Rain Gods

  The driver didn’t try to conceal his vexation. He looked at the face of his watch and pulled into darkness under the chinaberry tree and cut his lights, waiting for Pete to pick up his groceries from the roadside and carry them to the bed of the truck. The driver did not get out of his vehicle or offer to help. Pete made one trip, then returned to pick up the bag that had not broken. The back window of the truck was black under the tree’s overhang, the hood ticking with heat. The driver sat with his arm propped casually on his window, rolling a matchstick on his teeth.

  Pete walked to the passenger side and got in. A pair of handcuffs hung from the rearview mirror.

  “Them are just plastic,” the driver said. He grinned again, his pleasant mood back in place. He wore a brass buckle on his belt that was embossed with the Stars and Bars and was burnished the color of browned butter. “You got a knife?”

  “What for?”

  “This floor rug keeps tangling in my accelerator. It like to got me killed up the road.”

  Pete worked his Swiss Army knife out of his jeans and opened the long blade and handed it to the driver. The driver started sawing at a piece of loose carpet with it. “Strap yourself in. The latch is right there on your left. You got to dig for it.”

  “How about we get on it?”

  “State law says you got to be buckled up. I tend to be conscious of the law. I did a postgraduate study in cotton-picking ’cause I wasn’t, know what I mean?” The driver saw the expression in Pete’s face. “Ninety days on the P farm for nonsupport. Not necessarily anything I’d brag to John Dillinger about.”

  Pete stretched the safety belt across his chest and pushed the metal tongue into the latch and heard it snap firmly into place. But the belt felt too tight. He pushed against it, trying to adjust its length.

  The driver tossed the piece of sawed fabric out the window and folded the knife blade back into the handle with his palm. “My niece was wearing it. Hang on. We ain’t got far to go,” he said. He took the gearshift out of park and dropped it into drive.

  “Give me my knife.”

  “Just a second, man.”

  Pete pressed the release button on the latch, but nothing happened. “What’s the deal?” he said.

  “Deal?”

  “The belt is stuck.”

  “I got my hands full, buddy,” the driver replied.

  “Who are you?”

  “Give it a break, will you? I got a situation here. Do you believe this asshole?”

  An SUV had pulled off the road beyond the Sno-Ball stand and was now backing up.

  “What the fuck?” the driver of the pickup said.

  The SUV was accelerating, its bumper headed toward the pickup, the tires swerving through the gravel. The driver of the pickup dropped his gearshift into reverse and mashed on the accelerator, but it was too late. The trailer hitch on the SUV plowed into the truck’s grille, the steel ball on the hitch and the triangular steel mount plunging deep into the radiator’s mesh, ripping the fan blades from their shaft, jolting the pickup’s body sideways.

  Pete jerked at the safety belt, but it was locked solid, and he realized he’d been had. But the events taking place around him were even more incongruous. The driver of the SUV had cut his lights and leaped onto the gravel, holding an object close to his thigh so it could not be seen from the road. The man moved hurriedly to the driver’s door of the pickup, jerked it open, and, in one motion, thrust himself inside and grabbed the driver by the throat with one hand and, with the other, jammed a blue-black .38 snub-nose revolver into the driver’s mouth. He fitted his thumb over the knurled surface of the hammer and cocked it back. “I’ll blow your brains all over the dashboard, T-Bone. You’ve seen me do it,” he said.

  T-Bone, the driver of the pickup, could not speak. His eyes bulged from his head, and saliva ran from both sides of his mouth.

  “Blink your eyes if you got the message, moron,” the man from the SUV said.

  T-Bone lowered his eyelids and opened them again. The driver of the SUV slid the revolver from T-Bone’s mouth and lowered the hammer with his thumb and wiped the saliva off the steel onto T-Bone’s shirt. Then, for no apparent reason other than unbridled rage, he hit him in the face with it.

  T-Bone pressed the flat of his hand to the cut below his eye. “Hugo sent me. The broad is at the Fiesta motel,” he said. “We couldn’t find the Fiesta ’cause we were looking for the Siesta. We had the wrong name of the motel, Bobby Lee.”

  “You follow me to the next corner and turn right. Keep your shit-machine running for three blocks, then we’ll be in the country. Don’t let this go south on you.” Bobby Lee Motree’s eyes met Pete’s. “It’s called a Venus flytrap. Rapists use it. It means you’re screwed. But ‘screwed’ and ‘bullet in the head’ aren’t necessarily the same thing. You roger that, boy? You’ve caused me a mess of trouble. You can’t guess how much trouble, which means your name is on the top of the shit list right now. Start your engine, T-Bone.”

  T-Bone turned the ignition. The engine coughed and blew a noxious cloud of black smoke from the exhaust pipe. Something tinkled against metal, and antifreeze streamed into the gravel as the engine caught, then steam and a scorched smell like a hose or rubber belt cooking on a hot surface rose from the hood. Pete sat silent and stiff against the seat, pushing himself deeper into it so he could get a thumb under the safety strap and try to work it off his chest. His Swiss Army knife was on the floor, the red handle half under the driver’s foot. A car went by, then a truck, the illumination of their headlights falling outside the pool of shadow under the chinaberry tree.

  “My piece is under the seat,” T-Bone said.

  “Go ahead.”

  “I need to talk to Hugo.”

  “Hugo doesn’t have conversations with dead people. That’s what you’re gonna be unless you do what I say.”

  T-Bone bent over, his gaze straight ahead, and lifted a .25 auto from under the seat. He kept it in his left hand and laid it across his lap so it was pointed at Pete’s rib cage. A thin whistling sound like a teakettle’s was building inside the hood. “I didn’t mean to get in your space, Bobby Lee. I was doing what Hugo told me.”

  “Say another word, and I’m going to seriously hurt you.”

  Pete remained silent as T-Bone followed Bobby Lee’s SUV out of town and up a dirt road bordered by pastureland where black Angus were clumped up in an arroyo and under a solitary tree by a windmill. Pete’s left hand drifted down to the latch on the safety belt. He worked his fingers over the square outline of the metal, pushing the plastic release button with his thumb, trying to free himself by creating enough slack in the belt to go deeper into the latch rather than pull against it.

  “You’re wasting your time. It has to be popped loose with a screwdriver from the inside,” T-Bone said. “By the way, I ain’t no rapist.”

  “Were you at the church?” Pete asked.

  “No, but you were. Way I see it, you got no kick coming. So don’t beg. I’ve heard it before. Same words from the same people. It ain’t their fault. The world’s been picking on them. They’ll do anything to make it right.”

  “My girlfriend is innocent. She wasn’t part of anything that happened at that church.”

  “A child is created from its parents’ fornication. Ain’t none of us innocent.”

  “What were you told to do to us?”

  “None of your business.”

  “You’re not on the same page as the guy in the SUV, though, are you?”

  “That’s something you ain’t got to worry about.”

  “That’s right. I don’t. But you do,” Pete said.

  Pete saw T-Bone wet his bottom lip. A drop of blood from the cut under his eye slipped down his cheek, as though a red line were being drawn there with an invisible pencil. “Say that over.”

  “Why would Hugo send you after us and not tell Bobby Lee? Bobby Lee is working on his own, isn’t he? How’s the guy named Preacher fit into all this?”

  T-Bone glanced sideways, the shine of fear in his eyes. “How much you know about Preacher?”

  “If Bobby Lee is working with
him, where’s that leave you?”

  T-Bone sucked in his cheeks as though they were full of moisture. But Pete guessed that in reality, his mouth was as dry as cotton. The dust from the SUV was corkscrewing in the pickup’s headlights. “You’re a smart one, all right. But for a guy who’s so dadburned smart, it must be strange to find yourself in your current situation. Another thing I cain’t figure out: I talked with your girlfriend at the steak house. How’d a guy who looks like a fried chitling end up with a hot piece of ass like that?”

  Up ahead, the brake lights on the SUV lit up as brightly as embers inside the dust. To the south, the ridges and mesas that flanged the Rio Grande were purple and gray and blue and cold-looking against the night sky.

  Bobby Lee got out of his vehicle and walked back to the truck, his nine-millimeter dangling from his right hand. “Cut your lights and turn off your engine,” he said.

  “What are we doing?”

  “There’s no ‘we.’” Bobby Lee’s cell phone hung from a cord looped over his neck.

  “I thought we were working together. Call Hugo. Call Artie. Straighten this out.”

  Bobby Lee screwed the muzzle of a nine-millimeter against T-Bone’s temple. The hammer was already cocked, the butterfly safety off.

  “You use your nine on your—”

  “That’s right, I do,” Bobby Lee said. “A fourteen-rounder, manufactured before the bunny huggers got them banned. Hand me your piece, butt-first.”

  T-Bone lifted his hand to eye level, his fingers clamped across the frame of his .25. Bobby Lee took it from him and dropped it in his pocket. “Who’s down here with you?”

  “A couple of new people. Maybe Hugo’s around. I don’t know. Maybe—”

  “Maybe what?”

  “There’s a lot of interest in Preacher.”

  Bobby Lee removed the nine-millimeter’s muzzle from T-Bone’s temple, leaving a red circle that seemed to glow against the bone. “Get out.”

  T-Bone stepped carefully from the door. “I was supposed to grab the girl and call Hugo and not do anything to her. I didn’t pull it off, so I saw the kid carrying his groceries on the road, and I took a chance.”

  Bobby Lee was silent, busy with thoughts inside of which people lived or died or were left somewhere in between; his thoughts shaped and reshaped themselves, sorting out different scenarios that, in seconds, could result in a situation no human being wanted to experience.

  “If you see Preacher—” T-Bone said.

  “I’ll see him.”

  “I just carry out orders.”

  “Do I need to jot that down so I got the wording right?”

  “I ain’t worth it, Bobby Lee.”

  “Worth what?”

  “Whatever.”

  “Tell me what ‘whatever’ is.”

  “Why you doing this to me?”

  “Because you piss me off.”

  “What’d I do?”

  “You remind me of a zero. No, a zero is a thing, a circle with air inside it. You make me think of something that’s less than a zero.”

  T-Bone’s gaze wandered out into the pasture. More Angus were moving into the arroyo. There were trees along the arroyo, and the shadows of the cattle seemed to dissolve into the trees’ shadows and enlarge and darken them at the same time. “It’s fixing to rain again. They always clump up before it rains.”

  Bobby Lee was breathing through his nose, his eyes unfocused, strained, as though someone were shining a light into them.

  T-Bone closed his eyes, and his voice made a clicking sound, but no words came from his throat. Then he hawked loudly and spat a bloody clot on the ground. “I got ulcers.”

  Bobby Lee didn’t speak.

  “Don’t shoot me in the face,” T-Bone said.

  “Turn around.”

  “Bobby Lee.”

  “If you look back, if you call Hugo, if you contact anybody about this, I’m gonna do to you what you did to that Mexican you tied up in that house in Zaragoza. Your truck stays here. Don’t ever come in this county again.”

  “How do I know you’re not—”

  “If you’re still sucking air after about forty yards, you’ll know.”

  Bobby Lee rested his forearm on the truck window and watched T-Bone walk away. He slowly turned his gaze on Pete. “What are you looking at?”

  “Not a whole lot.”

  “You think this is funny? You think you’re cute?”

  “What I think is you’re standing up to your bottom lip in your own shit.”

  “I’m the best friend you got, boy.”

  “Then you’re right. I’m in real trouble. Tell you what. Pop me out of this safety belt, and I’ll accept your surrender.”

  Bobby Lee walked around to the other side of the vehicle and opened the door. He pulled a switchblade from his jeans and flicked it open. He sliced the safety strap in half, the nine-millimeter in his right hand, then stepped back. “Get on your face.”

  Pete stepped out on the ground, got to his knees, and lay on his chest, the smell of the grass and the earth warm in his face. He twisted his head around.

  “Eyes front,” Bobby Lee said, pressing his foot between Pete’s shoulder blades. “Put your hands behind you.”

  “Where’s Vikki?”

  Bobby Lee didn’t reply. He stooped over and hooked a handcuff on each of Pete’s wrists, squeezing the teeth of the ratchets as deep as he could into the locking mechanism. “Get up.”

  “At the A.A. meeting, you said you were in Iraq.”

  “What about it?”

  “You don’t have to do this stuff.”

  “Here’s a news flash for you. Every flag is the same color. The color is black. No quarter, no mercy, it’s ‘burn, motherfucker, burn.’ Tell me I’m full of shit.”

  “You were kicked out of the army, weren’t you?”

  “Close your mouth, boy.”

  “That guy, T-Bone, you saw yourself in him. That’s why you wanted to tear him apart.”

  “Maybe I can work you in as a substitute.”

  Bobby Lee opened the back door of the SUV and shoved Pete inside. He slammed the door and lifted the cell phone from the cord that hung around his neck, punching the speed dial with his thumb. “I got the package,” he said.

  22

  VIKKI DRIED HERSELF and wrapped the towel around her body and began brushing her teeth. The mirror was heavily fogged, the heat and moisture from her shower escaping through the partially opened door into the bedroom. She thought she heard a movement, perhaps a door closing, a half-spoken sentence trailing into nothingness. She squeezed the handle on the faucet, shutting off the water, her toothbrush stationary in her mouth. She set the toothbrush in a water glass. “Pete?” she said.

  There was no response. She tucked the towel more securely around her. “Is that you?” she said.

  She heard electronic laughter through the wall and realized the people in the next room, a Hispanic couple with two teenage children, had once again turned up the volume on their television to full jet-engine mode.

  She opened the door wide and tied a hand towel around her head as she walked into the bedroom. She had left only one light burning, a lamp by the table in the far corner. It created more shadows than it did illumination and softened the neediness of the room—the bedspread that she avoided touching, the sun-faded curtains, the brown water spots on the ceiling, the molding that had cracked away from the window jambs.

  She felt his presence before she actually saw him, in the same way one encounters a faceless presence in a dream, a protean figure without origins, from an unknown place, who can walk through walls and locked doors, and in this instance place himself in the cloth-covered chair by the closet, on the far side of the bed, the only telephone in the room two feet from his hand.

  He had made himself comfortable, one leg crossed on his knee, his pin-striped suit in need of pressing, his white shirt starched, his shoes buffed, his knit necktie not quite knotted, his shave done without a mirror. Like the dream figure, he was a study in contradiction, his shabby elegance not quite real, his rectangularity that of a grandiose poseur sitting in a soup kitchen. br />
  He kept his eyes on hers and did not lower them to her body, but she could see the flicker of hunger around his mouth, the hollows in his cheeks, his suppressed need to lick his tongue across his bottom lip.

  “You,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “I hoped I would never see you again.”

  “Worse men than I are looking for you, missy.”

  “Don’t you talk down to me.”