hugo said? I’m quoting Hugo, I didn’t say it, it’s Hugo talking, not me. He said, ‘Preacher’s last sexual encounter was a visit to his proctologist.’ How long has it been since you got your ashes hauled?”

Preacher watched the lizard’s throat puff out in a red balloon on the rock. The lizard’s tongue uncoiled and wrapped around a tiny black ant and pulled the ant into the lizard’s mouth. “I’m glad you’re on my side, Bobby Lee. You have loyalty in your lineage. That’s why General Lee stuck with the state of Virginia, isn’t it? Loyalty has no surrogate. Blood will out, won’t it?”

There was a long silence. “Why are you always ridiculing me? I’m the only guy who stood with you. You really hurt my feelings, man.”

“You got a point. You’re a good boy, Bobby Lee.”

“That means a lot to me, Jack. But you got to quit renting space in your head to bozos who couldn’t shine your shoes.”

“Artie Rooney is going to pay me a half million dollars. Ten percent of that will go to you.”

“That’s generous of you, man. You got a kind heart.”

“In the meantime, Artie is going to leave the Jews alone. That one isn’t up for grabs.”

“You still worried about the Jews after what Ms. Dolan did to you? What about the Gaddis broad and the soldier boy? Are they out?”

“They’re in.”

“They’re in?”

“You heard me.”

“What about Holland?”

“I’ll give it some thought.”

“I think he saw me. I pulled off the road to case his place. I thought he was asleep. He came outside and saw my car. But it was too dark for him to get my tag or see my face. If we leave him alone, he’ll forget about it.”

“You didn’t tell me that.”

“So I just did. Use your head, Jack. Artie Rooney hijacked Josef Sholokoff’s whores. Who do you think Rooney is gonna put that on? You got the rep from L.A. to Miami. Mexican cops think you walk through walls. Artie gets on the phone, tells Sholokoff you’re a psycho, tells him you’re working for Nick Dolan, and gets you permanently out of his hair. You taught me to be a fly on the wall, Jack.”

“Want to spell that out?”

“That agent you capped wasn’t just a fed, he was from ICE. They’re fanatics, worse than Treasury agents. You got any idea of how hot you are?”

“You just said ‘you.’”

“Okay, ‘we.’”

“Call me when you find Vikki Gaddis.”

“Is this girl worth clipping? Think about it. A waitress from a truck stop?”

“Did I say anything about clipping her? Did you hear me say that?”

“No.”

“You find her, but you don’t touch her.”

“Why should I want to touch her? It’s not me who’s got-”

“Got what?”

“An obsession. Like a tumor on the brain. The size of a carrot.”

Again Preacher let his silence speak for him; it was a weapon Bobby Lee never knew how to deal with.

“You still there?”

“Still here,” Preacher said.

“You’re the best there is, Jack. Nobody else could have done what you did behind the church. It took guts to do that.”

“Say again?”

“To step across the line like that, to grease every one of them, to burn the whole magazine and bulldoze them under and mark it off. It takes maximum cojones to do a mass whack like that, Jack. That’s why you’re you.”

This time Preacher’s silence was not of his own volition. He took the cell phone from his ear and opened his mouth to clear a blockage in his ear canal. The side of his face felt both numb and hot to the touch, as though he had been stung by a bee. He stared at the gray rock. The lizard was gone, and at the base of the rock, he saw a spray of tiny purple flowers that looked like tiny violets. He wondered how any flower that lovely and delicate could grow in the desert.

“You still there? Talk to me, man,” he heard Bobby Lee’s voice say. Preacher closed his cell phone without replying. He picked up the Thompson and ran a bore brush through the barrel and swabbed it with a clean oil patch. He folded a piece of white paper and inserted it in the open chamber, reflecting the sunlight up through the rifling. The inside of the barrel was immaculate, the whorls of light an affirmation of the gun’s mechanical integrity and reliability. He lifted up the drum and snapped it cleanly into place under the barrel and laid the gun across his lap, his palms resting on the wood stock and steel frame. He could hear whirring sounds in his head, like wind blowing in a cave or perhaps the voices of women whispering to him through the ground, whispering inside the wildflowers.

AT THAT SAME moment, one hundred miles away, three bikers were headed down a two-lane highway, full-bore, their arms wrapped with jailhouse tats, the points of their shoulders bright with sunburn. Sometimes, out of boredom, they lazed across the solid yellow stripe or stopped at a roadside rathole for a beer and a grease burger or caught a live hillbilly band at a shitkicker nightclub or steak house. But otherwise, they burned their way across the American Southwest with the dedication of Visigoths. The crystal that coursed in their veins, the dirty thunder of their exhaust flattening against the asphalt, the blowtorch velocity of the wind on their skin, the surge of the engines’ power into their genitalia, blended together in a paean to their lives.

They topped a rise and turned onto a dirt road and followed it for two miles until they came out on the cusp of a sloping plain of alluvial grit and alkali and green mesquite. They stopped between two dun-colored bluffs, and their leader consulted a topographical map without dismounting, then used binoculars to study a small stucco house set against a mountain that contained a shadow-darkened opening in its face. “Bingo,” he said.

The three men dismounted and touched fists and parked their hogs down in a gulley and built a fire and cooked their food on sticks. When they had finished eating, they pissed on the flames in the sunset and rolled out their sleeping bags and smoked weed and, like spectators at an exotic zoo, silently watched a coyote with a stiffened back leg try to keep up with a pack climbing a hill. Then they fell asleep.

On the fair side of the plain, the stucco house was quiet. A solitary figure sat on a metal chair in front of the opening to a shored-up cave, staring at the mantle of gold light on the hills, his expression as removed from earthly concerns as that of a man whose severed head had just been placed on a platter.