Rain Gods (21 page)

“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 Kwong. 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.”

“You don’t dream about it anymore?”

He looked through the windshield at the dust and smoke from wildfires, and the way the hills went out of focus inside the heat waves bouncing off them, and for just a second he thought he heard bugles echoing out of a valley that had no name.

“No, I don’t dream very much anymore,” he said.

She looked out the side window and watched the countryside go by.

THE LOAN OFFICE was located on a corner where three streets that had once been cow trails intersected and formed a kind of financial center for people who possessed little of value to others, except perhaps their desperation.

Next to the loan office was a bail bonds office. Next to the bail bonds office was a pawnshop. Down the street was a saloon with a railed and mirrored bar, a kitchen that served food, and a clientele to whom the pawnshop, the bondsman, and the car-title loan office were as indispensable as the air they breathed. Few of them cared, or for that matter even knew, that John Wesley Hardin and Wild Bill Longley had been regulars at the saloon.

Hackberry parked in the alley behind the loan office and entered through the side door, removing his hat, waiting until the clerk was free before he went to the counter. Hispanic and Anglo working people were sitting at school desks filling out forms; a woman in glasses oversaw them as she might retarded people. Hackberry opened his badge holder on the counter and placed the photo of Liam Eriksson beside it. “Know this fellow?” he said to the clerk.

“Yes, sir, the FBI was in here about him. I’m the one called up the cops on him,” the clerk said. “He brought in a stolen check.”

“There was a woman with him?”

“Yes, sir, but I wasn’t paying her that much mind. He’s the one had the check.”

“You don’t know who the woman was?”

“No, sir,” the clerk replied. He had neat black hair and a mustache and a deep tan and wore gray slacks and a blue dress shirt and a striped tie.

“You work here long?”

“Yes, sir, almost five years.”

“Get a lot of United States Treasury checks in here?”

“Some.”

“But not many,” Hackberry said.

“No, sir, not a lot.”

“Never saw the woman before?”

“Not that I recall. I mean, I’m pretty certain on that.”

“Pretty certain you don’t know her or pretty certain you don’t recall?”

“A mess of folks come in.”

“This fellow Eriksson and the lady were drunk?”

The clerk looked blankly at Hackberry.

“Eriksson is the real name of the man who was impersonating Pete Flores. He and the woman were drunk?”

“Pretty marinated,” the clerk said, starting to smile for the first time.

“For ID, Eriksson had a library card?”

“Yes, sir, that was the extent of it.”

“Why’d you take the check in back?”

“To run it by my manager.”

“After five years here, you had to consult with your manager? You didn’t know the check was stolen, one brought in by a drunk with a library card? You had to ask your manager? That’s what you’re telling me?”

“It’s like I said.”

“There’s no reason Eriksson would have a history with a business like yours. That means the woman probably brought him here. I also think she’s probably a hooker and a shill and brings her customers here with regularity. I think you’re lying through your teeth, bub.”

“Maybe I’ve seen her once or twice,” the clerk said, his eyes shifting off Hackberry’s face.

“What’s her name?”

“She goes by ‘Mona,’ I think.”

Hackberry pulled at his earlobe. “Where does Mona live?”

“Probably any place a guy has a bottle and two glasses and a few bucks. I don’t know where she lives. She’s not a bad person. Why don’t you give her a break?”

“Tell that to the guy Liam Eriksson tortured to death,” Hackberry said.

The clerk threw up his hands. “Am I in the shitter?”

“Could be,” Hackberry said. “I’ll be giving it some thought.”

HACKBERRY AND PAM began their search for the woman named Mona in a backward pattern, starting up the street through a series of low-bottom bars where no one seemed to possess any memory for either faces or names. Then they reversed direction and went block by block through a district of secondhand stores, and missions that sheltered the homeless, and bars with darkened interiors, where, like prisons, time was not measured in terms of the external world and the patrons did not have to make comparisons.

Hackberry didn’t know if the cause was the smell of the alcohol or the dissolute and wan expression on the faces of the twenty-four-hour drinkers at the bar when he opened the front door of a saloon, but he soon found himself revisiting his long courtship with Jack Daniel’s, like a compulsive man picking up pieces of glass with his fingertips.

Actually, “courtship” wasn’t the appropriate word. Hackberry’s experience with charcoal-filtered whiskey had been a love affair as intense as any sexual relationship he’d ever had. He’d dreamed about it, awakened with a thirst for it in the morning, and turned the first drink of the day into a religious ritual, bruising a sprig of mint inside the glass, staining the shaved ice with three fingers of Jack, adding a half teaspoon of sugar, then setting the glass in the freezer for twenty minutes while he pretended that whiskey had no control over his life. The first sip made him close his eyes with a sense of both release and visceral serenity that he could associate only with the rush and sense of peace that a morphine drip had purchased for him in a naval hospital.

“Not much luck, huh, kemosabe?” Pam said as they entered a saloon that was defined by an old checkerboard dance floor and a long railed bar with a big yellowed mahogany-framed mirror behind it.

“What’d you call me?” Hackberry asked.

“It’s just a joke. Remember the Lone Ranger and his sidekick, Tonto? Tonto was always calling the Lone Ranger ‘kemosabe.’”

“That’s what Rie, my second wife, used to call me.”

“Oh,” Pam replied, clearly not knowing what else to say.

Hackberry opened his badge holder and placed the photo of Liam Eriksson on the bar for the bartender to look at. “Ever see this guy in here?” he said.

The bartender wore a short-sleeve tropical print shirt. His big forearms were wrapped with a soft pad of hair, and just above his wrist was a green and red tattoo of the Marine Corps globe and anchor. “No, cain’t say I’ve ever seen him.”

“Know a gal by the name of Mona, maybe a working girl?”

“What’s she look like?”

“Middle-aged, reddish hair, five feet three or four.”

The bartender propped his arms on the bar and stared at the painted-over front window. He shook his head. “Cain’t say as I remember anyone specific like that.”

“I noticed your tattoo,” Hackberry said.

“You were in the Corps?”

“I was a navy corpsman attached to the First Marine Division.”

“In Korea?”

“Yes, sir, I was.”

“You made the Chosin or the Punch Bowl?”

“I was at the Chosin Reservoir the third week of November, 1950.”

The bartender raised his eyebrows, then looked at the painted-over window again. “What’s the beef on this gal Mona?”

“No beef at all. We just need some information.”

“There’s a woman who lives at the Brazos Hotel about five blocks toward downtown. She’s a hooker, but more of a juicer than a hooker. Her dance card is pretty used up. Maybe she’s your gal. Y’all want a drink? It’s on me.”