Rain Gods

  “Let’s take a look at your head, partner,” Hackberry said.

  10

  NICK DOLAN SWALLOWED a tranquilizer and a half glass of water, took Esther into his office, and closed the door behind him. With the dark velvet drapes closed and the air-conditioning set to almost freezing levels, there was an insularity about his office that made Nick feel not only isolated and safe but outside of time and place, as though he could rewind the video and erase all the mistakes he had made in his journey from the schoolyard playground in the Lower Ninth Ward to the day he bought into an escort service and the attendant association with people like Hugo Cistranos.

  He told Esther everything that had happened during his abduction—the ride in the SUV down the highway to the empty farmhouse, Preacher Jack Collins sitting next to him, the New Orleans button man Hugo Cistranos and the strange kid in a top hat sitting in front, the moon wobbling under the surface of a pond whose banks glistened with green cow scat. Then he told Esther how the man called Preacher had spared him at the last moment because of her name.

  “He thinks I’m somebody out of the Bible?” she said.

  “Who knows what crazy people think?” Nick said.

  “There’s something you’re leaving out. Something you’re not talking about.”

  “No, that’s it. That’s everything that happened.”

  “Stop lying. What did these men do in your name?”

  “They didn’t do it in my name. I never told them to do what they did.”

  “You make me want to hit you, to beat my fists bloody on you.”

  “They killed nine women from Thailand. They were prostitutes. They were being smuggled across the border by Artie Rooney. They machine-gunned them and buried them with a bulldozer.”

  “My God, Nick,” she said, her voice breaking in her throat.

  “I didn’t have anything to do with this, Esther.”

  “Yes, you did.” Then she said it again. “Yes, you did.”

  “Hugo was supposed to deliver the women to Houston. That’s all it was.”

  “All it was? Listen to yourself. What were you doing with people who smuggle prostitutes into the country?”

  “We’ve got a half-interest in a couple of escort agencies. It’s legal. They’re hostesses. Maybe some other stuff goes on, but it’s between adults, it’s a free country. It’s just business.”

  “You’ve been running escort services?” When he didn’t reply, she said, “Nick, what have you done to us?” She was weeping quietly in the leather chair now, her long hair hanging in her face. Her discomposure and fear and disbelief, and the black skein of her hair separating her from the rest of the world, made him think of the women lined up in front of Preacher’s machine gun, and his lips began to tremble.

  “You want me to fix you a drink?” he said.

  “Don’t say anything to me. Don’t touch me. Don’t come near me.”

  He was standing over her, his fingers extended inches from the crown of her head. “I didn’t want anybody hurt, Esther. I thought maybe I’d get even with Artie for a lot of the things he did to me when I was a kid. It was dumb.”

  But she wasn’t hearing him. Her head was bent forward, her face completely obscured, her back shaking inside her blouse. He took a box of Kleenex from his desk and set it on her lap, but it fell from her knees without her ever noticing it was there. He stood in the darkened coldness of his office, the jet of frigid air from the wall duct touching his bald pate, his stomach sagging over his belt, the smell of nicotine rife on his fingers when he rubbed his hand across his mouth. If he had ever felt smaller in his life, he could not remember the instance.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, and started to walk away.

  “What do these gangsters plan to do now?”

  “There was a witness, a soldier who was in Iraq. Him and his girlfriend could be witnesses against Hugo and the kid in the top hat and this guy Preacher.”

  “They’re going to kill them?”

  “Yeah, if they find them, that’s what they’ll do.”

  “That can’t happen, Nick,” she said, raising her head.

  “I called the FBI when I was drunk. It didn’t do any good. You want me to go to prison? You think that will stop it? These guys will kill those kids anyway.”

  She stared into space, her eyes cavernous. Through the floor, she and Nick could hear the children turning somersaults on the living room carpet, sending a thud down through the walls into the foundation of the house. “We can’t have this on our souls,” she said.

  THE MOTEL WAS a leftover from the 1950s, a utilitarian structure checkerboarded with huge red and beige plastic squares, the metal-railed upstairs walkways not unlike those in penitentiaries, all of it located in a neighborhood of warehouses and bankrupt businesses and joyless bars that could afford no more than a single neon sign over the door.

  The swimming pool stayed covered with a plastic tarp year-round, and the apron of grass around the building was yellow and stiff, the fronds of the palm trees rattling drily in the wind. On the upside of things, hookers did not operate on its premises, nor did drug dealers cook meth in the rooms. The sodium halide lamps in the parking lot protected the cars of the guests from roving bands of thieves. The rates were cheap. Arguably, there were worse rental lodgings in San Antonio. But there was one undeniable characteristic about the motel and the surrounding neighborhood that would not go away: The rectangularity of line and the absence of people gave one the sense that he was stand ing inside a stage set, one that had been created for the professional sojourner.

  Preacher sat in a stuffed chair in the dark, staring at the television set. The screen was filled with static, the volume turned up full blast on white noise. But the images on the screen inside Preacher’s head had nothing to do with the television set in his room. Inside Preacher’s head, the year was 1954. A little boy sat in the corner of a boxcar parked permanently on a siding in the middle of the Texas-Oklahoma Panhandle. It was winter, and the wind was gray with grit and dust, and it chapped the cheeks and lips and dried out the hands and caused the skin to split around the thumbnails. A blanket draped over a rope divided the boxcar in half. On the other side of the blanket, Edna Collins was going at it with a dark-skinned gandy dancer while two more waited outside, their hands stuffed in their canvas coat pockets, their slouch hats pulled low over their ears as protection against the wind.

  Preacher’s motel windows were hung with red curtains, and the lamps in the parking lot seemed to etch them with fire. He heard footsteps on the steel stairway, then a shadow crossed his window and someone tapped tentatively on the jalousie.

  “What do you want?” Preacher said, his eyes still fixed on the television screen.

  “My name is Mona Drexel, Preacher. We met once,” a voice replied.

  “I don’t remember the name.”

  “Liam is like a client of mine.”

  He turned his head slowly and looked at her shadow on the frosted glass. “Liam who?”

  “Eriksson.”

  “Come in,” he said.

  He smelled the cigarette odor on her clothes as soon as she entered the room. Against the outside light, her hair possessed the frizzy outline and color of cotton candy. The foundation on her face made Preacher think of an unfinished clay sculpture, the lines collapsing under the jaw, the mouth a bit crooked, the eye shadow and rouge both sad and embarrassing to look at.

  “Can I sit down?” she said.

  “You’re in, aren’t you?”

  “I heard that maybe people are looking for Liam because of this government check he took into one of these car-title loan places. I didn’t want to have my name mixed up in this, because I’m not really involved or a close friend of his. See, we had a few drinks, and he had this check, and he wanted to party some more, so I went along with him, but it kind of hit the fan for some reason, and Liam said we ought to get out of there, and he thought you were gonna be pissed off, but that was all over my head and not really my business. I just wanted to clear this up and make sure nobody has a misunderstanding. Since we’d already met, I didn?
?t think you’d mind me coming by to answer any questions you might have.”

  “Why should I have questions for you?”

  “A couple of people told me this is what I should do. I didn’t mean to bother you during your program.”

  Then she looked at the empty screen. She was sitting on the edge of the bed, out of breath and holding her hands in her lap, unsure of what she should say next. She placed one foot on the top of the other as a little girl might, chewing her lip.

  “I don’t like touching the bedspreads in motels,” she said, half smiling. “There’s every kind of DNA in the world imaginable on them, not that I mean this place is any worse than any other, it’s just the way all motels are, with unclean people using everything and not caring that other people are gonna use it later.”

  The side of Preacher’s face was immobile, the eye that she could see like a marble pushed into tallow. “Mona Drexel is my stage name,” she said. “My real name is Margaret, but I started using Mona when I was onstage in Dallas. Believe it or not, it was a club Jack Ruby once owned, but you can call me whatever you want.”

  “Where’s Liam now?”

  “That’s why I’m here. I don’t know. Maybe I can find out. I just don’t want to hurt anybody or have anybody think I’m working against them. See, I’m for people, I’m not against anybody. There’s a big difference. I just want everybody to know that.”

  “I can see that,” he said.

  “Can you turn down the volume on the television?” she said.

  “Do you know what I do for a living?”

  “No.”

  “Who told you I was staying at this motel?”

  “Liam said you use it sometimes when you’re in town. That noise is really loud.”

  “That’s what Liam told you, did he?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I mean, yes, sir, he just mentioned it in passing.”

  “Do you know where Liam got the government check?”

  “No, he didn’t tell me. I don’t talk with clients about their personal business.”

  “That’s a good way to be.”

  “It is, isn’t it?” she said, crossing her leg on her knee, her mouth jerking as though she wanted to smile. She watched Preacher’s face in the white glow of the television screen. His eyes never blinked; not one muscle in his face moved. Her own expression went dead.

  “I have clients that become friends,” she said. “After they’re friends, they’re not clients again. Then I have friends that are always friends. They never become clients. They’re friends from the first time I meet them, know what I mean?”

  “No, I don’t,” he replied.

  “I can be a friend to somebody. I have to make a living, but I believe in having friends and helping them out.” She lowered her eyes. “I mean, we could be friends if you want.”

  “You remind me of someone,” he said, looking at her directly for the first time.

  “Who?” she asked, the word turning to a rusty clot in her throat.

  He stared at her in a way no one had ever stared at her in her life. She felt the blood drain from her head and heart into her stomach.

  “Somebody who never should have been allowed around small children,” he said. “Do you have children?”

  “I did. A little boy. But he died.”

  “It’s better that some people don’t live. They should be taken before their souls are forfeit. That means some of us have to help them in ways they don’t like, in ways that seem truly awful at the time.” Preacher reached out into the darkness and pulled a straight chair closer to him. On it were his wallet, a small automatic, an extra magazine, and a barber’s razor.

  “Sir, what are you planning to do?” she said.

  “You understood what I said.” He smiled. His statement was not a question but a compliment.

  “Liam wanted to party. He had the check. I went with him.” Her breath was tangling in her chest, the room starting to go out of focus. “I have a mother in Amarillo. My son is buried in the Baptist cemetery there. I was gonna call her today. She’s hard of hearing, but if I shout, she knows it’s me. She’s seventy-nine and cain’t see real good, either. We still talk to each other. She doesn’t know what I do for a living.”

  Preacher was holding something in his hand, but she couldn’t bring herself to look at it. She went on, “If you let me walk out the door, you’ll never see me again. I’ll never tell anyone what we talked about. I’ll never see Liam again, either.”

  “I know you won’t,” he said in an almost kindly fashion.

  “Please, sir, don’t.”

  “Come closer.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “You need to, Mona. We don’t choose the moment of our births or the hour of our deaths. There are few junctures in life when we actually make decisions that mean anything. The real challenge is in accepting our fate.”

  “Please,” she said. “Please, please, please.”

  “Get on your knees if you want. It’s all right. But don’t beg. No matter what else you do in this world, don’t beg.”

  “Not in the face, sir. Please.”

  She was on her knees, her eyes welling with tears. She felt his hand grasp hers and lift her arm into the air, turning up the paleness of her wrist and the green veins in it. The static-filled storm on the television screen seemed to invade her head and blind her eyes and pierce her eardrums. Her fingernails bit into her palm. She had heard stories of people who did it in a warm bathtub and supposedly felt no pain and just went to sleep as the water turned red around them. She wondered if it would be like that. Then she felt his thumb dig into her palm and peel back her fingers.

  “What are you doing?” she said.

  “You go into the brightness of the sun. You go inside its whiteness and let it consume you, and when you come out on the other side, you’ve become pure spirit and you never have to be afraid again.”

  She tried to pull her hand from his, but he held on to it.

  “Did you hear me?” he said.

  “Yes, sir,” she said.

  He placed five hundred-dollar bills across her palm and folded her fingers on them. “The Greyhound for Los Angeles leaves in the morning. In no time you’ll be in Albuquerque, and you’ll see what I mean. You’ll go west into the sun across a beautiful countryside, a place that’s just like the world was on the day Yahweh created light. The person you were when you walked into this room won’t exist anymore.”

  When she got to the bottom of the stairs, she lost a shoe. But she did not stop to pick it up.

  DURING THE RIDE to the car-title loan office in San Antonio, Hackberry did not speak again of Pam’s attack on the ICE agent Isaac Clawson. They were in his pickup truck, and the undulating countryside was speeding by rapidly, the chalklike hills layered with sedimentary rock where the highway cut through them, the sun a dust-veiled orange wafer by late afternoon.

  Finally, she said, “You don’t want to know why I hit Clawson?”

  You attacked him with a blackjack because you’re full of rage, he thought. But that was not what he said. “As long as it doesn’t happen again, it’s not my concern.”

  “My father started having psychotic episodes when I was about eight or nine and we were living up in the Panhandle,” she said. “He’d look out on a field of green wheat and see men in black pajamas and conical straw hats coming through elephant grass. He went into a treatment program at the naval hospital in Houston, and my mother stayed there to visit him. She put me in the care of a family friend, a policeman everybody trusted.”

  “Sure you want to talk about this?” he said, steering around a silver-plated gas tanker, his yellow-tinted aviator shades hiding the expression in his eyes.

  “That bastard raped me. I told a teacher at school. I told a minister. They lectured me. They said the cop was a fine man and I shouldn’t make up stories about him. They said my father was mentally ill and I was imagining things because of my father’s illness.”

  “Where’s this guy today?”

  “I’ve tried to find him, but I think he died.”

  “I used to dream about a Chinese guard named Sergeant Kwo
ng. The day I informed on two fellow prisoners, I discovered I was the eighth man to do so. My fingernails were yellow talons, and my beard was matted with the fish heads I licked out of my food bowl. My clothes and boots were caked with my own feces. I used to think that Kwong and his commanding officer, a man by the name of Ding, had not only broken me physically but had stolen my soul. But I realized that in truth, they’d probably lost their own soul, if they ever had one, and at a certain point I had no control over what I did or what they did to me.”