Rain Gods

by James Lee Burke

  What was it that had bothered him about Ethan Riser? The fact that he could drink normally and walk away from it? That he represented an organization with power that had almost global reach? Or Hackberry’s refusal to accept the notion that the Ethan Risers of the world were functional and made the system work and, in spite of all their inadequacies and failures, did an enormous amount of good?

  No, that wasn’t it, either. Some people dwelled apart and didn’t fit. It was that simple. Preacher Jack Collins was one of them. In all probability, he was a psychopath who, upon his death, would continue to look upon himself as normal, stepping through a hole in the dimension still convinced it was the world that was wrong and not he. But there were both male and female counterparts to men like Jack Collins. They wore badges or Roman collars or climbed fire ladders into flaming buildings or did triage in battalion aid stations and, like Collins, never discussed their difference or the events in their lives that had sawed them loose from the seminal glue holding the rest of humankind together.

  Saint Paul had written that perhaps there were angels living among us. If so, perhaps this was the bunch he was talking about. But before any one of them congratulated himself, he needed to be aware of the dues that went with membership. If an individual, through either his own volition or events over which he had no control, found himself taking up residence in a country undefined by flags or physical borders, he could be assured of one immediate and abiding consequence: He was on his own, and solitude and loneliness would probably be his companions unto the grave.

  The greatest irony was that celibacy often went with the residency, less out of spiritual choice than circumstance. And those who called celibacy a gift were usually, in Hackberry’s opinion, those who lived twenty-four hours a day inside the iron maiden, their flesh tormented by the spikes of their unacknowledged desire.

  He leaned forward in his folding chair and stretched his lower back, his sciatica like a fire creeping along his spinal cord.

  He saw the cruiser turn off the road and come up his driveway. He heard the doorbell ring but did not bother to get up to answer it. When Pam Tibbs came around the side of the house, he saw that she had changed out of her evening clothes into jeans and a departmental khaki shirt. She was wearing her gun belt and cuffs and slapjack and Mace.

  “What are you doing here?” he said.

  “This month I go on at oh-one-hundred Saturdays,” she replied.

  “That doesn’t address the question.”

  “You always sit in the yard by yourself at one in the morning?”

  “Sometimes my back lights up and I have to wait for it to pass.”

  She was standing in front of him, looking down at him, the curly ends of her hair hanging against her cheeks, her eyes bright in the shadows. He could hear her breathing and see her breasts rising and falling under her shirt. “You want me to resign?” she said.

  “No, I just want you to accept certain realities.”

  “Like what?”

  “You’re still a young woman. The world is yours. Don’t mistake sympathy or admiration or friendship for love.”

  “Who the hell are you to tell me what to think?”

  “Your goddamn boss is what I am.”

  “You never swear, Hack. You’re going to start now?”

  “I told you, I’m old. You need to let me alone, Pam.”

  “Then run me off,” she said. “Until then I’m not going anywhere.”

  She was standing closer to his chair, closer than she should have been. He stood up, towering over her. He could smell the heat in her clothes and the warm odor in her hair. She put her hands on both of his hips and pressed the crown of her head into the center of his chest. He could feel his mouth go dry and a thickness growing in his loins.

  “The best women always fall in love with the wrong men,” he said. “You’re one of those, kid.”

  “Don’t call me that.”

  “You’re late for your shift,” he said.

  He left her there and went inside the house and locked the door behind him.

  13

  LIAM ERIKSSON HAD parked his pickup truck, one with a camper shell inserted in the bed, down in a sandy bottom thinly shaded by mesquite trees. A shiny green liquid, one with the viscosity of an industrial lubricant, wound through the pebbled creek bed, and gnats and horseflies hung in the brush along the banks. In the distance was a long stretch of baked flatland that glimmered like salt and, beyond it, a range of blue hills. Bobby Lee Motree sat on a rock and took a longneck from a bucket of ice and cracked off the cap.

  “I don’t see how you can cut up a sweet piece like that,” he said.

  “Business is business. Why be sentimental about it? Besides, I found it, so it ain’t no skin off my ass,” Liam replied.

  Liam stood at the rear door of his camper shell, touching the blade of a hacksaw with his thumb. He was bare-chested and wore a straw hat with a wilted brim, like one a female gardener would wear, and hiking shorts with big snap pockets and alpine shoes with lugs on the soles. He had shaved off his orange beard after he had screwed up at the check-cashing store in San Antonio; now the lower half of his face looked like emery paper. Or maybe the skin of a freshly exhumed corpse, Bobby Lee thought.

  “You should have left your beard, or maybe just trimmed or dyed it,” Bobby Lee said.

  “Something eating on you?”

  Yeah, there was. But exactly how much information could he trust Liam with? Bobby Lee bit on his lip and thought about it.

  Liam grinned, showing the gaps in his teeth, and locked down a pump shotgun in a machinist vise that was bolted to the bed of his truck. He had already wood-rasped the stock into a pistol grip and machine-sanded the wood smooth. He set the hacksaw blade flush with the pump and began sawing.

  “I think I’ve figured out where the soldier boy is living,” Bobby Lee said.

  “How’d you do that?” Liam asked, still grinning.

  “He led me south, then way to hell and gone out east. I think he’s probably about the same distance in the exact opposite direction.”

  “You were always good at ciphering things out, Bobby Lee. Matter of bloodline, maybe,” Liam said. “I’m referring to the fact that Robert E. Lee is in your pedigree.”

  Was Liam coming on wise? Bobby Lee narrowed his eyes. All right, let’s take a run at it, he thought. “We’ve worked lots of gigs, me and you.”

  “We’ve splattered the walls, bud. They’re never gonna know who did any of it, either,” Liam said.

  “But this current deal has gotten complicated.” Bobby Lee let his words hang in the air.

  Liam stopped sawing, not raising his eyes. He wiped the cut in the shotgun’s barrel with an oily rag. “Does this have something to do with that call you got from Hugo?”

  “Hugo says we get rid of the girl and the soldier. Then we do Nick Dolan and his wife, with special instructions for the wife. Then we do Preacher.”

  Liam began sawing again, his back turned to Bobby Lee. “I suspect I misheard you on that last part.”

  “Jack cut off Artie Rooney’s finger, and now he’s shaking him down for a half mil. Hugo says it’s time for Jack to join the Hallelujah Chorus.”

  Liam turned around. “Do Preacher? You’re actually serious? You haven’t started fooling with acid again?”

  “I’m taking you into my confidence, Liam. I don’t like the way things have turned out. But Preacher is slipping. I think it’s because of the deal behind the church.”

  “Yeah, well, nobody planned that one. If that’s on anybody, it’s on Hugo.”

  “You in or not, Liam?”

  “Cap Preacher? That’s like trying to kill death.”

  “He’s got a weakness. It’s got something to do with sugar. Or candy or pastry. I don’t get it. But he’s got something wrong with him. A hooker I knew said Jack almost died once because of something he ate.”

  “You’re that scared of him?” Without waiting for an answer, Liam casually resumed cutting off the shotgun’s barrel, the muscles in his back rippling like warm tallow as he worked.

 
Bobby Lee felt a blood vessel pulse in his temple. He took a sip of his beer before he spoke. “Want to add anything to that last remark?”

  “Why would I want to do that?”

  “Because I’m having a little trouble handling it.”

  “I was talking about myself. Preacher scares the hell out of me. He’s a mean motor scooter and crazy besides.”

  Bobby Lee started to speak again but this time held his tongue. He cracked open another beer and drank from it, realizing irrefutably that he had made his problems worse by taking Liam into his confidence. He had stood up for Liam with Preacher, and this was what he got for it. Liam was no different from any other gutter rat in the business. He had no mercy, either. He had proved that when he went to work on the owner of the diner, what-was-his-name, Junior Kraut Face or something. Now Bobby Lee had both Preacher and Liam to worry about, plus the fact that he hadn’t gotten paid, plus the fact that Preacher had popped a federal agent, which was sure to bring down a ton of heat on all of them.

  Liam finished sawing through the shotgun’s barrel and sailed it across the creek bed into a cluster of sandstone boulders. He listened as the barrel tinkled and rolled down the side of a ravine. He begin fitting a series of twelve-gauge shells into the magazine, pushing them in with his thumb until the spring in the loading tube came tight. “I already took out the sportsman’s plug,” he said. “Five double-aught bucks. You want to see the paint fly? These babies can do it.”

  He aimed at a jackrabbit running across the hardpan, leading it with the sawed tip of the barrel, one eye closed. Then he breathed out a popping sound and lowered the gun. He grinned and smacked Bobby Lee on the shoulder, causing him to spill beer down the front of his shirt. “Relax, enjoy the time you got,” Liam said. “That’s my philosophy. Life’s a party, right?”

  Bobby Lee took a drink from his bottle, eyeing Liam with the caution he would show a snake coiled in the shade of scrub brush.

  “You spoke up for me when Preacher wanted to rip my ass,” Liam said. “I’m not forgetting that. We’re buds. Crack me a beer.”

  DANNY BOY LORCA was squatted behind the jail at sunup Monday morning when Hackberry parked his truck and started inside. Danny Boy’s skin had the dark, smudged coloration of someone who cooked as a matter of course over open charcoal pits or who cleared and burned brush for a living or who worked land that had been blackened by wildfires. His thick hair, cut like an Apache’s, did not look unwashed as much as dull and ash-powdered, the scars from jailhouse-knife beefs of years ago like dead worms on his hands and forearms. He was drawing a picture in the dirt with a sharpened stick.

  “What you got there, Danny Boy?” Hackberry asked.

  “Face I saw in a dream.”

  “You here to see me about something?”

  Danny Boy stood up. He wore jeans that were so tight that they looked painted on his body, and a long-sleeve calico shirt notched around the upper arms with purple garters. Stuffed in his clothes, he had the shape of a giant banana. “Pete Flores called me. He needs me to get him a car. Him and Vikki Gaddis want to go to Montana.”

  “Come inside.”

  “I been dry three days. I’m staying clear of jail for a while,” Danny Boy said, not moving. The sky in the west was a metallic blue still caught between darkness and first light, the horizon layered with a long band of steel-colored clouds that could have been either dust or rain mist. Danny Boy sniffed at the air and stared at the sky as though he had just heard a brief rumble of thunder that had no source.

  “I thought we were friends,” Hackberry said. “I thought you trusted me. You think I’ll do you harm?”

  Danny Boy’s eyes seemed full of sleep when he looked back at Hackberry. Hackberry could not remember seeing Danny Boy smile, not ever. “Pete said he got away from a guy who was trying to kill him. Somewhere down by Big Bend. He said the guy was at an A.A. meeting in a church. If Pete can get holt of a car, he’s gonna drive straight through to Montana.”

  “Where’s Pete staying?”

  Danny Boy shook his head, indicating that he didn’t know or he wasn’t prepared to say.

  “How about Vikki?”

  “Waitressing and playing in a restaurant or a club. I told Pete I didn’t have no money, but he better not be thinking about stealing a car. He says he ain’t going down for the murder of them Oriental women.”

  “He won’t. I promise.”

  “Last night I dreamed about rain. I woke up and thought it was hitting on my roof. But it was grasshoppers flying into the windmill and the screens. You say Pete ain’t going down for them murders. But Pete was there when they got killed. Guys like Pete have a hard time in jail. They try to go their own way and get in trouble. He’ll be in Huntsville for a long time.”

  “Not if I can help it.”

  But Danny Boy had lost interest in the conversation in the same way he had lost interest years ago in the promises of most white people. He was staring at the face he had drawn in the dirt. The Apache haircut, the wide brow, the square jaw, and the small eyes all looked like his own. He rubbed the sole of his shoe back and forth across the drawing, smearing it back into the earth.

  “Why’d you do that?”

  “He’s one of them ancient rain gods. There was a bunch of them living here when this was a giant valley full of corn. But the rain gods went away. They ain’t coming back, either.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “They got no reason to. We don’t believe in them no more.”

  AT EIGHT A.M. Hackberry called Pam Tibbs into his office.

  “Yes, sir?” she said.

  “I have a general idea where Vikki Gaddis and Pete Flores might be. My back is flaring up, and I need you to drive me,” he said.

  “You ought to see a doctor,” she said. Her eyes left his. “Sorry.”

  “I depend on you because you’re smart, Pam. I’m not patronizing you when I say that.”

  “You don’t have to explain yourself.”

  He let it pass. “We’ll be back late tonight or maybe tomorrow. Get whatever you need out of your locker.” But he couldn’t let it pass after all. Why did she bother him like this? “I know I don’t have to explain myself. I was trying to Never mind.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing. Would you get me an aspirin, please? Bring the box.”

  At eight-thirty A.M., Hackberry and Pam Tibbs were doing eighty miles an hour down the four-lane, the emergency flasher rippling silently. Hackberry lay back in the passenger seat, half asleep, his Stetson tilted over his eyes, his long legs extended.

  Where do you look for a guitar-picking woman in the state of Texas?

  Anywhere.

  Where do you look for a guitar-picking woman who sings “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” to a beer-joint audience?

  In a place that will probably remember the experience for a long time.

  Hackberry knew his errand was probably a foolish one. He was out of his jurisdiction and trying to save young people who trusted neither him, his department, nor the system he represented. Cassandra had been given knowledge of the future and simultaneously condemned to a lifetime of being disbelieved and rejected. The wearisome preoccupation of the elderly—namely, the conviction that they had already seen the show but could never pass on the lessons they had learned from it—was not unlike Cassandra’s burden, except the anger and bitterness of old people was not the stuff of Homeric epics.

  Hackberry shifted in the seat, pulling his hat lower on his face, and tried to get out of his funk. The cruiser hit a bump and forced his eyes open. He hadn’t realized how far he and Pam had driven. He saw the shapes of mountains in the south and the buildings and planted trees and the planned neighborhoods of a small town spread along the side of a long geological slope that looked as though the land had suddenly tilted into the sky.

  “You fell asleep,” Pam said.

  “Where are we?”

  “Not far from the convenience store where Bobby Lee Motree pulled a semiauto on the night clerk. Did the FBI get you a mug shot of him yet?”

  “They will eventually. Th
ey have their own problems to deal with.”

  “Why do you make excuses for them?”

  “Because a lot of them are decent people.”

  “I bet they love their grandmothers and they’re kind to animals, too.” She glanced sideways at him, her expression hidden behind her aviator shades, her mouth a flat line.

  “My grandfather was a Texas Ranger,” Hackberry said. “He and some of his friends went on a raid into Mexico after Pancho Villa crossed the river and killed a bunch of civilians. My grandfather and his friends attacked a train loaded with Villa’s soldiers. The Texans had captured a Lewis gun. They caught a bunch of those poor devils in an uncoupled cattle car that was rolling downhill. My grandfather said their blood was blowing out of the boards and fanning in the wind like the discharge from a chute in a slaughterhouse.”