Rain Gods

by James Lee Burke

  Hackberry saw Pam reach up and turn off the dome light. Then, for a reason he didn’t understand, the light went back on. Hackberry yelled at the top of his voice just as the bedstead splintered apart. Preacher fitted the Thompson to his shoulder, his right elbow pointed outward like a chicken’s wing, and aimed through the iron sights.

  The eruption of fire from the barrel was like the jagged and erratic contortions of an electrical arc. The .45-caliber rounds blew the glass out of the back and side windows and stitched across the doors, ripping stuffing out of the seats, exploding a side mirror, tattering the hood, flattening a tire in under a second.

  Hackberry tore the handcuffs loose from the destroyed bedstead and found his holstered revolver on the floor where Preacher had placed it. He ran barefoot into the side yard just as Preacher let off another burst, this time holding the Thompson against his hip, spraying the cruiser from one end to the other. A flame glowed under the hood, then seemed to drip from the engine onto the asphalt and race backward toward the gasoline tank. There was no transition between the moment of ignition and the explosion that followed. A fireball exploded from the car’s frame, filling the windows, roasting the interior, rising into the darkness in a dirty red-black scorch that gave off a smell like an incinerator behind a rendering plant. Hackberry felt the whoosh of heat float across the lawn and touch his face.

  “Collins!” he shouted. He saw Preacher turn, framed against the burning car. Hackberry raised his revolver and aimed with both hands and fired once, the report deafening, the recoil like the kick of a jackhammer. He steadied the front sight and fired two more shots, but he was too far away from his target, and he heard the rounds strike stone or the top of a rise and whine into the darkness with a sound like the tremolo of a broken banjo string.

  He saw Preacher move out of the light and head for the north pasture, unhurried, holding the Thompson by the pistol grip, the barrel pointed at the sky, glancing back at Hackberry only once.

  The rain steamed on the smoldering remains of the cruiser, the flames in the grass burning outward in a ring, the mesquite starting to catch and flare like fireflies. There was no movement anywhere near the cruiser. The airbags in the front seat had inflated and exploded in the heat and were now draped on the steering wheel and blackened seats and dashboard like curtains of ash. Hackberry could feel his eyes brimming with water. He followed Preacher into the pasture, the rain blowing in his face, his two geldings terrified. Inside the flash of lightning in the clouds, he thought he saw Preacher climbing through the rails of the north fence. He fired once, or was it twice, with no effect.

  He stepped on a fence clip and felt the aluminum tip slice through the ball of his foot. Then Preacher was out in the pasture, out of the shadows, past the stump fire. Hackberry paused at the fence and fired again. This time he saw Preacher’s coat jump, as though a gust of wind had caught it and flapped it loose from his side. Hackberry climbed through the fence and went deeper into the Johnson grass, toward a thicket behind which a compact car was parked.

  Preacher opened the compact’s door. Almost as an afterthought, he turned and faced Hackberry, his Thompson lowered. He smiled at the corner of his mouth. “You’re a persistent man, Holland.”

  Hackberry raised his revolver with both hands, cocked back the hammer, and sighted on Preacher’s face. “Send me a postcard and tell me how you like hell,” he said. He squeezed the trigger. But the hammer snapped on a spent cartridge.

  “You lose, bub,” Preacher said.

  “Be done with it.”

  “I don’t have to. I’m stronger than you are. I’ll live inside your thoughts the rest of your life. The woman I just killed will become my friend and haunt your sleep. Welcome to the great shade.”

  Preacher got in his car, started the engine, and drove slowly out of the field. After he had passed the burned shell of the cruiser, he turned on his headlights and proceeded down the county road toward town, the pocked hole in his rear window glinting like a crystal eye.

  Hackberry walked out of the field onto the asphalt, the blood in his hair mixing with the rain, running through his eyebrows and down his face. In the way that dreams turn out to be only dreams, he saw an image in the mist that made no sense, that was out of place and time, that was like the reversal of a film whose frames contained material that was unacceptable and had to be corrected.

  Pam Tibbs was climbing from the rain ditch that paralleled the far side of the road, her clothes powdered with soot, her face smudged and streaked with rain.

  “Oh, Pam,” he said.

  She stepped out on the road, her eyes watering in the black smoke blowing off the cruiser’s tires. She seemed disoriented, as though the earth were shifting under her feet. She looked at him woodenly. “I’d gotten out of the cruiser. I thought I hit a deer. A doe with two fawns ran in front of me. One of the fawns was making a sound like it was hurt or frightened. But they’re not here. I think the explosion knocked me unconscious.”

  “I was sure you were dead.”

  “You’re hurt,” she said.

  “I’m fine.”

  “Is Collins still here?”

  “He’s gone. You have your cell?”

  He saw that it was already in her hand. He took it from her, but his fingers were shaking so badly that she had to make the 911 call for him.

  20

  PETE CAUGHT A ride back to the motel on a poultry truck and slept through the morning, trying to block out the memories of the previous night, which included his fight with Vikki, his failed attempt to boost a car, his admission of fear and inadequacy to his friend Billy Bob in Montana, and his rage and attack upon the driver of the compact car at the traffic light.

  How could one guy screw up so often, so bad, and in so short a time? When he woke at noon, a poisonous lethargy seemed to grip both his body and spirit, as though he had been drinking for two days and all his tomorrows had been mortgaged. He was sure that if a high wind blew away the motel and left him behind, he would discover that creation was a vast empty shell as well as a sham, a stage set that hid no mysteries, and he was an insignificant cipher in the middle of it.

  Vikki was nowhere in sight. His only companion was a roach the size of a cigar butt climbing up the curtain by the television set. He put on his shirt, not bothering to button it, and sat on the side of the bed and wondered what he should do next.

  Billy Bob had said to trust his cousin the sheriff. But what about the feds? Sometimes they hung witnesses out to dry. Pete had heard stories about the Justice Department prosecuting cases that couldn’t be won, turning over the names of confidential informants to defense lawyers who passed the names on to their clients and exposed the informants to violent and perhaps fatal retribution.

  His and Vikki’s names would be in the newspapers. Vikki had pumped two rounds into this guy Preacher when he had tried to force her into his car. Pete had never seen the man’s face and knew nothing of his history or background but had little doubt what he would do to Vikki if he got his hands on her.

  But what if Pete continued to do nothing? So far he and Vikki had been lucky. If they just had money or passports or a car. Or a weapon. But they had none of these things, and now, to compound his problems, he had fought with Vikki.

  The rains had passed when he went outside, but the sky was sealed from horizon to horizon with clouds that were as heavy and gray as lead, like a giant lid pressing the humidity and heat back into the earth. In the convenience store that doubled as a Greyhound bus stop, he bought a box of saltine crackers and a can of Vienna sausages. He also bought a coned-up straw hat from a Mexican who was selling hats and serapes and garish velvet paintings of either the Crucifixion or the Sacred Heart of Jesus off the back of a pickup truck. He bought a bottle of Coca-Cola from the outside machine, and just as the sun was breaking through the overcast, spearing columns of light onto the desert, he squatted down in the shade of the store and began eating the sausages sandwiched between crackers, drinking from the soda, moistening the dried-out saltines to the poin
t where they were almost chewable.

  He could not explain adequately to himself why he had bought the hat, which had cost six dollars, except for the fact that squatting down on his haunches, the leather of his colorless cowboy boots spiderwebbing with cracks, eating his lunch in the hot shade of a convenience store on the outer edges of the Great American Desert, his hat slanted down on his brow, was like a conduit back into a time when he had thought of the world in terms of chimerical holograms rather than events—bobber-fishing in a green river, Angus grazing in red clover, sunlit showers breaking on bluebonnets in the spring, harvest moons that were as big and brown and dust-veiled as a planet that had strayed from its orbit.

  Pickup trucks and country music and dancing to the “Bandera Waltz” under Japanese lanterns at a beer garden on the banks of the Frio. Barbecues and fish frys and high school kids on hayrides and other kids hanging out on horseback in front of the IGA. Dinner on the ground and devil in the bush and baptism by immersion and outdoor preachers ranting in ecstasy with their eyes rolled back in their heads. If he could just reach back a couple of years and put his hand on all of it and hold on to it and never let anyone talk him into giving it up.

  That was the secret: to hold on to the things you loved and never give them up for any reason, no matter how strong the entreaty.

  He walked down the street to the town’s one block of business buildings, stepping up on an elevated sidewalk that still had tethering rings inset in the concrete. He passed a shut-down bank that had been constructed in 1891, a barbershop with a revolving striped pole in a plastic tube, a used-appliance store, a café that advertised bison burgers in water-based white paint on the window, a barroom that was as long and narrow and dark as a boxcar. The town’s library was tucked compactly inside a one-story limestone building that once sold recapped automobile tires.

  In the reference section, he found a stack of phone books for all the counties in Southwest Texas. It took him only five minutes to find the number he needed. He borrowed a pencil from the reference librarian and wrote the number on a piece of scrap paper. The librarian’s hair was almost blue, her eyes very tiny and bright behind her glasses; her facial skin was wrinkled with deep folds that had the coloration of a pink rose. “You’re not from here, are you?” she said.

  “No, ma’am. I’m a visitor.”

  “Well, you come back here any time you want.”

  “I surely will.”

  “You’re a nice young man.”

  “Thank you. But how do you know what I am?”

  “You removed your hat when you entered the building. You removed it even though you thought no one was watching you. Your manners are those of a naturally considerate and respectful person. That makes you a very nice young man.”

  Pete walked back to the motel, left a note for Vikki on her pillow, and hitchhiked thirty miles west of town to a desolate crossroads that reminded him of the place where the Asian women had died and his life had changed forever. He entered a phone booth, took a deep breath, and dialed a number on the phone’s console. In the distance, he could see a mile-long train inching its way along a stretch of alkali hardpan, like a black centipede, heat waves warping the horizon.

  “Sheriff’s Department,” a woman said. It was a voice he had heard before.

  “Is this the business line?” he asked.

  “That’s the number you dialed. Did you want to report an emergency?”

  “I need to talk to Sheriff Holland.”

  “He’s not in right now. Who’s calling, please?”

  “When will he be in?”

  “That’s hard to say. Can I he’p you with something?”

  “Patch me through. You can do that, cain’t you?”

  “You need to give me your name. Is there a reason you don’t want to give me your name?”

  He could feel sweat pooling inside his armpits, his own stale odor rising into his face. He folded back the door of the booth and stepped outside, the receiver pressed against his ear.

  “Are you there, sir?” the woman said. “We’ve spoken before, haven’t we? You remember me? Your name is Pete, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, ma’am, that’s what I go by.”

  “We want you to come see us, Pete. You need to bring Ms. Gaddis with you.”

  “That’s why I want to talk to the sheriff.”

  “The sheriff is at the hospital. A man tried to kill him and Deputy Tibbs last night. I think you know the man we’re talking about.”

  “This guy Preacher? No, I don’t know him. I know his name. I know he tried to kidnap and maybe kill Vikki. But I don’t know him.”

  “We’ve been trying to he’p you, soldier. Sheriff Holland in particular.”

  “I didn’t ask him to.” He could hear sweat creaking between his ear and the phone receiver. He held the receiver away from his head and wiped his ear with his shoulder. “Hello?”

  “I’m still here.”

  “How bad are the sheriff and the deputy hurt?”

  “The sheriff is having some X-rays done. You’re not a criminal, Pete. But you’re not acting real bright, either.”

  “What’s your name, ma’am?”

  “Maydeen Stoltz.”

  Pete looked at his watch. How long did it take to trace a call? “Well, Miss Maydeen, why don’t you pull your head out of your hole and give me the sheriff’s cell phone number? That way I won’t have to trouble you anymore.”

  He thought he could hear her ticking a ballpoint on a desk blotter.

  “I’ll give you his number and tell him to expect your call in the next few minutes. But you listen to me on this one, smartass. Last night we almost lost two of the best people either one of us will ever know. You give that some thought. And if you talk to me like that again and I catch up with you, I’m gonna slap the daylights out of you.”

  She gave him the sheriff’s cell number, but he had nothing to write with and had to draw the numerals on the dusty shelf under the phone console with his finger.

  He went inside the small grocery store at the intersection, the smell of cheese and lunch meat and insect spray and stale cigarette smoke and overripe fruit enough to make him choke. At the back of the store, he stared through the smoky glass doors of the coolers, his arms folded across his chest as though he were protecting himself from an enemy. Inside one door, the Dr Peppers and root beers and Coca-Colas stood end to end in neat racks. Behind the next door were six-pack upon six-pack of every brand of beer sold in Texas, the amber bottles beaded with coldness, the cardboard containers damp and soft, waiting to be picked up gingerly by caring hands.

  One six-pack of sixteen-ouncers, he thought. He could space them out through the afternoon, just enough to flatten the kinks in his nervous system. Sometimes you needed a parachute. Wasn’t it better to ease into sobriety rather than to be jolted into it?

  “Find what you want?” the woman behind the counter said. She weighed at least 250 pounds and swelled out like an inverted washtub below the waistline. She was smoking a cigarette and flicking the ash into a bottle cap, her lipstick rimmed crisply on the filter, a V-shaped yellow stain between her fingers.

  “Where’s the men’s room?” he asked.

  She drew in on her cigarette and exhaled the smoke slowly, taking his measure. “About four feet behind you, the door with the sign over it that says Men’s Room.”

  He went in the restroom and came back out wiping the water off his face with a paper towel. He slid open the door to the cold box and lifted out a six-pack of Budweiser, balancing it on his palm, the cans coated with moisture and hard and clinking against one another inside the plastic yoke. The cashier was smoking a fresh one, blowing the smoke through her fingers while she held the cigarette to her mouth. He set the six-pack on the counter and reached for his wallet. But she didn’t ring up the purchase.

  “Ma’am?”

  “What?”

  “You have a reason for acting so damn weird?”

  “Weird in like what way?”

  “For openers, staring at me like I just climbed out of a spaceship.”

  She dropped he
r cigarette into a bucket of water under the counter. “I don’t have a reason for staring at you.”

  “So—”

  “He might.”

  Her gaze drifted out the front window of the store, past the two gas pumps under the porte cochere. A town constable’s patrol car was parked beside the telephone booth. A man wearing a khaki uniform and shades was sitting behind the wheel, the engine off, the doors open to let in the breeze while he wrote on a clipboard.

  “That’s Howard. He asked who was just using the phone,” the woman said.

  “I reckon that could have been me.”