Rain Gods

  Hackberry picked up the baton from the car hood and let it hang from his right hand. It felt heavy and light at the same time. He could feel the comfortable solid warmth of the metal in his palm and the blood throbbing in his wrist. In his mind’s eye, he could see images of things breaking—glass and chrome molding and light filaments.

  “Sheriff?” Ouzel said. “You won’t let the kids see me in cuffs, huh?”

  “Get out of my sight,” Hackberry said.

  ON THE WAY back to the department, with Pam Tibbs behind the wheel, the weather started to blow. Directly to the north, giant yellow clouds were rising toward the top of the sky, dimming the mesas and hills and farmhouses in the same way a fine yellow mist would. Hackberry rolled down his window and stuck his hand into the wind stream. The temperature had dropped at least ten degrees and was threaded with flecks of rain that struck his palm like sand crystals.

  “When I was about twelve years old and we were living in Victoria, we had a downpour on a sunny day that actually rained fish in the streets,” he said to Pam.

  “Fish?” she said.

  “That’s a fact. I didn’t make it up. There were baitfish in the gutters. My father thought a funnel cloud probably picked up a bunch of water from a lake or the Gulf and dropped it on our heads.”

  “Why are you thinking about that now?”

  “No reason. It was just a good time to be around, even though those were the war years.”

  She removed her sunglasses and studied the side of his face. “You’re acting a little strange this morning.”

  “Better keep your eyes on the road,” he said.

  “What do you want to do with that phone number Ouzel gave you?”

  “Find out who it belongs to, then find out everything you can about the location.”

  “What are you planning to do, Hack?”

  “I’m not big on seeing around corners,” he replied. He heard her drum her fingers on the steering wheel.

  At the office, Maydeen Stoltz told him that Danny Boy Lorca had been picked up for public drunkenness and was sleeping it off in a holding cell upstairs. “Why didn’t somebody just drive him home?” Hackberry asked.

  “He was flailing his arms around in the middle of the street,” she replied. “The Greyhound almost ran over him.”

  Hackberry climbed the spiral steel stairs at the back of the building and walked to the cell at the far end of the corridor where overnight drunks were kept until they could be kicked out in the morning, usually without charges. Danny Boy was asleep on the concrete floor, his mouth and nostrils a flytrap, his hair stained with ash, his whole body auraed with the stink of booze and tobacco.

  Hackberry squatted down on one haunch, gripping a steel bar for balance, a bright tentacle of light arching along his spinal cord, wrapping around his buttocks and thighs. “How you doing, partner?” he said.

  Danny Boy’s answer was a long exhalation of breath, tiny bubbles of saliva coming to life at the corner of his mouth.

  “Both of us have got the same problem, bub. We don’t belong in the era we live in,” Hackberry said. Then he felt shame at his grandiosity and self-anointment. What greater fool was there than one who believed himself the overlooked Gilgamesh of his times? He had not slept well during the night, and his dreams had taken him back once again to Camp Five in No Name Valley, where he had peered up through a sewer grate at the gargoyle-like presence of Sergeant Kwong and his shoulder-slung burp gun and quilted coat and earflapped cap, all of it backlit by a salmon-pink sunrise.

  Hackberry retrieved a tick mattress from a supply closet and laid it out in front of Danny Boy’s cell and lay down on top of it, his knees drawn up before him to relieve the pressure on his spine, one arm across his eyes. He was amazed at how fast sleep took him.

  It wasn’t a deep sleep, just one of total rest and detachment, perhaps due to his indifference toward the eccentric nature of his behavior. But his iconoclasm, if it could be called that, was based on a lesson he had learned in high school when he spent the summer at his uncle Sidney’s ranch southeast of San Antonio. The year was 1947, and a California-based union was trying to organize the local farmworkers. Out of spite, because he had been threatened by his neighbors, Uncle Sidney had hired a half-dozen union hands to hoe out his vegetable acreage. Somebody had burned a cross on his front lawn, even nailing strips of rubber car tires on the beams to give the flames extra heat and duration. But rather than disengage from his feud with homegrown terrorists, Uncle Sidney had told Hackberry and an alcoholic field picker named Billy Haskel, who had pitched for Waco before the war, to mount the top of the charred cross on the roof of the pickup and chain-boom the shaft to the truck bed. Then Uncle Sidney and Billy Haskel and Hackberry had driven all around the county, confronting every man Uncle Sidney thought might have had a hand in burning a cross on his lawn.

  At the end of the day, Uncle Sidney had told Hackberry to dump the cross in a creek bed. But Hackberry had his own problems. He had been ostracized by his peers for dating a Mexican girl he picked tomatoes with in the fields. He asked his uncle if he could keep the cross on the truck for a few more days. That Saturday night he took his Mexican girlfriend to the same drive-in theater where he had already lost a bloody fistfight after the one occasion when he had tried to pretend the color line for Mexicans was any different than it was for black people.

  As the twilight had gone out of the sky and the theater patrons had filtered to the concession stand in advance of the previews, Hackberry’s high school friends had assembled around the pickup, leaning against its surfaces, drinking canned beer, touching the boomer chain on the cross, touching the blackened shell-like wood of the cross itself, talking louder and louder, their numbers swelling as an excoriated symbol of rejection became a source of ennoblement to all those allowed to stand in its presence. That moment and its implications would stay with Hackberry the rest of his life.

  Perhaps only fifteen minutes had passed before he opened his eyes and found himself looking squarely into Danny Boy Lorca’s face.

  “Why were you waving your arms in the middle of the street?” Hackberry said.

  “’Cause all my visions don’t mean anything. ’Cause everything around us is kindling waiting to burn. A drunk man can flip a match into the weeds on the roadside and set the world on fire. Them kind of thoughts always make me go out there flapping my arms in the wind.”

  Danny Boy didn’t say where “there” was, and Hackberry didn’t ask. Instead, he said, “But you did your job. It’s on us if we don’t listen to guys like you.”

  “Then how come I got this gift? Just to be a wino in a white man’s jail?”

  “Think of it this way. Would you rather be sleeping overnight in my jailhouse or be one of those people who have no ears to hear?”

  Danny Boy sat up, his thick hair like a helmet on his head, the bleariness in his eyes unrelieved. He looked at the ceiling and out into the corridor and at the clouds of yellow dust moving across the skylight. Then his head turned as he focused on Hackberry’s face. His eyes seemed to possess the frosted blue sightlessness of a man with severe cataracts. “You’re gonna find the man you been looking for.”

  “A guy named Preacher?”

  “No, it’s a Chinaman, or something like a Chinaman. The guy you always wanted to kill and wouldn’t admit it.”

  “WE’VE GOT THE location of the phone number,” Pam said from the top of the steel stairs. “It’s a game farm up by the Glass Mountains.” Her gaze wandered over Hackberry’s face. “Have you been asleep?”

  “I dozed off a little bit,” he said.

  “You want to contact the sheriff in Pecos or Brewster?”

  “See who’ll give us a cruiser at the airport.”

  “We’re not sure Cistranos is at the game farm.”

  “Somebody is there. Let’s find out who they are.”

  “There’s something else. Maydeen got a call from a guy who wouldn’t identify himself. He wouldn’t talk to anyone but you. His number was blocked. She told him to hold on while she got a pad and wrote down his remarks. He h
ung up on her.”

  “Who do you think it was?”

  “He said you and he had unfinished business. He said you and he were the opposite sides of the same coin. He said you’d know what he meant.”

  “Collins?”

  “Know anybody else who makes phone calls like that?”

  “Get the plane ready,” he said.

  An hour later, they lifted off into bad weather, wind currents that shook the single engine’s wings and fuselage and quivered all the needles on the instrument panel. Later, down below, Hackberry could see the sharp crystalline peaks known as the Glass Mountains, the column-like mesas rising red and raw out of volcanic rubble or alluvial flood plain that had gone soft and pliant and undulating, as tan as farmland along the Nile, dotted with green brush, all of it besieged by a windstorm that could sand the paint off a water tower.

  Then they were above a great wide fenced area where both domestic and exotic animals roamed among the mesquite and blackjack and cottonwoods, like a replication of a mideastern savannah created by an ecologically minded philanthropist.

  “What’s your opinion on game farms?” Pam said.

  “They’re great places for corporation executives, fraternity pissants, and people who like to kill things but can’t pull it off without their checkbooks.”

  “You shock me every time,” she said.

  26

  NICK DOLAN HAD stopped thinking of time in terms of calendar units or even twenty-four-hour or twelve-hour periods. Nor did he think in terms of events or old resentments or jealousies or success in business. He no longer indulged in secret fantasies about revenge on his boyhood tormentors, Irish pricks like Artie Rooney in particular. As he watched his bank accounts and stock-and-bond portfolio seep away, and as the IRS focused its bombsights on his past tax returns, Nick remembered his father talking about life in America during the Great Depression, when the Dolinskis first arrived on a boat they had bribed their way onto in Hamburg.

  Nick’s father had spoken with nostalgia of the era rather than of the privation and harshness the family experienced during the years they lived on the Lower East Side of New York and, later, by the Industrial Canal in New Orleans. When Nick complained about going to a school where bullies shoved him down on line or stole his lunch money, his father spoke with fondness of both the settlement houses in New York and the public schools in New Orleans, because they had been steam-heated and warm and had offered succor and education and opportu nity at a time when people were dying in Hitler’s concentration camps. Nick had always been envious of his father’s experience and emotions.

  Now, as his possessions and his money seemed to be departing piecemeal in a hurricane, Nick had begun to understand that his father’s fond memories were not a gift but an extension of the personal strength that defined his character. Whether in the Bowery or in a blue-collar school by the Iberville Project, Nick’s father must have run up against the same kind of Jew-baiting bullies who had plagued Nick in the Ninth Ward. But his father had not empowered his enemies by carrying their evil into his adult life.

  The new measure of time and its passage in Nick’s life had become one of mental photographs rather than calendar dates: his children floating on inner tubes down the Comal River, the sunlight slipping wetly off their tanned bodies; Esther’s bemused and affectionate glances after his return from Phoenix and his verbal victory over Josef Sholokoff (which he did not tell her of and would never tell anyone else of, lest he lose the newly found sense of pride it had given him); the smiles of his employees, particularly the blacks, who worked in his restaurant; and not least, the unopened carton of cigarettes he soaked in kerosene and set afire in his barbecue pit, saying to the clouds and Whoever lived there, Guess who just had his last smoke.

  He had even stopped worrying about Hugo Cistranos. Nick had stood up to Josef Sholokoff in front of his goons on his property, with no parachute except a Pakistani cabdriver who shouldn’t have been licensed to drive in a demolition derby. Who were the real gladiators? Nondescript, bumbling people with no power who had stood up while the Hugo Cistranos brigade bag-assed for the bomb shelter.

  Nick had another reason to feel secure. That lunatic called Preacher Collins had thrown his mantle of protection over Nick’s family. True, Esther had bashed him with a cook pot, but one great advantage in having a peckerwood crackbrain on your side was the fact that his motivations had nothing to do with rationality. Collins scared the hell out of the bad guys. What more could you ask for?

  As Esther always said, a good deed done by a Cossack was still a good deed.

  Nick had begun lifting weights at a gym. After the initial soreness, he was amazed at the resilience his body still possessed. In under two weeks, he could see a difference in the mirror. Or at least he thought he could. His clothes looked good on him. His shoulders were squared, his eyes clear, the fleshy quality starting to disappear from his cheeks. Could it be that easy? Why not? He came from working people. His grandfather had been undaunted by physical labor of any kind and had been ingenious and marvelous with his hands when he’d built his own house and created a thriving vegetable garden amid urban decay. Nick’s father had been a short, wiry shoe repairman, but he could slip on a pair of Everlast gloves and turn a speed bag into a leathery blur. Even Nick’s rotund compulsive mother, who overfed and protected him and sometimes treated him like a human poodle, scrubbed her floors on her hands and knees twice a week, from the gallery to the back stoop. The Dolan family, as they were called in America, stayed in motion.

  As Nick looked at his full-length profile in the mirror, sucking in his stomach, his chin up, his arms pleasantly stiff and tinged with pain from curling a sixty-pound bar, he thought, Not bad for Mighty Mouse.

  Even though he didn’t like to see blood leaking from every orifice in his portfolio, his finances had a formidable degree of solidity at their core. He still owned the restaurant, a wholesome place that served good food and offered mariachi music, and nobody was going to take it away from him, at least not Josef Sholokoff or Hugo Cistranos. He still had a mortgage on his house in San Antonio, but his weekend home on the Comal in New Braunfels was free and clear, and he was determined for the children’s sake to hold on to it. He and Esther had started out with virtually nothing. For the first five years of their marriage, she’d had to give up attending classes at UNO and work full-time as a cashier at the Pearl while Nick ran Didoni Giacano’s cardroom until five in the morning, fixing drinks and coffee and making sandwiches for Texas oilmen who told Negro and whorehouse and anti-Semitic jokes in his presence as though he were deaf. Then he would swamp out their piss and puke in the bathroom while the sun rose and a greasy exhaust fan roared above his head.

  But those days were all behind him. Esther was his Esther again, and his kids were his kids. They were not just a family. They were friends, and more important, they loved one another and loved being with one another. What he owned he had worked for. Screw the world. Screw the IRS. Nick Dolinski, badass at large, had arrived.

  It was Saturday evening, and Nick was relaxing on the terrace of his weekend home on the Comal, reading the newspaper, drinking a gin and tonic. Fireflies were lighting in the trees, and the air was fragrant with the smell of flowers, charcoal lighter flaring on a grill, meat smoke pooling among the heavy green shadows on the river.

  Esther had taken the kids to deliver a box of her peanut-butter-and-chocolate brownies to a sick friend in a San Antonio suburb; she had said she would be back no later than six-thirty P.M. with a delicatessen cold supper they would eat on the sunporch. He glanced at his watch. It was after seven. But sometimes she decided on impulse to take the children to an afternoon movie. He flipped open his cell phone to check for missed calls, although he was sure it had not rung that afternoon. He put aside his paper and called her cell number. His call was transferred to her voice mail.

  “Esther, where are you?” he said. “I’m starting to think alien abduction here.”

  He went inside the house and checked the kitchen phone. Th
ere were no new calls. He walked in a circle. He went into the living room and walked in another circle. Then he called Esther’s cell phone again. “This isn’t funny. Where are you? This is Nick, the guy who lives with you.”

  He tried Jesse’s number and was sent to voice mail. But Jesse was one of those rare teenagers who had little interest in computers, cell phones, or technology in general; he sometimes left his cell phone turned off for days. Regarding his son, the more essential question for Nick was: Did Jesse have an interest in anything? It surely wasn’t girls or sports. The kid had an IQ of 160 and spent his time listening to old Dave Brubeck records or playing lawn darts by himself in the backyard or hanging out with his four-man chess club.