Rain Gods

5

AS HE LAY in a bed with a view of a chicken yard, a railed pen with six goats inside it, and a bladeless, rusted slip of a windmill strung with dead brush blown from a field of weeds, the man whose nickname was Preacher could not get the woman out of his mind, nor the scent of her fear and sweat and perfume while he wrestled with her on the ground, nor the expression on her face when she fired the.38 round through the top of his foot, exploding a jet of blood from the sole of his shoe. Her expression hadn’t been one of shock or pity, as Preacher would have expected; it had been one of triumph.

No, that wasn’t it, either. What he had seen in her face was loathing and disgust. She had fried his eyes with wasp spray, taken his weapon, shot him at close quarters, crushed his cell phone with her tire, and left him to bleed out like a piece of roadkill. She had also taken the time to call him bubba and inform him he had gotten off easy. She had done all this to a man considered by some, in terms of potential, to be one notch below the scourge of God.

The sheaf of bandages and tape on his calf smelled of medicinal salve and dried blood, but the pain pills he had eaten and the veterinarian’s injection had numbed the nerves down to the ankle. The plaster cast on his foot was another matter. It felt like wet cement on his skin, and the heat and sweat and friction it generated turned his wound into an aching misery. Twenty minutes ago, the electric power had failed and the fan on the table by his bed had died. Now he could feel the heat and humidity intensifying in the walls, the tin roof expanding, pinging like a banjo string.

“Put some more ice on my foot,” he said to Jesus, the Hispanic man who owned the house.

“It melted.”

“Did you call the power company?”

“We don’t got a phone, boss. When it gets hot like this, we got brownouts. After the day gets cooler, the electricity goes back on.”

Preacher pressed the back of his head into the pillow and stared at the ceiling. The room was sweltering, and he could smell a growing stench from inside the hospital gown he had worn for two days. When he closed his eyes, he saw the girl’s face again, and it filled him with both desire and resentment for the sexual passion she excited in him. Hugo had brought him his.45 auto. It was a 1911 model-simple in design, always dependable, effective in ways most people couldn’t imagine. Preacher ran his hand along the bottom of his mattress and felt the hardness of the.45’s frame. He thought of the girl, her deep-set eyes and her chestnut hair that was curled at the tips, and the way her tongue and teeth looked when she opened her mouth. He held the last image in his mind for a long time. “Tell your wife to get a sponge and wash me,” he said.

“I can bathe you.”

“I look like a maricón to you?” Preacher said, grinning.

“I’ll ask her, boss.”

“Don’t ask. Tell her. Hugo paid you enough money, didn’t he? For you and your family and the veterinarian who left me with all this pain? Y’all got paid plenty, didn’t you, Jesus? Or do you need more?”

“It’s bastante.”

“Hugo gave you bastante to take care of the gringo. ‘Bastante’ means ‘enough,’ doesn’t it? How should I take that? Enough to do what? Sell me out? Maybe tell your priest about me?” Preacher’s eyes became hazy and amused.

Jesus’s hair was as black and shiny as paint, barbered like a matador’s, his skin pale, his hands small and his features frail, like those of a consumptive Spanish poet. He was not over thirty, but his daughter was at least ten and his overweight wife could have been his mother. Go figure, Preacher thought.

THAT EVENING THE power was back on, but Preacher could not shake either his funk or his misgivings about his environment and his caretakers. “Your name is a form of irreverence,” he said to Jesus.

“Is a what?”

“Try to speak in complete sentences. Don’t leave the subject out of your sentences. ‘Is’ is a verb, not a noun. Your parents gave you the Lord’s name, but you take money to hide a gringo and break the laws of your country.”

“I got to do what I got to do, boss.”

“Take me outside. Don’t put me downwind of those goats, either.”

Jesus set up the collapsible wheelchair by the bedside and worked Preacher into the seat, then wheeled him out the front door into the lee of the house, Preacher’s.45 resting on his lap. The view to the south was magnificent. The sky was lavender, the desert wastes bound not by earthy borders but by the arbitrary definitions of light and shadow. Few people would have found such a vista spiritually comforting, but Preacher did. The dry riverbeds were prehistoric, the flumes strewn with rocks the color of wizened apples and plums and apricots. Preacher saw wood that rain and wind and heat had carved and reshaped and hardened into bleached objects that could be mistaken for dinosaur bone. The desert was immutable, as encompassing as a deity, serene in its own magnitude, stretching into the past all the way back to Eden, a testimony to the predictability and design in all creation, a mistress beckoning to those who were unafraid to enter and conquer and use her.

“You ever hear of Herbert Spencer?” Preacher said.

“Who?” Jesus said.

“That’s what I thought. Ever hear of Charles Darwin?”

“Claro que sí.”

“It was Herbert Spencer who understood how society worked, not Darwin. Darwin wasn’t a sociologist or philosopher. Can you relate to that?”

“Whatever you say, boss.”

“Why are you grinning?”

“I thought you was making a joke.”

“You think I need you to agree with me?”

“No, boss.”

“Because if you did, that would be an insult. But you’re not that kind of man, right?”

Jesus lowered his head and folded his arms, his face drawn with fatigue and his inability to deal with Preacher’s convoluted rhetoric. A purple haze was settling on the mesas and vast wasteland that lay to the south, the dust rising off the hardpan, the creosote brush darkening inside the gloom. Not far away, Jesus saw a coyote digging hard into a gopher’s burrow, flinging the dirt backward with its nails, darting its muzzle into the hole.

“You got any family, people who can help take care of you, boss?” Jesus said.

It was a question he shouldn’t have asked. Preacher lifted his head the way a fish might when feeding on the surface of a lake. There was an unexpected and unreadable bead of light in his eyes, like a damp kitchen match flaring on the striker. “I look like a man with no family?”

“I thought maybe there was somebody you wanted me to call.”

“A man inseminates a woman. The woman squeezes the kid out of her womb. So now we’ve got a father and a mother and a child. That’s a family. You’re saying I’m different somehow?”

“I didn’t mean nothing, boss.”

“Go back inside.”

“When it’s cool, the mosquitoes come out. They’ll pick you up and carry you off, boss.”

Preacher’s expression seemed to go out of joint.

“I got you, boss. When you’re ready to eat, my little girl made some soup and tortillas special for you,” Jesus said.

Jesus went through the back door, not speaking until he was well inside the house. Preacher watched the coyote dip a gopher out of the hole and run heavily and stiff-necked across the hardpan, the gopher flopping from its jaws. Jesus’s wife came to the window and stared at Preacher’s silhouette, her fist pressed to her mouth. Her husband pulled her away and closed the curtain, even though the house was superheated by the propane cooking stove in the kitchen.

In the morning a windburned man with an orange beard and blue tats on his upper arms delivered a compact car for Preacher’s use and then left with a companion in a second vehicle. Jesus’s little girl brought Preacher his lunch to him on a tray. She set it on his lap but did not go away.

“My pants are on the chair. Take a half dollar out of the pocket,” he said.

The girl took two quarters from his trousers and closed her palm on them. Her face was oval and brown, like that of her mother, her hair dark brown, a blue ribbon tied in it. “You ain’t got no family?” she asked.

“You ask too many questions for a person your age. Somebody should give you a grammar book, too.”

“I’m sorry you was shot.”

Preacher’s eyes lifted from the girl’s face to the kitchen, where Jesus and his wife were washing dishes in a pan of greasy water, their backs to Preacher. “I was in a car accident. Nobody shot me,” he said.

She touched the cast with the ends of her fingers. “We got ice now. I’ll put it on your foot,” she said.

So Jesus had opened his mouth in front of his wife and daughter, Preacher thought. So the little girl could tell all her friends a gringo with two bullet holes in him was paying money to stay at their house.

What to do? he asked himself, staring at the ceiling.

Late that afternoon he had a feverish dream. He was firing a Thompson submachine gun, the stock and cylindrical magazine turned sideways so the recoil would jerk the barrel horizontally rather than upward, directing the angle of fire parallel to the ground rather than above the shapes he saw in the darkness.

He awoke abruptly into the warm yellow glare of the room and wasn’t sure where he was. He could hear flies buzzing and a goat’s bell tinkling and smell the odor of water that had gone sour in a cattle pond. He picked up a damp cloth from a bowl on his nightstand and wiped his face with it. He sat on the side of the mattress, the blood draining down into his foot, waiting for the images in his dream to leave his mind.

Through the kitchen doorway he could see Jesus and his wife and little girl eating at their kitchen table. They were eating tortillas they’d rolled pickled vegetables inside, their faces leaning over their bowls, crumbs falling from their mouths. They made him think of Indians from an earlier era eating inside a cave.

Why’d Jesus have to blab in front of the kid? Preacher wondered. Maybe he plans to blab to a much wider audience anyway, maybe to the jefe and his khaki-clad half-breed dirtbags down at the jail.

Preacher could feel the coldness of the.45’s frame protruding from under the mattress. His crutches were propped against a wood chair in the corner. Through the window he could see the tan compact Hugo had ordered delivered for his use.

The veterinarian was coming back that evening. The veterinarian and Jesus and his wife and the little girl would all be in the house at one time.

This crap was on Hugo Cistranos, not him, Preacher thought. Just like the gig behind the stucco church. It was Hugo who’d blown it. Preacher hadn’t invented how the world worked. The coyote’s ability to dig the gopher out of its burrow was hardwired into the coyote’s brain. A hundred-million-year-old floodplain disappearing into infinity contained only one form of meaningful artifact: the mineralized bones of all the mammals, reptiles, and birds that had done whatever was necessary in order to survive. If anyone doubted that, he needed only to sink the steel bucket on a backhoe into one of those ancient riverbeds that looked like calcified putty in the sunset.

Jesus brought Preacher his supper at dusk.

“What time is the vet going to be here?” Preacher asked.

“No is vet. Es médico, boss. He gonna be here soon.”

“Answer the question: When will he be here?”

“Maybe fifteen minutes. You like the food okay?”

“Hand me my crutches.”

“You getting up?”

Preacher’s upturned face looked like the edge of a hatchet.

“I’ll get them, boss,” Jesus said.

Jesus’s wife had hand-washed Preacher’s trousers and shirt and socks and underwear, replaced his coins and keys and pocketknife in the pockets, and hung them neatly on the wood chair by the wall. Preacher worked his way to the chair, gathered up his clothes, and sat back down on his mattress. Then he slowly dressed himself, keeping his mind empty of the events that would take place in the house within the next few minutes.

He had not tucked in his shirt, allowing it to hang outside his trousers. Through the front window, he saw the veterinarian’s paint-skinned truck clattering over the ruts in the road, churning a cloud of fine white dust in the air. Preacher slid the.45 from under his mattress and pushed it inside the back of his belt, then pulled his shirt over the grips. The veterinarian parked in back and cut the engine, just as the rooster tail of dust from his truck broke across the front of the house and drifted through the screens. Preacher lifted himself onto his crutches and began working his way toward the kitchen, where Jesus and his wife and little girl sat at the table, waiting for the veterinarian, who clutched a sweating six-pack of Coca-Cola.

The veterinarian was unshaved and wore a frayed suit coat that was too tight on him and a tie with stains on it and a white shirt missing a button at the navel. He suffered from myopia, which caused him to squint and to furrow his brow, and as a consequence the villagers looked upon him as a studious and educated man worthy of respect.

“You look very good in your clean clothes, señor. Do you not want me to change your bandages? I brought you more sedatives to help you sleep,” the veterinarian said to Preacher.

The veterinarian was framed against the screen door, the late red sun creating a nimbus around his uncut hair and the stubble on his jowls.

Preacher steadied his weight and eased his right hand from the grip on the crutch. He moved his hand behind him slowly, so as not to lose his balance, his knuckles touching the heaviness of the.45 stuck down in his belt. “I don’t think I’ll need anything tonight,” he said.

They all stared at him in the silence, the bare lightbulb overhead splintering into yellow needles, reducing the differences in their lives to pools of shadow at their feet. Now, now, now, Preacher heard a voice in his head saying.

“Rosa made you some peanut-butter cookies,” Jesus said.

Was that the little girl’s name or the name of the wife? “Say again?”

“My little girl made you a present, boss.”

“I’m diabetic. I cain’t eat sugar.”

“You want to sit down? You look like you’re hurting, boss.”

Preacher’s right hand opened and closed behind his back. He sucked in slightly on his bottom lip. “How far up the dirt road to the highway?”

“Ten minutes, no more.”

Preacher swallowed drily and slid his palm over the grips of the.45. Then his stare broke, and he felt a line of tension like a fissure divide the skin of his face in half. He pulled his wallet from his back pocket and labored on the crutches to the kitchen table. He splayed open the wallet and began counting a series of bills onto the table. “There’s eleven hundred dollars here,” he said. “You educate that little girl with it, you buy her decent clothes, you get her teeth fixed, you send her to a doctor and not to some damn quack, you buy her good food, and you burn a candle at your church in thanks you got a little girl like this. You understand me?”

“You don’t got to tell me those things, boss.”

“And you get her a grammar book, too, plus one for yourself.”

Preacher worked his wallet into his pocket and thumped across the floor on his crutches and out the screen into the yard, under a purple and bloodred sky that seemed filled with the cawing of carrion birds.

He fell behind the wheel of the Honda and started the engine. Jesus came out the back screen of his house, a can of Coca-Cola in his hand.

“Some guys just don’t know how to leave it alone,” Preacher said under his breath.

“Boss, can you talk to Rosa? She’s crying.”

“About what?”

“She heard you talking in your sleep. She thinks you’re going to hell.”

“You just don’t get it, do you?”

“Get what, boss?”

“It’s right yonder, all around us, in the haze of the evening. We’re already there,” Preacher said, gesturing at the darkening plain.

“You one unusual gringo, boss.”

WHEN HACKBERRY HOLLAND woke inside a blue dawn on Saturday morning, he looked through his bedroom window and saw the FBI agent Ethan Riser in his backyard, admiring Hack’s flower beds. The FBI agent’s hair was as thick and white as cotton, the capillaries in his jaws like pieces of blue and red thread. The iridescent spray from Hackberry’s automatic sprinklers had already stained Riser’s pale suit, but his concentration on the flower beds seemed so intense he was hardly aware of it.

Hackberry dressed in a pair of khakis and a T-shirt and walked barefoot onto the back porch. There were poplar trees planted as a windbreak at the bottom of his property, and inside the shadows they made on the grass he could see a doe and her fawn watching him, their eyes brown and moist inside the gloom.

“You guys get up early in the morning, don’t you?” he said to the FBI agent.

“I work Sundays, too. Me and the pope.”

“What do you need, sir?”

“Can I buy you breakfast?”

“No, but you can come inside.”

While the agent sat at his kitchen table, Hackberry started the coffeemaker and broke a half-dozen eggs in a huge skillet and set two pork chops in the skillet with them. “You like cereal?” he said.

“No, thanks.”

At the stove, Hackberry poured a bowlful of Rice Krispies, then added cold milk and started eating them while the eggs and meat cooked. Ethan Riser rested his chin on his thumb and knuckle and stared into space, trying not to look at his watch or show impatience. His eyes were ice-blue, unblinking, marked by neither guile nor doubt. He cleared his throat slightly. “My father was a botanist and a Shakespearean actor,” he said. “In his gardens he grew every kind of flower Shakespeare mentions in his work. He was also a student of Voltaire and believed he could tend his own garden and separate himself from the rest of the world. For that reason, he was a tragic man.”

“What did you want to tell me, sir?” Hackberry said, setting his cereal bowl in the sink.

“There were two sets of prints on the Airweight thirty-eight the road gang supervisor gave you. We matched one set to the prints of Vikki Gaddis we took from her house. The other set we matched through the California driver’s license database. They belong to a fellow by the name of Jack Collins. He has no criminal record. But we’ve heard about him. His nickname is Preacher. Excuse me, are you listening?”

“I will be as soon as I have some coffee.”

“I see.”

“You take sugar or milk?” Hackberry said.

Ethan Riser folded his arms and looked out the window at the deer among the poplar trees. “Whatever you have is fine,” he said.

“Go ahead,” Hackberry said.

“Thank you. They call him Preacher because he thinks he may be the left hand of God, the giver of death.” Ethan Riser waited, his agitation beginning to show. “You’re not impressed?”

“Did you ever know a sociopath who didn’t think he was of cosmic importance? What did this guy do before he became the left hand of God?”

“He was a pest exterminator.”

Hackberry began pouring coffee into two cups and tried to hide his expression.

“You think it’s funny?” Riser said.

“Me?”

“You said you were at Pak’s Palace. I did some research. That was a brick factory where Major Pak hung up GIs on the rafters and beat them with clubs for hours. You were one of them?”

“So what if I was or wasn’t? It happened. Most of those guys didn’t come back.” Hackberry scraped the eggs and meat out of the skillet onto a platter. Then he set the platter on top of the table. He set it down harder than he intended.

“We hear this guy Preacher is a gun for hire across the border. We hear he doesn’t take prisoners. It’s a free-fire zone down there. More people are being killed in Coahuila and Nuevo León than in Iraq, did you know that?”

“As long as it doesn’t happen in my county, I’m not interested.”

“You’d better be. Maybe Collins has already killed Pete Flores and the Gaddis girl. If he’s true to his reputation, he’ll be back and brush his footprints out of the sand. You hearing me on this, Sheriff?”

Hackberry blew on his coffee and drank from it. “My grandfather was a Texas Ranger. He knocked John Wesley Hardin out of his saddle and pistol-whipped him and put him in jail.”

“What’s that mean?”

“Mess with the wrong people and you’ll get a shitpile of grief, is what it means.”

Ethan Riser studied him, just short of being impolite. “I heard you were a hardhead. I heard you think you can live inside your own zip code.”

“Your food’s getting cold. Better eat up.”

“Here’s the rest of it. After nine-eleven, Immigration and Naturalization merged with Customs and became ICE. They’re one of the most effective and successful law enforcement agencies we have under Homeland Security. The great majority of their agents are professional and good at what they do. But there’s one guy hereabouts who is off the leash and off the wall.”

“This guy Clawson?”

“That’s right, Isaac Clawson. Years ago two serial predators were working out of northern Oklahoma. They made forays up into Kansas, the home of Toto and Dorothy and the yellow brick road. I won’t describe what they did to most of their victims because you’re trying to eat your breakfast. Clawson’s daughter worked nights at a convenience store. These guys kidnapped both her and her fiancé from the store and locked them in the trunk of a car. Out of pure meanness, they set fire to the car and burned them alive.”

“You’re telling me Clawson’s a cowboy?”

“I’ll put it this way: He likes to work alone.”

Hackberry had set down his knife and fork. He gazed out the back door at the poplar trees. The sky was dark, and dust was blowing out of a field, the tips of the poplars bending in the wind.

“You okay, Sheriff?”

“Sure, why not?”

“You were a corpsman at the Chosin?”

“Yep.”

“The country owes men and women like you a big debt.”

“Not to me they don’t,” Hackberry said.

“I had to come here this morning.”

“I know you did.”

Ethan Riser got up to leave, then paused at the door. “Love your flowers,” he said.

Hackberry nodded and didn’t reply.

He wrapped the uneaten pork chops in foil and placed them in the icebox, then put on a gray sweat-ringed felt hat and in the backyard scraped the eggs off the platter for his bird dog and two barn cats that didn’t have names and a possum that lived under the house. He went back in the kitchen and took a sack of corn out of the icebox and walked down to the poplar trees and scattered the corn in the grass for the doe and her fawn. The grass was tall and green in the lee of the trees, channeled with the wind blowing out of the south. Hackberry squatted down and watched the deer eat, his face blanketed with shadow, his eyes like those of a man staring into a dead fire.