Rain Gods (41 page)

“No, ma’am. I’m a visitor.”

“Well, you come back here any time you want.”

“I surely will.”

“You’re a nice young man.”

“Thank you. But how do you know what I am?”

“You removed your hat when you entered the building. You removed it even though you thought no one was watching you. Your manners are those of a naturally considerate and respectful person. That makes you a very nice young man.”

Pete walked back to the motel, left a note for Vikki on her pillow, and hitchhiked thirty miles west of town to a desolate crossroads that reminded him of the place where the Asian women had died and his life had changed forever. He entered a phone booth, took a deep breath, and dialed a number on the phone’s console. In the distance, he could see a mile-long train inching its way along a stretch of alkali hardpan, like a black centipede, heat waves warping the horizon.

“Sheriff’s Department,” a woman said. It was a voice he had heard before.

“Is this the business line?” he asked.

“That’s the number you dialed. Did you want to report an emergency?”

“I need to talk to Sheriff Holland.”

“He’s not in right now. Who’s calling, please?”

“When will he be in?”

“That’s hard to say. Can I he’p you with something?”

“Patch me through. You can do that, cain’t you?”

“You need to give me your name. Is there a reason you don’t want to give me your name?”

He could feel sweat pooling inside his armpits, his own stale odor rising into his face. He folded back the door of the booth and stepped outside, the receiver pressed against his ear.

“Are you there, sir?” the woman said. “We’ve spoken before, haven’t we? You remember me? Your name is Pete, isn’t it?”

“Yes, ma’am, that’s what I go by.”

“We want you to come see us, Pete. You need to bring Ms. Gaddis with you.”

“That’s why I want to talk to the sheriff.”

“The sheriff is at the hospital. A man tried to kill him and Deputy Tibbs last night. I think you know the man we’re talking about.”

“This guy Preacher? No, I don’t know him. I know his name. I know he tried to kidnap and maybe kill Vikki. But I don’t
know
him.”

“We’ve been trying to he’p you, soldier. Sheriff Holland in particular.”

“I didn’t ask him to.” He could hear sweat creaking between his ear and the phone receiver. He held the receiver away from his head and wiped his ear with his shoulder. “Hello?”

“I’m still here.”

“How bad are the sheriff and the deputy hurt?”

“The sheriff is having some X-rays done. You’re not a criminal, Pete. But you’re not acting real bright, either.”

“What’s your name, ma’am?”

“Maydeen Stoltz.”

Pete looked at his watch. How long did it take to trace a call? “Well, Miss Maydeen, why don’t you pull your head out of your hole and give me the sheriff’s cell phone number? That way I won’t have to trouble you anymore.”

He thought he could hear her ticking a ballpoint on a desk blotter.

“I’ll give you his number and tell him to expect your call in the next few minutes. But you listen to me on this one, smartass. Last night we almost lost two of the best people either one of us will ever know. You give that some thought. And if you talk to me like that again and I catch up with you, I’m gonna slap the daylights out of you.”

She gave him the sheriff’s cell number, but he had nothing to write with and had to draw the numerals on the dusty shelf under the phone console with his finger.

He went inside the small grocery store at the intersection, the smell of cheese and lunch meat and insect spray and stale cigarette smoke and overripe fruit enough to make him choke. At the back of the store, he stared through the smoky glass doors of the coolers, his arms folded across his chest as though he were protecting himself from an enemy. Inside one door, the Dr Peppers and root beers and Coca-Colas stood end to end in neat racks. Behind the next door were six-pack upon six-pack of every brand of beer sold in Texas, the amber bottles beaded with coldness, the cardboard containers damp and soft, waiting to be picked up gingerly by caring hands.

One six-pack of sixteen-ouncers,
he thought. He could space them out through the afternoon, just enough to flatten the kinks in his nervous system. Sometimes you needed a parachute. Wasn’t it better to ease into sobriety rather than to be jolted into it?

“Find what you want?” the woman behind the counter said. She weighed at least 250 pounds and swelled out like an inverted washtub below the waistline. She was smoking a cigarette and flicking the ash into a bottle cap, her lipstick rimmed crisply on the filter, a V-shaped yellow stain between her fingers.

“Where’s the men’s room?” he asked.

She drew in on her cigarette and exhaled the smoke slowly, taking his measure. “About four feet behind you, the door with the sign over it that says Men’s Room.”

He went in the restroom and came back out wiping the water off his face with a paper towel. He slid open the door to the cold box and lifted out a six-pack of Budweiser, balancing it on his palm, the cans coated with moisture and hard and clinking against one another inside the plastic yoke. The cashier was smoking a fresh one, blowing the smoke through her fingers while she held the cigarette to her mouth. He set the six-pack on the counter and reached for his wallet. But she didn’t ring up the purchase.

“Ma’am?”

“What?”

“You have a reason for acting so damn weird?”

“Weird in like what way?”

“For openers, staring at me like I just climbed out of a spaceship.”

She dropped her cigarette into a bucket of water under the counter. “
I
don’t have a reason for staring at you.”

“So—”

“
He
might.”

Her gaze drifted out the front window of the store, past the two gas pumps under the porte cochere. A town constable’s patrol car was parked beside the telephone booth. A man wearing a khaki uniform and shades was sitting behind the wheel, the engine off, the doors open to let in the breeze while he wrote on a clipboard.

“That’s Howard. He asked who was just using the phone,” the woman said.

“I reckon that could have been me.”

“I saw you at the A.A. meeting at the church.”

“That could have been me, too.”

“You still want the beer?”

“What I want is a whole lot of gone between me and your store.”

“I cain’t he’p you do that.”

“Ma’am, I’m in a mess of trouble. But I haven’t harmed anybody, not intentionally, anyway.”

“I expect you haven’t.”

Her eyes were full of pity, the same kind of pity and sorrow he had heard in the voice of his friend Billy Bob. Pete folded his arms across his chest again and watched the town constable get out of his patrol car and walk under the porte cochere and pull open the front door of the store. In those few seconds, a line of stitches seemed to form and burst apart across Pete’s heart.

“Were you using that booth out there?” the constable asked. His skin was sun-browned, his shirt peppered with sweat, his eyes hidden by his shades.

“Yes, sir, just a few minutes ago.”

“You owe the operator ninety-five cents. Would you take care of it? She’s ringing it off the hook.”

“Yes, sir, right away. I didn’t know I went overtime.”

“You want the beer?” the clerk said.

“I surely do.”

Pete hefted the six-pack under his arm, got his change and an extra three dollars in coins, and walked back out to the booth. The sun was hammering down on the hardpan and the two-lane asphalt state highway, glazing the hills, alkali flats, and the distant railroad track where the freight train had stopped and was baking in the heat.

He ripped open the tab on a sixteen-ouncer and set it on the shelf below the phone and punched in Sheriff Holland’s cell phone number. As the phone rang, he gripped the sweaty coldness of the can in his left palm.

“Sheriff Holland,” a voice said.

“Your cousin Billy Bob—”

“He’s already called me. You going to come see us, Pete?”

“Yes, sir, that’s what I want to do.”

“What’s holding you up?”

“I don’t want to go to Huntsville. I don’t want to see this guy Preacher and his friends come after Vikki.”

“What do you think they’re doing now, son?”

I ain’t your son,
a voice inside him said. “You know what I mean.”

“How have people been treating you?”

“Sir?”

“Since you came back from Iraq, how do people treat you? Just general run-of-the-mill people? They been treating you all right?”

“I haven’t complained.”

“Answer the question.”

“They’ve treated me good.”

“But you don’t trust them, do you? You think they might be fixing to slicker you.”

“Maybe unlike others, I don’t have the luxury of making mistakes.”

“I have an idea where you might be, Pete. But I’m not going to call the sheriff there. I want you and Ms. Gaddis to come in on your own. I want y’all to help me put away the guys who killed those poor Asian women. You fought for your country, partner. And now you have to fight for it again.”

“I don’t like folks using the flag to get me to do what they want.”

“You drinking?”

“Sir?”

“You were drinking when you called in the original nine-one-one by the church house. If I were you, I’d lay off the hooch till I got this stuff behind me.”

“You would, would you?”

“I had my share of trouble with it. Billy Bob says you’re a good man. I believe him.”

“What do we do, just walk into your office?” Pete said. He looked at the cloud of vapor on top of the aluminum beer can. He looked at the brassy bead of the beer through the tab. His windpipe turned to rust when he tried to swallow.

“If you want, I’ll send a cruiser.”

Pete picked up the beer can and pressed its coldness against his cheek. He could see the train starting to move on the track, the black gondolas clanging against their couplings as though they were fighting against their own momentum.

He sat down on the floor of the booth, pulling the phone and its metal-encased cord with him, the six-pack splaying open on the concrete pad. He felt as though he had descended to the bottom of a well, beyond the sunlight, beyond hope, beyond ever feeling wind on his face again or smelling flowers in the morning or being a part of the great human drama most of the world took for granted, a man with red alligator hide for skin and a bagful of sins that would never be forgiven. He pulled his knees up to his face, his head bent forward, and began to weep silently.

“You still with me, bud?”

“Tell Miss Maydeen I’m sorry for sassing her. I also apologize to you and your deputy for getting y’all hurt. I also owe an apology to some guy I attacked at a traffic light last night. I think I’m plumb losing my mind.”

“You assaulted somebody?”

“I threw rocks at his car. I busted a hole in his rear window with a brick.”

“Where was this?”

Pete told him.

“What kind of car?”

“A tan Honda.”

“You busted a big hole in the window?”

“Just under the size of a softball. It was elongated. It looked like the eye of a Chinaman staring out the window.”

“You don’t remember the license number, do you?”

Pete was still holding the sixteen-ouncer. He set it on the ground outside the booth. He pushed it over with the sole of his boot. “One letter and maybe two numbers. Y’all already got a report on it?”

“You could say we may have had contact with the driver.”

A few moments later, Pete picked up the cans he had dropped and took them back inside the store and set them on the counter. “Can I get a refund?” he said.

“If you hold your mouth right,” the cashier said.

“What?”

“That’s a joke.” She opened the register drawer and counted out his cash. “There’s some showers in back. Hang around if you feel like it, cowboy.”

“I got someone waiting on me.”

She nodded.

“You’re a nice lady,” he said.

“I hear that lots of times,” she said. She stuck another filter-tip in her mouth and lit it with a BIC, blowing the smoke at an upward angle, gazing through the window at the way the two-lane warped in the heat and dissolved into a black lake on the horizon.

“I didn’t mean anything, ma’am.”

“I look like a ‘ma’am’? It’s ‘miss,’” she said.

TWO DAYS AFTER the invasion of his home by Jack Collins, Hackberry Holland and Pam Tibbs flew in the department’s single engine plane to San Antonio, borrowed an unmarked car from the Bexar County Sheriff’s Office, and drove into Nick Dolan’s neighborhood. The enclave atmosphere and the size of the homes, the Spanish daggers and hibiscus and palm and umbrella trees and crepe myrtle and bougainvillea in the yards, and the number of grounds workers made Hackberry think of a foreign country, in the tropics, perhaps, or out on the Pacific Rim.