Rain Gods

by James Lee Burke

  “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.

  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.r />
  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.