Rain Gods (26 page)

Bill pulled onto the shoulder and got out, staring at a dry wash running from a culvert into a tangle of brush that had leaves like thick green buttons. Out in the moonlight, away from the shadows, were cactuses blooming with yellow and red flowers. A nine-millimeter semiauto hung from Bill’s right hand. “Want to take a shot?” he said.

“What for?”

“Sometimes in hot weather, they get worms. But if you gut and skin them right and hang them from wire overnight, so all the heat drains out, they’re safe to eat. Come on, hop out.”

Pete opened the SUV’s door and stepped down on the gravel, the wind warm on his face, a smell like dried animal dung in his nostrils. The highway was empty in both directions. On the other side of the border, he thought he could see electric lights spread across the bottom of a hill.

“Follow me down here,” Bill said. “You can have the first shot. He’s gonna spook out of the brush in just a minute. Jackrabbits always do. They don’t have the smarts to stay put, like a cottontail does. You never hunted rabbits when you were a kid?”

Pete took his soda straw out of his pocket and put it in his mouth. “Not often. Our farm was so poor the rabbits had to carry their own feed when they hopped across it.”

Bill grinned. “Come on, we’ll flush him out. Afraid of rattlers?”

“Never given them much thought.”

“Think I’m gonna rape you?”

“What?”

“Just a bad joke. But your behavior strikes me as a little bit queer.”

“How are you using the word ‘queer’?”

“That’s what I mean. You’re wrapped too tight, trooper. If you ask me, you need to get your pole polished.”

Bill seemed to lose interest in the conversation. He reached down and picked up a rock. He studied the clump of brush with buttonlike leaves at the bottom of the wash and flung the rock into it hard enough to break a branch and make a clattering sound far down the wash. “See him scoot? Told you he was in there,” he said.

“Yeah, you called it.”

Bill turned and faced Pete. His nine-millimeter was pointed downward, along his thigh, the butterfly safety pushed to the fire position. He formed a pocket of air in one cheek, then the other, like a man rinsing his mouth. “Yes, sir, you’re a mite spooky, Pete. A hard man to read, I’d say. I bet you blew up some hajji ass over there, didn’t you?”

Pete tried to remember giving his name to Bill. Maybe he had, if not at the meet, perhaps at the café.
Think, think, think,
he told himself. He could feel his scalp tightening. “I’d better be getting on home. I’d like to introduce you to my girlfriend.”

“She’s waiting on you, huh?”

“Yeah, she’s a good one about that.”

“Wish I was you. You bet I do,” Bill said. He looked southward into the darkness, his thoughts hidden. Then he released the magazine on his gun and stuck it in his pocket. He cleared the chamber and inserted the ejected round into the top of the magazine and shoved the magazine back into the frame with the heel of his hand. “Think fast,” he said, throwing the gun to Pete.

“Why’d you do that?”

“See if you were paying attention. Scared you, didn’t I?”

“Pert’ near,” Pete replied. “You’re quite a card, Bill.”

“Not when you come to know me,” Bill said. “No, sir, I wouldn’t say I was a card at all. Just stick my piece back in the glove box, will you?”

Five miles farther down the road, the hills flattened and the moon sat on the horizon like a huge, bruised white balloon. Up ahead, Pete could see a passing lane, then a brightly lit convenience store and gas-pump island. “We’re just about two miles or so from the dirt track that goes to our house,” he said. “I can get off up yonder if you want.”

“In for a penny, in for a pound. I’ll take you all the way.”

“I got to be honest about something, Bill.”

“You kill somebody with your car while you were in a blackout?”

“The reason I don’t have a lot of sobriety is I want to drink.”

“You mean now?”

“Now, yesterday, last week, tomorrow, next month. When I catch the bus, the undertaker will probably have to set a case of Bud on my chest to keep me in the coffin.”

“What are you trying to tell me?”

“Like they say, unless you’ve reached your bottom, you’re just jerking on your dork. Pull into the store yonder.”

“Sure that’s what you want to do?”

“Hell, yes, it is. What about you?”

“One or two cold brews wouldn’t hurt. I’m no fanatic. What about your girlfriend?”

“She doesn’t complain. You’ll like her.”

“I bet I will,” Bill said.

He pulled the SUV into the gas island and got out to fill the tank while Pete went inside the convenience store. The air was thick and warm and smelled of burned diesel. Hundreds of moths had clustered on the overhead lights. Pete took two packs of pepperoni sausage from a shelf and two cartons of king-size beers from the cooler. The cans were silver and blue and beaded with moisture and cold inside the cardboard. He set them on the counter and waited while another customer paid for a purchase, clicking his nails on top of one carton, looking around the store as though he had forgotten something. Then he adjusted his belt and made a face and asked the cashier where the men’s room was. The cashier lifted his eyes only long enough to point toward the rear of the store. Pete nodded his thanks and walked between the shelves toward the back exit, out of view from the front window.

Seconds later, he was outside in the dark, running between several eighteen-wheelers parked on a grease-compacted strip of bare earth behind the diesel island. He dropped down into an arroyo and ran deeper into the night, his heart beating, clouds of insects rising into his face, clotting in his mouth and nostrils. The heat lightning flaring in the clouds made him think of the flicker of artillery rounds exploding beyond the horizon, before the reverberations could be felt through the earth.

He crawled through a concrete culvert onto the north side of the two-lane state highway, then got to his feet and began running across a stretch of hill-flanged hardpan traced with serpentine lines of silt and gravel that felt like crustaceans breaking apart under his shoes.

He had created a geographic forty-five-degree angle between his present location and the Fiesta motel, where Vikki waited for him. The distance, by the way the crow flies, was probably around forty-five miles. With luck, if he ran and walked all night, he would be at the motel by sunrise. As he raced across the ground, the lightning threw his shadow ahead of him, like that of a desperate soldier trying to outrun incoming mail.

12

W
HEN HACKBERRY HOLLAND was captured by the Chinese south of the Yalu and placed in a boxcar full of marines whose clothes smoked with cold, he tried to convince himself during the long transportation to the POW camp in No Name Valley that he had become part of a great historical epic he would remember one day as one remembers scenes from
War and Peace
. He would be a chronicler who had witnessed two empires collide on a snowy waste whose name would have the significance of Gallipoli or Austerlitz or Gettysburg. A man could have a worse fate.

But he quickly learned that inside the vortex, you did not see the broad currents of history at work. No grand armies stood in position behind rows of cannons that were given the order to fire in sequence, almost in tribute to their own technological perfection rather than as a means of killing the enemy. Nor did you see the unfolded flags flapping in the wind, the caissons and ambulance wagons being wheeled into position, the brilliant colors of the uniforms and the plumes on the helmets of the officers and the sun shining on the drawn sabers. You saw and remembered only the small piece of ground you had occupied, one that would forever be filled with sounds and images that you could not rinse from your dreams.

You remembered shell casings scattered along the bottom of a trench, field dressings stiff with blood, frozen dirt clods raining down on your steel pot, the chugging sound of a 105 round arching out of its trajectory, coming in short. You remembered the rocking of the boxcar, the unshaved jaws of the men staring back at you out of their hooded parkas; you remembered the face of hunger in a shack where fish heads and a dollop of rice were considered a banquet.

When Hackberry returned from San Antonio after the shooting death of Isaac Clawson, he pulled off his boots on the back steps and walked inside the house in his socks, undressed in the bath, and stayed in the shower until there was no more hot water in the tank. Then he dried himself and put on fresh clothes and took his shoeshine kit out on the steps and used the garden hose and a can of Kiwi polish and a brush and a rag to clean Isaac Clawson’s blood from the sole and welt of his right boot.

He had burst into the motel room where Isaac Clawson died, not knowing what was on the other side of the door, and stepped into a pool of Clawson’s blood, printing the carpet with it, printing the walkway outside, smearing it into the grit and worn fabric that marked the passage of a thousand low-rent trysts.

And that was the way he would always remember that moment—as one of ineptitude and unseemliness and violation. Later, after the arrival of a journalist and a photographer, someone had placed a hand towel over Clawson’s head and face. The towel didn’t cover his features adequately and provided him neither anonymity nor dignity. Instead, it seemed to add to the degradation done to him by the world.

The shooter, who was probably Preacher Jack Collins, had gotten away. In his wake, he had left the ultimate societal violation for others to clean up. For Hackberry, those details and none other would always define the death of Isaac Clawson. Also, he would never lose the sense that somehow, by stepping in Clawson’s blood, he had contributed to the degradation of Clawson’s person.

Hackberry used a second rag to wipe the moisture from the hose off his boots. When his boots were dry and clean and smooth to the touch, he slipped them on his feet and put his rags, his shoe brush, and the can of Kiwi polish in a paper bag, soaked the bag with charcoal starter, and burned it in the metal trash barrel by his toolshed. Then he sat down on the steps and looked at the sun rising above the poplars at the back of his property.

Inside the shadows, he saw a doe with twin fawns looking back at him. Two minutes later, Pam Tibbs pulled her cruiser into the driveway and rang the bell.

“Back here,” Hackberry yelled.

When she came around the side of the house, she was holding a thermos in one hand and a bag of doughnuts in the other. “You get some sleep?” she said.

“Enough.”

“You coming to the office?”

“Why wouldn’t I?”

“You eat yet?”

“Yeah, I think I did. Yeah, I’m sure I did.”

She sat on the step below him and unscrewed the top of the thermos and popped open the bag of doughnuts. She poured coffee into the thermos top and wrapped a doughnut in a napkin and handed both to him. “You worry me sometimes,” she said.

“Pam, I’m your administrative superior. That means we don’t personalize certain kinds of considerations.”

She glanced at her watch. “Until eight A.M. I’ll do what I damn please. How do you like that? Can I get a cup out of your kitchen?”

He started to answer, but she opened the screen door and went inside before he could speak. When she came back out, she filled her cup and sat down beside him. “Clawson went in without backup. His death is not on either one of us,” she said.

“I didn’t say it was.”

“But you thought it.”

“Jack Collins got away. We were probably within a hundred feet of him. But he got out of the motel and out of the parking lot and probably out of San Antonio while I was tracking an ICE agent’s blood all over the crime scene.”

“That’s not what’s bothering you, is it?”

When he blinked, like a camera lens
clatch
ing open and closing just as quickly, he saw the faces of the Asian women staring up at him from the killing ground behind the stucco church, grains of dirt on their lips and in their nostrils and hair.

“Ballistics shows that all the women were killed by the same weapon,” he said. “There was probably only one shooter. From what the FBI knows about Collins, he seems to be the one most capable of that kind of mass murder. We could have put Collins out of business.”

“We will. Or if we don’t get to him first, the feds will.”

Hackberry looked at the doe with her fawns in the poplar trees and could feel Pam’s eyes on the side of his face. He thought of his twin sons and his dead wife and the sound the wind made at night when it channeled through the grass in the pasture. Pam moved her foot slightly and touched the side of her shoe against his boot. “Are you listening to me, Hack?”

He could feel a great fatigue seep through his body. He cupped his hands on his knees and turned his head toward her. There was no mistaking the look in her eyes. “I’m too old,” he said.

“Too old for what?”

“The things young people do.”

“Like what?”

“You got me. How about we change the subject?”

“You’re a stubborn and unteachable man. That’s why somebody needs to look after you.”